00:00:00.000Well, some folks on the right are ecstatic with glee today because Kanye West is saying some things that they agree with.
00:00:09.260Even Kim Kardashian has gotten favorable coverage from the right because of all this.
00:00:20.220Now, let's remember something about the right, the right, of which I am a member.
00:00:25.180Um, unless I'm imagining things, unless I've been hallucinating for the last 20 years or so, I'm pretty sure that the right has spent a very long time insisting that celebrities are dumb and stupid and they're morons and their political opinions don't matter.
00:00:44.380And they need to just shut up and sing and entertain us because we don't want to we don't want to hear them injecting politics and everything.
00:00:50.860Just shut up. Just shut up. Just shut up. That's what we've been saying.
00:00:54.220We've said it a million times over and over and over again to these celebrities.
00:00:58.980It's not. No, it has not been as much as we'd like to pretend otherwise.
00:01:02.900Our message to celebrities and singers and pop stars, athletes, our message to them has not been, oh, I disagree with what you're saying.
00:01:14.080Let's let's engage. Let's have a discussion. No, that's it hasn't been our message.
00:01:18.800Our message has been very explicitly. You shouldn't be talking about this subject.
00:01:23.980You don't know anything about it. Your job is to entertain us.
00:01:27.400So just shut up. That's been our message.
00:01:30.220But then what happens the moment one of these celebrities says something we agree with while we're in the midst of shouting, shut up, all you just stop talking about this.
00:01:41.940And then one of them responds, oh, but wait a second. I actually agree with you on this one single point.
00:01:46.480Well, that would be OK. Well, hold on. No, OK. You come here. You can talk.
00:01:50.960You. Yes. You please stand up on this stage, this platform. Repeat it again so everyone can hear it.
00:01:56.560No, no. You guys over there, you Meryl Streep and Colin Kaepernick, you still shut up.
00:02:00.720You know what? No one wants to hear you. But you go ahead, please.
00:02:04.660Please. I mean, Kanye West, a few years ago when you were talking about how George Bush hates black people, you needed to shut up then because nobody cares about your political opinions.
00:02:13.980But now, oh, yes, please share your political opinions with everyone. This is huge.
00:02:18.320Everyone listen to this person. Listen to this celebrity.
00:02:22.160He's a celebrity. His opinion matters.
00:02:24.920And then two seconds later, you're a celebrity. Your opinion doesn't matter.
00:02:27.980Our perspective changes very quickly from shut up and sing to please be our president.
00:02:36.700And I know. Listen, I know what I'm saying right now is not crowd pleasing.
00:02:41.920It's not crowd pleasing because I'm criticizing us.
00:02:47.480And I know that when someone watches a video on Facebook or listens to a podcast,
00:02:52.980what they really want to hear is criticisms of everybody else.
00:02:58.760What they're really looking for is a moment where you and I are talking about how terrible everyone else is.
00:03:03.360I mean, you and I haven't figured out, but all those other people, let's talk about how terrible they are.
00:03:07.480What I've noticed is that the moment I turn the mirror around on us and say,
00:03:12.760oh, but look at this thing that we're doing. Maybe we have problems, too.
00:03:16.340That's when there's suddenly a revolt.
00:03:18.240And it's, oh, stop being negative. Stop judging.
00:03:20.300Now, I've noticed that. I'm only negative and judging and all these things when I'm criticizing us.
00:03:27.780But if I stick with criticizing everyone else, well, then there's no problem.
00:03:33.360But I don't care because this is just, I mean, we are on the right.
00:03:37.240We are blatantly contradicting ourselves, not just on this issue, but on so many issues, especially recently.
00:03:45.280We have just turned into utter and complete hypocrites.
00:03:50.840Just changing our tune on so many things all of a sudden, opportunistically, and forfeiting our integrity in the process.
00:04:00.140And I don't really care if pointing that out turns everyone against me.
00:04:06.160I don't really care because it's true.
00:04:08.520Now, in Kanye West's case, he's been tweeting a bunch of controversial things.
00:04:14.180And he does have, I think he has new music coming out soon.
00:04:16.960So I'm sure it's just a coincidence that he's saying all this controversial stuff and getting attention while he's got music to promote.
00:04:24.800I'm sure there's no connection there whatsoever, right?
00:04:27.000And he's tweeted some nice things about free expression, free speech, etc.
00:04:32.640But mainly, the thing that has gotten him attention and has gotten him favorable, has made him a darling of the right, is that he's expressed support for Donald Trump.
00:04:44.200And Trump responded on Twitter, and there was this little exchange, this back and forth between Kanye West and Donald Trump.
00:04:49.420And that is really what sent some folks on the right into rapturous seizures, is when they saw that.
00:04:57.000And that's the only conservative thing he said, conservative thing, as far as I can tell.
00:05:06.320I only know what he's tweeting because a lot of conservatives in my Twitter feed have just been retweeting the heck out of him.
00:05:12.520They've just retweeted everything he said.
00:05:13.960And again, these are the same conservatives who have spent years, the exact same ones, who have spent years telling celebrities to shut up their political opinions don't matter.
00:05:23.520And now they're just all day retweeting Kanye West.
00:05:26.660And so I know that he's also, I mean, he's talked about how truth is subjective.
00:05:32.180He's talked a lot about how the key to happiness is self-love and, you know, it's within yourself, self-affirmation, you know, the self-affirmation type of typical Hollywood tripe.
00:05:47.380But with Kanye West's affinity for Trump, we're told that this is a sign that the right is winning the culture.
00:05:58.300And this is how we win the culture, I'm told.
00:06:01.640We win it through celebrities who like Donald Trump.
00:07:45.400The right is becoming more like the left.
00:07:49.280The right is just fighting to be the new left.
00:07:52.140The right thinks that it's making the culture more conservative, but all it's really doing is becoming more liberal itself.
00:08:02.120Thus, it sees itself more reflected in the culture because it has stooped down and rid itself of most everything that used to differentiate it from the culture.
00:08:12.240Let me try to explain my meaning a little more.
00:08:14.900And I think first we have to ask a very simple question.
00:08:27.800As I see it, and as I think almost every conservative used to see it, the real problem with the culture and the central battle in the culture is spiritual and moral decay.
00:09:18.140But even if we had all the gun rights and the border was closed and taxes were low, which would be great, believe me, it would mean nothing at all.
00:09:28.600If the culture is still in a state of moral rot, because then we would still just be wandering into the abyss.
00:09:36.960Not sure of what sort of people we're supposed to be or what the point of life even is, and we're just wandering into destruction, only we happen to have a gun and more money in our wallet and fewer illegals walking next to us, which, fine.
00:09:51.040But it means nothing if we've given up on the one thing that means everything, which is truth.
00:10:03.100It's important to fight for rights because we need to have the, and why?
00:10:06.980Why is it important to fight for rights?
00:10:08.600Because we need to have the right to be the sort of people we should be.
00:10:13.060But then the next level, more fundamentally than that, we need to know what sort of people we should be.
00:10:24.980In other words, the fight for freedom is important only because freedom gives a person the ability to realize their God-given potential.
00:10:33.880But if we take freedom and we do not pursue that potential, and indeed we reject that there is a potential, that there is a God or anything, that there is anything to strive for, then we're just going to end up even worse than we would have been without the freedom in the first place.
00:10:54.520And as I've seen, this is something that conservatives have been doing more and more, is, as you've noticed, conservatives, more and more, they're not fighting for what is right, they're just fighting for rights.
00:11:11.600I don't know if you've noticed that transition, because you're just getting rid of one little word there, is, but it's huge.
00:11:19.560Not fighting for what is right, we're just fighting for rights.
00:11:22.080An example of how this works is, you'll notice that pretty much any conservative will get up and they'll fight for the right, they'll fight for people's right to be against gay marriage.
00:11:38.060They'll fight for the rights of bakers who don't want to bake gay wedding cakes.
00:11:43.240They'll fight for those rights on the basis of free speech and freedom of religion, which is good, because that's really important.
00:11:50.280But what they won't do is they won't then proceed to explain why it is right to fight for the protection of marriage.
00:12:35.500Our main message is not, I have the right to say these things.
00:12:38.460Our primary message should be, I am right about these things.
00:12:43.360And that's why you should listen to me.
00:12:45.440Not just because I have the right to say it, but because I'm right in saying it.
00:12:50.780I think conservatives have just have not been as willing to make that point.
00:12:58.880So then just look at what's happened in our culture over the last several decades.
00:13:04.920We've taken all this freedom, all of this great and wonderful freedom, and we've used it to destroy the family, destroy marriage, destroy babies, destroy the church, destroy ourselves.
00:13:16.340With our freedom, we've invented the drug epidemic, the divorce epidemic, the suicide epidemic, the porn epidemic, the depression epidemic, on and on and on.
00:13:23.240We have the freedom to satisfy our desires, yet we don't know what we should desire, what will bring us true joy and fulfillment.
00:13:30.760So we run around just indulging every whim, and we plunge ever deeper and deeper into despair and ruin because of it.
00:13:38.800In fact, we have so much freedom to indulge our whims, and we have so many desires that now what we do in our culture is we plunge deep into the recesses of our subconscious, and we bring to the surface just every degrading, perverse desire we can find, and we present it to the world, and we fight for the right to indulge it.
00:14:03.980Meanwhile, nobody's happy, nobody knows why we're even here, or what's the point of anything.
00:14:10.980I'm not arguing against freedom here. This is not an argument against freedom. This is an argument for the thing that is deeper than freedom, and that thing fundamentally is truth, virtue, God, morality.
00:14:23.880That's what we should be fighting for. And the problem is that the right is less and less concerned with fighting for those things, for truth, God, morality, virtue.
00:14:34.640And so it only continues to lose the actual battle, the real battle, the battle for the thing that matters.
00:14:41.320We're losing because we've surrendered it, and we won't even fight it anymore.
00:14:46.460This is the left's primary objective is the destruction of truth and morality, the destruction of the moral fabric of our civilization.
00:14:59.500That is the left's main primary objective. So if you are not fighting against them on that battlefield, fighting against their efforts to undermine the moral fabric of our civilization,
00:15:13.340if you're not fighting them there, then you're not fighting them. You're really not doing anything.
00:15:17.800You may be arguing with them on a million other topics, but if you will not dive in on that point and say, no, this is right, this is moral, we are fighting for this because of that, if you won't do that, then you're not fighting them.
00:15:33.220You're not doing anything. In fact, I would say even you're a coward, and you're not really helping.
00:15:39.160So how do Kanye West and Roseanne factor into this?
00:15:45.000I mean, not in a very important way, but what I see here in the right's love affair with leftist celebrities who happen to like Donald Trump, I see a symptom of this problem.
00:15:54.160The right will, you know, hold their affinity for Trump and maybe their affinity for free speech.
00:16:03.340They'll hold those things up as the most important things, further marginalizing, further ignoring, further surrendering the battle for truth, virtue, morality, and God.
00:16:13.240The right will embrace some figure who is fully a proponent of degeneracy and moral relativism and every other evil known to man, and the right will embrace them just because they said some positive stuff about Trump.
00:16:29.240And on the other side, if there's a figure who is really fighting the battle against degeneracy and moral relativism and fighting for truth and fighting for those things, yet who is not sufficiently on board with Trump, well, they're going to be alienated and exiled.
00:17:22.560As if that will have any bearing whatsoever on the one thing that matters.
00:17:31.000But it seems the one thing that matters doesn't really matter to us anymore.
00:17:36.120And so what I see happening right now is it used to be you had the moral relativists, and then you had those on the other side who fought for objective morality and truth.
00:17:49.360And now what I think is going to happen is you have just two factions who are both moral relativists fighting for domination and control.
00:17:59.080Not fighting for truth or anything, not fighting for anything beyond that, but just fighting for domination and control of the culture so that their brand, their variety of relativism may be supreme.
00:18:13.380I don't see any kind of real victory in that, personally.
00:18:18.160So I hate to be a party pooper, but there it is.