The King's Hall - Vlad the Impaler： Dracula, Bram Stoker, & the Christian Prince Behind the Myth

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00:00:56.600 the legend of dracula the blood-sucking vampire started in europe with the novelist bram stoker

00:01:07.780 in the 1890s and is somehow connected in more recent history to microsoft co-founder paul allen

00:01:13.960 since then the story has taken on a life of its own for all its twists and turns the story

00:01:20.560 fundamentally centers around Wallachia, or present-day Romania, and one key historical

00:01:25.640 figure, Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler, or, as he was known by contemporaries,

00:01:32.500 Vlad Dracul. How does it all fit together? In the summer of 1890, 45-year-old Bram Stoker

00:01:41.080 visited the library in Whitby, England, where he requested a very specific title. The accounts

00:01:47.340 of Principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia by William Wilkinson. A rare book unavailable to the

00:01:54.560 public, it was somewhat strange that Stoker had requested it. In reality, an acquaintance of his

00:02:00.620 recommended he check out the rare manuscript. Patrons who did read the book were kept under

00:02:05.740 the watchful eye of the librarian, who immediately after the patron was done, returned the book to

00:02:10.900 its place on the shelf. When he viewed the book, Stoker turned immediately to a specific passage,

00:02:16.560 left, then visited Whitby Museum, then began investigating a strange shipwreck.

00:02:22.960 In his journal, he wrote the following, Voivode or Dracula. Dracula in Wallachian means devil.

00:02:29.700 Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous,

00:02:35.420 either by courage, cruel actions, or cunning, end quote. When he finally wrote his book Dracula,

00:02:41.960 he included a strange preface, one that was removed when the book was officially published

00:02:47.000 in 1897. This is what he wrote, quote, I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the

00:02:53.960 events here described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might

00:02:59.240 appear at first sight. And I am further convinced that they must always remain to some extent

00:03:04.260 incomprehensible, end quote. What is clear from his journal is that Stoker never intended Dracula

00:03:11.060 to be published as a work of fiction at all.

00:03:14.020 Instead, he believed that the events he wrote about,

00:03:16.180 at least to some extent, had taken place.

00:03:19.140 By the time of publishing,

00:03:20.500 Dracula was missing the original first 101 pages,

00:03:24.440 and the publisher insisted that it be produced

00:03:26.620 as a work of fiction, or not at all.

00:03:29.920 The main reason is the publisher feared

00:03:32.080 it would stir panic in England,

00:03:34.140 which was already at a high watermark

00:03:35.820 because of the unsolved serial killings

00:03:37.980 of Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel during the late 1880s. A century later in the 1980s,

00:03:45.640 a shocking discovery was made. The original Dracula manuscript was discovered in a barn

00:03:50.940 in Pennsylvania. No one knows how the manuscript exactly made its way across the Atlantic,

00:03:56.460 but it was afterward purchased by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. But that brings up an

00:04:02.320 interesting question. What was in the first 101 pages that publishers found too frightening for

00:04:08.160 public consumption? That story has been recently told by Dacre Stoker, great-grandnephew of the

00:04:14.940 author, and J.D. Barker in their more recent novel, Dracule. The Irish social landscape described in

00:04:22.100 Dracule includes cholera epidemics, famine, and poverty, which create a claustrophobic,

00:04:28.000 dread-infused atmosphere. The novel tells a fictional story about Bram Stoker's childhood

00:04:35.180 and early life from the 1850s through 1868, including the encounters he claims to have had

00:04:41.340 with Dracula. In Stoker's early pages, he tells the story of himself as, wait for it, a vampire

00:04:48.360 slayer. What were the supposed real-life events upon which Stoker built his story about Dracula,

00:04:54.540 the blood-sucking vampire who never died.

00:04:57.860 His story most of all seems to be based on the historical person of Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Dracule.

00:05:04.960 As we will show in this episode, there is no doubt that Vlad was a brutal military leader and prince in Wallachia 0.97

00:05:10.580 who was faced with stopping the spread of an equally brutal Islamic encroachment.

00:05:15.720 His force to the Impaled is notorious among Christians and Muslims alike. 1.00

00:05:20.300 His method of executing enemies of the state is indeed shocking.

00:05:24.540 He would impale them on large wooden poles, a spectacle that left all in shock and awe. 0.98

00:05:30.300 After saving his Wallachian people from the bloody Muslim invasion,

00:05:34.540 Vlad was arrested and held in prison by Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, son of John Hunyadi.

00:05:40.600 The move shocked many within Christendom.

00:05:43.900 In 1462, Pope Pius II had expected Vlad and Corvinus to partner on a sort of crusade against Islam.

00:05:51.000 As a result of the arrest, Pope Pius II demanded answers from Matthias as to why he had not

00:05:56.520 partnered with, but instead arrested, the famous defender of Christendom.

00:06:00.980 What resulted was a relentless propaganda campaign against Vlad.

00:06:05.840 In addition to accusing Vlad of seeking to aid the Muslims, a story that quite frankly

00:06:09.940 made no sense even to Corvinus' closest aides, Matthias detailed fantastical accounts of

00:06:16.180 Vlad's alleged diabolical and sadistic cruelties.

00:06:20.920 Thanks to Gutenberg's printing press, stories of Ladd circulated quickly and were accompanied by lurid engravings.

00:06:28.420 Appearing under the title, The Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked Blood-Drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula,

00:06:35.860 these pamphlets spread across Europe and were sensational bestsellers.

00:06:40.180 The story is told of how he boiled people alive, shredded others like cabbage,

00:06:45.540 forced parents to eat their children impaled and broiled,

00:06:48.540 husbands to eat their wives' breasts, 0.99

00:06:50.640 forced Tartars to swallow their own semen 1.00

00:06:52.500 and built secret trapdoors to drop his victims 0.96

00:06:55.100 uncunningly located stakes below.

00:06:58.300 The obviously fabricated propaganda

00:07:00.740 generated to discredit Vlad became part of urban lore.

00:07:04.360 And even his name, Dracule,

00:07:06.000 which meant Order of the Dragon

00:07:07.600 and was ascribed to a select set of defenders of Christendom,

00:07:11.760 was changed by the tracks to mean Son of a Devil,

00:07:14.180 a myth that Stoker obviously repeated.

00:07:18.520 Vlad Dracula was victim to one of the most brutal fake news campaigns of all time.

00:07:23.920 These false narratives are the ones that Bram Stoker used to construct his Dracula novel. 0.86

00:07:29.320 In reality, Vlad was a great, albeit brutal, Christian prince. 0.94

00:07:33.280 But when weighed against the brutalities he and his people suffered under the Muslims, 0.74

00:07:37.540 Vlad isn't nearly the monster modern movies and fiction portray him as.

00:07:42.000 We'll tell his story in this episode of the King's Hall Podcast.

00:07:50.160 A monster from the id?

00:07:52.140 But before we get into the story, one other perspective on Dracula and the horror genre

00:07:57.440 is worth exploring.

00:07:59.340 In his book, Monsters from the Id, The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, E. Michael

00:08:04.900 Jones posits the theory that the horror genre took off in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

00:08:11.540 which focused its efforts on the liberation of the libido. Amidst the chaos of the sexual

00:08:18.360 revolution that France unleashed on the world, a new fixation with the horror genre emerged.

00:08:25.480 As Jones argues, key figures like Mary Wollstonecraft played a pivotal role.

00:08:32.880 Wollstonecraft, who became enamored from afar with the trappings of the revolution,

00:08:36.660 traveled to France where her life was quickly upended by the lived-out principles of sexuality

00:08:43.600 unchained. Regarded as a founding feminist, Wollstonecraft had two failed sexual relationships, 0.82

00:08:50.900 eventually landing in the arms of William Godwin, a founding father of the anarchist movement. 0.93

00:08:57.500 Her life was a disaster brought about by jettisoning the moral compass of the Christian

00:09:03.300 faith, she would die just a few short days after the birth of her daughter, Mary Shelley. Shelley,

00:09:10.500 of course, would go on to write the novel Frankenstein. She had begun a sexual relationship 1.00

00:09:15.520 with Percy Shelley, who was already married and a friend of William Godwin. Pregnant, however, 0.99

00:09:22.300 with Percy's child, the couple faced ostracism from the English elite circles they tried to swim

00:09:29.140 So torn was Percy's first wife, Harriet, by his infidelity, that in 1815 she committed suicide.

00:09:37.400 Percy remained without remorse. Percy and Mary's relationship was fraught with turmoil,

00:09:43.360 his repeated infidelity and brokenness of degenerate ideals. As E. Michael Jones argues,

00:09:49.660 Frankenstein is really a monster from the id, that is, the monster that arose from the scarred

00:09:55.240 subconscious of the French Revolution. Created by a mad scientist, the monster comes to strangle 0.62

00:10:01.900 and kill everything its creator held dear. As a metaphor, it stands to warn against the grave 0.78

00:10:08.380 dangers of intentionally imposed sexual chaos. The Dracula myth is something similar, a metaphor

00:10:15.840 emerging from the deep subconscious of what happens when degeneracy becomes commonplace. 0.90

00:10:22.840 As Stoker tells the story, Dracula runs parallel to the homosexual movement. 0.93

00:10:27.920 He is unable to reproduce and so flees from Transylvania to the fresh blood of London. 0.96

00:10:33.880 There he gains followers and victims, not through reproduction, but through blood-satiated recruitment.

00:10:40.860 Jones writes, like vampirism and homosexuality, revolutions can only be destructive.

00:10:46.900 They can only have a parasitic relationship

00:10:49.160 to the body politic draining off its vital forces,

00:10:53.640 rendering the soil barren,

00:10:55.620 forcing its proponents to search for new lands to conquer

00:10:58.700 because the lands of its birth have already been depleted.

00:11:02.780 So Transylvania could stand as a metaphor

00:11:05.020 for revolutionary France,

00:11:07.440 as seen through the eyes of Shelley and Mary Godwin

00:11:09.920 in the days of devastation

00:11:11.460 following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.

00:11:15.140 Shelley, infected by his sojourn in revolutionary France,

00:11:18.960 returned to England to spread the revolutionary basilisk 0.58

00:11:22.220 and its concomitant woes to unsuspecting Englishmen, end quote.

00:11:27.600 Jones posits that Stoker likely had syphilis,

00:11:30.620 and so the connection with Dracula is a deep desire for pure blood.

00:11:36.020 Whatever is true of Stoker, this we know for sure.

00:11:38.480 The revolutionary spirit has brought great diseases upon mankind

00:11:42.340 that robbed it of its strength. 0.95

00:11:44.160 abortion, infanticide, sexually transmitted diseases, homosexuality, and more.

00:11:50.280 Not surprisingly, it was a society that effortlessly became fixated with the horror genre, 0.59

00:11:55.880 and in the case of Vlad, turned a Christian story into something of a nightmare. 0.66

00:12:07.940 In the year 1431 AD, a man named Vlad was welcomed into the Order of the Dragon

00:12:13.860 which was a group of valiant men devoted to the Christian defense against the Islamic aggression.

00:12:20.380 The man's name became Vlad Dracul, Dracul meaning dragon, as reference to his order.

00:12:26.960 In 1436, Vlad Dracul became Vlad II, warlord of Wallachia.

00:12:32.100 He was one of many sons of the previous warlord.

00:12:35.180 He had to fight his way to the throne, since in Wallachia there was no succession of the firstborn, no primogeniture.

00:12:41.440 Every son of a voivode had equal claims to the throne.

00:12:45.380 As such, Wallachia was a brutal and unstable country

00:12:48.780 with as many as 29 different leaders in a 60-year period.

00:12:54.040 Raymond Ibrahim points out that Wallachia was also treated as a chessboard

00:12:58.440 by Hungary and the Ottoman Empire alike. 0.74

00:13:01.660 The Hungarians would promote whatever voivode would help them the most

00:13:05.160 and the Ottomans would do the same. 0.75

00:13:07.880 The nobles of Wallachia lurked in the background as a third party,

00:13:11.440 constantly attempting to sabotage voivodes for their own political advantage.

00:13:16.420 With constant outside influences and danger, Vlad became a vassal of the Ottoman Empire in 1437.

00:13:23.840 The next year, Sultan Murad II, the arch-enemy of Skanderbeg and John Hunyadi,

00:13:29.840 used Vlad to invade and devastate the Christian country of Transylvania.

00:13:33.720 However, it seemed that Vlad had some regret for taking the sultan's side. 0.76

00:13:38.460 So when John Hunyadi became active against the Ottoman oppression, Vlad switched to the Christian camp.

00:13:44.720 As a result, the sultan called Vlad to Adrianople, where he locked him in prison. 0.55

00:13:49.760 To buy his freedom, Vlad gave his two youngest sons as hostages to the sultan.

00:13:54.440 The two boys were Vlad, the middle of his father's three sons and named for his father,

00:13:58.900 and Radu, the younger brother, who were both thrown in an Ottoman prison. Just like Skanderbeg

00:14:04.760 before him, Vlad was raised as an Ottoman. From his approximate birth date in 1430 AD, 0.80

00:14:11.260 Vlad III was raised in a tough and brutal environment. Due to his upbringing, Ibrahim

00:14:16.620 refers to Vlad as a top graduate of the school of hard knocks. He writes, quote,

00:14:21.620 From the tenderest age, a great deal of emphasis was placed on physical fitness

00:14:25.900 in Wallachia. Even at court, children were exposed to the elements on stormy nights in

00:14:31.260 true Spartan tradition. Should they survive the chills and fevers of the accompanying colds,

00:14:36.060 they were considered to have strong physical and moral character, essential traits for good

00:14:41.100 warriors. For physical exercise, even a five-year-old tot had to be able to ride an unsaddled

00:14:46.920 horse at Gallup, end quote. His appearance was as follows, quote, he was not very tall,

00:14:52.380 but very stocky and strong with a cold and terrible appearance a strong aquiline nose

00:14:58.320 swollen nostrils a thin and reddish face in which the very long eyelashes framed large

00:15:04.860 wide open green eyes the bushy black eyebrows made them appear threatening his face and chin

00:15:11.260 were shaven but for a mustache the swollen temples increased the bulk of his head a bull's

00:15:16.980 neck connected his head from which black curly locks hung on his wide-shouldered person, end

00:15:22.720 quote. However, as an Ottoman captive, Vlad was rather skinny and pale. For six years, from the

00:15:29.280 age of 12 to about 18, he lived under the iron rule of the sultan. At any moment, Vlad's precarious

00:15:36.220 position could change and he could be killed or blinded. If his father's relationship with the

00:15:40.880 sultan changed, if Vlad himself made a wrong step, or if the sultan simply had a mood swing.

