The NXR Podcast - THE LIVESTREAM - We’ve Been Lied To About History

00:00:00.000 Leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform.

00:00:03.960 I get it. It's annoying. Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.

00:00:07.660 When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm

00:00:12.040 so that our podcast shows up on more people's newsfeeds.

00:00:16.260 You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.

00:00:21.860 We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.

00:00:26.800 the last decade has seen an explosion in history related podcasts shows like the rest is history

00:00:34.560 receive approximately 12.5 million downloads per month proving that people are hungry to know what

00:00:41.540 really happened in the past our history shapes our understanding of who we are as a nation

00:00:47.920 as communities and even as christians but with so much information at our fingertips conflicting

00:00:55.340 narratives, revisionist accounts, and even long-buried truths finally coming to light,

00:01:01.380 how do we sort through all of this to find out what's true? This episode is brought to you by

00:01:08.520 our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and Reese Fund, as well as our Patreon members

00:01:14.280 and our faithful donors. You can join our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash

00:01:20.440 Right Response Ministries, or you can donate by going to rightresponseministries.com forward slash

00:01:27.860 donate. Today, we'll explore the erosion of trust in our institutions, the value of tradition that

00:01:35.720 so many have dismissed, and why it matters that we do the hard work of uncovering our history.

00:01:42.240 Stay tuned with this episode, especially as we welcome paleoconservative Christian perspective

00:01:49.540 from John Harris to the show. Tune in now.

00:02:06.660 All right, welcome back. Here we are. It is Monday afternoon, a little after 3 p.m. I'm joined by

00:02:11.740 Michael Belch. Our very own Wesley Todd is not with us today. He's traveling, but we'll see him

00:02:16.680 on Wednesday, Lord willing. And as I just said in that introduction, we're going to be joined today

00:02:21.960 by special guest John Harris from Conversations That Matter. And Michael has outlined today's

00:02:28.260 episode, so I'm going to hand it to him to kind of flesh things out and lay a little bit of the

00:02:32.220 framework. But basically what we're going to be delving into is how do we know what's true?

00:02:37.960 We cannot progress unless we can stand on the shoulders of giants that came before us,

00:02:44.180 unless we can learn certain lessons from the past.

00:02:47.800 And whenever we do learn a lesson,

00:02:49.260 whenever there is positive developments within the providence of God,

00:02:53.220 we want to be able to seal those into our conscience as we move forward as a society

00:02:59.680 so that we keep those lessons

00:03:01.880 and that we don't have to constantly be reinventing the wheel with every generation that passes by.

00:03:07.040 You've seen this even theologically outside of politics and culture,

00:03:10.920 But 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.

00:03:35.100 but one of the constant ones uh just constant scrutiny re you know scrutinizing again and

00:03:41.500 again and again and again decade upon decade upon eight over the the 20th century was um in regards

00:03:48.620 to scripture the inerrancy of scripture and how do we know that you know this is really the word

00:03:53.100 of god and that we got the manuscripts right and then we got this and we got that um and what i've

00:03:59.020 i've noticed is that if you're not careful um you essentially can you know you can just do the work

00:04:05.700 that generations have already done and and waste your entire life where you know by the the end of

00:04:11.780 your life you're 80 years old and and you're sitting there and you're like yeah the king james

00:04:16.200 turns out is just fine um could have i could have actually just been reading it and doing the you

00:04:22.920 know actual theological work and ironing out you know new things and applying god's word to society

00:04:28.980 and to politics and to culture but instead um i spent my entire life you know because i thought

00:04:34.800 that maybe um maybe the entire canon of scripture was a psyop you know and so so have we been lied

00:04:42.820 to that's kind of what we're going to be getting into have we been lied to yes um have we been

00:04:47.600 especially lied to in our generation has the 20th century been uniquely, uniquely suppressed

00:04:55.900 aspects of history and things like that to pull the wool over our eyes.

00:05:02.740 I think virtually every generation has probably had that where elites are hiding certain things

00:05:08.160 from the public. So I don't know if it's unique, but yes, I think there's been a lot of deceit,

00:05:13.060 things that have to be uncovered, but we, we want to be careful not to just simply become

00:05:17.720 contrarians. It's one thing to be a, a conspiracy theorist, you know, within reason to say, well,

00:05:25.460 I, you know, I don't know about masks. I don't know about, you know, jabs. I don't, I don't know

00:05:29.620 about this. I don't know about that. Well, you know, a lot of the conspiracy theorists have

00:05:35.560 ultimately over the last few years been proven right again and again and again, right? The old

00:05:41.000 adage is the difference between a conspiracy and the truth is about you know three to six months

00:05:46.140 you know so um certainly uh that has paid off well to be uh suspicious uh but a contrarian

00:05:53.380 in my assessment i like that word i think it's helpful contrarian versus conspiracy theorist

00:05:59.100 somebody who's conspiratorial basically is just acknowledging elite theory and that elites at

00:06:06.380 times lie. And in our society, as we've moved more from a republic, you know, to an aristocracy and

00:06:13.200 more from that, even to an oligarchy with, I think, nefarious elites, then that's probably a good

00:06:18.320 instinct. And it's not always going to make you right. But I think more often than not, you'll

00:06:23.860 do well to be suspicious of what your elites are telling you. But a contrarian, a contrarian is

00:06:32.140 different a contrarian is not just conspiratorial a contrarian basically ascertains the truth at

00:06:39.200 on any given topic at any given time by simply taking the minority position right like you just

00:06:46.700 you just take the minority position so it's like uh the contrarian would say um covid um is a lie

00:06:53.780 uh and because that's a lie um so is everything else all all the way down um and and ironically

00:07:03.720 um the contrarian can find himself actually pushing certain narratives um that that are false

00:07:11.860 and even nefarious um so all right this will get me in trouble with some of our audience because

00:07:16.560 our audience likes us because we we push back on on mainstream narratives all the time post-war

00:07:22.060 consensus is a big example that we've been pushing back on a lot. But just for fun, kicks and giggles,

00:07:28.480 I'll just get into it real quick, the moon landing, right? So you can say, well, we were in a cold war

00:07:33.040 with Russia. And so, you know, we lied in order to win, you know, and the whole thing was fabricated

00:07:37.360 and we never really landed on the moon. You know, if we've landed on the moon, how come we haven't

00:07:41.000 been back? It's been 60 years, you know, but here's another alternative. I remember, you know,

00:07:51.480 as I, as I looked into the moon landing just for, for fun, it is fun and interesting to look into,

00:07:56.680 um, you know, some of the popular hip hop songs at the time, right. It's, it's the 1960s summer

00:08:02.300 of love. You know, you've got, um, you've got the sexual revolution, you've got the hormonal birth

00:08:07.480 control pill, you've got Vietnam, you know, and there's wars. And then you've got the civil rights,

00:08:11.920 um, movement that's happening at the time and all these different things. And one of the hip hop

00:08:17.620 songs that was popular at the time was uh talking about um basically um you know listing out every

00:08:24.960 grievance right um genuine or otherwise uh but listing every perceived you know alleged grievance

00:08:31.980 that you could list under the sun that in the in the vein of social justice that kind of stuff

00:08:36.760 and then the refrain that would repeat again and again after listing uh the grievances is but 0.93

00:08:42.600 whitey's on the moon right so you know black people are in the welfare lines you know can't 0.59

00:08:46.980 have bread to eat, but Whitey's on the moon. You know, we're, we're over here in Vietnam fighting 0.94

00:08:50.920 a war, you know, and, and, um, our, our young boys of our country are being slaughtered, 1.00

00:08:56.620 but Whitey's on the moon. Um, in other words, um, part of the friction that was going on at the time 0.79

00:09:03.280 was, well, we're giving money to NASA. We're spending all these tax dollars to compete with

00:09:08.220 Russia and a cold war to go and land on the moon. And, and what for, you know, what, what are we

00:09:12.780 going to what are we going to find on the moon that solves our problems here on earth and so

00:09:18.460 you know on one hand you could say well the the moon you know that whole thing is is just you know

00:09:23.760 nasa lying and i think nasa is suspicious um i think that there have been lies from nasa but

00:09:30.600 you can go so far that like while you're being you know hashtag based and you know like i i can

00:09:36.740 see behind the veil and i'm aware of what's really going on um meanwhile unknowingly uh what you're

00:09:43.640 actually promulgating potentially maybe i'm wrong you know but potentially what you're promulgating

00:09:49.040 is um you're actually giving in to the left and uh and making all their wishes and dreams come true

00:09:55.980 by once again agreeing that uh one of the white man's pristine accomplishments isn't true um

00:10:05.420 you know like we never made it to the moon uh whereas the alternative is what if we made it 0.98

00:10:10.400 to the moon we actually did have the technology because we weren't um idiotic with social justice

00:10:18.380 and uh and we actually um had a meritocracy and and we were pushing for american excellence

00:10:25.500 um and and what if the reason we've never been back is because uh we've been woke ever since

00:10:32.860 the Civil Rights Act, not just for the last five years since 2020 and George Floyd, but we've

00:10:39.060 actually been woke for 60 years. What if wokeness destroyed American excellence? And the reason we've

00:10:45.280 never been able to go back and actually land on the moon and the reason why we've lost, what if

00:10:50.380 we've actually regressed, right? That we actually did progress up to a certain point for centuries

00:10:56.300 within Christendom in Western civilization. And then we started regressing in the 20th century

00:11:02.200 because we lost sight of christ and we became overly altruistic with a a pseudo sense of

00:11:11.360 empathy and we traded the inheritance of our children and our children's children

00:11:16.160 for the privilege of consoling ourselves as we try to sleep at night and telling ourselves that

00:11:22.660 we're not racist so you know what i mean so you can be the guy who thinks your base saying we

00:11:28.260 didn't land on the moon meanwhile um there could be a whole bunch of illuminati leftists that are

00:11:34.840 laughing and say yes yes the the guy who's based uh we got we were able to convince even him uh

00:11:43.040 that white people haven't achieved anything right and he's actually now agreeing with us and it's

00:11:47.600 like oh snap how did i get there um you got there by being a contrarian a contrarian is not an

00:11:53.700 intellectual. You're not, it's not, it doesn't require intelligence. It doesn't require

00:11:57.840 thoughtfulness. It doesn't require that you actually do the reading. A contrarian is just

00:12:01.980 somebody who spent, you know, had, you know, maybe they have a part-time job and they, you know,

00:12:07.160 extra time on their hand. So they spent four hours on 4chan, you know, and they found out,

00:12:13.380 you know, here's the majority position, here's the minority position, and the majority must always

00:12:18.280 be wrong. But if the majority is always wrong, you have to at least recognize we might be living,

00:12:25.840 and I would argue that we probably are, we're probably living in a generation, a particular

00:12:29.420 time, especially in our particular place, the West, where on most things, not all, but on most

00:12:35.440 things where there's a majority consensus because the majority is apostatizing from Christ, I think

00:12:40.740 the majority is wrong a lot of times. Even now, as bad as our particular generation is, I don't think

00:12:45.960 It's always, but I think there are a lot of times, and I would be willing to argue maybe

00:12:50.120 even over half of the time, most of the time, the majority is wrong.

00:12:53.320 But if you take that position always, which contrarians do, then you would actually have

00:13:00.560 to agree.

00:13:01.360 This is the problem is, okay, well, which majority am I going to go against?

00:13:06.720 At what time?

00:13:07.680 Because the majority right now would say, well, the dark ages were terrible, and they're

00:13:11.520 burning witches, you know, and everybody is oppressed by Christianity and by, you know,

00:13:17.300 the clergy. And it was just this horrible, horrible time. Whereas at that time, the majority 0.52

00:13:25.200 would disagree. The majority during those centuries would say, no, Christendom is great.

00:13:31.840 We love Christ. We love his church. We're making incredible advancements. We've pushed back on the

00:13:39.280 darkness and on driven literal demonic spirits out of Northern European tribes and places and

00:13:47.560 the Americas and all this kind of stuff and making incredible progress, incredible discoveries and

00:13:53.320 charting new maps and innovation and inventions. And so, I'm of the persuasion that I think that

00:13:59.860 the whole idea of the Dark Ages is a psyop. I think that the Dark Ages was actually a golden age

00:14:05.380 and that the Great Enlightenment is actually the dark spell that has come over the West,

00:14:11.300 and that if anything, we're in the dark ages now. But my point is that to come to that kind of

00:14:19.500 thoughtful position, you can't arrive there by just putting your finger in the wind, right?

00:14:25.960 You can't just do the opposite of Joe Biden. Joe Biden just, you know, well, where are the winds

00:14:30.900 blowing? I'll go with them. The contrarian just says, where are the winds blowing? I'll go the

00:14:34.780 opposite way neither one is thoughtful neither one is strategic neither one is is necessarily

00:14:40.560 siding with the truth one is just going with the people and the other one just goes against the

00:14:45.700 people but the one the contrarian who goes against the people um what you basically have to assert

00:14:51.340 is um you have to assert that the people have always been wrong so you you basically what you

00:14:56.400 have to you essentially this is what it comes down to you have to say christendom never happened

00:14:59.920 because Christendom asserts that there was a time when the majority of people actually were right,

00:15:08.500 generally right. They actually were aligned with Christ, with the scripture, with Christian values.

00:15:14.720 There was a general sense of the populace, the majority of the populace that was going in the

00:15:21.160 right direction. But the contrarian would have to say that humanity has always got it wrong,

00:15:25.660 That 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.

00:15:38.840 And 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.

00:15:50.560 And so you just, you always go against the majority because the majority is always deceived.

00:15:57.580 That 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.

00:16:08.780 that whatever christ did in his his earthly work um it was not significant enough to produce

00:16:14.660 one time period in one culture where the majority of people aligned with him right that's basically

00:16:22.860 your position like you may not spell it out like that but that's what you actually have to assume

00:16:27.620 and i don't assume that we're both post-millennial we believe christendom is a thing that it happened

00:16:32.900 We believe that right now we're in a significant dip, 80-year dip, arguably 130-year dip,

00:16:39.920 arguably 300-year dip if we're going back to the Enlightenment.

00:16:43.260 So dips can happen.

00:16:44.360 They can be severe.

00:16:45.160 They can be widespread.

00:16:46.180 They can have longevity.

00:16:47.880 We think we're in a Christendom crash.

00:16:50.900 But we believe that it did happen.

00:16:53.100 And because it did happen, we believe that by the grace of God, it could happen again.

