The Tucker Carlson Show - Medical Ethicist Charles Camosy Debunks Media Lies About Abortion and Kamala’s Love for Infanticide

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00:00:30.000 Welcome to Tucker Carlson show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere

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00:00:50.140 all of our content at TuckerCarlson.com. Here's the episode. Okay. So let me, let me ask you

00:00:56.280 that the Trump campaign has, and Donald Trump himself at, at the presidential debate has

00:01:03.740 accused Kamala Harris and Tim Walls of supporting infanticide, which is to say laws that allow

00:01:11.460 doctors to kill children post viability and allow them to stand by as babies born in botched

00:01:20.780 abortions die. And the media and the democratic party, same thing have pushed back ferociously 0.82

00:01:28.220 on this fact checked it. Um, you know, you're a medical ethicist. This is right at the center

00:01:33.620 of what you study for a living. Is that true?

00:01:37.160 It's absolutely true. And until this whole political thing got in the way, everyone knew

00:01:43.580 it was true. I was doing my dissertation at Notre Dame on neonatal bioethics. And I rounded

00:01:50.340 with neonatal teams in hospitals, United States and Europe. And everyone knew that not only in

00:01:58.860 the abortion context you're discussing, but in many other kinds of contexts, we would just

00:02:03.120 simply choose not to treat certain children, especially if they were too disabled. And we

00:02:08.320 would call it comfort care. We call it something else, but everyone knew exactly what was happening.

00:02:12.640 So it's not just the abortion case, far from it. It's just a matter of routine and NICUs across

00:02:18.420 the country and around the world.

00:02:20.280 Okay. And this is longstanding.

00:02:23.000 Yeah. I mean, for instance, you could do it in a way where you bypass the parents. It's called

00:02:28.420 slow coding or show coding where the medical team basically says, you know, I'm not sure this baby

00:02:35.380 is, uh, or I think this baby is too disabled, right? Or has, will have too hard a life. It's not in 0.97

00:02:41.980 this baby's interest in living. The couple wants to do everything. The family wants to do everything.

00:02:46.760 We don't agree with it. And so it's a well-known practice actually to show code or slow code your

00:02:52.300 way into getting the outcome you want. That's without the families.

00:02:56.140 Wait, wait, I'm complete. Wait. So hospitals kill people's kids without telling them?

00:03:01.640 I mean, it's a little more complex than that. The, it's not what Trump unfortunately uses the phrase

00:03:08.040 when he talks about it in a particular Trumpian way, execution, right? It's not as if there's like

00:03:13.420 a pillow put over their head or a sharp object is used or even like a poison is administered.

00:03:19.960 It's more like throwing someone away or discarding them in a way that keeps them comfortable.

00:03:26.120 So, um, it's called comfort care. The debate over the law in Minnesota that has prompted so much

00:03:32.860 debate over this, insists that the babies be given comfort care, but that's actually hiding what's

00:03:39.360 actually going on in these particular circumstances. They're given comfort care because they're not

00:03:43.040 given the typical care that others get.

00:03:44.620 What is comfort care?

00:03:46.340 It's mostly a kind of palliative care or a sense of trying to keep someone, um, from not feeling pain

00:03:53.240 or something like this.

00:03:54.240 Like giving them opioids?

00:03:55.440 Yeah. Or, um, keeping the temperature appropriate and that sort of thing. Um, in fact,

00:04:01.980 the former governor of Virginia, right, was caught on tape essentially, or not caught on tape. He gave

00:04:06.420 a radio interview saying this, this happens all the time. The baby would be kept comfortable.

00:04:10.520 And then, uh, he said, I'll tell you what would happen. The baby kept comfortable. And then we'd

00:04:14.040 make a decision together with the parents about what exactly to do. And he said this in his interview,

00:04:18.240 right? Very matter of factly. And he was right to do so because until recently, this was not a

00:04:23.020 controversial thing or it's a controversial thing, but it's not controversial that this goes on at all.

00:04:26.820 Yeah. And you're saying it goes on. I mean, there's so many questions. Sure. One, I think

00:04:33.560 I wasn't where this happened with, with children. I mean, of course, with the elderly at the request 0.75

00:04:39.820 of the patient, very often physicians stop treatment. Right. Which strikes me as fine. Um,

00:04:47.960 I don't, you know, something that I would want, I don't, you know, most people don't want

00:04:52.820 extraordinary treatment, you know, at 90 or something. Um, but you're saying it's very common

00:04:58.880 with children. And then you're further saying that it happens without the parent's knowledge

00:05:03.200 or consent. That strikes me. How is that not a crime? Well, it should be a crime, but it's,

00:05:07.900 and to be clear, it doesn't happen very often, right? This isn't, that is not routine. The

00:05:11.480 slow coding or show coding. Most slow coding, coding means death, right? Well, coding is,

00:05:16.800 is specifically, uh, coding somebody as a particular kind of patient. So if it's full code,

00:05:22.820 you do everything to save the child's life. Right. But if it's a different kind of code,

00:05:26.720 like say a DNR, right. Or a different kind of, uh, code would be put in to say, no, we're not going

00:05:31.140 to do anything to save the person, which is totally legitimate in many other contexts, right? Uh, at the

00:05:35.580 end of life, uh, we might make a choice about how to live, right. And say, I, I want to live the rest

00:05:40.040 of my life in this very particular way. So I'm, I'm, I'm going to have a DNR. Yeah. I don't want

00:05:44.040 chemo. Yeah. Something like that. Um, slower show coding. And I'm sorry to interrupt you,

00:05:49.060 but just to be clear as an ethicist, you're okay with that. Yeah. Yeah. As long as what we're saying

00:05:54.240 is it's a choice about how to live, not a choice about dying. Right. So if I say, I want to live

00:05:59.880 the rest of my life without, um, chemotherapy or without other aggressive treatments and to use

00:06:07.260 the language of, um, moral philosophy and moral theology and bioethics, I foresee, but don't intend

00:06:12.580 that death is going to be the likely result of this or death will be sped up as a result of this.

00:06:16.880 Totally fine. Totally legitimate centuries. We've been doing this. Um, it's quite different,

00:06:20.920 of course, to say, uh, either as a person yourself or as a medical team or as a surrogate for another

00:06:26.840 person to say, uh, let's not treat you so that you die, right? Like it's, we are aiming at your

00:06:32.960 death. We were trying to kill you. And the context of abortion, um, reveals exactly what's going on 1.00

00:06:38.820 here. So Tim Walton company in Minnesota, uh, specifically rewrote laws in that state to say,

00:06:45.360 um, yeah, I know we have this infant born alive protection act here, but we need to make it

00:06:50.800 available to, uh, medical teams and others when there's a botched abortion to give the baby only

00:06:56.840 comfort care and let them die. But we know that it's not, um, foreseen, but not intending death

00:07:02.020 because there was an abortion attempt, right? That was an attempt to kill. And so the attempt to kill

00:07:06.180 is transferred over into the newborn context. And so we're, we're just doing it by omission,

00:07:11.400 right? We call it comfort care again. Um, but let me give you another example of how this works.

00:07:15.520 Sometimes, uh, and very often, uh, parents, uh, are encouraged to have abortions in these cases where, 0.64

00:07:21.740 where, um, they choose not to write. They, um, push back on the medical team. Like if there's a,

00:07:26.280 uh, a Down syndrome diagnosis, for instance, prenatally, the medical teams, this is well documented,

00:07:32.060 will push them time and time again to have abortions. Even very pro-life, very, uh, prenatal 0.85

00:07:38.560 justice focused parents get bombarded by medical teams. Again, I've lived that. You've lived it.

00:07:44.560 Yes. And, um, yes, with a false diagnosis without even getting, it's not about me,

00:07:48.840 but, or my family, but I know for a fact that what you're saying is true because I've seen it

00:07:53.460 with my own eyes. It's extraordinary. And what sometimes happens, uh, and this again reveals what's

00:08:00.300 actually happening in, in the post-birth context. Uh, these teams will get so frustrated that

00:08:06.340 they'll say, okay, we can't convince you to have an abortion. There's still things we can do after 1.00

00:08:11.140 birth, right? So if you say there was this case, I just saw recently of a child who, uh,

00:08:15.860 was diagnosed prenatally with spina bifida and, uh, and the medical team tried to get the, the,

00:08:21.660 the mom to, to abort and was unable to do so. And the, uh, OBGYN said, uh, okay, um, we can still

00:08:29.940 choose not to treat the child after birth. We'll give the child comfort care after birth.

00:08:34.620 Now you might be able to say in the abstract, well, what exactly is going on here? Is it more like

00:08:38.320 foreseeing, but not intending death, but you know exactly what's going on here because the whole

00:08:42.600 point, they're trying to kill the kid, they're trying to kill the kid. The child is too disabled. 0.98

00:08:45.540 We've decided what, I mean, I have thought this for, you know, almost 30 years since I first saw it, but

00:08:53.140 how can someone like that be allowed to be a doctor in our country? If you're pushing a mother 1.00

00:09:00.380 to, to kill her child, like, this is not the opposite of your job. You would think so. We, 0.68

00:09:05.680 we have a lot of good doctors who don't participate in these kinds of things.

00:09:09.620 Do we have a lot of them? I don't believe you.

00:09:11.300 We have a large number, um, who either feel, uh, neutral about this or who feel positive about

00:09:19.720 it, who are, who are active in it. And the re, and let me just give you an example of how the

00:09:23.560 thought process goes. I wrote an article about this for the public discourse, um,

00:09:28.380 called the right to a dead baby question mark. And the way that they sort of try to justify it. And I,

00:09:35.020 I cite all the literature in this article, justifying this claim, the way they justify it is they say,

00:09:40.400 well, you know, after a certain time, we would never neglect a baby to death and call it comfort

00:09:46.100 care because we've decided that there is a new person here that we're saving actually who's

00:09:52.340 disabled. Right. And, um, but before that time, and it's for, for every, uh, medical team or every

00:09:59.300 doctor, it'll vary. Um, they think of it more as, um, stopping an individual, uh, who's disabled from

00:10:05.560 coming into existence. Right. Now we're talking about newborn children here or neonatal

00:10:09.880 children here. And this is well-documented again. Uh, the article is in the public discourse,

00:10:15.120 the right to a dead baby question mark. And I cite all the re all the research that shows that this

00:10:19.000 is how, um, this is thought of. And what's so interesting about this Tucker is this is what's,

00:10:25.860 I think if we think about history, if we think about the pagan Greek and Roman culture that existed

00:10:31.720 before Christianity on this came on the scene, these are the kinds of judgments that were made

00:10:36.680 before a Christian ethic came to dominate in our culture in the West, because as you probably know,

00:10:43.040 it was thought of as not a big deal at all in ancient Greece and Rome to simply discard

00:10:47.740 children that were too disabled or were female. Females were too expensive for many, uh, families.

00:10:53.340 And so they were just discarded. And it's no surprise that as we have, um, repaganized as the

00:11:02.000 Christian culture has retreated, especially in medicine, right? Secularized medicine is 1.00

00:11:07.240 deeply, deeply problematic and dominant at the moment, even in, in some contexts where you might

00:11:14.120 not expect it to be. Um, we are, it's no accident. We're moving towards this practice.

00:11:18.940 It's a little weird of sex selective abortion is defended by feminists, which I just find, I mean, 0.92

00:11:25.900 I don't take feminists very seriously, but I, even by their low standards, that seems 1.00

00:11:30.540 hard to explain. If your job is to defend women and fight against anyone who thinks of women as less

00:11:37.540 valuable than men, how can you not say anything when sex selective abortion changes the demographic

00:11:44.320 mix and say the biggest country in the world, China? I don't understand that.

00:11:47.620 Yeah. I mean, it's no accident that, that abortion is used as a tool of oppression for, uh, for this

00:11:54.960 in, in, in China and other places. Um, it's no accident that it was used this way in ancient Greece

00:12:00.520 and Rome. Um, the disabled were also, uh, very much, um, uh, part of the group that would have been

00:12:08.040 discarded. And just to give you a sense of how ubiquitous, ubiquitous it was before Christians came 0.97

00:12:12.520 on the scene, there were systems in place where you would, um, sometimes abandon your baby in

00:12:17.780 specific areas. And, um, with the hope that maybe somehow they would not die or from exposure or be

00:12:24.740 eaten by animals or something, but, you know, maybe they'd be picked up by slavers, right. Or sold into

00:12:29.920 prostitution or something like this. Even the early church fathers said, one reason you shouldn't visit

00:12:33.900 a prostitute among the many is it could be a kind of incest perhaps, because so many people in this 0.99

00:12:39.380 area were, would be exposed and then, uh, prostitutes, right. You're, you might have a 0.97

00:12:43.180 family member there. I gotta tell you one other, uh, case that just shows it's, it's terrible, but

00:12:47.620 it, it shows how ubiquitous it, uh, ubiquitous it was. We have a ancient papyrus letter from,

00:12:53.540 I think it's the year one AD of a migrant worker named Hillarion, who is writing his, uh, pregnant wife, 0.95

00:13:02.460 Alice, and he's, he's in Alexandria doing, uh, migrant work. And he's worried that because his

00:13:07.740 buddies are going to go home, we don't know quite where home is, but they're going to go home.

00:13:11.720 And he's worried that she might, um, think that he's abandoned her because he's not going to go

00:13:15.720 with them. So he's writing her saying, dude, I'm, don't worry. I'm going to send you the money as

00:13:20.380 soon as I get it. I'm going to stay in Alexandria and try to make some more money. By the way, if

00:13:25.300 you're pregnant, oh, and then he says, and take care of our loved ones. So they already have kids.

00:13:29.560 Um, take care of our little one. And by the way, if you're pregnant, if it's a boy, keep it. If it's a 1.00

00:13:34.340 girl, throw it out. Okay. Bye. Essentially. That's it's, it's an amazing letter. It's revealed

00:13:40.220 so much about the culture, including again, when you don't have a Christian ethic that says all

00:13:44.800 human beings are equal, right? When it doesn't matter how old you are, it doesn't matter how

00:13:48.240 young you are, how disabled you are, how expensive you are, how quote unquote burdensome you are. 0.98

00:13:53.380 That vision of the good is not present in pre-Christian pagan Greece and Rome. And increasingly 0.95

00:13:58.020 it's not present in our own repaganizing culture.

00:14:00.700 And it wasn't, you know, present in supposedly Christian Europe in the 30s and 40s. And I just

00:14:06.680 find it so interesting that, you know, we spend a lot of time 80 years later talking about the

00:14:10.240 Nazis and obviously the Nazis are bad. Everyone agrees with that very much, including me. But the 0.99

00:14:15.640 one thing that we almost never mention is that before they started rounding up other populations,

00:14:20.220 the Nazis killed hundreds of thousands, about 300,000 Germans in hospitals. Uh, the disabled 1.00

00:14:28.160 children, a lot of them had comfort care, but it was murder. And we never talk about that for some

00:14:34.440 reason. And it's sort of weird to see the American medical establishment, which I think thinks of

00:14:38.360 itself as anti-Nazi. It's weird to see them embrace Nazi eugenics policy because that's exactly what 0.96

00:14:44.300 they're doing. It sounds like.

00:14:45.140 At the, um, early stages of life. Yes. I think it's no accident. This is defended as kind of an

00:14:51.340 extension of abortion, which is a sacred cow that apparently we find it very difficult to ask

00:14:56.020 questions about, even, even just very basic critical questions about saving lives after birth.

00:15:00.660 There is a little more hope. I think at the end of life, the American medical association still says,

00:15:06.460 um, that physician assisted suicide, uh, can't be, uh, consistent with any rational understanding of

00:15:13.980 what healthcare is. That's, that's still explicitly said by, by them, though it's under fire every year.

00:15:20.520 And the beginning of medical ethics was actually the Nuremberg trials or the, the secular medical

00:15:25.420 ethics was, it was the Nuremberg trials, which, which called out a lot of these practices.