00:15:46.600 Indeed, when Vlad II assisted John Hunyadi at the Battle of Varna,

00:15:51.300 it seemed that Murad would kill the two hostage Wallachians as a repercussion.

00:15:55.920 Instead, Murad kept both boys alive in order to regain Vlad's neutrality,

00:16:01.220 which turned out to be successful.

00:16:03.500 As a result, Vlad and his brother Radu lived in constant fear of being killed at any moment.

00:16:10.000 Radu's story is somewhat more tragic.

00:16:13.080 Radu is known in history as Radu the Handsome,

00:16:16.040 for his incredible good looks.

00:16:18.060 And because of that, Sultan Murad's son Muhammad

00:16:20.520 made Radu into his personal katamite,

00:16:23.440 or lover, as the Muslims call him.

00:16:25.920 Radu had at first resisted Muhammad, 0.51

00:16:28.560 but finally gave in to the satanic man's advances.

00:16:32.740 The historian Chalco Kandiles

00:16:34.620 offers these vile details concerning Radu's molestation.

00:16:38.700 Quote,

00:16:39.440 It happened that the Sultan was almost killed by the boy, Radu, 0.98

00:16:42.940 when he had wanted to have sex with him.

00:16:44.660 This was when he, Muhammad, had first gained the throne in 1451.

00:16:49.420 He was in love with the boy, then aged 15, and invited him for conversation.

00:16:54.960 And then, as a sign of his respect, he invited him for drinks to his bedchamber.

00:16:59.400 The sultan kissed the unwilling boy, who drew a dagger and struck the sultan on his thigh.

00:17:05.260 Shortly afterward, Radu was coerced at the port and became the sultan's lover.

00:17:10.460 End quote.

00:17:11.840 During his imprisonment, Radu became a victim of what today would probably be called Stockholm Syndrome.

00:17:18.440 He became fully submissive to the sultan and would remain his devilish servant for the rest of his days.

00:17:24.480 Because of the different treatment they received as captives and their naturally opposite dispositions,

00:17:29.980 Vlad and Radu grew to hate each other over the years,

00:17:33.580 which is one main reason for the conflict they would experience against each other in the years to come.

00:17:39.080 The rule of Vlad begins.

00:17:40.960 In 1447, John Hunyadi had had enough of Vlad II's constant betrayals and duplicity.

00:17:48.980 He led the Wallachians to revolt against their leader, and Vlad was beheaded.

00:17:53.640 Vlad's oldest son, Mercia, was tortured and then buried alive. 0.71

00:17:57.660 Hunyadi took control of Wallachia. 0.83

00:18:00.120 Aware and afraid of Hunyadi's power, Sultan Murad turned to Vlad III,

00:18:05.160 his captive and an heir to the throne of Wallachia. 0.84

00:18:08.260 Vlad had a fierce temper and was often whipped as a captive.

00:18:12.060 This, as a result, toughened his character to a diamond-like hardness.

00:18:16.960 Murad saw these good qualities for a Voivode and so sent him to claim his birthright

00:18:21.800 in the form of the throne of Wallachia.

00:18:24.420 In return, Vlad owed a yearly tribute to Murad in the form of Wallachian children.

00:18:30.180 Once Vlad arrived in Wallachia, the accounts of what happened are confusing.

00:18:34.100 Vlad took the throne of Valachi at age 18, but two months later was ousted.

00:18:38.280 Then he disappears from history completely for the next eight years.

00:18:42.280 Vlad resurfaced in the summer of 1456, seemingly with help from John Hunyadi,

00:18:47.640 who was then in his final days, suffering under the dark cloud of the plague.

00:18:52.660 Vlad retook his throne by single combat,

00:18:55.560 defeating the same man who had killed his father and older brother, Vladislav II.

00:19:00.040 In order to stay in power, Vlad would have to make some crucial changes to the structure of the Wallachian government and military.

00:19:07.200 Because treachery from within his own people was the order of the day, he developed a loyal and skilled personal guard to be with him at all times,

00:19:15.600 protecting him from any assassination attempts from his own nobles or the Ottomans. 0.98

00:19:20.960 The next step in cementing his rule was dealing with the ever-present, always-malicious Wallachian nobles. 0.95

00:19:28.320 Vlad had a plan, and as would soon become his trademark, it was a particularly brutal plan. 0.97

00:19:35.100 Vlad invited all the nobles he believed capable of treachery to dinner at his palace.

00:19:40.480 Once they arrived, he asked them how many Voivodes have gone before him.

00:19:44.980 They responded with a laugh and said, many.

00:19:48.040 Curious, Vlad asked why that was.

00:19:51.420 Without letting them answer, Vlad told them that their incessant scheming

00:19:55.740 and malicious treachery was the cause of this country's turmoil.

00:20:00.220 By now, the nobles suspected treachery, but it was too late.

00:20:04.300 The palace doors were locked from the outside.

00:20:06.580 Vlad and his new guard drew their swords and butchered the nobles.

00:20:10.560 To fill the holes left by the now-deceased nobles,

00:20:13.620 Vlad promoted all the worthy men he could find,

00:20:16.180 building a loyal corps around himself as a ruler.

00:20:19.280 Likewise, he rebuilt the Wallachian army from the top down.

00:20:23.220 After replacing the nobles, he filled the military ranks with trustworthy men who were loyal to him,

00:20:28.520 thus helping to secure his rule and the stability of his country.

00:20:32.280 Now that Vlad's rule was stabilized, a key question remained.

00:20:36.680 Where did Vlad's loyalties lie?

00:20:38.900 Would he remain loyal to the Ottomans or return to the Christian side?

00:20:43.360 Vlad made his position clear.

00:20:45.120 He allied himself to the Transylvanians and became a vassal of Hungary

00:20:49.860 He said, quote, under oath and with faith in God

00:20:53.220 We have decided and agreed that whenever over the course of time

00:20:56.860 Because of fear of the Turks or a coup by our enemies

00:20:59.940 That we will come to the aid of one another, end quote

00:21:03.400 He further consolidated his position with a letter to Transylvanian allies in September of 1456

00:21:10.500 Quote, now the time and appointed hour about which we spoke before has arrived

00:21:15.020 The Turks intend to put great burdens, almost impossible to bear, upon our shoulders, 0.94

00:21:20.900 forcing us to bow down before them. 0.99

00:21:23.080 It is not for us or ours that they put such a great burden, but for you and yours. 0.99

00:21:28.500 The Turks do this to humiliate us. 0.70

00:21:31.400 As far as we ourselves are concerned, we could have made peace. 1.00

00:21:35.400 But on account of you and yours, we cannot make peace with the Turks, 1.00

00:21:39.460 because they wish to pass through our country to attack and plunder you. 1.00

00:21:43.040 End quote.

00:21:43.440 Vlad also asked that the Transylvanians send him 50 men to show his power to the sultan the next time they met

00:21:50.040 Not only did Vlad's plea fall on deaf ears 0.77

00:21:53.040 The Hungarians and the Transylvanians conspired to replace Vlad on the Wallachian throne

00:21:58.280 Learning of the treachery planned against him

00:22:00.880 Vlad went into Transylvania and destroyed several towns he had made alliance with

00:22:04.880 Impaling thousands 0.95

00:22:06.320 As for Dan, the man the Hungarians had tried to place on the Wallachian throne 0.82

00:22:11.900 Vlad had a special punishment for him. 0.57

00:22:14.280 Dan was forced to dig his own grave

00:22:16.600 as the funeral service was carried out,

00:22:19.420 and then he was beheaded next to the grave he had dug.

00:22:23.280 The beheading of Dan and the fierceness

00:22:25.520 with which he defended his throne

00:22:27.080 confirmed Vlad's status as unquestioned warlord of Wallachia.

00:22:31.760 In 1461, Muhammad sent tributes to Vlad

00:22:34.840 demanding his tribute in the form of 500 Wallachian children

00:22:38.280 to supplement the Janissary course.

00:22:41.200 The men, upon arriving at Vlad's castle, did not remove their turbans.

00:22:45.460 It was the Christian custom to remove one's hat in the presence of a king,

00:22:49.620 and so Vlad was rightfully upset. 1.00

00:22:51.960 He was also well aware of the Muslim practice. 0.57

00:22:54.920 But he asked them nonetheless why they refused to remove their turbans.

00:22:58.600 They responded that the Turkish custom was to keep their heads wrapped.

00:23:02.400 Vlad laughed and said that he would help them keep their custom. 0.93

00:23:06.360 As a result, Vlad had the men's turbans nailed into their heads,

00:23:11.020 Blood flowing freely down their heads and torsos, Vlad sent the disrespectful men back to the Sultan with a message saying,

00:23:18.500 Don't send his, the Sultan's, customs to other lords who don't want them, but let them keep them to himself.

00:23:25.120 In fall of 1461, Sultan Muhammad again sent envoys to Vlad requesting his promised tribute.

00:23:32.020 This time he sent a man named Yunus Bey, who was known for his honeyed tongue.

00:23:36.580 He convinced Vlad to send tribute to Muhammad

00:23:39.360 And that winter, Vlad arrived at the Ottoman city of Nicopolis 0.85

00:23:43.120 With 50 Wallachian children 0.91

00:23:44.800 The first installment of the promised tribute

00:23:46.980 However, Vlad's tribute was all a guise

00:23:50.500 He hid his personal guard in the mountains

00:23:52.900 And attacked Nicopolis at nightfall

00:23:55.460 And took two Muslim leaders captive

00:23:57.700 Hamza Bey and Yunus Bey 0.95

00:23:59.640 The outraged Muslims cried 1.00

00:24:01.500 The Bey of Wallachia, Vlad 1.00

00:24:03.600 That damned son of an expletive 1.00

00:24:05.820 Vlad impaled both the captured Muslim men 1.00

00:24:26.620 and put them in a place according to their high stature. 0.64

00:24:29.920 They were impaled on stakes high up by Vlad's castle.

00:24:33.080 Their heads were also cut off

00:24:34.740 and sent to the sultan as a sign that Vlad did not fear him.

00:24:38.700 Upon returning to Alachia, Vlad raised an army of 2,000 men

00:24:42.280 and marched back over the Danube to the fortress of Georgia near Nicopolis.

00:24:47.900 Vlad approached the gate, speaking fluent Turkish,

00:24:50.720 and convinced the city to open the gate.

00:24:53.260 Vlad and his men massacred those in the fortress and those in the surrounding lands,

00:24:57.520 all told killing about 24,000 Turks.

00:25:01.020 To prove his victory, Vlad cut the nose off of every dead Turk and sent them to Hungary. 0.75

00:25:07.280 Next, Vlad sent terrified Turkish prisoners to Muhammad with a message, 0.55

00:25:11.600 quote,

00:25:12.300 Go, you will tell your sultan what you have seen.

00:25:15.260 I have served him as far as I was able.

00:25:17.600 And if my service is pleasing to him, I will serve him still, as much as is in my power, end quote. 1.00

00:25:24.360 Such an act drove fear into the hearts of the Muslims, 0.98

00:25:27.740 who were used to doling out violence and terror, not receiving it. 0.54

00:25:32.500 Everywhere in the Ottoman Empire, even in the Sultan's court of Constantinople,

00:25:37.100 the infuriated Sultan called for a jihad and declared war on Vlad. 0.53

00:25:42.220 Aware of the Turkish tidal wave that was coming,

00:25:44.460 Vlad appealed to the Hungarian king Matthias Korvenes, son of John Humyadi, for troops.

00:25:50.880 Korvenes declined to aid him with troops and Vlad was forced to raise a purely Wallachian army.

00:25:56.820 He managed to muster about 30,000 men, most of whom were peasants. 0.82

00:26:01.000 He hoped that it would be enough to stop the Ottomans.

00:26:03.720 In 1462, sources describe that Muhammad assembled between 150 and 300,000 men at Constantinople

00:26:12.580 before marching to the Danube.

00:26:14.760 When Muhammad arrived, he was met by the whole of Vlad's army standing on the other side of the riverbank. 0.97

00:26:20.160 Muhammad tried to force a crossing, but his Janissaries were repelled by the desperate Christians. 0.82

00:26:25.400 Soon, 250 Janissaries lay dead, his prized soldiers. 0.95

00:26:30.200 Fearing the loss of his most fearsome warriors,

00:26:32.880 Muhammad withdrew the Janissaries and bombarded Vlad and his men with cannon fire,

00:26:37.500 forcing the Wallachians to retreat.

00:26:39.560 Muhammad and his men then safely crossed the Danube. 0.60

00:26:42.900 For the next several days, the Muslim army marched unabated through Wallachian territory. 0.85

00:26:47.300 The Muslims marched directly for the place where the Wallachians had hidden their women and children in the surrounding forests. 0.85

00:26:54.400 The secret Wallachian hiding place had been betrayed by none other than Vlad's own brother, Radu, 0.61

00:26:59.760 who had accompanied the Sultan to Wallachia. 0.65

00:27:02.560 Their women and children captive, all the Wallachians except for those directly in Vlad's service submitted to Sultan Muhammad.

00:27:09.900 Vlad was left to his own limited resources. 0.65

00:27:12.500 Though he could not openly confront the Sultan in battle, Vlad did not make it easy for the Ottomans to march through his country.

00:27:19.520 As he retreated, Vlad burned all of the land and poisoned every well,

00:27:24.200 forcing the Ottomans to go without water.

00:27:26.420 Vlad conducted guerrilla raids on the edges of the sultan's armies as well.

00:27:30.960 Vlad and the Wallachians found themselves in a perilous situation.

00:27:34.320 Surely Vlad would be helped now by his ally, Matthias Corvinus.