00:16:57.360 and in those Christendom shining moments, a contrarian mindset will not actually serve you

00:17:06.600 well because there are, God actually does sometimes send revival. There actually are times where the

00:17:12.700 majority of a culture loves Christ and his word and his truth. And if you're a contrarian in those

00:17:17.880 moments, then you're going to find yourself siding with demons because demons are actually at that 0.94

00:17:24.020 moment in that place the ones who are losing and getting their butts kicked so the contrarian can

00:17:28.500 never celebrate anything right everything that happens on the public stage by virtue of it being

00:17:34.160 public must be wrong right so the contrarian has well you know if you're wondering what's a

00:17:40.940 contrarian i can say it as simply as this the contrarian is the insufferable individual who

00:17:46.100 over this last week has been, you know, with his 17 different anon accounts, you know, like

00:17:54.520 Trump just freed, you know, 23, you know, pro-lifers, including, you know, a woman in her

00:17:59.740 70s with cancer who's going to die alone in a jail cell away from her husband. But this is still

00:18:04.800 somehow a loss, you know, or, you know, he just, you know, cut off, you know, got us out of the

00:18:11.700 WHO the very thing that you as a contrarian were all about how the WHO is terrible you know five

00:18:17.180 years ago with COVID and I was right there too because because we had reasons for that it wasn't

00:18:21.920 just being a contrarian we had reasons for explaining the WHO is corrupt but but now because

00:18:27.100 you're a contrarian you can't say well WHO bad in 2020 we shouldn't have been a part of it now

00:18:33.360 Trump pulls us out of it but the contrarian has to say that somehow both are bad in the WHO bad

00:18:39.060 out of the who still somehow bad right right because because both were the majority position

00:18:46.320 in 2020 majority position is trust the who well i was against that um because of reasons not just

00:18:54.520 because it was the majority and now you know with trump taking us out of the who that's now a

00:19:00.780 majority position by by virtue of the majority voting trump into office um i'm actually for that

00:19:06.560 decision because i'm consistent it was bad and it's still bad and so therefore it's good that

00:19:11.180 we're out but the contrarian can't ever celebrate anything anything that happens that has majority

00:19:17.220 appeal must be wrong that's not being conspiratorial because there really is such a thing as

00:19:22.900 conspiracies but that's not merely conspiratorial that's a contrarian and a contrarian is just as 0.99

00:19:30.520 dim-witted, just as dull, just as thoughtless as the sheep. He's, you know, the sheep that just 0.99

00:19:37.960 follows the herd. The contrarian is the one who just doesn't follow the herd, even if the shepherd

00:19:42.140 is actually, in this moment, leading the herd in the right direction. He just goes the opposite.

00:19:47.280 Both are thoughtless creatures and very sad. So, Michael.

00:19:51.980 Actually, Nathan, is it possible to go to the quotes? I know it's a slightly different order,

00:19:56.400 but it piggybacks off of what Joel was saying.

00:20:01.840 So I did some reading over the week.

00:20:05.480 A historian named Christopher Lash,

00:20:07.100 who wrote in the 90s and the early 2000s especially,

00:20:12.820 one of the things that was interesting to me about reading him

00:20:15.320 was that even through the 90s and the early 2000s,

00:20:19.400 he was already beginning to say some of the things

00:20:22.300 that we're saying now about the erosion of the middle class,

00:20:27.280 the idea that expectations of a better life for your children

00:20:34.180 are no longer attainable.

00:20:35.880 Some of the things, even some of the things

00:20:37.900 that we released last week with the real numbers about wages.

00:20:41.740 I mean, one of the things that was very refreshing to me

00:20:44.620 was that actually establishment people even,

00:20:47.020 he's a very well-known historian

00:20:49.060 and taught at major universities.

00:20:51.580 he was already talking about some of these things

00:20:54.320 back in the 90s and the early 2000s.

00:20:56.820 Sometimes we have this sense

00:20:58.740 that we are the first people to have noticed this.

00:21:01.900 And I think that sometimes we on the dissonant right

00:21:05.960 can think that we are a little bit like the atheist

00:21:10.160 who has finally figured out to ask the Christian,

00:21:12.820 yeah, but can God be all-powerful

00:21:15.280 and all-loving at the same time?

00:21:17.700 All-loving and suffering still being the world.

00:21:18.500 That's right, yeah.

00:21:19.160 And 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.

00:21:35.340 And 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.

00:21:49.160 They were seeing the buds of it, and we're seeing the blooms of it now, right?

00:21:52.860 So all of that is true.

00:21:54.580 All of that is true.

00:21:55.620 But Christopher Lash had some good warnings, I think, that were helpful for me.

00:22:00.080 So the first quote that I have from him is very short.

00:22:03.680 He simply said this, we are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

00:22:07.600 And he was saying that there's a tendency among some people to only be able to function

00:22:14.760 in chaos, right?

00:22:16.740 And if there is no chaos, then we have to figure out some way to create chaos.

00:22:22.800 Now, I don't think that we're necessarily creating chaos.

00:22:26.540 I think that what he said actually is true.

00:22:28.460 And society at large is addicted to change.

00:22:32.440 You talk about attention spans.

00:22:34.080 You talk about the fact that there are so many niche interests in music and in movies and television.

00:22:42.660 We are all addicted to change right now.

00:22:44.700 And I think it's a unique thing of our generation.

00:22:46.980 Part of what that does when thinking about history is it separates us from the idea that

00:22:52.440 there could be timeless principles in history, right?

00:22:55.520 And since we are so unsettled, and since life for us is constant change, constant upheaval,

00:23:02.180 we kind of assume that there is no actual sort of pillar that we can look back to in

00:23:08.840 history.

00:23:10.000 Tradition ought to be mistrusted or doubted.

00:23:15.860 Even the paleoconservative impulse

00:23:17.700 that a lot of people, I think, rightly are gravitating towards

00:23:21.080 can be mistrusted.

00:23:23.060 Well, how could we trust a tradition, right?

00:23:26.820 That's something that's gonna let us down as well.

00:23:29.660 There was a second quote from Lash

00:23:32.080 that I wanted to read also.

00:23:33.780 I think this was really insightful.

00:23:36.360 So he's speaking of being disillusioned,

00:23:38.820 which I think he was getting at something similar to contrarian,

00:23:42.480 where the idea that nothing can ever be decent

00:23:46.360 or there can be really no optimism, no hope, right?

00:23:50.900 Whatever is going on is the worst thing that's ever happened.

00:23:53.260 And whatever the modern message is, is the wrong message.

00:23:56.960 And so he said this about disillusionment.

00:23:59.140 And I think by extension, a little bit of contrarianism that we're talking about.

00:24:03.100 He says, disillusionment originates in an impulse that is anything but quaint

00:24:07.540 and has very serious consequences,

00:24:09.840 not the least of which is to prevent an understanding

00:24:12.300 of vitally important matters.

00:24:14.340 It betrays a predisposition to read history either,

00:24:18.040 so two options, as a tragedy of lost illusions

00:24:21.120 or as the progress of critical reason.

00:24:23.860 And he disagrees with both of those.

00:24:25.700 He says history is not just lost ideals

00:24:28.620 that can never be recovered.

00:24:30.360 And history is not the unconquerable progression

00:24:33.600 of reason and improvement.

00:24:36.780 That's kind of what I was saying just a moment ago in the beginning of the episode of being a post-millennial.

00:24:41.760 And I even see somebody in the chat, Daniel Voller, who's asking great questions.

00:24:45.940 Daniel, we're glad that you're here.

00:24:47.480 But he's basically saying, like, how in the world could you believe that Christianity is in a better place today?

00:24:52.360 And you may have tuned in late, Daniel, but if you were listening earlier, I was arguing precisely the opposite.

00:24:59.700 I don't think that Christianity is in a better place today than it was in the 1800s or the 1600s.

00:25:06.540 or the 1500s. I don't. So we just don't think it's that simple. We don't think that it's

00:25:13.400 constantly digressing or constantly progressing. We think that there are, like the stock market,

00:25:20.540 there are dips and spikes along the way. Now we're post-millennial, so we think the overarching

00:25:23.960 trajectory is up, but that doesn't mean that there aren't large swaths of history in certain places

00:25:31.980 and at times within the province of God, it may not just be in one place, but in many places,

00:25:37.360 like the entirety of Western civilization for arguably 300 years. I actually said that exactly.

00:25:43.600 I said, if you're tracking all the way back to the enlightenment, then you're looking at,

00:25:46.820 you know, 300 year dip. And we would be, Michael and I would be the first to recognize that we are

00:25:53.500 in a dip. But we're also willing to recognize that it has not constantly been a dip. It has

00:26:01.260 not been a 2000 year long constant dip from the coming of christ um and it's like well but you

00:26:07.120 know another question i saw in the chat was like well what are your metrics okay well um we we could

00:26:11.820 do a lot of metrics but you know we'll just start with the spiritual ones because that's usually

00:26:15.220 what guys are getting at is like well your metrics are going to be you know um long long

00:26:19.660 gating uh lifespans you know or um you know like people are living longer you know or eradicating

00:26:24.900 you know certain diseases or um maybe it's innovation and architecture building cathedrals

00:26:30.800 you know, instead of grass huts, you know, or inventions like airplanes, you know, or sanitation

00:26:35.980 and sewers. And okay, yeah, there's all that. I think those are legitimate metrics. But here's

00:26:41.140 another one, if we want to just do the spiritual one, because a lot of guys sometimes will use that

00:26:44.760 as an opportunity to Jesus juke and say, well, the only true metric is disciples of Jesus. Okay,

00:26:48.980 fine. That's a good one. Let's go with it. At the time of Christ's earthly ministry,

00:26:54.080 um the disciples of jesus were very few that's right um the majority of the crowd is yelling

00:27:00.840 crucify him right i mean jesus jesus died the the sheer fact that jesus was nailed to a cross

00:27:07.900 was because the majority of the people at that time were against him and today we have billions

00:27:15.300 of christians and even if you want to be you know a little bit more careful with that number and say

00:27:20.820 well, I don't think they're all genuinely Christians. Well, yeah, they probably aren't 1.00

00:27:23.920 all genuine Christians. But still, we have, it's like, I think 3.2 billion Christians,

00:27:30.700 something like that. So let's say 1 billion. Well, that's still too much. Okay, let's say

00:27:33.920 100 million, right? Can we even say that 3% or 0.3% are genuine Christians? Well, that's still

00:27:44.920 a ton of Christians. You might say, yeah, but the overarching population of the world has

00:27:50.060 has multiplied, you know, over and over and over again. Any way you slice it, you can look at these

00:27:55.140 metrics. It's not just that we have more, numerically more Christians, but we also have

00:27:59.820 a much higher percentage of the world population that are Christian than in previous time periods.

00:28:07.480 And so whether you're looking at the spiritual metrics of discipleship and conversion, or

00:28:11.480 whether you're looking at some of the more practical and physical, you know, metrics of

00:28:15.840 innovation and lifespan and health and eradicating diseases or all these different things.

00:28:23.980 Again, we're not saying that history doesn't have dips along the way and at times significant dips

00:28:29.020 in multiple countries in the West all at the same time for three centuries. That can happen and we

00:28:34.900 would argue that it has. But we would say the overarching trajectory is up. And what I don't

00:28:40.640 want 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

00:28:44.680 dip. And you've been in a dip for so long that you've basically resolved that you can only go

00:28:53.260 down. And then what happens is that eventually the market does reverse and you miss an incredible

00:28:59.640 buying opportunity for long-term investment. And I'm just wondering out loud right now,

00:29:07.280 Trump is no savior. I don't even think he's a Christian, but I'm incredibly grateful for him.

00:29:11.400 he absolutely had my vote if i could i would crawl over glass to vote for donald trump over

00:29:17.480 kamala harris my goodness like we are we are so blessed to have trump's a zionist yeah dude it's

00:29:24.160 2025 friend the year of our lord 2025 in america that's been steeped in dispensational zionism for

00:29:32.440 150 years. Trump is a Zionist? Yeah. I'm trying not to say something. There is zero non-Zionist 0.56

00:29:42.960 option. There is no non-Zionist option. Politics is the realm of the possible, not the perfect, 0.95

00:29:51.380 the possible. There is no possible outcome in the year of our Lord, 2025, in a nation steeped in

00:29:59.860 dispensational zionism for a century and a half that someone could win a presidential national 0.97

00:30:05.740 election and not be right some shade or form of zionist so what you're doing in politics

00:30:13.840 is you're taking the ingredients god gave you right it's it's like it's like your kids sitting

00:30:20.120 and crying at the table they're hungry and it's time for dinner and you're over there

00:30:26.540 pontificating and thinking and dreaming about a michelin star you know five course meal

00:30:33.560 but god in his providence has given you not those ingredients but he's given you some

00:30:40.420 there is some food by the grace of god in the pantry right and sometimes instead of thinking

00:30:46.360 about five star meals sometimes it's it's just time to cook dinner open the pantry open the fridge

00:30:53.020 see what you've got, and make the best dish that you can, because the family's hungry now.

00:30:59.100 The family needs to eat. And right now in the province of God, this last week has been far

00:31:06.620 more gracious than what we deserve as a country that murders babies by the millions. Are you

00:31:12.260 kidding me? 70 million? That doesn't even count all the different birth control and IUD and all

00:31:21.140 these different you know measures of of abortion beyond just going into a clinic but 70 million

00:31:27.340 arguably well past 100 million um babies murdered in the womb in the last 50 years and god gave us

00:31:36.300 trump right like we we deserve stalling god gave us trump far more gracious is is trump michelin

00:31:46.480 you know five star like no um but trump is food and the pantry and what we were looking at without

00:31:53.640 him was four more years of starvation yeah and so all of a sudden like conservatives one of the

00:31:59.640 things that we're gonna have to think is in terms of tailwinds right we're so used to headwinds like

00:32:04.540 oh the parallel economy and i need to you know homestead and like there's a lot of great virtues

00:32:09.600 that can be uh honed from these practices i'm not against any of them i think they're they're

00:32:13.740 generally good things. They're good hobbies. They're good for training your kids, have them

00:32:17.980 touch grass, get in the dirt, all these, there's plenty of good things. But right now, we actually

00:32:24.480 have a moment to wield power, to wield power. Is Trump the Christian that I want him to be? No.

00:32:31.680 But there are Christians like me, like Michael, who would not be able to step within a 50-mile

00:32:40.880 radius of the white house if kamala was president and trump may not agree with him on everything

00:32:48.100 but they can actually have his ear yep and they may be still the minority and few and far between

00:32:53.440 but it's way better than what we have had previously way better than what we've had

00:32:58.160 previously so i want to be hopeful and say all right we've been in a huge decline a huge dip

00:33:03.580 but right now there's some signs of life could this be a reversal i'm not saying it has reversed

00:33:10.100 Like 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.

00:33:18.080 Like, no, not even close.

00:33:19.500 There'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.

00:33:33.960 that solutions are at least within the realm of possibility, within our grasp, that a reversal

00:33:41.100 might be on the horizon. We've got some buy signals, again, to go back to investing terms.

00:33:47.140 We're seeing some buy signals. We've been on a major crash, but we're starting to see some

00:33:51.560 buy signals that the market might be reversing. And that, I think, is incredibly encouraging.

