Eric Metaxas, host of The Eric Metaxes Show and author of the new book Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World, joins the show to defend Martin Luther s honor against my popish insults and to discuss his new book.
00:01:34.280There is so much news to get to today and so much delight that we can take at Al Franken getting caught up in this sexual harassment witch hunt.
00:01:49.360By the way, when I say it's a witch hunt, we're clearly in a witch hunt mindset, but there are witches.
00:01:56.380There are Weinsteins out there, so we're in a witch hunt, but there are witches here.
00:02:00.220We have a lot to get to, but listen, I caught a lot of flack for my Martin Luther episode.
00:02:05.580People thought that I was a little harsh on the corpulent German heretic.
00:02:08.940They felt that I was overly popish and a little leaning in toward Rome.
00:02:13.600So to rectify this, I brought on the great Eric Metaxas.
00:02:17.960He was kind enough to do an interview.
00:02:19.520We prerecorded it so it could go a little bit longer, and providentially it was on Martin Luther's birthday, actually, November 10th, that we recorded it.
00:02:26.000He's going to talk about his new book and defend Martin Luther against my popish onslaught.
00:02:31.460Now I have the great pleasure of being joined by someone that I'm a big fan of both for his radio show and for his writing, Eric Metaxas, host of The Eric Metaxas Show and author of the new book, Martin Luther, The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World.
00:02:47.280Now, Eric, I do not share your admiration of the corpulent German exactly, but I did really enjoy the book.
00:02:54.260I thought the narrative is very compelling, very readable, and I learned so much about Martin Luther that I didn't know before.
00:03:01.720And more importantly, I unlearned so many things about Martin Luther that I did know.
00:03:06.420It's like what Ronald Reagan used to say.
00:03:08.260It's not that our liberal friends are ignorant.
00:03:59.560His father was a successful businessman in the mining business.
00:04:03.420He was socially upwardly mobile, which is an extraordinary thing in the 1480s that there was enough of a free market that somebody could be not wealthy but could get wealthy or could work hard and that there was enough of an opportunity, let's say.
00:04:19.620So the father borrowed, it seems, a lot of money from the mother's family and started this huge business.
00:04:25.260And it had to work very hard to justify the loan to get it, you know, to work out.
00:04:33.340But the more we know about Luther, there's a bunch of things in the book that are brand new.
00:04:37.280I talk about a couple of archaeological things that were done, 2003, 2008, where they discovered that the actual house that Luther was born in is three times as large as they've been saying for 500 years.
00:04:49.300So it's kind of crazy, and then they found a lot of garbage, trash, and they could dig through it, and they discovered real evidence that these were people of some means.
00:05:02.200He was not raised under difficult circumstances.
00:05:12.400I read it over a cigar because the body is a temple and the temple needs incense.
00:05:16.260It's the claim that comes later on in the book that you point out, which is probably the essence of the Protestant Revolution, and it's what Hamlet talks about, is that Luther cracked the cover of objective truth, cracked the authority and the ownership of objective truth.
00:05:36.360And we've seen a lot of varied consequences from that.
00:05:40.140On the one hand, we have political freedom and the nation states and liberal democracy.
00:05:44.980On the other hand, you and I both attended a former university called Yale, and there are people wreaking havoc over there because—
00:05:54.120Is it still Yale, or have they changed the name because he was a slaveholder?
00:06:38.940You know and I know that it's a little more complicated than that.
00:06:41.780I wrote a whole book called If You Can Keep It, my book before this, where I go into how if you don't have a virtuous populace, if faith is not at the heart of a culture, self-government doesn't work.
00:06:53.620People will destroy themselves, as has happened many times in the past.
00:06:58.260Free market will not give us everything we're looking for.
00:07:00.880These things need to have people running them in such a way that they're going to give us what we want, right?
00:07:07.760So what Luther enabled, I think, led to great things, but it also led to many terrible things.
00:07:15.520And I love the point about mass communication.
00:07:19.000I loved when you're writing about how Luther himself didn't intend for his 95 theses to spread as quickly as they did, as ubiquitously as they did, almost like a Facebook debate.
00:07:31.060You know, it gets out of hand and everybody sees it.
00:07:33.600And he said he had some doubts about them.
00:07:45.280My only quibble with your book, by the way, is I felt you were a little harsh on Pope Sixtus IV.
