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00:18:59.900Yeah, so what I'm trying to accomplish with this is I would consider a slightly distinct conversation from like defining ethnic American.
00:19:07.960And I think that there's a place for that conversation, but that's not quite what I'm driving at with this.
00:19:12.280And I think the reason is, is because we are facing a literal situation of an invasion over the last, you know, 20 years or so.
00:19:19.080And so the whole point of this conversation is, is not to get into the detail on that, but I do think that we should talk about the correlations between ethnic identity and the American ethnos or the American ethos.
00:19:32.880And so there is a conversation to be had there, but what I'm trying to at least get people to admit is that it is legitimate to say, I have roots here and I belong here.
00:19:44.780and these people that came in five years ago and they get to lecture me about who i am
00:19:48.960and the way of life that i'm supposed to lead that's not okay and so the very concept of
00:19:55.080heritage american is trying to make people recognize that they stand on the shoulders
00:19:58.460of giants they have inherited something they are um the product of an actual people who
00:20:04.740experienced hardship and difficulties they've produced all sorts of cultural artifacts like
00:20:10.460music and literature and myths and legends. Like when you say something like Johnny Appleseed or
00:20:16.260Paul Bunyan, that means something deep down in our soul because we're Americans. And I think
00:20:21.200that's what I'm trying to do is stop the deracination, stop the de-homogenization or
00:20:27.640the separation of individuals from their group and just recognize the fact that you come from
00:20:32.260somewhere and it's okay to recognize that you've inherited something worth preserving.
00:20:36.740hmm what um on on eth ethnic component how would you factor that in then in into sort of this
00:20:45.940concept well i think the first thing to say is that this is not new and made up i mean if you
00:20:51.340look at the immigration um arguments in the early 20th century especially in the 1920s with calvin
00:20:56.720coolidge he was making the case for severe restrictions on immigration based on those
00:21:02.940who are most likely to assimilate into,
00:21:28.040that's not the purpose of having the conversation.
00:21:29.720Yeah. So the way that from Teddy Roosevelt to Coolidge, these people, these advocates of immigration restriction, they would say that America is a unique people. There was an ethnogenesis and ethnogenesis have happened all over the place in the Western world.
00:21:46.140I mean, if you look at the English and the French and the German, these are combinations of earlier ethnic groups.
00:21:53.460And over time, through intermarriage and so forth, they became the English.
00:21:57.020And it was this conglomeration of these earlier groups.
00:21:59.880And what Teddy Roosevelt and others like Coolidge were saying was that just like that, the Americans went through their own ethnogenesis.
00:22:08.520And so you had Scandinavians and Germans and English and Scotch-Irish and all of these people that fortified themselves on the frontier and through their experiences on the North American continent, and they became a new people.
00:22:20.740And so that's how I would describe the core of what it means to be a heritage American is to be a descendant of or connected to those settlers and pioneers and trailblazers that set up this country for the first time.
00:22:35.240people will say things like, well, you're not even a Native American. The Native Americans
00:22:39.840pre-existed the European settlers. And what I would point out is not a single one of those
00:22:44.380tribes or nations called themselves Americans. They had Cherokee and Cheyenne and Shawnee and
00:22:49.820all of these others, but the Americans was the product of a European experience here. And so
00:22:55.580American to them meant that new thing that took time, took hundreds of years to grow into something
00:23:02.580that we can identify as a people but it we are the native americans and people get like really
00:23:08.420like that's a really fun thing on twitter to do it's be like yeah of course i'm a native american
00:23:11.760what tribe anglo-saxon anglo-saxon but i think that's a really and people are like you can't
00:23:18.120just redefine terms look back at the dictionaries of the of the 19th century look at the letters
00:23:23.020that phrase native american was actually used to describe those whose descendants went back to
00:23:28.840the pilgrims or to the founding generation and distinguished them from the newcomers from
00:23:34.900central europe etc so we are the native americans that's who we are that is our identity that's what
00:23:40.620we're trying to communicate how does this relate to so there's coolidge even earlier views of
00:23:46.560american identity of who this people is you know who we are right how did the founding fathers how
00:23:53.860did others think about this yeah i mean one of the funny things about the founding fathers is like
00:23:58.960they would have had no concept of having discussion about whether someone can come from europe and
00:24:05.120then be like literally the same people as someone from you know like asia or africa or something it
00:24:10.420wouldn't have made any sense to them so they'll speak in terms like anybody can come here and we
00:24:15.120want more people to come here but obviously there was a boundary on that right like if you read the
00:24:20.280letters of Thomas Jefferson, it was very obvious that he was like an Anglo-Saxon maximalist. And
00:24:26.460that was his conception. So at the very beginning in colonial America, they really saw themselves