00:33:58.520 And if you're just a contrarian, if that's how you determine truth from falsehood,

00:34:02.420 then you have to look at everything from the election to all the executive orders to this

00:34:08.380 to that to the other and you have to somehow make it bad in other words you have to be nick fuentes

00:34:14.640 right right like he's been insufferable like oh you know uh 500 deportations a day and trump saying

00:34:21.640 that he's ramping up and going to be you know 1200 to 1500 um that's the worst thing in the world

00:34:26.740 that you know that won't do anything like okay then then just what do you like just sit on your

00:34:33.260 hands and just just go down with the ship right you know like what you might as like you might as

00:34:38.700 well like we've got to do something and i i think i think it was zerubbabel who it says there was

00:34:48.540 shouts of grace to it grace to it when he was holding the plumb line you know and like they

00:34:53.980 built nothing holding the plumb line is just like like the very beginning stages you haven't even

00:34:58.980 laid the foundation you're just kind of mapping it out it's like we're breaking ground on this

00:35:02.700 new building development and like we just basically we just brought the tractors out

00:35:07.240 and and we haven't built laid a single stone but but we're gonna start there's the signs of life

00:35:14.300 and and the people are shouting and then when they finish the the second temple we preach

00:35:19.000 through ezra but when they finish the second temple it's um yeah there's a mixed crowd and

00:35:24.020 some of them there's shouts of of uh cheering and joy and gladness and there's also profound

00:35:30.200 wailing and moaning and the ones who are wailing and moaning are the ones who are saying but it's

00:35:35.420 not as good as it once was they're the ones who who remember the formal former temple that was

00:35:41.040 superior in its glory the second temple wasn't as as magnificent um but then there's this younger

00:35:48.160 new generation that's excited because if you go back 80 years, it was 70 years in exile in Babylon,

00:35:56.340 but 80 years, the temple today is an inferior temple to the temple 80 years ago. And the older

00:36:03.260 men are bemoaning that fact. The younger men, they're looking back and saying, yeah, but 40

00:36:08.700 years ago, there was no temple at all. A temple is better than no temple. In our scenario, please

00:36:15.720 do not do not build a temple in in jerusalem no no no no more temples um the third temple is uh

00:36:23.840 christians the people of god living stones built together christ is a cornerstone um so you know

00:36:28.560 that was that was for then but the point is um something is better than nothing and the guys

00:36:34.100 who are just sitting around um above it all priding themselves i think it appeals i i really

00:36:41.460 the last thing i'll say i think it appeals to laziness i think it appeals to apathy because

00:36:45.100 the contrarian doesn't have to actually do anything. He can just, he can just boast in his,

00:36:52.160 you know, his illusion of being hot takes. Yeah, exactly. Just a hot take on everything. This

00:36:57.140 happens. It's bad. This other thing happens. That's looks like the opposite of the last thing

00:37:00.900 that was bad, but that's bad too. And this is bad. And, you know, the, you know, nothing ever

00:37:05.220 happens, bros, you know, nothing ever happens, bros have been having a tough time this last week.

00:37:09.800 You know, it's been, it's been hard for them, you know, send your thoughts and prayers to the

00:37:12.960 nothing ever happens, bros, because things have actually been happening, but they have to find a

00:37:17.060 way to say, well, but not really, you know, not really, nothing's really happening. But that

00:37:21.800 appeals because one, it means it's really kind of Gnostic in a sense. It's I am a part of this

00:37:28.020 minority elite people who have been enlightened. And I have the master key, right? I have this

00:37:35.060 one ideology that's like the master key that opens every single door. And so I know, I know

00:37:40.140 the answer to what's really going on behind every single thing, because I know this one issue. It's

00:37:46.280 my, it's not theology, it's ideology. I'm an ideologue. There's leftist ideologues. I'm actually

00:37:51.860 an ideologue also. I'm just, you know, not a leftist in this one regard, but I actually am

00:37:57.040 a leftist in other regards. Ironically, I just haven't realized it yet. And so I have my ideological

00:38:02.060 master key. I'm one of the minority, you know, enlightened individuals, this elite enlightened

00:38:07.160 group and uh and the beauty about is one superiority i'm better than everyone two um apathy um because

00:38:15.000 i actually don't have to do anything the only thing that i do is just boast about how i know

00:38:19.560 i know what's really going on oh you know what's really going on great um and so what are you

00:38:25.980 doing oh well that's that's you know well here's here's the neat thing is uh there's nothing to do

00:38:30.820 the end is nigh you know abandon your post it's like you know the guy the steward of gondor

00:38:36.460 abandon your post you know and and sometimes gandalf the white you know somebody with with

00:38:42.000 some some hope has to just come and knock that guy out and say don't listen don't listen to the 0.90

00:38:49.200 steward of gondor who's yelling abandon your post all is lost the end is nigh bonk him on the head

00:38:55.960 knock him out do gondor a favor and say no no no no call to battle call to battle are we losing

00:39:03.180 Yes. Can we win? Maybe. Let's try. All right, let's go to our first commercial break,

00:39:09.800 and then we're going to bring on John Harris. Our sponsor, Private Family Banking, wants to

00:39:14.000 help you with one money move that'll implicate itself in multi-generational wealth building

00:39:19.740 starting the first day. They help you to avoid taxation and to draw compound interest to your

00:39:25.800 money. Now, if you're a high net worth individual, someone who has maybe even $10 million in net

00:39:31.980 worth, then they can help you even more. W-2 workers, contract workers, business owners,

00:39:38.320 it's all about cash flow and making tax-deferred gains on all your money for the rest of your life.

00:39:45.640 Don't avoid this. It's a big move, but it's a great time to make it. Click the link below and

00:39:50.860 you can get on Chuck DeLaterante's calendar and he'll go over your background and what you want

00:39:56.080 to accomplish, and he's going to help model a program that exactly fits your needs. So go ahead

00:40:02.200 and send an email to chuck at privatefamilybanking.com. Again, that's chuck at privatefamilybanking.com,

00:40:10.400 or you can click the link below. Make a free discovery call now. America is a country that

00:40:16.080 was founded for the purpose of allowing Christians to do their duty before God and not to have their

00:40:19.860 consciences ruled by the doctrines and commandments of men. Reese's Fund exists in order to see the

00:40:24.700 Ten Commandments properly applied, not just as a plaque on the wall, but to actually be used in

00:40:29.580 business as though they're commandments from God that we're supposed to obey. Our goal is to find

00:40:35.020 businesses and to buy them and to build them up. We want to find manufacturing businesses and use

00:40:41.220 them to make sure that we can maintain our capacity to do things here. Reese Fund, Christian

00:40:46.440 capital boldly deployed we're back some would say we're so back we've got john harris from

00:40:56.160 conversations that matter john are you able to hear me can you hear me there he is he's looking

00:41:01.320 so right now i don't think john has volume but here's the thing john is tech savvy he's no boomer

00:41:07.680 i am a boomer in the technical and the technical realm i uh you know it was funny a while back

00:41:13.780 somebody like was like you know joel's commanding his anon army and you know he has all these you

00:41:18.240 know anon accounts or whatever you know and doing this and uh nathan our tech guy was just like he

00:41:23.000 was looking at it on x and just laughing he was like he's like literally they know um you don't

00:41:28.640 even you can't even manage your own one x account on your own without me helping you to log in from

00:41:34.660 time to time and figure it out so anyways um i am not very savvy but john harris is he runs a

00:41:40.900 whole operation. He's a one-man band. If you ever saw the guy clinging cymbals and playing a harmonica

00:41:46.600 and the guitar all at once. Yeah, exactly. That said, I'm boasting of John, but I don't

00:41:52.620 even see him on the screen. So I might be... Yeah, I know he can. I'm just ad-libbing a little bit

00:41:59.500 as we wait for him and singing his praises. I believe, this is my post-millennial hope again,

00:42:04.840 I believe that John Harris can figure out the tech problem. That's your post-millennial hope?

00:42:09.560 Yeah, this is it. My post-millennial hope is that John Harris is going to come on this show.

00:42:13.680 He's going to be able to hear us. So he's still trying to figure out, Nate, is there anything

00:42:17.020 that you can do on your end? Oh, I see him again. John, can you hear us?

00:42:22.120 Yes. Oh, snap. I was just, I don't know if you could hear me that whole time, but I was singing

00:42:27.060 your praises and saying, John is not a boomer. He will figure out the tech. He's going to come

00:42:31.640 on the show. It's going to work. Yeah, I forgot how to use Zoom, so maybe I'm a little bit of a

00:42:36.320 boomer. I didn't know if it was you or if it was us. A Zoomer in that case. I joined it now and I

00:42:44.380 can hear you. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming on the show. I'm going to give it to

00:42:48.360 Michael. He's outlined this episode. Michael and Wes kind of alternate. I talk a lot, as you know,

00:42:56.720 John. But Michael and Wes, they do the reading, as the kids say. I do some reading too, but

00:43:02.140 they're sharp. And so Michael has outlined this episode. Yeah, I think he's got some great

00:43:06.000 questions. And it's a lot of the stuff that John, you've been talking about, about like,

00:43:09.660 we want to do theology. We don't want to necessarily do a bunch of ideology. And that's

00:43:15.380 how we were framing it before you came on, just saying that like the contrarian, the way he would

00:43:19.620 do history is there's difference than somebody who has some measure of conspiratorial

00:43:26.880 you know, aptitude where they're like, yeah, I think COVID is way overblown. Or I think

00:43:32.640 George Floyd, this is fishy. But the contrarian doesn't just realize that there really is in

00:43:38.420 our world such a thing as some measure of elite theory. And sometimes there's conspiracies. And

00:43:42.480 sometimes our leaders lie to us. The contrarian is very much like the Democrat, the Sixers finger

00:43:48.020 in the wind. And then just always the only difference is they go the opposite way. They

00:43:51.600 always side with whatever the minority opinion is. And then with ideology, I think of it like

00:43:57.340 an analogy or illustration of the master key where it appeals to apathy. It appeals to laziness

00:44:03.960 because instead of doing the hard work of, you know, multivariant situations and reading multiple

00:44:08.620 sources and all this kind of stuff, you can find the one issue, right? Whatever the one issue is,

00:44:13.080 and that's your master key. And it's kind of even Gnostic. It's like, I'm a part of this elite 0.91

00:44:17.860 minority group that's been enlightened because I've had this one piece of revelation, you know,

00:44:24.100 Gnostic downloaded to me. It's become the master key. It's my ideology that opens every single

00:44:29.580 door and we can all do it. And a lot of times, if you're a Christian, it is actually, you take

00:44:36.020 a theological argument and make it ideological. And so you can kid yourself and say, well, I'm

00:44:41.140 doing theology. And I'll be the first to admit it. This is, you know, people are like, well,

00:44:44.400 Joel changes his positions.

00:44:45.560 Yeah, but Joel also admits when he's wrong.

00:44:47.240 So remember that one.

00:44:48.860 I've done it.

00:44:49.580 I've done it with both patriarchy and, you know this, John, I've done it with post-millennialism.

00:44:54.480 Post-millennialism, it's the answer to everything.

00:44:57.080 And now I'm like, oh, I still love my post-millennial brothers in Christ.

00:45:01.140 But, you know, like as the fault lines keep forming and shaping up, I'm like over here

00:45:08.160 and I'm like, gosh, but I have more in common with John Harris and Stephen Wolf and CJ and

00:45:12.140 none of them are post-millennial.

00:45:13.780 And I thought post-millennialism was going to be the master key that determined who's

00:45:17.880 on the team and who's not and who's right about everything and who's wrong about everything.

00:45:22.260 And I'm still post-millennial.

00:45:24.540 I believe it as my theology, but by the grace of God, I don't think it's any longer my ideology.

00:45:30.500 And so whether it's reading history or whether it's reading the Bible, all these kinds of

00:45:34.520 things, we don't want to be mere contrarians that just always take the opposite view.

00:45:38.400 We don't want to be ideologues.

00:45:40.560 We want to be thoughtful.

00:45:41.720 So all that being said, Michael has some great questions for you.

00:45:44.620 I'm going to give it to him.

00:45:46.620 John, thanks for joining us today.

00:45:48.080 I actually have been asking Joel for a little bit to be able to have us do an episode with

00:45:54.200 you.

00:45:54.680 And I know that you've got a lot of interests, but I was really curious to pick your brain

00:46:00.540 a little bit about some of the historical questions that we see surfacing.

00:46:04.200 And just to jump right into it, the thing that is a little bit overwhelming to me as

00:46:11.080 Joel 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.

00:46:19.200 Like, we need to go do more reading because there's just an overwhelming amount of information out there.

00:46:23.800 And it's impossible to do all the reading on everything.

00:46:29.020 And this is something that in the information age and now with the Internet is a particular difficulty of our time.

00:46:37.000 And that is, there is so much information available to the average student, consumer,

00:46:44.860 citizen, whatever you want to call it.

00:46:47.140 And like, I guess on one sense, like what do we do with the fact that you can, if you

00:46:56.220 read one particular area or you read another particular area or author, you can craft almost

00:47:01.800 any historical narrative that you want to, to fit kind of a preconception.

00:47:06.420 And when I think about us studying history and trying to learn truths from history, I

00:47:12.960 don't mean even necessarily historical truth, but trying to draw lessons from history, what

00:47:19.320 do we do with the fact that there is an overwhelming amount of information out there that if I

00:47:25.040 were to come to a conclusion on an issue, very easily Joel could come to literally the

00:47:29.380 opposite conclusion just by reading different authors.

00:47:31.820 I mean, this is something that I think that the average guy at home who's just trying

00:47:36.800 to raise his kids but also doesn't want to be duped and have the wool pulled over his

00:47:40.080 eyes, like, I think that this idea of the glut of information that we have and then

00:47:45.200 so much coming at us, well, now it's this.

00:47:48.060 Well, actually, now the new thing in history is this, and it can be overwhelming.

00:47:52.480 So I wanted to start there and just kind of pick your brain a little bit and let you launch

00:47:56.180 from there with the overwhelming amount of information.

00:47:58.420 What do we as Christian thinkers do with all of the possible information sources that we

00:48:04.460 could go to, and even the fact that many of these, they contradict with each other even?

00:48:11.380 Yeah, thank you, Michael, and thank you, Joel, and I appreciate the warm introduction and

00:48:16.700 welcome, and I don't, obviously, I didn't hear what you said when my mic was off, but

00:48:21.600 yeah, I know, Joel, we did have conversations.

00:48:24.700 um i think when i first went out there for your conference was it maybe three years ago now that's

00:48:29.680 hard to believe yeah couldn't have been i guess it was well it feels like that was so long ago

00:48:35.540 it feels like it was just yesterday but then sometimes it's like three years i'm like that

00:48:39.740 feels like it was 30 years ago so much has happened yeah i think as i was on my flight

00:48:45.220 out there i remember for some reason the sticks in my head i think it was karen swallow prior

00:48:49.180 had tweeted that you oh no no it was based on the conversation we had so this must have been

00:48:53.560 right after, but that we had 80, you know, you and I sat in a room and talked about some things

00:48:57.980 and she said we were human trafficking because that's right. We talked about her. It was very

00:49:03.300 strange, but now that's history. That's an historical record being three years ago.

00:49:07.700 And, uh, um, and I think, yeah, I mean, we've all gone through our cage stages. Well, I shouldn't

00:49:11.920 say all of us, but many of us, I know I've been in my cage stages on different things. Uh, Calvinism

00:49:17.160 was one of them. I thought, wow, this is the thing. This is, uh, this will determine everything

00:49:22.220 else just about. And if you believe this, it's the dividing line. I don't really care about other

00:49:26.560 issues as much. And then an issue comes along where the key doesn't fit and you realize,

00:49:31.980 oh, wow, that's not it because there's a bunch of Calvinists who are on the wrong side of this

00:49:35.580 issue. Clearly that wasn't the determining factor and they still are Calvinists. So

00:49:39.740 I think ideology is dangerous because it does blind us to facts that don't fit the narrative.

