In this episode, we're joined by John Harris from Conversations That Matter to explore the erosion of trust in our institutions, the value of tradition, and why it matters that we do the hard work of uncovering our history.
00:03:01.880and that we don't have to constantly be reinventing the wheel with every generation that passes by.
00:03:07.040You've seen this even theologically outside of politics and culture,
00:03:10.920But I'm reminded of the 20th century, you know, there's been a lot of higher criticism, you know, that seeped into seminaries and, you know, the white ivory towers and basically, you know, people questioning, well, do we really know that there was a literal virgin birth, you know, or that there was actually, you know, a bodily resurrection or how, you know, one of the big ones, those are obviously massive.
00:03:35.100but one of the constant ones uh just constant scrutiny re you know scrutinizing again and
00:03:41.500again and again and again decade upon decade upon eight over the the 20th century was um in regards
00:03:48.620to scripture the inerrancy of scripture and how do we know that you know this is really the word
00:03:53.100of god and that we got the manuscripts right and then we got this and we got that um and what i've
00:03:59.020i've noticed is that if you're not careful um you essentially can you know you can just do the work
00:04:05.700that generations have already done and and waste your entire life where you know by the the end of
00:04:11.780your life you're 80 years old and and you're sitting there and you're like yeah the king james
00:04:16.200turns out is just fine um could have i could have actually just been reading it and doing the you
00:04:22.920know actual theological work and ironing out you know new things and applying god's word to society
00:04:28.980and to politics and to culture but instead um i spent my entire life you know because i thought
00:04:34.800that maybe um maybe the entire canon of scripture was a psyop you know and so so have we been lied
00:04:42.820to that's kind of what we're going to be getting into have we been lied to yes um have we been
00:04:47.600especially lied to in our generation has the 20th century been uniquely, uniquely suppressed
00:04:55.900aspects of history and things like that to pull the wool over our eyes.
00:05:02.740I think virtually every generation has probably had that where elites are hiding certain things
00:05:08.160from the public. So I don't know if it's unique, but yes, I think there's been a lot of deceit,
00:05:13.060things that have to be uncovered, but we, we want to be careful not to just simply become
00:05:17.720contrarians. It's one thing to be a, a conspiracy theorist, you know, within reason to say, well,
00:05:25.460I, you know, I don't know about masks. I don't know about, you know, jabs. I don't, I don't know
00:05:29.620about this. I don't know about that. Well, you know, a lot of the conspiracy theorists have
00:05:35.560ultimately over the last few years been proven right again and again and again, right? The old
00:05:41.000adage is the difference between a conspiracy and the truth is about you know three to six months
00:05:46.140you know so um certainly uh that has paid off well to be uh suspicious uh but a contrarian
00:05:53.380in my assessment i like that word i think it's helpful contrarian versus conspiracy theorist
00:05:59.100somebody who's conspiratorial basically is just acknowledging elite theory and that elites at
00:06:06.380times lie. And in our society, as we've moved more from a republic, you know, to an aristocracy and
00:06:13.200more from that, even to an oligarchy with, I think, nefarious elites, then that's probably a good
00:06:18.320instinct. And it's not always going to make you right. But I think more often than not, you'll
00:06:23.860do well to be suspicious of what your elites are telling you. But a contrarian, a contrarian is
00:06:32.140different a contrarian is not just conspiratorial a contrarian basically ascertains the truth at
00:06:39.200on any given topic at any given time by simply taking the minority position right like you just
00:06:46.700you just take the minority position so it's like uh the contrarian would say um covid um is a lie
00:06:53.780uh and because that's a lie um so is everything else all all the way down um and and ironically
00:07:03.720um the contrarian can find himself actually pushing certain narratives um that that are false
00:07:11.860and even nefarious um so all right this will get me in trouble with some of our audience because
00:07:16.560our audience likes us because we we push back on on mainstream narratives all the time post-war
00:07:22.060consensus is a big example that we've been pushing back on a lot. But just for fun, kicks and giggles,
00:07:28.480I'll just get into it real quick, the moon landing, right? So you can say, well, we were in a cold war
00:07:33.040with Russia. And so, you know, we lied in order to win, you know, and the whole thing was fabricated
00:07:37.360and we never really landed on the moon. You know, if we've landed on the moon, how come we haven't
00:07:41.000been back? It's been 60 years, you know, but here's another alternative. I remember, you know,
00:07:51.480as I, as I looked into the moon landing just for, for fun, it is fun and interesting to look into,
00:07:56.680um, you know, some of the popular hip hop songs at the time, right. It's, it's the 1960s summer
00:08:02.300of love. You know, you've got, um, you've got the sexual revolution, you've got the hormonal birth
00:08:07.480control pill, you've got Vietnam, you know, and there's wars. And then you've got the civil rights,
00:08:11.920um, movement that's happening at the time and all these different things. And one of the hip hop
00:08:17.620songs that was popular at the time was uh talking about um basically um you know listing out every
00:08:24.960grievance right um genuine or otherwise uh but listing every perceived you know alleged grievance
00:08:31.980that you could list under the sun that in the in the vein of social justice that kind of stuff
00:08:36.760and then the refrain that would repeat again and again after listing uh the grievances is but0.93
00:08:42.600whitey's on the moon right so you know black people are in the welfare lines you know can't0.59
00:08:46.980have bread to eat, but Whitey's on the moon. You know, we're, we're over here in Vietnam fighting0.94
00:08:50.920a war, you know, and, and, um, our, our young boys of our country are being slaughtered,1.00
00:08:56.620but Whitey's on the moon. Um, in other words, um, part of the friction that was going on at the time0.79
00:09:03.280was, well, we're giving money to NASA. We're spending all these tax dollars to compete with
00:09:08.220Russia and a cold war to go and land on the moon. And, and what for, you know, what, what are we
00:09:12.780going to what are we going to find on the moon that solves our problems here on earth and so
00:09:18.460you know on one hand you could say well the the moon you know that whole thing is is just you know
00:09:23.760nasa lying and i think nasa is suspicious um i think that there have been lies from nasa but
00:09:30.600you can go so far that like while you're being you know hashtag based and you know like i i can
00:09:36.740see behind the veil and i'm aware of what's really going on um meanwhile unknowingly uh what you're
00:09:43.640actually promulgating potentially maybe i'm wrong you know but potentially what you're promulgating
00:09:49.040is um you're actually giving in to the left and uh and making all their wishes and dreams come true
00:09:55.980by once again agreeing that uh one of the white man's pristine accomplishments isn't true um
00:10:05.420you know like we never made it to the moon uh whereas the alternative is what if we made it0.98
00:10:10.400to the moon we actually did have the technology because we weren't um idiotic with social justice
00:10:18.380and uh and we actually um had a meritocracy and and we were pushing for american excellence
00:10:25.500um and and what if the reason we've never been back is because uh we've been woke ever since
00:10:32.860the Civil Rights Act, not just for the last five years since 2020 and George Floyd, but we've
00:10:39.060actually been woke for 60 years. What if wokeness destroyed American excellence? And the reason we've
00:10:45.280never been able to go back and actually land on the moon and the reason why we've lost, what if
00:10:50.380we've actually regressed, right? That we actually did progress up to a certain point for centuries
00:10:56.300within Christendom in Western civilization. And then we started regressing in the 20th century
00:11:02.200because we lost sight of christ and we became overly altruistic with a a pseudo sense of
00:11:11.360empathy and we traded the inheritance of our children and our children's children
00:11:16.160for the privilege of consoling ourselves as we try to sleep at night and telling ourselves that
00:11:22.660we're not racist so you know what i mean so you can be the guy who thinks your base saying we
00:11:28.260didn't land on the moon meanwhile um there could be a whole bunch of illuminati leftists that are
00:11:34.840laughing and say yes yes the the guy who's based uh we got we were able to convince even him uh
00:11:43.040that white people haven't achieved anything right and he's actually now agreeing with us and it's
00:11:47.600like oh snap how did i get there um you got there by being a contrarian a contrarian is not an
00:11:53.700intellectual. You're not, it's not, it doesn't require intelligence. It doesn't require
00:11:57.840thoughtfulness. It doesn't require that you actually do the reading. A contrarian is just
00:12:01.980somebody who spent, you know, had, you know, maybe they have a part-time job and they, you know,
00:12:07.160extra time on their hand. So they spent four hours on 4chan, you know, and they found out,
00:12:13.380you know, here's the majority position, here's the minority position, and the majority must always
00:12:18.280be wrong. But if the majority is always wrong, you have to at least recognize we might be living,
00:12:25.840and I would argue that we probably are, we're probably living in a generation, a particular
00:12:29.420time, especially in our particular place, the West, where on most things, not all, but on most
00:12:35.440things where there's a majority consensus because the majority is apostatizing from Christ, I think
00:12:40.740the majority is wrong a lot of times. Even now, as bad as our particular generation is, I don't think
00:12:45.960It's always, but I think there are a lot of times, and I would be willing to argue maybe
00:12:50.120even over half of the time, most of the time, the majority is wrong.