00:15:30.600 Then I'm aware of that. And I'm, I'm grateful for the codification of the lessons of the Second

00:15:36.100 World War in our medical ethics. Um, and this is what you do for a living, but it's just kind of weird

00:15:41.400 to see that same medical establishment embrace Nazi medical ethics, um, which they have. So does anyone 0.65

00:15:49.160 say that? Yeah. I mean, it's the, as you know, the critique, uh, you're a

00:15:55.380 Nazi is so overused that it sort of loses its bite sometimes. But, uh,

00:16:00.220 Well, if being a Nazi means anything, it means euthanizing children who aren't fit. 0.92

00:16:03.620 That's right. That's exactly right. And that sort of mentality was only possible with a retreat of 0.94

00:16:10.860 a Christian ethic, right? Uh, in Nazi Germany. And increasingly as the retreat of the Christian 0.90

00:16:15.660 ethic today takes place, we're finding it more and more difficult to, um, to marshal the resources

00:16:21.820 to say why we shouldn't have very similar kinds of practices. Canada is already almost a totally

00:16:26.920 lost cause in this regard. We've had it in the Netherlands and Belgium and Switzerland for some

00:16:30.920 time. Many U S states have adopted this. Unfortunately, I do think it's interesting that

00:16:36.020 some deep blue States out here on the East coast have, have resisted in part because the disability

00:16:42.060 rights community, you're talking about euthanasia, right, right, right. Um, so, so yeah, we're talking

00:16:47.040 about, uh, euthanasia, physician assisted suicide. In fact, I think both, um, are Maryland, New York,

00:16:56.220 um, uh, Massachusetts, uh, Connecticut, all these states are just have resisted well-funded attempts

00:17:05.360 to try to legalize physician assisted suicide. So who's, who's funding the attempts to, to kill?

00:17:12.060 Um, who's paying for that? Yeah, I don't, I don't have all of the information about that,

00:17:16.020 but the main activist group is a group called compassion and choices, um, formerly known as

00:17:21.980 you may know as the hemlock society, the charmingly named hemlock society. You might imagine why

00:17:26.260 the board got together and changed their name to compassion and choices. Um, uh, but, uh, and they've

00:17:33.560 been successful. They've been successful in California. They've been successful, um, in, uh, my home

00:17:39.220 state of New Jersey, unfortunately. Who are the donors to compassion and choices to the

00:17:44.500 pro killing? That's a good question. I'll tell you, I don't know the answer. It's weird that

00:17:48.980 they're not famous because if you're, you know, pushing the medical establishment and the state,

00:17:56.660 inevitably the state, because the state really does control healthcare to murder people or 0.96

00:18:01.740 convince them to quote, kill themselves because they're like poor or unhappy, then you're a monster 0.98

00:18:06.460 and you should be well known. I would think I can imagine donors not wanting to be publicly 0.95

00:18:11.980 known. So maybe I, I, this is just pure speculation. I, I don't know. Maybe, maybe there's a place we

00:18:17.100 can look this up. It'd be good to know about these questions. Yeah. But, uh, you know, what's,

00:18:21.660 what's interesting about this is that, um, they are well-funded and they have, um, narratives that

00:18:27.520 they like, uh, that they can use their well-funded resources to promote. And one of those narratives

00:18:32.380 is very sympathetic, a narrative, right? Like how could anyone, and we were just talking at

00:18:36.860 breakfast, right? How can anyone see somebody at the, at the end stages of their life or in

00:18:40.940 racking pain, losing control of their bodily functions, you know, like that's almost where

00:18:45.760 everyone goes, right? Is the first example. Um, well, because that's where really almost everyone

00:18:52.060 goes in life. I mean, that is what having seen, we've all at a certain age seen people die who we

00:18:57.200 love. And that is what it looks like. It's unbearably painful and ugly and sad. It, you

00:19:03.380 know, it's the worst thing. Um, so that is a compelling argument. It is. What is not widely

00:19:10.560 known though, is that it's a misleading argument because, um, Oregon, for instance, has had legalized

00:19:16.760 physician assisted killing since the nineties and, um, never has physical pain ever made the top five

00:19:24.120 reasons people in Oregon request physician assisted killing. The number one reason is fear of a loss

00:19:29.440 of autonomy. Um, also in the top five is fear of being a burden on others. Of course. Um, you can

00:19:36.440 understand why disability rights communities are some of the most effective and energetic, uh, resistors 1.00

00:19:42.160 of these practices, because when they say things like loss of autonomy, fear of enjoyable activities,

00:19:47.140 which is another loss of enjoyable activities, fear of being a burden on others, disability rights

00:19:50.860 communities say, um, that sounds a lot like us. Are you telling us that we're sort of making this

00:19:55.220 judgment that people like us maybe have the kind of lives that should be killed or like not worth

00:20:00.000 living anymore? And I think that's actually interesting to think about why these blue states,

00:20:05.000 um, out, out here have been successful. I, I, I think it's pretty clear actually that the arguments made

00:20:11.180 by disability rights groups saying we matter just as much as anybody else, um, have been so far

00:20:17.180 persuasive. It shows that the Christian ethic of fundamental human equality has not totally died

00:20:21.820 because again, these are populations without that Christian ethic that would otherwise just simply

00:20:26.620 be discarded. Land of the free home of the brave. It is the land of the free because the people are

00:20:32.400 brave, but what if they stop being vigilant? Do you remember when Ed Snowden revealed that the U S

00:20:38.140 government, your government was spying on you, you were probably shocked and then angry, but most people

00:20:44.540 have forgotten the lesson and the lesson is it's still ongoing. And so they use digital products

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00:22:09.200 Yeah, I'm so mad at the Down syndrome people that it's hard to accept what you're saying,

00:22:17.260 but I know that it's true. I don't understand why the Down syndrome groups haven't said something

00:22:21.860 about the genocide of people with Down syndrome. And I think they should be ashamed of their

00:22:27.660 cowardice. But that doesn't mean that there aren't great disability rights groups.

00:22:30.940 Well, it's interesting to think about how can we do a better job

00:22:34.920 on our end as pro-lifers to welcome, we need them at the fight at the beginning of life for

00:22:41.300 prenatal justice and neonatal justice now. Because again, it's not just abortion. These babies who are

00:22:47.140 neglected to death very often have disabilities and were targeted for abortion in the first place

00:22:52.120 precisely because they had disabilities. And so I think, you know, there seems to be some movement

00:22:56.400 now post-Dobbs. I was heartened by some of the language that J.D. Vance used in a recent debate

00:23:03.720 with Governor Waltz, thinking about ways to expand the pro-life message in ways that would be

00:23:10.200 focused on social support and broadening the message out in ways that are really helpful.

00:23:15.120 And I think if we continue on that track, we might be able to bring in some of the disability 1.00

00:23:21.160 rights groups into the fight for prenatal justice. Because you're just totally right that 0.97

00:23:24.240 that it's, I mean, it's a mass slaughter. I think that's the way we need to talk about it.

00:23:29.100 Well, how can you get up there and be like, I'm advocating for people with Down syndrome,

00:23:32.440 and I'm so grateful someone is, of course, and then ignore the fact that basically they've been

00:23:38.580 eliminated by prenatal testing and then abortion. They've been targeted for killing and it succeeded. 0.94

00:23:45.160 And if you run, again, I'm just grinding an ax here, but I wrote about them 30 years ago.

00:23:49.400 I've never forgotten it. The arc. Like, have you ever asked them that?

00:23:56.180 We get into, I've been in part of the pro-life movement for a very long time now. My first real

00:24:00.720 job was actually communications director for pro-life Wisconsin back in the day. So I've been

00:24:06.360 around the movement a long time and I've been aware of attempts to reach out, especially at the

00:24:11.040 beginning of life. Our relationships are really solid at the end of life, really solid. Beginning of

00:24:15.900 life, we have this political stuff going on. It makes it very difficult. But again, I think we're

00:24:19.620 at this moment perhaps where something is clearly shifting in the pro-life movement, I think,

00:24:25.760 along with our politics that would make it easier to welcome those folks in. If I can tell you just

00:24:31.180 one story to highlight why this has moved me so much too, it sounds like you have a lot of stories

00:24:36.280 in your background. I was giving a talk, a kind of post-mortem after the 2016 election

00:24:42.100 with, in Connecticut, I think. I was on a panel discussion with that and I was talking about

00:24:49.780 this very topic, you know, abortion and the slaughter of disabled people via abortion.

00:24:58.060 And after the talk, this gentleman in his 70s with a guy I later learned was his son in his 30s,

00:25:06.860 clearly had Down syndrome, came up to me and he just thanked me, the older gentleman, and said,

00:25:11.880 you know, nobody ever talks about this. As you pointed out, nobody ever talks about,

00:25:15.340 thank you for bringing it up. I lost my wife, you know, two years ago and all I have in my life

00:25:19.440 now is my son. He's the joy of my existence. And he's, you know, it's so hard to hear the kinds of

00:25:25.920 things we hear about abortion and how it's used against people like him. And in the middle of us

00:25:30.880 talking, this guy who's probably in his 30s just grabbed me and hugged me as hard as ever been

00:25:35.960 hugged in my entire life. Yeah, it makes me emotional. It's like, ah, yes.

00:25:38.800 Because he feels it too. He can't really articulate it as well, but he feels the surrounding

00:25:43.520 culture. Well, I mean, I don't, you know, anytime you're around someone with Down syndrome,

00:25:48.020 or at least I'll speak for myself, anytime I've been around someone with Down syndrome,

00:25:51.360 the spirit coming off that person is really unlike any other person you meet. I mean,

00:25:58.120 that's just hard to imagine, you know, thinking that it's good to get rid of people like that.

00:26:04.340 I mean, there's just a kindness that it's impossible not to notice.

00:26:09.720 And there's data now to support this. People with Down syndrome actually rate their lives

00:26:13.920 happier than those of us who don't have Down syndrome.

00:26:16.700 Of course.

00:26:17.060 I'm not surprised at all having spent time around people. I couldn't be less shocked by that.

00:26:22.740 And yet we have a regime of prenatal violence, which targets them in a way that's just reprehensible.

00:26:29.240 But I'm also, you know, in addition to feeling sorry for anyone who's targeted for genocide,

00:26:35.160 I also worry about the attitudes that make that possible and that make it mostly unnoticed.

00:26:41.720 And the core underlying attitude seems to be some people aren't worth anything.

00:26:47.460 They're just objects that can be discarded. And I don't think that's a good attitude at all to

00:26:52.140 have for our fellow human beings. Where did that come from?

00:26:55.120 Well, throughout human history, we've seen this be the norm rather than the exception, right?

00:27:06.000 It was not great for disabled people at all before a Judeo-Christian ethic came on the scene in the West.

00:27:11.520 And with this idea that every single human being, in virtue of their being a member of the species Homo sapiens, right?

00:27:22.280 A fellow human animal, in a way of speaking, has exactly the same value because that human being bears the image and likeness of God

00:27:30.520 in precisely the same way, regardless of age, regardless of disability, regardless of burden,

00:27:35.820 regardless of any accidental trait, in their very nature, in the very nature of who they are, the face of the image of God is present.

00:27:44.780 They have souls, we used to say.

00:27:46.460 Yeah.

00:27:46.580 People have souls.

00:27:47.600 They have souls.

00:27:50.080 Before that, it was just a matter of course to consider human beings in this way.

00:27:56.080 After that, though we didn't always live out, as Martin Luther King said, the true meaning of our creed,

00:28:03.900 but we were on this trajectory, right?

00:28:06.160 We were trying to better live out this principle of fundamental human equality.

00:28:09.800 As the Declaration says, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all of us are created equal by God, right?

00:28:16.640 Try to live that out more consistently.

00:28:18.160 I think it's fair to say, and it's especially true in medicine, but I think it's true more broadly throughout the culture.

00:28:26.220 As we've become post-Christian, as we've repaganized, at least again within our sort of spheres of power,

00:28:33.500 not necessarily with the broader people, we've lost the ability to say that all human beings are equal.

00:28:38.980 We've lost the basis for saying, now we do affirm the view, like equality is maybe one of the most overused buzzwords around, right?

00:28:48.160 But I think of it almost like cut flowers, as an analogy.

00:28:53.260 You can cut the flower off of its roots and put it in water, and it'll stay beautiful for a little while, right?

00:28:59.580 But everybody knows that once you cut the flower from its foundation, from its roots, it's dying.

00:29:04.800 It's going to die.

00:29:06.880 These ideas, these foundational ideas, like fundamental human equality, have their roots in Judeo-Christian ethics.

00:29:13.460 There's just absolutely no doubt about it.

00:29:14.840 And we have cut these ideas away from their roots, and we still talk about them, right?

00:29:20.060 We still even use them as important ideas.

00:29:23.540 But the issue is the idea is dying.

00:29:26.880 The idea of fundamental human equality is dying.

00:29:28.820 We're no longer on the trajectory of trying to live this idea out more consistently.

00:29:33.000 We are now in a very different trajectory.

00:29:36.760 Like people are losing their fundamental equality, right?

00:29:39.340 We are thinking less about how to do this and more about, well, you know, is it really being human that matters at the end of the day?

00:29:47.180 Maybe it's about autonomy.

00:29:49.560 Maybe it's about rationality.

00:29:51.380 Maybe it's about self-awareness.

00:29:53.400 Maybe it's about IQ.

00:29:54.720 I've heard more and more people talking about IQ recently in ways that I find sort of disturbing, especially given what you said about Nazi Germany.

00:30:02.640 And so once you move away from fundamental human equality, you're left with these trait Xs, I call them.

00:30:08.300 And it's very clear that human beings don't have those in equal capacity, right?

00:30:11.960 Or some human beings don't appear to have them at all.

00:30:13.920 Right, I mean, it doesn't, I think it's really obvious that IQ determines more than any other factor your material success in life.

00:30:22.320 I don't think there's any question about that.

00:30:23.760 And I also think it has a huge effect on your interactions with the criminal justice system.

00:30:28.560 I think it's a very important predictor of your life.

00:30:33.140 I don't think it has anything to do with your value.

00:30:36.240 So this is my opinion.

00:30:37.480 In other words, I think IQ is super important.

00:30:38.960 We should talk about it.

00:30:39.580 Okay.

00:30:40.620 But God doesn't care what your IQ is.

00:30:43.160 It has nothing to do with whether or not you have a soul.

00:30:46.100 You have a soul because you're a human being.

00:30:48.140 Your soul is identical in value to mine.

00:30:51.360 You may have an IQ twice mine.

00:30:53.160 You may be three times as rich as me.

00:30:54.460 It doesn't matter.

00:30:54.940 No, that matters.

00:30:56.560 So just to be clear about my view on this.

00:30:58.160 Yeah, yeah.

00:30:59.780 And if it's all right with you, I'd just like to name some of the categories of human beings that are on their way.

00:31:08.480 If we think about the trajectory before of trying to live out this more consistently,

00:31:13.160 we're now moving in a very different direction where people are falling out of the circle of protection for fundamental human equality.

00:31:18.940 And so we've already talked about prenatal human beings and neonatal human beings as classic examples of that.

00:31:23.700 In fact, it's so interesting to think about the early church's response to ancient Greece and Rome's infanticide was found in the Didache,

00:31:32.520 which is a first century, essentially a catechism, which gives us a really important insight into how they lived.

00:31:38.300 And they contrast the way of life with the way of death and say Christians need to lead the way of life. 0.85

00:31:44.220 And the way of life is explicitly focused on a couple of things.

00:31:48.260 One, don't do abortion and infanticide, and they were talked about together explicitly because that's how the ancient pagan Greeks and Romans thought about them.

00:31:55.760 When was this written?

00:31:56.720 First century.

00:31:58.080 I don't know exactly when in the first century, but first century.

00:32:00.640 So it's very, very old.

00:32:02.640 It's very, very old.

00:32:03.340 It's called the Didache.

00:32:04.220 You can find it online.

00:32:05.480 You can find-

00:32:06.040 It's got to be one of the oldest Christian documents.

00:32:07.640 Yeah.

00:32:07.960 It's one of the oldest Christian documents.

00:32:09.360 It also, interestingly, contrasts the way of life with the way of death in a way that those who are the rich and unjust judges of the poor are part of the way of death.

00:32:21.540 And the way of life is explicitly focused on one of the central messages of Christ, which is to see my face, he says, in the poor, right?

00:32:29.920 See my image in the poor.

00:32:33.220 But, okay, so this goes all the way back to the very earliest parts of the church, right?

00:32:38.480 And now we're not just seeing this with regard to the populations that so perfectly mirror that, newborn children and prenatal human beings.

00:32:47.920 But now we're seeing it with people with catastrophic brain injuries.