00:49:47.180 And I think with history, historiography is the proper word for it.

00:49:51.480 But I think with historiography, the attempt is to use the tools of the discipline, just

00:49:55.860 like hermeneutics, when you're approaching biblical interpretation, there's tools for

00:49:59.780 the discipline.

00:50:00.740 And you're trying to make a paradigm or discover a paradigm in which all the moving parts fit.

00:50:10.960 And the problem with ideology is you're not doing that.

00:50:14.540 you're just throwing out parts that don't fit your paradigm so you can keep the paradigm um

00:50:19.720 i actually i just before coming on here i noticed on x uh all of a sudden there was these guys

00:50:24.860 that um uh were saying well i don't want to get into the details of it but long and short of it

00:50:31.760 is that they very much admire the 19th century abolitionists and there are some things to admire

00:50:35.760 about certain 19th century abolitionists but they uh were very protective of uh the abolitionist

00:50:44.240 brand and they didn't want john brown to be an abolitionist because he's got a bad rap so they

00:50:48.720 an abolitionist and like that may seem like a very small thing and perhaps in the grand scheme it is

00:50:54.360 but i do think there is uh at least with some of the guys that were saying this kind of thing i

00:50:59.520 think there's an ideological impulse there to throw out the facts that don't fit the paradigm

00:51:04.320 brown was clearly an abolitionist uh he might not have been the flavor that some that you like but

00:51:09.220 he wanted to immediately end slavery. He didn't want compensation for the masters. That would

00:51:19.080 have put him in a category of being an abolitionist. All his associations were pretty much

00:51:24.920 with abolitionists. He was funded by abolitionists. Abolitionists are the ones who canonized him

00:51:30.980 after he died. Was he an abolitionist or was he not? Well, if we let ideology and

00:51:38.420 an attempt to rescue that brand determine the question then perhaps he's not but if we want

00:51:45.880 to be historically accurate and we look at the context of the time and we look at his views and

00:51:50.520 we compare them to other prominent abolitionists and so he clearly was and that's a pretty universal

00:51:55.860 perspective uh in historiography that's the same that's the same as like russell moore like i'd

00:52:01.660 love for him not to be a calvinist but he is yeah he is i mean what are you gonna do right

00:52:06.940 he's he's you know he's a lousy person but he is a calvinist you know and and to be fair to the

00:52:13.060 abolitionist um you know like in the same way that like uh the fact that russell moore is a

00:52:18.020 calvinist doesn't uh make calvinism untrue you know and and and so like john john brown being

00:52:25.960 an abolitionist doesn't make abolition abolitionism untrue you would have to on on the merits of the

00:52:32.440 arguments the substance you would have to flesh that out and and come to a conclusion but um but

00:52:38.360 the the point the larger point still remains there's not one issue be it calvinism or patriarchy

00:52:44.160 or post-millennialism or or um you know abolitionism or uh the jews or you know there's

00:52:51.440 there's no one issue that's the master key it's like and if you get this if you get this right

00:52:57.280 you'll get everything right and you'll always be on the right side of every political issue

00:53:01.580 cultural issue you know um that's just not the case unfortunately so i think it's an excellent

00:53:08.140 point i think to get back to the original question because i think i veered a little

00:53:11.240 i'm sorry about that uh there's so many sources out there so what do you do i think it's very

00:53:15.600 similar to biblical interpretation which we are all familiar with and i'm sure the audience is

00:53:20.580 when you're looking at the bible you can't read every commentary you can't look at every phd

00:53:25.600 dissertation that's been written on the passage that you're studying you can't look at every

00:53:29.680 archaeological artifact and so forth. So what do you do? You have to make some determinations.

00:53:34.740 Obviously, we have the Holy Spirit illuminating scripture for us. There's certain tools that I

00:53:42.260 would say go beyond the standard historiographical analysis that people use on secular documents and

00:53:50.040 so forth. But I still think the same principles are really at play. You're going to use common

00:53:55.920 sense. And when I mean common sense, I'm really talking about authorial intent. When you're doing

00:54:02.000 manuscript evaluations, earlier manuscripts, generally more accurate, but the majority

00:54:07.880 text, you have to take that into account. I mean, we understand these things, right? I mean, a lot

00:54:11.440 of this is common sense. We want to know the audience. We want to know the historical context

00:54:16.260 in brief. We want to know the greater and the larger context within the framework of scripture.

00:54:22.380 And also, I think how other faithful interpreters have viewed the same passages throughout time.

00:54:28.340 I mean, these are all things that we can look at.

00:54:30.340 I 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.

00:54:37.900 We could never have a rational understanding of anything.

00:54:42.600 but I think if we, if we approach history with the same assumptions, we approach the Bible,

00:54:49.980 we will be able to make sense of it. And that would include things like human nature. How do

00:54:55.780 humans normally behave? Now we have some theological assumptions that we bring to the

00:55:00.660 table. I think these are assumptions that we shouldn't dump overboard. Everyone has them.

00:55:05.440 They're going to have an anthropology as soon as they arrive at the task of even trying to figure

00:55:10.840 out what happened in the past so you know there's human nature uh there's certain like for example

00:55:17.180 um there are certain history schools that think that history is cyclical and other schools that

00:55:23.300 think it's linear and it's approaching something christians uh there's a little bit of both i

00:55:27.600 suppose you could say in christianity but in a cosmic sense we believe that we're actually

00:55:31.820 um and post-millennials will like this but we're approaching a consummation and god is he's writing

00:55:37.680 a story. And there's a mystery to it, but it's like a scroll being unrolled. And so we're leading

00:55:43.080 up to something. And so this is going to, I think, impact to some degree, the kind of history that

00:55:48.620 you do, these assumptions that you bring. So I guess you could call these philosophical

00:55:53.320 assumptions. And then, of course, there's the craft itself, and that would include the source

00:55:58.840 material. So we're going to weight different sources differently. Obviously, a secondary

00:56:03.900 source, meaning someone who's writing about an event that they were not there for. When I write

00:56:09.120 a history or an aspect of history I talk about on the podcast, I'm not a primary source if I wasn't

00:56:14.240 there for it. If I gave you a podcast on January 6th, I lived through it. I can tell you from my

00:56:19.940 perspective, I'm a source that has witnessed that. You were there, right, John? I was there. I smelled

00:56:27.220 the tear gas. The longer that event goes on, though, and so we hit 10 years, 20 years, 30

00:56:32.980 years, the more fuzzy it will likely be in my mind. Well, that's something we know about human

00:56:36.700 nature. So the source material, the video I made the next day is going to be more

00:56:41.020 I make in 10 years or so. So anyway, I'm just giving you some examples, but it's just like

00:56:52.820 hermeneutics. There's tools to the discipline. I found some good, when I was in history,

00:56:58.040 some good historiographical books on this. This is one of the most popular ones for people who

00:57:02.920 are interested. Herbert Butterfield, writings on Christianity and history. He also published

00:57:08.540 the Whig Interpretation of History. I have David Hackett Fisher's book, Historians Fallacies. 0.64

00:57:14.880 So he talked about fallacies like presentism and other problems that historians get themselves

00:57:20.960 into. I actually have Gordon Clark's book. I haven't actually read this, but this was recommended

00:57:26.200 to me by one of my professors, historiography. I think I've skimmed part of it. These are like

00:57:30.360 my buddies. They sit on my shelf. I converse with them when I need them. And then this is John

00:57:35.640 Lukash. John Lukash is a very, very important historian, historical consciousness of the

00:57:41.280 remembered past. These are great sources to look at, to understand the tools of the discipline and

00:57:45.700 how it works. To put a cap on everything I said, I don't think you have to have all knowledge to

00:57:50.640 know, get a sense of history. I do think you have to have a humble demeanor when you're approaching

00:57:55.000 it, be open to new information and new sources, if there are new sources, and make sure that you

00:58:01.960 use common sense as you're approaching it. And if you do that, I think you can make sense of the

00:58:07.800 past without knowing everything everyone said about it. So we could dive into anything I said

00:58:13.340 there. Real quick, have you listened to, have you listened to any to Daryl Cooper, the Martyr

00:58:19.060 there too made podcasts yeah years ago i listened to his whole thing on epstein and it freaked me

00:58:25.180 out have you listened to anything else i started to listen to his one on mining in appalachia

00:58:32.200 and uh i'm ashamed to say i got a little bored and i stopped but uh fair enough very interesting

00:58:38.220 i think he does some popular level stuff yeah i like him um like he you know he's he's been

00:58:46.060 on American reformer before, um, uh, or new founding, uh, podcast. And, um, but I think

00:58:52.660 as you were talking, I just thought of, uh, his style, you know, like, uh, now he's doing his new

00:58:58.360 series on world war two. Um, and, you know, and he's, he, you know, he waited as long as he did

00:59:04.780 because he was reading, you know, tons and tons and tons of sources. And, um, but a lot of what

00:59:10.560 he's done, whether it's the, uh, fear and loathing, uh, series in the new Jerusalem, I listened to

00:59:15.280 that one and um a lot of what he does is um is just here's a source here's a source here's a

00:59:22.000 source here's a source mostly dealing with primary sources and you know and does his best not to

00:59:28.580 really take a side and that angers people especially with you know central you know

00:59:34.700 historical narratives where you know there's a mainline consensus and everybody's supposed to

00:59:40.340 take 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

00:59:46.420 not um necessarily revisionist although he he certainly has been accused of that um but he's

00:59:51.780 not coming and taking somebody who's demonized and then lionizing them um but he's saying well

00:59:57.300 we should neither demonize nor lionize but um humanize okay here here's what's on the ground 0.65

01:00:03.920 this is what was going on here's atrocities committed by you know the germans and but here's

01:00:09.140 dresden you know and a lot of people are unfamiliar with the history on that side of the

01:00:14.360 equation what was going on and atrocities committed to the germans and so you have this and you have

01:00:19.420 that and all that kind of stuff so anyways but i my point is it seems like ideology is um

01:00:26.180 not not only is it not the master key but it's it almost like um not only will it not get you

01:00:33.460 through uh every door but it seems like it's actually um it can be a hindrance it can it can

01:00:39.360 end up locking doors to where you you'll never you'll never actually find out the truth because

01:00:44.100 it's inconvenient yeah i think historians have motivations every historian obviously does when

01:00:51.160 they approach a subject right so daryl cooper is very entertaining uh he does give you a string of

01:00:56.500 sources at least from what i listen to uh and and they're it moves it keeps you moving it keeps you

01:01:02.620 interested i think it's uh good for our generation because you're not stuck mastering one source as

01:01:08.440 soon as you might start to get bored it's like another source enters the equation so there is

01:01:12.240 an entertainment value to what he does i think history should be at least popular history should

01:01:16.840 be interesting for sure um but i think you know for i can get in his head but i'm sure he finds

01:01:22.960 it interesting because uh the sense i get is it's the story of people and he's interested in how

01:01:28.180 people think and how they react and what happens when you're in a cult. What's that like? And so

01:01:33.140 he wants to bring the experience to you so that you can live the experience in a sense without

01:01:38.960 the consequences. Isn't that what a good story does? And so I think that's excellent. I think

01:01:44.220 there's different motivations for studying history though. And we've seen this throughout

01:01:51.120 time with different figures, different historians in different eras. So you could study history

01:01:57.480 because it's the story of virtue.

01:01:59.920 It's supposed to cultivate virtue

01:02:01.200 and that's going to change the way

01:02:02.940 that you treat sources.

01:02:05.620 You're gonna emphasize certain things, right?

01:02:07.640 Even in Daryl Cooper's podcasts,

01:02:10.660 you should be attempting to be objective for sure.

01:02:14.580 But history is a record that's incomplete.

01:02:18.300 Unless you're God, you don't see every angle.

01:02:20.320 You don't have every piece of information.

01:02:21.860 You're reconstructing things.

01:02:23.120 It's a bit of a puzzle depending on the issue.

01:02:25.900 Some some things we have less information than others, you know, like Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto.

01:02:30.700 Like what sources did he have? I mean, it's mainly archaeology.

01:02:34.240 And I mean, there's not much, though. There's a lot of assumptions.

01:02:37.840 There's, you know, so different. They have like a society that has historical records they've been writing down for a while.

01:02:44.240 That makes it a little easier. But, you know, some would look at that.

01:02:47.500 They they signal single out the virtuous men or women and say, I'm going to focus on this.

01:02:54.820 That's what history is. Cultivating virtue. Or it could be discovery. We want to discover

01:02:59.660 the principles of human being and action. Think of Machiavelli in a sense, where he wanted to

01:03:10.840 understand how to, I mean, this is what he gets a bad rap for, but he wanted to understand how

01:03:15.980 to manipulate in a sense. How do humans react under certain conditions? Are there patterns

01:03:20.240 here that emerge? Can we quantify these patterns? Some people are writing to explain things or to

01:03:27.600 justify, like for example, Fox's book of martyrs. You've probably read that. It's a very classic

01:03:33.100 Christian book, but it was written at a time when Protestantism and Catholicism were in tense

01:03:38.740 disagreement and justify Protestantism. That was one of the ways at least that book was used to

01:03:44.920 show how cool the Catholic church was. And so it's, it's focusing on a certain strand. These

01:03:49.460 are all valuable things. These can all be done right. I think it's important at the outset,

01:03:53.560 though, to know what the motive is. And so if someone comes at it with an ideological

01:03:57.080 framework that's very rigid, that sees everything as ones and zeros and deletes the twos and the

01:04:02.700 threes and the negative numbers, then they're only going to give you a very narrow sliver that

01:04:09.020 justifies whatever their philosophical ideology is. And I think we see that a lot in history

01:04:15.520 today, academic history, at least. In fact, the majority of academic history seems to be now

01:04:20.220 more social history, as opposed to like, you know, diplomatic histories and economic,

01:04:24.880 other kinds of histories. People want to focus on social history. The reason is

01:04:28.300 because there's a political motivation behind it, using the historical record to justify current

01:04:35.300 political policies. And that's an ideology imposed on the past that I think gives us

01:04:41.040 very warped interpretations well tell us real quick um for you know some of our listeners may

01:04:49.660 be new to this but um you would describe yourself as a paleo conservative can you can you talk about

01:04:58.120 what what is that because a lot of you know the new right or the new christian right is you know

01:05:04.760 and and this is to me is consoling it's it's it's a comfort um to recognize that it none of it's

01:05:10.240 really new it's not um like from i gotta be careful with this one too because it could you

01:05:16.360 know i could just as easily make it the new master key you know ideology thing and think that this

01:05:20.920 is you know the one the one ring to rule them all you know and i finally i finally have it my

01:05:25.200 precious you know and um my new ideology but as i'm thinking of like how how the fault lines keep

01:05:30.520 shaping up and and how christians continue to be divided you know against one another especially

01:05:36.620 within the evangelical world of which i'm a part um i you know it it it's starting to look to me

01:05:43.760 like eschatology which does matter i mean it's it's it's biblical it's yeah eschatology matters

01:05:50.840 um but uh yeah good podcast yeah um but that that podcast which i love those guys they're great guys

01:05:59.800 um and uh and i i think they're doing great work but that was uh started you know and probably i

01:06:07.020 can't remember exactly but like 2022 maybe 2021 and that was kind of the main thing that people

01:06:12.040 it was like eschatology makes all the difference in the world it's the it's the the thing it's not

01:06:17.280 just a thing it's the thing and um and i would say yeah eschatology matters um but i don't think

01:06:23.940 it's the thing um so anyways all that like whether it's you know reform theology um eschatology or

01:06:30.220 biblical you know roles of men and women you know patriarchy or what you know all these things

01:06:35.760 really do matter and um and and they've shaped some some pretty clear dividing lines but the

01:06:41.940 big one because i've been trying to figure it out it's like how did i land where i landed like i

01:06:48.020 look around i'm like i look at my friends you know i look at you i look at isker i look at ogden i

01:06:53.420 I look at, you know, Stephen Wolf, I look at A.D. Robles and, you know, all the, and I'm like,

01:06:58.980 I'm here. I'm glad I'm here. I like these guys. And I think these things that I currently hold

01:07:07.640 are true. Otherwise I wouldn't hold them, right? Shocker. Everybody who believes something thinks

01:07:12.680 that what they believe is true. I didn't give them point. That's all of us. But it seems like

01:07:17.460 as I'm trying to figure it out, so what is the new dividing line? I feel like it's nature.