00:12:53.320But if you take that position always, which contrarians do, then you would actually have
00:13:07.680Because the majority right now would say, well, the dark ages were terrible, and they're
00:13:11.520burning witches, you know, and everybody is oppressed by Christianity and by, you know,
00:13:17.300the clergy. And it was just this horrible, horrible time. Whereas at that time, the majority0.52
00:13:25.200would disagree. The majority during those centuries would say, no, Christendom is great.
00:13:31.840We love Christ. We love his church. We're making incredible advancements. We've pushed back on the
00:13:39.280darkness and on driven literal demonic spirits out of Northern European tribes and places and
00:13:47.560the Americas and all this kind of stuff and making incredible progress, incredible discoveries and
00:13:53.320charting new maps and innovation and inventions. And so, I'm of the persuasion that I think that
00:13:59.860the whole idea of the Dark Ages is a psyop. I think that the Dark Ages was actually a golden age
00:14:05.380and that the Great Enlightenment is actually the dark spell that has come over the West,
00:14:11.300and that if anything, we're in the dark ages now. But my point is that to come to that kind of
00:14:19.500thoughtful position, you can't arrive there by just putting your finger in the wind, right?
00:14:25.960You can't just do the opposite of Joe Biden. Joe Biden just, you know, well, where are the winds
00:14:30.900blowing? I'll go with them. The contrarian just says, where are the winds blowing? I'll go the
00:14:34.780opposite way neither one is thoughtful neither one is strategic neither one is is necessarily
00:14:40.560siding with the truth one is just going with the people and the other one just goes against the
00:14:45.700people but the one the contrarian who goes against the people um what you basically have to assert
00:14:51.340is um you have to assert that the people have always been wrong so you you basically what you
00:14:56.400have to you essentially this is what it comes down to you have to say christendom never happened
00:14:59.920because Christendom asserts that there was a time when the majority of people actually were right,
00:15:08.500generally right. They actually were aligned with Christ, with the scripture, with Christian values.
00:15:14.720There was a general sense of the populace, the majority of the populace that was going in the
00:15:21.160right direction. But the contrarian would have to say that humanity has always got it wrong,
00:15:25.660That if we were looking at like a stock chart, that it's just been, there's zero spikes whatsoever, only one giant dip from Genesis 3 onward, that there's never been any upward trajectory.
00:15:38.840And if there is maybe a tiny spike, it's never been so significant that 50% of the population plus one has ever sided with the truth.
00:15:50.560And so you just, you always go against the majority because the majority is always deceived.
00:15:57.580That there's never been any time period in any culture or any country, any place throughout all of the church age, the last 2,000 years since Christ has come.
00:16:08.780that whatever christ did in his his earthly work um it was not significant enough to produce
00:16:14.660one time period in one culture where the majority of people aligned with him right that's basically
00:16:22.860your position like you may not spell it out like that but that's what you actually have to assume
00:16:27.620and i don't assume that we're both post-millennial we believe christendom is a thing that it happened
00:16:32.900We believe that right now we're in a significant dip, 80-year dip, arguably 130-year dip,
00:16:39.920arguably 300-year dip if we're going back to the Enlightenment.
00:21:19.160And so what I wanted to encourage you guys a little bit with, because I've been wanting to do this episode with John Harris for a while, is that we are not the first people, even in recent history, to notice and to be aware of some of the dynamics that are going on.
00:21:35.340And even while the warnings haven't been heeded, other people before us have very eloquently and very, I think with a lot of good data and a lot of good evidence, argued about some of the things that we are observing now.
00:21:49.160They were seeing the buds of it, and we're seeing the blooms of it now, right?
00:24:47.480But he's basically saying, like, how in the world could you believe that Christianity is in a better place today?
00:24:52.360And you may have tuned in late, Daniel, but if you were listening earlier, I was arguing precisely the opposite.
00:24:59.700I don't think that Christianity is in a better place today than it was in the 1800s or the 1600s.
00:25:06.540or the 1500s. I don't. So we just don't think it's that simple. We don't think that it's
00:25:13.400constantly digressing or constantly progressing. We think that there are, like the stock market,
00:25:20.540there are dips and spikes along the way. Now we're post-millennial, so we think the overarching
00:25:23.960trajectory is up, but that doesn't mean that there aren't large swaths of history in certain places
00:25:31.980and at times within the province of God, it may not just be in one place, but in many places,
00:25:37.360like the entirety of Western civilization for arguably 300 years. I actually said that exactly.
00:25:43.600I said, if you're tracking all the way back to the enlightenment, then you're looking at,
00:25:46.820you know, 300 year dip. And we would be, Michael and I would be the first to recognize that we are
00:25:53.500in a dip. But we're also willing to recognize that it has not constantly been a dip. It has
00:26:01.260not been a 2000 year long constant dip from the coming of christ um and it's like well but you
00:26:07.120know another question i saw in the chat was like well what are your metrics okay well um we we could
00:26:11.820do a lot of metrics but you know we'll just start with the spiritual ones because that's usually
00:26:15.220what guys are getting at is like well your metrics are going to be you know um long long
00:26:19.660gating uh lifespans you know or um you know like people are living longer you know or eradicating
00:26:24.900you know certain diseases or um maybe it's innovation and architecture building cathedrals
00:26:30.800you know, instead of grass huts, you know, or inventions like airplanes, you know, or sanitation
00:26:35.980and sewers. And okay, yeah, there's all that. I think those are legitimate metrics. But here's
00:26:41.140another one, if we want to just do the spiritual one, because a lot of guys sometimes will use that
00:26:44.760as an opportunity to Jesus juke and say, well, the only true metric is disciples of Jesus. Okay,
00:26:48.980fine. That's a good one. Let's go with it. At the time of Christ's earthly ministry,
00:26:54.080um the disciples of jesus were very few that's right um the majority of the crowd is yelling
00:27:00.840crucify him right i mean jesus jesus died the the sheer fact that jesus was nailed to a cross
00:27:07.900was because the majority of the people at that time were against him and today we have billions
00:27:15.300of christians and even if you want to be you know a little bit more careful with that number and say
00:27:20.820well, I don't think they're all genuinely Christians. Well, yeah, they probably aren't1.00
00:27:23.920all genuine Christians. But still, we have, it's like, I think 3.2 billion Christians,
00:27:30.700something like that. So let's say 1 billion. Well, that's still too much. Okay, let's say
00:27:33.920100 million, right? Can we even say that 3% or 0.3% are genuine Christians? Well, that's still
00:27:44.920a ton of Christians. You might say, yeah, but the overarching population of the world has
00:27:50.060has multiplied, you know, over and over and over again. Any way you slice it, you can look at these
00:27:55.140metrics. It's not just that we have more, numerically more Christians, but we also have
00:27:59.820a much higher percentage of the world population that are Christian than in previous time periods.
00:28:07.480And so whether you're looking at the spiritual metrics of discipleship and conversion, or
00:28:11.480whether you're looking at some of the more practical and physical, you know, metrics of
00:28:15.840innovation and lifespan and health and eradicating diseases or all these different things.
00:28:23.980Again, we're not saying that history doesn't have dips along the way and at times significant dips
00:28:29.020in multiple countries in the West all at the same time for three centuries. That can happen and we
00:28:34.900would argue that it has. But we would say the overarching trajectory is up. And what I don't
00:28:40.640want to do is I don't want to be in a dip, right? It's just like investing. I don't want to be in a
00:28:44.680dip. And you've been in a dip for so long that you've basically resolved that you can only go
00:28:53.260down. And then what happens is that eventually the market does reverse and you miss an incredible
00:28:59.640buying opportunity for long-term investment. And I'm just wondering out loud right now,
00:29:07.280Trump is no savior. I don't even think he's a Christian, but I'm incredibly grateful for him.
00:29:11.400he absolutely had my vote if i could i would crawl over glass to vote for donald trump over
00:29:17.480kamala harris my goodness like we are we are so blessed to have trump's a zionist yeah dude it's
00:29:24.1602025 friend the year of our lord 2025 in america that's been steeped in dispensational zionism for
00:29:32.440150 years. Trump is a Zionist? Yeah. I'm trying not to say something. There is zero non-Zionist0.56
00:29:42.960option. There is no non-Zionist option. Politics is the realm of the possible, not the perfect,0.95
00:29:51.380the possible. There is no possible outcome in the year of our Lord, 2025, in a nation steeped in
00:29:59.860dispensational zionism for a century and a half that someone could win a presidential national0.97
00:30:05.740election and not be right some shade or form of zionist so what you're doing in politics
00:30:13.840is you're taking the ingredients god gave you right it's it's like it's like your kids sitting
00:30:20.120and crying at the table they're hungry and it's time for dinner and you're over there
00:30:26.540pontificating and thinking and dreaming about a michelin star you know five course meal
00:30:33.560but god in his providence has given you not those ingredients but he's given you some
00:30:40.420there is some food by the grace of god in the pantry right and sometimes instead of thinking
00:30:46.360about five star meals sometimes it's it's just time to cook dinner open the pantry open the fridge
00:30:53.020see what you've got, and make the best dish that you can, because the family's hungry now.