00:27:38.440 In a disgrace to his father's name, Matthias failed to appear, 0.93

00:27:42.820 leaving Vlad vexed and betrayed by his own Christian kinsmen. 0.87

00:27:47.460 On top of that, some of Vlad's holdings were attacked by his own cousin, Stephen of Moldavia, whom Vlad himself had placed in power. 0.99

00:27:56.140 Christian infighting was again bringing Christendom to new depths and bringing joy to the Muslim hordes. 0.97

00:28:02.940 Aware of his desperate situation, Vlad planned a somewhat startling move. 1.00

00:28:06.480 At midnight on June 16th and 17th, 1462, in the plains of the Carpathian Mountains,

00:28:12.420 Vlad, Dracula, and several thousand horsemen violently blitzed the sleeping Ottoman encampment

00:28:18.400 with the intention of killing the sultan and his personal guard.

00:28:22.060 The sultan fled by foot with the other scattered Muslims.

00:28:25.740 By dawn, as Vlad returned to his mountain fortress, the Ottoman camp was in disrepair.

00:28:30.980 The attack became known as Dracula's Night Attack. 0.90

00:28:34.320 The move was daring and bold. 0.99

00:28:36.460 Muslim contemporaries tried to cover their defeat by saying that they eventually fought

00:28:40.560 off Vlad and caused his retreat, but that simply is not true. The Muslims had been literally caught

00:28:45.200 sleeping and were scattered. Vlad left before they could recover and mount an attack. But no

00:28:51.040 matter how bold or daring, Vlad's plan ultimately failed. The Sultan was still alive and his army

00:28:56.840 was still beyond number. On his return to his palace, Vlad bestowed glowing praise upon those

00:29:04.020 of his men who were wounded in the chest. As for those wounded in the back, a sign of their retreat

00:29:09.440 before the enemy. Vlad had them impaled, saying, you're not a man, but a woman. The sultan's

00:29:15.920 response to Vlad's attack was to round up as many Wallachian men as possible, beheading them all.

00:29:21.380 Some 3,700 Wallachian men were killed as a result of the sultan's fury. Still, though Vlad's plan

00:29:27.620 for killing the sultan had not prevailed, it had succeeded in planting a seed of fear in the sultan's

00:29:33.540 mind. What made Muhammad fear Vlad the most was the way in which Vlad's own men feared him.

00:29:40.200 Following the night attack, a Wallachian soldier was brought before the sultan and questioned.

00:29:44.660 The man answered every question except the question concerning Vlad's whereabouts.

00:29:49.700 When Muhammad threatened to kill the man if he did not reveal Vlad's location,

00:29:54.040 the man did say that he knew exactly where Vlad was, but since he feared Vlad greatly,

00:29:58.560 he would not reveal his location even on pain of death.

00:30:02.580 Raymond Ibrahim said concerning the sultan that,

00:30:05.760 seeing that the Wallachian preferred to be tortured to death by Turks

00:30:09.360 rather than risk the wrath of the Lord Impaler, 0.67

00:30:12.300 a thrilling spasm of terror and not a little admiration shook Muhammad.

00:30:17.420 As he casually watched and listened to the death throes of the Wallachian's execution,

00:30:22.940 the sultan was heard to remark that with such fear surrounding him,

00:30:26.900 Dracula could become unstoppable, end quote.

00:30:30.660 Despite his fear, Sultan Muhammad slowly pressed on. 0.93

00:30:33.780 After the night attack, he made his men dig a very extensive ditch

00:30:37.800 around his encampment each night to protect from future attacks.

00:30:41.660 The Ottomans pushed to the town of Targovist,

00:30:44.340 the home of Vlad and the Wallachian throne.

00:30:47.120 As the Turks approached Targovist,

00:30:49.000 they saw glinting in the distance crooked objects on poles.

00:30:53.680 As they drew closer, the objects grew clear and the Turks grew terrified.

00:30:58.760 Terrified and restless as a giant gasp emanated from the huge army. 0.79

00:31:03.540 They had discovered the truth of the legend.

00:31:06.000 Vlad's forest of the impaled was no myth.

00:31:09.060 Quote,

00:31:09.260 Thousands of stakes of various heights held the remaining carcasses of some 20,000 Turkish captives.

00:31:16.140 Their body were in a state of complete decomposition due to the heat of the summer

00:31:20.020 and the ravages of ravens and other Carpathian birds of prey,

00:31:23.680 many of which had made their nests within the skulls and skeletal remains of the victims.

00:31:29.920 Barely recognizable because of the higher stakes used in deference to their position

00:31:33.700 were the remains of the Greek Katabolinos, Eunice Bay, and Hamza Pasha,

00:31:38.800 who had been impaled months before.

00:31:41.620 The tattered remains of their gaudy vestments fluttered against the evening sky.

00:31:46.660 The entire area reeked with the stench of death,

00:31:49.380 the smell of rotting flesh. Dracula had deliberately stage-managed their sinister spectacle

00:31:55.800 as part of his terror tactics to destroy whatever spirit was still left in Muhammad

00:32:00.360 after the unsuccessful assassination attempts a few days before. Indeed, the force of the impaled 0.51

00:32:07.020 was horrible enough to discourage the most stout-hearted officers who witnessed the scene.

00:32:11.240 End quote. Just as Vlad hoped, Muhammad's spirit was broken. Contemporary Muslim writers described

00:32:19.160 the powerful sultan as panic-stricken.

00:32:22.020 Muhammad ordered an especially deep trench

00:32:24.160 dug around him that night, but to no avail.

00:32:26.420 Vlad still conducted another massive night raid, 0.81

00:32:29.580 slaughtering thousands more Muslims.

00:32:31.880 When the dawn came, the frantic sultan packed up his camp 0.82

00:32:34.800 and with much haste returned across the Danube

00:32:37.880 to his homeland, his efforts having failed,

00:32:40.800 and it was with great disgrace that he returned.

00:32:43.860 Vlad III, Dracula, the dreadlord impaler,

00:32:46.620 was heralded throughout Europe as a hero for his efforts.

00:32:50.260 His tiny force had conquered a massive Ottoman army

00:32:53.800 by turning the Muslims' own terror tactics against them. 0.75

00:32:57.400 Unfortunately, Vlad's power would not last.

00:33:00.740 Sultan Murad had one last gamble.

00:33:03.020 He left his faithful minion Radu, the brother of Vlad,

00:33:06.240 with a small contingent of men and lots of cash and fine things in Wallachia.

00:33:10.980 Because Radu had just as legitimate acclaim to the throne of Wallachia as Vlad,

00:33:15.780 Remember, no primogeniture

00:33:17.660 Muhammad planned on using him to take control of Wallachia

00:33:21.220 Radu began talks with the Wallachian nobles

00:33:24.040 If they put Radu on the throne, they would have peace with the Muslims

00:33:27.380 Something Vlad could never give 1.00

00:33:28.980 One by one, the foolish nobles forgot who had delivered them 0.95

00:33:32.860 And turned to Radu 0.96

00:33:34.420 Vlad, aware of his brother's scheming, fled to Hungary

00:33:38.200 Vlad assumed he would be safe in Hungary, but he was wrong

00:33:42.860 Instead, the treacherous Matthias Corvinus framed Vlad,

00:33:47.520 forging a letter purportedly from Vlad to the sultan,

00:33:50.700 where Vlad proposed to betray Christendom to the sultan in exchange for the throne of Wallachia.

00:33:55.920 Based on these forged documents, Matthias threw Vlad in prison.

00:34:00.380 After the imprisonment of Vlad Dracula, Matthias Corvinus had to explain himself to the pope.

00:34:05.400 Pope Pius II had given Matthias money to fund a crusade to help Vlad,

00:34:10.340 but Matthias instead spent the money on himself

00:34:12.980 and threw Vlad in prison.

00:34:15.500 Pius was understandably upset.

00:34:18.220 In order to defend himself,

00:34:20.260 Matthias invented stories about Vlad

00:34:22.500 that made him out to be a monster,

00:34:24.640 someone who should be kept in prison.

00:34:26.660 The stories were elaborate and almost clearly fake.

00:34:30.080 As we stated at this episode's onset,

00:34:32.580 Matthias accused Vlad of boiling people alive,

00:34:35.260 shredding people like cabbage,

00:34:36.720 forcing parents to eat their children, 0.99

00:34:38.620 husbands to eat their wives' breasts, and more. 0.85

00:34:41.340 They even twisted the meaning of Vlad's name from son of the dragon to the devil's son. 0.93

00:34:45.800 According to historian Raymond Ibrahim, Vlad was not needlessly cruel,

00:34:50.780 for any cruelties that he committed were part of a carefully crafted state policy,

00:34:55.660 and committed against the backdrop of a truly brutal age.

00:35:00.220 As a result of Matthias' propaganda, Vlad was imprisoned on the Danube in a fortress called Visegrad.

00:35:06.000 He was kept there for 13 years from 1462 to 1475.

00:35:11.680 In 1475, when Basarab Laiota took the Wallachian throne from Radu,

00:35:16.620 Matthias decided Vlad was needed again.

00:35:19.420 He released Vlad from prison and made him captain of his army.

00:35:23.300 Right away, Vlad obtained several victories over the Ottomans in Bosnia and Serbia in early 1476. 0.94

00:35:30.620 By August, Vlad had completely driven the Muslims out of Moldavia. 0.88

00:35:35.160 Vlad, using the army given him by Matthias Corvinus, retook the throne of Wallachia.

00:35:39.880 On November 26, 1476, Vlad III Dracula was crowned warlord in Wallachia for the third time.

00:35:47.840 He allied himself with Matthias and Stephen of Moldavia.

00:35:52.020 But Vlad's third reign over Wallachia was short.

00:35:55.560 Though the circumstances are unclear, what is clear is that Vlad was betrayed.

00:36:00.960 Whether he was betrayed by his own nobles

00:36:02.900 or by Basarab Laiota,

00:36:05.100 the man he had replaced as warlord, is unknown.

00:36:08.140 One story is that Basarab returned to Wallachia

00:36:11.200 with Turkish allies and killed Vlad.

00:36:13.520 Another is that his nobles surrounded him 0.58

00:36:15.740 and stabbed him to death,

00:36:17.020 remembering the way that he had slaughtered 0.99

00:36:19.120 all of the noblemen all those years ago.

00:36:21.980 Either way, Vlad was beheaded. 0.67

00:36:24.420 His head was impaled and flown 0.70

00:36:25.960 from the highest tower in Constantinople.

00:36:29.120 Just like Skanderbeg before him, and unlike his brother Radu,

00:36:32.860 Vlad III Dracula, the dreadlord Impaler, 0.53

00:36:35.700 had risen above his Muslim captivity to defend Christendom 0.93

00:36:38.700 with vigor and bravery and shocking brutality. 0.98

00:36:43.760 He had held the frontier of the Christian West

00:36:46.240 multiple times against much larger forces, 0.98

00:36:49.540 using his own might and terror.

00:36:51.700 However, just as was the case with John Hunyadi and Skanderbeg,

00:36:55.820 Vlad's greatness was undermined 0.96

00:36:57.540 by constant Christian backstabbing and betrayal. 0.99

00:37:01.760 Vlad's most valiant efforts did not last,

00:37:04.740 mainly because he was undermined 1.00

00:37:06.100 by his own allegedly Christian brothers. 0.81

00:37:08.720 As Mark 3, 24 to 25 says,

00:37:11.280 if a kingdom be divided against itself,

00:37:14.100 that kingdom cannot stand.

00:37:15.920 And if a house be divided against itself,

00:37:18.420 that house cannot stand.

00:37:20.500 It is a poignant lesson for our own time.

00:37:23.800 If the kingdom of Christ is divided, it cannot stand.

00:37:27.940 Because of the terrible division and infighting among Christians in Vlad's own day,

00:37:32.800 the Ottomans made vast inroads into Christian territory, 0.51

00:37:36.580 defeating even the best warriors Christendom had to offer. 0.81

00:37:39.920 A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.

00:37:44.760 The King's Hall Podcast exists to make self-ruled men rule well and win the world.

00:37:52.920 well gentlemen welcome to this episode of the king's hall podcast i'm one of your hosts eric

00:38:06.260 con joined by dan dig your own grave burkholder wow yeah wow wow pretty sure eric just interjected

00:38:14.620 that story it was not real there was no guy named dan yeah it was a threat who believes in a guy

00:38:20.720 named dan in the 1400s and in like transylvania i had to tap out because i couldn't even pronounce

00:38:25.900 the names and then there comes dan and then dan shows up well we know it wasn't you because his

00:38:30.400 name was dan the younger so because you're old because you're old it's like if you didn't get

00:38:35.840 not it because you're old okay they're the same age they're the same man um brian silvey good to

00:38:42.840 be here with you skanderbecks welcome to yeah exactly uh brian we have a lot to talk about in

00:38:48.040 this show um one of the things we don't need to talk about because we all accept it as fact is

00:38:53.120 that this level of violence is perfectly acceptable i knew it but i knew it many such many other

00:38:58.640 questions i knew it that we have i just want to say up front here i knew it i knew i knew that

00:39:04.340 we were going to get into this episode and the first thing that eric vlad dracula enjoyer khan

00:39:09.480 was going to say is you've you know like when uh mona lisa says i've never done anything wrong ever

00:39:16.500 I know this.

00:39:17.260 I know this.

00:39:18.060 Money, please.

00:39:19.080 Money, please.

00:39:20.560 Yeah, yeah.

00:39:21.380 That's an apt comparison.

00:39:22.820 Brian, one of the things that I do want to ask you,

00:39:25.360 we ended the cold open with this,

00:39:27.940 that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.

00:39:31.160 And I think it's really interesting because on Acts recently,

00:39:35.800 one of the things that has been most divisive now

00:39:39.100 has been this issue of the Crusades.

00:39:41.640 Yeah.

00:39:42.180 Like, ironically.

00:39:43.900 Ironically, there's been a lot within the Christian reform camp where we're not only, I think, getting pushback.

00:39:50.440 James White was one of the key people giving pushback against the Crusades.

00:39:53.960 But it's also interesting, Dan, because it's the kind of pushback where you say, because of your opinion, James is essentially saying, because of your opinion and how bad it is, we can't even have a discussion about it.

00:40:07.580 Like, this is a really crucial issue, how you view the Crusades.

00:40:10.480 And I want to ask you at this moment, why do you think that is?

00:40:13.540 Like, why is the Crusades, which we've actually been talking about for quite some time, how

00:40:18.660 did it get to the point where now we have people in upheaval?

00:40:21.120 Why is it upsetting to some people within the Christian camp?

00:40:25.900 I don't even know if it's necessarily the Crusades themselves.

00:40:29.460 I think it was just the thing that was latched onto as far as a test of orthodoxy.