01:07:23.420 nature like like um and and that's for me as i look back i'm like that that was a big part of

01:07:30.300 the whole patriarchy thing that the appeal to me was uh not going against the grain but saying no

01:07:35.040 that like it's it's not just um uh complementarianism right a halfway house you know

01:07:41.740 pretty novel idea in 1988 you know the term is coined and this idea that you know the distinction

01:07:47.180 between men and women is is merely duties and roles because in a sense if you're you know it

01:07:53.120 doesn't take much to lift up the hood and realize yeah but that kind of subtly indicts god is as

01:07:58.880 arbitrary and capricious that like there's no real rhyme or reason it's like that like your wife you

01:08:03.680 know constantly singing anything you can do i can do better i can do anything better than you but i

01:08:07.420 won't because i'm complementarian you know and that's where you get people saying absurd things

01:08:13.440 you know like um like i can preach better than the majority of male preachers but i won't and i

01:08:21.140 remember what, like when I, when I heard, you know, things like that, I was like,

01:08:23.860 that's like, that's, that's Beth Moore 10 years ago. You know what I mean? Or, you know,

01:08:31.100 like that's Jen Hatmaker. That's like, I've heard this before. I know where this goes. And,

01:08:36.100 and I think complementarianism allows for that. And so the appeal, the point is the appeal of

01:08:40.080 patriarchy was not just a distinction of roles, but it's saying, no, the differences go all the

01:08:44.620 way down. It's that the roles stem from design. God's not arbitrary. He's not capricious. He

01:08:50.880 gives certain roles to men and women because he made in our nature men and women differently all

01:08:57.400 the way down. And not even just physically with breath of shoulders versus hips, you know, for

01:09:04.440 fighting wars or, you know, birthing children. But no, even psychologically, mentally, at every

01:09:13.780 single level, like, I don't know if you watched that popular show a while back, but The Queen's

01:09:17.300 gambit right it was it was actually i looked into it was highly accurate there's only one big piece

01:09:22.680 right it was really it's about chess yeah it was about chess and it really followed a true story

01:09:27.740 and kept to many of the details it was really uh pretty accurate there's only one major detail

01:09:33.040 they changed um in real history it wasn't a chick it was a dude that was that's the major you know

01:09:43.000 so it's like, it's not just like, well, men can outbench women. Like, well, yeah, of course. Um,

01:09:47.700 but no, it's, it's, uh, even in something that's strictly intellectual, right? That doesn't

01:09:53.320 require any physical prowess like chess. Um, you, like you can take the best female chess players 1.00

01:10:00.100 in the world. And so it's just like, we're different. And that doesn't mean women are, 0.97

01:10:04.520 are dumb, but, but chess is, it's the game of Kings. It's strategy. It's war. Chess is what 1.00

01:10:09.800 men are wired physically, psychologically, mentally, emotionally. So there's difference

01:10:15.240 in nature that stems to role. And that really got me, you know, five years ago, whatever,

01:10:21.140 when I, you know, became patriarchal. Here's my point though. Today I'm realizing, I think it's,

01:10:26.020 that's a microcosm. The macro is, it's just the new dividing lines that seem to be shaping up

01:10:31.660 is just around nature. Who believes in nature? Applied to gender, applied to nations, applied to

01:10:39.060 ethnicity right which none of that requires any racial animus you don't have to hate anybody

01:10:44.440 right but but it does require yeah but there is like race actually is a thing and color blindness

01:10:51.280 sounds nice but probably isn't true there are different races and and there are distinctions

01:10:59.280 among them a lot like as as much as i'm offended by this and disappointed and i feel like it's a

01:11:05.780 great injustice. Not a lot of white guys in the NFL. Doesn't feel fair. But there it is. And so

01:11:13.500 there's distinctions, there's differences, there's strengths, there's weaknesses. But whether it's

01:11:17.500 race, whether it's nations, whether it's gender, at every single level, nationalism over globalism,

01:11:24.420 patriarchy over feminism, hierarchy over egalitarianism, at every level, I'm starting to

01:11:31.220 see and again i want to be careful not just make this ideology but i am starting to see trying to

01:11:37.140 find the common thread a denominator and it seems like one of the common denominators that's

01:11:41.500 separating because i'm like how in the world how in the world are are me and my friends finding

01:11:48.780 ourselves at odds with james white i still love james white i you know i and i like if you would

01:11:53.620 ask me two years ago if there would be some kind of i'd be like no that's dumb like we love james

01:11:59.360 why we're not going to have some big disagreement. And what I'm starting to think is that it's not

01:12:06.240 just an eschological, it's not like all the post-mill guys are on one side and the all-mill

01:12:09.860 guys are on another. And it's not just even dispensationalism. As much as I despise

01:12:14.700 dispensationalism, I think it's wrong. But there's guys who are disbies who I'm finding 1.00

01:12:20.600 more common ground with them on a lot of issues than guys who are covenantal. And so at every 0.99

01:12:25.660 level, I'm realizing, okay, all right, there's something under this. There's something under

01:12:29.700 this. There's something, and I'm trying to get to the lowest common denominator. And the only thing

01:12:33.200 I'm coming up with right now is nature. Who wants to, who sees the whole post-liberal order as

01:12:43.000 stretching the rubber band or suppression, like Doug would say, like pushing the beach ball of

01:12:47.440 nature under the water and it's snapping back. And who thinks that snapback is God's design and

01:12:53.600 is okay with it and knows it could snap back and you could have pagan nationalism or islamic

01:12:57.660 national like it can snap back in in a sinful manner but the snapback itself is not inherently

01:13:03.040 sinful so we want to snap back and just but we want to be biblical patriarchy not andrew tate

01:13:07.980 patriarchy and we want it to be christian nationalism you know and not islamic nationalism 0.78

01:13:12.260 we want it but but we but we're rooting for the beach ball just to to burst out of the water we

01:13:17.900 actually nature is our friend we're actually not going against the grain um we we actually want

01:13:23.380 that return to nature. All that back to my original question, believe it or not, I remember

01:13:27.040 when I think of paleoconservative, I know it's beyond that, but guys like Pat Buchanan, it seems

01:13:33.960 like these were guys who believed in nature. They believed in distinct nations. They believed in

01:13:39.980 differences between men and women. They believed in different ethnicities without despising any of

01:13:45.180 them, but they were nature guys. And when I think of Stephen Wolf today, you know, kind of a modern,

01:13:50.860 And where I think of you, I think like, these are guys who aren't trying to go against nature.

01:13:57.180 What do you think?

01:13:59.220 Well, I just wrote a book.

01:14:01.420 I turned in the final manuscript this morning.

01:14:03.400 So it's, uh, it's on this topic.

01:14:06.280 So, I mean, I, I, obviously I'm tracking, so, um, uh, where to start, well, you can't 0.99

01:14:14.220 pre-order it yet, but hopefully soon it's called, um, against the grain Christian order

01:14:19.640 in a liberal age and uh hopefully mid-february it will be up on amazon but i'll also sell

01:14:25.860 autographed copies and stuff through my website john harris podcast.com um i should well while

01:14:31.160 we're on this i also have a music album coming out this saturday so if people want to go to

01:14:34.700 john harris tunes.com they can check that out uh if you have any uh connections to singer songwriters

01:14:40.480 in nashville or you know i'll sell them my stuff i don't care but uh um back to the nature question

01:14:47.020 um and i assume you want to relate this to history and paleo like what is paleo conservatism does it

01:14:54.100 have to do with nature am i right about that what you know that whole conversation what do you think

01:14:57.660 yeah tradition uh nature religion it's it's more of an anti-modern sentiment or posture i would say

01:15:05.700 and it's not something uh that you can quantify in in ten principles or uh it's uh it's it's

01:15:15.120 something that with changes in the situation that we're in and the level of threat and the different

01:15:20.120 threats will adapt to those changes because it values the, what I'm trying to think of the word

01:15:27.860 Richard Reaver used for it, which I'm blanking on now, but basically the principles that the

01:15:33.740 eternal principles, transcendentals, I think is what he called them, that do not change. There's

01:15:38.740 certain things that do not change based upon the character and nature of God. And so there's an

01:15:43.860 order that he set up, we aim to defend that order. Paleo just means old. Paleo conservative was a 0.55

01:15:51.480 term that Paul Gottfried and Tom Fleming came up with to distinguish themselves from people who

01:15:56.120 were calling themselves conservatives, but they were not the same. They were more ideological and

01:16:02.780 liberal, and they wanted to freeze frame America circa 1950 or whatever, not post-liberal.

01:16:10.900 We talk about the post-war consensus. It really was that and say that this is what America is.

01:16:17.320 And they just said that's not really what conservatism is about. Conservatism is about

01:16:22.740 valuing the order, not as an abstract thing, but as a tangible reality. Just like I love my

01:16:29.440 child or I love my wife. I love the people around me. I love the things around me. I'm not a Gnostic.

01:16:36.360 I think it's great that I can smoke meat and, you know, go shoot my bow outside.

01:16:41.720 And I mean, these are things God created the flavor of life to enjoy and experience.

01:16:46.460 So all that to say, getting back to history, paleo conservatives tend to value older, more

01:16:54.740 pre-modern ways of thinking.

01:16:56.140 And so a good history that I would use as a touch point for this is Edmund Burke's story

01:17:03.160 or writings against the French Revolution.

01:17:06.340 He wrote a book called, I don't remember the name of it now.

01:17:08.800 I think it's called Notes on the Revolution in France.

01:17:12.540 And he basically says that societies that get away from the traditions

01:17:20.000 and the social glue that binds societies together,

01:17:25.520 these things that develop really over the course of decades and centuries

01:17:29.640 that are incredibly fragile if you disrupt them.

01:17:35.020 And they are strong when they're together,

01:17:39.920 but when you start separating,

01:17:42.220 well, to give you an example of what I'm saying,

01:17:44.040 Great Britain's experiencing these right now

01:17:46.040 as they unravel the bonds

01:17:48.340 that have bound them together for years.

01:17:50.020 It's not just Christianity,

01:17:51.420 it's a British common culture that existed at one point. 0.97

01:17:55.160 They're destroying towns.

01:17:56.260 I mean, we're seeing a little bit of this

01:17:57.320 in the United States, but it's worse there, I think.

01:17:59.640 And 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.

01:18:07.600 Other ideological, modern, you know, ideology is a modern impulse, but other modern regimes have used different principles to base the regime.

01:18:16.460 I 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.

01:18:25.840 It made race a more of an abstract thing, simplified it. 0.59

01:18:30.160 It's a reductionistic.

01:18:31.220 That's what ideology does.

01:18:33.400 You know, communists were much more in tune with economics and, you know, they wanted

01:18:38.280 to create a one principle that solved everything.

01:18:40.940 And so they would write their histories based upon this.

01:18:45.960 So Burke writes to defend organic community throughout time and the amazing, true and

01:18:52.700 valuable things that we all love that organic community develops. And really in his time,

01:19:00.200 that would have been like British common law and things that were Christian principles mediated

01:19:04.440 through this shared cultural medium. And so he was against innovation, starting at year zero,

01:19:13.040 saying we're going to force everyone to conform to this without knowing what the consequences

01:19:17.180 are going to be. It's like saying in the lab, we don't know what it'll do, but on paper,

01:19:21.520 it seems to have worked and and let's just force everyone let's do a a giant experiment in mrna

01:19:27.620 therapy or something and just you know we do this all the time uh with certain things and it's

01:19:33.820 burke was basically writing against this tendency so i don't know i'm trying to relate it back to

01:19:39.260 history but i think history is the story of people and people are what metaphysically

01:19:46.720 anthropologically, they're created in the image of God. There's an order to the university fit

01:19:52.060 into that. They have a purpose. They have a telos. So history should take into account all these

01:19:57.580 things. And really the enlightenment project of history, no matter which school I'm talking about

01:20:02.020 or figure, I would say has a tendency to reduce history and to be an anti-history, to really

01:20:09.500 honestly rip down the stories of people to deconstruct uh to um mock religion there is

01:20:18.820 no order to to mock order and i think that the paleo conservative impulse is to actually do real

01:20:25.640 history talking about real people in god's real created order that's good all right let's go to

01:20:33.580 our last commercial break and then we'll come back for uh some final thoughts and maybe to um

01:20:37.820 What I'd like to do is maybe even deal with the chat a little bit.

01:20:40.600 So if you guys have questions and you're listening right now, you're in the live chat,

01:20:45.200 go ahead and give us your questions.

01:20:47.300 Nathan will actually take those.

01:20:48.660 If you put a question mark at the end of your sentence, we'll know it's a question.

01:20:51.940 And he'll put those and categorize them in a separate chat for us.

01:20:54.940 And then John and I and Michael will be able to read those and try to get to as many of

01:21:00.600 them as possible.

01:21:02.940 Nobody has to pay any money, but I will tell you, if you do a super chat, you will get

01:21:07.720 priority. So that's just, those are the rules. I don't make the rules, but those are the rules.