00:24:31.940as derivative of English. It was very narrow. And of course, America at that time was the 13
00:24:37.700colonies. It primarily existed on the Eastern seaboard. And so they, they had no idea that
00:24:43.460America would be this entire continent of people. So there was a changing and developing meaning of
00:24:49.900america and so what i like to say is there's different like cutoffs for what a heritage
00:24:55.000american in i think my favorite one is the teddy roosevelts and teddy roosevelt basically emphasized
00:25:00.000the fact that america continued to change what it meant to be an american continued to change and
00:25:05.440develop until the frontier was closed the frontier was closed at the 19th century and then we had
00:25:11.420done it we had conquered the continent european settlers heroes legendary explorers had basically
00:25:18.380done what europeans had done for thousands of years and that's expand their civilization westward
00:25:24.020and in all sorts of directions and so that was the close and so when you look at that picture
00:25:28.940that's when he said we are a new people and we are the product of the combination of
00:25:36.100scandinavians and english and all of these european peoples and he actually specifies
00:25:40.660these european people he lists them i think there's like seven that he lists and this is in
00:25:43.980his um the winning of the west his four volume history and he he literally describes the american
00:25:49.560in these like ethnic adjacent terms and that's his definition of american is someone who came
00:25:56.020here from europe and created this new ethos this new country out of raw land with grit
00:26:03.560with struggle with hardship facing savages he would call them and that's what he meant by the
00:26:09.220by the american that was his definition of american and so my definition of heritage american
00:26:13.500it's those of us who want to belong to something deeper than ourselves in this individual moment
00:26:19.380they can look back on teddy roosevelt's definition and say that's my patrimony
00:26:24.220yeah that's really interesting uh it's also interesting brian and i've talked about this
00:26:29.000like you look at the you know the the early period the founding of america and then even
00:26:34.220all the way up to like 1950 you get really looking at demographic studies census census reports that
00:26:42.140sort of thing it's like 90 or more and it's predominantly like british right so mostly
00:26:48.240british peoples uh but then in the 60s you have changes with hart cellar um and it's also
00:26:53.800interesting i think maybe kennedy was the one who coined the phrase but a nation of immigrants with
00:26:58.760his book pushed by the adl but it's really interesting because i grew up thinking we've
00:27:04.520always just been what what i knew in like the 90s and the oos which was that you know you have all
00:27:10.820sorts of different nations present on your shores. But this really wasn't the case. It's hard for a
00:27:16.140lot of Americans to comprehend that today. But as you look at that, first of all, what's wrong with
00:27:22.740the phrase that we're a nation of immigrants in the way that that was meant? Yeah. So nation of
00:27:27.940immigrants has this idea that this is not our land and we don't actually belong to it. We're kind of
00:27:33.500like aliens ourselves and our land. It's part of that guilt manipulation complex. So I would say
00:27:40.540we're not a nation of immigrants. We're a nation of pioneers and settlers that America did not
00:27:45.340exist until European explorers built something out of what they found, which was chaos and pagan
00:27:52.080religions and warfare and bloodshed and slavery and all the things that like we're supposed to
00:27:57.400adopt as our own, you know, original sins. That's actually what they found here. And so they built
00:28:02.940this America out of that. They conquered it. They literally conquered it. And they came to
00:28:07.880face these dangers with bravery. And I think that it's okay to talk in terms of that. So we are a
00:28:13.260nation of settlers and immigrants. So the difference between a settler and an immigrant is an immigrant
00:28:18.960comes into a country that already exists and he assimilates and he, and he, you know, uh, adjusts
00:28:26.340his way of life and his, um, his instincts to that culture. An invader is someone who comes in to
00:28:31.500conquer. A settler is someone who comes in to build something new. And so all of us, we are
00:28:37.640told daily by the media and by academic that we are we too are immigrants and i say no we're
00:28:42.520actually native americans we're the children and descendants of the settlers we're not immigrants
00:28:48.700there are some immigrants here and so we're not like anti-immigration in some absolutist sense
00:28:53.380but there is a difference between a settler and an immigrant and i think we are a nation of
00:28:57.860settlers and that that that nation was created by real men doing hard things and it was created
00:29:05.560over the course of several hundred years, and immigration came after there was already a nation
00:29:10.380set up by the settlers. It seems to me like this is another one of those areas where the exception
00:29:16.200makes poor law, where, you know, obviously you're not saying that American identity, that American
00:29:25.940citizenship, that essentially there's absolutely no room ever for an immigrant ever in any sense
00:29:34.220Even if you thought today a really good policy would be a century-long moratorium on immigration, for example, you're still not saying there is no such thing as an immigrant who genuinely assimilates, join the mother culture.