00:32:52.260 So if I can just speak briefly about brain death, maybe not so briefly because we have a two-hour podcast here and it's somewhat complicated, but I need to set it up a little bit.

00:33:03.220 So I do a lot of work on secular utilitarian philosophy and I'm actually friends with Peter Singer, who's a very well-known secular utilitarian philosopher.

00:33:14.920 We don't agree on many, many things, but I think he's wrong in really interesting ways.

00:33:19.080 And he's seen, and since the 70s, he's seen what it has meant to reject a Christian ethic of human life.

00:33:26.800 And he said very explicitly, if you're pro-choice for abortion, you also need to be pro-choice for infanticide.

00:33:31.920 He's right about that, just to work the other way.

00:33:34.260 If we're protecting babies, we should protect prenatal babies as well.

00:33:37.600 But interestingly, he says it really wasn't abortion that was the first moment where we decided to say being human doesn't matter.

00:33:46.740 It was brain death.

00:33:47.520 So around the time of the 60s and 70s, when a lot of stuff went down that involved cultural shifts, there was a confluence of two inventions.

00:34:01.940 The first was the ventilator, so a machine that helps people breathe.

00:34:06.660 And the second was the transplantation of vital organs from one individual to another.

00:34:13.940 And once we got the capacity to transplant organs, as you might imagine, as we have today, huge waiting lists developed, right, for this resource.

00:34:26.540 And then the ventilator was invented, and suddenly we had people with catastrophic brain injuries on ventilators.

00:34:33.380 And something called the Harvard, ad hoc Harvard Committee to Determine Death or Brain Death, came up with a proposal.

00:34:42.180 They said, let's decide that all these individuals with catastrophic brain injuries on ventilators have something called brain death and are dead.

00:34:52.240 And therefore, we can take their organs and give them to others who need them.

00:34:57.120 And by the way, I'm not hating an organ donation.

00:34:58.800 I'm an organ donor myself.

00:35:00.800 I'm just trying to tell the story that both Peter Singer and I agree on actually was a major turning point in all of this.

00:35:06.400 So, what the dean of Harvard Medical School said at the time was, it sounds like you just are redefining death in order to get more organs.

00:35:14.400 We don't want to release a document that says that's what we're doing.

00:35:17.380 And so, they changed the document.

00:35:20.420 But it's still, even with the edited document, it's very clear.

00:35:23.240 And this is historically well known that this is what happened.

00:35:25.420 And so, what Peter Singer and I and others who are aware of this history say is, this is when we first said a living member of the species Homo sapiens, a fellow human being, did not count, was dead, essentially.

00:35:39.140 Did not have the same moral status as others.

00:35:41.600 Because guess what, Tucker?

00:35:43.680 People in these so-called brain dead states can gestate children.

00:35:50.160 They can fight off infections.

00:35:52.680 If you cut into their body, they release adrenaline and their heart rate speeds up.

00:35:59.700 There was even this case of, oh, and by the way, the gestating children case often happens, unfortunately, in very tragic cases where a pregnant woman gets into a car accident or something, has a catastrophic brain injury.

00:36:11.980 And her body is, herself, she's able to gestate a child despite being declared brain dead.

00:36:17.760 One of my favorite all-time headlines about this, it shows the confusion we have about this in the culture, it's from the AP.

00:36:22.660 It said, brain dead woman gives birth then dies.

00:36:26.420 So, it's just like the full confusion on display in one very short headline.

00:36:31.600 But maybe you remember this case from a few years ago, Jahai McMath in California.

00:36:36.620 She was this African-American girl who had a surgery go really terrible for sleep apnea, had a catastrophic brain injury.

00:36:43.840 And the state of California declared her dead.

00:36:47.140 And her very Christian, also African-American parents said, she's not dead.

00:36:53.400 And the state of California said, and her medical team said, yes, she is.

00:36:58.100 And by the way, according to her family's lawyer, Jahai's family's lawyer, the chief of pediatrics at, I think it was UC San Francisco Hospital, pounded his fists on the table and said, she's dead.

00:37:09.860 She's dead.

00:37:10.540 What is it you don't understand?

00:37:11.700 She's dead.

00:37:14.080 And then a few days later, she got her first period.

00:37:16.120 And they managed to convince both the state of California and her medical team to essentially allow them to transfer to New Jersey, where I live, which happens to be the only state in the union that allows religious freedom for people like Jahai's family to say, I don't think this individual who just got her first period is dead and I want to take care of my daughter.

00:37:40.080 And the other states don't allow that?

00:37:41.620 They don't allow it.

00:37:42.580 They don't allow it.

00:37:43.340 What does that mean?

00:37:44.360 They don't allow it.

00:37:45.260 It would be as if from their, in my view, deeply misguided view, they would say, well, you know, you can't just say a corpse is alive, right?

00:37:58.540 Like this is a dead individual.

00:38:00.140 This is a corpse.

00:38:01.040 In fact, some of the medical ethics, the deans of medical ethics around the United States reacted to this case, the Jahai McMath case saying, this is a corpse.

00:38:10.120 They're animating a corpse.

00:38:11.300 Who are these people?

00:38:12.540 She's going to decompose, they said.

00:38:14.040 Why did it make them so mad?

00:38:15.720 Why are they so, so many physicians, most physicians seem like they just love death.

00:38:21.320 What is that?

00:38:22.900 Yeah, I, I don't know exactly.

00:38:26.120 I think, because I want to talk about vegetation.

00:38:29.100 I know, I know, I know, and I want you, but I just keep, five different times in the last half an hour, you've made reference to the views of doctors on these things.

00:38:38.280 And each time I had the same question, which is, I would hope that the default desire for doctors would be to see people live.

00:38:46.940 And yet, I have seen it in my own life.

00:38:50.020 Most doctors I know get off on death.

00:38:53.180 They love death.

00:38:54.180 That is just my observation.

00:38:55.420 Maybe you've got a different one.

00:38:56.520 But what is that?

00:38:57.780 I do think there's a strain within contemporary secularized medicine that is so ideological that if there's something that pushes back against their very secularized, whatever, I don't know what to call it, whatever the opposite of pro-life is perspective.

00:39:17.520 Well, pro-death, I think we'd be the opposite.

00:39:23.260 Is anathema, right?

00:39:25.420 And so.

00:39:25.840 But why?

00:39:27.140 Because they're, and this is, I mean, I want to speak with too broad a brush, but in many cases, the ideology is far more important than their oath they took to protect and care for life.

00:39:37.080 But you would just think like, okay, so this girl, they think she's dead, but then she has her period, she's clearly not dead.

00:39:42.360 Like, why would you pound your fist on the table and demand that other people think she's dead?

00:39:47.420 Or why would you push parents to abort a child with Down syndrome or spinal bifida, both of which are survivable and thrive?

00:39:54.960 You know, you can thrive with both of those things.

00:39:56.460 So why are they so vested in a we must kill?

00:39:59.900 Like, they're not neutral on it.

00:40:01.240 That's right.

00:40:02.420 Like, what is that?

00:40:03.920 Well, I think there would be at least two sets of reasons in the case of brain death.

00:40:10.360 The first one would be unique to brain death.

00:40:11.920 But the other one would connect with what's called vegetative state.

00:40:14.200 I think maybe offensively vegetative state, which is different.

00:40:16.860 And I'm going to say more about that in a minute if that's all right.

00:40:18.940 But with brain death, I think what's always in the background here is what the Harvard Brain Death Committee was concerned with, organs.

00:40:26.120 Right?

00:40:26.360 So if we suddenly say that individuals with catastrophic brain injuries are not dead, and we still have the dead donor rule that says you need to be dead in order to donate a non-paired vital organ, like a heart, say.

00:40:38.520 Then the number of, then the waiting list for organs just goes way through the roof right now.

00:40:46.580 And this is actually brought up.

00:40:49.200 There have been champions, secular champions, of attempts to really call brain death or what it is, a kind of fiction.

00:40:58.020 Well, originally it was a fiction that was just designed to put us in a position to get better organs and more organs.

00:41:06.000 Who, when he gives talks, he routinely gets questions like, you shouldn't be talking about this.

00:41:14.540 You know what's going to be the result of what you're talking about here?

00:41:17.060 People are going to die because they're not going to get organs, right, that they need.

00:41:20.400 They're going to die on organ waiting lists.

00:41:21.840 And so don't talk about this because people will die.

00:41:26.300 Don't talk about vax injuries because vaccines are too important.

00:41:29.880 It's a classic utilitarian perspective on these things.

00:41:33.680 But if you find yourself lying or ignoring harm to individuals on behalf of some imagined greater good, then you're just evil.

00:41:43.700 I mean, I don't really see another plausible description of that.

00:41:48.680 If one has a view that what's at bottom true about ethics and morality is maximizing the greatest good for the greatest number, we can call it evil.

00:42:00.740 I think in many cases it is, but this just follows logically.

00:42:04.120 Why would we get bent out of shape about whether Jehi McMath is a person or not or has human dignity or not?

00:42:09.600 What really matters at the end of the day is that we maximize good outcomes from this situation.

00:42:14.460 Because that's a Nazi attitude. 0.84

00:42:15.920 That's literally the attitude that they were not ashamed of.

00:42:20.480 They bragged about.

00:42:21.200 They wrote about it extensively.

00:42:23.320 We seem to have forgotten all of this.

00:42:24.800 We remember all the lessons about Poland and Czechoslovakia, but we missed the basic lesson, which is you cannot treat people like objects or else you end up committing genocide.

00:42:34.260 It's like super simple.

00:42:35.920 Right.

00:42:36.120 Sorry.

00:42:36.600 No, that's well said.

00:42:38.620 I think another angle into it, though, is a different kind of ideological angle, which is if we say that individuals who have catastrophic brain injuries but are clearly still functioning members of the species Homo sapiens, just like you and I are, though very seriously disabled, that has implications for human dignity that if applied consistently would undermine very foundational views, including with regard to abortion.

00:43:07.160 And this is explicitly said, so let's talk, if you don't mind, about so-called vegetative state.

00:43:14.300 Yeah, okay.

00:43:14.720 So if I could get so spun up, I keep interrupting you.

00:43:18.240 I beg your pardon.

00:43:19.140 No.

00:43:20.700 You've said three times that brain death is a category that was kind of devised as really almost like a marketing tool in order to increase the supply of organs.

00:43:32.620 But what is brain death exactly?

00:43:36.160 When it's explained to laymen like me, it's they're flatlining.

00:43:39.120 We're doing, you know, we're measuring brain activity and there's none.

00:43:42.920 Is that real?

00:43:44.600 Yeah.

00:43:44.740 So part of the problem here is there really isn't a good way to test for what's called whole brain death, in part because, and this was actually after the Harvard report came out, something called the Uniform Commission, which is a nonprofit group that has surprisingly a lot of power to propose uniform language for states across the country without federal law.

00:44:13.980 How to sort of make sure they're basically on the same page with regard to legislation so there wouldn't be like one kind of brain death laws in California and a different kind in New York.

00:44:22.880 And so I think it was 1981, certainly the early 80s, they proposed language that basically mirrored the recommendations of the Harvard Brain Death Commission, which said brain death, which means death of the whole brain, including the brain stem, is death.

00:44:36.260 And that's fine.

00:44:39.700 You could say that as a thing, but then we have to find ways to determine that.

00:44:43.540 And there's-

00:44:44.160 To measure to see if it's true?

00:44:45.540 See if it's true.

00:44:46.060 And most of the ways, especially to determine whether there's brain stem activity, like in the very center of the brain, it's just super, super difficult.

00:44:56.180 There's a big debate right now in my world about whether the hypothalamus, which controls a lot of different things, but is this sort of tiny organ or part of the inner part of the brain stem, there's all sorts of debates now about how precisely to test for whether the hypothalamus is still alive.

00:45:11.820 And some people will say, well, who cares whether the hypothalamus is still alive?

00:45:15.540 Other people will say, well, no, we've got to determine whether the whole brain is dead or not.

00:45:18.380 And meanwhile, we've got this individual, regardless of what's happening here, who's fighting off infections, maybe gestating a child, right?

00:45:24.360 Maybe reaching their first period.

00:45:26.740 And so I don't-

00:45:28.240 So anyway, to answer your question-

00:45:29.100 None of what should be possible if the brain was dead.

00:45:32.260 Well, this is an interesting question.

00:45:33.440 These, I think the push for organs, the connection to organs really pushed us through to determine that people were dead who had dead brains too quickly.

00:45:45.220 I think we just sort of said, well, that sounds right.

00:45:47.160 Especially, you know, in the developed West, I think in a, I think, therefore I am sort of inspired world that's focused on the head.

00:45:54.840 I wonder if we don't too quickly just assume that these things are controlled by our brain.

00:46:01.040 One of the interesting things I like to point out, or I think it's interesting, I hope you and your viewers think it's interesting.

00:46:07.780 When the ancient Egyptians would mummify somebody, do you know what they did with the brain? 1.00

00:46:12.280 No.

00:46:12.580 They threw it out.

00:46:13.700 They thought it cooled the blood.

00:46:15.760 Now, what would a culture have to be thinking about themselves, right?

00:46:21.940 To think that the brain is something you're really not going to need in the afterlife.

00:46:24.940 It just cools the blood.

00:46:25.880 It's sort of this thing that you won't really need.

00:46:28.360 As opposed to us, you really sort of imagine ourselves like, I'm raised in this culture.

00:46:32.720 I kind of imagine myself inside my head here.

00:46:35.600 All these thought experiments in my world.

00:46:37.340 Imagine, like, what if you had your brain in a vat on Mars, right?

00:46:40.740 Would that be you, right, in that vat? 0.92

00:46:43.940 Like, if we could put it in a tub of nutrients and give it electric shocks.

00:46:48.060 We talk about, in this current transhumanism moment, what if we could, like, do this modeling of your brain's information and upload it to the cloud and then, like, download it into a robot or something?

00:47:00.680 These are questions that transhumanists are really asking right now.

00:47:03.140 Very serious people are asking these questions.

00:47:06.880 But I think it's because we sort of just imagine ourselves as this kind of creature that thinks of ourselves, well, maybe we just are our brains.

00:47:15.580 I want to push back on that.

00:47:17.160 I want to say we are in sold bodies, right?

00:47:20.260 We are our bodies and that we were who we were before we had our brains, right?

00:47:24.960 Prenatally, we were who we were before we had brains.

00:47:27.320 And there is some evidence, though it still needs to be explored, that especially young people, Tucker, can have other parts of their body take over for the functions of the brains in a kind of a really interesting plasticity of the body.

00:47:41.600 I think some people have speculated.

00:47:43.480 Wait, what?

00:47:44.400 So it's no accident that a lot of these cases, these so-called brain death cases, are children, right?

00:47:53.500 So there's been some speculation, some informed speculation that says, well, you know what?

00:47:58.560 These children have the ability to have other parts of their bodies take over for their brains when their brains are destroyed.

00:48:07.460 Perhaps their spinal cord, perhaps some other way of thinking about this.

00:48:11.100 The body, as you know, is an incredibly mysterious thing.

00:48:14.880 And by the way, we still have not found the place where consciousness exists in our brain.

00:48:20.160 Maybe you've heard about this.

00:48:21.320 Because for now, for decades, we've been exploring the brain.

00:48:24.200 Where is the consciousness?

00:48:25.220 Where is the consciousness?

00:48:26.280 Is it here?

00:48:26.800 Is it in this part of the brain?

00:48:27.600 Is it here?

00:48:28.460 It's nowhere.

00:48:29.100 Nobody can find any seat of consciousness in the brain to the point where some philosophers of mine, like Daniel Dennett, have said, you know what?

00:48:37.260 Maybe consciousness is an illusion because it must be in the brain.

00:48:41.260 The consciousness must be part of the brain.

00:48:43.280 And that is such a revealing claim because it's an absurd claim, right?

00:48:48.820 It's an absurd claim.

00:48:49.680 Right.

00:48:49.960 And that's also a non-scientific claim.

00:48:51.880 I mean, the basis of science is inquiry.

00:48:54.540 Yeah.

00:48:54.960 And taking your preconceptions and setting them aside and trying to see things.

00:48:58.100 If I know for a fact my car keys are in the kitchen, I'm never going to find them in my bedroom.