01:21:12.820 And last thing, real quick, if you're listening live, help us out with the algorithm. It makes

01:21:17.740 a world of difference. If you can give us a like on this video, give it a thumbs up. And if you're

01:21:23.000 not subscribed to our channel, please subscribe to us on YouTube and also go ahead and follow us

01:21:28.740 on X. We are posting all of our videos. We launch Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 3 p.m. Central

01:21:35.380 time, our live stream, three times a week. And it simultaneously live streams on both X and

01:21:41.480 YouTube. So there's nothing on X. You won't be missing anything that's happening on YouTube

01:21:47.880 that doesn't also happen on X. And X is probably a superior platform for reasons. So go ahead and

01:21:56.820 follow us. It's at RightResponseM. At RightResponseM is our handle over on X. All right, let's go to

01:22:02.820 our last commercial break. All right, the clock is running out. You need to go and register now

01:22:09.580 for our Christ is King, How to Defeat Trash World Conference. It's happening the year of our Lord,

01:22:15.480 2025, April 3rd, 4th, and 5th. That's a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. And by God's grace, we're

01:22:22.660 able to provide for you an all-star lineup. We've got Steve Dace, Calvin Robinson, Oren McIntyre,

01:22:29.200 Dr. Stephen Wolf, Eric Kahn, David Reese, Andrew Isker, John Harris, A.D. Robles, Dan Burkholder,

01:22:36.860 Dusty Devers, Ben Garrett, C.J. Engel, and yours truly, Pastor Joel Webin. Come on out. Join us

01:22:44.180 April 3rd, 4th and 5th, 2025, Thursday through Saturday. Go to rightresponseconference.com

01:22:52.540 to register today. Again, that's rightresponseconference.com. Listen, guys,

01:22:57.840 you probably listen to Right Response Ministries because you take the Dominion mandate offered to

01:23:03.800 us in Scripture seriously. Well, unsurprisingly, so does Dominion Wealth Strategist. As the only

01:23:11.060 distinctly reformed financial consulting firm, they help Calvinistic, covenantal, and confessional

01:23:18.160 Christians to steward their resources faithfully in a way that actually aligns with God's Word.

01:23:24.380 Dominion Wealth leverages all corners of the financial service industry as independent brokerage agents, matching you with suitable products and services from dozens of top industry providers.

01:23:37.140 Their mission is to equip believers to secure their family's future and build a legacy that glorifies God by building holistic financial strategies that include budgeting, insurance, debt management, retirement planning, estate planning, and more.

01:23:55.940 In order to make wealth Christian again with a portfolio that might even put King Solomon to

01:24:01.460 shame, go and take dominion over your finances today by visiting www.reformed.money and book

01:24:10.820 an introductory overview right now. All of Christ for all of life and all of finance for Christendom.

01:24:20.780 All right, we're back. Welcome. Welcome back, everybody. John, I had one question for you

01:24:25.480 before we move into some of the ones from the chat.

01:24:27.560 And you can go in any direction you want with it.

01:24:30.640 But here's the question.

01:24:32.020 You mentioned earlier

01:24:33.320 that one of the perspectives of history

01:24:38.340 is to inculcate virtue into a society.

01:24:41.600 And so one of the reasons we tell the stories that we do

01:24:44.460 is to foster the sense of virtue that that society wants.

01:24:49.580 So here are the two tensions that I'm feeling,

01:24:53.760 and I think a lot of people are feeling right now.

01:24:55.480 is one, we get told stories in school or in popular history.

01:25:02.680 Abe Lincoln was good, Freeing the Slaves was good,

01:25:05.040 or the Allies were the good guys in World War II.

01:25:08.420 And this is what gets told at kind of a high school,

01:25:11.300 maybe even a undergraduate college level.

01:25:13.960 And this is partly because a society, I think, this is my theory,

01:25:19.580 needs cultural mythologies and even cultural touch points

01:25:24.080 to point people to emulate.

01:25:26.860 This guy was good, this guy was bad, et cetera.

01:25:29.260 Now, what happens is then you start reading and like,

01:25:32.160 well, actually, there are problems with Abraham Lincoln.

01:25:35.620 And actually, Stonewall Jackson

01:25:37.420 was not the devil incarnate.

01:25:39.260 Actually, there were problems with Churchill, right?

01:25:43.240 And Hitler was not the most, 0.65

01:25:45.360 possibly the most evil person

01:25:47.860 that's ever existed in history.

01:25:49.300 And so what ends up happening, actually,

01:25:51.680 especially going back to what I said earlier

01:25:54.060 with the amount of information that we have,

01:25:56.120 is people now tend to think,

01:25:57.940 well, I have been entirely lied to.

01:26:00.720 And because I've been lied to,

01:26:02.000 there's a nefarious intent

01:26:03.480 behind all the historical stories I've been told.

01:26:06.740 It's all about control.

01:26:08.000 It's all about manipulation.

01:26:09.920 And what that leaves us with is,

01:26:13.240 I think we're going into a society

01:26:14.840 where we don't have a common cultural language anymore.

01:26:19.560 We don't have a common cultural perceived virtue anymore, and part of that has to do

01:26:26.400 with the stories that we tell each other, the historical stories that we tell each other,

01:26:30.000 and the mythologies like Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill and all of those as well.

01:26:34.180 So I just would really love for you to talk for just a few minutes before we go to the

01:26:39.040 chat questions about this idea of a shared cultural historical narrative that sometimes

01:26:46.080 historians have to reinforce certain things leave out other things versus i think what a lot of

01:26:51.600 conservatives and maybe rightly so feel no actually we've just been lied to this whole time could you

01:26:57.520 help pull on a couple threads on that knot that would that would point people in a good way of

01:27:02.680 thinking about that problem that is a knot how long do you want me to go yeah i mean if you just

01:27:09.140 if you just give us a couple little like here's something to think about as you're as you're

01:27:13.520 wrestling with that? Well, I do think that we mentioned before history being the story of people

01:27:20.780 and their actions over time. And I think that that does confer identity. You don't usually

01:27:29.440 see someone who wakes up one morning and wants to study history because they're not fascinated by

01:27:35.740 it. They're forced to do it. It's something that you're usually driven to do because there's

01:27:40.580 something that intrigues you about an event or a group of people or a person in the case of

01:27:45.880 biography. So I think that that's very important because in scripture, we see scripture as the

01:27:51.920 best historians, by the way, and it gives us a lot of these historical, historiographical

01:27:56.320 principles. You see the stories of people with their faults, but you also see heroes that should

01:28:03.920 be highlighted. And that's really key. David's mighty men need to be highlighted, what they

01:28:08.420 accomplished, who their names were. Not everyone's in the Bible, right? And one of the things that

01:28:13.560 we see with social history today is this attempt, you see it with like the Howard Zinn, Eric Foner

01:28:18.520 types to try to tell history from the bottom up. We want to know what, you know, someone who's

01:28:23.300 really poor, depressed feels about this, which is, I actually think there's some merit to that,

01:28:27.920 but I think that most histories throughout time have focused on the achievements of either rulers

01:28:35.820 or significant people in a society or people who did great acts that the people who did great acts

01:28:40.820 who achieve great things that does give a people a sense of cohesion and identity those shared

01:28:47.400 myths and not in the sense of false you know but myths in the sense of shared stories that

01:28:54.780 give you a distinction so the what's happened I think on steroids lately but it's really been

01:29:04.800 happening for a long time, is the historical professions have been lined up against the

01:29:11.680 identities of Western peoples. And so their task in doing history is to rip down those peoples,

01:29:19.100 to rip down their heroes. In some, I guess, circumstances, it's to also replace them 0.61

01:29:25.620 with new heroes that are more revolutionary, that are against the society at a certain point.

01:29:33.960 And, you know, we look to them to see how bad we used to be or something.

01:29:37.780 And so they're kind of like negative.

01:29:39.500 They serve as a negative example of how society was.

01:29:43.860 And and I think there's a reaction against that today.

01:29:48.080 Somewhat you could see with some people who haven't maybe been trained historically on

01:29:53.120 some of this stuff, an overreaction, I would say, to just not believe anything that you're

01:29:58.860 told, you know, a radical skepticism.

01:30:00.780 and we want to be careful of all we want to be careful of radical skepticism we also want to

01:30:07.140 be careful of just believing anything that we hear uh because it's common knowledge when the

01:30:12.820 monument thing started i was one of my big issues i did a whole documentary on it called american

01:30:18.420 monument you can find it on youtube i mean i went like the confederate monuments all of it i wanted

01:30:24.300 them to stay i knew this was an attack on our identity regional identity broader american

01:30:29.540 identity. And one of the things I remember, though, was when there was some talk about

01:30:34.940 taking down the Lincoln Monument during 2020. I mean, it's hard. We all erase that in our minds,

01:30:40.400 perhaps, because we don't want to, at least I don't want to remember that year. But people

01:30:44.500 were talking about some really crazy things, taking down the Washington Monument, taking

01:30:47.880 down the Lincoln Monument. And I remember thinking, you know, I've done enough reading

01:30:53.580 on Lincoln to know that he's not the man that often he is portrayed to be. I think he actually

01:30:59.220 serves a more of a revolutionary, there's kind of like two, two broad versions. There's more than

01:31:03.680 two, but two broad versions of Lincoln. There's one that's more traditional. And then there's

01:31:07.640 one that's more revolutionary. And I think the revolutionary one tends to be the, that's the

01:31:11.500 accurate one. And the more you get into Lincoln, I think you realize there is definitely a

01:31:15.980 revolutionary kind of angle to him. But all that to say, I wasn't for ripping down the Lincoln

01:31:22.540 monument, even though, you know, you look at it, I mean, it's almost God-like of all the monuments.

01:31:28.440 That's one that you could say, well, that one's like, you know, you're, you're thinking

01:31:31.180 about like idols.

01:31:31.980 That one's got a scale that's way beyond humans.

01:31:34.260 It's in a temple for crying out loud, but the thing I, I thought of, and this is a circumstantial

01:31:40.140 thing, right?

01:31:41.120 This is for the times we live in right now in human history.

01:31:44.360 We don't have a lot of heroes that inculcate virtues into the young men and women of this

01:31:50.780 country.

01:31:51.080 We need reminders of that.

01:31:53.100 And there is a version of Lincoln that, uh, definitely exemplifies virtue.

01:31:58.440 and my concern is what do you replace that with it leaves a gaping hole when you take all these

01:32:04.620 things out um and who is who comes in to replace that so i've been in favor of uh trying to get

01:32:12.680 back to some of the the truly noble uh people in our country's history who were who did great

01:32:20.100 things and i mean i have a whole list of heroes i one time i wanted to do like a whole documentary

01:32:24.000 series on heroes. But, you know, George Washington is like top of that list for me. And, you know,

01:32:29.420 guys like Booker T. Washington and Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith and Lewis and Clark, you know,

01:32:34.240 the list goes on and on, explorers, military guys, presidents. And, you know, for me, I'm talking,

01:32:40.800 you know, personally, I want to elevate those heroes for my own children, because it gives

01:32:45.380 them a sense of who they are. This is the country that you're part of. This belongs to you, this

01:32:49.800 story uniquely to you. Uh, it's not a bigoted remark. It's just, um, it's just part of a

01:32:56.120 tradition we can use a plural possessive about it's ours. And that's the reason we shouldn't

01:33:01.140 be tearing down the monuments. It's because they're ours. And once, once that, once you

01:33:05.700 have to justify these characters from history based upon some rationalistic principle and,

01:33:12.520 you know, while they really weren't as bad as you think, because they, they, they were against

01:33:17.560 slavery. They just didn't go all the way or something, you know, like I've seen that this

01:33:20.940 is the neoconservative move is like, you know, they were all secretly egalitarians from the 21st

01:33:26.780 century. They just couldn't tell you at that time. And it's like, well, you'll never gain,

01:33:32.300 you have to focus on their virtues that they exemplified publicly, their sacrifice, their

01:33:36.440 internal fortitude, you know, the cardinal virtues. And those are the things that are being

01:33:42.840 lost and they're being lost. And the historical discipline is front and center on this. They are

01:33:49.540 being lost to a new metric for virtue. So virtue is not internal disciplines, character. Virtue is

01:33:57.500 now checking the right box when it comes to some egalitarian issue, some political issue. You don't

01:34:04.920 have to even lift a finger. If you're on the right side of it, you are a good person. And someone on

01:34:10.280 the wrong side of it they could be the greatest person in the world give all their money to charity

01:34:13.440 love their wife they're terrible that's the metric that we're fighting and we just can't accept the

01:34:18.060 metric and i'll say one final thing uh i don't know if you've noticed because this streams down

01:34:23.360 to the popular level but like you know even like the napoleon movie i don't know if you saw that

01:34:28.140 but josephine his wife he's so front and center she's his demise uh there's this emphasis in in

01:34:38.040 history now on characters that were not as emphasized it really takes i'm just using that

01:34:42.420 as one example but it takes away from the stature no no pun intended of napoleon uh because now the

01:34:49.340 main character is not napoleon it's josephine she's the more significant more important character

01:34:53.860 and we're doing this with everything to rip down the past and in that case i guess you could say

01:34:59.300 he's a villain but um with heroes too uh i was just watching a movie was it last night or something

01:35:05.000 I couldn't take it. Oh, I remember I started watching Gladiator 2. Big mistake. And within

01:35:11.080 the first fight scene, there's this, you know, this chick who's, you know, she's just kicking 1.00

01:35:15.960 butt. And I'm just like, I, it's got great costumes. It's got great everything. I, and now

01:35:22.520 I'm like, so out of it. Cause I know that's not accurate. And the reason it's not accurate is

01:35:26.580 because they're pushing an agenda and it's subtle and stuff. But that's the kind of thing I think

01:35:32.840 we have to fight. We have, we want accurate portrayals, but we also, we want to embrace

01:35:37.880 the myth and the identity conferring nature of history, because without it, you don't have a

01:35:43.120 society. Yeah. Well said. Here are some of the questions. So we got a couple of super chats from

01:35:50.920 Jeff Halfley. We'll start with those. He said, would you say that being less subservient to the

01:35:58.020 desires, agenda, and priorities of certain protected minorities, such as Jews or blacks, 0.87

01:36:04.940 et cetera, would be a key distinctive. I think he means of paleoconservatism. 0.79

01:36:10.420 Yeah, a key distinctive of being a paleoconservative. And then he followed it up.

01:36:14.780 I'll just read his second one, another super chat. Thank you for that, Jeff. I have started

01:36:20.420 calling the civil rights movement uh the blm movement 1.0 it seems to me that it is both

01:36:28.420 good branding and true history to call the whole 70 plus year uh thing the blm movement um and then

01:36:38.260 he has hashtag repeal mlk day what what are your thoughts on that john and michael i i would change

01:36:47.060 the scope to go back to, you know, the Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction era, to be honest with

01:36:52.720 you. We've been, this has been something that's, we've had these kinds of issues for a lot longer

01:37:01.760 than just even the civil rights movement. And it comes, I mean, I don't want to get into all

01:37:07.120 the complexities of it because we don't have time, but I think once the paternal relationships and

01:37:13.580 labor arrangements and so forth were severed during reconstruction between mostly a slave

01:37:19.280 class and their masters. What you've had since then is a degree of dependency on government and

01:37:25.680 a looking to government as the solution to poverty and all these kinds of things. And so the

01:37:35.220 government keeps throwing new innovative, uh, policies, uh, at not just the, the primarily

01:37:43.400 black population, but now other groups that are in minority statuses. And so we, we, we've just

01:37:49.900 had this for a long time in our country. Hmm. Yeah. I, Jeff, I basically agree with those

01:37:59.540 comments like i think that that's that's um i think john's right like you can probably go even

01:38:05.720 further back and it's been going you know it's even broader but um but if you're just saying

01:38:10.380 like that there's a straight line from the civil rights movement to um from mlk to george floyd

01:38:18.080 i basically agree i think john doyle we've had him on the show before i like him he's a friend

01:38:23.520 And 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?