00:07:50.460I felt that he—but, you know, people are a little harsh on Sixtus.
00:07:54.100And the confusion over the sale of indulgences married to this printing press where people on the other side of the world end up reading Luther's thesis and say,
00:08:28.420Suddenly somebody invents the printing press, and you can write something, and whether you like it or not, someone else can copy it and print it and distribute it very cheaply.
00:08:37.420And then people who get it can reprint it and distribute it, and it goes on and on.
00:08:42.340It's no different than, you know, forwarding something, hitting reply all, and it goes to everybody, and you think, uh-oh, what just happened?
00:08:49.680And that wasn't possible 10 years ago or 20 years ago.
00:08:52.940But suddenly everybody knows, and there's no way to get the horse back in the barn.
00:08:57.220Luther's theses, I mean, one of the hugest misconceptions in the story of Luther, which, you know, it's such a good story if people want to believe it.
00:09:04.460But they had this idea that in 1517 this young man wanted to stick his finger in the pope's eye and post this incendiary document in the most incendiary place imaginable.
00:09:17.780And then you find out, no, no, no, no, no, that we're looking at it, you know, from a different perspective.
00:09:24.280What happened at the time was a humble monk who loved his church and loved his pope wanted to bring attention to something that he thought was dragging the church's name through the mud.
00:09:38.180And he did this for the church, for the honor of the church.
00:09:41.280He said, this is not right that we have allowed the practice of indulgences to get out of hand so that people are coming to my confessional and throwing this piece of paper in front of me saying, hey, Padre, what can I get for this?
00:10:37.540You might as well picture him with a pushpin down by the laundry room, putting it on the bulletin board next to the thing with the missing cat and the guitar lessons.
00:10:55.140And speaking of his deference to the pope and not trying to, you know, poke a nail into his eye, there's the most heartbreaking moment of the story is that he writes the letter to the pope.
00:11:06.020He writes a letter to Leo X, I believe, and it never is sent.
00:11:28.380Miltitz, who was this papal legate sent to kind of deal with Luther, made some terrible mistakes.
00:11:34.860And a couple of other people involved made some terrible mistakes.
00:11:37.980He kind of kept thinking if I could deal directly with the pope, surely he has to see what I'm saying is correct.
00:11:44.260I'm not trying to upend Catholic doctrine.
00:11:48.360I mean so much of his point is that the pope – the Christian doctrine, church doctrine on indulgences is that, you know, it remits penance and temporal punishment for sin.
00:12:01.820And while the pope doesn't have jurisdiction over souls in purgatory, he can intercede on your behalf.
00:12:07.480He can ask really nicely for those souls to have less punishment.
00:12:10.980And then you get guys like Tetzel down at the ground who are hawking when the coin rings and a soul out of purgatory springs.
00:12:18.280So much seems to be Luther wanting to reach the pope, wanting to go directly to the vicar of Christ on earth, the bark of Peter.
00:12:25.940I mean look, it's no different than a president like Reagan not knowing what's happening with his guys with Iran-Contra.
00:12:33.060I mean you realize that it's very complicated.
00:12:37.000So he's on the hook ultimately, but there are people that he has trusted, and obviously people like Tetzel were very fast and loose, and the corruption.
00:12:46.300One moment that struck me is when Luther had not talked to his father for a while because his father wanted him to become a lawyer.
00:13:47.960When he did this initially, his whole view of God was wrong.
00:13:51.900He had a view of God as a nasty judge who was just slavering, ruling to throw people into hell.
00:14:01.260If you have that view of God, you're going to act accordingly.
00:14:04.000And Luther thought, the only thing I can do to cover my rear end is to go into the monastery.
00:14:07.600I'm not going to risk eternal hell for a good law career.
00:14:13.700So he goes to the monastery really to cover his rear end, and when he gets there, he tries as hard as anyone to pray his way into the peace of God and to, in effect, earn his way.
00:14:26.680This is what happens is that he has this sense that I've got to do this and this and this and this.
00:14:31.440I've got to jump through these hoops, and you feel like you're performing and you're failing, and what kind of a God would put you through that hell?
00:14:37.940So you begin to resent God and hate God.
00:14:40.380He's reading the Bible, reading the Bible, and of course, famously at some point, he discovers this idea that we are saved by faith.
00:14:46.900The righteousness of God is given to us.