00:40:35.320 Right. 0.82

00:40:35.500 And part of that is just because like we read in this story, with the propensity of Christians throughout history to betray and to be schismatic in their own tribe, it's a great problem that we just, I mean, you have Judas and then it all goes downhill from there, right? 0.89

00:40:54.940 Within the Christian kingdom. 0.71

00:40:56.840 And so I think what you're seeing is a spirit of schismatism within Christianity that's existed for a very long time.

00:41:06.460 And the Crusades were just the thing that was latched onto.

00:41:09.280 What I'm continually frustrated by is actually something that we have as far as rules for engagement.

00:41:18.020 We have rules for engagement on Twitter.

00:41:21.220 Oh, you're talking about us here.

00:41:22.440 Yeah, us here personally.

00:41:23.980 How do we approach Twitter?

00:41:26.060 Obviously, there are strategic fights that are picked, usually around some just absolutely

00:41:34.000 idolatrous pagan ideals like feminism or about just some of the sins of our age.

00:41:42.340 A lot of, I mean, I'm speaking for more Eric and Brian because I don't really tweet that often,

00:41:46.840 but you can tell that's where you guys really mount the attack is I'm going to poke one of

00:41:52.420 the idols of the age in the eye. That's the goal. But as far as attacking Christians, 0.74

00:41:59.740 attacking really in our tribe of Christians, that's not something that we're going to do.

00:42:05.500 We're not going to go on the offensive against other reformed brothers unless we see something

00:42:10.960 that is absolutely egregious. And so we really want to keep our friends close is part of the

00:42:18.860 goal. So it's really confusing to me when you have someone such as James White and there are

00:42:24.460 others in the reform camp that continue to attack us and our friends, even though they're supposed

00:42:30.660 to be our friends, like these men that are attacking, they're supposed to be our friends.

00:42:36.260 And so then when we defend ourselves, because we didn't attack, we didn't initiate this,

00:42:42.060 but obviously our reputations and credibility and our arguments, they're all under attack,

00:42:47.220 we must defend ourselves. And then when you defend yourself, you have a whole host,

00:42:54.160 the rabble comes from Christian circles, and then they accuse you of things like being divisive or

00:43:02.500 not respecting your elders or all of these crazy things, crazy accusations against us.

00:43:09.900 And that whole dynamic is really irritating to me.

00:43:15.860 I don't know.

00:43:16.560 You guys have experienced this more directly than me.

00:43:19.700 Well, I want to ask Brian kind of his take on this.

00:43:22.440 But I think if you go back in history a little bit, say like a year and a half ago when sort of the Christian nationalism, Stephen Wolf's book came out, I think what you're actually seeing is two kinds of Christianity that are like just butting into each other head to head.

00:43:38.700 And on the one side, you have James White and pietism.

00:43:41.960 And I think where he's calling the early reformers, they're sacralists.

00:43:47.920 And I've heard other people say that most of the early reformers were racists.

00:43:53.340 Okay.

00:43:53.900 Well, if you're pietistic and you're very anti-actual reformer position, and you tend to be more of the non-magisterial Anabaptist type,

00:44:06.320 I think it's just inevitable, Brian.

00:44:08.880 It's baked into the foundation.

00:44:10.360 Well, yeah, if you read chapter 20 of John Calvin,

00:44:14.080 and he says that a civil magistrate is to promote the Christian religion

00:44:17.420 and to prevent blasphemies, and on and on he goes.

00:44:20.900 If you're in our camp and you're saying those things,

00:44:23.020 it's naturally going to be offensive to the pietist.

00:44:25.800 And particularly, I think, the Crusades, because you're saying, 0.88

00:44:28.760 yeah, there were great Christian men who took up the sword,

00:44:31.680 not as a church but as a political entity a nation a civil magistrate in the spirit of

00:44:38.880 romans 13 they took the sword and they defended their people as they ought i think the pietists

00:44:44.500 it's like they really just don't seem to like that and understandably so i want to get your

00:44:49.600 thoughts though in 2023 indigo sundries became one of our sponsors at the time their business

00:45:01.120 was little more than a side hobby generating a couple hundred dollars a month. But because of

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00:45:17.060 who wants to reach thousands of like-minded people and grow your company, we'd love to partner with

00:45:21.680 you. Email us at advertising at newchristendompress.com. I mean, there's so much.

00:45:33.900 A lot of the location of the disagreement is misunderstood, I think, even by participants

00:45:39.120 in the disagreement. Some of this is, I think, the fault of Dr. White, who constantly,

00:45:47.900 whether, I don't know, I'm going to assume not on purpose, but constantly dislocates the

00:45:55.460 disagreement from where I think it truly lies onto other red herrings. Like, oh, you're seeing

00:46:02.420 these men promoting the Pope, sending people with the promise of forgiveness of the fight

00:46:07.220 in Christian wars and absolution from purgatory and all these things. But if you just listen to

00:46:11.920 even what we've said in this show, then obviously show us any Popish errors and we'll damn them 1.00

00:46:16.920 along with anybody else. We're Protestants. We're not promoting papist errors. There were huge,

00:46:27.320 huge issues with the papacy, huge, huge issues with the Christian religion of the time,

00:46:33.820 but we're trying to deal with them in a historically realistic way where we're saying

00:46:39.160 this, in fact, most of what we've talked about so far was pre-Reformation Christendom. And so

00:46:45.580 there, it wasn't as if there was, there were a lot of Protestants over somewhere else that we,

00:46:51.680 you know, were ignoring. These were all like, when you're talking about God-free, you're talking

00:46:56.120 about an age when the church just was Orthodox and Roman Catholic. And that was just what it was. 0.79

00:47:02.540 And there was all sorts of sinful infighting between Christian princes. There were all sorts 0.91

00:47:07.900 of political intrigues going on between popes and kings and that sort of thing. We're not interested

00:47:14.620 in offering theological support for all of those errors. What we are interested in doing is looking

00:47:22.500 at the history and recognizing that the Christian church in its infancy, which I think both Dr.

00:47:26.960 White and us would agree that the church is still in its toddler years, and certainly in the 1000s

00:47:31.940 was in its infancy, that they were fighting an existential enemy for Christianity itself against 0.98

00:47:42.300 civilization-destroying hordes of Muslims. And that the Muslims, we've established this several 1.00

00:47:48.260 times in the 300 years or so after Muhammad had proceeded to essentially enslave, murder, 1.00

00:47:55.880 rape, destroy, pillage, plunder, and conquer Eastern Christendom, and then began to encroach 0.96

00:48:02.260 even on Western Christendom. And so seeing an existential threat, seeing their brethren enslaved,

00:48:07.260 Christian kings and princes engaged in war.

00:48:10.260 Surrounding that, there were many, many issues

00:48:12.380 of doctrine and theology that all of us would damn

00:48:15.180 right along with anybody, any other Protestant.

00:48:17.580 That's uncontroversial to us.

00:48:19.320 Like we're talking about a historical question.

00:48:22.240 So that's one issue over here.

00:48:25.500 I think that for me, what does frustrate me about this

00:48:30.980 is that believe it or not, I mean,

00:48:33.920 our enemies slander us in many ways

00:48:35.580 is schismatic ourselves and divisive and whatever. But if you know us, if you've done business with

00:48:40.700 us, you know that we do, we work fairly hard to keep in-house disagreements between what should

00:48:47.960 be allies in-house. You will rarely see us, for example, blast some ally on Twitter over some

00:48:55.960 in-house disagreement. Like when we're talking about other reformed Protestant, especially

00:48:59.760 post-millennial christians who are like active in the culture war you know we're not like up out in

00:49:06.380 twitter often trying to dunk on the abolitionists versus the other folks we're not often out in

00:49:11.640 twitter trying to dunk on the theonomist versus the classical two kingdoms guys um we've tended

00:49:16.400 to try to say even one of the main points of my talk at new christian impresses conference last

00:49:19.920 june was that we need to develop a familiarity with saying a sentence that sounds something like

00:49:26.480 um i'm very thankful for brother x or so and so over in you know such and such a place i disagree

00:49:34.800 with him on this point this point and this point but i'm thankful for the the way the lord's using

00:49:39.060 him and i'm good with you know we're cool i'm for him and he's for me and we disagree on some

00:49:44.540 things um we'll share the stage with you know i'll go speak at a conference with apology guys

00:49:50.520 Moscow guys who have like Stephen Wolf, et cetera.

00:49:54.820 Because what we're interested in is Christendom,

00:49:57.800 which requires broad Christian coalition. 0.99

00:50:01.820 So we try to be very hard on our enemies, 0.78

00:50:05.380 very hard on feminism, very hard on the demons.

00:50:08.240 And we want to be friendly to brothers.

00:50:13.380 And the result of that is probably 98%

00:50:16.040 of public Christian kind of like eyes in our circles

00:50:18.500 we get along with perfectly fine. 1.00

00:50:19.820 there's a small percentage that it seems like we're constantly butting heads with the g3 guys

00:50:23.780 owen strand would be one james white seems to increasingly be one he's also g3 though as well

00:50:28.380 and he's kind of a g3 sort of guy and honestly like i don't know james personally um don't really

00:50:33.380 have a dog in the fight of like wanting his downfall like anything like that we're we're we

00:50:38.380 have good relations with the local apologia in salt lake city and pastor wade and like text with

00:50:43.060 zach connell a lot of these apology guys have long had good relationships with them and so it is

00:50:47.920 frustrating to me. Um, some of the way Dr. White's chosen to behave surrounding the issue and talk

00:50:54.200 about good brothers like Stephen Wolf and that sort of thing. Do you think it's odd that like

00:50:59.780 in the case of Stephen Wolf, you know, James has debated Muslims. He's debated Mormons. He'll share 0.67

00:51:03.940 the stage with, uh, Michael Brown, Michael Brown, who's like, might be a heretic, you know, crazy,

00:51:09.740 charismatic dispensationalist, you know, but, but, but then when it comes to these issues,

00:51:14.540 you know james had even been on the dividing line and he had said you know i challenge eric to come

00:51:18.600 on the show blah blah blah i've reached out to james multiple times i said well if that's real

00:51:22.440 i'd love to talk to you um have yet to uh hear back from james on that the the other one though

00:51:27.960 is he said flatly i refuse to talk to stephen wolf about any of these issues um and of course

00:51:33.640 you know we won't share the stage at right response because of stephen wolf jeff durbin

00:51:38.360 pulled out of that and they were, yeah, I refuse to debate. My question with this is why is this

00:51:44.460 an issue that is like, it's, it seems to be in another category. Cause right. There's issues

00:51:50.300 among Christians where we go, yeah, we disagree. You know, James is a credo Baptist and I'm not,

00:51:54.520 and you know, post mill, there's a certain set of issues where it's like, it's okay

00:51:58.880 to debate, but it seems like, correct me if I'm wrong. There's somehow a set of issues that

00:52:03.440 make you anathema. Yeah. Right now it's world war two and the crusades.

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00:53:05.960 Hmm. Oh, yes. Hey, Dan, what are you doing? I'm just checking my mutual funds,

00:53:15.800 my stock portfolio. Mutual funds, stock portfolio. What did Dave Ramsey tell you to do that?

00:53:24.700 Maybe. Why? How's your return looking so far this year?

00:53:29.620 Well, they just did come out with unemployment numbers and they're a little higher or lower

00:53:35.360 than I thought. Ooh. Well, have you ever thought about diversifying your portfolio into things

00:53:41.180 like silver and gold? I mean, yeah, I guess. Well, you know, gold and silver are having pretty

00:53:47.380 good years. I mean, gold is up 20% in the last 12 months. 20%? Yeah. Have you ever thought of

00:53:53.040 investing in it? I hadn't. How would I do that? Really good question. Just go over to the guys

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00:55:04.620 right those are the two issues yeah like you know we shared this video from sam holden and

00:55:11.500 um it apparently like i it's not it's a video with tons of quick cuts and scenes and i share

00:55:17.500 this video and a you know a pastor in our area called me a racist nazi heretic uh the guy i've

00:55:24.020 known for a long time like the next day or that day um and you you hear i just while we were

00:55:30.740 recording this i i glanced at twitter and saw another guy tagging me and you like now they're

00:55:35.580 openly praising this video it has this scene from a 1936 german propaganda thing or something like

00:55:42.780 that and it was like the olympics yeah it was the like 36 olympics or something like that and i've

00:55:47.320 always been clear about this issue like i think the concept i want to know the truth about world

00:55:52.840 War II and I don't want to be beholden to the post-war consensus that I think is globalist

00:55:58.260 propaganda run by people who hate Christ and want to destroy the world and enslave everybody to

00:56:03.840 globalists, globo homo, et cetera. So what I'm interested in with something like World War II 0.96

00:56:09.240 and the Crusades, it's the same. I want to know what's true. I want to have the freedom to be

00:56:13.040 able to damn everything that's evil and praise everything that's good and come away with a

00:56:17.460 complicated, true story of history, which rarely has white hats and black hats unstained and 0.61

00:56:24.080 totally blackened. That's rarely how history goes. So I want to be able to say of German nationalism

00:56:30.440 leading up to World War II, I want to be able to say they were responding to some of the dumbest 0.91

00:56:35.360 acts of foreign policy by Europe and England and America. Versailles was garbage. We shouldn't 0.99

00:56:42.160 have had either of these World War IIs. These brother wars were garbage. We shouldn't have had 0.99

00:56:46.560 them. Same stuff that happened through the Crusades. We have European Christendom killing

00:56:52.200 each other constantly and the devil cheers. And I hate it. And I want to be able to say that a lot 0.91

00:56:59.320 of the German nationalism included things that condemned genuine evils like homosexuality and

00:57:04.680 pornography and the attack of the family and things like that. And I want to be able to say,

00:57:08.760 I don't think Hitler was a Christian prince. I don't think Hitler was a good guy. I'm not pro 0.68

00:57:13.840 Hitler. Like I've always, pretty much from the beginning, this has been my position and I'm open

00:57:19.800 to learning all the history. And I just want to know what's true. But when you say anything like

00:57:25.940 that, all of a sudden the smear becomes this ultimate boiling it down to the lowest common

00:57:31.740 denominator. Oh, so you love Hitler and you are pro Holocaust or you're pro this or you're pro

00:57:38.140 that. It's like, no, I'm obviously I'm not, I'm not stupid. Like it's almost like the decision 0.97

00:57:44.400 tree only has two options at that point. It's, are you a Nazi? Yes. Or are you a Nazi? No. 0.62

00:57:49.120 And usually it's how long have you been a Nazi? Usually that's the question. So how long have 0.67

00:57:53.720 you been a Nazi, Brian? I'm like, look, I know, I know people that argue, make the arguments against

00:57:58.980 what I just said. They're like, we'll argue that Hitler didn't mean the stuff that he said that

00:58:02.720 makes it seem like he's not a Christian. And we'll, we'll, you know, make all sorts of arguments

00:58:06.220 about and on on that front it's like um i don't agree i'm not persuaded of that but we get these

00:58:15.480 issues where the to ask the question or to engage in the historical investigation itself is an act

00:58:23.200 of declaration of tribal identity well that's right on in a war well that's that's the thing

00:58:29.220 i think where you know to the other camp i would say one of the things you're going to do is alienate

00:58:35.360 a lot of people who you could otherwise win. But when you, again, when you have these categories

00:58:39.520 of like unpardonable sin, where it's like, oh, these subjects, you just can't even talk about

00:58:43.800 it. I think it becomes particularly problematic. One other thing that I noticed, and I tweeted

00:58:49.360 this the other day, I said, when evangelicals discuss the physical courage required of men,

00:58:55.380 they are quick to point to the martyrs, but they are slow to talk about men like Godfrey

00:58:59.880 Boyan or Richard the Lionheart. Why is that? Why is getting killed promoted over righteously

00:59:05.240 taking life in defense of life. And one of the things I was doing, I was reading a Vodibaka book

00:59:10.280 and he's talking about young men. And he was like, let me tell you what real physical courage is.