01:38:36.260 I mean, he was protesting against fiat currency by using a fake $20 bill.

01:38:41.320 And his final words, he was crying out for his mother, you know, right?

01:38:44.320 There was that maternal, you know, familial instinct, you know, I'm a George Floyd conservative.

01:38:48.560 and he was basically just saying that um that's how your your grandparents um and in some cases

01:38:54.980 great grandparents would have felt at the time in the 60s someone saying i'm a martin luther king

01:39:01.700 conservative they would say like what it would be as as slanderous right uh not but scandalous

01:39:11.120 absurd um as saying i'm a george floyd conservative you'd be like what do you mean conservative the

01:39:16.700 dude's a commie that's what your grandparents would have said god bless him may they rest in 0.52

01:39:21.780 peace you know but like and we all might be saying again now that it's being released that's true

01:39:25.760 he was a commie and and hopefully you know hopefully the majority um you know things can

01:39:31.180 change uh narratives history um even mainline consensus can change uh over time i think that

01:39:39.460 like i think that's happened with napoleon right so like john briefly mentioned villain and that's

01:39:43.560 And 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.

01:39:57.440 But 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.

01:40:06.240 i mean it made napoleon a sniveling simp you know and and his wife you know wore the pants and

01:40:13.900 and so it was you know it was what you would expect come to expect from hollywood but um but

01:40:20.100 still even in that movie i think part of what's happening like with napoleon in in recent decades

01:40:26.120 um is you know you go from from being demonized to humanized um and and that still doesn't

01:40:34.360 necessarily mean that you're virtuous so that doesn't mean that everybody necessarily becomes

01:40:37.860 a napoleon fan um but it just means that you're able to see like like any good story uh lead

01:40:44.520 characters of stories are usually you know you have um like if you're writing a a a fictional

01:40:50.120 narrative you have flat characters and you have you know rat more rounded you know where they

01:40:55.040 have they're more than just one-sided they have multi-faceted you know he's um he's sneaky but

01:41:02.380 he's also um but he's also um at the same time courageous and he you know and he like he has

01:41:08.860 more than one virtue more than one characteristic there's some negative things there's some positive

01:41:13.460 things he's a well-rounded character he's like and and what is that like like human beings

01:41:18.420 like people people are like that people always have more than you can't just define one person

01:41:24.160 in one way um people are complex and so i think you know that's happening with napoleon i think

01:41:31.620 that probably will eventually happen even with, you know, he who must not be named, you know,

01:41:37.080 Voldemort himself, Adolf Hitler. I think that, not that he necessarily is a good guy, I'm not

01:41:43.420 saying that, but I do think 50 years from now, he probably won't be viewed in exactly the same

01:41:50.060 light that he has for the last 50 years. I think that as time goes on, you move from, we must have

01:41:59.980 this as a flat character one characteristic because it serves a certain agenda like the

01:42:05.900 post-war consensus never again you know we can never have sovereign nations again we can never

01:42:11.220 have patriarchy again we can never have nationalism again we can never because we you know we know when

01:42:15.980 we know what happens when when you do that you know um like and so i think as time goes on and

01:42:21.420 you're and you're further removed from the thing that that the the the first historians were worried

01:42:27.000 about, and that's no longer a looming threat, then you can go to primary sources and you can

01:42:34.200 write more well-rounded without being crucified in the public sphere of like, this guy is a Nazi,

01:42:39.080 you know, or this guy is a Napoleon fan, you know, or this guy's a, you know, and none of that,

01:42:45.740 you don't move from demonizing to lionizing, because that's just the contrarian spirit that

01:42:50.040 we were talking about earlier. That can be just as thoughtless, that can be just as false, and not

01:42:54.020 actually true history, but you, you can avoid both of those pitfalls, neither lionizing nor

01:42:58.800 humanizing or lionizing nor demonizing, but humanizing and in humanizing, um, you can still

01:43:04.800 say, and so-and-so on the whole bad guy or so-and-so on the whole good guy. Um, but you're

01:43:12.340 just, but you're, you're, it's a more encompassing, you know, view. And so all that being said, my

01:43:18.300 point is, um, I think that's happening right now. I think the Overton window is shifting at the

01:43:22.880 speed of light, which I'm, I'm happy about. I think there will be over-corrections. And I think

01:43:26.980 that, but overall, I think things have been terrible, terrible. We have been this progressive,

01:43:32.920 we've been a society that chops genitals off of children. So like for me, like my biggest concern 1.00

01:43:38.360 in this moment, the year of our Lord, 2025, when we've murdered 70 million babies in their, 0.59

01:43:44.160 in their mother's womb and, and chopping off the genitals of children, my biggest concern is not,

01:43:49.660 yeah but guys oh you know the woke right we might overreact a little bit you know we could hurt some

01:43:56.100 like that like my goodness like to lose a plot at that level is just like i i don't i i mean that's

01:44:04.320 to me that's astronomical i don't even know how to the person who is concerned about overreach

01:44:10.420 from the right when we've been living with 70 years of of just total progressive post-liberal 0.98

01:44:21.320 leftist total domination i'm just like you like you're either very ignorant or or i think you're 0.87

01:44:28.480 subversive i think like i think you're on the other team i think you actually you like liberalism 0.97

01:44:33.960 you you're not you're not a christian or like steven wolf would always say isn't it convenient

01:44:37.860 it isn't it wonderful that you know that uh the timeless politics of the bible just happened to

01:44:42.200 perfectly match up with you know the post-liberal order you know and we've we've like and you're

01:44:46.460 you're either that guy you're an ideologue and you're naive or you're you are a bad guy you're

01:44:52.840 subversive so anyways all that being said i think that's that's happening with napoleon i think that

01:44:56.840 will happen with mlk i think i i think that i think it's it's funny it's like john said like

01:45:02.660 the further you get removed and you get further away from primary that that's true so like it

01:45:09.060 gets fuzzy you lose some accuracy perhaps uh but you the other thing that you lose and i think this

01:45:15.440 is true is you lose biases and you lose agendas and you lose like like the things that were

01:45:22.360 happening right then as you're writing you know somebody's memoir and and he's still within living

01:45:27.720 memory and everybody has a dog in the fight they have they have um a reason a strong reason to

01:45:35.420 either lionize so and so or demonize so and so and the further you get removed from that um you

01:45:43.120 you know in terms of the accuracy of the details that might get fuzzy but but uh you you lose

01:45:48.420 details while simultaneously losing emotions you know and and in some sense you you may it may be

01:45:55.580 possible to do even better history and so all that being said yeah i think i think that like

01:46:00.620 straight line from mlk to george floyd yeah i think you know i i think that that makes sense

01:46:06.080 you 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

01:46:14.920 honestly the guys who are you know sounding the alarm and clutching the pearls over the woke right

01:46:21.460 um i've noticed john i'd be curious if you've noticed this but even recently just on x i've

01:46:26.660 noticed you know your neil shin v's and guys um kind of changing their their typical uh tone in

01:46:33.360 the way that they that they do public discourse to where it looks like genuine like like genuinely

01:46:38.980 questioning like i don't understand why why why are people uh moving to that like like neil shin

01:46:44.300 doesn't doesn't get it it's like the world is literally passing him passing him by the overton

01:46:49.140 shifting so fast. And he's shocked. He can't believe it. He's like, I don't understand why

01:46:52.760 people would, oh, it was about meritocracy. He was basically saying like, we said that

01:46:58.820 meritocracy was great and we shouldn't give jobs to people just because they're minorities.

01:47:03.640 And now people are saying that we shouldn't do meritocracy and that jobs should belong to

01:47:11.780 heritage Americans. And he's genuinely perplexed. He can't figure it out. And it's like, yeah,

01:47:16.720 I, because we're, we're realizing liberalism was a bad idea. There's a difference. There's a

01:47:22.660 dynamic difference in, um, I'm going like, let the best man win. May the best man win among my

01:47:30.520 community, my countrymen, um, my, you know, uh, my, my church members, you know, those kinds,

01:47:36.820 that's very different than may the best man win on a global stage. Even if it means that all of

01:47:43.080 india on h1b visas replace all of my countrymen and all of my natural citizens are unemployed 0.99

01:47:50.920 like for shinvi it's the same it's like tomato tomato meritocracy knows no bounds across the 0.78

01:47:57.480 board you know like let the best man win and if that means you know that uh the vec is right and

01:48:02.940 that americans just watch too much boy meets world then you know tough luck for americans where it's

01:48:07.580 like like even the idea of nepotism becoming this like demonized thing it's so so bad where it's

01:48:12.360 like every other generation like you would you would have looked at them and said like oh uh

01:48:17.440 you're going to hand the business over to your kid uh the family trade is going to stay with 0.94

01:48:21.180 your family of course to do anything other than that would have been frowned on as like 0.92

01:48:25.640 you selfish prick you know they wouldn't have said boomer because boomers weren't alive at the 0.81

01:48:31.100 time like they but they would have had some other term for selling the birthright of your children 0.98

01:48:35.940 and it would have been negative it would have been universally frowned upon whereas now we're

01:48:40.760 like, well, that's nepotism. Yeah, well, nepotism is actually a biblical principle that you store up,

01:48:46.000 you store up an inheritance for your children's children. That's not meritocracy. Inheritance

01:48:52.920 for your children's children doesn't mean I'm just going to look for, you know, I'm now 65 years of

01:48:57.720 age, I'm looking to retire, I have an inheritance to give, and I'm writing my will, and I'm just

01:49:02.780 going to look and see, you know, who's the brightest, you know, the brightest young man

01:49:07.500 out of the bunch, you know, and whoever has the most manners and a firm handshake and will make

01:49:12.300 eye contact with me when I'm talking, then it doesn't matter if that's my natural offspring

01:49:16.260 or my own child. I'm going to write his name in the will over and against my own. Like that's

01:49:21.900 wicked. The Bible condemns that. And so, yeah, meritocracy has its merits, but it's not a

01:49:30.480 universal one size fits all global across the board. And a lot of guys just, things are moving

01:49:36.320 fast. That's my point. Things are moving fast. And if you're not careful, you will be sitting

01:49:41.380 there like a deer in the headlights and say, what the heck is going on? And I think that that's

01:49:45.980 happening from MLK to, you know, historical figures to, you know, to the post-liberal order

01:49:52.240 being completely deconstructed and crumbling before our very eyes. And history, the actual

01:49:59.300 history, what happened doesn't change. But the way we view it does, that changes. And I think

01:50:04.500 it can change for the worse because things get fuzzy but can also change for the better because

01:50:09.500 you have less biases do you guys have any thoughts on that john sure i feel like uh i i don't want

01:50:19.340 to hog here i talked a lot uh but yeah if you don't have anything to share michael um i think

01:50:26.380 that the needs of the moment very much favor a strong in-group preference especially for american

01:50:33.420 citizens. And as you surveyed some of the figures you were just talking about, Napoleon, Hitler,

01:50:38.980 I mean, Hitler was a figure that Europe united to defeat. And I think this has been a dream since 0.98

01:50:48.240 I actually think World War I is much more significant than World War II, to be honest

01:50:52.040 with you, as far as setting the ground. I actually would be content with a post-war narrative and it

01:50:58.600 being World War I, but that's another story. I think that the League of Nations and the trend

01:51:03.100 towards the globalism we see now, there's been a thirst for uniting Europe and uniting the world,

01:51:10.640 but Europe, you know, specifically to be the genesis point of this. And Hitler was one of the, 0.82

01:51:17.560 I think, commonly shared foes that a lot of these nations had. And this served a purpose. And then 1.00

01:51:23.000 you have the Cold War. So now Russia becomes the villain. And you have NATO. And I think that 0.88

01:51:29.900 Um, this has been a need in the moment, according to a lot of elites they've wanted.

01:51:35.620 And I think maybe we're talking about on a popular level, really.

01:51:37.980 What did, what do people feel in the moment?

01:51:39.820 What are they looking for?

01:51:40.800 Because academic history is going to still be as woke as ever.

01:51:43.220 But, um, but you know, what are people sensing?

01:51:46.080 I think right now, one of the things, one of the converging forces that shapes history,

01:51:52.240 uh, that, that God and his providence uses to shape history is there is this real need

01:51:56.740 for an in-group preference because we've been denied it for so long.

01:51:59.740 You're not supposed to love your own, your own region, your own community, your own citizens.

01:52:05.880 You're supposed to favor everyone else.

01:52:08.980 And Trump has really put a damper on that.

01:52:13.360 And people realize this is not how God, again, we're going back to order, the natural order.

01:52:18.420 This isn't how God set up the world.

01:52:20.700 And so I think that this is part of why someone like Anil Shenvey is maybe wondering, how come

01:52:27.520 people don't want a meritocracy?

01:52:28.840 Well, because it's conflicting, at least some versions of it are conflicting with

01:52:32.600 having an in-group preference for one's own. We've allowed so many people into this country,

01:52:38.260 it was such a low bar that it's diluted us to the point that we don't recognize each other and we 1.00

01:52:44.580 want to recognize each other again. We want time for assimilation. We want to deport the people 0.90

01:52:49.020 who have come here illegally and these kinds of things. So of course, people are going to be upset

01:52:54.020 If H-1B migrants are coming over and taking jobs for half the price that Americans should 1.00

01:52:59.480 have, that's going to be something that's a natural thing. 1.00

01:53:01.940 If you just read the needs of the moment and that does affect our historical interpretations

01:53:06.860 as well.

01:53:07.620 And that's why I think you can even have guys who have been dead for a long time.

01:53:12.200 You know, even like someone like Thomas Aquinas, there's a lot of, you know, aversion to Thomas

01:53:18.020 Aquinas, but I don't know if I've seen, maybe someone has, and I haven't seen it, but if

01:53:22.280 some of the theologians who are upset about this have asked the question, why is Thomas Aquinas

01:53:26.280 making a comeback? Have you thought about the circumstances we live in and why someone might

01:53:31.000 be interested in natural law in these circumstances? Makes a lot of sense if you just

01:53:36.080 think about it. He's a character that was alive a long time ago, but he was significant in his,

01:53:42.960 obviously, his thinking on natural law. So I think it's important to just sit down for a moment,

01:53:47.620 think through the needs of the moment the times in which we live and oftentimes that's how i at

01:53:53.060 least try to make sense of the world i live in it don't always get there 100 but it helps that's

01:53:58.880 super helpful john i didn't even i didn't even make that connection like in a time where um

01:54:04.200 in a time where our world can't tell you the difference between a boy and a girl

01:54:10.700 a guy who is known for natural law might make a comeback yeah there you go like the most obvious

01:54:17.700 thing ever yeah that totally makes sense yeah uh here's a question for you john somebody else

01:54:21.920 is the the handle there he says uh how would you prevent that logic uh so what you said earlier

01:54:27.880 about like abraham lincoln you know there's a there's a traditional version and then there's

01:54:32.640 more 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

01:54:38.780 I think there are good characteristics, but on the whole, I'm not a huge fan, but, um,

01:54:43.460 but he, say it again, what? He's an awful guy in almost every level. Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry.

01:54:52.240 Yeah. So, but with that, this, I thought this was a thoughtful question from somebody else.