00:49:02.620 That's right.

00:49:02.940 So why would you start with that assumption?

00:49:06.760 I mean, I agree with your critique.

00:49:08.640 I think it's because we are so, especially in the developed West, focusing on rationality.

00:49:13.580 Again, I'm the Kantian sort of, I think, therefore I am, cogito ergo sum.

00:49:17.400 I'm a thinking thing.

00:49:19.280 That's not a Christian vision of the human person.

00:49:22.300 We are not thinking things.

00:49:23.660 We are in soul bodies, right?

00:49:25.100 And we can have in soul living bodies with a very seriously damaged brain, perhaps a fully dead brain.

00:49:31.360 And what's so interesting, again, about children is it looks like the spinal cord can maybe take over for some of what the brain did.

00:49:37.200 And we know that we're conscious beings, right?

00:49:39.680 That's just a brute fact about us.

00:49:43.480 And we also know that at least so far, after many decades of trying, we can't find consciousness in the brain anywhere.

00:49:50.360 And so that suggests to me anyway that consciousness is a product of something else, right?

00:49:55.420 It's not a product of the brain, most likely.

00:49:56.940 It's probably a product of some, there are actually some philosophers of mind, secular ones, who say it's probably the product of like our whole bodies holistically considered in relationship with each other in our environment.

00:50:07.360 I don't fully understand some of those arguments.

00:50:09.360 But at the very least, I think we need to expand this idea that we're more than just our brains.

00:50:13.440 Well, and also at the very least, I think we need to approach medicine and science with renewed humility.

00:50:19.740 If we don't even know where consciousness resides, self-awareness as people, which is the whole, you know, that's the main, that's what makes the brain different from the spinal cord, I would argue, actually, or we thought made it different, then we don't know squat.

00:50:35.920 And why don't, I feel like you're wiser when you concede that rather than bounding forward with the false pretense that you're all knowing.

00:50:44.400 Like, why don't we admit that?

00:50:46.140 Like, it helps to believe in God.

00:50:47.860 Why not force doctors to admit that at gunpoint, actually?

00:50:50.340 Like, how can you get a medical license if you won't admit that?

00:50:55.360 Doctors, shots fired, right?

00:50:56.960 No, no, I'm sorry.

00:50:57.600 I don't mean literally at gunpoint.

00:50:58.260 Yeah, I know, I know, I know.

00:50:58.780 Why don't we force that?

00:51:00.580 I think it helps to have a context in which there is a God, right, who is all knowing and who, in whom ultimate truth resides.

00:51:11.320 And it's not from you, right?

00:51:13.320 It's not up to us.

00:51:15.100 It's not in us.

00:51:15.660 I agree, but I mean, I don't know.

00:51:16.800 Most of my life, I haven't spent thinking about God.

00:51:19.620 I do now.

00:51:20.660 But I mean, most of my life, I didn't.

00:51:21.960 Yeah.

00:51:22.620 But I don't know, just trying to be honest with myself, it was always pretty clear to me that I didn't really know anything and that nobody does.

00:51:29.540 And if you're, if you don't know that, then you're dangerous.

00:51:33.820 Yeah, this is just pure speculation.

00:51:36.440 And I guess I'm just trying to, especially now that I teach at a medical school and I've been in academia for now almost two decades.

00:51:42.740 And those kind of humble sort of, yeah, humble approaches are not rewarded in these structures, right?

00:51:58.060 In these systems.

00:51:58.840 What is rewarded is saying, I've got the answer, right?

00:52:02.360 Or I'm on my way to finding the answer.

00:52:03.680 I've got this new piece of information about this.

00:52:05.720 That's one of the reasons I think that so many theologians, at least in my world, have reacted negatively to this sort of publish or perish, come up with new ideas constantly, sort of a model of higher education.

00:52:20.060 Because, boy, oh boy, if we're truly exhibiting the virtue of humility in the way you suggest, we need to make far fewer claims about the kinds of things that are, that we do precisely because we need to be, start with the virtue of humility first.

00:52:37.940 Well, right.

00:52:38.460 And in a, you know, in a system that actually wanted to expand knowledge and perpetuate it, pass it on, there would be much more reading and much less writing.

00:52:48.200 That's right.

00:52:48.560 Much more listening, much less talking.

00:52:52.120 And it seems the opposite.

00:52:55.340 That's absolutely true. 0.88

00:52:56.600 There's a, there's a tremendous amount of pressure put on academics and including those in academic medicine to just publish your ass off, right?

00:53:05.880 And just get paper after paper out there.

00:53:08.500 And we have, as you know, a replication crisis now in part because of this.

00:53:12.940 Can you explain for people who don't follow what that is?

00:53:15.800 So, in part, but not only because of the, the, the intense pressure on academics and especially in academic medicine to advance one's career through publications.

00:53:27.360 Uh, there's been a real, um, lack of humility in sort of sitting with data and books and studies, uh, and, and attempt to sort of just push things out and get your name out there and get your publications out there.

00:53:42.920 Um, and then when people come behind them and it's actually more and more difficult for people to come behind them because there's not a lot of glory in either confirming what somebody has already published or, um, there's some glory in finding that they were, they were wrong about it.

00:53:57.160 But, um, not a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to confirm, um, or replicate studies, but when they do, we now have found a replication crisis that a lot of these.

00:54:06.120 The replication is not just like a virtue, it's prerequisite for science.

00:54:09.720 That's right.

00:54:10.160 It's a basic scientific precept.

00:54:11.800 That's right.

00:54:11.980 If you're going to make a claim in order for us to declare it true, it has to be replicated.

00:54:17.080 That's right.

00:54:17.640 And it's a deep and foundational problem that especially, um, in areas which are ideologically charged, let's say, um, the, the replication crisis is particularly profound.

00:54:28.360 So it's not just, it's not just about, um, publish or perish, get a ton of articles out there for your, to advance your career.

00:54:37.200 It's also to get the right kind of articles out there.

00:54:39.680 The ones that say the right things that have the right conclusions about some of the issues we've been discussing so far on the show, right?

00:54:45.640 These are politically charged things.

00:54:47.680 And, um, in order to get it published in the best journals, uh, you probably need to have the quote unquote right answer as well.

00:54:55.300 It seems like total corruption.

00:54:58.940 It's, there's corruption.

00:55:01.300 I mean, there's no, there's absolutely no doubt about it.

00:55:03.440 I mean, I experienced this even in my own world of bioethics where you just sort of know what journals, um, you need to submit to if you have a particular sort of argument and a sort of conclusion.

00:55:15.020 You say, well, you know, I could submit it there, but it's never going to be published there.

00:55:20.000 It doesn't matter how good the argument is.

00:55:21.200 It doesn't really matter, um, whether I've done good research or, or, or have adequately investigated this and I'm making very tight arguments.

00:55:28.340 I have the wrong conclusion for that journal.

00:55:30.180 And so you submit it to a different journal, right?

00:55:31.960 And, or you don't submit it at all, or you submit it to an online, um, uh, journal or something that, that might actually get read by people.

00:55:41.200 Just submit it to Twitter.

00:55:42.100 Or, yeah, I mean, that's, that's increasingly where a lot of this is headed.

00:55:46.080 That's, uh, Twitter has actually been one of the places where we've been able to most clearly see the replication crisis, right?

00:55:53.560 I was half joking, but what do you mean?

00:55:56.760 Well, I mean, so many of these things before Twitter and before social media happened on the down low, right?

00:56:01.420 They would just be only the specialists would sort of know like, oh, so-and-so their article got retracted or like so-and-so followed behind them.

00:56:09.140 It wasn't able to replicate their work or, you know, whatever.

00:56:11.540 Now, as soon as that happens, happily, there's a place where you can go and see people saying, hey, look, this, this data was problematic.

00:56:18.320 This problem, this data was faulty and there's public pressure, in fact, to then have the journal address that and say, well, maybe this, you know, we need to have a note here or something like that and address the problem.

00:56:28.360 So, that kind of transparency, which is only just a few years old now, um, I think we've yet to see the end result of that.

00:56:37.760 So, I'm sorry, back to the topic that you were explaining before I once again so rudely sidetracked the conversation, um, which was brain death and a persistent vegetative state.

00:56:49.620 Right.

00:56:50.780 So, when we left, you were explaining, I think, that there is no way or universally agreed upon way to measure whether or not a brain is dead.

00:57:02.600 We're, I think that's right.

00:57:03.580 We're trying to get ways, for instance, to do a better job testing for hypothalamic function, for instance, and brainstem function.

00:57:08.860 But, but actually one of the difficulties that is pushing us, um, in ways that I find pretty disturbing about declaring somebody brain dead is a lot of people are sort of throwing up their hands and say, it's, it's actually pretty arbitrary how we test.

00:57:22.080 Like, who cares whether we can test for the function of the hypothalamus?

00:57:25.840 Who cares, actually, how much of the brain is dead?

00:57:28.080 They're, they're good.

00:57:28.600 They're not the person they ever will be again or something like this.

00:57:31.320 So, there is, um, there is something in most people that kind of agrees with that, though.

00:57:38.860 They don't want themselves or their loved ones living on a ventilator.

00:57:44.400 And I think that's fair to say.

00:57:46.100 I'm.

00:57:46.940 That's right.

00:57:47.460 Uh, and getting back to one of our earlier discussions, um, it's perfectly legitimate to take somebody off a ventilator as long as one is not aiming at their own death, right?

00:57:56.600 As long as it's a choice about how to live.

00:57:58.040 If somebody says to me and, and, uh, you know, my parents, a friend, spouse, listen, Charlie, I, I, I would not want to be on a ventilator.

00:58:06.920 So, can you make sure I'm not living on a ventilator?

00:58:08.560 It's not that I want to die in any particular moment.

00:58:10.120 I just don't want to live my life that way.

00:58:12.700 Um, that's, again, to use the more fancy language, that's foreseeing, but not intending one's death, but making a choice about how to live rather than a choice to die.

00:58:20.660 And we do that all the time, right?

00:58:22.060 Even the food we eat, as, as your show has hopefully pointed out, is maybe a choice how to live.

00:58:26.900 We can foresee if we eat or behave or exercise a certain way.

00:58:29.960 We have certain outcomes, right?

00:58:31.500 It's a choice about how to live, not a choice about, um, how to die.

00:58:35.380 So, that's different from saying, quite different from saying, um, because you're on a ventilator and you don't have the requisite brain activity, you're dead, right?

00:58:45.140 You're dead.

00:58:45.640 Right. 0.96

00:58:45.760 That's quite different.

00:58:46.580 And so, we can perfectly say, and we should say, and let me make this clear if I haven't already, we don't need to keep, uh, people alive indefinitely.

00:58:54.420 In fact, this is not at all a Christian ethic.

00:58:56.940 I mean, you just look, look up at Christ on the cross.

00:58:59.100 It's pretty obvious.

00:59:00.220 You don't need to do everything to save your life, right?

00:59:01.900 If we're imitating Christ, the early, uh, the, the church's martyrs, um, also give a great, great example of this.

00:59:08.360 It's, it can be an, it can be a very clear example of idolatry, in fact, to just pursue life, extended life.

00:59:14.940 I agree.

00:59:15.320 Um, so, so, I hope I'm making it clear that that's not what I'm saying, that we have to do everything.

00:59:21.020 We should not do everything.

00:59:21.980 We don't make an idol out of life.

00:59:23.280 At the same time, we don't tell ourself silly bedtime stories about individuals who gestate children or get their first period as being dead.

00:59:31.620 Do you remember when Democrats used to refer to abortion as something that should be safe, legal, and rare?

00:59:36.960 Well, they've changed their view on that.

00:59:39.280 It went from a right to a sacrament, and Kamala Harris is celebrating it at full volume.

00:59:45.120 She was the first vice president to visit an abortion mill, and then the Democratic National Convention offered abortions on demand, basically right outside the convention hall.

00:59:55.040 As the publication First Things reported, Tim Walz, who's running with Harris, supports the right to kill babies after birth, to infanticide.

01:00:03.080 And that's true, despite what the fact-checkers may tell you.

01:00:06.160 And it's also evil.

01:00:08.680 The media are calling this the abortion election.

01:00:11.820 You shouldn't sit by without registering your position on it.

01:00:15.860 This isn't the pro-choice movement you may remember from 30 years ago.

01:00:19.960 This is something much darker.

01:00:21.480 And that's why we have joined forces with Preborn, they're a sponsor of the show and of our speaking tour, to do something about it.

01:00:28.640 It's the largest pro-life organization in the United States, and they are doing what they should do, which is speaking up against this atrocity.

01:00:36.920 No one seems to have the bravery to call that wrong, which it is, but Preborn is calling it out.

01:00:46.240 Their networks of clinics are positioned in the highest abortion areas in the country, and they've rescued 300,000 babies.

01:00:52.380 When a woman considering an abortion searches to end her baby's life, Preborn is there.

01:00:57.380 The power of ultrasound, combined with the love of God, doubles the baby's chance of being born.

01:01:02.860 A single ultrasound costs 28 bucks.

01:01:05.540 Five ultrasounds are 140 bucks.

01:01:07.880 Giving women the information they need to make the decision that many of them actually want to make, to have a baby.

01:01:15.700 Any gift will help, and all gifts are tax-deductible.

01:01:18.940 To donate securely, go to preborn.com slash Tucker, or call pound 250 on your phone, and when asked, use the word baby.

01:01:37.880 Yeah, and I think we should, I agree with everything you've said.

01:01:44.400 I would never want to be in a ventilator.

01:01:47.320 I mean, I'm 55, my kids are grown.

01:01:49.000 I'm, you know, whatever, I have no reason to want to prolong life to that extent at all.

01:01:54.940 And I think it's degrading, and I would hate it.

01:01:56.860 So, I'm definitely in the do not resuscitate side of this argument, and that, you're the ethicist, but tell me if that's immoral.

01:02:04.400 No, you're perfectly legitimate.

01:02:06.000 Yeah, but I do think we should really care about whether a person is alive or dead.

01:02:10.900 Like, I do think we should fret about these questions, because every life has intrinsic value.

01:02:15.940 And again, if you treat people like objects, you're going to wind up murdering millions of them, because we've seen that again and again.

01:02:23.960 So, to the question of organ donation and, quote, harvesting organs, repulsive phrase, but I think it's still used, right?

01:02:32.280 Harvesting?

01:02:33.300 Yeah.

01:02:33.680 Yeah.

01:02:34.520 And it's repulsive because it treats people like farmland.

01:02:37.880 Yeah.

01:02:38.880 Just like a medium in which this thing grows, this heart, liver, kidney.

01:02:44.360 I don't like that at all.

01:02:46.200 But it raises the question, are people from whom organs are, quote, harvested still alive?

01:02:51.700 I think these are deep questions we need to ask, Tucker.

01:02:55.760 And I'm giving a talk at the seminary where I teach next week, which is essentially, should Catholics be organ donors, precisely in light of these questions.

01:03:05.520 Again, I'm an organ donor.

01:03:07.220 I have people in my life who are walking around right now because of organ donation.

01:03:11.160 It's an incredibly important thing.

01:03:12.700 But again, we should not be telling ourselves false stories about who is alive and who is dead just because we want more organs.

01:03:19.540 That was the foundational mistake of...

01:03:21.120 So, it sounds like we're harvesting organs, taking organs from living people.

01:03:25.260 So, if brain death is not death, then that's definitely what we're doing.

01:03:28.920 Do you think we're doing that?

01:03:29.940 Yeah.

01:03:31.440 Okay.

01:03:31.800 So, that's kind of heavy.

01:03:32.920 It's really heavy.

01:03:34.100 It's really heavy.

01:03:34.920 I'm sure you're going to be yelled at for saying that because, like, how dare you get in the way of progress, but...

01:03:39.260 And let me say it for a third time.

01:03:41.280 I'm an organ donor.

01:03:42.340 I support organ donation.

01:03:43.660 Yes.

01:03:45.260 I also support telling the truth about whether people are alive or dead.

01:03:49.100 And to get back to the original reason for bringing this up, Peter Singer and I both agree that it was this foundational place where we said an obviously living human being no longer counts as a legal person, and therefore we can take their organs.

01:04:01.440 That was the foundational shift where we moved away from fundamental human equality and we moved it to something else.

01:04:07.000 And then we slid into persistent vegetative state.