00:59:14.640 And then he was like talking about Fox's Book of Martyrs. The real heroes of Christianity,

00:59:19.080 the really strong men were the ones who were killed. And, you know, I read Fox's Book of 0.61

00:59:23.800 Martyrs and I'm very grateful for the martyrs. And of course, it's not a question of who was

00:59:28.600 totally brave and who was a coward. And Eric Kahn is saying that the martyrs were cowards.

00:59:33.020 exactly but no but why do we not in the modern lens of like christian i think that even this is

00:59:41.100 like a sense of like christian pietism why do we not look at guys who defended the faith and i think

00:59:48.560 okay vlad is like the most extreme example in many cases we will talk about it right with nuance too

00:59:54.500 just a heads up why why do you think this why are we not allowed to celebrate a guy who defended

01:00:00.620 his people. So this is, again, this is to me the key location of all of these battles.

01:00:06.560 It's one of the key locations. It's the key location of the issue with Stephen Wolf,

01:00:11.160 where people hate him. It ties to the post-war consensus. It ties to the World War II and the

01:00:17.200 Crusades, Civil War, all sorts of issues come together into this. And it is the failure of

01:00:22.740 distinction between the kingdoms. It's a failure of a distinction between the governance of nations

01:00:27.840 and the political realm and the governance of the church

01:00:30.780 and God's purpose for the church and the heavenly kingdom.

01:00:33.720 So I think a lot of the issues here

01:00:35.900 come from a fundamental collapse of all those issues

01:00:39.100 into ecclesiocentrism.

01:00:41.080 I think this is one of the errors

01:00:42.660 that theonomic types tend towards.

01:00:45.200 And I, again, don't mean that disparagingly.

01:00:47.220 Love theonomists.

01:00:47.880 They have arguments to everything I would say.

01:00:49.800 And I recognize that.

01:00:50.960 And they're brothers.

01:00:51.900 Like this isn't me declaring war and saying we're now like,

01:00:55.300 theonomy a lot of it is actually a good recovery of something much closer to the political theory

01:01:01.040 of the reformers and i think classical christian ideas of these things than what they were arguing

01:01:06.520 against so so great there but there's a tendency to to a collapse in ecclesiocentrism and then an

01:01:13.480 attempt to force or to measure leaders according to ecclesiocentric standards rather than dealing

01:01:21.860 with those leaders within, A, their historical context and the actual realities of those times,

01:01:27.000 what was going on, the existential threats that they faced, and the realpolitik and political

01:01:34.200 realities of their day. Well, even like Calvin, for example, in the Institutes, he will talk about

01:01:39.360 things like, he actually addresses these issues. He said, surely there will be critics who say,

01:01:44.760 you know, the state shouldn't defend its people with the sword. They should turn the other cheek

01:01:49.320 because didn't jesus say that and calvin's very clear he's like he's talking to christians in the

01:01:54.700 spiritual realm dealing with the church and personal retaliation that has nothing to do with

01:01:59.680 how a state ought to operate no those are not the standards for the state in the minute that you make

01:02:04.240 them the standards for the state you end up with something like communism or socialism where the

01:02:09.260 parable of the good samaritan is now applied to endless third world immigration which people are

01:02:14.120 right now and it just those are the arguments of um who was the guy that um david chiltern

01:02:20.600 argued against in his productive christians ronald cider yeah this it's ciderian socialist nonsense

01:02:26.640 yeah it's the same play that those guys have been running it's the same bonhoefferian kind

01:02:31.360 of play like it's just it's bad theology uh and i'm not saying that everybody who doesn't like

01:02:38.660 the crusades or like whatever doesn't agree with us about these different issues is on the level of

01:02:43.720 Ronald Sider or something like that. But there's a category distinction we have to make here

01:02:48.160 where we truly deal with nations as nations, with kings as kings. And one of the other things I think

01:02:56.200 we often fail to deal with is those passages of scripture that give us a full awareness of the

01:03:05.520 absolute brutality of warfare and of the brutality of tactics in warfare as they will really happen

01:03:12.380 in the real world. Read the Psalms, read the Old Testament, and you will find things just as brutal

01:03:19.220 as what we just read in the stories of Vlad. And some of the time, I think at the minimum,

01:03:25.500 one thing that we have to recognize is that before we understand the question of whether or not Vlad

01:03:32.020 was right, or more probably it's going to end up being like in which things he was right about,

01:03:37.000 which things he was wrong about, because it's not always so simple as right and wrong, like 100%,

01:03:41.700 100%. We have to understand why someone like Vlad was why he was the way he was.

01:03:47.700 That God often raises up and uses men who are actually not in the final analysis, like

01:03:53.180 guys that you would say, that was 100% a good guy. He never did anything wrong.

01:03:58.680 But God often raises up like men like that to destroy and chase in the wicked, 0.80

01:04:03.040 including those who claim God's name while acting hypocritically. So at the least-

01:04:08.380 Like a Jehu. 1.00

01:04:09.360 Yeah. 1.00

01:04:10.100 At the least, we have to see Vlad in this light

01:04:11.800 and just understand this principle at the same time

01:04:14.120 that if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword,

01:04:17.060 you and all that you hold dear. 0.96

01:04:18.640 The Turks did this.

01:04:20.320 The Turks lived by the sword. 1.00

01:04:22.460 They stole and raped little boys 1.00

01:04:24.140 and turned them into soldiers against their homeland. 1.00

01:04:27.340 They raped and enslaved women. 1.00

01:04:29.280 They killed indiscriminately and plundered. 0.99

01:04:31.820 And so what happened?

01:04:33.080 Well, God and his providence here

01:04:34.540 in this little corner of God's big story 0.96

01:04:36.760 raised up a blood, like a bloodthirsty dragon of a man to kill their women and children, 0.70

01:04:43.020 their men and boys, right? You have to look at this and say, to me, at the minimum,

01:04:48.320 I read this story similarly to what God does in Esther by raising up his people to destroy 0.58

01:04:56.280 wicked Haman with his own, and actually, I think in the book of Esther, it's an impaling stake as 0.72

01:05:01.660 well. It's not a gallows like a noose. To lift somebody up was actually to impale them. So Haman 0.80

01:05:08.080 ends up in the book of Esther impaled on his own stake. And I see that with the Turks in this story 1.00

01:05:13.120 too. You don't have to praise Vlad as like a saint in order to recognize God in his providence raised

01:05:19.800 him up to do to the Turks, eye for an eye, what they had been doing. I was going to say, and that 0.98

01:05:25.440 would make sense with esther because it's really an eastern persian oh yeah it's the type thing to 0.90

01:05:31.720 impale um so we see this here he learned that from the muslims but if you have the tendency 0.53

01:05:36.980 to boil everything down into into ecclesiocentrism you know into the sphere of the church and then

01:05:43.140 filter everything through theology you read this story completely different and i think that's

01:05:48.380 where the where the frustration james uh white on on twitter is very frustrated right when he's

01:05:53.380 speaking about the Crusades, because he's arguing in a theological sphere. Here's the theology.

01:06:00.500 Somebody bring me the Bible and debate me. As an apologist against Roman Catholic. 0.95

01:06:04.240 And also, I refuse to talk to you. Right. Yeah. And you're like, what are you talking about? 0.99

01:06:10.500 That's not what we were discussing. Nobody actually thinks any different. I agree with

01:06:14.860 what you're saying in a lot of these things. The theology was terrible. Yeah. Let's deal with the

01:06:19.200 facts. Let's deal with the political philosophy. Yeah. And some of this, I do think, so when you

01:06:27.400 approach history as an apologist and a theologian, you tend to approach it through the lens of

01:06:32.860 historical theology where you're attempting to justify certain theological positions you hold

01:06:37.220 over against error in history and find people who support or hold your view or proto versions of

01:06:43.140 your view through history so that you can, like when a Protestant historian tells history, it has

01:06:48.660 a Protestant flair, when a Roman Catholic does, it has a Roman Catholic flair. This is just human,

01:06:52.380 right? But what you can tend to do if that's how you engage in history is that when someone who's

01:06:57.940 operating in a different category, like Stephen Wolf is, he is going to these questions of

01:07:02.840 historical retrieval, actually asking more of the question, what was the political theology of the

01:07:07.740 reformers? Like, what was it? And were they maybe more, did they have it better than us? Like,

01:07:12.860 were they right? Were we right? Where are they wrong? Where can we disagree? It really, I think,

01:07:18.080 can break the brain of somebody who has come from history from a theological and apologetical angle

01:07:24.740 where they're not trying they're not used to going to the history and asking the geopolitical

01:07:29.740 question and they got their politics from the post-war consensus so in a way that they're not

01:07:35.520 that is opaque to them that's right and i think one of the places you see this is like there is

01:07:41.360 a great fear in our culture post-world war ii consensus that the worst thing you could ever

01:07:46.940 be called, I think worse than a racist, is being called a Nazi or a fascist. So there's an allergy

01:07:54.320 within the Christian camp that we've also been reared on that in public school. Our political

01:07:59.740 theory has come from that consensus. And so I think people are like, oh, we don't want to be

01:08:03.960 associated with that in any way, anything. I saw things today where it's like, you're a brown shirt

01:08:09.480 if you believe that any of the crusades were good or in any sense. One of the other things I think

01:08:16.420 is really interesting and it's actually just pure hypocrisy in our culture is you'll hear this from

01:08:21.240 the christian camp they will say things like uh there is no place for christian violence there

01:08:27.900 is no place for a nation particularly let's stay in the realm of nations because of romans 13 there's

01:08:32.740 no place for political violence and then immediately if they've got a ukraine flag in their bio and

01:08:40.280 they're like we need to destroy russia or when that the attacks in israel happen they're like 0.55

01:08:45.720 Like we need, you know, Ben Shapiro. 0.93

01:08:47.160 We need to, you know, annihilate Hezbollah from the face of the earth. 1.00

01:08:50.580 And I said, all right, well, hold on. 1.00

01:08:52.040 I thought you said violence was never the answer.

01:08:54.260 Yeah, God says violence actually is the answer some of the time.

01:08:57.200 So I love the quote.

01:08:58.260 A lot of people were sharing this because this is really one of the central issues on Vlad is somebody had shared it.

01:09:05.060 They said violence is seldom the answer, but when it is, it is the only answer.

01:09:08.600 That's exactly right. 0.91

01:09:09.640 And that's just war theory.

01:09:12.840 That's how you understand just war theory

01:09:14.720 is that when you have exhausted alternatives, 0.74

01:09:17.200 you have a likelihood of success,

01:09:19.180 your cause is just,

01:09:20.680 then you fight and you fight like you mean it

01:09:23.760 because that means that that's all that is left.

01:09:26.920 I do really quick,

01:09:28.160 before we get into just war theory a little bit,

01:09:30.680 I want to point out for Vlad

01:09:32.380 because I am not willing to defend

01:09:36.400 every single thing Vlad did as righteous.

01:09:38.360 Name one bad thing.

01:09:39.240 i don't know leaving like 20 000 image bearers to decompose in the open air 0.84

01:09:46.480 i yeah i mean they were actually muslims they were ouch i so you know what eric 0.90

01:09:53.180 i just we try so hard here's what i'll just go and ruin it why did so you have to ask back up 0.92

01:10:01.180 why did vlad have to resort to terror tactics that he learned from the muslims

01:10:05.360 because of Christian disunity. 0.96

01:10:07.780 Why did Vlad have to go and defend his realm 0.74

01:10:10.020 the only possible way that there was,

01:10:11.840 which was through terror tactics,

01:10:13.440 guerrilla warfare and terror tactics?

01:10:14.840 Because he was in a Taliban situation.

01:10:17.540 He was in a vastly outnumbered, 0.92

01:10:19.920 the technologically disadvantaged.

01:10:22.320 He's got peasants and sheepskin as armor,

01:10:24.840 a vast majority of them, which by the way- 0.99

01:10:27.000 And they're taking your kids to rape them. 0.99

01:10:28.340 Yeah, the fact that the peasants showed up, 0.99

01:10:30.660 a lot of the propaganda, the peasants loved Vlad. 1.00

01:10:33.260 He protected them from the Muslims. 0.98

01:10:34.660 they loved Vlad. He even told them, if you're scared, don't fight. He pulled a Gideon with his 1.00

01:10:39.860 30,000 peasant army. But the reason that he had to resort to those tactics militarily and 0.95

01:10:46.120 geopolitically, whether or not he should have, was because of Christian disunity. It was because of

01:10:51.760 the Hungarian betrayal of Christendom for geopolitical interests, which constantly happened 0.88

01:10:58.480 in Christendom, where you would have nations and kings who were willing to let their Christian 0.87

01:11:04.400 brethren be raped and their, or die and their children raped and enslaved rather than go and 0.97

01:11:10.620 fight together against the Muslims because they had geopolitical bickering going on. So that to 1.00

01:11:15.920 me is one of the greatest sins to be denounced in this. To me, that is a greater sin than any of

01:11:23.680 the papal heresies that, because, and I have to justify that because that's a big statement.