00:29:47.060Well, you're not saying that, but it seems like when people bring that as an objection to even thinking through this American identity, a heritage American identity question, it's almost like they're not recognizing that while that is true, it's also obviously true.
00:30:03.960It's almost like an afro, it's almost axiomatic that there is a very limited range or a very limited percentage to where a culture, maybe a hundred million strong nation could absorb some percentage of immigrants and more easily from a area that was more harmonious with its ethnic character and culture.
00:30:26.660but it certainly can't absorb 40 million more as a hundred million person nation or a hundred
00:30:33.960million or 200. Obviously there's a boundary somewhere where it becomes conquest and the
00:30:41.020replacement destruction, you know, it's the end of that original culture. Yeah. That seems obvious
00:30:46.440to me, but it also seems like the location of a lot of the controversy. I think so. I mean,
00:30:50.820there's this like, there's this universalist particularist kind of dynamic at play here,
00:30:55.240like thomas jefferson will write that we really do need more immigrants because we have
00:30:59.600you know an entire continent that we have to conquer like we can't do that with just the
00:31:04.640people in the colonies we need more people but it's 2026 now you know like it's the 21st century
00:31:10.600now and so you can't take this little phrase in a letter from 250 years ago and say this is our
00:31:16.420this is our absolute principle for all time and if you doubt this then you hate the founders
00:31:20.900yeah yeah Thomas Jefferson would just hit you with his musket yeah I mean absolutely I mean
00:31:26.700like like I said he I mean this is this is so funny like to use the founders like that as if
00:31:31.180like like Thomas Jefferson was the one of the more liberal founders and like you look at his like how
00:31:37.100would you deal with something like sodomy right and Thomas Jefferson enlightenment deist anti-christian
00:31:43.420um he his suggestion was castration and so like you want to he's a super lib you know yeah he just
00:31:50.140wants to castrate this on well yeah because the death penalty was the standard at the time but
00:31:54.280i'm just my point is that like these people selectively apply phrases it's like it's what
00:31:59.380you said earlier the left is really good at using things to um hit you over the head with and it's
00:32:05.200just dumb and it's low iq and it actually is not an argument and they rely on people not
00:32:10.260understanding the difference between a contextualized statement from a founder given the way
00:32:16.160that they used a word, even some of the universal language they taught, they wanted more people
00:32:21.200because they had a whole continent to settle. There was a lot of work to get done, who they
00:32:25.240thought of as anyone, but also understanding what they would have taken as obvious. Like the idea
00:32:31.000you noted earlier that, that any of the founders would have said, oh yeah, we could take some of
00:32:37.520the Barbary pirates and we could take, you know, some Nigerians and pretty much anybody that'd be
00:32:44.700fine that's what we need to help settle the it's funny how like the founders are simultaneously
00:32:48.260like misogynist racist like terrible people that you should never look up to and also you have to
00:32:53.480believe every single yeah exactly every single time and so it's like maybe there's a better way
00:32:58.920of thinking through this what if we actually thought through it yes what if you know okay
00:33:03.680and so like immigration policy does change because the situation is strange and that's part of
00:33:08.440politics is like there's always unique threats there's always unique opportunities and you need
00:33:12.520to adjust your policy in accordance with those so by the time of the 1920s um you know the united
00:33:18.720states was being flooded with people from central europe who are closer they're part of western
00:33:22.480civilization so maybe over time they could assimilate better than you know someone from
00:33:27.160india or something like that over time just but calvin coolidge was recognizing the fact that even
00:33:32.280that was kind of drifting us away from our core our core culture yeah and so he put on a moratorium
00:33:39.780And he recognized the fact that if you're going to, this is his phrase again, in his, in his speech, defending the 1920s immigration initiatives, he said, if we're going to preserve the American race, we should talk about race in a second.
