The Charlie Kirk Show - Socialism: The Two Thousand Year Failure with Bill Federer and Blake Neff

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk show, Blake Neff and Bill Federer, we talk about Roman history, history in general.

00:00:06.000 What can it teach us today?

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00:00:22.000 Here we go.

00:00:23.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:01:05.000 Okay, welcome back, everybody.

00:01:07.000 Email us freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:01:09.000 Very special hour.

00:01:10.000 We have Blake Neff, fan favorite, and Bill Federer.

00:01:14.000 Welcome back, Bill.

00:01:14.000 Hey, Charlie, great to be with you.

00:01:16.000 So I have two minds that have IQs off the charts that know history very, very well.

00:01:21.000 I'm going to do my best to try to keep us on topic while also getting our audience educated on history, philosophy, and what we are living through.

00:01:30.000 Bill, we've had you on the show many times, and I was actually just rereading Socialism, The Real History from Plato to the Present.

00:01:36.000 Tell us about this book, Bill.

00:01:38.000 So Plato was the first one that talked about everybody owning everything in common.

00:01:38.000 Right.

00:01:42.000 And it sounds good until you think it through.

00:01:45.000 Somebody has to be in the government handing out the common stuff.

00:01:48.000 And they're always going to be tempted to want to funnel a little extra to their family and friends on the side and hold back from someone they don't like.

00:01:55.000 And before you know it, it gets discretionary.

00:01:57.000 And the saying is, he who holds the purse strings has the power.

00:02:00.000 So every attempt at everybody owning everything equally always ends up with a deep state bureaucracy passing out favors to their friends with the most corrupt guy at the top, a dictator.

00:02:10.000 And then I go in the book to how these different attempts to institute socialism over the years.

00:02:20.000 And people say, well, wasn't the early church socialist?

00:02:22.000 No, the early church was the early church.

00:02:24.000 Socialism is counterfeit early church and the difference is between the word voluntary and involuntary.

00:02:29.000 So early believers voluntarily sold their property, laid it at the feet of the apostles.

00:02:34.000 They didn't have the government take away their property and laid it at the feet of Pilate.

00:02:37.000 And then when the children of Israel went into the promised land, every family was given property.

00:02:43.000 If you own property, you can accumulate stuff, the Bible called that being blessed, and you can give away some of your stuff.

00:02:50.000 The Bible called that charity.

00:02:52.000 Well, if you don't own any property, how can you be charitable?

00:02:55.000 How can you give away what you don't have?

00:02:57.000 And so the idea is that Lenin said socialism is a transition phase to communism.

00:03:05.000 And Karl Marx says communism can be summed up in one sentence, abolition of private property.

00:03:10.000 So one part of this I'm going to focus on because I'm going to try to do my best to connect this history to today.

00:03:14.000 And you've talked about it, is this idea of a permanent bureaucracy, almost like a praetorian guard, right?

00:03:20.000 You talk about this in the book.

00:03:21.000 Is this a characteristic we see manifest time and time again, that if you have a dictator or despot, a non-small R Republican form of government, by definition, you're going to have to have almost a permanent leviathan that issues the decrees, the orders, and that are somewhat untouchable.

00:03:40.000 Is that fair to say historically?

00:03:42.000 Yeah, the default setting for human government is gangs.

00:03:46.000 And all a king is is a glorified gang leader.

00:03:49.000 And if there were no police tomorrow, what would happen?

00:03:52.000 Well, it'd be fine for a couple of days, and then people would start stealing stuff from stores.

00:03:55.000 And then when the stores are empty, they'd start going house to house.

00:03:58.000 And then you would get your neighborhood together and say, we need to defend ourselves.

00:04:01.000 And Joe here, he's a little bit better at knowing how to fight than the rest.

00:04:04.000 And so we'll all elect Joe as our captain.

00:04:07.000 And it's good.

00:04:07.000 You fight, you win.

00:04:09.000 But over time, you're going to be indebted to this person.

00:04:13.000 And that's how kings developed.

00:04:17.000 And so you'd have a good king and the bad king.

00:04:19.000 And so the default setting for human government is kings.

00:04:22.000 And it's hierarchical.

00:04:23.000 If you are friends with the guy at the top, you are more equal.

00:04:26.000 If you're not their friend, you're less equal. 0.97

00:04:28.000 And if you're their enemy, you're dead.

00:04:29.000 It's called treason. 0.99

00:04:31.000 Or you're a slave.

00:04:32.000 People say, I thought slavery started in 1619.

00:04:35.000 No, wherever you had the first king on top, you had slaves on the bottom.

00:04:38.000 And so that's the default setting is gangs.

00:04:41.000 So you have Nimrod Tower of Babel and Pharaohs and Caesars and Kaisers and Sultans and Tsars and Maharaj, Gangeskan, Julius Caesar, Child the Hunt, kings of Spain, France, and Austria.

00:04:49.000 That's the norm.

00:04:50.000 And so what's rare is people getting a chance to rule themselves without a king.

00:04:54.000 Self-government, which the Hebrews were the first example that we know, at least for some period of time, they had some form of self-government.

00:05:00.000 So Blake, I want to connect this.

00:05:01.000 Is there an example ever of, and Bill, you could chime in once Blake answers, of successfully challenging, disrupting, or dismantling an administrative state?

00:05:11.000 Well, I mean, they tend to crash rather spectacularly when they do fall apart, which is the whole civilization crashes with it.

00:05:18.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:05:19.000 Exactly.

00:05:20.000 So you get these, if you have, you know, a very rigid order, like it is inherently unstable.

00:05:26.000 And it kind of, it, it makes probably everyone involved with it worse, I think you could say.

00:05:31.000 So it's like when you compare like English society with French society before the revolutions, where English society has a stronger tradition of decentralized government, self-government.

00:05:42.000 And so it's like it means that their revolution even is more orderly.

00:05:45.000 Like we're able to have the American Revolution.

00:05:47.000 We don't literally behead every single person connected with the king in America.

00:05:52.000 Whereas when the French Ancient regime comes down, it is an extremely bloody affair.

00:05:59.000 And it's not, you know, everyone involved kind of comes off worse as a result of it.

00:06:04.000 You know, the people who are upholding the regime are more violent.

00:06:07.000 The people overthrowing the regime are more violent.

00:06:10.000 So we have this permanent deep state.

00:06:12.000 We can all agree at that right now running the country.

00:06:14.000 Bill, what historical precedent can be instructive of how to dismantle and or correct this creation of the progressive bureaucracy?

00:06:25.000 So as more power concentrates into fewer hands globally, God's counterbalance is to get more people involved locally.

00:06:35.000 So it's a counterbalance.

00:06:35.000 Right?

00:06:36.000 So if we're going to be fewer hands globally power, our response is get more people involved locally.

00:06:41.000 I mean, there's more people that go to a church than vote in a school board election.

00:06:45.000 You just get out there and start getting involved.

00:06:47.000 And that's the only way.

00:06:49.000 The counterbalance has to be local action.

00:06:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:06:51.000 It has to be more people involved, fewer people with more power, or lots and lots of people with little bits of power, but we need to each take our little bit of power.

00:07:01.000 Now, you know, can we turn it around?

00:07:03.000 I'm just hoping we slow it down.