00:30:59.100The family needs to eat. And right now in the province of God, this last week has been far
00:31:06.620more gracious than what we deserve as a country that murders babies by the millions. Are you
00:31:12.260kidding me? 70 million? That doesn't even count all the different birth control and IUD and all
00:31:21.140these different you know measures of of abortion beyond just going into a clinic but 70 million
00:31:27.340arguably well past 100 million um babies murdered in the womb in the last 50 years and god gave us
00:31:36.300trump right like we we deserve stalling god gave us trump far more gracious is is trump michelin
00:31:46.480you know five star like no um but trump is food and the pantry and what we were looking at without
00:31:53.640him was four more years of starvation yeah and so all of a sudden like conservatives one of the
00:31:59.640things that we're gonna have to think is in terms of tailwinds right we're so used to headwinds like
00:32:04.540oh the parallel economy and i need to you know homestead and like there's a lot of great virtues
00:32:09.600that can be uh honed from these practices i'm not against any of them i think they're they're
00:32:13.740generally good things. They're good hobbies. They're good for training your kids, have them
00:32:17.980touch grass, get in the dirt, all these, there's plenty of good things. But right now, we actually
00:32:24.480have a moment to wield power, to wield power. Is Trump the Christian that I want him to be? No.
00:32:31.680But there are Christians like me, like Michael, who would not be able to step within a 50-mile
00:32:40.880radius of the white house if kamala was president and trump may not agree with him on everything
00:32:48.100but they can actually have his ear yep and they may be still the minority and few and far between
00:32:53.440but it's way better than what we have had previously way better than what we've had
00:32:58.160previously so i want to be hopeful and say all right we've been in a huge decline a huge dip
00:33:03.580but right now there's some signs of life could this be a reversal i'm not saying it has reversed
00:33:10.100Like we're so back, you know, like right now it's, it's as good as, you know, Calvin's Geneva, you know, like we've completely returned and everything's solved.
00:33:19.500There's so much work to do, but we have, I think by the grace of God and God's grace alone, seen some of the signs of life that are telling us not that the problem solved, but that the problem might be solved, that it could be solved.
00:33:33.960that solutions are at least within the realm of possibility, within our grasp, that a reversal
00:33:41.100might be on the horizon. We've got some buy signals, again, to go back to investing terms.
00:33:47.140We're seeing some buy signals. We've been on a major crash, but we're starting to see some
00:33:51.560buy signals that the market might be reversing. And that, I think, is incredibly encouraging.
00:33:58.520And if you're just a contrarian, if that's how you determine truth from falsehood,
00:34:02.420then you have to look at everything from the election to all the executive orders to this
00:34:08.380to that to the other and you have to somehow make it bad in other words you have to be nick fuentes
00:34:14.640right right like he's been insufferable like oh you know uh 500 deportations a day and trump saying
00:34:21.640that he's ramping up and going to be you know 1200 to 1500 um that's the worst thing in the world
00:34:26.740that you know that won't do anything like okay then then just what do you like just sit on your
00:34:33.260hands and just just go down with the ship right you know like what you might as like you might as
00:34:38.700well like we've got to do something and i i think i think it was zerubbabel who it says there was
00:34:48.540shouts of grace to it grace to it when he was holding the plumb line you know and like they
00:34:53.980built nothing holding the plumb line is just like like the very beginning stages you haven't even
00:34:58.980laid the foundation you're just kind of mapping it out it's like we're breaking ground on this
00:35:02.700new building development and like we just basically we just brought the tractors out
00:35:07.240and and we haven't built laid a single stone but but we're gonna start there's the signs of life
00:35:14.300and and the people are shouting and then when they finish the the second temple we preach
00:35:19.000through ezra but when they finish the second temple it's um yeah there's a mixed crowd and
00:35:24.020some of them there's shouts of of uh cheering and joy and gladness and there's also profound
00:35:30.200wailing and moaning and the ones who are wailing and moaning are the ones who are saying but it's
00:35:35.420not as good as it once was they're the ones who who remember the formal former temple that was
00:35:41.040superior in its glory the second temple wasn't as as magnificent um but then there's this younger
00:35:48.160new generation that's excited because if you go back 80 years, it was 70 years in exile in Babylon,
00:35:56.340but 80 years, the temple today is an inferior temple to the temple 80 years ago. And the older
00:36:03.260men are bemoaning that fact. The younger men, they're looking back and saying, yeah, but 40
00:36:08.700years ago, there was no temple at all. A temple is better than no temple. In our scenario, please
00:36:15.720do not do not build a temple in in jerusalem no no no no more temples um the third temple is uh
00:36:23.840christians the people of god living stones built together christ is a cornerstone um so you know
00:36:28.560that was that was for then but the point is um something is better than nothing and the guys
00:36:34.100who are just sitting around um above it all priding themselves i think it appeals i i really
00:36:41.460the last thing i'll say i think it appeals to laziness i think it appeals to apathy because
00:36:45.100the contrarian doesn't have to actually do anything. He can just, he can just boast in his,
00:36:52.160you know, his illusion of being hot takes. Yeah, exactly. Just a hot take on everything. This
00:36:57.140happens. It's bad. This other thing happens. That's looks like the opposite of the last thing
00:37:00.900that was bad, but that's bad too. And this is bad. And, you know, the, you know, nothing ever
00:37:05.220happens, bros, you know, nothing ever happens, bros have been having a tough time this last week.
00:37:09.800You know, it's been, it's been hard for them, you know, send your thoughts and prayers to the
00:37:12.960nothing ever happens, bros, because things have actually been happening, but they have to find a
00:37:17.060way to say, well, but not really, you know, not really, nothing's really happening. But that
00:37:21.800appeals because one, it means it's really kind of Gnostic in a sense. It's I am a part of this
00:37:28.020minority elite people who have been enlightened. And I have the master key, right? I have this
00:37:35.060one ideology that's like the master key that opens every single door. And so I know, I know
00:37:40.140the answer to what's really going on behind every single thing, because I know this one issue. It's
00:37:46.280my, it's not theology, it's ideology. I'm an ideologue. There's leftist ideologues. I'm actually
00:37:51.860an ideologue also. I'm just, you know, not a leftist in this one regard, but I actually am
00:37:57.040a leftist in other regards. Ironically, I just haven't realized it yet. And so I have my ideological
00:38:02.060master key. I'm one of the minority, you know, enlightened individuals, this elite enlightened
00:38:07.160group and uh and the beauty about is one superiority i'm better than everyone two um apathy um because
00:38:15.000i actually don't have to do anything the only thing that i do is just boast about how i know
00:38:19.560i know what's really going on oh you know what's really going on great um and so what are you
00:38:25.980doing oh well that's that's you know well here's here's the neat thing is uh there's nothing to do
00:38:30.820the end is nigh you know abandon your post it's like you know the guy the steward of gondor
00:38:36.460abandon your post you know and and sometimes gandalf the white you know somebody with with
00:38:42.000some some hope has to just come and knock that guy out and say don't listen don't listen to the0.90
00:38:49.200steward of gondor who's yelling abandon your post all is lost the end is nigh bonk him on the head
00:38:55.960knock him out do gondor a favor and say no no no no call to battle call to battle are we losing
00:39:03.180Yes. Can we win? Maybe. Let's try. All right, let's go to our first commercial break,
00:39:09.800and then we're going to bring on John Harris. Our sponsor, Private Family Banking, wants to
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00:40:10.400or you can click the link below. Make a free discovery call now. America is a country that
00:40:16.080was founded for the purpose of allowing Christians to do their duty before God and not to have their
00:40:19.860consciences ruled by the doctrines and commandments of men. Reese's Fund exists in order to see the
00:40:24.700Ten Commandments properly applied, not just as a plaque on the wall, but to actually be used in
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00:40:41.220them to make sure that we can maintain our capacity to do things here. Reese Fund, Christian
00:40:46.440capital boldly deployed we're back some would say we're so back we've got john harris from
00:40:56.160conversations that matter john are you able to hear me can you hear me there he is he's looking
00:41:01.320so right now i don't think john has volume but here's the thing john is tech savvy he's no boomer
00:41:07.680i am a boomer in the technical and the technical realm i uh you know it was funny a while back
00:41:13.780somebody like was like you know joel's commanding his anon army and you know he has all these you
00:41:18.240know anon accounts or whatever you know and doing this and uh nathan our tech guy was just like he
00:41:23.000was looking at it on x and just laughing he was like he's like literally they know um you don't
00:41:28.640even you can't even manage your own one x account on your own without me helping you to log in from
00:41:34.660time to time and figure it out so anyways um i am not very savvy but john harris is he runs a
00:41:40.900whole operation. He's a one-man band. If you ever saw the guy clinging cymbals and playing a harmonica
00:41:46.600and the guitar all at once. Yeah, exactly. That said, I'm boasting of John, but I don't
00:41:52.620even see him on the screen. So I might be... Yeah, I know he can. I'm just ad-libbing a little bit
00:41:59.500as we wait for him and singing his praises. I believe, this is my post-millennial hope again,
00:42:04.840I believe that John Harris can figure out the tech problem. That's your post-millennial hope?