00:33:51.880We're going to preserve the American race, then we need to select from immigrants who actually have a better chance of, you know, cooperating with that and becoming part of that.
00:34:02.340Interesting. So I do want to talk about race just to put it, you know, underline it a little bit and make sure people are following.
00:34:09.020and that I'm hearing you correctly, it seems like your ideal conception of heritage American
00:34:15.020while recognizing disagreement and that there's a range would be something similar to Teddy
00:34:19.820Roosevelt's, the descendants of the people who settled America into the 19th century. But
00:34:25.340sometime in the 19th century, you move into now, we're actually dealing more with immigration.
00:34:30.980Yeah, exactly. I think that, I think that's a great, it's convenience, right? Like people
00:34:35.420want to get all rationalistic. And what about this person? Here's his ethnic breakdown. Here's
00:34:39.360his percentages. Like that's not how politics works. That's not how culture or anything else
00:34:43.760that has no part in these serious conversations. We're dealing with generalities. We're dealing
00:34:49.200with archetypes, um, things of that sort. So I really do think the most useful conversation
00:34:54.040is, or the most useful position is to take the closing of the frontier. That's a really natural
00:34:59.420stopping point. It ends like right at the turn of the, of the 20th century. And I think that's
00:35:04.440a great way to think about it that's that's kind of my preference now yeah now look we have to be
00:35:09.120political realists here and so we've come a long way from 1900 to 1960 when the heart seller act
00:35:15.040is passed and basically what that does is it reverses the restrictions where there's all of
00:35:20.840these national caps on who can come from what country and it basically just obliterates those
00:35:26.500and so what that does is that brings in people who are not part of western civilization so like
00:35:33.720for for convenience like it's totally fine to say look we're not going to take all these italians
00:35:39.340we're not going to take all these other central europeans and we're not going to just round them
00:35:43.700up either we're going to we're going to be realists about what the situation is and so
00:35:47.980things do change and i think that it's better to think in terms of okay so what now can we do to
00:35:53.160preserve western civilization who came from the west who came from the christendom those are those
00:35:57.960are conversations that we can have and so it does morph over time and our realistic policy has to
00:36:03.060adopt to that. But I think heritage American is best defined as being sourced before the closing
00:36:09.600of the frontier. Okay. And then even within, I think obvious, obviously this is something like
00:36:15.560what you're saying, but even when you think about immigration, there are more or less harmonious
00:36:20.800cultures, you know, so when you have 20, you know, post 2000, most of the Indians in America, I
00:36:28.060believe came since the year 2000. I think that's demographically accurate. In terms of immigration,
00:36:34.220most people from India, I don't mean Native American, Chippewa, Cherokee. Most of them came
00:36:40.220since the year 2000. Even that is a much different thing than some of the maybe less easily
00:36:48.060integratable European immigration over the world wars and in the 20th century that it took two
00:36:54.500world wars to integrate and to destroy ethnic ghettos of even European ethnic ghettos that are
00:36:59.580maintaining their own European heritage in ways that are contrary to the American identity. Is
00:37:05.440that fair? Yeah, I think that's exactly fair. I mean, it's like we're dealing with, you know,
00:37:09.780concentric circles. And so there is a core and the core is the WASP, the white Anglo-Saxon
00:37:14.980Protestant. That was the core of the founding generation. And it has broadened since then.