01:04:10.460 You probably remember the Terri Schiavo case very well.

01:04:13.220 Very well.

01:04:14.540 Terri Schiavo, for your listeners who aren't aware, was a woman who also underwent a catastrophic brain injury due to an eating disorder, as I recall. 0.54

01:04:24.560 And her husband and her family disagreed about what should be done.

01:04:29.540 To be clear, persistent so-called vegetative state, no person, no human being is a vegetable, but that's just sort of the language we use.

01:04:34.980 Or have used.

01:04:36.880 It's changing now.

01:04:38.820 But she did not have brain death.

01:04:42.100 She had other parts. 1.00

01:04:43.640 A large part of her brain had been fundamentally compromised, but she had sleep and wake cycles, and she responded.

01:04:49.300 There's an amazing video online you can watch of her responding to music.

01:04:52.620 Somebody plays music.

01:04:53.400 She just sort of leans over and sort of makes a noise that sort of almost smiles.

01:04:58.200 People who were there, like her parents said, they responded to her.

01:05:03.080 It was a huge fight.

01:05:03.980 You remember it.

01:05:04.860 It sort of engulfed the nation in the early part of this millennium, early aughts.

01:05:10.980 Anyway, it's interesting.

01:05:13.140 Her, I think, nefarious husband won that battle, and they starved her and dehydrated her to death after declaring, essentially, that she was no longer there.

01:05:24.160 In fact, if anybody would challenge me on this, I challenge them to look at the gravestone that her husband created for her.

01:05:32.320 It says that on the date of her catastrophic brain injury that she departed this earth, I think it was 1990, he uses the phrase departed this earth, and then I think it was 2003 when they dehydrated her to death, it says she was at peace.

01:05:49.720 And so when I give talks on this topic, I often start with that gravestone as a really indicative, important insight into what we are doing here.

01:06:02.340 What we are saying is this individual has departed this earth as a person and yet can leave behind somehow a body that is responding to music, has sleep-wake cycles, all the things.

01:06:17.000 Now, even since that time, Tucker, maybe you are or you aren't aware of this, there's been research into people who've been lumped into this category of vegetative state.

01:06:25.500 Joe Fins, who's a secular bioethicist, wrote a great book called Rights Come to Mind if listeners want to explore it.

01:06:32.840 We now know that a significant percentage of people in a so-called vegetative state are actually conscious.

01:06:38.080 They've done scans of their brains, fMRI scans, and they ask them yes or no questions with yes being imagine you're playing tennis and no being read a book in your room.

01:06:52.300 And they answer by what parts of their brain light up correctly.

01:06:55.380 They answer these yes or no questions correctly.

01:06:57.860 We've further learned that with the right kind of therapies, Joe Fins points out in this book, you can actually prove that more and more, either they weren't conscious before and then they become conscious because of the therapy or they were conscious the whole time and the therapies end up showing that they give them opportunity.

01:07:17.540 In fact, he tells this amazing story of this neurologist who was working on a patient and suddenly he realized she was blinking and trying to communicate with her through her blinking.

01:07:26.180 Just an extraordinary story.

01:07:28.740 But yet, so many people have this idea that Terry Schiavo's husband had, which is like people who are in a vegetative state have departed this earth despite this human body that is very clearly here.

01:07:39.920 I see that as the sort of next step from brain death to say, well, you know, and that's why some people aren't too concerned about whether the hypothalamus is really functioning or not because who cares at the end of the day?

01:07:48.000 So it's the concern that I'm concerned about or the lack of concern.

01:07:51.740 I mean, I, you know, these are all emotional subjects for people, particularly the end of life stuff because everyone by middle age has seen it with a loved one and it's so sad and you imagine yourself in that position and you think, I don't want this for myself.

01:08:04.680 I mean, I understand all of that.

01:08:06.060 I'm not judging anybody, but I, but the core idea is so important that all of us have identical moral value.

01:08:14.620 Right.

01:08:15.500 Um, because without it, society becomes really dark and evil.

01:08:21.260 That's right.

01:08:22.100 Not just in the way we treat the weak in hospice or in, you know, neonatal care, but in the way that we treat like everybody, the way our economy is structured.

01:08:34.200 So when I was a kid, I grew up in a rich world, rich people had a sense of noblesse oblige, like we're fortunate.

01:08:40.580 That was the word people used, but there are good people who are not fortunate and we should feel at the very least bad about that.

01:08:47.860 We're not gods because we're rich.

01:08:49.620 Like that was a, I mean, I know I was there.

01:08:51.960 That was a prevalent feeling that is totally absent.

01:08:55.380 You think Larry Fink thinks that like poor people are as good as him? 1.00

01:08:58.940 No, he's like a disgusting money worshiper who thinks he's better than poor people. 0.96

01:09:03.520 And they all think that it's not just Larry Fink, though. 0.99

01:09:05.380 He's obviously genuinely repulsive, but they're all that way.

01:09:09.580 That's right.

01:09:10.420 And that's a big change.

01:09:11.680 Is it not?

01:09:12.220 Am I imagining this?

01:09:13.940 Well, this gets back to, for me anyway, back to the Didache, right?

01:09:16.580 Because when they contrasted the way of life with the way of death, they weren't just interested in what you might call today classical bioethics issues of abortion and infanticide.

01:09:23.820 They were interested in the, what you just described, right?

01:09:26.640 Yeah, the rest of life from birth till death.

01:09:28.640 Like there's a lot of years in there.

01:09:29.860 The rich and unjust judges of the poor were named explicitly in the Didache as part of the way of death.

01:09:35.980 Part of the way of death.

01:09:36.740 And all the early church fathers, Tucker, thought about abandoning the poor as akin to indirect homicide, right?

01:09:42.280 And you owe the poor from your substance, actually.

01:09:46.460 And you put your salvation in peril if you don't give from your substance to the poor.

01:09:49.960 Because they deserve it.

01:09:52.080 It's owed them as a matter of natural right.

01:09:54.460 If you have too much, you owe it to them.

01:09:56.160 And this isn't something that's made up.

01:09:58.720 It comes right out of sacred scripture.

01:09:59.940 Jesus couldn't be more clear about this.

01:10:02.080 That culture was still alive when I was a kid.

01:10:04.540 Like I remember that very well.

01:10:06.020 I remember people saying that.

01:10:07.460 And I remember them acting like it was true.

01:10:09.320 And these are not even faithful Christians that I grew up around at all.

01:10:11.980 But there was this feeling you had a moral obligation to help people beneath you, not to scoff at them, not to try and put their presidential candidate in prison, but to listen to them and help them.

01:10:21.860 That's all gone.

01:10:23.180 It's gone.

01:10:23.680 I mean, back in the day in, I think it was medieval practice, rich people would routinely ask, invite the poor beggars outside the cathedral to pray for their loved ones at their funeral.

01:10:40.740 Because they would think these people bear the face of Christ in a special way.

01:10:45.500 And I better get.

01:10:46.200 Well, that's taken directly, of course, from a story of the New Testament.

01:10:49.920 Yeah.

01:10:50.580 Yeah.

01:10:50.800 And that's what I've loved so much about this kind of shift that we've seen.

01:10:59.560 I don't know if it's on the right or that's even the way to describe it today.

01:11:03.300 You've been an important leader, I think, in this shift for conservatives, for people who are more traditional to say,

01:11:09.660 we don't need to choose, actually, between more traditional pro-life ideas and human dignity and focusing on giving the poor what they are owed, giving the most vulnerable social classes what they are owed.

01:11:25.480 In fact, not only do we not have to choose between them, it's part of the same ethic.

01:11:29.180 It's part of the same vision.

01:11:30.260 It's part of the same seeing individuals as not mere things to be discarded, but as fellow image bearers, exactly the same as I am in value totally.

01:11:39.140 And again, to go back to the debate that the vice presidential candidates had recently, it was so heartening for me to hear J.D. Vance talk about both, to say, like, yeah, we got some challenges right now with prenatal justice and we have to re-earn trust.

01:11:57.080 But we don't need to choose between trying to protect babies in utero and neonatally now and supporting very poor women and families who feel pushed often into contexts where they have a desperate situation in front of them and they don't know what else to do.

01:12:17.980 And so to have someone like him be so public about saying, we're going to do both of these things together.

01:12:24.140 We're going to pursue prenatal justice and we're going to pursue economic justice for women and families who are in these difficult circumstances.

01:12:31.300 What a beautiful thing.

01:12:32.560 If that takes fire, if that takes hold, I am just so excited about what that could mean.

01:12:40.180 Because this is something I haven't really emphasized.

01:12:42.820 I want to make sure I emphasize this, Tucker.

01:12:44.140 In so many of these contexts that we've been discussing this, the push away from fundamental human equality has been, in part, a question of resources, a question of consumerism, a question of allocation of resources.

01:13:01.000 So, again, with brain death, what pushed it?

01:13:03.580 Organs, right?

01:13:04.660 So many people thought, Terry Schiavo, why would we put resources into caring for her?

01:13:08.380 Why would anybody put – Joe Finn says, hey, I'm trying to tell people you can help people in these states and we can actually bring them back and let's get on the horn here and let's figure out how to do this.

01:13:18.740 And he's had crickets from his colleagues.

01:13:20.560 Because we've got wars to fund.

01:13:22.600 We've got lots of things that people –

01:13:24.120 We have a lot of wars and I have to say that's the last – and I will get off my soapbox – but that is the last big effect of this attitude change is the callousness that you see displayed everywhere on the right a lot and universally on the left now about the killing of other people.

01:13:41.700 It's like, I don't know, if you're in a war with somebody and it's a just war, maybe you have to kill people, but you should never gloat over it.

01:13:47.800 You should never be happy or cavalier about the deaths, particularly of like huge civilian populations, a million people in Iraq.

01:13:56.080 And no one has – obviously, no one has gone to prison.

01:13:58.360 Lots of people should go to prison for it and no one ever will.

01:14:00.740 But we should at least say that's really bad.

01:14:02.740 That's like a million human beings.

01:14:05.040 Or, you know, what's going on in the Middle East now?

01:14:07.200 I mean, half the right, the whole Daily Wire every day, they're just so excited about all these people getting killed.

01:14:12.100 And it's like there's not one person who stands up and says, look, you know, I'm not for this or that group. 0.71

01:14:18.360 These people are terrorists.

01:14:19.020 That's all fine. 0.58

01:14:19.420 I get all that.

01:14:20.040 I'm not even contesting it.

01:14:21.580 But if civilians get killed, noncombatants get killed, we should feel bad about that.

01:14:26.500 I don't understand.

01:14:27.780 And if we don't feel bad about that, that suggests a darkness that's really scary.

01:14:33.680 And it's no surprise that the same people who are thrilled when giant bombs drop on apartment blocks, those people have, I think, really dark attitudes about Americans who, say, die of fentanyl ODs or find their towns invaded by, you know, people who shouldn't be here or whatever, victims of crime.

01:14:53.100 They don't care because they don't care about other people, actually.

01:14:55.840 That's the theme that connects those two.

01:14:59.100 It connects all of this.

01:15:00.340 Oh, I couldn't, and I'm thinking of a couple leaders on the so-called right, they're not conservative in any sense that I recognize at all, who were like this.

01:15:09.340 And I just, I think to myself, I can't believe I'm in the same category with these people.

01:15:13.140 I have nothing in common with them.

01:15:14.940 I'm never going to celebrate someone's death, ever.

01:15:18.380 Why would you?

01:15:19.420 And it's wrong.

01:15:21.220 Sorry.

01:15:21.780 And what a beautiful, no, please.

01:15:23.100 Do you see this?

01:15:23.560 Oh, yeah.

01:15:23.960 And by the way, this is, again, I hate to keep coming back to this, but maybe I'll pull my moral theologian card one more time.

01:15:31.200 This is just Jesus and the Gospels and the early church again, right? 0.90

01:15:36.260 This is this anti-war, swords into plowshares, turn the other cheek, love your enemies.

01:15:43.360 Augustine thought it was so important to love your enemies that he was not a pacifist.

01:15:46.760 But he said, if you're going to kill your enemies, you got to do it out of love for your enemies.

01:15:50.520 Well, I agree with that.

01:15:51.440 Or at least it should be accompanied by guilt and shame.

01:15:54.440 Yes.

01:15:54.820 I've done all kinds of bad things in my life.

01:15:56.860 I'm sure I'll do more, unfortunately.

01:15:58.420 But my only defense would be, I think I felt guilt and shame, probably not enough.

01:16:02.920 Like, you should feel bad.

01:16:05.700 And I even, I'm probably make myself super unpopular for saying this, but I remember when Osama bin Laden got shot to death and I hated Osama bin Laden.

01:16:13.400 He killed a friend of mine, actually.

01:16:14.720 Um, I'm not for someone bin Laden, but I thought, you know, we should just have, when someone dies, we should have reverence for death itself.

01:16:24.580 I mean, we can be happy that someone who was attacking us is gone and the threat is gone.

01:16:28.500 I think that's worth celebrating.

01:16:30.140 But we should never feel glee watching a human soul be extinguished.

01:16:37.420 I just don't, I think that's a really ugly habit to get into and it diminishes us and turns us into monsters.

01:16:44.340 It turns us into Osama bin Laden type people. 0.98

01:16:47.600 And I didn't have the balls to say this at the time, but I remember thinking, I'm not into celebrating some guy, an unarmed man getting shot in the face. 0.95

01:16:54.680 I don't care if it's Osama bin Laden, the guy I like least. 0.97

01:16:57.920 But that's precisely.

01:16:59.260 Okay.

01:16:59.520 I probably shouldn't even have said that, but I felt that at the time.

01:17:02.740 Like, ugh.

01:17:03.740 It sounds like you're talking about trying to find a way to love your enemy.

01:17:07.080 Yeah, I mean, look, I don't think a country can, I mean, could there really be a truly Christian country that loved its enemies? 1.00

01:17:12.940 Maybe we get invaded the first day.

01:17:14.360 I don't know.

01:17:15.300 I'm not a statesman or a theologian, so I don't have to make these.

01:17:17.960 But I just think at the level of the individual, the human being, we should be on guard for the natural impulse to treat other people as objects and to worship death.

01:17:31.100 I just think it's important not to worship death.

01:17:34.820 I just, I don't know.

01:17:36.160 I mean, all of us have it in ourselves.

01:17:38.200 How many videos have I seen on the internet of someone, you know, a robber getting shot to death at a 7-Eleven? 0.98

01:17:44.100 And I'm like, you go shoot that robber. 0.91

01:17:46.760 Like, I get it. 0.99

01:17:47.500 I understand that impulse.

01:17:48.720 It's very human, but it's ugly and we should fight against it.

01:17:52.840 That's right.

01:17:54.440 That's right.

01:17:55.040 And again, what a beautiful image of human dignity, an image of resisting a throwaway culture that would combine all these things together to see them and not as dichotomous or even strange.

01:18:09.060 But of course, you would be for anti-war. 0.52

01:18:12.580 Of course, you would be for justice for impoverished and middle-class populations who are under siege.

01:18:19.140 Of course, you would be for disability rights.

01:18:22.120 Of course, you would be anti-abortion.

01:18:23.780 Of course, you would be anti-infanticide.

01:18:26.520 And of course, you would be anti-euthanasia physician-assisted killing because it's all part of the same vision.

01:18:30.560 And not throwing away old people and putting them in some super depressing facility. 1.00

01:18:35.640 I don't know.

01:18:35.980 The whole thing.

01:18:37.680 I don't think there's any surprise when I look at how little our leaders care about Americans.

01:18:46.760 They just don't care.

01:18:48.000 They step over the bodies of drug addicts on the way to go vote to fund the Ukraine war.

01:18:53.780 Like those two facts are connected.

01:18:56.460 I think if you don't care about people, you will mistreat them.

01:19:01.020 And the last category you should have ruling over you is people who don't care about other people.

01:19:07.200 Like that, oh man.

01:19:08.740 Like keep them away from power.

01:19:10.320 Right?

01:19:10.520 Can I say one thing about older people here in light of this?

01:19:15.340 Especially those who are, I mean, we're in the midst, we're in the very early stages of a dementia crisis, as you know.

01:19:23.320 What is that?

01:19:24.160 Can you be more sure?

01:19:24.900 Sure.