00:07:04.000 So whenever you have people ruling themselves, two things happen.

00:07:09.000 It works, and people get a chance to be all that they want to be and become creative.

00:07:15.000 And they either become so successful, they become targets of attack by kings, and then they get co-opted, or they get bigger and bigger, and it builds this bureaucracy.

00:07:25.000 And if you can imagine trying to float on top of a beach ball with suntan lotion on, it's really hard.

00:07:32.000 And then all of a sudden you slip off and the beach ball pops up.

00:07:34.000 So the people trying to, but what happens is once it gets top heavy with too big of a people, it flips instantly into a dictator.

00:07:43.000 And that's what happened with Rome.

00:07:44.000 So Rome was a republic from 509 BC up until 27 BC.

00:07:50.000 From Romulus to.

00:07:52.000 Well, they had seven kings, and the last king was Tarquinius.

00:07:57.000 Tarquin the Proud.

00:07:59.000 And Tarquin the Proud, and he had a son named Sextus, what a name. 0.88

00:08:03.000 And Sextus raped a virtuous woman named Lucretia.

00:08:08.000 And she was so distraught, she gathers the Roman leaders together, and she commits suicide right in front of them.

00:08:15.000 And the rape of Lucretia, there's all kinds of artwork, you know, with Michelangelo.

00:08:21.000 And, you know, this is a theme that's been, even St. Augustine mentioned it, the rape of Lucretia and the city of God.

00:08:29.000 So she kills herself.

00:08:31.000 These Roman leaders get so upset that she killed herself right in front of him.

00:08:34.000 What do they do?

00:08:35.000 They go out and drive King Tarquinius out and they set up a republic.

00:08:40.000 And in the republic, you have the people that are the king.

00:08:43.000 And they made a rule.

00:08:45.000 Publius was one of the leaders.

00:08:47.000 And the rule was: if anybody ever would make themselves king, anybody else could kill that person without any repercussions.

00:08:55.000 So for 500 years, nobody in the Roman Republic wanted to come anywhere near being called.

00:08:59.000 Publius was building a mansion, and rumor spread that he was thinking about being king.

00:09:04.000 When he heard the rumor, he destroyed his own mansion.

00:09:07.000 And so you have, over time, you have 600 senators, and they're representing their little areas.

00:09:14.000 And it gravitates into three parties, right?

00:09:18.000 So we have Democrat, Republican, maybe Libertarian.

00:09:20.000 Well, their three parties were led by Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus.

00:09:24.000 The triumphant.

00:09:25.000 The triumvirate.

00:09:26.000 The first triumphant because there's a first triumphant.

00:09:30.000 So Crassus is over there in Haran, Turkey.

00:09:33.000 Did he get his head cut off or something?

00:09:35.000 He decides, I'm going to be this general.

00:09:37.000 And, you know, he's like, Pompey conquered Syria and Judea and a lot of other places.

00:09:41.000 Caesar's off in Gaul.

00:09:42.000 I just have a giant pile of money.

00:09:44.000 I need to prove that I'm this great general. 0.97

00:09:46.000 And so he gets this big, expensive army, pays for the whole thing himself, walks five miles across the border into Parthia, and they kick his butt and cut his head off, and they pour, I think, molten silver, molten gold, I can't remember which, down whatever's left of his head. 0.81

00:10:00.000 And so then that destabilizes the triumphant.

00:10:02.000 Yeah, and removed a third of it.

00:10:05.000 Before that, there was the famous Spartacus, and these are gladiators.

00:10:10.000 Yeah, they got tired of having to kill each other.

00:10:12.000 And so they decided to leave.

00:10:14.000 And these gladiators are going to the toe of Italy, and they got some pirate ships that they've arranged to pick them up.

00:10:20.000 Crassus pays the pirate ships not to come.

00:10:23.000 And so these gladiators, what do they do?

00:10:25.000 Well, they start marching back to Rome.

00:10:27.000 And Crassus is like, I'm going to defend Rome.

00:10:29.000 And he goes out there and kills them, but he doesn't get the glory for the win anyway.

00:10:33.000 Okay, Bill. 0.99

00:10:35.000 So then what happens?

00:10:36.000 Caesar's up in France or Germany or whatever, and Pompey takes the day.

00:10:41.000 And Caesar says, not so fast, my friend.

00:10:43.000 Right.

00:10:44.000 So Crassus dies in the Battle of Carna, 53 BC.

00:10:49.000 And so now you have two people left, Caesar and Pompey.

00:10:53.000 And Pompey's in Rome, but he leaves, goes to the Adriatic, and Caesar marches into Rome.

00:11:01.000 Now, in Rome, they had a treasury, and it was called the Temple of Saturn.

00:11:05.000 And it was like their Federal Reserve.

00:11:07.000 Every country would use the temple as their storage for money. 0.83

00:11:12.000 Even in Jerusalem, right?

00:11:14.000 All the gold was stored in the temple.

00:11:16.000 And so it was sort of a given that nobody would touch that, except Caesar doesn't care what the traditions are.

00:11:23.000 He goes to the treasury and takes 15,000 bards of gold, 30,000 bars of silver, 15 million sesters of coins, and he uses the money to buy antipharioters.

00:11:36.000 He says, use money to get men, use men to get money, right?

00:11:39.000 So he buys them, then they're supporting him, and then he ends up chasing Pompey, and then eventually Pompey.

00:11:47.000 He meets him in the Middle East somewhere, right?

00:11:48.000 Persia or something?

00:11:51.000 And so it's sort of interesting.

00:11:53.000 William Henry Harrison in his inaugural issue.

00:11:55.000 He's the shortest serving president?

00:11:57.000 Correct.

00:11:58.000 28 days or something.

00:11:59.000 And shortest term, but longest inaugural.

00:12:03.000 But he says the executive department has become dangerous, appointing power to bring under its control the whole revenues of the country to stamp this monarchical character on our government, but the control of the public finances.

00:12:18.000 The first Roman emperor, in his attempt to seize the sacred treasure, silenced opposition of the officers there at the Temple of Saturn, to whose charge it had been committed with a significant allusion to his sword.

00:12:30.000 So you got these Temple of Saturn people.

00:12:32.000 We're supposed to guard this gold. 0.99

00:12:33.000 And Caesar says, okay, I'm going to kill you with my sword. 0.96

00:12:36.000 And so he takes this money, Caesar, and he uses it.

00:12:40.000 And Will and Ariel Durant wrote in their Lessons of History: In Italy, rival factions competed in wholesale purchase of votes.

00:12:47.000 In 53 B.C., one group of voters received 10 million successors for its support.

00:12:53.000 And so that's Julius Caesar buying votes.

00:12:56.000 And then after he kills, or after Pompey's Pompey was wanting to preserve the Republic, even though it had gravitated to these parties, and Caesar was representing the popularis or the populist party.

00:13:16.000 So Caesar was saying, I'm defending you common people against those rich Republicans.

00:13:21.000 I'm defending the common people against the...

00:13:23.000 But once he gets rid of Pompey, instead of him going back to the Republic and giving the popularis stuff, he just makes himself a dictator.

00:13:30.000 When did the Praetorian Guard deep state bureaucracy start to get formed?

00:13:34.000 That's a little bit later.

00:13:35.000 So Caesar gets assassinated.