00:37:19.900but i think i think we can fairly say that those outside of the west have a harder time
00:37:26.520assimilating into western heritage than those inside it and so it's a concentric circle and
00:37:32.080like you get someone who's like literally from england like he's going to fit in best with the
00:37:36.800colonies yeah you bring in someone from you know the what we call the third world now and he he
00:37:41.700just like they wouldn't make sense right so there is there is a spectrum to it and that's how
00:37:45.720politics is it it works in gray areas and you can't have these absolutes and that's how they
00:37:50.340try to trick you right yeah they they try to catch you up with that but no we're we're dealing with
00:37:54.500archetypes and generalities we're dealing with cultures which is by definition a grouping of
00:37:59.120of individuals and they may they they will try to put in your mouth these absolutes of course and
00:38:05.020then make make your position absurd or try to present your position as absurd you know we're
00:38:10.380all of a sudden they're asking like well you know andrew isker is he a heritage american when did
00:38:14.260his family get here was it the 18 was it 1883 well that's after the cutoff so you know andrew's
00:38:20.540on a boat he's going back to poland scandinavia i'm just kidding no andrew you could let me just
00:38:29.260i want you to put a picture of andrew on the screen right now with the label heritage american
00:38:32.800well i was just gonna say he's he's working out really hard because he wants to fit in when he
00:38:37.280gets here in june yeah yeah that's right that's right okay i've noticed this other tendency though
00:38:41.900even among christians and i want to talk just a bit about this and then we can deal with race as
00:38:46.540well because they're connected i've noticed with a lot of christians that they actually seem to be
00:38:52.080helping the left here uh because they try to muddy the waters here so a big thing i hear is like well
00:38:58.060you can't even really know what your heritage is and you know there's been so much intermarriage
00:39:03.900and like you just nobody knows anything because we can't calculate it to the 10th decimal point
00:39:08.140exactly therefore it's not a thing at all correct terrible argument um so yeah i just want to ask
00:39:13.020you about that why is that problematic and then the kind of the follow-up you've mentioned this
00:39:17.480but sort of this problem of like a very ecclesiocentric way of thinking through like
00:39:22.120immigration and ethnicity where we're thinking about like who can worship the true and living
00:39:27.540god and like that's not exactly the same question about politically who should be in your country
00:39:33.080yeah no i think that's a really good point to have because people get funny about this because
00:39:37.260like they'll say things like, you're confusing the church and the state. Like whenever you want
00:39:41.000a Christian politics, like, like Stephen Wolf will mention the Christian prince, you're not
00:39:44.780supposed to cross the church and the state. But suddenly when you talk about like who we are as
00:39:49.300a nation, you're not allowed to draw those boundaries because we're all one in Christ.
00:39:54.340Wait a second. I thought we weren't allowed to do a church and state. Now Galatians 3.28 is like
00:39:59.660our immigration policy. Exactly. As if that is what St. Paul was discussing in the letter to
00:40:06.220the galatians well specifically like i mean it's right there those in christ like is is everybody
00:40:12.320in christ like are we universalist no of course not like nobody they wouldn't say that but they
00:40:16.880get all they get all flaky about it and it's like it's really obvious that there's a difference
00:40:21.720between the kingdom of of god those who are saved those who are elect which obviously transcends
00:40:28.440race and all these national boundaries nevertheless it doesn't eradicate national
00:40:33.500boundaries no it doesn't but it it does it does recognize that he can draw from all of these
00:40:38.680nations and we are brothers and sisters in christ together on equal terms but that's not civil policy
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00:42:34.660I just preached a sermon called The Sin of Midwittery. That was the literal title. And it
00:42:40.860was about some of this stuff because our church has been trying to talk through these questions
00:42:45.380and men's book groups and lots of different contexts. It's in the conversation. We know
00:42:50.240the people under our pastoral care are trying to figure them out. And one thing they're trying to
00:42:53.960figure out is where is the boundary between the ecclesiastical and the political. So that,
00:42:59.240because that matters a lot. And in that sermon, I looked at a lot of those passages and it's so
00:43:06.920easy when you just pay attention on the most basic level to what's happening in them and how we deal
00:43:13.100with them in any other category like sex that there's neither male nor female well okay then