01:11:29.520 It's because Jesus Christ says over and over, the apostles say over and over and over,

01:11:34.400 One of the most repeated commands in the New Testament is that Christians are to particularly love one another.

01:11:41.960 Do good unto all, but especially those in the household of faith.

01:11:45.360 Over and over, the Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles make this a test of whether or not you are a Christian.

01:11:51.160 If you will not love the brethren, you are not a Christian. 1.00

01:11:54.760 You're a liar, okay? 0.96

01:11:56.040 So when Christendom 1.0 is marked by constant tribal warfare of Christian land against Christian 0.99

01:12:05.100 land, that to me is one of the most shocking and irredeemably wicked acts of Christendom.

01:12:12.940 I would put it in the top three. I mean, for sure. Lined up with any other thing that you

01:12:18.500 could give me theologically or actually. I think that because so much of the bad,

01:12:22.900 so much of the wickedness that happened,

01:12:25.560 it happened because that happened.

01:12:27.860 If they had been united,

01:12:29.720 and I even mean East and West,

01:12:31.600 and then within the West,

01:12:33.020 if they had been united,

01:12:34.320 the Muslims never would have taken these lands. 1.00

01:12:36.980 In fact, Islam probably wouldn't exist today. 1.00

01:12:39.240 That spirit, though, is still alive today.

01:12:41.680 It's just not violent, right?

01:12:43.920 How is the fruit of the Reformation?

01:12:46.380 But I would say this,

01:12:47.640 in a way it's not violent.

01:12:50.680 But for instance,

01:12:51.580 You know, like this week with Owen Strand, it was kind of a weird timing event.

01:12:55.740 You have the second assassination attempt on President Trump.

01:12:58.260 Very next day, you know, I'm thinking, like, this is going to be the main news.

01:13:02.040 Very next day, Owen Strand comes out.

01:13:04.280 Eric shared this video. 0.68

01:13:05.700 Eric is a clear Nazi supporter.

01:13:07.980 What are they trying to do? 0.96

01:13:08.920 They're trying to kill your reputation.

01:13:11.000 I mean, it's reputation assassination.

01:13:13.640 So you say it's nonviolent, but you're definitely trying to ruin people's lives when you do this sort of thing.

01:13:19.920 Just throwing that in.

01:13:21.580 Well, yeah. So it's, you know, this is marked, you said the spirit, the sin is a predominant

01:13:27.900 personality trait of Christendom 1.0, but even post Christendom 1.0, nothing has changed. In fact,

01:13:35.460 the schisms have become more numerous. I mean, and I do think this is part of the fruit of the 0.98

01:13:41.820 Reformation. As excellent as the work of the Reformers was in recapturing the gospel and 0.92

01:13:49.820 in just correcting a lot of the errors 0.93

01:13:53.080 of the Catholic church,

01:13:54.500 like praise God for these men. 0.84

01:13:56.420 But one of the byproducts of that

01:13:58.420 was extreme schismatism.

01:14:02.560 Yeah, you see it in both. 0.97

01:14:03.820 You see it in Roman Catholic

01:14:05.020 and what you're actually seeing there,

01:14:07.540 it's not a sin that's peculiar

01:14:09.180 to Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox

01:14:11.700 or Protestantism.

01:14:13.620 It's simply works of the flesh.

01:14:15.600 The works of the flesh include rivalries

01:14:17.400 and dissensions.

01:14:18.080 So these are two sins that when we're yet sanctified, not yet sanctified, will plague us, which is why, and to be clear, I really do want to be clear about this.

01:14:30.380 My criticisms of Dr. White and anybody else, I can't keep track of who we've criticized in the video, they're criticisms that I genuinely want to be on the same team.

01:14:41.040 Like, I want to be able to share the conference stage

01:14:44.940 with any men in this tribe

01:14:46.740 and promote one another's good work

01:14:49.740 and disagree charitably and do all these things.

01:14:52.920 Like, I genuinely want that.

01:14:54.620 My instinct dispositionally is that way anyway.

01:14:57.040 So this is kind of like, well, that's how I am.

01:14:59.620 But particularly because of these commands in scripture,

01:15:04.680 it grieves me.

01:15:06.360 And I don't mean that in the pietistic,

01:15:08.280 like, oh, I'm grieved, brother.

01:15:09.440 I mean, it genuinely, it grieves me that we have brother wars in the Reformed camp as such a

01:15:18.640 thoroughgoing mark of our presence or our culture. This is one of the top five things people outside

01:15:27.080 of our movement or world would point at inside of it as a critique. And that's one that we have

01:15:32.560 to take very seriously and actually admit, you know what? They're right about that. There's a

01:15:37.760 reason that reformed Christianity is a tiny cultural force today. And it's vanquished and 0.99

01:15:43.720 swallowed up by normie SBCism, by broadly evangelical megachurchianity. We are vastly

01:15:50.500 less influential. And one of the biggest reasons is that because we can't even maintain friends

01:15:55.460 with people who agree with us on 94.7% of stuff for 10 minutes before we start anathematizing

01:16:02.420 them and going on screeds against one another. And I think that's a, that's a, that's a shame.

01:16:07.800 Like that's to our shame that that's true. Shouldn't be. Yeah. I think you're absolutely

01:16:13.000 right. And I think there's, there's also a place for, and this is what I would encourage a lot of

01:16:17.700 the people we've tried to do this. And I think it would be healthy where it's like with a Dr.

01:16:23.920 White, you know, just reaching out and saying like, I'd love to talk. I'd love to hear you out.

01:16:27.640 I'd love it if we didn't have to fight these fights in broad daylight while the enemy wants to castrate our children, if a lot of this could be solved.

01:16:37.260 And again, we could treat each other as brothers.

01:16:39.360 I think that would be really helpful.

01:16:41.340 One of the things I want to ask you guys is, this is more specific to Vlad now, on the issue of violence.

01:16:48.620 Brian, you know, we've kind of joked about this, but I don't think anybody here is saying, yeah, everything that Vlad did was great.

01:16:55.120 What are some of the things that you would say are, like, where would you say, okay, this is a definite, I think there's some definite problems here.

01:17:06.320 And that's really just to clarify.

01:17:08.300 Yeah.

01:17:08.580 So this is one of my, I think it's a good exercise for pastors and theologians.

01:17:14.680 And I'm a pastor.

01:17:16.740 I'm not a political theorist.

01:17:19.440 I'm not trained in that.

01:17:21.720 I'm not a statesman.

01:17:23.200 and I'm not an exhaustive student of politics.

01:17:28.820 So I think that it's probably,

01:17:32.920 at least to me, my instincts on the best answer

01:17:35.560 to that kind of question is that

01:17:37.120 I don't know exactly where the line is

01:17:42.520 when it comes to war with terror tactics

01:17:46.180 and guerrilla warfare

01:17:47.120 that inevitably involve the death of civilians.

01:17:49.940 and and there's two tensions in my mind that bring us there is that just where you must avoid

01:17:56.480 unintentional at least this is the consensus view of the christian tradition when it comes to just

01:18:01.720 war use in bellow you said bellum you have to avoid which those are justice just war in whether

01:18:09.200 not to go to war and then just war in the exercise or the execution of warfare those are the two kind

01:18:14.140 of sides of the question when can i lawfully go to war and then how do i lawfully conduct war so

01:18:19.760 I'm actually talking more of that use ad bellum, like in, I might be getting that wrong. One of

01:18:25.100 those two, when I'm engaging in just warfare, I think it was a just war against the Muslims in 0.98

01:18:29.740 Vlad's case and pretty much every case. So in the conduct of that warfare, how do you deal with

01:18:35.580 the killing of civilians? And particularly in an age when your enemy is definitely going to kill

01:18:42.820 all the civilians they can in the most horrific way and enslave them. And you're vastly outnumbered

01:18:48.220 because of the backstabbing of your Christian brethren. 1.00

01:18:50.160 And so your only hope to not have 1.00

01:18:51.520 all of the children of your land enslaved to you 0.96

01:18:53.860 seems to be, I need to basically adopt 0.99

01:18:56.280 the terror tactics of the Turks. 0.94

01:18:58.360 So that I think is a very difficult question

01:19:00.740 where it's tempting to just say,

01:19:03.200 well, obviously you should never do that.

01:19:05.280 You should just entrust yourself to the Lord

01:19:06.820 and let the Muslims win. 0.99

01:19:08.540 And maybe the Lord will act on your behalf.

01:19:10.700 I've heard people genuinely make that argument.

01:19:13.500 It's the same argument I've heard people make

01:19:15.080 against even the use of military deception

01:19:16.840 as a form of sinful lying.

01:19:18.580 So you should never deceive because-

01:19:21.420 Whereas all warfare is deception.

01:19:23.420 It's just deception.

01:19:24.100 It's even commanded in scripture in different,

01:19:25.760 but that's for a different time.

01:19:27.620 So here's what I want.

01:19:30.540 I want righteous, godly Christians 1.00

01:19:33.260 who are elites in the conduct of statecraft and war. 1.00

01:19:40.160 And I'm not that guy.

01:19:41.440 And so there are limits to my knowledge

01:19:43.360 and my wisdom on the issue.

01:19:45.060 But I want to defer and say, we need godly statesmen who are engaged in godly statecraft, including the exercise of godly war, with extreme violence sometimes.

01:19:57.680 And I want those men to make this their study so that we can have political elites and military elites and that kind of thing that pastors don't need to know or make it their study all the way down. 0.66

01:20:13.060 so i'm there is when i see like vlad impaling women and putting their babies on the stake too

01:20:22.060 i'm like obviously he shouldn't do that that's my immediate like that seems sinful that seems wrong

01:20:27.540 i get why he did it 100 i understand the chain of reasoning they let him go we're gonna they're

01:20:34.420 gonna enslave all of our kids unless we fight terror with terror and and they completely win

01:20:39.680 And I think of passages where in the Psalms,

01:20:43.760 if we sing all the Psalms,

01:20:44.940 one of the things you will sing is Psalm 109,

01:20:46.980 celebrating or petitioning God

01:20:49.640 that the infant children of our enemies

01:20:51.860 would be dashed upon the rocks.

01:20:53.640 And I think that that's a type of passage

01:20:56.140 that is sometimes left out of our thinking

01:20:59.880 and our calculations in these things.

01:21:01.660 My answer is, I don't know.

01:21:03.620 I actually don't know where the line should be drawn.

01:21:06.940 I have instincts to go like, that seems obviously sinful to me.

01:21:11.440 But then I think of that passage and I'm like, well, I think there's biblical theological ways of answering it in Israel.

01:21:17.060 However, it's a difficult question.

01:21:20.040 I think it's easier to justify Vlad than it is even the allies in World War II and obviously the Germans with their just indiscriminate bombing of cities. 0.76

01:21:33.580 So that is the interesting thing. 0.69

01:21:35.960 And I think it's worth examination.

01:21:37.840 You're absolutely right.

01:21:39.260 Is I had people on Twitter because the, you know, the Daryl Cooper on Tucker, that brought up a huge discussion about, you know, maybe Churchill is at least some to blame for what happened in World War II.

01:21:51.920 You start reading Pat Buchanan's book.

01:21:53.400 You say, wait a minute.

01:21:55.120 Some of this stuff actually looks really unjust.

01:21:57.300 but the same people were like the crusades are bad we're on twitter defending like to it to the

01:22:03.860 hilt what churchill had done and so we're talking about things like firebombing dresden um intentionally

01:22:10.540 bombing civilians uh the british after dunkirk were in a really bad way and so they're really

01:22:16.180 limited in what they could do to fight a war and so yeah they're like bombing cities from

01:22:23.100 distance and i think christians i think people that that by instinct defend churchill or roosevelt

01:22:30.360 yeah by instinct they're like if i don't do that then i'm saying hitler was good

01:22:35.460 and you can say actually how about this all of them were bad or all of them did bad things and

01:22:42.360 good things right yeah yeah because that's harder to say than just that people did bad it's harder

01:22:48.880 to say that they all did good and bad things. It's even harder to say because, and I could,

01:22:55.280 I'm not a historian. My understanding of the issue is that particularly the firebombing of

01:22:59.780 civilians was started by the British into the Germans and that it was something that

01:23:05.720 the Germans wanted to avoid, but that once it got to there, it was tit for tat. And I would say even 0.97

01:23:11.440 to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear bombs dropped on civilian populace,

01:23:16.240 that sort of question you have to when people who would be patently like appalled at vlad

01:23:23.700 in another part of their mind they make a whole argument that that was great because it was we

01:23:31.400 were going to lose a million more servicemen if we invade had to invade japan and so i think

01:23:35.740 therefore we had to kill several hundred thousand civilians i'm saying corporate wants me you to

01:23:40.280 show me the difference between these two pictures um vaporizing with atomic weaponry women and

01:23:45.200 children and impaling women and children they're the same picture well and you're even using the

01:23:50.640 exact same line of reasoning to get there yeah your finger is on the scale ideologically somewhere 0.64

01:23:56.240 if you reject vlad wholeheartedly and embrace the atomic bombing of japan japanese and a war

01:24:04.320 right wasn't that yeah that's it was a terror attack we've talked about this with stonewall

01:24:09.380 jackson when when he is a use ad bellum use in bellow question again where he said i don't want

01:24:13.580 the civil war to happen but if it does the south needs to invade the north and wage a black flag

01:24:19.840 campaign against the north burning and pillaging as we go because it's the only way to end this war

01:24:24.740 with as little bloodshed as possible as quickly as possible you have to admit that that line of

01:24:30.280 reasoning is the line of reasoning of the bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki is the line of reasoning

01:24:34.880 of lad the impaler is the line of reasoning and then you either have to reject all of it or you

01:24:40.100 have to get more nuanced than that. That's the point I think that is not often reckoned with

01:24:44.280 by modern commentators who don't realize that in one room of their mind, they hold an opinion that

01:24:50.500 contradicts an opinion they hold in a different room of their mind. And that's important to see.