01:19:25.260 So, we already don't care properly for reasons you just suggested for people with moderate and later stage dementia.

01:19:35.800 Essentially, we shuffle them off into so-called care homes. 0.79

01:19:40.920 And really, the New York Times did this very interesting expose about how many of them are treated.

01:19:47.160 And essentially, many of them, a high percentage, because they're sort of difficult to take care of in some contexts.

01:19:51.560 Yeah.

01:19:51.900 People are given antipsychotic drugs, not because they have any psychosis, but it's essentially a way of keeping them more docile.

01:19:59.300 In part, because we don't put enough resources into caring for them.

01:20:02.040 And I don't know about you, Tucker, but when I talk to immigrants about how we treat our elderly and those who have dementia, they are shocked.

01:20:09.040 They are shocked that we put them away in the way that we do.

01:20:11.840 We literally throw them away into a room until they die.

01:20:16.220 And this is what we're doing now.

01:20:18.420 In the next 20 years, unless the mean siblings get what they want in terms of treating type 3 diabetes, the number of people with later stage dementia is going to double.

01:20:28.420 In 30 years, it's going to triple.

01:20:30.160 In 30 years, Tucker, what are we going to do with three times the number of people with dementia?

01:20:34.760 Are we going to adequately care for them?

01:20:37.400 Are we going to find new ways to help them?

01:20:40.120 Or are we going to slouch towards physician-assisted killing as we do? 1.00

01:20:42.640 Well, we're going to kill them. 1.00

01:20:43.340 We're going to kill them. 1.00

01:20:43.920 We're going to do what Canada's doing. 1.00

01:20:45.740 That's right.

01:20:46.120 And so that's the next – in a book I wrote called Losing Our Dignity, How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality, 0.57

01:20:56.120 I finished the last three chapters by saying this is the next shoe to drop in our loss of fundamental equality.

01:21:02.920 We're going to end up saying that individuals who have lost their rationality and self-awareness at the end of life no longer count as persons.

01:21:08.720 And just as we said it about – just as we say it about prenatal and neonatal children, just as we say it about those in a so-called vegetative state, just as we say it about those in a so-called brain-dead state.

01:21:18.680 And Canada's already saying it about individuals at the end of life with later stage dementia.

01:21:25.800 And unless we can have a recovery of the concept of fundamental human equality – and I hope you don't mind me asking you this question – the only hope I really have that we don't have a dementia crisis along the lines we suggest is if there's a kind of revival,

01:21:40.760 a kind of recovery of the kinds of – the vision of human dignity, fundamental equality that we've been talking about here.

01:21:52.820 You've spent the last month or so traveling around the country.

01:21:58.160 I've heard you say you've been – I don't know if I'm putting words in your mouth here – but rejuvenated or you have some sort of really positive experience as a result of this.

01:22:06.480 Do you think – do you think – you know, I'm isolated in academia in a lot of ways.

01:22:12.100 Do you think we can have a kind of revival in this country that could recapture a vision of human dignity that would cause us to say,

01:22:22.360 yes, grandpa, dad, my neighbor, he doesn't know his name, he doesn't know his wife's name, but he matters just the same as anyone else.

01:22:33.060 And we are going to rearrange our lives to care for him in his final journey on this earth.

01:22:39.220 Or do you think – the ship has sailed, like, we've just jettisoned – the cut flowers are dying.

01:22:46.480 There's no way to reattach them to the roots.

01:22:48.660 And we just have to find a way to work through it somehow.

01:22:51.000 I mean, the – you know, one of the reasons that immigrants can't believe how we treat our elderly is because they have intact families and we don't. 0.99

01:23:12.280 Right. So it's pretty hard when you have a lot of – you know, you have a lot of elderly without any family, actually, way more than any other time in our history.

01:23:21.440 This is just one among countless issues that every person deals with every single day that turn on how we see each other.

01:23:34.260 Do we see other human beings as fellow human beings, as people with souls whose lives inherently matter, whether we like them or the life they're living or not?

01:23:46.380 It's kind of not up to us. How do we see ourselves? Do we understand ourselves as, you know, as subjects to a greater authority?

01:23:54.600 Not a government authority, but authority above that? Or do we see ourselves as gods?

01:23:59.080 I mean, these are all, like, basic questions.

01:24:03.900 And I think the way that we understand all of these things depends on our core understanding of who we are and, you know, how much power we have.

01:24:11.760 Like, do you think – do you really believe you have the right to kill somebody except in self-defense?

01:24:16.440 I don't – where do we get that idea? Only God has that power.

01:24:19.480 I will just say this. Here's what I believe is happening.

01:24:21.980 I think the last 80 years, really, since we dropped that second bomb on Nagasaki, have been an anomaly in human history.

01:24:31.420 And I think because of these profound technological, very rapid technological advances, people have lost context and lost perspective on themselves. 0.81

01:24:40.680 And I think they think they're God, and the result has been a pretty hollow culture, just based on buying crap and sensual pleasure. 0.90

01:24:53.680 And I don't think that – you know, I'm not against buying crap or sensual pleasure. 0.88

01:24:57.200 I've engaged them both quite ardently, but I don't think, in the end, they satisfy.

01:25:03.620 Right.

01:25:03.980 It is like eating Snickers bars, which I've also done a lot of, and they just don't fill you up.

01:25:08.460 And I do think that there's a recognition of that among almost every single person I know, and the result is, you know, a spiritual yearning that's becoming explicit.

01:25:20.220 And what that becomes, I have no idea.

01:25:22.640 I'm terrible at predictions, but it is a kind of revival underway.

01:25:25.340 There's no question about it right now.

01:25:27.800 And that will change people's attitudes.

01:25:29.380 You're not going to change – you know, one of the things I've learned from covering politics for, you know, more than 30 years is that we're coming at the story at the very end.

01:25:37.400 Like, if there's a real debate over a law, then that means that, or even if you get a law, attitudes have changed on the ground, like, fundamentally.

01:25:47.880 And, you know, I think people's attitudes are changing back, I do think.

01:25:57.320 And with the rise of AI and transhumanism and phenomenon that are really designed to degrade and eliminate people and make them redundant and irrelevant, that is the point of AI and transhumanism is to kind of eliminate people.

01:26:11.780 The body.

01:26:12.240 Yeah, the body and the mind, actually, both.

01:26:16.180 I think people can feel that.

01:26:17.820 It scares the crap out of them.

01:26:19.900 And they're reacting against that, thank heaven.

01:26:22.980 And I know, of course, it's not too late.

01:26:25.260 I mean, AI and transhumanism will, you know, 1,000 or 10,000 years ago from now will seem like the absurd jokes they are.

01:26:35.340 I mean, AI is not going to extinguish people forever.

01:26:39.120 It may extinguish 99% of them, but people will live on.

01:26:42.580 And they'll mock AI, you know, in future generations. 0.99

01:26:46.780 And transhumanism will just be like phrenology or some other stupid cult that we make fun of, slavery. 0.99

01:26:54.440 You know, something we look back on and think, do people really do that? 0.99

01:26:57.980 Do you know what I mean?

01:26:58.740 No, it's absurd.

01:27:00.280 It's like it's only for creepy billionaires in the tech world think that's a good idea.

01:27:06.080 And, of course, they're being controlled by spiritual forces, by demons.

01:27:09.240 That's so obvious to me.

01:27:10.980 But they're not going to win.

01:27:12.440 Are you joking?

01:27:13.120 They're not going to win.

01:27:14.840 They may win short term, but they're not going to win long term.

01:27:17.040 So, anyway, yeah, no, I think there's massive change in people's, like, deepest feelings about the world right now.

01:27:25.960 And I think it's fair to call it a revival.

01:27:28.740 It's my sense, too.

01:27:30.420 And in part because I've listened to some of the people you've interviewed and talked with over the last few weeks.

01:27:37.200 And I've looked at some of the data, which suggests that there's actually young men are the ones leading a return to church.

01:27:47.700 18 to 29-year-olds are leading a return to church.

01:27:52.580 In fact, that more—

01:27:53.580 Yeah, like how much can you eat?

01:27:54.720 How many random people can you sleep with?

01:27:56.360 It's not that fun.

01:27:57.200 How much time can you spend on your phone?

01:27:59.160 Exactly. 0.87

01:27:59.460 How much porn can you watch?

01:28:02.360 It's a deep—and they have a very strong sense, too, maybe even better than you and I have, about it being foisted on them.

01:28:08.620 They just grew up in a culture that was—that had these structures already in place.

01:28:14.640 And interestingly, when some of my colleagues do things like teach a class that would involve a technology fast, for instance, like, those classes are totally full.

01:28:25.240 And, like, people want—people want to get out of it.

01:28:28.520 They want an excuse to get out of it.

01:28:29.880 They want an excuse to get out of it.

01:28:31.940 It's—I just am amazed, you know, given how many addictions I've beaten in my life, you know, things I never thought I would stop doing, like smoking especially.

01:28:42.540 Amazingly, I quit at the age of 45 or drinking, you know.

01:28:46.000 So, no problem, I quit it.

01:28:49.180 No problem.

01:28:49.620 I never would go back to either one of those things.

01:28:51.840 Pretty hard to get off bad food and your phone.

01:28:56.320 Like, I just have—I'll just say from my own experience, I think I'm pretty good at beating addiction.

01:29:00.540 Hard to get off your phone.

01:29:02.180 Hard to stop eating Wheat Thins.

01:29:04.460 Like, those are very addictive, both of those things.

01:29:08.020 And we've got, as you've talked about on your show a few times now, we've got the best scientists, and including social scientists, and chemists, and others who are working very hard to make sure that's the case, right?

01:29:22.220 Because it makes a lot of people a lot of money.

01:29:24.260 Well, yeah.

01:29:25.260 Yeah, yeah.

01:29:26.420 I sort of miss the porn thing, and thank God I didn't grow up with that.

01:29:32.200 And, you know, obviously my phone's totally monitored, so I'm like, even if I was into porn, I would not look at porn.

01:29:38.020 I wish I'm not.

01:29:39.180 But my sense is that, like, the whole country's addicted to porn.

01:29:42.660 I don't know too much about it.

01:29:44.280 Oh, it's an extraordinary thing.

01:29:45.960 I mean, we basically have a pornified culture.

01:29:48.380 Or the kind of things that you and I grew up with is sort of odd.

01:29:51.180 You say, well, that's how a porn star dresses.

01:29:53.000 Or these are attitudes that come from porn, this thing that's out there that's separate from the rest of the culture.

01:30:00.100 It's now pretty well accepted that the culture itself has been pornified.

01:30:03.480 So the logic of porn is now the logic of the culture more broadly.

01:30:06.400 In fact, this is how most young people today understand what sex is and what it's for.

01:30:12.880 This is why, I don't know if you've seen in recent, I think it's been over the last couple years, this has been a phenomenon.

01:30:18.060 More and more women report being choked during sex, right?

01:30:22.820 This is a phenomenon that's just come up almost directly because young men and boys see this on their phones and on their TV screens, right?

01:30:31.100 Yeah, I don't know.

01:30:32.620 Again, I'm 55, thank heaven.

01:30:34.780 But I'll be gone soon.

01:30:37.080 I don't have to deal with any of this stuff.

01:30:39.680 But since you brought up something that forbidden and naughty, I'll just say, for whatever it's worth, probably nothing.

01:30:47.660 But I've heard a lot about this from younger people I come into contact with.

01:30:52.640 And it sounds like that's driven 100% by women, just being honest, from every report.

01:30:58.520 I mean, I was so shocked the first time I heard that, since I don't really see a connection between violence and sex.

01:31:04.640 I never have.

01:31:05.420 It's just deeply unappealing to me.

01:31:08.340 Maybe I'm revealing too much here.

01:31:10.220 But I mean it.

01:31:11.780 You know, we all have preferences.

01:31:12.900 I've never really understood that.

01:31:14.080 Violence?

01:31:14.560 Really?

01:31:14.840 No.

01:31:15.120 Violence is not hot.

01:31:16.820 But anyway, here's the point.

01:31:19.600 I've talked to like more than three young men who were like, oh yeah, this is like a constant request that I'm not that into from women.

01:31:26.040 Okay, I didn't know that.

01:31:26.880 I've heard that so much that I think it's really interesting.

01:31:30.460 What is that?

01:31:32.360 I don't know what that's about.

01:31:33.460 I don't know what that's about.

01:31:34.100 But it does show that the impact now is not just on men, right?

01:31:37.060 So we used to think that porn was mostly consumed.

01:31:40.300 And it still is, I think, the numbers say mostly by men and boys.

01:31:42.840 But with that, I think it really strongly indicates is that women and girls are also consumed.

01:31:46.940 You know, I really, I don't know.

01:31:48.380 I'm really interested in how people live just because I'm a curious person.

01:31:52.160 So I've like, I always ask questions about all sorts of stuff with people, probably too many questions. 0.78

01:31:57.180 But do you know who has the most sex and the best sex of all?

01:32:00.820 Yeah, married people. 0.89

01:32:01.420 Married people.

01:32:01.900 By far.

01:32:02.320 By far.

01:32:02.900 And I know that as a pretty very pro-sex Protestant, because I'm, I don't know, for reproduction, you know. 0.92

01:32:09.880 Yeah.

01:32:10.680 It seems like people are not having sex before.

01:32:13.400 No.

01:32:13.900 No, they're not.

01:32:15.280 I would joke with my students and say, you know, you guys claim to be these wild people.

01:32:18.840 And you look at my generation, older generation as fuddy-duddies or whatever.

01:32:22.360 That's not what the numbers say.

01:32:23.440 No.

01:32:23.820 That's not what the numbers say at all.

01:32:25.640 And so it's interesting to think about what that is.

01:32:27.400 It doesn't seem to be a kind of, I mean, it's not clear.

01:32:29.920 I mean, if there is a revival underway and if young men are returning to church in significant ways, maybe it has something to do with that.

01:32:36.560 But it could also be just, again, the ubiquity of sitting around playing video games and watching porn all day long, too.

01:32:41.560 Well, it does, my strong, overwhelming sense is that the distrust between the sexes, particularly when younger people, is kind of the defining fact.

01:32:50.620 Like, they don't trust each other.

01:32:51.740 And they don't, they seem to have a lot of trouble getting along.

01:32:55.580 I don't know.

01:32:56.020 I don't want this to turn into like a long catalog of all of our social problems.

01:32:59.040 But it, I guess all I'm saying is, in response to your original question, I think things are coming to a head where whatever we're doing is just not working.

01:33:08.380 That's right.

01:33:08.680 And that's become really obvious at every level.

01:33:12.860 At the personal level, men and women are having a lot of trouble understanding each other, getting married, having children, buying a home, finding a job that sustains all of that.

01:33:23.100 You know, just a basic middle class life that's like beyond people's reach. 0.91

01:33:25.860 And then looming above us is the constant threat of annihilation by AI or war, things that were created by our lunatic leaders, like actual lunatics who run the country, who hate us and hate humanity. 0.99

01:33:40.660 And, but, but everyone feels that anxiety of like, holy shit, any minute this could all end. 0.99

01:33:46.900 And that's a weird environment.

01:33:48.460 Like, I grew up during the Cold War, you know, I was on my honeymoon when it ended.

01:33:52.080 So that's how old I am.

01:33:53.620 And I never felt, I was sort of aware, you know.

01:33:56.980 Yeah.

01:33:57.260 I never really felt like any second we could die in a nuclear conflagration.

01:34:03.280 Now I definitely feel that way.

01:34:05.080 Don't you?

01:34:06.520 And we have obviously something that didn't exist back then.

01:34:09.800 Our addiction to our phones and our social media, which is constantly calibrated to make us feel anxious and depressed.

01:34:16.060 Oh, and it works.

01:34:17.220 And it totally works.

01:34:18.100 Again, we got the best social scientists in the world working for these companies.

01:34:21.380 It would be strange if we weren't.

01:34:23.720 It'd be strange if we weren't.

01:34:24.540 How long after you wake up do you check your phone?

01:34:26.880 Oh my gosh.

01:34:28.120 I don't want to admit it.

01:34:29.940 It's okay.

01:34:30.680 I've admitted I love wheat thins.

01:34:32.160 Yeah.

01:34:32.500 Yeah.

01:34:33.320 No, I, my phone is, is my alarm clock.

01:34:36.460 So, so like for so many people.