00:43:18.120based on the way that you deal with the racial elements of that or the ethnic elements would
00:43:23.360you then also say like yeah to your six-year-old daughter go in the men's room or the girl's room
00:43:27.620it doesn't even matter there's neither male nor female in christ but you're not retarded so people
00:43:35.600are able to make these distinctions pretty readily and and that i do think a lot of this
00:43:41.420is people pretending not to understand for sure being offended and pretending not to understand
00:43:47.800things that they absolutely do understand what you're saying but they're not trying to understand
00:43:52.620they're trying to win yeah well i think the other the other part i'm working on a book on the long
00:43:57.900house and feminization but ann douglas makes this argument that as the the a lot of the founding of
00:44:03.920america was very calvinistic and patriarchal and she said the thing that eroded it with feminism
00:44:09.520was the sentimentalization of the faith and so i think as it you get less doctrine you get more
00:44:17.860emotion people stop being able to think clearly in a political way right and and you could go back
00:44:25.600to the magisterial reformers and you're like they thought very clearly about these things
00:44:29.040but as you noted like when steven wolf's book came out this was like the first time people
00:44:34.340had heard any of these concepts yeah and so the knee-jerk was from a place of like ecclesiocentric
00:44:41.100pietism that was like well you know how does this all work together so i think maybe that's one of
00:44:46.560the things we're trying to re-establish in in rebuilding the west is also robust theology
00:44:52.140and particularly robust political theory we don't start with the question whose feelings will this
00:44:58.580hurt? What would be the difficult emotional implications of this thing really being
00:45:03.960politically true? Because that would be really difficult for this people group that's here,
00:45:07.820or that people group that wants to be here, or this friend who is Indonesian and just got here
00:45:14.060in 2004. Like there's a lot of, and to act like those aren't actually difficult emotional questions
00:45:20.040is stupid. They are. That's a really hard question. I think about Christians who are,
00:45:24.360who are even, this crisis of identity, it's not just for heritage Americans seeing their nation
00:45:30.700being destroyed and their demographic replaced. It's also for immigrants who, through no choice
00:45:37.280of their own, many of them are here. And they got here because grandpa came here or dad came here
00:45:43.580and I was eight. And now I recognize that I'm not in terms of stock, a part of this people.
00:45:50.600and yet i was raised in the cultural norms of this people i am religiously christian i'm all
00:45:56.440these different things we we can i think walk and chew gum at the same time say these are difficult
00:46:02.860questions and let's not be flippant about how difficult they are but at the same time let's
00:46:09.000make sure that we're reasoning down to first principles not on the basis of how those will
00:46:13.240make us feel but what's true and then we'll have the tools to figure out what to do there's an
00:46:18.140interesting phrase the therapeutic state have you guys heard of this yeah so so paul grotford
00:46:22.000uses this this is like one of his primary interpretations of like the post 60s managerial
00:46:28.040state and the therapeutic state kind of prioritizes things based on like how the groups are going to
00:46:33.700feel about the policy or the agenda and so it's it's not even down to an individual level like
00:46:39.400is this person going to be offended by this but it's more like is this group going to feel like
00:46:43.560they're part of our nation if we define things in this way so like if we if we interpret history if
00:46:48.980we have our children learning about it like so you've brought in millions of people and they
00:46:53.320have children as they're in school if the children learn that america was primary set primarily set
00:46:58.180up by white english accent and protestants like they might go home and complain because you know
00:47:03.160they don't fit in they don't belong here and so we need to adjust our understanding of history
00:47:08.600our understanding of identity in order to, um, prioritize the, the, the demands of the
00:47:15.300therapeutic state. And I think that's a, when he says therapeutic state, it's not literally the
00:47:19.560state, but it's like the therapeutic way of being that, um, characterizes modern America. And so I
00:47:25.520really liked that phrase. It's very therapeutic. It's not necessarily individually emotional,
00:47:30.520but definitely you can't get down to the facts and you can't speak objectively about anything
00:47:35.360because it really does make people feel like they don't belong.
00:47:39.400And those words like belonging and safety and fitting in
00:47:43.200and being able to set your own reality,
00:47:45.780that's all part of the fruit of the therapeutic state.