00:42:09.560Yeah, this is it. My post-millennial hope is that John Harris is going to come on this show.
00:42:13.680He's going to be able to hear us. So he's still trying to figure out, Nate, is there anything
00:42:17.020that you can do on your end? Oh, I see him again. John, can you hear us?
00:42:22.120Yes. Oh, snap. I was just, I don't know if you could hear me that whole time, but I was singing
00:42:27.060your praises and saying, John is not a boomer. He will figure out the tech. He's going to come
00:42:31.640on the show. It's going to work. Yeah, I forgot how to use Zoom, so maybe I'm a little bit of a
00:42:36.320boomer. I didn't know if it was you or if it was us. A Zoomer in that case. I joined it now and I
00:42:44.380can hear you. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming on the show. I'm going to give it to
00:42:48.360Michael. He's outlined this episode. Michael and Wes kind of alternate. I talk a lot, as you know,
00:42:56.720John. But Michael and Wes, they do the reading, as the kids say. I do some reading too, but
00:43:02.140they're sharp. And so Michael has outlined this episode. Yeah, I think he's got some great
00:43:06.000questions. And it's a lot of the stuff that John, you've been talking about, about like,
00:43:09.660we want to do theology. We don't want to necessarily do a bunch of ideology. And that's
00:43:15.380how we were framing it before you came on, just saying that like the contrarian, the way he would
00:43:19.620do history is there's difference than somebody who has some measure of conspiratorial
00:43:26.880you know, aptitude where they're like, yeah, I think COVID is way overblown. Or I think
00:43:32.640George Floyd, this is fishy. But the contrarian doesn't just realize that there really is in
00:43:38.420our world such a thing as some measure of elite theory. And sometimes there's conspiracies. And
00:43:42.480sometimes our leaders lie to us. The contrarian is very much like the Democrat, the Sixers finger
00:43:48.020in the wind. And then just always the only difference is they go the opposite way. They
00:43:51.600always side with whatever the minority opinion is. And then with ideology, I think of it like
00:43:57.340an analogy or illustration of the master key where it appeals to apathy. It appeals to laziness
00:44:03.960because instead of doing the hard work of, you know, multivariant situations and reading multiple
00:44:08.620sources and all this kind of stuff, you can find the one issue, right? Whatever the one issue is,
00:44:13.080and that's your master key. And it's kind of even Gnostic. It's like, I'm a part of this elite0.91
00:44:17.860minority group that's been enlightened because I've had this one piece of revelation, you know,
00:44:24.100Gnostic downloaded to me. It's become the master key. It's my ideology that opens every single
00:44:29.580door and we can all do it. And a lot of times, if you're a Christian, it is actually, you take
00:44:36.020a theological argument and make it ideological. And so you can kid yourself and say, well, I'm
00:44:41.140doing theology. And I'll be the first to admit it. This is, you know, people are like, well,
00:45:54.680And I know that you've got a lot of interests, but I was really curious to pick your brain
00:46:00.540a little bit about some of the historical questions that we see surfacing.
00:46:04.200And just to jump right into it, the thing that is a little bit overwhelming to me as
00:46:11.080Joel says I do the reading, but both Wes and I said to Joel last week, we're like, Joel, we've done all the reading that we have episodes for.
00:46:19.200Like, we need to go do more reading because there's just an overwhelming amount of information out there.
00:46:23.800And it's impossible to do all the reading on everything.
00:46:29.020And this is something that in the information age and now with the Internet is a particular difficulty of our time.
00:46:37.000And that is, there is so much information available to the average student, consumer,
00:46:44.860citizen, whatever you want to call it.
00:46:47.140And like, I guess on one sense, like what do we do with the fact that you can, if you
00:46:56.220read one particular area or you read another particular area or author, you can craft almost
00:47:01.800any historical narrative that you want to, to fit kind of a preconception.
00:47:06.420And when I think about us studying history and trying to learn truths from history, I
00:47:12.960don't mean even necessarily historical truth, but trying to draw lessons from history, what
00:47:19.320do we do with the fact that there is an overwhelming amount of information out there that if I
00:47:25.040were to come to a conclusion on an issue, very easily Joel could come to literally the
00:47:29.380opposite conclusion just by reading different authors.
00:47:31.820I mean, this is something that I think that the average guy at home who's just trying
00:47:36.800to raise his kids but also doesn't want to be duped and have the wool pulled over his
00:47:40.080eyes, like, I think that this idea of the glut of information that we have and then
00:47:45.200so much coming at us, well, now it's this.
00:47:48.060Well, actually, now the new thing in history is this, and it can be overwhelming.
00:47:52.480So I wanted to start there and just kind of pick your brain a little bit and let you launch
00:47:56.180from there with the overwhelming amount of information.
00:47:58.420What do we as Christian thinkers do with all of the possible information sources that we
00:48:04.460could go to, and even the fact that many of these, they contradict with each other even?
00:48:11.380Yeah, thank you, Michael, and thank you, Joel, and I appreciate the warm introduction and
00:48:16.700welcome, and I don't, obviously, I didn't hear what you said when my mic was off, but
00:48:21.600yeah, I know, Joel, we did have conversations.
00:48:24.700um i think when i first went out there for your conference was it maybe three years ago now that's
00:48:29.680hard to believe yeah couldn't have been i guess it was well it feels like that was so long ago
00:48:35.540it feels like it was just yesterday but then sometimes it's like three years i'm like that
00:48:39.740feels like it was 30 years ago so much has happened yeah i think as i was on my flight
00:48:45.220out there i remember for some reason the sticks in my head i think it was karen swallow prior
00:48:49.180had tweeted that you oh no no it was based on the conversation we had so this must have been
00:48:53.560right after, but that we had 80, you know, you and I sat in a room and talked about some things
00:48:57.980and she said we were human trafficking because that's right. We talked about her. It was very
00:49:03.300strange, but now that's history. That's an historical record being three years ago.
00:49:07.700And, uh, um, and I think, yeah, I mean, we've all gone through our cage stages. Well, I shouldn't
00:49:11.920say all of us, but many of us, I know I've been in my cage stages on different things. Uh, Calvinism
00:49:17.160was one of them. I thought, wow, this is the thing. This is, uh, this will determine everything
00:49:22.220else just about. And if you believe this, it's the dividing line. I don't really care about other
00:49:26.560issues as much. And then an issue comes along where the key doesn't fit and you realize,
00:49:31.980oh, wow, that's not it because there's a bunch of Calvinists who are on the wrong side of this
00:49:35.580issue. Clearly that wasn't the determining factor and they still are Calvinists. So
00:49:39.740I think ideology is dangerous because it does blind us to facts that don't fit the narrative.
00:49:47.180And I think with history, historiography is the proper word for it.
00:49:51.480But I think with historiography, the attempt is to use the tools of the discipline, just
00:49:55.860like hermeneutics, when you're approaching biblical interpretation, there's tools for
00:50:00.740And you're trying to make a paradigm or discover a paradigm in which all the moving parts fit.
00:50:10.960And the problem with ideology is you're not doing that.