01:34:39.800 Uh, so immediately.

01:34:41.400 So I, I, my, my phone wakes me up and then my phone is in my hand.

01:34:45.060 And so I see the notifications on my phone and I want to see what's going on in the news that day or somebody's texted me.

01:34:50.820 Like right when you wake up.

01:34:51.700 Oh yeah.

01:34:52.720 Oh yeah.

01:34:52.940 So how bad for your spirit is that?

01:34:54.880 It's horrific.

01:34:55.560 Like how many mornings have been wrecked?

01:34:58.520 You're speaking for everyone right now, not just yourself.

01:35:00.820 Well, I'm mostly speaking, I mean, to be honest with you about myself, but I'm definitely speaking for lots of other people as well.

01:35:04.580 Yeah, you are.

01:35:05.020 Yeah.

01:35:05.300 But how many mornings have you sort of woken up and there's, you know, your bride next to you and maybe a dog or two and you're sort of happy and sunlight streaming in and you pick up your phone and you think, oh man, Western civilization is over.

01:35:18.860 I mean, we just spent an hour and a half talking about infanticide.

01:35:24.160 So like, you know, the kinds of things I think about almost all day long are horrific things, right?

01:35:29.420 So I, and my algorithm knows that.

01:35:31.100 So I get sent these things.

01:35:33.100 People also send these things because they know I'm interested, right?

01:35:35.600 So, oh, did you see what so-and-so hospital is doing now?

01:35:38.460 And that, this, that, and the other.

01:35:39.360 So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's something that I've thought about and many of us I'm sure have thought about for a long time now is how do we, how can I do my job?

01:35:50.680 How can I be aware of the things I need to be aware of and yet have a much healthier, and people have written books and I've read the books that I've, I've talked with other people.

01:36:00.440 My wife and I have talked about this at some length, how we can negotiate these things in our life because she's not as bad as I am, but it's, you know, she's involved in this, in this lifestyle as well.

01:36:10.840 But, but again, the, the, the companies that make shit tons of money from this stuff have, have hired the best social scientists in the world to make sure that we, that we, that we're going to try to do the best job to make us fail in these, in these opportunities.

01:36:25.720 And I've tried multiple times.

01:36:27.000 We even have this thing that we, we haven't used yet.

01:36:29.840 We bought it.

01:36:30.360 It's apparently this box you can sort of put your phone into and like, you have to have a specific combination to open it.

01:36:37.340 And it's sitting there in our kitchen sort of laughing at us because we haven't used it, but it's there as a reminder, like we probably should be using this thing.

01:36:44.340 But yeah.

01:36:45.540 I used to feel that way about drinking, you know, Sunday morning.

01:36:48.580 I'd think I've just, I've got to stop this.

01:36:50.280 This is just too bad.

01:36:52.860 And, you know, ultimately I did, but, and I always knew I would, like, you can't be that hung over and like keep doing it.

01:36:59.840 Yeah.

01:37:00.300 But, um, I suspect I'll never get rid of this.

01:37:05.080 So how do we live with it?

01:37:06.420 Like, what is the, what is the good way that we live with those things?

01:37:11.120 It's, it's very, it's, it's, it's difficult for me to imagine.

01:37:14.640 Cause I've thought about this.

01:37:15.520 I've obsessed, frankly, over this question.

01:37:18.240 And, um, and I think we need, I think one of the solutions is to have a community of people right around you that can hold you accountable for this.

01:37:26.260 And so much of what happens here, it seems to me anyway, is, um, we lead isolated lives, unlike the lives we used to lead both as a species and sort of as a culture, not that long ago.

01:37:36.520 Or there could be people that would hold you accountable to that sort of thing.

01:37:39.500 Like I, I at least, uh, would of course make my kids leave their phones away from the dinner table, for instance.

01:37:45.560 That's one small thing you can do.

01:37:47.620 Um, but now I find myself at the dinner table, uh, pulling it out, right.

01:37:51.180 And say, well, we're at dessert.

01:37:52.240 I guess I can sort of check and see what's going on.

01:37:54.000 Well, of course, are you, or in a restaurant, people leave it on the table.

01:37:56.780 Like they used to leave a pack of cigarettes.

01:37:58.480 They leave the phone.

01:38:00.000 I prefer the cigarettes.

01:38:01.420 Um, less, less harmful, much less harmful.

01:38:04.380 I think there's a strong case for that.

01:38:06.120 Oh my God.

01:38:07.300 Marlboros compared to the iPhone.

01:38:09.080 Bring back the Marlboros. 0.99

01:38:10.500 Are you joking?

01:38:11.440 Yes.

01:38:12.540 Um, so you live to 65.

01:38:14.700 So, you know what I mean?

01:38:16.700 Uh, okay.

01:38:17.200 So I want to get back.

01:38:18.340 Speaking of holding people accountable.

01:38:19.860 So doctors have a unique power in that they are present at the beginning and the end of life.

01:38:25.300 And they have the power to kill.

01:38:27.320 And it's not regulated at all.

01:38:29.060 I've noticed.

01:38:30.240 And so really we're all dependent on the attitudes of physicians.

01:38:35.100 To stay alive.

01:38:37.760 Like we need them to be pro-life, not simply against abortion, but in favor of life as a default position.

01:38:45.240 That's right.

01:38:45.900 Or else we're screwed. 0.95

01:38:48.420 And yet so many of them I have, in my personal experience, are vehemently pro-death. 0.79

01:38:53.760 And I'm not saying all, but most doctors I have known are strongly pro-death.

01:39:00.040 So what do you do about that?

01:39:02.740 Yeah.

01:39:02.840 Well, we are living through an epic change right now in our culture, a change with regard to our technology, a change with regard to our politics, a change perhaps with regard to this religious revival that may be coming.

01:39:18.260 We currently have a medical culture which is dominated by secularism, by a hostility to the vision of human dignity and equality that we've been articulating so far.

01:39:31.820 Could that change?

01:39:34.340 I think the answer is yes.

01:39:35.400 It could also change in a very similar way to the way that younger people more generally are changing.

01:39:41.360 So young doctors, young nurses, young whoever will be caring for us.

01:39:48.540 I think there's an important case to be made actually that maybe healthcare needs like a different kind of category to care for people that doesn't exist just in a clinic with a bed somewhere, but is a broader sort of understanding of people more broadly outside of just caring for them in their sickness, but also in their health or in this in-between stage before they need to go to the hospital or get checked out by a clinician.

01:40:08.540 And maybe that sort of thing is coming.

01:40:10.140 I hope it is.

01:40:11.360 But if we can recover, and by the way, it was, you know, the first hospital was, of course, a Christian hospital, right?

01:40:19.580 Like this was invented in the Middle Ages.

01:40:23.060 Nurses, we were talking about at breakfast, all the original nurses were Catholic women religious. 0.93

01:40:31.160 Nuns.

01:40:31.640 Nuns.

01:40:32.320 Nuns.

01:40:33.480 They taught Nightingale everything that she knew.

01:40:35.360 There's still a really strong proliferation of religious hospitals, religious health organizations, health systems, many of which are Catholic.

01:40:49.700 One in seven beds in the United States is actually at a Catholic facility.

01:40:52.760 There are ways to recover this image of human dignity and replace the one that's in there now, especially, again, if we have this broader religious revival underway that you're talking about.

01:41:05.920 Can we recover this vision of human dignity that we've been articulating?

01:41:09.540 I think the answer is yes.

01:41:10.700 But we're going to need to, and this is very much connected, again, to the show you did with the mean siblings about how, what is the God that is actually governing health care?

01:41:19.440 Is it the God of mammon?

01:41:20.740 Is it the God of consumerism?

01:41:21.960 Is it the God of efficiency?

01:41:24.140 Or is it something else, right?

01:41:26.200 Is it a center of ultimate concern, God, that is nonviolent, that is about fundamental equality, that is about the most vulnerable, it is about not using individuals as mere means to another end for profit and efficiency and consumerism?

01:41:40.780 Um, there are enough people out there, there are enough people out there, good people, uh, to be a form of resistance to that.

01:41:49.280 Um, I'm biased.

01:41:50.200 I'm a Catholic moral theologian.

01:41:51.360 I teach at a Catholic medical school.

01:41:53.760 Again, I teach at a seminary as well.

01:41:55.820 I think one place to start would be institutions of the Catholic church to say, we are going to rebuild these institutions in ways that resist the kinds of things that, um, the kinds of things that happen when we put mammon and consumerism and efficiency.

01:42:09.980 At the center of what we do.

01:42:12.300 Um, and, and we are well primed to do something like that.

01:42:16.200 Again, one in seven beds, it's a massive, uh, opportunity and it doesn't need to be limited to Catholic institutions.

01:42:22.160 There are plenty of non-Catholic institutions as well.

01:42:24.920 Um, but at least that's where I put my hope.

01:42:27.220 That's where I say we can have a revival.

01:42:28.840 Could you start a Christian hospital center and just say, you know, that we're not in the business of killing or in the business of healing?

01:42:36.580 We're not going to do any killing here.

01:42:38.280 That's right.

01:42:38.620 But could you do that?

01:42:41.000 There's no hospital like that that I'm aware of.

01:42:42.940 Oh yeah.

01:42:43.220 There's really no reason why you couldn't do it.

01:42:44.740 I mean, in fact, this is what Catholic hospitals say.

01:42:46.720 We have ethical and religious directives, which we say we aren't going to do these things.

01:42:52.080 There's no abortion in Catholic hospitals?

01:42:53.560 There's no hospital.

01:42:54.040 There's no abortion. 1.00

01:42:54.680 There's no euthanasia.

01:42:55.980 Now, I'm not going to say that there aren't hospitals and systems that try to find their way around these things.

01:43:00.100 They do, but it's at least in principle something that, um, is forbidden and, um, and it's not a no, it's a broader yes.

01:43:06.920 Right.

01:43:07.140 It's, it's a yes to a particular vision of human dignity that requires no's.

01:43:10.440 But we have four decades now in the United States had a really powerful, um, uh, uh, attempt to carve out this space for ourselves through religious freedom to say, yeah, I know you guys you're for abortion.

01:43:26.320 Yeah.

01:43:26.460 I know you guys are doing this other thing.

01:43:27.900 We're not going to do that in these hospitals.

01:43:29.540 And by the way, uh, we can no longer call this a Catholic hospital.

01:43:32.880 If you're going to force us to do that, we will shut ourselves down.

01:43:35.140 In fact, if you tell us we need to do this.

01:43:37.500 And so far we've had pretty good success, frankly, in, um, in, in, in, especially from the Supreme court in telling us that, yes, you're free as Catholic hospitals and other institutions to not do abortions, to not do a physician assisted suicide, even contraception, even something like that.

01:43:53.320 Uh, Catholic hospitals don't, don't prescribe contraception, at least in principle, shouldn't.

01:43:57.780 Um, and so if we, there's no reason, again, it needs to be limited to Catholic hospitals.

01:44:02.240 Again, it was the, oh, I didn't mention this, that, you know, who, uh, who carved out the religious freedom exemption for brain death in New Jersey, Orthodox Jews. 0.95

01:44:09.540 So it was Orthodox Jews who said, um, yeah, our guys who have brain dead, not dead. 0.83

01:44:14.900 Uh, and you're not going to force us, um, to call them dead.

01:44:17.900 And we're going to carve out religious freedom exemption for ourselves here in New Jersey.

01:44:20.880 Um, so again, it doesn't need to be limited to even Christianity at all.

01:44:25.220 Plenty of, uh, religious folks and even non-religious folks can, can, can imagine how this might work apart from it.

01:44:31.220 I agree completely.

01:44:32.580 Um, I, you know, people who think there's an authority higher than themselves have the humility that is the foundation of wisdom and good decision-making.

01:44:42.400 And people who think they're God, you know, always wind up going way off the rails, I think.

01:44:47.920 I think that's right. And, and it's not an accident, right?

01:44:52.240 Again, that historically, um, it was Jews, it was Christians and even Muslims to a certain extent who are very much connected in their early stages to, to both Christianity and Judaism who pushed back on abortion and infanticide in the ancient world for the reasons that we've already talked about.

01:45:06.920 So is there anybody providing ethical guidance to the scientists funded by U.S. tax dollars who are tampering with the building blocks of life and doing Frankenstein-like experiments, one of which resulted in COVID, um, in order not to save lives but to feel like God?

01:45:25.940 Because there's an awful lot of that genetic engineering and the rest of it. Is it, are there any ethical guidelines to that at all?

01:45:35.300 There are medical ethicists who work in those spaces. Um, most of them, if I can just speak frankly, uh, have been compromised with regard to the kinds of stuff we've been talking about so far.

01:45:44.340 So, most of them would either be, um, neutral or have no connection to the kinds of, uh, visions of, of human dignity and nonviolence.

01:45:53.160 So they're not really ethicists then?

01:45:55.060 Well, they're certainly not ethicists that you and I would recognize as being good ethicists. In fact, they might call them bad ethicists.

01:46:00.040 Um. Or propagandists for murder. 0.74

01:46:03.000 That's what I would say. I mean, I don't know. I'm sure the Nazis had ethicists too. I mean, like, it doesn't mean anything at a certain point.

01:46:08.200 If you kill Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I'm sorry. Yeah. You don't have any working ethicists on staff.

01:46:14.080 Yeah. The, uh, the largest, um, the largest conference in bioethics in the United States is something called the ASBH, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities Conference.

01:46:24.200 And, um, I stopped going a few years ago because I realized that, um, the only place that my voice was really welcome there was in the, uh, Christian ethics interest group that met in the evenings.

01:46:34.340 The main, the main papers, the main panels, not at all interested in hearing from someone like me.

01:46:40.420 Justifying evil was kind of their job. Like what, like what are their guidelines exactly?

01:46:45.640 Well, um, it depends who you talk to, but, um, a secularized context in bioethics has been sort of taken over by what's called principalism, which is this idea that there are four main principles in bioethics.

01:46:57.360 It turns out autonomy really high on the list. The first principle, actually, uh, non-maleficents do no harm, which is a classic bioethics principle.

01:47:04.840 Beneficents do good and justice give everyone their due.

01:47:08.020 But those things, those principles, uh, Tucker are just so generic and so unspecific that virtually anyone can manipulate those principles and sort of end up with what they want at the end of the day.

01:47:19.280 But don't kill people's not on the list.

01:47:21.120 Well, you might say that's non-maleficents.

01:47:23.180 Yes. Well, clearly it's not. They've killed a lot of people.

01:47:26.240 Or offended against justice, right? But that's what I'm talking about. So, you know, what is harm is parasitic on what is good, right?

01:47:32.960 And if we have a disagreement about what is good, um, then we're going to disagree about what non-maleficents is.

01:47:38.520 What, you know, I have to say first do no harm, right?

01:47:40.700 Well, if I think, uh, you know, that there's no such thing as human dignity and that we really just need to be maximizing organs for transplant, what is doing no harm in any situation will look quite different, right?

01:47:49.820 It might in fact be saying, I don't really need to test for hypothalamic function.

01:47:54.140 Let's just declare this individual dead and decide that we can take their organs, right?

01:47:58.920 So when we have these four sort of generic principles, which rule the day and by secular bioethics today, you can really get anywhere you want with them.

01:48:05.580 Um, and so it turns out, frankly, that those of us who are doing theological bioethics end up in do having our own conferences, our own journals, our own sort of intra, um, insulated, uh, discussions and secularized medicine really does is with few exceptions.

01:48:24.140 There are some exceptions.

01:48:25.680 Secularized medicine rarely gives us the kind of hearing.

01:48:28.300 So there are no ethics without God.

01:48:29.820 Like why would there be actually?

01:48:31.380 I mean, I think there's a strong case to be made that, that especially the, I mean, the first bioethicists were in fact theologians.

01:48:38.180 We invented the field.

01:48:39.080 Well, if there's no higher power, then how can there be absolute right or wrong?

01:48:44.360 You can't say that.

01:48:46.220 You can say, I prefer this thing to that thing, but you can't say that anything is wrong.

01:48:50.760 Why is slavery wrong?

01:48:53.100 Why is murdering your neighbor wrong?

01:48:55.520 We, you can say, well, it's bad in some sense, but you can't say it's wrong.

01:49:00.240 Can you?

01:49:00.880 I think on what basis are you saying that?