00:53:59.780but over the long view of history my my view is that you can't say that two plus two equals
00:54:06.340purple forever exactly and have it work yeah because these are issues of nature they're not
00:54:11.960just issues of religious conversion which they are those two and that deeply matters it's of
00:54:17.200highest importance but they're also issues of nature well they're social renewal right like
00:54:21.980that's that's what's happening it's not just like individual hearts are being converted
00:54:25.040but nations can be made anew yeah and i think that's kind of the level we're supposed to be
00:54:29.800speaking at yeah i also think cj to your point as people experience sort of the decline and the
00:54:36.660degeneracy at a firsthand level so i've seen in utah even as we've had more and more flood of
00:54:42.380immigrants thanks to spencer cox who was championing the biden policy and some of the worst
00:54:46.860venezuelan gang members violent crime yeah but all it takes is like soccer moms who are like
00:54:52.820there was a triple homicide at the apartment complex across from where my kids go to school
00:54:57.140yep i don't like this and they were could have been an ad for lip for for liberalism five years
00:55:03.780before this yeah but then they experience it we've talked to people like this in utah that are like
00:55:08.660yeah i was kind of ambivalent and then and then the apartment complex that eight years ago when
00:55:13.060we moved in was majority we're in utah so it's majority white it was probably majority mormon
00:55:18.140even maybe lower middle, middle income Mormons. And it was societally possible to live there in
00:55:25.500a peaceful way. Even if you didn't agree, like these are Mormons. They're not even,
00:55:30.200they don't even share your religious identity. But then it literally, it's been a five to 10
00:55:35.880year period in Utah where Spencer Cox and his ilk has brought in, oh, we're going to, you know,
00:55:41.440we're not enforcing immigration law. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of immigrants
00:55:46.940you can't ignore it out of the west from not in the west yeah and now all of a sudden these
00:55:51.820complete normies who would not politically have any of the terminology that we've used in this
00:55:55.960episode at all all of a sudden they're saying and they kind of look left and they look right
00:56:00.660when you bring it up and they go you know what like i think the immigrants are the problem well
00:56:05.280and they'll even say they'll be like yeah i had to move it wasn't a safe we had to leave we had to
00:56:09.900leave this place that was our place before that i think i think that eventually the therapeutic
00:56:14.980state of mind is going to capitulate to the natural order. And I think that's what happens.
00:56:19.360May, may, may the Lord speed it. Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask while we still have you on,
00:56:24.020on the race thing, just tee up for that. Walk me through it. What are your thoughts there?
00:56:29.400Yeah. So I think that there's the way I think about, here's the thing.
00:56:34.060There are different ways of conceiving what it means to be an American. So like
00:56:37.660I distinguish between like the genetic absolutists who I consider materialists,
00:56:42.960The definition of a human being is, is very physical. It's material. It's, it's the genes
00:56:47.180in your body. And I don't think that's, I don't think we have to go down that path to defend
00:56:51.620heritage America or even ethnic America, because I believe in an ontology that unites soul and body
00:56:58.980together. And so therefore a people can be this combination of their experiences. I think that
00:57:06.060they've inherited spiritual factors from their parents. And part of our, our way of being our
00:57:11.420culture, our instincts, our cultural and social predilections are actually inherited. And those
00:57:17.120are soulful or spiritual elements too. And so I think when we speak in terms of race, we need to,
00:57:23.300we need to get out of the materialist trap because this is like the Joel Berry's like,
00:57:27.680they always say, Oh, you're a Darwinist, right? Because you, you believe in race. And it's like,
00:57:32.080actually, I have a pre Darwinian conception of race. And the pre Darwinian conception of race
00:57:37.400is actually more complex than just material genetics so that's the first thing the second
00:57:42.960thing that i would say is that when you look back at the history of the meaning of race there's
00:57:50.420actually a unity and a plurality to it and so in one sense the unity of it is that all mankind is
00:57:57.640descended from adam we are one race in that sense but there's also a plurality to it classical
00:58:02.840christian authors have talked about the fact that there's three great races there's the
00:58:06.660descendants of Noah's children, of Noah's sons. And so in that sense, there's a little bit of
00:58:12.640plurality, but as you go on, you can find that there's more plurality. So they talked about in
00:58:16.840the middle ages that you are of the race of Charlemagne and you're of the race of, you know,
00:58:21.160some, some African patriarch. And so race doesn't have to be this Darwinian materialist genetic
00:58:27.300thing. It actually just means commonality of ancestors. That's what it means. My Bible,
00:58:31.920I was just reading Romans 9 for family worship last night to my children.
00:58:36.860And Paul, in the ESV, the translation I'm reading from, it just says Paul talks about the race of the Israelites.
00:58:42.800And the ESV uses that word, race, to translate that Greek term because those concepts were antecedent to Darwinism, greatly antecedent to Darwinism.
01:19:52.500But the goal is that we're creating, it's actually a real historically rooted thing that's also not historically rooted in the sense that there's always hagiography.
01:21:16.800You know, and that's the mistake I think some people make is they're, they're, they're far, they're, they're too scared of arguing in generalities.