00:14:49.620It's not something that God uses to beat us into hell.
00:14:53.820So it turns his world upside down, and right around the same time was when he decided to post the theses on indulgences, and so it all kind of exploded thereafter.
00:15:07.000The portrait you paint, as you've just described, is of a guy who is an obsessive.
00:15:14.380He is constantly worrying himself to death.
00:15:17.460He seems to have a great fear of death.
00:15:19.700He's so gaunt and thin, not like that portrait that we imagine of him, and then later on, he becomes this garrulous, fat German fellow, and he's constantly troubled by intestinal pains.
00:15:33.000A priest friend of mine, because of the word in cloaca or ox cloaca, it is a suggestion that he had his epiphany about Romans while sitting on the commode,
00:15:44.040and my priest friend wondered what torrent of commentary he could have unleashed on the world with a modern colonic irrigation.
00:22:10.540But, Alicia, to be fair, we always try to be fair, Roche-Foucault said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
00:22:17.780So should we hold Democrats in particular to account on sexual debauchery and assault because they're always demagoguing the women's issue, the war on women?
00:23:11.980She used to come for free to the Sean Hannity Oliver North Freedom Concerts that raise money for KIA, MIA children to go to college.
00:23:18.560She's a wonderful human being, and I'm a fan of her as a person.
00:23:22.100And I'm sure that she, like many women that have been victims of this, had to consider, you know, what is this going to do to my career?
00:23:29.520What is this going to do to, you know, the situation at large if I come out and share this story?
00:23:34.820And it looks as if there might be another woman that has said publicly, yes, Al Franken did do this to me too, and my story will be out soon.
00:23:43.060And, of course, now reporters are hounding down if there's any women that he's treated this way since being a sitting senator on Capitol Hill.
00:23:48.880And I've got to say, I'm shocked we didn't look for this sooner.
00:23:52.060The guy has spent his whole career in Hollywood and Washington, D.C.
00:23:55.320I mean, he worked with Lorne Michaels, who is, of course, the creator of SNL.
00:23:58.980And when he was asked about, well, how come you guys didn't do a cold SNL open making fun of Harvey Weinstein, he said, oh, well, you know, it's a New York thing.
00:24:05.740Well, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani, also people that are all from New York that Lorne Michaels has been totally okay with making fun of over the years.
00:24:13.920And it doesn't really surprise me that Al Franken came from that boys' club of comedy in liberal New York.
00:24:20.980And this is exactly the point, because there have been plenty of sex scandals to go around, certainly, at Fox News or wherever.
00:24:29.320But for the really high-profile ones of people in office or running as candidates, they seem to have been Democrats of late.
00:24:35.700Obviously, Bill Clinton is the sexual creep par excellence, but there's Anthony Weiner.
00:24:45.460And, Bradley, I'm curious about this as a campus question, because with the sexual hysteria on campus now, that bogus statistic that one in four women is raped or something like that, who are the people perpetrating this?
00:25:08.520But who are the guys who are really perpetrating the creepy stuff here?
00:25:11.120Is it the conservative kids, buttoned-up Brooks Brothers, or is it the lefties who are at one corner of their mouth spouting all of this feminist hogwash, and then when no one's looking, they're the ones perpetrating these crimes?
00:25:25.580Yeah, I completely agree with you that that statistic is fairly bogus.
00:25:30.380But it's because we see a movement towards sexual liberation on the left, thinking that women are the same as men, that women want it just as badly as men.
00:25:39.940And there's been several studies where college-aged men admit that they haven't had consensual sex.
00:25:48.380So what they say is, oh, well, I was with her all night, and I had sex with her, and that's just the way I operate, and that's the way she operates, because the left has been telling me that women are the same as men, and women want it just as bad.
00:26:04.160So we can't deny women their own agency and their own volition by forcing upon them belief systems and values to fight the patriarchy.
00:26:14.880And I think that that is a major pitfall for the left and why you're seeing a movement back towards conservatism.
00:26:20.920Right now it's a very, very liberal environment, but I think you're going to start seeing social conservatives come out of the woodwork with all these net negatives that are coming from this leftist agenda.
00:26:30.760And a huge statistic is 300,000 abortions per year.
00:26:53.200Oh, man, I get your feelings, you know, and then they just get really creepy and weird.
00:26:57.100Oh, yeah, man, I love feminism. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:26:59.220But what you're saying is it's the philosophy itself.