01:24:55.600 I think the real issue is you have to understand how the modern leftist mind works. And when I say

01:25:01.580 leftist, I mean, most people in America are actually leftists and don't know it. They've

01:25:06.300 just been trained by leftists. But if you read Saul Alinsky, his definition of what is the moral

01:25:11.900 right, how do you know whether the bombing of Dresden was right or wrong? And he says,

01:25:16.520 because we had power when we did it, therefore it's right. So that actually makes a lot of sense

01:25:22.620 of how people think today, is they're not going to Aquinas or Augustine and thinking through like,

01:25:28.200 what is just war theory? What they're doing is they're saying, well, yeah, like the invasion

01:25:34.440 of afghanistan for example that was justified because we did it right because the good guys 0.94

01:25:40.960 did it it really is in their mind that simple so they're like well we know that ukraine is a just 0.55

01:25:46.520 war because we're doing it yeah like shrink it down to this if you dads knew that someone was 0.96

01:25:53.080 going to come and kill and rape your children enslave your sons and your daughters and you had 0.89

01:25:58.540 no option before you no one to call upon for help it was just you you're the father you're 1.00

01:26:05.460 the city father you're the father of the home what would you do how far would you go how far

01:26:09.820 would you go and on at least going there psychologically helps us to get a little bit

01:26:17.560 i don't think we can fully get there but it helps us get a little bit closer to understanding the

01:26:21.860 type of moral calculation that these men and women were facing in their day we think about 0.73

01:26:27.980 vlad and like he grew up being raped yeah i mean if he wasn't it was because he was too ugly

01:26:34.180 but more than likely more than most people think like radu obviously was he was six years in a 0.99

01:26:39.480 muslim prison like every they'd be raping everybody so you're watching this you're 0.71

01:26:42.700 stolen from your family the janice areas we told the story of those guys um it's brutal 0.99

01:26:47.220 you you watch this oppression on it on a daily basis you pick up the enemy's tactics well and

01:26:53.720 he'd been trained he had been trained he'd been trained and so actually this one of my favorite

01:26:58.580 quotes and i think this applies to vlad it's a mistake to push a man to violence when violence

01:27:04.580 is what he has dedicated his life to perfecting oh hot dang based i knew someone was gonna say

01:27:13.140 base but there is there is something to this and and you know jordan peterson has pointed this out

01:27:18.600 John Lovell. This is something that I've gone back to repeatedly, that you can't be a good man

01:27:25.660 if you have no capacity for danger, right? You have to control it. You have to, the biblical

01:27:31.020 word for meekness is praeus, often gets translated gentleness, but it's the idea of a war horse

01:27:38.440 under control, right? And that's power under restraint. Power under restraint. So to be a

01:27:43.700 genuinely good man, you have to have a capacity for violence. And here's one of the things that

01:27:47.660 I do want to go back to, too, just to challenge people who are like, well, there's no place in

01:27:52.280 scripture where we can promote, you know, men as conquerors and warriors as a good thing.

01:28:00.560 But it's really interesting. And, you know, people want to say, like, our, you know,

01:28:04.980 our kingdom isn't of this earth. But it's really interesting that when we get the Hall of Faith

01:28:12.500 in Hebrews 11, that it's not only like, you know, we have Abraham and Moses, and they did all these

01:28:18.200 things, but in the list, we get people like Samson, right? We get people, verse 32, chapter 11,

01:28:26.420 what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah,

01:28:31.580 about David and Samuel and the prophets, who through faith, now hear this, conquered kingdoms,

01:28:36.500 administered justice, gained what was promised, and shut the mouths of lions.

01:28:41.760 And then it'll go on to talk about also the martyrs.

01:28:44.880 But when we sing 666, the Son of God goes forth to war,

01:28:49.180 and we sing the Psalms that talk about David's hands being trained for war,

01:28:54.060 I don't think you can walk away with that and be like,

01:28:57.360 we're like the Mennonites. 0.63

01:28:58.600 Christians should just be pacifists at all costs.

01:29:01.000 I don't think that's what Scripture is teaching at all.

01:29:03.440 There is a place for righteous and holy violence,

01:29:05.680 And we need to be very careful about that.

01:29:07.980 I think understanding the realms of where that fits in with the state.

01:29:12.260 One of the things Aquinas pointed to was that it needs to be, in order to be a just war, right?

01:29:19.540 It needs to be properly called upon for war.

01:29:22.980 Like in America, Congress has to declare, which apparently now they don't have to do anymore.

01:29:28.260 Or well-organized militia, which is, I mean, I'm-

01:29:31.380 It's not just you going rogue.

01:29:32.660 No, no, no, no, no.

01:29:33.560 No, and even that, it assumes some sort of state sponsorship.

01:29:37.500 Chain of command.

01:29:38.420 Yeah.

01:29:38.940 Administration.

01:29:39.840 It's not just the rabble, you know, that rises up in revolution or something like that.

01:29:44.860 Well, I also think it's interesting.

01:29:46.460 I kind of want to tie this to the situation. 0.55

01:29:48.960 Where does pietism rot your country? 0.92

01:29:52.600 I think one of the places that we've seen it is with the Haitian situation. 0.75

01:29:56.960 Because you've had a lot of Christians who are like, well, you have to love your neighbor. 1.00

01:30:00.060 And so we should welcome all these people who are committing crimes and eating cats. 0.84

01:30:05.900 And, you know, they said, no, that didn't happen.

01:30:07.640 And then it's like, hmm.

01:30:08.640 HIV and tuberculosis is up 4 to 800% in various categories.

01:30:12.680 These are like deadly diseases.

01:30:15.460 Yeah, assault, violence, theft. 1.00

01:30:17.760 But it's the same thing where at some point good Christian men are going to have to use some level of force to protect themselves. 0.96

01:30:26.600 And that level of force may be loading buses and planes and deporting these people, right? 0.86

01:30:31.620 But somewhere, somehow, it's going to require more than just your prayers in your prayer closet to get the job done.

01:30:37.760 Well, the thing is, the prayers in the prayer closet lead to, over and over and over again in biblical history and church history, God raising up people with swords.

01:30:48.460 That's the history.

01:30:49.540 I mean, you have to deal with it.

01:30:51.440 The people in Judges 6 prayed, and what did God do?

01:30:54.040 He raised up Gideon with a sword.

01:30:56.080 Yeah, this is God's pattern of dealing in nations. 0.90

01:30:59.660 Well, I want to go back to loving your neighbor because that's the thing that keeps being weaponized through COVID and now through this Haitian situation is that fundamentally, though, by loving your Haitian neighbor, you're hating your actual neighbor, your Springfield, Ohio, next door neighbor, because their children are the ones that are being assaulted. 0.87

01:31:21.700 Their properties are the ones being damaged. 0.94

01:31:23.520 They're the ones that are being stolen from.

01:31:26.900 And so you're actually hating your neighbor to love your distant neighbor.

01:31:30.160 It's a classic universalizing of the principle so that it doesn't land in any particular way.

01:31:34.940 Yeah, it doesn't mean anything.

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01:34:34.700 So one question I want to ask you guys.

01:34:36.760 the Matthias Corvinas and the campaign against which which leads to the Bram Stoker but the

01:34:43.600 campaign against Vlad one of the other elements of warfare here is propaganda and I can't help

01:34:51.020 but think that guys like Owen Strand guys like Russell Moore these guys are basically regime

01:34:58.380 tools issuing propaganda that's basically telling Christians you need to be a doormat 0.88

01:35:03.140 You need to let the immigrants come. 1.00

01:35:05.200 They need to flood us, our country. 1.00

01:35:07.300 That's good. 1.00

01:35:08.460 They're going to destroy white America. 1.00

01:35:09.920 That's a good thing. 1.00

01:35:10.540 Whatever.

01:35:10.920 This is a propaganda campaign.

01:35:13.180 So, Brian, I guess, like, as you think about that, it's not just, we've talked about the physical.

01:35:18.760 How do we as Christians think through, like, how do we fight that well?

01:35:24.080 We're kind of doing some of that, I think.

01:35:26.820 But we're sort of in the information operation phase of war.

01:35:30.240 And so it's important to think through, like, how do we actually communicate?

01:35:33.800 What messaging do we posit?

01:35:36.000 Yeah, this is where it's actually, it's really challenging because what it will require when

01:35:42.720 you're countering something like the post-war consensus, that is just the default view of

01:35:47.820 all of us.

01:35:48.820 It is your default view, listener.

01:35:50.840 It was my default view until it's still in many ways is my default view in terms of our

01:35:56.380 programming.

01:35:57.160 Very few of us can say anything other than that.

01:35:59.620 So when you start committing blasphemy

01:36:03.360 against the gods of the age,

01:36:05.880 when you start saying things,

01:36:08.300 and this is Owen's fundamental problem,

01:36:10.520 is that he's clearly read a couple Stephen Ambrose books.

01:36:13.100 I like Stephen Ambrose, by the way,

01:36:14.340 World War II historian, et cetera, you know, whatever.

01:36:17.380 And he, you know, based on his interests,

01:36:19.740 as I can see them unfold over the years,

01:36:21.220 World War II history is one of his interests.

01:36:23.600 And it's, but-

01:36:24.960 Probably grew up on the History Channel.

01:36:26.580 Yeah, from the most post-World War consensus view

01:36:28.900 of the war that you could possibly get where churchill's this great lion of a man and he's

01:36:34.440 basically a tremendous hero he was by the way not a christian did not attend church he was genuinely

01:36:42.420 if for all the things you say like we you called racist all the time churchill's like a total 0.79

01:36:48.620 racist like hated indians hated all this stuff like consider them consider blacks like subhuman 0.95

01:36:54.160 like all this different stuff. 0.94

01:36:55.920 But Owen has a vision of World War II 0.89

01:36:59.220 that is on par with the heavenly pattern

01:37:01.820 for the Holy of Holies in his mind.

01:37:03.820 And so when you challenge it,

01:37:05.760 you have become not just a liar, 0.95

01:37:08.220 but you have become an apostate. 0.99

01:37:10.120 So you have to understand that

01:37:11.740 from a propagandist perspective,

01:37:14.180 the function of people like us is,

01:37:17.480 one of the functions is to commit public blasphemy

01:37:20.000 and take the heat.

01:37:21.900 Guys, I'm telling you-

01:37:22.740 Against idols,

01:37:23.160 not against the holy yeah against the against the idols of the day and like right now on my twitter

01:37:28.140 my mentions are full this is an average day for all of us some another guys call me a nazi now

01:37:33.860 like just this morning eli whatever his name is uh the that guy so this is an everyday occurrence

01:37:41.340 for for guys like us that step forward not as anons i love my anon brothers i i see the need

01:37:47.420 for you many of you being anons total you won't hear me counter signal you on that front at all

01:37:52.440 But we're not Anons. My Christian name, my family's name is out there tied to these things, and we're saying them out loud, okay? So what's going to happen is that a lot of people are going to run propaganda campaigns against all of us. They're going to say, they're going to try to discredit us in whatever way they possibly can. So discord, so doubt about our character, you know, fill in the blank.

01:38:16.320 so if you are going to wage ideological war and we must you just have to prepare yourself first

01:38:22.560 for the fact that people will try to kill you and i mean that like people are trying to assassinate

01:38:28.300 our character daily on the internet i've also had death threats and like literal death threats too

01:38:33.900 i think most you know at least eric and i have both had literal death threats and i don't know

01:38:38.420 if dan dan maybe has two he doesn't tweet very much just to my face yeah that's true we've had

01:38:42.680 we've just had death threats over actually earlier today didn't eric threaten to kill you if you you

01:38:48.580 know like from the story well yeah he he said you'll have to dig your own grave that wasn't

01:38:53.040 but dan the younger yes so i would say like you just have to be when you when you hear

01:38:59.400 a note of shrillness in people talking about us or whatever just go to our actual words like try

01:39:05.840 to let us defend ourselves recognize that we're all discipled into this kind of stuff and it's

01:39:12.120 painful and genuinely difficult to reprogram your mind. Yeah. And one thing I would say to people

01:39:18.160 too, if you're a pastor listening to this and you're like, you know, some of your messaging,

01:39:22.440 I don't understand. You know, even reaching out, I think for guys to have the willingness to have

01:39:28.840 the conversation, because it is weird to me that you could see so many people as worthy of a

01:39:34.760 conversation, but then like guys who are, like you said, 94 point whatever percent aligned with you.

01:39:39.680 yeah and you're never gonna pick you're gonna anathematize a guy you're never gonna pick up

01:39:45.460 the phone i actually feel like that's a disgrace to the pastoral office to do that we try to be 0.91

01:39:50.300 pretty careful about it unless somebody has like an you know let's say they're a trinitarian heretic 0.78

01:39:54.780 for example and we know outwardly yeah an arian we know outwardly like i know your position i don't

01:40:01.780 need to like question like well what's your character but your your stated position is

01:40:06.840 unorthodox right but we're not in that camp no and in fact within the tribes we run in we tend

01:40:14.300 to land much more towards pretty standard westminsterian orthodoxy in terms of presbyterianism

01:40:20.500 our tradition then um even a lot of our friends you know like we're we're less people ask me all

01:40:26.400 time like are you federal vision like no i'm not i'm not federal vision i understand it i'm not i

01:40:30.740 don't agree with it okay so like a lot of this stuff we're pretty standard orthodox on and where

01:40:38.840 we're unorthodox we're not anti-right justification people no no like i'm i i don't i don't go there

01:40:45.580 i'm not you know fill in the blank with a million things so when where we are unorthodox is we're

01:40:51.760 culturally unorthodox against the backdrop of popular orthodoxy today and in there we're like

01:40:57.460 violently unorthodox. We're not feminists. We're not, we are patriarchalists. We're not

01:41:02.280 even complementarians. We're patriarchalists. We're, we're, we're not post-war consensus

01:41:08.240 supporters. We're, we're very much going to tell you that nationalism is not the problem,

01:41:13.680 that national particularity of a people in a place is not the problem, that loving your own kindred

01:41:18.920 and, you know, seeking to propagate your own culture and people, that's not a problem. That's

01:41:24.860 not a sin to do that. It's not a sin contra the post-war consensus and contra race brain of today 0.70

01:41:30.800 to say general things about different races and say that generally speaking, this race has this

01:41:37.300 strength and weakness as a general statement. The scriptures do that. Yeah. It's one of my

01:41:42.340 favorites. Cretans. The Cretans, you know, but also it's just no, you have to recognize no one

01:41:48.180 would care if you did that. And you said Kenyans are better long distance runners on the, on the

01:41:53.220 mean than Europeans. And you'd go, duh. But then if you say something about whites that's positive,

01:41:59.380 it's whites that will get you in trouble. And they'll immediately jump to, well, they're white, 1.00

01:42:04.400 like the local pastor that smeared me this week as a racist Nazi heretic. And he said, 0.97

01:42:12.260 I rebuke you. I mean, it's like his words. So why did he do that? Because I was willing to say

01:42:19.260 something positive about something that he considered part of the divine holy of holies,

01:42:24.660 the heavenly, you know, pattern that must be traced up on earth. And he's wrong about that

01:42:29.420 historically. And we could run circles around him in an argument on any of these things.