00:13:37.000 On the Eides of March.

00:13:38.000 On the Eides of March.

00:13:39.000 He gets assassinated.

00:13:40.000 There's a second triumvirate.

00:13:42.000 This takes a long time to unwind itself.

00:13:45.000 About 15 years or so before the final civil war is over, his nephew, Octavian, who renames himself after Julius Caesar gets formally adopted.

00:13:54.000 He becomes Augustus, which is a title they give him.

00:13:59.000 And he mentioned that you could never call yourself a king in Rome.

00:14:02.000 So he doesn't get declared king.

00:14:05.000 And our very word emperor sort of comes from imperator, which just means like holding command.

00:14:11.000 So his actual title is princips, first citizen, basically.

00:14:16.000 And so he's the first citizen of Rome, the first man of Rome.

00:14:20.000 And sort of like in Russia, they would call him comrade, Comrade Stalin.

00:14:25.000 But everybody knows that he's not.

00:14:27.000 He's the guy in charge.

00:14:29.000 And he just has, the way he runs things is sort of, it's a constitutional fiction where he just holds every high office.

00:14:35.000 So he's the Pontifex Maximus.

00:14:37.000 He's, I don't know if they were still, if they were consul every year, but they sort of were above the consuls, which were the old executive.

00:14:46.000 Cicero was.

00:14:46.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:14:47.000 So they would, I think they still appointed consuls, but it was just a total fiction.

00:14:50.000 So the deep state emerges over a period of time.

00:14:53.000 And eventually, is it fair to say the deep state starts running the government?

00:14:56.000 The government is not running the deep state or the emperor or the heads.

00:15:01.000 It's a bureaucratic operation.

00:15:03.000 So he has this praetorian.

00:15:05.000 What I'm getting at is what we're living through in America right now is nothing new.

00:15:08.000 We've seen this pattern manifest before.

00:15:10.000 They call it the patronage system.

00:15:13.000 So it's the guy at the top that gets to decide who gets the government bailouts.

00:15:18.000 And then they get the money.

00:15:20.000 They end up giving money to their friends.

00:15:23.000 It's like BlackRock, right?

00:15:24.000 If you do the DEI, then you get loans.

00:15:29.000 And so it's using the money from the guy at the top, but through this bureaucratic system.

00:15:35.000 It's like electrons all have to line up before lightning strikes.

00:15:38.000 It's like you get everybody to submit, but you're establishing this dictatorship.

00:15:43.000 There's an interesting quote from William Henry Harrison.

00:15:46.000 He said, Caesar became the master of the Roman people under the pretense of supporting the democratic claims of the former against the aristocracy of the latter.

00:15:55.000 So he's saying, I'm going to support the people against those terrible rich people, even though once he gets in, he makes himself a 100% absolute dictator.

00:16:05.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:17:09.000 We've talked about the administrative state.

00:17:10.000 I haven't really figured out the answer to my question.

00:17:13.000 I don't think there's a good answer to it, which is: can you disassemble this thing looking through his story?

00:17:17.000 But you want to talk about Philip of Macedon.

00:17:19.000 How does that all connect, if at all, to these themes?

00:17:21.000 Well, I wanted to throw one more thing.

00:17:23.000 Caesar stacked the Senate.

00:17:25.000 There were 600 senators.

00:17:26.000 He appointed personally 300 more.

00:17:29.000 So they still kept the title of Roman Republic, but since he had 300 senators that were just doing his bidding, it more or less switched to him.

00:17:37.000 SPQR changed to.

00:17:38.000 And they were like foreign senators in some cases.

00:17:41.000 He would have been up in Gaul, modern France, which he conquers.

00:17:43.000 And he appoints some of these Gauls to the Senate, which is highly controversial.

00:17:48.000 And he even named a month after himself, right?

00:17:50.000 So the beginning of the year was March 22nd, right?

00:17:53.000 It's the spring economy.

00:17:54.000 July was his month, right?

00:17:56.000 July.

00:17:56.000 And then Augustus Caesar named the next month after himself, August.

00:18:01.000 But Philip of Macedon, so before the Roman Republic, but before Caesar and the triumvirate, you had these city-states.

00:18:12.000 Now, an easy way to explain democracies and republics, demos means people, crossing means rule.

00:18:18.000 So in a democracy, the people rule.

00:18:20.000 There were 6,000 citizens of Athens.

00:18:22.000 The word citizen is Greek.

00:18:23.000 It means co-ruler, co-sovereign, co-king.

00:18:26.000 Every citizen had to be at every meeting every day to talk about every issue. 1.00

00:18:30.000 And if you didn't keep up with what they're talking about, you're called an idiotus, an idiot. 0.99

00:18:35.000 Interesting things, because the people are in charge, if you have an agenda, how do you pitch it to 6,000 people? 1.00

00:18:42.000 They invented theater.

00:18:44.000 And you would get the whole city together and you would put on plays, comedies, tragedies, satires, where you would ridicule and buffoon certain points of view and honor and extol other points of view.

00:18:53.000 And you read Aristophanes and these different comedies.

00:18:56.000 It reads like Saturday Night Live.

00:18:58.000 I mean, they're literally making fun of living politicians by name.

00:19:01.000 And you would leave the theater saying, I don't want to be like that poor guy that was ridiculed.

00:19:04.000 And you back away from him and everything you stood for.

00:19:06.000 And then in the tragedies, they would make somebody noble and remembered.

00:19:10.000 And so I want to be like him.

00:19:12.000 And so from that time until now, theater is always political in a country where it's the people that are the rulers.

00:19:16.000 So think of your favorite sitcom or movie.

00:19:19.000 There's a character you identify with.

00:19:21.000 First couple episodes, they're upstanding.

00:19:23.000 And then the writers begin to have this character make morally compromising decisions.

00:19:27.000 A little cheating here, a little lying there, a little lust, a little revenge, a little approving of different lifestyles.

00:19:33.000 And you find yourself apologizing for him, saying, you know, I know James Bond is with a woman he's not married to, but he's about to save the world.

00:19:40.000 So can we get on with the story?

00:19:42.000 And it minimizes something that used to be important to you. 1.00

00:19:45.000 And then they portray people that hold old traditional values as simpletons and bumpkins and idiots. 1.00

00:19:49.000 And you turn off the TV saying, yeah, that person, they were old-fashioned and stodgy. 1.00

00:19:53.000 And the other person, they were cool.

00:19:54.000 And I want to wear their tennis shoes.

00:19:56.000 And so, from Athens till now, theater, media, Hollywood, it's always political in a country where it's the people that are the king.

00:20:04.000 And so, we have Athens.

00:20:06.000 We have the people that are the king, 6,000 of them, and they would call them out of their homes to the marketplace.

00:20:12.000 Then you have Philip Amacedon, and he is conquering Thebes and Thrace and the Pangonian hills where there's gold, and Amphipolis that controls those gold mines.

00:20:24.000 And Philip of Macedon takes money and buys citizens of Athens.

00:20:30.000 It's called the Macedonian Party.

00:20:32.000 And so Philip's conquering. 0.58

00:20:33.000 And so the citizens get together and say, man, we got to get our navy going.

00:20:36.000 We've got to get our army going.

00:20:37.000 Philip's conquering.