00:27:01.940It's that philosophy that says women and men have entirely identical views of sex and relationships to sex and just unquenchable desires for sex.
00:27:11.920And so if a woman regrets an experience or a woman is in a bad place and gets very drunk and the man gets very drunk and there's some regret or something, then, hey, no harm, no foul.
00:27:22.700Well, you know, we both made a mistake or something when really that that isn't a traditional view.
00:27:26.800And that that isn't the case because men and women are complementary and they're not identical.
00:27:30.920Very good point. Fleckis, you're out in Hollywood.
00:27:34.320You know, for so long, there has been this double standard.
00:27:37.040So Gloria Steinem flacks for Bill Clinton, right?
00:27:40.780Bill Clinton is accused of sexual harassment, sexual assault, on and on.
00:27:43.860And she says, well, he's good on abortion, so we're going to stand by our guy.
00:28:27.920But yeah, the double standard is cracking.
00:28:30.140I really think it is because I think right now we're dealing with a lot of echo chambers.
00:28:35.240So everyone's just seeing what they agree with.
00:28:37.880They're seeing their values reaffirmed.
00:28:40.100And it's tough to get stories that actually break through the echo chamber and are bipartisan people that can agree on in a bipartisan way.
00:28:46.440So when they do, and it's like these sexual misconduct cases, even though they said alleged, meanwhile, he's looking at the camera, and it was completely premeditated.
00:28:56.220But when these cases do actually break the echo chambers, I think it raises the level of awareness.
00:29:01.680So going forward, I think these cases of sexual misconduct are going to be way less popular and just way less in general, and the whole industry is going to change.
00:29:12.500But I think the fact that we are seeing these cases come forward, and it does tend to be Democrats and disgusting Hollywood, I think going forward it has to change, and I think it will.
00:29:26.480I'm a little less hopeful than you are probably.
00:29:29.140But the stats show that it is changing.
00:29:32.000I mean, Hillary Clinton lost millennial women because millennial women were children during the age of Bill Clinton.
00:29:38.180And then now in the age of the Internet, even if they didn't vote for Donald Trump, his bringing the accusers to the debate, his bringing it up, his surrogates bringing it up,
00:29:46.180was enough for a lot of millennial women to go, yeah, we're not OK with this.
00:29:50.700We're not going to go out and go vote for a woman that stayed married to a man that had these accusations in his past.
00:29:58.980I think that politically this is maybe potentially an opportunity for the Republicans to say, hey, guys, we're supposed to be the party of the good guys.
00:30:12.840They wouldn't just vote for her because she was a woman.
00:30:14.560And one thing, when Trump decided to bring those women to the debate, all of Clinton's accusers, people said this is awful, this is tawdry, no one cares, this is 20 years old, why are you rehashing this?
00:30:25.620He clearly sensed something about the moment.
00:30:28.240Sexual harassment, sexual assault is in the air right now for many reasons.
00:30:32.780Obviously, the Access Hollywood tape came out against him talking to Billy Bush.
00:32:16.040He is, his constitutional right to a blue checkmark is clearly being infringed on.
00:32:20.400And Alicia, to play devil's advocate here, literally devil's advocate in this case, should we be worried?
00:32:28.660To invert a phrase often used against Nazis, first Twitter came for the Nazis.
00:32:34.320How long before they start coming for regular run-of-the-mill conservatives who violate their regulations and start criminalizing thought?
00:32:44.380I'm even wondering if they're going to start coming after conservatives that aren't violating the regulations and they keep moving those regulations.
00:32:50.700You know, we've seen other social media platforms do this as well to fit with the more politically correct narrative.
00:32:58.420I'm not a fan of these other people that have lost their checkmarks and eventually their accounts.
00:33:01.860But there is a level of hypocrisy here.
00:33:04.320And I'm kind of torn on it because I don't know that a blue checkmark is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment.
00:33:10.300But it isn't to promote, the blue checkmark from Twitter doesn't mean that Twitter agrees with every single tweet that Ben Shapiro, you or I, send out.
00:33:17.280It just means, yes, this is Alicia Krauss, this is her verified account.
00:33:21.200So anything else that has like, you know, Alicia Krauss' eyebrows or something isn't going to actually be myself.