00:50:14.540you're just throwing out parts that don't fit your paradigm so you can keep the paradigm um
00:50:19.720i actually i just before coming on here i noticed on x uh all of a sudden there was these guys
00:50:24.860that um uh were saying well i don't want to get into the details of it but long and short of it
00:50:31.760is that they very much admire the 19th century abolitionists and there are some things to admire
00:50:35.760about certain 19th century abolitionists but they uh were very protective of uh the abolitionist
00:50:44.240brand and they didn't want john brown to be an abolitionist because he's got a bad rap so they
00:50:48.720an abolitionist and like that may seem like a very small thing and perhaps in the grand scheme it is
00:50:54.360but i do think there is uh at least with some of the guys that were saying this kind of thing i
00:50:59.520think there's an ideological impulse there to throw out the facts that don't fit the paradigm
00:51:04.320brown was clearly an abolitionist uh he might not have been the flavor that some that you like but
00:51:09.220he wanted to immediately end slavery. He didn't want compensation for the masters. That would
00:51:19.080have put him in a category of being an abolitionist. All his associations were pretty much
00:51:24.920with abolitionists. He was funded by abolitionists. Abolitionists are the ones who canonized him
00:51:30.980after he died. Was he an abolitionist or was he not? Well, if we let ideology and
00:51:38.420an attempt to rescue that brand determine the question then perhaps he's not but if we want
00:51:45.880to be historically accurate and we look at the context of the time and we look at his views and
00:51:50.520we compare them to other prominent abolitionists and so he clearly was and that's a pretty universal
00:51:55.860perspective uh in historiography that's the same that's the same as like russell moore like i'd
00:52:01.660love for him not to be a calvinist but he is yeah he is i mean what are you gonna do right
00:52:06.940he's he's you know he's a lousy person but he is a calvinist you know and and to be fair to the
00:52:13.060abolitionist um you know like in the same way that like uh the fact that russell moore is a
00:52:18.020calvinist doesn't uh make calvinism untrue you know and and and so like john john brown being
00:52:25.960an abolitionist doesn't make abolition abolitionism untrue you would have to on on the merits of the
00:52:32.440arguments the substance you would have to flesh that out and and come to a conclusion but um but
00:52:38.360the the point the larger point still remains there's not one issue be it calvinism or patriarchy
00:52:44.160or post-millennialism or or um you know abolitionism or uh the jews or you know there's
00:52:51.440there's no one issue that's the master key it's like and if you get this if you get this right
00:52:57.280you'll get everything right and you'll always be on the right side of every political issue
00:53:01.580cultural issue you know um that's just not the case unfortunately so i think it's an excellent
00:53:08.140point i think to get back to the original question because i think i veered a little
00:53:11.240i'm sorry about that uh there's so many sources out there so what do you do i think it's very
00:53:15.600similar to biblical interpretation which we are all familiar with and i'm sure the audience is
00:53:20.580when you're looking at the bible you can't read every commentary you can't look at every phd
00:53:25.600dissertation that's been written on the passage that you're studying you can't look at every
00:53:29.680archaeological artifact and so forth. So what do you do? You have to make some determinations.
00:53:34.740Obviously, we have the Holy Spirit illuminating scripture for us. There's certain tools that I
00:53:42.260would say go beyond the standard historiographical analysis that people use on secular documents and
00:53:50.040so forth. But I still think the same principles are really at play. You're going to use common
00:53:55.920sense. And when I mean common sense, I'm really talking about authorial intent. When you're doing
00:54:02.000manuscript evaluations, earlier manuscripts, generally more accurate, but the majority
00:54:07.880text, you have to take that into account. I mean, we understand these things, right? I mean, a lot
00:54:11.440of this is common sense. We want to know the audience. We want to know the historical context
00:54:16.260in brief. We want to know the greater and the larger context within the framework of scripture.
00:54:22.380And also, I think how other faithful interpreters have viewed the same passages throughout time.
00:54:28.340I mean, these are all things that we can look at.
00:54:30.340I don't think you have to be an expert on all those things and have all information to make determinations or else we would never get off the ground.
00:54:37.900We could never have a rational understanding of anything.
00:54:42.600but I think if we, if we approach history with the same assumptions, we approach the Bible,
00:54:49.980we will be able to make sense of it. And that would include things like human nature. How do
00:54:55.780humans normally behave? Now we have some theological assumptions that we bring to the
00:55:00.660table. I think these are assumptions that we shouldn't dump overboard. Everyone has them.
00:55:05.440They're going to have an anthropology as soon as they arrive at the task of even trying to figure
00:55:10.840out what happened in the past so you know there's human nature uh there's certain like for example
00:55:17.180um there are certain history schools that think that history is cyclical and other schools that
00:55:23.300think it's linear and it's approaching something christians uh there's a little bit of both i
00:55:27.600suppose you could say in christianity but in a cosmic sense we believe that we're actually
00:55:31.820um and post-millennials will like this but we're approaching a consummation and god is he's writing
00:55:37.680a story. And there's a mystery to it, but it's like a scroll being unrolled. And so we're leading
00:55:43.080up to something. And so this is going to, I think, impact to some degree, the kind of history that
00:55:48.620you do, these assumptions that you bring. So I guess you could call these philosophical
00:55:53.320assumptions. And then, of course, there's the craft itself, and that would include the source
00:55:58.840material. So we're going to weight different sources differently. Obviously, a secondary
00:56:03.900source, meaning someone who's writing about an event that they were not there for. When I write
00:56:09.120a history or an aspect of history I talk about on the podcast, I'm not a primary source if I wasn't
00:56:14.240there for it. If I gave you a podcast on January 6th, I lived through it. I can tell you from my
00:56:19.940perspective, I'm a source that has witnessed that. You were there, right, John? I was there. I smelled
00:56:27.220the tear gas. The longer that event goes on, though, and so we hit 10 years, 20 years, 30
00:56:32.980years, the more fuzzy it will likely be in my mind. Well, that's something we know about human
00:56:36.700nature. So the source material, the video I made the next day is going to be more
00:56:41.020I make in 10 years or so. So anyway, I'm just giving you some examples, but it's just like
00:56:52.820hermeneutics. There's tools to the discipline. I found some good, when I was in history,
00:56:58.040some good historiographical books on this. This is one of the most popular ones for people who
00:57:02.920are interested. Herbert Butterfield, writings on Christianity and history. He also published
00:57:08.540the Whig Interpretation of History. I have David Hackett Fisher's book, Historians Fallacies.0.64
00:57:14.880So he talked about fallacies like presentism and other problems that historians get themselves
00:57:20.960into. I actually have Gordon Clark's book. I haven't actually read this, but this was recommended
00:57:26.200to me by one of my professors, historiography. I think I've skimmed part of it. These are like
00:57:30.360my buddies. They sit on my shelf. I converse with them when I need them. And then this is John
00:57:35.640Lukash. John Lukash is a very, very important historian, historical consciousness of the
00:57:41.280remembered past. These are great sources to look at, to understand the tools of the discipline and
00:57:45.700how it works. To put a cap on everything I said, I don't think you have to have all knowledge to
00:57:50.640know, get a sense of history. I do think you have to have a humble demeanor when you're approaching
00:57:55.000it, be open to new information and new sources, if there are new sources, and make sure that you
00:58:01.960use common sense as you're approaching it. And if you do that, I think you can make sense of the
00:58:07.800past without knowing everything everyone said about it. So we could dive into anything I said
00:58:13.340there. Real quick, have you listened to, have you listened to any to Daryl Cooper, the Martyr
00:58:19.060there too made podcasts yeah years ago i listened to his whole thing on epstein and it freaked me
00:58:25.180out have you listened to anything else i started to listen to his one on mining in appalachia
00:58:32.200and uh i'm ashamed to say i got a little bored and i stopped but uh fair enough very interesting
00:58:38.220i think he does some popular level stuff yeah i like him um like he you know he's he's been
00:58:46.060on American reformer before, um, uh, or new founding, uh, podcast. And, um, but I think
00:58:52.660as you were talking, I just thought of, uh, his style, you know, like, uh, now he's doing his new
00:58:58.360series on world war two. Um, and, you know, and he's, he, you know, he waited as long as he did
00:59:04.780because he was reading, you know, tons and tons and tons of sources. And, um, but a lot of what
00:59:10.560he's done, whether it's the, uh, fear and loathing, uh, series in the new Jerusalem, I listened to
00:59:15.280that one and um a lot of what he does is um is just here's a source here's a source here's a
00:59:22.000source here's a source mostly dealing with primary sources and you know and does his best not to
00:59:28.580really take a side and that angers people especially with you know central you know
00:59:34.700historical narratives where you know there's a mainline consensus and everybody's supposed to
00:59:40.340take a side like world war ii um but a lot of i think what he does is he you know he's not he's
00:59:46.420not um necessarily revisionist although he he certainly has been accused of that um but he's
00:59:51.780not coming and taking somebody who's demonized and then lionizing them um but he's saying well
00:59:57.300we should neither demonize nor lionize but um humanize okay here here's what's on the ground0.65
01:00:03.920this is what was going on here's atrocities committed by you know the germans and but here's
01:00:09.140dresden you know and a lot of people are unfamiliar with the history on that side of the
01:00:14.360equation what was going on and atrocities committed to the germans and so you have this and you have
01:00:19.420that and all that kind of stuff so anyways but i my point is it seems like ideology is um
01:00:26.180not not only is it not the master key but it's it almost like um not only will it not get you
01:00:33.460through uh every door but it seems like it's actually um it can be a hindrance it can it can
01:00:39.360end up locking doors to where you you'll never you'll never actually find out the truth because
01:00:44.100it's inconvenient yeah i think historians have motivations every historian obviously does when
01:00:51.160they approach a subject right so daryl cooper is very entertaining uh he does give you a string of
01:00:56.500sources at least from what i listen to uh and and they're it moves it keeps you moving it keeps you
01:01:02.620interested i think it's uh good for our generation because you're not stuck mastering one source as
01:01:08.440soon as you might start to get bored it's like another source enters the equation so there is
01:01:12.240an entertainment value to what he does i think history should be at least popular history should
01:01:16.840be interesting for sure um but i think you know for i can get in his head but i'm sure he finds
01:01:22.960it interesting because uh the sense i get is it's the story of people and he's interested in how
01:01:28.180people think and how they react and what happens when you're in a cult. What's that like? And so
01:01:33.140he wants to bring the experience to you so that you can live the experience in a sense without
01:01:38.960the consequences. Isn't that what a good story does? And so I think that's excellent. I think
01:01:44.220there's different motivations for studying history though. And we've seen this throughout
01:01:51.120time with different figures, different historians in different eras. So you could study history
01:17:56.260I mean, we're seeing a little bit of this
01:17:57.320in the United States, but it's worse there, I think.