01:42:33.780 Which they usually won't. 0.99

01:42:34.520 Because he's probably completely ignorant on the subject. He's probably never read one book that 0.95

01:42:39.660 would challenge his thinking. And you just have to go into this world saying, that's the majority

01:42:43.880 of people. So on this front, backing up to something earlier, this is why we have to get

01:42:49.680 comfortable saying, I disagree with brother so-and-so on this issue. I love what the Lord

01:42:55.540 is doing in them, and I'm not their enemy. I'm actually their friend, and we are allowed to

01:43:01.600 disagree on some of these things. Because the moment you elevate, any praising of the Crusades

01:43:07.580 makes you a sacralist Roman Catholic popish heretic. I'm sorry, you have gone over the 0.82

01:43:15.080 little rumble strip on the freeway at 75 miles an hour, and you're about to hit a concrete barrier

01:43:19.740 in terms of Christian love. You're making an elementary failure of Christian love. 0.71

01:43:26.280 And that's the issue. So when we talk about the propaganda of the day, one of the functions of 0.82

01:43:32.440 the propaganda of the day is to divide the enemies of itself against each other. So you just have to

01:43:39.780 understand this, that one of the things the enemy would love, and I mean both the human enemy and

01:43:43.300 the spiritual enemy, is to divide us all up, all of us Reformed Christians and Theonomists and

01:43:47.820 Two Kingdom guys and Paedo-Baptists and Credo-Baptists and Presbyterians and Lutherans and

01:43:51.700 all this stuff, and people who have this view of the history of the Civil War or the World War II

01:43:58.580 or the Crusades and people have this view

01:44:00.220 and they would love nothing more than to get us

01:44:02.120 who agree on 90 plus percent of stuff.

01:44:04.160 All those groups I just agreed, just listed,

01:44:06.500 should be brothers. 0.98

01:44:08.080 And they just want us to kill each other 0.99

01:44:10.100 so that we don't kill them. 0.99

01:44:11.960 Yeah. 0.98

01:44:12.760 Metaphorically speaking.

01:44:13.660 I think that's right.

01:44:14.460 And one of the things I want to ask you is,

01:44:17.040 maybe it's a warning about how you read history,

01:44:19.900 but in the Crusades discussion,

01:44:21.720 it's been really helpful

01:44:22.480 because you see all these people commenting.

01:44:24.640 And one thing I noticed in a lot of people

01:44:26.620 who are also in our camp they're okay so there's the people who militantly oppose us

01:44:31.620 right crusades are evil wicked but there's another type of guy that actually kind of drives me nuts

01:44:37.300 and it's the guy who's like always a wet blanket you know it's like yeah the crusades this but you

01:44:44.800 know there was this and well you know i don't know i just don't know if i agree with this

01:44:48.780 and really what they're trying to do is put a wet blanket on any positive movement of rebuilding

01:44:55.260 right so it's like you're allowed to think thoughts you're allowed to have certain

01:44:59.580 even interesting ideological takes but it seems like the guy who is really not allowed to exist

01:45:07.760 our type of people are the kind of people who build things who say the crusades we can learn

01:45:15.460 some things and we're going to take that fighting spirit we're going to take that explorative spirit

01:45:21.380 for the people who sailed seas, we're going to take that and we're going to say, let's build,

01:45:24.620 let's go, let's do this thing. Dan, there seems to be a type of Christian who's like,

01:45:30.100 yeah, read the Crusades book, but as long as you do a fair amount of questioning

01:45:33.640 and then turning it into sort of a gash me a moment of like, yeah, but we can't ever do that

01:45:39.340 today. Right. Yeah. I mean, our whole goal and looking at Christendom 1.0 was like, okay,

01:45:45.180 why are we not allowed to be interested in this time? Why are we not allowed to question it?

01:45:50.920 Why are we not allowed to learn? Why is there this narrative overarching narrative? That's like

01:45:56.060 just dismiss it. And so our goal is to look at it and say, what did they do? Right.

01:46:01.080 What did they do wrong? And what can we learn from that? Amen. And that's what a builder does,

01:46:05.700 right? Is you, you, I mean, case studies in business, you look at a business and you're like,

01:46:09.880 Hey, they did this really, really well. They didn't do this very well. If I was to apply

01:46:14.780 that to my situation, I would do it this way, learning the lesson that I have. And so then

01:46:19.780 you're like, okay, hey, yeah, like you said, Eric, there's a fighting spirit. There is a

01:46:24.780 martial spirit that's really important. There's a love of people and place, a love of Christian

01:46:31.160 neighbor, and those things that you can learn and say, okay, let's particularize that in our time

01:46:37.320 against this globalist sort of Marxist attitude that's predominant in the spirit of our age.

01:46:43.800 Let's love our time and our people and our place and defend Christian brothers and defend the weak.

01:46:52.000 Let's do that. 0.98

01:46:53.140 Let's build something.

01:46:54.940 And then you've got the wet blanket guy.

01:46:57.580 You said it's like a sandballot guy.

01:47:00.900 And instead of asking the question, what do you think about this aspect of the Crusades?

01:47:07.320 So-and-so. 0.83

01:47:07.900 it's just it's right to you heretic you blah blah you know don't they know don't you know this

01:47:14.720 instead of asking the question well or what do you think about that a lot of times what i saw

01:47:19.580 was things like you know we're recommending rodney stark's book and that you know somebody

01:47:23.440 would say well you know i take issue with some of his interpretive method and i don't know how

01:47:28.960 much stock we can put in that and they don't actually answer any like there's no substantive

01:47:33.260 objective, but really what it's made to do is take the, this is what so many of like the boomer

01:47:39.040 evangelicals, it's like their life force is taking the wind out of young men's sails. 0.89

01:47:44.480 Sucking all the air out of a room. Like you just want to make sure that nobody ever actually does 1.00

01:47:49.840 anything. All they need is one data point to discredit a person and then they don't have to

01:47:55.220 listen to anything they say. This is, and again, like I know we've been hard on Dr. White and I

01:47:59.720 I think these are fair criticisms,

01:48:01.440 but this is why to me it was so off-putting for,

01:48:06.180 and this is public behavior for him to respond so consistently

01:48:10.500 with everything you've done is like Roman Catholic,

01:48:15.700 blah, blah, blah, sacralism, your heretics.

01:48:17.440 But have you debated this guy?

01:48:19.260 Have you done this?

01:48:19.920 Have you done this?

01:48:20.700 Look at all the stuff I've done.

01:48:21.760 Look how experienced I am.

01:48:22.860 Look how great I am.

01:48:23.860 And to me, the amount that that just made me go,

01:48:28.980 So, yuck.

01:48:31.260 It was off-putting. 1.00

01:48:33.080 And it was, I thought, unbecoming of an older man 1.00

01:48:35.220 who ought to be, yes, helping and temper the zeal

01:48:39.660 and help young men like do a good job.

01:48:41.880 This is one of the things we try to do

01:48:42.840 at New Christendom Press is we're not gonna affirm

01:48:45.440 every single thing that young men do or say in their zeal,

01:48:48.620 but we are going to affirm their zeal

01:48:50.400 and try to direct it in a helpful course.

01:48:53.820 And again, like all the brother war things I said,

01:48:56.900 I want to be at peace with apologia.

01:48:59.340 And like when I look at the things

01:49:02.140 that a lot of the abolitionist guys have done,

01:49:04.860 that Jeff Durbin has done pastorally

01:49:07.100 and in his fight against abortion,

01:49:09.160 when I look at the debates Dr. White

01:49:11.440 has engaged in apologetically

01:49:13.300 and a lot of the great things that he's done on that front.

01:49:17.800 And I look at a lot of people

01:49:19.020 with whom we have disagreements of various types.

01:49:21.340 And I want to say like those agreements are real,

01:49:24.100 but also just let's go.

01:49:25.220 Let's all build together.

01:49:26.900 Let's go do something meaningful.

01:49:28.460 Because when you're actually building things

01:49:30.060 and not just saying words,

01:49:32.100 you realize very quickly that you have to figure out

01:49:35.260 how to work together across minor

01:49:38.260 to medium-sized disagreements

01:49:40.320 where you'll never build anything other than just yourself.

01:49:43.660 You'll be by yourself building

01:49:44.820 and you'll build something small

01:49:45.940 and it will be not lasting

01:49:47.000 and people will forget it within 10 minutes of your death.

01:49:50.080 Because it's not worth passing on.

01:49:51.660 No, because it's not, again,

01:49:53.200 And Christendom is a function of the people of God together building.

01:50:00.280 Yeah, that's right.

01:50:01.760 Gentlemen, as we wrap things up, I think it's been a good discussion.

01:50:04.820 A couple things I want to point people to.

01:50:07.040 Number one, Joel Webin on Right Response Ministries had a good interview with Zach Garris.

01:50:12.880 Of course, Zach Garris wrote the book, For Us, Honor Thy Fathers,

01:50:16.640 recovering this biblical patriarchal vision of the Reformers.

01:50:20.400 And so I would encourage people to check that out.

01:50:23.240 Again, that was on Joel Webin's Right Response Ministries, had Zach Garris, Pastor Zach Garris on there.

01:50:29.480 One thing I want to point people to as well, we were talking about righteous deception.

01:50:34.120 I don't know if you guys had seen this today, but Justin Taylor from Crossway, old John Piper pal, him and Danny Burke were going hard at Matt Walsh.

01:50:43.480 Matt Walsh, because they said, how dare you, you know, do this film in which you're, you know.

01:50:50.060 Under false pretenses.

01:50:51.300 Yes, under false pretenses.

01:50:52.600 So Justin Taylor had said, if you think Jacob lying to his family is justification for deception today, I would recommend a three-point action plan.

01:50:59.480 Number one, slow down.

01:51:00.400 Number two, log off.

01:51:02.300 Number three, read the biblical narrative again.

01:51:05.920 Woo, I've done all those three things many times in my life.

01:51:09.380 So here's what I want to recommend.

01:51:10.600 And Joe Rigney retweeted and he said, since you mentioned it, I've preached on this before.

01:51:17.640 Be interesting to weigh in on that conversation for people who appreciate Dr. Rigney.

01:51:21.860 And I think he's sort of like responding to Justin and these guys.

01:51:25.580 So that's helpful.

01:51:27.180 And then final thing.

01:51:28.680 We have a conference next year.

01:51:30.580 Yes.

01:51:31.220 Brian, 2025.

01:51:33.040 You know, there's a lot of people who aren't willing to share a stage with us.

01:51:36.540 But Brian, I'll tell you this right now.

01:51:37.880 I'm going on the record.

01:51:38.760 I will share a stage.

01:51:40.600 with you. I am so relieved because I was worried that you're going to drop out.

01:51:46.200 Well, here's some of the problematic things I've said in the last hour. Here's the problem.

01:51:49.820 A lot of times- I thought you were really nice and reasonable.

01:51:52.040 A lot of times, this is what I get. People will call me or they'll message me and they'll say,

01:51:57.660 you know, I like Ogden and I like what's going on, but I'm just concerned that you associate

01:52:03.160 yourself with brian you know that's something that frankly i am known as the bad boy of ogden

01:52:10.900 yes in fact somebody said many are saying this somebody said on your wife is the only one that

01:52:16.900 ever calls you that somebody said this brian you're such a bad boy she's never once said that

01:52:23.120 in my whole life uh this isn't bright hearth this isn't my heart um actually uh somebody on twitter

01:52:30.540 referred to me as a bard and brian as a barbarian yeah that sounds right i think you're confused

01:52:35.880 no i think that that was probably that was probably it yeah they also they were probably

01:52:39.740 they were also disappointed in your deadlift being smaller than mine probably yeah i think

01:52:43.820 that's what it was um but you know what dan i'm willing to share a stage with you as well

01:52:48.320 um and i think that should mean a lot to you you think so i do so guys i appreciate anyway

01:52:55.820 are going to be right now so get them yeah june 12 through 14 2025 in ogden utah for a ruckus

01:53:04.140 good time it's gonna be great you will not soon forget it yeah and guys these are the times when

01:53:10.480 you you get to a conference like this the point of them like the talks are going to be great this

01:53:15.200 that's all going to be great but the point of them is to get face to face with people that

01:53:19.560 love you and people that want to help encourage you and spur you on and inspire you we want to

01:53:24.140 That's with the wind back in your sails.

01:53:26.260 Yes, that's right.

01:53:27.220 And so check out newchristendompress.com slash 2025,

01:53:30.820 or you can just go to the 2025 link on the website

01:53:33.820 and get your tickets now, as Brian said,

01:53:35.940 best prices that you will ever get.

01:53:39.160 Brian, I would like you to just give us a quick charge,

01:53:42.200 close us down.

01:53:43.520 My final charge, you know, happy impaling, whatever.

01:53:47.300 You've got to learn.

01:53:48.260 There's a technique.

01:53:49.520 Joel Evan.

01:53:50.720 What do you need for impaling?

01:53:52.140 Cash.

01:53:52.940 Cash.

01:53:54.140 All right, let me leave us with this charge then.

01:53:58.980 And it's that may we be good friends.

01:54:04.000 May we fight with one another well and Christianly.

01:54:07.920 But ultimately, may we be co-belligerents

01:54:11.160 against the kingdom of darkness. 0.65

01:54:13.320 Amen.

01:54:13.960 Amen.

01:54:24.140 Transcription by CastingWords

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The King's Hall - September 20, 2024

Vlad the Impaler： Dracula, Bram Stoker, & the Christian Prince Behind the Myth

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