00:33:27.440So it's a process of verifying that that's the real person to prevent fraud, not necessarily to silence speech or promote certain types of speech.
00:33:34.580And the reason I'm torn on this is because Twitter is a private company.
00:33:38.840And I think that Daily Wire should be able to do what they want.
00:33:42.040Michael Knowles should be able to do what he wants.
00:33:43.720And part of me does believe that Twitter, as a private company, as a corporation, should be able to make the decisions that they want.
00:33:50.520Well, at least Michael Knowles should be able to do what he wants.
00:34:08.360I go back and forth on this because I share many of your misgivings about telling companies what to do.
00:34:13.120But that distinction between the checkmark initially was just to identify that this is the real person because there are a lot of fake accounts.
00:34:29.680And, you know, you get like there are a thousand fake Trump accounts, but the one with the checkmark is how, you know, you're talking to the real guy.
00:34:37.260Now, though, it's considered like just a status symbol.
00:34:40.320It's a mark that I'm famous or I'm powerful or influential or whatever.
00:34:44.740There are people who have that checkmark who have like 100 followers, but they just they need to know that it's the real person because they've done something.
00:34:53.220It's not because they're a celebrity or a media personality.
00:35:31.480Yeah, I think with the situation with Richard Spencer, it's just Twitter trying to do everything they can to not associate with him in any way.
00:35:40.340So, I mean, we're seeing it as well with Taylor Swift.
00:35:42.700A lot of people are coming out now and saying, hey, Taylor Swift, why didn't you get political?
00:36:16.400That Twitter echo chamber now is, you know, a little bit stronger.
00:36:19.100And they keep chipping away and eventually it will be just, you know, a complete leftist mouthpiece.
00:36:24.540The one advantage I will say of the blue check is that as someone who got a blue checkmark for literally doing nothing,
00:36:31.520for publishing blank pages and selling a lot of books, the advantage is that businesses, when you complain about them, they give you stuff.
00:36:38.580So, you know, I had a flight that was delayed like 1,000 hours and it was all messed up.
00:36:43.120And I complained about it and they basically said, what can we do?
00:36:47.740It could also have to do with the number of followers that you have.
00:36:50.140I mean, this is something that I think Gary Vee and other people in entertainment and marketing and stuff have talked about.
00:36:55.640It's like, you know, is it really a company having good customer service if they're only answering to their popular people that tweet hate at them?
00:37:46.460And so I at least give him some credit for that.
00:37:49.300He's had some luck recently with a campaign that the alt-right has run, which is on college campuses, and it's a sign that says it's okay to be white.
00:37:58.580Obviously a totally innocuous statement.
00:38:00.980And they were relying on the backlash for reasonable people to say, well, yeah, there's nothing wrong with that.
00:38:07.100And obviously their meta-political goal here is to have people start identifying essentially or primarily with their skin color rather than with something like their ideas or their faith in God or some other ideological component.
00:38:21.520Do you find on campus that this is catching on, that people are falling for this trap that the alt-right are setting for them and that the left and the regressive left is basically rolling out the red carpet for people to do?
00:39:05.920Well, actually, a little aside here, young conservative writers that I run in the same circles with are having a very, very difficult time getting verified.
00:39:16.500You're getting a blue checkmark because you're verified that you have a business.
00:39:20.320I run a website called the University of Politics.
00:39:35.920Personally, if you're running a company and you're barring half the population, 47% of the population voted for Donald Trump, and you're barring half of the population for sharing their viewpoints and being a verified individual, you're going to lose individuals on the website.
00:40:04.740They're winning on the message boards on 4chan and Reddit because the echo chamber within hyper-liberal campuses have pushed these individuals down into this scummy, pepe, mean society where they're radicalized and it bubbles out in events like Charlottesville.
00:40:26.400So constitutional conservatives need to come out very strongly against the alt-right and tell individuals who don't necessarily like political correctness that just because the left labels you alt-right because you don't like political correctness doesn't mean you are alt-right.
00:40:42.560You can come join the conservative movement.
00:40:44.400You can come be for individual rights.
00:40:46.160You can come be for lower taxes and be for a strong national defense.
00:40:58.040I don't want people to ground their identity essentially in race because I think that's very stupid and it misses the point of our creation and of our lives.
00:41:06.020Okay, speaking of people who miss the point of their life and speaking of great evil and principalities and powers of this world, Charles Manson is on his deathbed only 46 years after he was sentenced to death, tells you something about criminal justice in the United States.
00:41:22.580So my first question, Alicia, on the death penalty itself, is it cruel and unusual punishment to abolish the death penalty?
00:41:30.440He's only still alive because it was found unconstitutional in California for some ridiculous reason in the 70s.
00:41:37.680Is it wrong to abolish the death penalty and lock people up for half a century?
00:41:44.380I think, well, I mean, he would be in hell a hell of a lot sooner, so I think that I'm okay with the death penalty.
00:41:52.180This is something that I know that especially some Catholic friends of mine say, well, if you're going to be pro-life, then you have to be pro-life throughout the whole life.
00:41:58.420But my argument is that a baby in utero didn't murder people senselessly and create a cult and lead people to do disgusting and horrible things.
00:42:06.400You know, Manson did do that as an adult and had a fully formed functioning ability to decide between right and wrong.
00:42:13.120A child in the womb does not and is at the whim of the mother and the doctor, you know, the abortionist.
00:42:17.920So, but I think Manson should have died a long time ago.
00:42:21.120It really pisses me off that my tax dollars have been paying to keep him alive and to hospitalize him and to feed him.
00:42:28.480And, you know, to have his crazy wife that he married a couple years ago come and visit him and all that stuff.
00:42:54.700Like, I think you should lose everything when you commit certain crimes.
00:42:57.480And in this case, I think Manson should have lost his life a long time ago.
00:43:00.620But for a little sympathy for Manson, by the way, I will say on the Catholic point, Pope Pius IX, blessed Pope Pius IX, killed over 500 people.
00:43:22.500Well, I mean, there's lots of people out there that have had horrible lives that have not gone on the rampages that he has or been responsible for what he has done.
00:44:09.040I mean, this guy was in prison for half of his life before the the Manson family.
00:44:13.360He just I mean, it's in some ways he never had a shot from the beginning.
00:44:17.720I mean, it was really, really a horrible, tragic life that you imagine for a little baby.
00:44:22.340Just because it was a horrible, tragic life.
00:44:24.220You can't tell me that there wasn't one decent person that ever interacted with him and gave him the opportunity to choose between right and wrong.
00:44:30.880He had multiple moments throughout his life to do that.
00:48:24.180Make sure you have a good lawyer and an accountant so that your paperwork is very important.
00:48:28.880And persevere because it's a real test of your character and what your character has developed into to see if you can actually put the pedal to the metal and leave the field of abstraction to exist in the real world.
00:48:41.160From Matthew, question, what is President Trump's greatest flaw in your opinion?
00:48:46.400You know, I had a lot of criticisms of Trump as a candidate.
00:48:49.780I've been very pleased by his presidency.
00:48:51.860He's been much better than I expected.
00:49:14.940And I think we're waiting for him to be Ronald Reagan.
00:49:17.420We really wish that he could give a time for choosing speech and articulate these timeless principles from the Bible up through Hayek and Burke and Kirk and whatever.
00:49:33.600Sometimes you need a plumber to clear out your pipes, and sometimes you need an orator.
00:49:38.600And he's been really good at connecting people and communicating.
00:49:42.340And, you know, I think if he were able to exhibit that high moral, truly inspiring on a moral level rhetoric, I think he would be a force unlike which we've seen certainly in my lifetime.
00:49:56.820But all in all, he's been doing pretty good.
00:50:00.940I've been trying to learn more about how this country was founded and the balance between natural rights and natural laws.
00:50:06.020It seems interesting to me that these rights would be deemed inalienable or unalienable when some could be taken away or restricted by the same government.
00:50:13.480I can understand there are limits because of natural law, but why then call them inalienable or unalienable in the first place as they are clearly not in some situations?
00:50:24.120Are there any good books you could recommend on the topic?
00:50:39.580It's not a right that depends upon the caprices of political winds that depend on this party being in power or that party.
00:50:48.920The right to control the border of the United States might be dependent on which party is in power at the time and which party is running the government, but not my absolute right.
00:50:59.480Now, you have plenty of natural rights that are violated all of the time.
00:51:02.320You have a right to life, but the right to life is constantly violated, which comes out of the natural law, which comes out of God and Christianity.
00:51:13.040It means that you can – a right that's contingent on a government, you can go to a government and say, look, my right was violated and go before that judge.