00:20:38.000 And these paid liars would stand up in the market and say, wait, wait, wait, let's not get carried away.

00:20:43.000 I hear Philip's not such a bad guy.

00:20:44.000 I hear he's not conquering city.

00:20:46.000 He's liberating them. 1.00

00:20:47.000 And they would gather around them people that believe their lies, who Lenin later referred to as useful idiots. 0.99

00:20:54.000 And it so confused the city that when Philip marched up to the walls, they just opened the gates and he came in and took over. 0.98

00:21:01.000 This is exactly the same as China going to countries and finding politicians in these countries that they can give money to.

00:21:08.000 And then when they all get together in their legislatures and they're like, oh, we need to do this and that.

00:21:13.000 No, no, no, wait.

00:21:14.000 And they're bought, they're paid for, right?

00:21:17.000 And so then when you're trying to get, well, we got to get our defenses going.

00:21:20.000 We got to, you know, defend our allies, Taiwan.

00:21:22.000 It's like, oh, no, no, let's not.

00:21:24.000 I hear it.

00:21:24.000 You have a thoughtful.

00:21:25.000 There's just another very fun example of this in kind of 1500s, 1600s, Poland.

00:21:31.000 They had their like old medieval legislature and it had a problem.

00:21:34.000 You had to be unanimous to do anything.

00:21:37.000 And so one person could derail everything. 0.96

00:21:40.000 And eventually all of Poland's neighbors realized that this was an incredible thing they could hack. 0.92

00:21:45.000 And so they would just start, you would pay off your one guy, your couple guys in the Polish legislature, and they could literally just. 0.89

00:21:52.000 What year was this?

00:21:53.000 This would be like the 1600s and early 1700s.

00:21:56.000 It was called the liberum veto, free veto.

00:21:58.000 And so any one guy who showed up at their legislature the same could just break the whole thing with by just essentially vetoing everything.

00:22:07.000 And it started off as a rare deal.

00:22:09.000 And then by the 1700s, anytime they wanted to do anything, imagine if any one senator could just dissolve the U.S. Congress at will.

00:22:16.000 And we might kind of like that idea a little bit, but you do need Congress to do things sometimes.

00:22:21.000 So in the book here, I want to try to keep focus on a couple things here.

00:22:24.000 Socialism, the real history from Plato to the present.

00:22:27.000 One of the things that you touch on, Bill, repeatedly is the rise of the tyrant.

00:22:33.000 And you wrote a whole book on that, right?

00:22:35.000 So if you were to say, what are a couple things that tyrants throughout history have in common?

00:22:40.000 What are characteristics that most tyrants share?

00:22:43.000 Do they have a pattern from either from Nero to Stalin to Lenin to Mussolini?

00:22:51.000 Yeah, it's selfish human nature.

00:22:53.000 And so St. Augustine called it libido dominanti, the lust to dominate.

00:22:57.000 You put some kids on a playground, one's the bully.

00:23:00.000 You put some junior high girls in a clique, one's the diva. 0.98

00:23:03.000 You put some people in the woods, one's an Indian chief. 0.76

00:23:05.000 You put them in an inner city, one of them is a gang leader, and all a king is a glorified gang leader. 1.00

00:23:10.000 And so they usually say that they want to get more power to do good.

00:23:16.000 A Bible of story is Joseph in Egypt was a godly guy, and he concentrates power into the hands of the Pharaoh.

00:23:23.000 And this Pharaoh does good, right?

00:23:25.000 He feeds the children of Israel. 0.63

00:23:26.000 So the next Pharaoh.

00:23:27.000 And then there's a new Pharaoh that does not know Joseph.

00:23:29.000 Yes, that's right, who did not know Joseph.

00:23:30.000 And he throws him through.

00:23:31.000 That's the turning point of Exodus, yeah.

00:23:33.000 And so that's the dilemma.

00:23:34.000 You get our guy in there, and you sort of let him concentrate power that he shouldn't because he's pushing our agenda, but he's not in there forever.

00:23:41.000 And it all gets handed over to the other party, and they use this power for evil, right?

00:23:45.000 They're pushing their agenda. 0.55

00:23:46.000 And, you know, you look at William Howard Taft was the one who pushed through the Supreme Court getting their own building.

00:23:53.000 And he's the first one to hire a staffer, and he federalized the court system.

00:23:56.000 He's a Republican so that used to be different federal courts could make decisions, and they didn't always jive, and you sort of knew this part of the country acted this way.

00:24:04.000 Well, he wanted to make it so when the Supreme Court said it, it's the law of the land.

00:24:08.000 Well, he's a Republican, but who comes after him?

00:24:11.000 You get Woodrow Wilson.

00:24:12.000 Yeah, well, no, this is Taft is the 27th president, but afterwards he becomes the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

00:24:19.000 But then you have Franklin Roosevelt.

00:24:21.000 And Franklin Roosevelt says, okay, the Supreme Court says it's the law.

00:24:24.000 We're going to push all these New Deal things.

00:24:27.000 And then it gets passed on to, you know, the whole, you know, pro-abortion and changing marriage and so forth.

00:24:34.000 But it was a Republican that said, hey, let's centralize power because we can do good better, not realizing that you're going to pass it over to the other party and they'll use it for wrong.

00:24:41.000 And so that's, so one of the trends is you get somebody that says they wanted, and even the Lord of the Rings, there's a scene where the little Gandalf or little Frodo offers the ring of power to Gandalf.

00:24:55.000 And they do the special effects and Gandalf says, don't tempt me, Frodo.

00:24:58.000 I dare not take it.

00:24:59.000 Not even to keep it safe.

00:25:00.000 Understand, I would use this ring from a desire to do good, but through me it would wield a power too terrible to imagine.

00:25:06.000 It's like, what does he mean?

00:25:08.000 I would try to do good.

00:25:09.000 So that's the problem is if you get anybody in power, you would tend to prefer your family and friends.

00:25:17.000 You got a family member that's in trouble.

00:25:19.000 You're like, okay, you know, I talk to so-and-so.

00:25:21.000 I'll get it taken care of.

00:25:22.000 And you get them off the hook.

00:25:23.000 But if you're not a family member, you don't get that special treatment.

00:25:26.000 And that's the norm.

00:25:27.000 And if somebody wants to point out your favoritism, you're going to be embarrassed and want to shut them up.

00:25:30.000 So power corps and absolute power corrupts, absolutely.

00:25:34.000 And so that's why it makes ancient Israel coming out of Egypt so amazing that you could have millions of people for 400 years not have a king.

00:25:45.000 And it worked because every citizen was taught the law and they were personally accountable to God to follow the law. 0.86

00:25:51.000 So you're about to steal.

00:25:52.000 Nobody's around.

00:25:52.000 Then you think God's watching me.

00:25:53.000 This was the Joshua generation onwards? 1.00

00:25:55.000 Right. 1.00

00:25:56.000 Is that correct? 0.98

00:25:56.000 So post the people of Egypt, their children from that point forward, correct? 0.98

00:26:03.000 It would be Joshua entering the promised land up until King Saul. 0.86

00:26:05.000 So you got it, that 400-year period.

00:26:07.000 Law has been delivered. 1.00

00:26:09.000 The old generation dies. 0.98

00:26:10.000 The new generation enters the promised land. 0.98

00:26:12.000 Yeah, and it worked as long as the priest taught it.

00:26:15.000 And then when the priest stopped.

00:26:16.000 They were supposed to be a nation of priests, right?

00:26:18.000 That was the idea of Israel.

00:26:20.000 And then when the Levites stopped teaching the law, it fell apart.

00:26:24.000 And you think they stopped teaching the law?

00:26:26.000 Well, here's a story.

00:26:27.000 Eli, the high priest, his own sons are sleeping with women in the tent where the Ark of the Covenant is.

00:26:31.000 And then there's another story of a Levite with a concubine, and the law says the Levites to marry a virgin of his own tribe.

00:26:37.000 So he's not following it.

00:26:38.000 And then they're traveling in a house surrounded by sodomites.

00:26:41.000 Something about that behavior, this casting off of self-restraint, this abandonment to passion.

00:26:46.000 And it turns into this chaos. 0.98

00:26:48.000 The poor girl dies and raped to death. 0.85

00:26:50.000 And they go to Samuel the prophet.

00:26:52.000 They say, this self-government system is not working. 0.61

00:26:53.000 We want to be like the other countries.

00:26:55.000 We want a king.

00:26:56.000 And then they go to Samuel and...

00:26:58.000 Give us a king and be careful what you wish for, basically.

00:27:00.000 Yeah, and Samuel cries, and the Lord tells him, they did not reject you, they rejected me.

00:27:04.000 So God's original plan for ancient Israel was to not have a king, have millions of people taught the law and personally accountable to God to follow the law.

00:27:11.000 And that's that period's called the Hebrew Republic.

00:27:14.000 And that was what was looked to by America's founding fathers as the model.

00:27:18.000 That's why they taught Hebrew at Yale and Harvard.

00:27:20.000 I mean, to this day.

00:27:21.000 It's a requirement to graduate, I think.

00:27:23.000 Yeah.

00:27:24.000 To this day, Yale has Hebrew characters on its coat of arms.

00:27:27.000 And so really, King Saul is the divider between Europe and America.

00:27:33.000 You think, King Saul?

00:27:34.000 Right.

00:27:35.000 So the kings of Europe looked to the Bible for their authority, but they looked to the King Saul and on.

00:27:40.000 The Calvinist Puritans that founded New England, they looked to the pre-King Saul period, this 400-year period where you have millions of people and no king, but everybody's taught the law and personally accountable to God to follow the law.

00:27:50.000 Light and truth.

00:27:51.000 Let's read the Urim and Turim was on Yale.

00:27:53.000 Bill, you flagged me in Boise.

00:27:55.000 You would have thought of something in Deuteronomy, of something I said about God knows the plans before you, but he gives you a chance to act.

00:28:01.000 Do you remember what you told me?

00:28:02.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:28:02.000 So God knows the future.

00:28:03.000 In a sense, he knows all the possible futures, and he tells you what they are, and he lets you choose.

00:28:10.000 What is the biblical evidence of that?

00:28:12.000 And then he's smart enough to know how you're going to choose.

00:28:14.000 So you have Deuteronomy 28, and he says, if you hearken to the voice of the Lord, this will be your future.

00:28:19.000 You'll be blessed coming in, blessed coming out.

00:28:21.000 If you do not hearken to the voice of the Lord, this will be your future. 0.93

00:28:24.000 The diseases of Egypt will come upon you.

00:28:26.000 The stranger will come in amongst you and rise up above you. 0.98

00:28:28.000 You've got Jeremiah going to King Zedekiah saying, if you go out and surrender to the king of Babylon, Jerusalem is going to be spared. 0.94

00:28:35.000 If you do not go out and surrender to the king of Babylon, Jerusalem will be burnt to the ground.

00:28:39.000 So here are the two possible futures. 0.84

00:28:42.000 You choose.

00:28:44.000 Please choose life.

00:28:45.000 Please choose around.

00:28:46.000 But you choose, and God's smart enough to know how we're going to choose.

00:28:50.000 But this is a concept that I develop in a new book called Believe.

00:28:56.000 And it's, how can God give us free will yet still be in control?

00:29:00.000 And it gets to the thought God created light and Einstein's theory.

00:29:05.000 Light travels at 186,000 miles per second.

00:29:07.000 And Einstein's theory of relativity is if you could travel the speed of light for you, time would stand still.

00:29:12.000 We'll never comprehend that, but there's a verse that says a day with the Lord is as a thousand years.

00:29:17.000 Imagine experiencing a day as if it was a thousand years.

00:29:20.000 In other words, God exists in the ever-present now.

00:29:23.000 I am that I am.

00:29:24.000 And we're moving in slow motion compared to him.

00:29:27.000 And so we get to make our little free will decisions, but he can readjust every electron in the universe.

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00:29:38.000 Real meat is under attack, and the store is less than trustworthy.

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00:29:44.000 This lab-grown stuff is strange.

00:29:46.000 It's weird, and you shouldn't eat it.

00:29:48.000 This means meat is formed in a bioreactor will soon be coming to a store near you. 0.99

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00:30:41.000 Bill, you wanted to make a final thought on that?

00:30:44.000 Yeah, just the fact that it's our limited free will inside the context of God's unlimited sovereign will.

00:30:51.000 And it works because he's outside of time.

00:30:53.000 All right.

00:30:54.000 And so we make our little free will decisions, but he can readjust every atom in the universe.

00:30:58.000 So it's sort of an interplay.

00:31:00.000 I use the example of a GPS on your phone.

00:31:02.000 You make a wrong turn.

00:31:03.000 It recalculates.

00:31:04.000 Make another wrong turn.

00:31:05.000 What if the guy in the car next to you is making wrong turns?

00:31:07.000 His is recalculating at the same time.

00:31:09.000 What if everybody in the world's making wrong turns and it's recalculating, right?

00:31:12.000 So we make good decisions, we make bad decisions, but God's outside of time.

00:31:15.000 He can recalculate every electron in the universe.

00:31:16.000 So his will is going to take place.

00:31:18.000 So it's our limited free will inside the unlimited context of his sovereign will.

00:31:24.000 But we must act obediently.

00:31:27.000 That is.

00:31:28.000 So we have the chance of letting him use us as a vessel for his goodness.

00:31:34.000 So the book is Socialism.

00:31:36.000 Well, it's one of your many books, Bill, and you have several.

00:31:38.000 One other thing I want to ask you about, and Blake, you can chime in.

00:31:43.000 Socialism, a monarchy makeover.

00:31:45.000 What do you mean by that?

00:31:47.000 So it's a bait and switch.

00:31:49.000 It promises heaven delivers hell.

00:31:54.000 I tell people, what if older fish could tell younger fish to stay away from shiny things dangling in the water?

00:32:01.000 But they can't.

00:32:01.000 So every new generation, younger fish sees the shiny thing.

00:32:04.000 It's a hook, and they get caught.

00:32:05.000 Socialism is a shiny thing dangling in the water.

00:32:08.000 Free food, free clothes, free education, free welfare.

00:32:11.000 Free is attractive, but there's a hook.

00:32:12.000 You give up control of your life.

00:32:14.000 And so I was reading how to catch pigs in the wild.

00:32:19.000 You put a post in the ground and you throw some corn down.

00:32:22.000 Pigs come, eat the corn, ignore the post.

00:32:24.000 And the next day, there's two posts.

00:32:25.000 Next day, three posts.

00:32:26.000 You start putting them in a little semicircle. 0.60

00:32:27.000 Pigs heat eating the post, eating the corn, ignoring the post.

00:32:30.000 So finally, they're almost in a closed circle, but there's a little opening and the pigs squeeze through the opening and they're eating their corn.

00:32:35.000 You close the gate and you caught yourself some wild pigs.

00:32:37.000 And so this is the idea.

00:32:38.000 You get people dependent on the government, dependent, dependent.

00:32:41.000 And then you begin to say, okay, if you want to continue this, you're going to have to incrementally give up your freedom.

00:32:46.000 Let us track you.

00:32:47.000 Let us, you know, get your digital IDs and everything.

00:32:52.000 So socialism is a bait and switch for dictatorship.

00:32:55.000 It sounds nice, but the thing they leave out is human nature.

00:33:01.000 And human nature is selfish.

00:33:02.000 That's why the founding fathers took the power of ruling and broke it into three branches, executive, legislative, judicial. 1.00

00:33:08.000 I use an illustration of explaining our Constitution with a brownies, right? 0.98

00:33:14.000 So I'm one of 11 kids. 1.00

00:33:15.000 I have five brothers and growing up and five sisters.

00:33:18.000 So one time we came in from playing, my mom had made brownies.

00:33:21.000 There was one left in the pan, and my little brother and I were about to fight over it.

00:33:24.000 My mom had an idea.

00:33:25.000 One of you cuts it and the other gets to pick the first piece.

00:33:28.000 Now, the one cutting it doesn't know which piece they're going to get, so they're going to try to cut it exactly equal.

00:33:32.000 It works great, unless you did it with my little brother, because he spit on him and got both pieces, but I punched him. 1.00

00:33:38.000 Anyway, but if you can imagine a big brownie, three hungry boys, you give me each a job. 1.00

00:33:43.000 First one is to trace out on the brownie where it's going to be cut. 1.00

00:33:46.000 He doesn't know which piece he's going to eventually end up with.

00:33:49.000 So he's going to try to trace those pieces exactly equal. 0.66

00:33:52.000 Second one's job is to take the knife and execute it, right? 0.98

00:33:54.000 Actually cut it. 0.98

00:33:55.000 And the third one's job is to judge and see who gets which piece.

00:33:57.000 So you have the legislative branch tracing and laying out the laws, the executive branch signing it, cutting it, putting it into law, and the judicial branch judging the law.

00:34:05.000 It's a stroke of genius.

00:34:07.000 Selfish, greedy people keep another selfish, greedy people from becoming selfish and greedy.

00:34:11.000 It would be like a Sunday school assignment.

00:34:13.000 Design a system of government where sinners keep other sinners from sinning. 0.95

00:34:16.000 That's what our Constitution is.

00:34:18.000 James Madison said, there's no angels on earth to govern us.

00:34:20.000 We're all human.

00:34:20.000 We're all selfish.

00:34:21.000 We'll all prefer our family and friends.

00:34:23.000 So what do you do?

00:34:24.000 You take the power of ruling and make a three-way tug of war.

00:34:27.000 And George Washington, in his farewell address, warns the only thing that can short-circuit this is parties, right?

00:34:34.000 So if two or more branches of the government belong to the same political party, why should we pull against each other?

00:34:40.000 Let's team up against that other branch.

00:34:42.000 And it loses its dynamic tension and it falls apart.

00:34:44.000 But our founders were preoccupied with how to take the power of a king and separate it.

00:34:50.000 In other words, our Constitution is basically a way to prevent a president from ruling through mandates and executive orders.

00:34:58.000 Should I say that again?

00:35:00.000 Our Constitution was intentionally made to keep a president from ruling through mandates and executive orders.

00:35:06.000 Take the power of one person ruling and take the Tower of Babel and scatter it.

00:35:10.000 Yes, and decentralize it.

00:35:12.000 They wanted the legislature to be the most powerful arm of government, which would be most responsive to the people.

00:35:18.000 And we haven't held up that portion of it terribly well.

00:35:21.000 Not at all.

00:35:21.000 No, we have a fourth branch, an administrative state, that's been created.

00:35:24.000 They are by far the most powerful, by far.

00:35:28.000 They act almost as this monarchy dictatorship within our own government.

00:35:34.000 Well, obviously we lost our own.

00:35:37.000 They intended for legislative supremacy, like have the legislative be the most powerful branch, have the House be the more powerful of the two chambers.

00:35:46.000 And this has decayed over time in the U.S. to the point where the House is probably the weakest.

00:35:53.000 Of the four components of the federal government, or five, if you want to include the bureaucracy, the House is probably the weakest one.

00:35:59.000 And it's very difficult to see how we can rebuild that.

00:36:03.000 And that's probably one of the big pictures from the big sweep of history.

00:36:08.000 Athens had a democracy.

00:36:09.000 It eventually failed.

00:36:11.000 And it basically took 2,000 years before you got to make another shot at that.

00:36:15.000 As bad as monarchy can be, as bad as these concentrations of power can be, they can be very, very durable.

00:36:22.000 And the alternatives to it can be very fragile.

00:36:24.000 And it's very difficult to rebuild.

00:36:26.000 Self-government is extremely rare, isn't it, Bill?

00:36:29.000 And it's slipping away.

00:36:30.000 And there's no guarantee we'll get it back for hundreds of years.

00:36:33.000 Because right now, self-government, I mean, India is not really self-government.

00:36:36.000 And that's kind of, I mean, maybe, maybe not.

00:36:38.000 But I'd say out of the, what, 170 countries, 170 countries, right?

00:36:42.000 190, 190.

00:36:44.000 Maybe 10 have legitimate self-government.

00:36:46.000 Is that fair?

00:36:46.000 Maybe.

00:36:47.000 Right.

00:36:47.000 And usually if it's smaller, it works.

00:36:49.000 But one of the things, teeter-totter.

00:36:51.000 So the less external restraints requires the populace have more internal restraints.

00:36:58.000 Right?

00:36:59.000 So if we're going to be a country with lots of freedom and few laws, the population needs to have more internal laws.

00:37:04.000 Virtue.

00:37:05.000 Plato called it virtue.

00:37:06.000 And so ancient Israel called it following the Ten Commandments and the morals.

00:37:11.000 But it's like the parent gives the teenager the car keys and says, you're a good kid.

00:37:15.000 You've got internal morals.

00:37:16.000 You can come home anytime you want.

00:37:18.000 But if you don't follow those internal morals and you drink and drive and party, you're going to be pulled over by the police and put behind bars and control.

00:37:26.000 So teenager, you are going to be controlled, either voluntarily from the inside or forcibly from the outside.

00:37:31.000 It's the same way with the nation.

00:37:33.000 We're either going to be voluntarily controlled with internal morals.

00:37:36.000 And what motivates us to follow those is we're accountable to a just God, or we're going to get rid of God, get rid of our morals, tell everybody there's no right and wrong.

00:37:42.000 Just give into your passions.

00:37:44.000 You don't even know if you're a boy or a girl anymore. 1.00

00:37:45.000 You can kill the baby in the womb. 0.93

00:37:47.000 And we shove these kids out on the street and like, there's no morals, there's no guidelines enough. 1.00

00:37:50.000 I feel like killing you. 1.00

00:37:51.000 I feel like hitting you on the head. 1.00

00:37:52.000 I feel like taking your... 1.00

00:37:53.000 And it turns into chaos.

00:37:54.000 And what happens after chaos?

00:37:55.000 You have a tyrant arise.

00:37:57.000 And it happens every time.

00:37:59.000 You know, one of the things, a visual illustration, if you drive into a city, they're doing construction.

00:38:04.000 There's a tall crane.

00:38:05.000 And your eyes are drawn to this high part of the crane.

00:38:08.000 But there's something very important on the other side you don't notice.

00:38:10.000 It's called a counterweight.

00:38:13.000 And the higher the crane goes, the heavier that counterweight has to be.

00:38:17.000 Otherwise, the whole thing tips over.

00:38:18.000 So the high part, that's a person's success.

00:38:22.000 Maybe an athlete, maybe a politician, maybe an actor, and they're really visible and really successful.

00:38:26.000 But if they don't have private moral virtue on the right, if they start doing all kinds of sin and drugs and stuff on the side, guess what?

00:38:34.000 At some point, that thing is going to crash in a day.

00:38:37.000 It's just going to fall over.

00:38:39.000 They're going to be caught in some kind of scam or some immoral stuff.

00:38:42.000 So the higher that God lifts someone up, then they need to have a counterbalance of more private internal morals and virtue and spend time with the Lord and the Bible and so forth.

00:38:54.000 And yeah, the question is you need both, right?

00:38:57.000 And currently, I do not think we have a virtuous citizenry.

00:39:01.000 So that's decline.

00:39:02.000 And so then you get the government that reflects that.

00:39:04.000 And so to try to rebuild the government, you also need to kind of rebuild the virtue in this society.

00:39:10.000 Yes, and the temperance and the prudence and the wisdom and the discipline.

00:39:15.000 Get back to this, you know, you think of it, you're a spirit, mind, and body.

00:39:19.000 So your mind is like a super fancy computer.

00:39:21.000 It's more than that, but it's at least that.

00:39:23.000 And your body's like the computer case, which makes it silly for people to argue over what color the computer case is.

00:39:29.000 Imagine if I were to say blue computers or better than green computers.

00:39:31.000 It's like, it doesn't matter what color the computer.

00:39:33.000 What matters is what software is, what apps are on your phone.

00:39:36.000 And so it doesn't matter what color somebody's skin is, is what behavioral software is running on their brain.

00:39:41.000 And so, for the longest time, we were putting Judeo-Christian morals, treat everybody fair, but now we've surrendered the programming of the children to people that want to put viruses and malware and spyware and corrupted files on their brain so they don't even know if there's a right or wrong.

00:39:55.000 They can feel like a fuzzy and it turns into chaos.

00:39:59.000 And once you have societal chaos, that's when people say government come in and restore order.

00:40:04.000 And the government's going to say, okay, we're going to take away everybody's guns.

00:40:06.000 We're going to take away your freedom of speech because you might say something that sets somebody off.

00:40:10.000 And so we're going to limit you rather than them.

00:40:12.000 And we're going to track you.

00:40:14.000 And so when there's chaos, that's the precursor to a dictatorship.

00:40:20.000 And do you find that chaos to be intentional at times, Blake?

00:40:24.000 I lean less that way than a lot of people do.

00:40:28.000 Like, I just, I think as conservatives, it's always our disposition to see everything as like planned, hierarchical, intentional, because we respect hierarchies generally.

00:40:40.000 But I just think typically things are not as planned as we often want to believe they are.

00:40:44.000 It's almost comforting to believe that, you know, there's one person who planned this because then you can remove that person or you can change their mind or otherwise, you know, displace them.

00:40:54.000 And it's much more troubling to imagine that there is no plan and rebuilding from this will be enormously difficult or even impossible.

00:41:01.000 It might, it often is that the only way you can restore, you know, the civic virtue we talk about is you might need some massive cataclysm that you have to rebuild from scratch.

00:41:10.000 It's like those Course of Empire paintings, you know, where you see the primal state and then the apogee and then the decline and fall.

00:41:17.000 And the fall is very, very painful when it takes.

00:41:20.000 Well, and so the question, I mean, without getting too blackpilled, has there ever been an example of a civilization that has turned itself around?

00:41:28.000 Slowed down, maybe, I don't know, if turned around. 0.52

00:41:31.000 So I like the story of there's this wicked king Manasseh in Judah, and he's sacrificing children to Moloch. 0.53

00:41:39.000 And the prophets come to him and say, look, you're doing the same thing that the people that were in Canaan before Israelite came and did, sacrificing children. 0.81

00:41:46.000 And so because they were doing it, I brought Israel in to judge them and drive them out. 0.90

00:41:50.000 And because you're doing it, I'm going to drive you out. 0.99

00:41:52.000 So judgment was pronounced.

00:41:54.000 Manasseh dies, has a grandson named Josiah, eight years old, starts to seek the Lord and 16 years old.

00:42:00.000 And then he's around in his early 20s.

00:42:01.000 He tells him to clean out the temple that his granddad had trashed.

00:42:04.000 And they find the law of God.

00:42:07.000 And the priests read it, said, We've never read this before.

00:42:10.000 Pretty unusual.

00:42:11.000 They take it to this young 26-year-old king, 24-year-old.

00:42:14.000 He's never read it.

00:42:15.000 And so he rips his garments and repents and sends to a prophetess in town named Holda, the wife of the king's tailor, to ask what's going to happen.

00:42:24.000 And she says, tell the man that sent you that judgment will come, but not during his lifetime because he repented.

00:42:29.000 And so for the rest of the 31-year reign of Josiah, there's peace and prosperity.

00:42:33.000 He tears down these sodomite temples, even some of them that Solomon had built because he had a thousand wives. 0.82

00:42:38.000 And then he has this huge Passover, bigger than anyone before. 0.82

00:42:42.000 And then he sends the Levite priests out to teach the law all across Judah. 0.60

00:42:46.000 And this is the revival that Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, right, got turned on. 0.52

00:42:52.000 And so my feeling is that we deserve judgment.

00:42:56.000 But if we repent, and all repentance, all liberty is individual, all repentance is individual.

00:43:01.000 It's not somebody out there repenting.

00:43:03.000 It's each one of us individually.

00:43:05.000 And so I think that it's an exciting time.

00:43:10.000 And in a sense, we wouldn't have it any other way.

00:43:12.000 I mean, imagine being in heaven talking to Moses and David and Gideon.

00:43:16.000 They're like, you know, telling all their exciting stories.

00:43:18.000 And imagine if you lived and it was all done.

00:43:20.000 Like everybody knew the Lord, all the diseases were cured, all the babies were fed, and you're like, I didn't really do anything.

00:43:25.000 It's like boring.

00:43:26.000 So for the rest of eternity, you'll be known as the boring story guy.

00:43:28.000 You know, if we want another example of some degree of comeback, we have our own English political history.

00:43:35.000 And England goes through cycles of being much more tyrannical versus much more free.

00:43:40.000 Like Henry VIII, nowadays we just make TV shows about him, and he's this like fat guy who has a lot of domestic drama.

00:43:46.000 But he basically was like running this incredibly violent tyranny in which anyone who stood in his way would get executed.

00:43:53.000 And we go from that in the 1500s to the 1600s.

00:43:57.000 England has a very vicious civil war over the powers of parliament, the glorious religion, and then they have the Glorious Revolution.

00:44:03.000 And, you know, the end state of this is we have 1700s England where they're, you know, blossoming all these ideas that the American Revolution further develops.

00:44:12.000 You know, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, separation of powers.

00:44:16.000 This grows out of, you know, England has a very tyrannical moment and then a much more liberty-minded moment where they do cultivate a lot of these virtues, you know, all the virtues that the Puritans are giving their kids as names, you know, prudence, charity, all of that.

00:44:30.000 And, you know, and then we also get out of that the abolition of slavery develops out of this English political tradition.

00:44:36.000 And so I think you could definitely argue that's a good example of a moral cultivation that there were painful moments.

00:44:43.000 You know, they have a very bad civil war, but they do get through it without a total collapse of civil war.

00:44:49.000 History is a teacher.

00:44:51.000 What is one thing that people need to do that is currently not being done that history tells us can improve our chances of revival or victory?

00:45:00.000 Well, every generation has had a crisis.

00:45:02.000 At the Hun, Genghis Khan, bubonic plague, Spanish flu.

00:45:05.000 And if we get through this crisis, there'll be another one.

00:45:07.000 We get through that crisis, there'll be another one.

00:45:09.000 Jesus said, wheat and terrors grow together until the harvest.

00:45:11.000 There's always going to be crisis.

00:45:12.000 And the crisis is an opportunity for people to reveal what's on the inside of them.

00:45:16.000 And some people's response is to run away and hide.

00:45:19.000 Others people's response is to step up and say, okay, God, where do you need me?

00:45:23.000 And historically, Christians have been on the front lines saying, you know, okay, there's a plague.

00:45:29.000 I'm going to step forward. 0.73

00:45:30.000 You know, in Hawaii, the statue that they have in our U.S. capital is Father Damien.

00:45:36.000 Who's he?

00:45:36.000 Well, whaling ships, Hawaii, diseases, and they'd get leprosy and they'd put them on an island of Molokai.

00:45:42.000 And they're just dying there.

00:45:43.000 And so this priest named Father Damien goes there and ministers to him for decades.

00:45:47.000 And he eventually dies.

00:45:48.000 But he ran to the need and it so ministered to the people of Hawaii that they chose to put his statue in Honolulu and in the U.S. Capitol. 0.91

00:45:56.000 But Christians have this reputation of there's instead of staying away, I might catch something from you. 0.97

00:46:01.000 It was like, no, let me. 1.00

00:46:02.000 And so, you know, freshman chemistry class, a teacher has a beaker with a solution and pours in a catalyst that causes a reaction.

00:46:12.000 And some stuff precipitates and gets heavy, settles to the bottom of the beaker.

00:46:16.000 Other stuff gets effervescent and bubbly and floats to the top.

00:46:19.000 The time period we're living in is our solution in the beaker.

00:46:22.000 The crises of our time period is the catalyst that's poured in and it causes a reaction.

00:46:26.000 And some people's reaction is to run away and hide and drop out and think about themselves and how am I going to survive without the government and even take the mark of the beast if they tell them to, right?

00:46:36.000 And other people's response is to say, okay, God, where do you need me?

00:46:39.000 Where's the crisis?

00:46:40.000 I'm going to run to the need.

00:46:42.000 You know, I'm already dead and my life is hid with Christ and God.

00:46:44.000 Where do you need me?

00:46:45.000 And so it's a dividing that's taking place.

00:46:48.000 And I can't help but think that, you know, from a spiritual point of view, we're the bride of Christ.

00:46:53.000 And every romance novel builds up to a decision-making moment, a forsaking of all others and choosing the one.

00:46:58.000 I feel like the world is being pushed to a decision-making moment.

00:47:02.000 And some people are going to choose the all-others.

00:47:04.000 They're going to be liked and friended and followed.

00:47:06.000 And others are going to say, I don't care about the all others.

00:47:08.000 All I care about is what God thinks about me.

00:47:10.000 But I think that the world's being pushed to this moment.

00:47:12.000 And I just would encourage people, take a stand.

00:47:15.000 Realize that the situations that we're facing is the opportunity for you to take a stand.

00:47:24.000 I mean, if people say, God knows my heart, and it's like, yeah, he knew what was in Abraham's heart, but he wanted to see him be willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac.

00:47:33.000 And it's like imagine a guy watching football.

00:47:35.000 And you say, when was the last time you told your wife you love her?

00:47:38.000 And he's like, I can't remember, but she knows my heart.

00:47:40.000 It's like, well, when was the last time you did anything to show your wife you love her?

00:47:44.000 I can't remember, but she knows my heart.

00:47:46.000 It's like, dude, we need to have a little talk.

00:47:49.000 It's like, God knows your heart.

00:47:50.000 Yeah, he does.

00:47:50.000 And he wants to hear some words out of your mouth and he wants to see some action.

00:47:54.000 Blake, what historically can we do that we are not currently doing that can improve our chances of victory?

00:48:02.000 I feel like this is going to sound weird.

00:48:04.000 Like we need to maybe like, maybe log off is the right term or whatever.

00:48:14.000 Like we're very much, I think a lot of people are very passive consumers of what is happening around them.

00:48:20.000 They'll, you know, they'll watch TV.

00:48:22.000 They'll be very informed.

00:48:23.000 They'll watch the news.

00:48:25.000 But it is almost like, it's like one of those dramas he talked about in ancient Athens at the start, that they are watching it like a TV show.

00:48:33.000 And you actually have to view, we have to view ourselves as characters and what is happening around us.

00:48:38.000 And that increases our amount of agency.

00:48:40.000 Like one of the temptations towards like these, this monarchical impulse is like, oh, we need to have one great person who will just do snap their fingers and fix everything or restore our problems.

00:48:51.000 And what we actually need is the realization that you, on a local level, can act to improve what is going on around you.

00:48:59.000 And that is something where you have personal agency.

00:49:02.000 You can make sure that your family is fine and your town is fine, even if the country is getting worse.

00:49:07.000 And that is what you, as an individual person, can do best to survive any bad things that happen in the future.

00:49:14.000 Because whenever a cataclysm comes, it's going to strike down the weak and vulnerable before it takes down the strong.

00:49:20.000 So make sure you're one of the strong people who stick around.

00:49:23.000 And make a choice to be strong.

00:49:24.000 I don't think the Amish will be destroyed if America has a disaster.

00:49:28.000 Email us freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:49:31.000 Bill Federer, thank you so much.

00:49:32.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:49:33.000 And Blake.

00:49:34.000 Book is Socialism: Real History from Plato to the Present.

00:49:36.000 You can also listen to Blake on our Thought Crimes episode as well.

00:49:39.000 God bless you guys.

00:49:40.000 Thanks so much.

00:49:41.000 Thank you.

00:49:42.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:49:43.000 Email us your thoughts as always freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:49:47.000 Thanks so much for listening and God bless.

00:49:51.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - July 14, 2023

Socialism: The Two Thousand Year Failure with Bill Federer and Blake Neff

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