01:17:59.640And so Burke wrote about this and said, if you try to base a society on some innovative idea in the French Revolution, it was equality.
01:18:07.600Other ideological, modern, you know, ideology is a modern impulse, but other modern regimes have used different principles to base the regime.
01:18:16.460I think, you know, to pick one that's obviously the whipping boy way too much, but just as a contrast, I think, you know, the Third Reich was a lot more based on this kind of a racialist principle.
01:18:25.840It made race a more of an abstract thing, simplified it.0.59
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01:24:20.780All right, we're back. Welcome. Welcome back, everybody. John, I had one question for you
01:24:25.480before we move into some of the ones from the chat.
01:24:27.560And you can go in any direction you want with it.
01:31:53.100And there is a version of Lincoln that, uh, definitely exemplifies virtue.
01:31:58.440and my concern is what do you replace that with it leaves a gaping hole when you take all these
01:32:04.620things out um and who is who comes in to replace that so i've been in favor of uh trying to get
01:32:12.680back to some of the the truly noble uh people in our country's history who were who did great
01:32:20.100things and i mean i have a whole list of heroes i one time i wanted to do like a whole documentary
01:32:24.000series on heroes. But, you know, George Washington is like top of that list for me. And, you know,
01:32:29.420guys like Booker T. Washington and Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith and Lewis and Clark, you know,
01:32:34.240the list goes on and on, explorers, military guys, presidents. And, you know, for me, I'm talking,
01:32:40.800you know, personally, I want to elevate those heroes for my own children, because it gives
01:32:45.380them a sense of who they are. This is the country that you're part of. This belongs to you, this
01:32:49.800story uniquely to you. Uh, it's not a bigoted remark. It's just, um, it's just part of a
01:32:56.120tradition we can use a plural possessive about it's ours. And that's the reason we shouldn't
01:33:01.140be tearing down the monuments. It's because they're ours. And once, once that, once you
01:33:05.700have to justify these characters from history based upon some rationalistic principle and,
01:33:12.520you know, while they really weren't as bad as you think, because they, they, they were against
01:33:17.560slavery. They just didn't go all the way or something, you know, like I've seen that this
01:33:20.940is the neoconservative move is like, you know, they were all secretly egalitarians from the 21st
01:33:26.780century. They just couldn't tell you at that time. And it's like, well, you'll never gain,
01:33:32.300you have to focus on their virtues that they exemplified publicly, their sacrifice, their
01:33:36.440internal fortitude, you know, the cardinal virtues. And those are the things that are being
01:33:42.840lost and they're being lost. And the historical discipline is front and center on this. They are
01:33:49.540being lost to a new metric for virtue. So virtue is not internal disciplines, character. Virtue is
01:33:57.500now checking the right box when it comes to some egalitarian issue, some political issue. You don't
01:34:04.920have to even lift a finger. If you're on the right side of it, you are a good person. And someone on
01:34:10.280the wrong side of it they could be the greatest person in the world give all their money to charity
01:34:13.440love their wife they're terrible that's the metric that we're fighting and we just can't accept the
01:34:18.060metric and i'll say one final thing uh i don't know if you've noticed because this streams down
01:34:23.360to the popular level but like you know even like the napoleon movie i don't know if you saw that
01:34:28.140but josephine his wife he's so front and center she's his demise uh there's this emphasis in in
01:34:38.040history now on characters that were not as emphasized it really takes i'm just using that
01:34:42.420as one example but it takes away from the stature no no pun intended of napoleon uh because now the
01:34:49.340main character is not napoleon it's josephine she's the more significant more important character
01:34:53.860and we're doing this with everything to rip down the past and in that case i guess you could say
01:34:59.300he's a villain but um with heroes too uh i was just watching a movie was it last night or something
01:35:05.000I couldn't take it. Oh, I remember I started watching Gladiator 2. Big mistake. And within
01:35:11.080the first fight scene, there's this, you know, this chick who's, you know, she's just kicking1.00
01:35:15.960butt. And I'm just like, I, it's got great costumes. It's got great everything. I, and now
01:35:22.520I'm like, so out of it. Cause I know that's not accurate. And the reason it's not accurate is
01:35:26.580because they're pushing an agenda and it's subtle and stuff. But that's the kind of thing I think
01:35:32.840we have to fight. We have, we want accurate portrayals, but we also, we want to embrace
01:35:37.880the myth and the identity conferring nature of history, because without it, you don't have a
01:35:43.120society. Yeah. Well said. Here are some of the questions. So we got a couple of super chats from
01:35:50.920Jeff Halfley. We'll start with those. He said, would you say that being less subservient to the
01:35:58.020desires, agenda, and priorities of certain protected minorities, such as Jews or blacks,0.87
01:36:04.940et cetera, would be a key distinctive. I think he means of paleoconservatism.0.79
01:36:10.420Yeah, a key distinctive of being a paleoconservative. And then he followed it up.
01:36:14.780I'll just read his second one, another super chat. Thank you for that, Jeff. I have started
01:36:20.420calling the civil rights movement uh the blm movement 1.0 it seems to me that it is both
01:36:28.420good branding and true history to call the whole 70 plus year uh thing the blm movement um and then
01:36:38.260he has hashtag repeal mlk day what what are your thoughts on that john and michael i i would change
01:36:47.060the scope to go back to, you know, the Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction era, to be honest with
01:36:52.720you. We've been, this has been something that's, we've had these kinds of issues for a lot longer
01:37:01.760than just even the civil rights movement. And it comes, I mean, I don't want to get into all
01:37:07.120the complexities of it because we don't have time, but I think once the paternal relationships and
01:37:13.580labor arrangements and so forth were severed during reconstruction between mostly a slave
01:37:19.280class and their masters. What you've had since then is a degree of dependency on government and
01:37:25.680a looking to government as the solution to poverty and all these kinds of things. And so the
01:37:35.220government keeps throwing new innovative, uh, policies, uh, at not just the, the primarily
01:37:43.400black population, but now other groups that are in minority statuses. And so we, we, we've just
01:37:49.900had this for a long time in our country. Hmm. Yeah. I, Jeff, I basically agree with those
01:37:59.540comments like i think that that's that's um i think john's right like you can probably go even
01:38:05.720further back and it's been going you know it's even broader but um but if you're just saying
01:38:10.380like that there's a straight line from the civil rights movement to um from mlk to george floyd
01:38:18.080i basically agree i think john doyle we've had him on the show before i like him he's a friend
01:38:23.520And he said, you know, 50 years from now, neocons, neoconservatives will be saying, I'm a George Floyd conservative, you know, because what was George Floyd other than a conservative?
01:38:36.260I mean, he was protesting against fiat currency by using a fake $20 bill.
01:38:41.320And his final words, he was crying out for his mother, you know, right?
01:38:44.320There was that maternal, you know, familial instinct, you know, I'm a George Floyd conservative.
01:38:48.560and he was basically just saying that um that's how your your grandparents um and in some cases
01:38:54.980great grandparents would have felt at the time in the 60s someone saying i'm a martin luther king
01:39:01.700conservative they would say like what it would be as as slanderous right uh not but scandalous
01:39:11.120absurd um as saying i'm a george floyd conservative you'd be like what do you mean conservative the
01:39:16.700dude's a commie that's what your grandparents would have said god bless him may they rest in0.52
01:39:21.780peace you know but like and we all might be saying again now that it's being released that's true
01:39:25.760he was a commie and and hopefully you know hopefully the majority um you know things can
01:39:31.180change uh narratives history um even mainline consensus can change uh over time i think that
01:39:39.460like i think that's happened with napoleon right so like john briefly mentioned villain and that's
01:39:43.560And that is true predominantly, if you're looking back, you know, he has, from most of, from his time to ours, most of that has been viewed as negatively, as a villain.
01:39:57.440But I get the sense, and John, you can correct me if you think I'm wrong, but I get the sense that Napoleon, even with that movie that you cited, that it was atrocious.