01:54:56.340 He says, John, how would you prevent that logic from applying, uh, to keeping MLK statues,

01:55:01.880 right? Like, so, so do, you know, like if, if the files are released and they, they have been,

01:55:07.740 and you know you're reading it and i i did some of the reading on on that actually uh virgil walker

01:55:12.160 you know posted it and um and i was doing some of the reading and yeah he's he's a commie who

01:55:17.080 was funded what's that are they released no not for virgil posted stuff that had been released

01:55:23.240 previously but the new stuff will not be released for what 42 days now at this point okay okay but

01:55:28.760 when those are released i was like no i missed it yeah no no no when when it's released and and

01:55:34.680 we likely find out that it's just i i'm i'm anticipating we will find out it's just as bad

01:55:40.040 or worse than what we thought i don't think it's going to be released and we're like oh he was

01:55:43.480 great you know but um it's like all right here's a communist who turned the american people against

01:55:49.220 each other and blah blah blah um what would you say john uh do we take his statute out

01:55:55.960 yeah so i was careful to say when i was talking about lincoln and i think there are some

01:56:03.940 Most 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.

01:56:24.960 um obviously you know we don't have to go through all that but i i think that um

01:56:28.640 he at some point i would like to see his uh stature his status in american society re-evaluated

01:56:38.460 but at the same time i know that nature of pours a vacuum and so if i don't have strong virtues

01:56:46.440 if there's a um this is part of the appomattox post-appomattox consensus if you want to

01:56:52.920 called that, or the reconciliation motif. It used to be called the reconciliation narrative, but

01:56:57.600 Robert E. Lee's a hero, so is Abraham Lincoln, and the abolitionists were kind of bad guys.

01:57:02.860 John Brown was a bad guy. That was that reconciliation motif that when we were born,

01:57:08.040 all of us would have, we would have inherited that to some extent. I think the woke guys have

01:57:12.700 tried to change this all to bring in a very neo-abolitionist interpretation of all this, but

01:57:16.520 that was the narrative that for a century, Americans believed about that conflict.

01:57:21.720 And 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.

01:57:31.020 And I think that if we're going to take him down, if we're going to, or not take him down, 1.00

01:57:42.480 but he was a president, but if we take his status down, that he's not as someone to be

01:57:47.540 as admired, we're going to have to think through what heroes we have to admire that exemplify

01:57:52.940 these virtues.

01:57:54.340 The virtues, I'm very concerned about those.

01:57:57.840 It's not just the hero.

01:57:59.140 It's not just the man.

01:57:59.780 So let's say, hypothetically, in 10 years, everyone, this is not going to happen.

01:58:04.240 But 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.

01:58:17.240 This is obviously fake.

01:58:18.840 Would you want to, in a country that is devoid of heroes, start ripping down MLK statues overnight?

01:58:25.440 I would be hesitant about that.

01:58:26.980 And this is the conservative in me.

01:58:28.260 conservatives want to be gradual. I mean, there's some things that you need to rip the bandaid off

01:58:32.780 of, but, but in general, we're skeptical of doing things too quickly because we're trying to think

01:58:37.140 of the potential consequences. And that's all I'm saying with Lincoln. And it's the GK Chesterton

01:58:42.860 quote where like, before you take down the fence, you need to know why it was put up.

01:58:46.980 And I think with MLK, we're not there though. I think that, you know, MLK is like achieve like

01:58:51.800 a Christ-like status beyond Lincoln, but I don't think MLK actually does exemplify virtues.

01:58:57.740 that's the difference like lincoln exemplified honesty and loyalty to his nation uh you mean

01:59:04.620 the mythology of him the myth like he he the person didn't in actuality but but the narrative

01:59:09.680 around him did and when when you're like you know people you know people from my dad's generation or

01:59:14.820 you know they love lincoln because i totally resonate with it i'm like this is part of our

01:59:19.020 story too i'm not just going to delete this we've been under this thinking for a while and

01:59:22.760 there's, you know, I, I want to be honest with the historical record, but I understand the

01:59:27.720 purpose for a Lincoln myth. Now with MLK, the MLK myth is basically a quality. It's basically

01:59:34.780 a propositional kind of thing. It's not, why do we respect him? Because he made things more equal.

01:59:40.860 I don't really know if there's anything beyond that. So I'm much more comfortable just ripping

01:59:45.660 down MLK stuff. I mean, ripping down, not in a violent way, but like taking, you know,

01:59:51.500 choosing not to celebrate um his his character on his birthday i mean i don't right not something i

01:59:58.660 participate in because i don't think he was that admirable a figure and i and i don't think we

02:00:03.200 remember him for virtues he didn't have if that makes sense yeah that makes a lot of sense um

02:00:08.500 real quick we gotta we gotta hit jeff hatley again because he's single-handedly funding

02:00:12.420 right response ministries right now with just super chats for for days right how many has he

02:00:18.360 done nate like three four four okay so we read two of them um here's two more okay so

02:00:25.120 uh he said uh could the blm 1.0 feminist sexual homosexual trans etc revolutions uh be seen as

02:00:35.100 a cold civil war with uh against white american uh elites imposing oh not against them but from

02:00:43.540 white american elites imposing their pet ideas um on the white middle working class

02:00:51.060 um in other words is this the white elite class imposing this on the white working class

02:00:58.240 imposing like all the yeah feminism yes sexual revolutionism

02:01:03.620 and you know i don't know if it's strictly white right i mean we're talking we're talking elites

02:01:10.580 in general we're talking jewish people talking yeah people that's what i was gonna say i was i

02:01:15.680 was gonna have to ask a clarifying question say well it depends are jews white no it's more than

02:01:21.040 just that i'm sorry um but yeah but i i think yeah i think that's a little bit too simplistic

02:01:26.140 because i don't i think it's just i would just be content to just say our elites like many of

02:01:31.400 them are white you got pelosi you got you know joe biden you got you know the usual suspects but

02:01:35.960 i think across the board just our elites like uh what's her name aoc ilhan omar like they're you 0.98

02:01:44.240 know they're not white you know but um but they hate you you bet your bottom dollar they hate you

02:01:50.020 um so i i don't know i i see that as more of like a class i was reading less racial but like just

02:01:56.580 like yes it's your elites i think that i'm perfectly content to say orin like we've had on

02:02:01.180 on the show multiple times and he would say the same thing like many of our elite leaders every

02:02:07.480 every society every culture has elites whether you like it or not um and uh even even you may

02:02:13.960 say well we're a you know a constitutional republic like at one point we may have been

02:02:19.500 and that's great and the constitution is still a beautiful document it'd be great if we adhere to

02:02:24.060 it we don't um and so you just have to recognize um you know like like it's the uh the old adage

02:02:30.320 you know the um uh the the uh the purpose of the system is what it does the purpose of this

02:02:36.640 not not what you call it not the label right this is the education system is it because it actually

02:02:42.700 seems like it's the uh democratic you know churning out new democrat voter system you know

02:02:47.820 or this is the immigration system is it seems like it's the more again democratic voting system

02:02:53.600 and and likewise like well this is the constitutional republic um america you know

02:02:58.140 um political system and say well is it like um and so i think just our elites in general

02:03:04.820 every society has them and our elites right now they hate their own they hate their own people

02:03:10.160 they are consciously trying to destroy um the american people that's really sad it's i think

02:03:16.760 it's not quite as as what john said earlier it's not quite as intense uh but it's similar to um

02:03:22.520 the leaders in great britain and england um and that that's even more tragic to me because one

02:03:28.020 it's um it's more severe and two um in the case of great britain we're not a country of immigrants

02:03:34.160 we're a country of settlers but but in the case of england i mean you're talking about

02:03:38.160 a thousand years that these and they are the indigenous people like they've lived there

02:03:43.860 for a thousand years they don't have anywhere else to go it's their home and their own leaders

02:03:48.600 in many cases they didn't they didn't vote for it um but their own leaders just said yeah we're 0.93

02:03:54.960 going to uh we're going to uh hold pakistani men by the hand and walk them into your town 0.99

02:04:03.540 to rape a third of your daughters that's insane that is insane that's not across the board but 1.00

02:04:11.480 that is a real number yeah um in what town was it do you remember maybe that was oldham or oldham 0.99

02:04:18.020 one of the towns outside of london it wasn't london but um london's terrible too but anyways

02:04:23.160 so yeah so i think elites i i see that as more of a class war and last thing uh one more super

02:04:28.260 chat from jeff haffley uh haffley uh he says and this is i appreciate this because i i still you

02:04:35.180 know i still really like rush duny so i you know i still would describe myself as a general equity

02:04:40.100 theonomist because i think it is confessional but uh capital t theonomy i'm i'm definitely

02:04:45.400 having some struggles with i will i will admit in part because i just a lot of the modern theonomists

02:04:51.320 guys who are theonomists today.

02:04:53.340 I mean, like the contemporary ones.

02:04:55.000 Yeah, not necessarily Bonson or Rushduny, who Halfley quoted right here, and I love

02:04:59.300 this Rushduny quote, but I like those guys.

02:05:02.540 I think they had a lot of good things to say, a lot of good insights, but the theonomists

02:05:07.940 today are just, on the one hand, what my first appeal to it was, I was like, yeah, we need

02:05:14.960 a standard, right?

02:05:16.000 The enemy comes in like a flood, the Lord raises a standard against them, the word of

02:05:20.000 god his law is applicable today i'm confessional right so i i like we go through the ten commandments

02:05:25.760 every single week and and i'm a christian nationalist of of the of the flavor that that

02:05:31.000 would be perfectly happy to have sabbath laws and blasphemy laws and those kinds of things that

02:05:35.220 we've had in the past in america i think that that gels even with american tradition apart from just

02:05:40.360 my theological convictions and all that so yeah so theonomy made sense it's like i i like this but

02:05:45.300 then all the theonomists today are liberals turns out you know so it's like on the one hand like

02:05:51.640 they're like we love the law of god on the other hand they're like stop working out you should be

02:05:57.020 fat you know and i'm like what what like and i don't i don't understand it and then i you know

02:06:02.820 as you pull beneath the surface you realize oh part of the appeal to like theonomy for these

02:06:09.100 guys not rush to me but these guys is um back to gk chesterton is the quote man will have 10

02:06:15.400 commandments or 10 000 um they're libertarians that's what that's what it is that theocratic

02:06:20.540 libertarians they they like theonomy because basically this is how you sum it up in a nutshell

02:06:25.120 they like the law of god not just because it's gods but particularly because they're underneath

02:06:30.560 the assumption that god's laws are few and they want a system of government that has very few laws

02:06:37.740 few restrictions, because they're very much invested in free trade, globalism, hedge funds.

02:06:46.340 Some of the guys work in those industries and fund their ministries. It makes sense for them.

02:06:54.300 So Rushdie was not like that. Jeff Halfley, he quotes Rushdie. He said, whenever and wherever

02:06:59.100 nepotism, because we talked about that earlier, is condemned. It is condemned on a moral principle,

02:07:04.820 which is not biblical and is, in fact, anti-biblical.

02:07:09.520 I appreciate it. 0.60

02:07:10.480 Rush Janine, once again, for the win, he was right.

02:07:13.740 Yeah, you can't, find me a Bible verse that says,

02:07:16.660 it is a sin to store up an inheritance for your children

02:07:21.960 or to prefer your own.

02:07:23.380 That's like, that's insane.

02:07:24.960 But isn't it funny?

02:07:25.720 Like nepotism is a bad word now.

02:07:27.780 It's a bad word.

02:07:28.880 And when it's like, you know, and meritocracy is a good word,

02:07:31.940 but now meritocracy, it's not just applied

02:07:33.680 to may the best american win it's may the best dude in india halfway across the world um and

02:07:40.540 he's not even necessarily the best but we'll say he's the best because we can pay him half the wage

02:07:44.800 that is in like may that form of meritocracy die a trillion deaths all right we got to land the

02:07:52.200 plane john any final thoughts from you plug your stuff for sure but give us any final thoughts

02:07:57.160 i think history is interesting it's important it confers identity uh it's it's the story of people

02:08:05.520 and we see it in the bible and the stories of the old testament of course are for our own

02:08:09.620 instruction and so i think we take our example from what god has already laid down through the

02:08:14.860 authors of scripture and that's an encouraging thing for budding historians out there he used

02:08:19.800 actual human beings in their own vernacular to write down the accounts of the past and what

02:08:28.420 God has done. And in a certain way, that's what you're doing when you, I think, rightly approach

02:08:33.580 history. You are looking at the unfolding providence of God. This is all God's story.

02:08:38.920 I know it's cliche, but his story, history, right? I mean, it really is. And I don't believe

02:08:45.840 what many historians have, especially since the modern period, that this is just molecules

02:08:54.200 bumping into each other and there's no really rhyme or reason. Or on the other end, we are

02:09:00.700 approaching some great enlightenment of some kind because of human achievement and scientific

02:09:04.920 innovation. I think what's happening is the Lord is through every age, every generation,

02:09:12.920 leaving himself with a witness. There's always going to be faithful men and women. There's

02:09:17.480 always a church. There's always things that he's in the business of doing, setting things up. And

02:09:23.580 it doesn't really matter what flavor of eschatology you believe in. And you may think

02:09:27.660 we're leading to different areas in the short term, but in the long term, he is setting up

02:09:32.120 his own reign and men will be without excuse. And so in the meantime, while we're here in this

02:09:38.980 temporal world, you know, let's, let's enjoy it. Let's honor the, the men and women who have come

02:09:44.720 before us, who, uh, I mean, I, I just, yesterday, one of the songs for my album, this is where I'm

02:09:49.000 going to start plugging stuff, but you go to johnharristunes.com after I think Saturday's

02:09:53.540 the first, so Saturday, it's all going to be there. Um, patrons already have access to it, but

02:09:58.440 it's a song about my grandfather, you know, and he's dead now and it's history. It's, it's, uh,

02:10:04.720 You 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.

02:10:31.440 So find a good department if you want to get some training on that.

02:10:36.280 And what's the last thing I should plug?

02:10:39.800 Go to my podcast website, johnharrispodcast.com, and you can find my books and everything else.

02:10:45.220 So thank you, Joel.

02:10:46.580 Thank you, Mike.

02:10:47.460 Appreciate this.

02:10:49.000 All right.

02:10:49.560 Thank you.

02:10:50.040 Appreciate it.

02:10:50.720 Thank you to the listeners.

02:10:52.040 Thanks for engaging.

02:10:53.320 Thanks for giving us a like on the video.

02:10:55.240 If you can, if you haven't done it one last time, give us a like.

02:10:58.380 Help it get out with the algorithm.

02:10:59.520 um thanks for the super chats to jeff halfley we appreciate that and we will see you guys again lord

02:11:04.900 willing on wednesday and wednesday wes will be back in the studio and we have a special guest

02:11:09.740 jared moore jared moore jared moore is going to come on and he's going to talk about um

02:11:15.040 the joke of a bible that preston sprinkle came out with and um i think publicly call him a heretic

02:11:21.820 and i'm here for it yep i'm here for it so all right see you wednesday thank you 0.73

02:11:29.520 Thank you.

The NXR Podcast - January 27, 2025

THE LIVESTREAM - We’ve Been Lied To About History

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript