00:00:35.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:44.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:16.000So I have two minds that have IQs off the charts that know history very, very well.
00:01:21.000I'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.
00:01:30.000Bill, we've had you on the show many times, and I was actually just rereading Socialism, The Real History from Plato to the Present.
00:01:42.000And it sounds good until you think it through.
00:01:45.000Somebody has to be in the government handing out the common stuff.
00:01:48.000And 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.
00:01:55.000And before you know it, it gets discretionary.
00:01:57.000And the saying is, he who holds the purse strings has the power.
00:02:00.000So 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.
00:02:10.000And then I go in the book to how these different attempts to institute socialism over the years.
00:02:20.000And people say, well, wasn't the early church socialist?
00:02:22.000No, the early church was the early church.
00:02:24.000Socialism is counterfeit early church and the difference is between the word voluntary and involuntary.
00:02:29.000So early believers voluntarily sold their property, laid it at the feet of the apostles.
00:02:34.000They didn't have the government take away their property and laid it at the feet of Pilate.
00:02:37.000And then when the children of Israel went into the promised land, every family was given property.
00:02:43.000If you own property, you can accumulate stuff, the Bible called that being blessed, and you can give away some of your stuff.
00:03:21.000Is 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.
00:04:32.000People say, I thought slavery started in 1619.
00:04:35.000No, wherever you had the first king on top, you had slaves on the bottom.
00:04:38.000And so that's the default setting is gangs.
00:04:41.000So 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.
00:04:50.000And so what's rare is people getting a chance to rule themselves without a king.
00:04:54.000Self-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.
00:05:01.000Is there an example ever of, and Bill, you could chime in once Blake answers, of successfully challenging, disrupting, or dismantling an administrative state?
00:05:11.000Well, I mean, they tend to crash rather spectacularly when they do fall apart, which is the whole civilization crashes with it.
00:05:20.000So you get these, if you have, you know, a very rigid order, like it is inherently unstable.
00:05:26.000And it kind of, it, it makes probably everyone involved with it worse, I think you could say.
00:05:31.000So 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.
00:05:42.000And so it's like it means that their revolution even is more orderly.
00:05:45.000Like we're able to have the American Revolution.
00:05:47.000We don't literally behead every single person connected with the king in America.
00:05:52.000Whereas when the French Ancient regime comes down, it is an extremely bloody affair.
00:05:59.000And it's not, you know, everyone involved kind of comes off worse as a result of it.
00:06:04.000You know, the people who are upholding the regime are more violent.
00:06:07.000The people overthrowing the regime are more violent.
00:06:51.000It 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.
00:07:04.000So whenever you have people ruling themselves, two things happen.
00:07:09.000It works, and people get a chance to be all that they want to be and become creative.
00:07:15.000And 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.
00:07:25.000And if you can imagine trying to float on top of a beach ball with suntan lotion on, it's really hard.
00:07:32.000And then all of a sudden you slip off and the beach ball pops up.
00:07:34.000So 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.
00:09:44.000I need to prove that I'm this great general.
00:09:46.000And 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.
00:10:00.000And so then that destabilizes the triumphant.
00:11:14.000All the gold was stored in the temple.
00:11:16.000And so it was sort of a given that nobody would touch that, except Caesar doesn't care what the traditions are.
00:11:23.000He 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.
00:11:36.000He says, use money to get men, use men to get money, right?
00:11:39.000So he buys them, then they're supporting him, and then he ends up chasing Pompey, and then eventually Pompey.
00:11:47.000He meets him in the Middle East somewhere, right?
00:11:59.000And shortest term, but longest inaugural.
00:12:03.000But 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.
00:12:18.000The 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.
00:12:30.000So you got these Temple of Saturn people.
00:12:33.000And Caesar says, okay, I'm going to kill you with my sword.
00:12:36.000And so he takes this money, Caesar, and he uses it.
00:12:40.000And Will and Ariel Durant wrote in their Lessons of History: In Italy, rival factions competed in wholesale purchase of votes.
00:12:47.000In 53 B.C., one group of voters received 10 million successors for its support.
00:12:53.000And so that's Julius Caesar buying votes.
00:12:56.000And 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.
00:13:16.000So Caesar was saying, I'm defending you common people against those rich Republicans.
00:13:21.000I'm defending the common people against the...
00:13:23.000But 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.
00:13:30.000When did the Praetorian Guard deep state bureaucracy start to get formed?
00:13:42.000This takes a long time to unwind itself.
00:13:45.000About 15 years or so before the final civil war is over, his nephew, Octavian, who renames himself after Julius Caesar gets formally adopted.
00:13:54.000He becomes Augustus, which is a title they give him.
00:13:59.000And he mentioned that you could never call yourself a king in Rome.
00:14:37.000He'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.
00:15:24.000If you do the DEI, then you get loans.
00:15:29.000And so it's using the money from the guy at the top, but through this bureaucratic system.
00:15:35.000It's like electrons all have to line up before lightning strikes.
00:15:38.000It's like you get everybody to submit, but you're establishing this dictatorship.
00:15:43.000There's an interesting quote from William Henry Harrison.
00:15:46.000He 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.
00:15:55.000So 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.
00:17:29.000So 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.
00:18:44.000And 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.
00:18:53.000And you read Aristophanes and these different comedies.
00:19:23.000And then the writers begin to have this character make morally compromising decisions.
00:19:27.000A little cheating here, a little lying there, a little lust, a little revenge, a little approving of different lifestyles.
00:19:33.000And 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.
00:20:06.000We have the people that are the king, 6,000 of them, and they would call them out of their homes to the marketplace.
00:20:12.000Then 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.
00:20:24.000And Philip of Macedon takes money and buys citizens of Athens.
00:21:53.000This would be like the 1600s and early 1700s.
00:21:56.000It was called the liberum veto, free veto.
00:21:58.000And so any one guy who showed up at their legislature the same could just break the whole thing with by just essentially vetoing everything.
00:23:34.000You 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.
00:23:41.000And it all gets handed over to the other party, and they use this power for evil, right?
00:23:46.000And, you know, you look at William Howard Taft was the one who pushed through the Supreme Court getting their own building.
00:23:53.000And he's the first one to hire a staffer, and he federalized the court system.
00:23:56.000He'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.
00:24:04.000Well, he wanted to make it so when the Supreme Court said it, it's the law of the land.
00:24:08.000Well, he's a Republican, but who comes after him?
00:24:21.000And Franklin Roosevelt says, okay, the Supreme Court says it's the law.
00:24:24.000We're going to push all these New Deal things.
00:24:27.000And then it gets passed on to, you know, the whole, you know, pro-abortion and changing marriage and so forth.
00:24:34.000But 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.
00:24:41.000And 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.
00:24:55.000And they do the special effects and Gandalf says, don't tempt me, Frodo.
00:25:27.000And if somebody wants to point out your favoritism, you're going to be embarrassed and want to shut them up.
00:25:30.000So power corps and absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
00:25:34.000And 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.
00:25:45.000And it worked because every citizen was taught the law and they were personally accountable to God to follow the law.
00:26:58.000Give us a king and be careful what you wish for, basically.
00:27:00.000Yeah, and Samuel cries, and the Lord tells him, they did not reject you, they rejected me.
00:27:04.000So 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.
00:27:11.000And that's that period's called the Hebrew Republic.
00:27:14.000And that was what was looked to by America's founding fathers as the model.
00:27:18.000That's why they taught Hebrew at Yale and Harvard.
00:27:35.000So the kings of Europe looked to the Bible for their authority, but they looked to the King Saul and on.
00:27:40.000The 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.
00:27:55.000You 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.
00:29:59.000If access to food you can trust is important, then I cannot recommend Good Ranchers enough.
00:30:03.000There's a reason they've won the best food subscription for two years in a row.
00:30:06.000They got genuinely good products and top-tier customer service.
00:30:10.000You can't call the scientists in the lab to ask about their fake meat, but Good Ranchers has a team of people available for you to call and answer all your questions.
00:32:26.000You start putting them in a little semicircle.
00:32:27.000Pigs heat eating the post, eating the corn, ignoring the post.
00:32:30.000So 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.
00:32:35.000You close the gate and you caught yourself some wild pigs.
00:33:55.000And the third one's job is to judge and see who gets which piece.
00:33:57.000So 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.
00:35:37.000They intended for legislative supremacy, like have the legislative be the most powerful branch, have the House be the more powerful of the two chambers.
00:35:46.000And this has decayed over time in the U.S. to the point where the House is probably the weakest.
00:35:53.000Of the four components of the federal government, or five, if you want to include the bureaucracy, the House is probably the weakest one.
00:35:59.000And it's very difficult to see how we can rebuild that.
00:36:03.000And that's probably one of the big pictures from the big sweep of history.
00:37:18.000But 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.
00:37:26.000So teenager, you are going to be controlled, either voluntarily from the inside or forcibly from the outside.
00:37:33.000We're either going to be voluntarily controlled with internal morals.
00:37:36.000And 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.
00:38:18.000So the high part, that's a person's success.
00:38:22.000Maybe an athlete, maybe a politician, maybe an actor, and they're really visible and really successful.
00:38:26.000But 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?
00:38:34.000At some point, that thing is going to crash in a day.
00:38:39.000They're going to be caught in some kind of scam or some immoral stuff.
00:38:42.000So 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.
00:38:54.000And yeah, the question is you need both, right?
00:38:57.000And currently, I do not think we have a virtuous citizenry.
00:39:02.000And so then you get the government that reflects that.
00:39:04.000And so to try to rebuild the government, you also need to kind of rebuild the virtue in this society.
00:39:10.000Yes, and the temperance and the prudence and the wisdom and the discipline.
00:39:15.000Get back to this, you know, you think of it, you're a spirit, mind, and body.
00:39:19.000So your mind is like a super fancy computer.
00:39:21.000It's more than that, but it's at least that.
00:39:23.000And your body's like the computer case, which makes it silly for people to argue over what color the computer case is.
00:39:29.000Imagine if I were to say blue computers or better than green computers.
00:39:31.000It's like, it doesn't matter what color the computer.
00:39:33.000What matters is what software is, what apps are on your phone.
00:39:36.000And so it doesn't matter what color somebody's skin is, is what behavioral software is running on their brain.
00:39:41.000And 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.
00:39:55.000They can feel like a fuzzy and it turns into chaos.
00:39:59.000And once you have societal chaos, that's when people say government come in and restore order.
00:40:04.000And the government's going to say, okay, we're going to take away everybody's guns.
00:40:06.000We're going to take away your freedom of speech because you might say something that sets somebody off.
00:40:10.000And so we're going to limit you rather than them.
00:40:14.000And so when there's chaos, that's the precursor to a dictatorship.
00:40:20.000And do you find that chaos to be intentional at times, Blake?
00:40:24.000I lean less that way than a lot of people do.
00:40:28.000Like, I just, I think as conservatives, it's always our disposition to see everything as like planned, hierarchical, intentional, because we respect hierarchies generally.
00:40:40.000But I just think typically things are not as planned as we often want to believe they are.
00:40:44.000It'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.
00:40:54.000And it's much more troubling to imagine that there is no plan and rebuilding from this will be enormously difficult or even impossible.
00:41:01.000It 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.
00:41:10.000It'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.
00:41:17.000And the fall is very, very painful when it takes.
00:41:20.000Well, and so the question, I mean, without getting too blackpilled, has there ever been an example of a civilization that has turned itself around?
00:41:28.000Slowed down, maybe, I don't know, if turned around.
00:41:31.000So I like the story of there's this wicked king Manasseh in Judah, and he's sacrificing children to Moloch.
00:41:39.000And 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.
00:41:46.000And so because they were doing it, I brought Israel in to judge them and drive them out.
00:41:50.000And because you're doing it, I'm going to drive you out.
00:42:15.000And 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.
00:42:24.000And she says, tell the man that sent you that judgment will come, but not during his lifetime because he repented.
00:42:29.000And so for the rest of the 31-year reign of Josiah, there's peace and prosperity.
00:42:33.000He tears down these sodomite temples, even some of them that Solomon had built because he had a thousand wives.
00:42:38.000And then he has this huge Passover, bigger than anyone before.
00:42:42.000And then he sends the Levite priests out to teach the law all across Judah.
00:42:46.000And this is the revival that Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, right, got turned on.
00:42:52.000And so my feeling is that we deserve judgment.
00:42:56.000But if we repent, and all repentance, all liberty is individual, all repentance is individual.
00:43:01.000It's not somebody out there repenting.
00:43:26.000So for the rest of eternity, you'll be known as the boring story guy.
00:43:28.000You know, if we want another example of some degree of comeback, we have our own English political history.
00:43:35.000And England goes through cycles of being much more tyrannical versus much more free.
00:43:40.000Like Henry VIII, nowadays we just make TV shows about him, and he's this like fat guy who has a lot of domestic drama.
00:43:46.000But he basically was like running this incredibly violent tyranny in which anyone who stood in his way would get executed.
00:43:53.000And we go from that in the 1500s to the 1600s.
00:43:57.000England has a very vicious civil war over the powers of parliament, the glorious religion, and then they have the Glorious Revolution.
00:44:03.000And, 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.
00:44:12.000You know, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, separation of powers.
00:44:16.000This 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.
00:44:30.000And, you know, and then we also get out of that the abolition of slavery develops out of this English political tradition.
00:44:36.000And so I think you could definitely argue that's a good example of a moral cultivation that there were painful moments.
00:44:43.000You know, they have a very bad civil war, but they do get through it without a total collapse of civil war.
00:44:51.000What 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?
00:45:00.000Well, every generation has had a crisis.
00:45:02.000At the Hun, Genghis Khan, bubonic plague, Spanish flu.
00:45:05.000And if we get through this crisis, there'll be another one.
00:45:07.000We get through that crisis, there'll be another one.
00:45:09.000Jesus said, wheat and terrors grow together until the harvest.
00:46:02.000And so, you know, freshman chemistry class, a teacher has a beaker with a solution and pours in a catalyst that causes a reaction.
00:46:12.000And some stuff precipitates and gets heavy, settles to the bottom of the beaker.
00:46:16.000Other stuff gets effervescent and bubbly and floats to the top.
00:46:19.000The time period we're living in is our solution in the beaker.
00:46:22.000The crises of our time period is the catalyst that's poured in and it causes a reaction.
00:46:26.000And 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?
00:46:36.000And other people's response is to say, okay, God, where do you need me?
00:46:45.000And so it's a dividing that's taking place.
00:46:48.000And I can't help but think that, you know, from a spiritual point of view, we're the bride of Christ.
00:46:53.000And every romance novel builds up to a decision-making moment, a forsaking of all others and choosing the one.
00:46:58.000I feel like the world is being pushed to a decision-making moment.
00:47:02.000And some people are going to choose the all-others.
00:47:04.000They're going to be liked and friended and followed.
00:47:06.000And others are going to say, I don't care about the all others.
00:47:08.000All I care about is what God thinks about me.
00:47:10.000But I think that the world's being pushed to this moment.
00:47:12.000And I just would encourage people, take a stand.
00:47:15.000Realize that the situations that we're facing is the opportunity for you to take a stand.
00:47:24.000I 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.
00:47:33.000And it's like imagine a guy watching football.
00:47:35.000And you say, when was the last time you told your wife you love her?
00:47:38.000And he's like, I can't remember, but she knows my heart.
00:47:40.000It's like, well, when was the last time you did anything to show your wife you love her?
00:47:44.000I can't remember, but she knows my heart.
00:47:46.000It's like, dude, we need to have a little talk.
00:48:25.000But 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.
00:48:33.000And you actually have to view, we have to view ourselves as characters and what is happening around us.
00:48:38.000And that increases our amount of agency.
00:48:40.000Like 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.
00:48:51.000And what we actually need is the realization that you, on a local level, can act to improve what is going on around you.
00:48:59.000And that is something where you have personal agency.
00:49:02.000You can make sure that your family is fine and your town is fine, even if the country is getting worse.
00:49:07.000And that is what you, as an individual person, can do best to survive any bad things that happen in the future.
00:49:14.000Because whenever a cataclysm comes, it's going to strike down the weak and vulnerable before it takes down the strong.
00:49:20.000So make sure you're one of the strong people who stick around.