01:40:06.240i mean it made napoleon a sniveling simp you know and and his wife you know wore the pants and
01:40:13.900and so it was you know it was what you would expect come to expect from hollywood but um but
01:40:20.100still even in that movie i think part of what's happening like with napoleon in in recent decades
01:40:26.120um is you know you go from from being demonized to humanized um and and that still doesn't
01:40:34.360necessarily mean that you're virtuous so that doesn't mean that everybody necessarily becomes
01:40:37.860a napoleon fan um but it just means that you're able to see like like any good story uh lead
01:40:44.520characters of stories are usually you know you have um like if you're writing a a a fictional
01:40:50.120narrative you have flat characters and you have you know rat more rounded you know where they
01:40:55.040have they're more than just one-sided they have multi-faceted you know he's um he's sneaky but
01:41:02.380he's also um but he's also um at the same time courageous and he you know and he like he has
01:41:08.860more than one virtue more than one characteristic there's some negative things there's some positive
01:41:13.460things he's a well-rounded character he's like and and what is that like like human beings
01:41:18.420like people people are like that people always have more than you can't just define one person
01:41:24.160in one way um people are complex and so i think you know that's happening with napoleon i think
01:41:31.620that probably will eventually happen even with, you know, he who must not be named, you know,
01:41:37.080Voldemort himself, Adolf Hitler. I think that, not that he necessarily is a good guy, I'm not
01:41:43.420saying that, but I do think 50 years from now, he probably won't be viewed in exactly the same
01:41:50.060light that he has for the last 50 years. I think that as time goes on, you move from, we must have
01:41:59.980this as a flat character one characteristic because it serves a certain agenda like the
01:42:05.900post-war consensus never again you know we can never have sovereign nations again we can never
01:42:11.220have patriarchy again we can never have nationalism again we can never because we you know we know when
01:42:15.980we know what happens when when you do that you know um like and so i think as time goes on and
01:42:21.420you're and you're further removed from the thing that that the the the first historians were worried
01:42:27.000about, and that's no longer a looming threat, then you can go to primary sources and you can
01:42:34.200write more well-rounded without being crucified in the public sphere of like, this guy is a Nazi,
01:42:39.080you know, or this guy is a Napoleon fan, you know, or this guy's a, you know, and none of that,
01:42:45.740you don't move from demonizing to lionizing, because that's just the contrarian spirit that
01:42:50.040we were talking about earlier. That can be just as thoughtless, that can be just as false, and not
01:42:54.020actually true history, but you, you can avoid both of those pitfalls, neither lionizing nor
01:42:58.800humanizing or lionizing nor demonizing, but humanizing and in humanizing, um, you can still
01:43:04.800say, and so-and-so on the whole bad guy or so-and-so on the whole good guy. Um, but you're
01:43:12.340just, but you're, you're, it's a more encompassing, you know, view. And so all that being said, my
01:43:18.300point is, um, I think that's happening right now. I think the Overton window is shifting at the
01:43:22.880speed of light, which I'm, I'm happy about. I think there will be over-corrections. And I think
01:43:26.980that, but overall, I think things have been terrible, terrible. We have been this progressive,
01:43:32.920we've been a society that chops genitals off of children. So like for me, like my biggest concern1.00
01:43:38.360in this moment, the year of our Lord, 2025, when we've murdered 70 million babies in their,0.59
01:43:44.160in their mother's womb and, and chopping off the genitals of children, my biggest concern is not,
01:43:49.660yeah but guys oh you know the woke right we might overreact a little bit you know we could hurt some
01:43:56.100like that like my goodness like to lose a plot at that level is just like i i don't i i mean that's
01:44:04.320to me that's astronomical i don't even know how to the person who is concerned about overreach
01:44:10.420from the right when we've been living with 70 years of of just total progressive post-liberal0.98
01:44:21.320leftist total domination i'm just like you like you're either very ignorant or or i think you're0.87
01:44:28.480subversive i think like i think you're on the other team i think you actually you like liberalism0.97
01:44:33.960you you're not you're not a christian or like steven wolf would always say isn't it convenient
01:44:37.860it isn't it wonderful that you know that uh the timeless politics of the bible just happened to
01:44:42.200perfectly match up with you know the post-liberal order you know and we've we've like and you're
01:44:46.460you're either that guy you're an ideologue and you're naive or you're you are a bad guy you're
01:44:52.840subversive so anyways all that being said i think that's that's happening with napoleon i think that
01:44:56.840will happen with mlk i think i i think that i think it's it's funny it's like john said like
01:45:02.660the further you get removed and you get further away from primary that that's true so like it
01:45:09.060gets fuzzy you lose some accuracy perhaps uh but you the other thing that you lose and i think this
01:45:15.440is true is you lose biases and you lose agendas and you lose like like the things that were
01:45:22.360happening right then as you're writing you know somebody's memoir and and he's still within living
01:45:27.720memory and everybody has a dog in the fight they have they have um a reason a strong reason to
01:45:35.420either lionize so and so or demonize so and so and the further you get removed from that um you
01:45:43.120you know in terms of the accuracy of the details that might get fuzzy but but uh you you lose
01:45:48.420details while simultaneously losing emotions you know and and in some sense you you may it may be
01:45:55.580possible to do even better history and so all that being said yeah i think i think that like
01:46:00.620straight line from mlk to george floyd yeah i think you know i i think that that makes sense
01:46:06.080you know a blm 1.0 to blm 2.0 and i think i think america's kind of done with wokeness um and i and
01:46:14.920honestly the guys who are you know sounding the alarm and clutching the pearls over the woke right
01:46:21.460um i've noticed john i'd be curious if you've noticed this but even recently just on x i've
01:46:26.660noticed you know your neil shin v's and guys um kind of changing their their typical uh tone in
01:46:33.360the way that they that they do public discourse to where it looks like genuine like like genuinely
01:46:38.980questioning like i don't understand why why why are people uh moving to that like like neil shin
01:46:44.300doesn't doesn't get it it's like the world is literally passing him passing him by the overton
01:46:49.140shifting so fast. And he's shocked. He can't believe it. He's like, I don't understand why
01:46:52.760people would, oh, it was about meritocracy. He was basically saying like, we said that
01:46:58.820meritocracy was great and we shouldn't give jobs to people just because they're minorities.
01:47:03.640And now people are saying that we shouldn't do meritocracy and that jobs should belong to
01:47:11.780heritage Americans. And he's genuinely perplexed. He can't figure it out. And it's like, yeah,
01:47:16.720I, because we're, we're realizing liberalism was a bad idea. There's a difference. There's a
01:47:22.660dynamic difference in, um, I'm going like, let the best man win. May the best man win among my
01:47:30.520community, my countrymen, um, my, you know, uh, my, my church members, you know, those kinds,
01:47:36.820that's very different than may the best man win on a global stage. Even if it means that all of
01:47:43.080india on h1b visas replace all of my countrymen and all of my natural citizens are unemployed0.99
01:47:50.920like for shinvi it's the same it's like tomato tomato meritocracy knows no bounds across the0.78
01:47:57.480board you know like let the best man win and if that means you know that uh the vec is right and
01:48:02.940that americans just watch too much boy meets world then you know tough luck for americans where it's
01:48:07.580like like even the idea of nepotism becoming this like demonized thing it's so so bad where it's
01:48:12.360like every other generation like you would you would have looked at them and said like oh uh
01:48:17.440you're going to hand the business over to your kid uh the family trade is going to stay with0.94
01:48:21.180your family of course to do anything other than that would have been frowned on as like0.92
01:48:25.640you selfish prick you know they wouldn't have said boomer because boomers weren't alive at the0.81
01:48:31.100time like they but they would have had some other term for selling the birthright of your children0.98
01:48:35.940and it would have been negative it would have been universally frowned upon whereas now we're
01:48:40.760like, well, that's nepotism. Yeah, well, nepotism is actually a biblical principle that you store up,
01:48:46.000you store up an inheritance for your children's children. That's not meritocracy. Inheritance
01:48:52.920for your children's children doesn't mean I'm just going to look for, you know, I'm now 65 years of
01:48:57.720age, I'm looking to retire, I have an inheritance to give, and I'm writing my will, and I'm just
01:49:02.780going to look and see, you know, who's the brightest, you know, the brightest young man
01:49:07.500out of the bunch, you know, and whoever has the most manners and a firm handshake and will make
01:49:12.300eye contact with me when I'm talking, then it doesn't matter if that's my natural offspring
01:49:16.260or my own child. I'm going to write his name in the will over and against my own. Like that's
01:49:21.900wicked. The Bible condemns that. And so, yeah, meritocracy has its merits, but it's not a
01:49:30.480universal one size fits all global across the board. And a lot of guys just, things are moving
01:49:36.320fast. That's my point. Things are moving fast. And if you're not careful, you will be sitting
01:49:41.380there like a deer in the headlights and say, what the heck is going on? And I think that that's
01:49:45.980happening from MLK to, you know, historical figures to, you know, to the post-liberal order
01:49:52.240being completely deconstructed and crumbling before our very eyes. And history, the actual
01:49:59.300history, what happened doesn't change. But the way we view it does, that changes. And I think
01:50:04.500it can change for the worse because things get fuzzy but can also change for the better because
01:50:09.500you have less biases do you guys have any thoughts on that john sure i feel like uh i i don't want
01:50:19.340to hog here i talked a lot uh but yeah if you don't have anything to share michael um i think
01:50:26.380that the needs of the moment very much favor a strong in-group preference especially for american
01:50:33.420citizens. And as you surveyed some of the figures you were just talking about, Napoleon, Hitler,
01:50:38.980I mean, Hitler was a figure that Europe united to defeat. And I think this has been a dream since0.98
01:50:48.240I actually think World War I is much more significant than World War II, to be honest
01:50:52.040with you, as far as setting the ground. I actually would be content with a post-war narrative and it
01:50:58.600being World War I, but that's another story. I think that the League of Nations and the trend
01:51:03.100towards the globalism we see now, there's been a thirst for uniting Europe and uniting the world,
01:51:10.640but Europe, you know, specifically to be the genesis point of this. And Hitler was one of the,0.82
01:51:17.560I think, commonly shared foes that a lot of these nations had. And this served a purpose. And then1.00
01:51:23.000you have the Cold War. So now Russia becomes the villain. And you have NATO. And I think that0.88
01:51:29.900Um, this has been a need in the moment, according to a lot of elites they've wanted.
01:51:35.620And I think maybe we're talking about on a popular level, really.
01:51:37.980What did, what do people feel in the moment?
01:53:07.620And that's why I think you can even have guys who have been dead for a long time.
01:53:12.200You know, even like someone like Thomas Aquinas, there's a lot of, you know, aversion to Thomas
01:53:18.020Aquinas, but I don't know if I've seen, maybe someone has, and I haven't seen it, but if
01:53:22.280some of the theologians who are upset about this have asked the question, why is Thomas Aquinas
01:53:26.280making a comeback? Have you thought about the circumstances we live in and why someone might
01:53:31.000be interested in natural law in these circumstances? Makes a lot of sense if you just
01:53:36.080think about it. He's a character that was alive a long time ago, but he was significant in his,
01:53:42.960obviously, his thinking on natural law. So I think it's important to just sit down for a moment,
01:53:47.620think through the needs of the moment the times in which we live and oftentimes that's how i at
01:53:53.060least try to make sense of the world i live in it don't always get there 100 but it helps that's
01:53:58.880super helpful john i didn't even i didn't even make that connection like in a time where um
01:54:04.200in a time where our world can't tell you the difference between a boy and a girl
01:54:10.700a guy who is known for natural law might make a comeback yeah there you go like the most obvious
01:54:17.700thing ever yeah that totally makes sense yeah uh here's a question for you john somebody else
01:54:21.920is the the handle there he says uh how would you prevent that logic uh so what you said earlier
01:54:27.880about like abraham lincoln you know there's a there's a traditional version and then there's
01:54:32.640more of the nefarious you know tyrant version and and i i'm with you i don't i don't he's to me like
01:54:38.780I think there are good characteristics, but on the whole, I'm not a huge fan, but, um,
01:54:43.460but he, say it again, what? He's an awful guy in almost every level. Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry.
01:54:52.240Yeah. So, but with that, this, I thought this was a thoughtful question from somebody else.
01:54:56.340He says, John, how would you prevent that logic from applying, uh, to keeping MLK statues,
01:55:01.880right? Like, so, so do, you know, like if, if the files are released and they, they have been,
01:55:07.740and you know you're reading it and i i did some of the reading on on that actually uh virgil walker
01:55:12.160you know posted it and um and i was doing some of the reading and yeah he's he's a commie who
01:55:17.080was funded what's that are they released no not for virgil posted stuff that had been released
01:55:23.240previously but the new stuff will not be released for what 42 days now at this point okay okay but
01:55:28.760when those are released i was like no i missed it yeah no no no when when it's released and and
01:55:34.680we likely find out that it's just i i'm i'm anticipating we will find out it's just as bad
01:55:40.040or worse than what we thought i don't think it's going to be released and we're like oh he was
01:55:43.480great you know but um it's like all right here's a communist who turned the american people against
01:55:49.220each other and blah blah blah um what would you say john uh do we take his statute out
01:55:55.960yeah so i was careful to say when i was talking about lincoln and i think there are some
01:56:03.940Most people you can find qualities to admire. And I think there are some in Lincoln. But Lincoln is, I think, he's a kind of a conniving lawyer, in my opinion. A deceitful guy. I think that he's responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
01:56:24.960um obviously you know we don't have to go through all that but i i think that um
01:56:28.640he at some point i would like to see his uh stature his status in american society re-evaluated
01:56:38.460but at the same time i know that nature of pours a vacuum and so if i don't have strong virtues
01:56:46.440if there's a um this is part of the appomattox post-appomattox consensus if you want to
01:56:52.920called that, or the reconciliation motif. It used to be called the reconciliation narrative, but
01:56:57.600Robert E. Lee's a hero, so is Abraham Lincoln, and the abolitionists were kind of bad guys.
01:57:02.860John Brown was a bad guy. That was that reconciliation motif that when we were born,
01:57:08.040all of us would have, we would have inherited that to some extent. I think the woke guys have
01:57:12.700tried to change this all to bring in a very neo-abolitionist interpretation of all this, but
01:57:16.520that was the narrative that for a century, Americans believed about that conflict.
01:57:21.720And so Lincoln in that narrative was lionized and given honest aid. He's got these attributes he didn't really have. He wasn't a very honest guy, probably an atheist.
01:57:31.020And I think that if we're going to take him down, if we're going to, or not take him down,1.00
01:57:42.480but he was a president, but if we take his status down, that he's not as someone to be
01:57:47.540as admired, we're going to have to think through what heroes we have to admire that exemplify
01:57:59.780So let's say, hypothetically, in 10 years, everyone, this is not going to happen.
01:58:04.240But if everyone thought MLK was this super conservative, like a real traditional, biblical, conservative Christian guy, and people respected him for it, and he had fidelity to his wife, and we all want to be faithful to our wife with MLK.
02:07:28.880And when it's like, you know, and meritocracy is a good word,
02:07:31.940but now meritocracy, it's not just applied
02:07:33.680to may the best american win it's may the best dude in india halfway across the world um and
02:07:40.540he's not even necessarily the best but we'll say he's the best because we can pay him half the wage
02:07:44.800that is in like may that form of meritocracy die a trillion deaths all right we got to land the
02:07:52.200plane john any final thoughts from you plug your stuff for sure but give us any final thoughts
02:07:57.160i think history is interesting it's important it confers identity uh it's it's the story of people
02:08:05.520and we see it in the bible and the stories of the old testament of course are for our own
02:08:09.620instruction and so i think we take our example from what god has already laid down through the
02:08:14.860authors of scripture and that's an encouraging thing for budding historians out there he used
02:08:19.800actual human beings in their own vernacular to write down the accounts of the past and what
02:08:28.420God has done. And in a certain way, that's what you're doing when you, I think, rightly approach
02:08:33.580history. You are looking at the unfolding providence of God. This is all God's story.
02:08:38.920I know it's cliche, but his story, history, right? I mean, it really is. And I don't believe
02:08:45.840what many historians have, especially since the modern period, that this is just molecules
02:08:54.200bumping into each other and there's no really rhyme or reason. Or on the other end, we are
02:09:00.700approaching some great enlightenment of some kind because of human achievement and scientific
02:09:04.920innovation. I think what's happening is the Lord is through every age, every generation,
02:09:12.920leaving himself with a witness. There's always going to be faithful men and women. There's
02:09:17.480always a church. There's always things that he's in the business of doing, setting things up. And
02:09:23.580it doesn't really matter what flavor of eschatology you believe in. And you may think
02:09:27.660we're leading to different areas in the short term, but in the long term, he is setting up
02:09:32.120his own reign and men will be without excuse. And so in the meantime, while we're here in this
02:09:38.980temporal world, you know, let's, let's enjoy it. Let's honor the, the men and women who have come
02:09:44.720before us, who, uh, I mean, I, I just, yesterday, one of the songs for my album, this is where I'm
02:09:49.000going to start plugging stuff, but you go to johnharristunes.com after I think Saturday's
02:09:53.540the first, so Saturday, it's all going to be there. Um, patrons already have access to it, but
02:09:58.440it's a song about my grandfather, you know, and he's dead now and it's history. It's, it's, uh,
02:10:04.720You know, he was born in 1922. And it's so special. I was just crying, even trying to put this together, looking at old pictures of him. I mean, that's, I think it's a powerful thing. And as Christians, we can't abandon that field. So that's my plug for getting involved in history. And I had a great time at Liberty University's history department. If you're trying to find a good history department, I've heard the one at Hillsdale College is pretty good for history.
02:10:31.440So find a good department if you want to get some training on that.
02:10:36.280And what's the last thing I should plug?
02:10:39.800Go to my podcast website, johnharrispodcast.com, and you can find my books and everything else.