00:51:20.780A right that's absolute and not contingent on a government but contingent on your creator, you'll have to appeal to heaven.
00:51:27.100And as this George Washington flag shows, you'll have to appeal to the ultimate judge in heaven.
00:51:36.920I was recently discussing spiritual presence with a friend.
00:51:39.820He was talking to me about when he visited Germany and had the opportunity to stand in one of the crematoriums at a concentration camp.
00:51:47.040We questioned how men could stoop to such evil as to systematically kill people the way the Nazis did.
00:51:52.560My conclusion was that there are certain ideologies that are at their foundation evil, and people could only become so evil by ensconcing themselves in those ideologies.
00:52:07.960I don't think people become evil simply because of ideology.
00:52:12.160Someone had to create the ideology, right?
00:52:13.940The ideology had to come from somewhere.
00:52:15.160I agree with what happens right after Noah gets off the ark, and he sacrifices to God, and God says, God knew at that moment that the imagination of man's heart was evil from the beginning.
00:52:27.280There were fallen creatures, and evil in here and in that, not simply in ideas.
00:52:43.280Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil is a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
00:52:49.680In Ephesians, put on your whole armor of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
00:52:55.160For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
00:53:04.320Then entered Satan into Judas Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve.
00:53:11.900The book of Job has God speaking to the person of the devil.
00:53:15.640Jesus was led into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
00:53:20.760It is creeping along in the world, as we see in Paradise Lost, as we see in the Bible, as we see in our own metaphysical vision of the world.
00:53:30.660So I think when you view things that way, it's less clinical, it's less secularized, it's less rationalist, but it's much more accurate, and it will serve you better to try to fight against evil.
00:53:53.100It's very fashionable these days for women to say that they're bisexual or men to say that their sexuality is on a spectrum and gender is on a spectrum.
00:54:00.120We see in all of the data show this, that among polling people, are much less likely now to say that they're straight or cisgender, that they are the gender that they are.
00:54:21.680If that's a breaking point, then, you know, obviously, you guys should break up, and I'm going to withhold all of the other jokes that I was thinking of when I saw your question.
00:54:41.420Clavin makes fun of you all the time, but why do you never make fun of him?
00:54:44.620A simple answer, he's the supreme lord of the multiverse who could strike me down whenever—by just closing his eyes and transporting me mystically into a clavin-less weekend.
00:54:54.440So I would never tempt that power at all, and if you're listening, Drew, I'm sorry I even read the question, okay?
00:55:00.240And from Teresa, hey, Michael, someone close to me strayed from the church years ago and is now beginning to embrace the left.
00:55:06.100They think the stigma around socialism is unwarranted.
00:55:12.300It's almost impossible to debate them because they either get so heated or they pull the moral relativism card.
00:55:18.740They just basically ignore the conversation, you mean, and say that there's no point to talking because nothing is true or false, but heaven makes it so, which is an argument against its own argument.
00:55:28.260I've been trying to get them to at least consider going back to church.
00:55:54.360Marx and Engels used it soon thereafter in volume one of Der Kapital.
00:55:58.660The idea of capital comes from the 12th century of the idea referring to funds and stock of merchandise and money and money that carries interest and so forth.
00:56:16.640Do you think people should be able to use the money how they want and hire who they want?
00:56:19.860And do you think the people should be able to work for whom they want to work and negotiate contracts and deal in free markets that are protected by laws?
00:56:27.320If you like that, then that's pretty good.
00:56:29.000As far as going back to the church, if this person is using relativistic arguments, it's very simple to stop those arguments.
00:56:36.800They say, well, you know, that's your opinion, man, but don't forget opinions are not preferences.
00:56:41.420They're statements of fact as you see them.
00:56:43.620So a preference is I really like this covfefe.
00:56:47.200An opinion is this is the greatest covfefe in the world.
00:56:52.100Another statement of fact would be I think this is the greatest covfefe in the world or this is the greatest covfefe in the world, right?
00:56:57.640So the way to stop the relativist so-called argument is to say if they say truth doesn't exist, then you say, well, that's impossible because for you to state the truth doesn't exist requires there to be a truth that is truth doesn't exist, which doesn't.
00:57:16.440So if you can communicate the point that communication breaks down because of relativistic nonsense, you might be able to crack her, this intellectual fad that she seems to be going through, which has no bearing to reality.