01:49:03.100 Yeah.

01:49:03.200 I think, I think it's kind of, I like the cut flower analogy, right?

01:49:06.060 You can still say, well, here's a flower, right?

01:49:09.060 And it's pretty and it's whatever, but it's been cut off from the thing that gives it life.

01:49:13.880 It's dying.

01:49:14.520 It's on its way out.

01:49:15.280 So there are secular people, uh, who do, who do offer visions of human dignity.

01:49:20.380 They offer visions of human equality, but they've been so cut off from the tradition that God gave us.

01:49:25.340 But they can't justify it.

01:49:26.680 Yeah.

01:49:26.940 It's if you, if you pin them down and you just go all walk them all the way.

01:49:29.500 Well, which is why I just think this is preferable.

01:49:31.340 Like life is better than death.

01:49:32.880 Cruelty is bad.

01:49:33.720 Why is it bad?

01:49:34.620 That's right.

01:49:35.160 Because I don't like it.

01:49:36.120 Okay.

01:49:36.500 But that, well, maybe I do like it.

01:49:38.100 So how can you say you're right and I'm wrong?

01:49:39.580 Because they're not appealing to anything above themselves.

01:49:42.920 Therefore, it's just a circular argument.

01:49:45.680 And, uh, and the thing that I find so frustrating about this is, um, my secular counterparts, um, in these fields sort of criticize religious people for being, um, you know, uh, believing in superstition, uh, irrational, you know, and trying to impose their point of view on others.

01:50:06.820 But in reality, if you just walk, uh, these secular folks back to their first principles, their vision of the good and you say, okay, we've walked you back and you believe in the greatest good for the greatest number.

01:50:17.980 Why do you think that?

01:50:19.140 Right.

01:50:19.260 Why do you think you should maximize the greatest good for the greatest number?

01:50:21.580 And why do you think that's the primary thing you should do?

01:50:23.960 And there aren't any rules governing that at all.

01:50:25.880 They don't have an answer for that, Tucker.

01:50:27.440 It's just something that grabs them by some sort of authority or intuition or self-evidence, but that sounds a lot like a faith claim.

01:50:35.540 Right.

01:50:35.700 They're just children.

01:50:37.360 Have you ever asked them, what do you think of the Nazi euthanasia program?

01:50:40.900 Was that justifiable?

01:50:42.100 And how is it different from what we have now?

01:50:44.120 Oh, they would say that, um, the, the reason why the Nazi program was problematic is because it didn't respect patient autonomy, the first principle of bioethics.

01:50:51.720 Oh.

01:50:52.260 And, and we just let, we just.

01:50:54.940 And we differ in what way?

01:50:56.020 Well, given the conversation over the last hour and a half or whatever it's been, I think we, it's very clear we also, uh, do not respect patient autonomy.

01:51:03.820 Well, anyone who forces a vaccine on somebody by definition is not respecting patient autonomy.

01:51:10.080 If I'm telling you you're required by law to put some drug in your body that you don't want, how am I treating you as a human being?

01:51:17.940 I'm treating you as my slave, as a subhuman, right? 0.95

01:51:20.620 Well, that's the argument that we've heard, um, now for several years, which is, isn't it interesting that, um, many of you were all about bodily autonomy, are all about bodily autonomy, uh, when it comes to reproductive rights, so-called.

01:51:35.080 Um, but then, uh, we're, we're very happy to jettison conscience rights and bodily autonomy rights when it came to those, uh, sorts of issues.

01:51:43.540 It doesn't seem to be, um, again, a kind of coherent vision of the good.

01:51:48.380 What did the ethicist community say to that?

01:51:51.720 Well, I'm sure they went all in on the VAX mandates.

01:51:54.480 I mean, of course they did.

01:51:55.180 Yeah.

01:51:55.460 I mean, as you know, there've been a lot of important questions asked across the board recently that weren't asked at the time, but I, at that point, I think there was just a ton of fear, right?

01:52:03.560 A sense that like, um, you know, they, they, this is almost always how it works, right?

01:52:07.340 These sort of things get, get eroded because of claims that are so fearful.

01:52:11.320 Not to be mean or whatever, but that is my default.

01:52:15.100 Um, don't we have ethicists precisely for the moments that are ruled by fear?

01:52:19.380 Isn't that, that is what, when we lack a clear consensus on the right direction.

01:52:25.180 And when our judgment is muddled by panic, that's exactly the moment we need clear thinking ethicists.

01:52:34.300 Correct.

01:52:34.960 Correct.

01:52:35.260 That's why we employ them. 0.52

01:52:36.520 That's right.

01:52:37.320 And it was at that moment that they like were swept away by panic too.

01:52:41.460 In what?

01:52:42.600 Not all of them, but, but a lot of, but a lot of them, a lot of them.

01:52:46.200 I was one of the ones arguing that, um, uh, you know, Catholicism actually has a very robust sense of conscience, right?

01:52:53.800 Uh, to say like, oh, conscience is the place where you meet God in the most profound way.

01:52:59.480 And, um, and where you, and where you, where God speaks to you in the most profound way.

01:53:04.060 And conscience, um, rights actually, um, have been coded left for a lot of, uh, the church's history in recent years.

01:53:13.140 Um, but it's interesting again, when this sort of fear took over, um, the, the focus on conscience sort of went away, right?

01:53:20.900 Like this, the sense of, I mean, I, I don't agree with some of the claims that people were making about, you know, the kinds of connections to aborted body parts and things like that.

01:53:30.640 And reasonable people can disagree about that, but I would say, hey, this is enough of a serious argument.

01:53:35.220 We ought to respect people's conscience rights to choose not to take the vaccine because, because, but, but it's so interesting that those arguments sort of evaporated in light of all that fear.

01:53:44.560 Well, you didn't even hear them.

01:53:45.900 At least I didn't.

01:53:47.340 Um, okay.

01:53:48.080 So last question I have, I, I just, I'll just say it because I know that you're, well, you're a Catholic theologian.

01:53:54.640 Um, and I'm a lifelong Protestant, so I've always been for contraception.

01:54:00.780 I've never even really thought about it.

01:54:02.100 It was one of the things we used to make fun of the Catholics about. 1.00

01:54:04.100 They were against birth control.

01:54:05.100 Okay.

01:54:05.760 They had these giant families, which we, for some reason considered bad.

01:54:09.040 Oh, like low rent, too many children.

01:54:13.540 What are you Irish?

01:54:14.280 Oh, stop.

01:54:16.080 It's like, I'm laughing as it's like, it's hard even to imagine having those attitudes now, but I once did.

01:54:20.740 But anyway, I'm saying that by way of confession.

01:54:22.820 But in the last few years, I have noticed, the reason I've had cause to rethink all this is because I've noticed that almost every major push from the public health community, and certainly from our politicians, is anti-fertility.

01:54:38.980 That's what they're focused on.

01:54:40.860 It's the one right you possess is the right to have an abortion. 0.95

01:54:44.340 You don't have the right to speak freely, to have control of your own money, to gather with like-minded people, to protest or petition your government.

01:54:54.180 None of those rights still exist.

01:54:55.680 The only right you have is the right to end your pregnancy, and of course, to prevent it in the first place through birth control. 0.98

01:55:03.100 And I'm sensing a theme.

01:55:04.580 I'm not a genius, but I have noticed that the thread that connects all of their main concerns is the same, and is they don't want you to have kids.

01:55:11.620 And why is that?

01:55:14.800 It's a multivariant problem.

01:55:16.680 I mean, if you look at surveys, women are very consistently reporting that they would like to have more kids than the kids they actually have.

01:55:27.000 You think? Yeah.

01:55:27.800 Yeah.

01:55:28.020 And the reasons they give are very interesting.

01:55:33.860 Both Vance and Waltz in the recent debate were asked about paid family leave as a possible option to pursue, and it was very interesting to hear them both offer sort of vaguely supportive ideas with regard to that.

01:55:47.940 A number of women give lack of paid family leave as reasons for why they don't have the number of kids that they want to have. 1.00

01:55:55.520 Others suggest that, you know, they would much rather have a not be in a two-income trap, right, where they feel like they must be away from their kids all the time and work.

01:56:07.520 Elizabeth Warren, before she became a totalitarian robot, which she is today, wrote a wonderful book on this called The Two-Income Trap, which I quoted at length on Fox News once without identifying the author, and I could hear people applauding in the audience until they found it was Elizabeth Warren who wrote it, but she did write it, and she made that point.

01:56:25.760 And if you ask women what they actually want, not all, of course, but the overwhelming majority would like to raise their own children, particularly when they're little, you know, no one wants to hang around a 15-year-old, I got it. 0.98

01:56:37.000 But when they're five, most women would like to raise their own kids and not import people from another country to do it. 1.00

01:56:42.040 And that seems like the most human of all desires, and it's the one desire that we thwart.

01:56:45.880 And I found that conversation about paid family leave, like, nauseating, actually, because that was, no one ever mentioned the possibility that maybe women could raise their own kids.

01:56:56.400 That's right.

01:56:56.720 Why do we have to choose between the two, right?

01:56:58.200 Well, exactly.

01:56:58.880 How about the thing that people really want, like, above all else, which is to be with their own children?

01:57:03.440 The most important thing they'll ever do is have children.

01:57:06.540 Maybe they'd like to be with them for a couple years.

01:57:08.540 No one even mentioned that.

01:57:11.040 I think they don't, you know, this is pure speculation.

01:57:13.900 I think one reason people don't mention it is precisely because of how deeply the systems and structures which have led to the two-income trap are foundational in our culture.

01:57:25.100 We would have to undo so much of what our culture has become.

01:57:28.340 Well, I hope we do it immediately because it's so rotten and anti-human.

01:57:31.960 It's denying people the true source of joy.

01:57:35.700 That's right.

01:57:36.360 In their lives and substituting it with, like, a banking job or something that's utterly pointless and destructive.

01:57:42.600 No, what you really need to do instead of having kids is help us loan money at interest. 0.70

01:57:47.400 I mean, that's so disgusting to me.

01:57:50.880 Sorry.

01:57:51.540 And actually, the exploit of lending money at interest used to be called usury, and it used to be considered an intrinsically evil act in the tradition, by the way.

01:57:59.440 Well, it still is in my house, so that's how I feel about it strongly.

01:58:03.020 Unfortunately, but that's considered wildly controversial.

01:58:06.320 I mean, like, you know, having six trans kids is considered great, but criticizing usury is considered like, whoa, off the charts. 0.96

01:58:15.300 You're a bigot. 1.00

01:58:16.300 You're crazy. 1.00

01:58:19.260 Well, I find it disgusting. 1.00

01:58:20.360 I just want to be on the record saying that.

01:58:21.740 But anyway, but what, like, why would you want to deny people children?

01:58:27.780 Like, what is that impulse?

01:58:30.060 Again, I think it's multivariant.

01:58:31.440 The other variable I would include is the climate crisis that is constantly thrown at people, right?

01:58:37.700 To say, like, I don't want to bring children into a world where everyone's going to die for things related to climate change.

01:58:43.240 But I think also—

01:58:45.200 They're not worried about nuclear war, which they've—I mean, they brought us to the brink of nuclear war.

01:58:48.820 Where we are, as of right now, October 2nd, I think it's October 2nd, we're on the brink of nuclear war right now.

01:58:55.040 But nobody cares.

01:58:55.920 But they're worried about climate change.

01:58:58.360 I mean, what is going on?

01:59:00.380 It doesn't make any sense.

01:59:01.620 And again, there's no reason that we need to choose between the two.

01:59:04.860 But at least I can't think of one.

01:59:08.800 But then there's also the drug companies here as well.

01:59:11.720 And this is, again, I keep on bringing up this amazing show you did with the mean siblings that brought up big pharma and exploitive practices of contraception as part of big pharma.

01:59:23.660 We talk about getting kids on a regimen, which makes pharma shit tons of money for almost their whole lives.

01:59:30.620 Well, how about getting a young girl on birth control from the time she's 12 until the time she has menopause, right? 0.84

01:59:40.320 Think about that windfall.

01:59:42.420 Think about what that means for the broader culture, too.

01:59:47.660 And we support patient autonomy, right?

01:59:50.360 Except for 12-year-old girls where the doctor just says, okay, it's time for you to be on contraception now.

01:59:54.020 And everyone sort of goes along, ho-hum.

01:59:55.500 And we're just now really starting to reckon with what this might be doing to women's bodies and beyond.

02:00:01.460 Well, it's a disaster.

02:00:02.840 And young women know that. 0.78

02:00:04.340 And I think the number of young women getting off the pill is extraordinary.

02:00:09.160 Right.

02:00:09.380 For the first time in my lifetime, I mean, it was always considered really subversive and not acceptable, really, to point out that the pill increased stroke risk, for example, just as abortion increases breast cancer risk.

02:00:20.600 You're not allowed to mention that either.

02:00:21.640 Not allowed.

02:00:22.020 But I never put it all together in my mind, which is the one thing that all of these attitudes have in common, is the desire to stifle fertility.

02:00:35.100 And it's hard to escape the conclusion that there's a spiritual force behind that.

02:00:40.500 Yeah, and it's a spiritual force that may, again, run throughout the different topics we've engaged.

02:00:47.900 You know, it's, again, treating women not as fully autonomous individuals.

02:00:52.240 Ironically, though, that's the language which is used to suggest that they need to do this, right?

02:00:56.300 Except for women who do want to prescind from this, who want to lead a different kind of lifestyle, who are often actually not religious at all, but sort of crunchy, progressive lefties who say, I don't want to put this carcinogen in my body.

02:01:07.460 I want to put this poison in my body, right?

02:01:09.140 That's, again, one of the things that's pushing back from this.

02:01:13.500 We use the language, which actually inverts what is actually happening.

02:01:17.220 We use the language of autonomy and empowering women, when in reality, it's doing precisely the opposite.

02:01:23.120 It's interesting, though, the connection.

02:01:25.080 I'm so glad you pointed that out.

02:01:26.960 It's not just like evangelicals in Iowa who are suspicious of the current program.

02:01:31.960 It's also like, you know, the furry armpit girls who are for that, who I support strongly. 0.93

02:01:38.680 I should just say that.

02:01:39.420 But what do those two have in common?

02:01:42.580 No, but it's kind of secular granola people, too.

02:01:46.680 Yeah.

02:01:47.440 To the extent they still exist, there aren't many of those left.

02:01:49.800 I wish we had more.

02:01:50.780 They're great people.

02:01:51.520 Yeah.

02:01:52.000 But what do they have in common with religious people? 0.98

02:01:53.840 Well, they're both kind of grounded, actually, in something beyond the digital world.

02:02:00.080 And they're both more in touch with themselves.

02:02:02.420 Like, those are the two groups in America who might actually have a moment of silence every day where they can listen.

02:02:09.360 You know what I mean?

02:02:10.440 Yeah.

02:02:10.960 And skeptical of what's being foisted on them by corporations and others who want to make money off of them.

02:02:15.720 It's only when you have that silence that you can be skeptical.

02:02:18.400 Otherwise, your senses are hijacked by the machine in your hand.

02:02:23.040 And you don't have time to think.

02:02:25.200 And more important, you don't have time to listen.

02:02:27.300 You don't have time for silence.

02:02:28.320 And it's in silence that you receive wisdom, obviously.

02:02:32.320 Obviously.

02:02:34.240 And so the rest of the country goes to sleep with the TV on.

02:02:37.840 And only the granola chicks and the religious people don't have it on. 1.00

02:02:43.520 And maybe they're hearing something that the rest of us should be hearing.

02:02:47.120 And that's, yeah, that's a wonderful thing to, I don't know if this is what we're going to finish on, but that's a wonderful thing.

02:02:52.180 Can we make space for that silence, right?

02:02:55.680 That place, again, where God meets us in our most foundational way.

02:03:00.700 Like that is, I think that maybe, I don't want to speak for you, maybe one reason you moved up here to Maine, because at least in my short time here, this seems like a wonderful place to encounter that silence.

02:03:09.740 It's to put the phone away, to put the pounding feed that just pushes you to doom scroll and feel terrible.

02:03:20.240 But instead, think critically, but also think creatively.

02:03:23.780 I can't tell you how many times my creative thoughts, even whole book ideas have come just when I was holding my infant son in my lap and just had nothing else to do but let that happen.

02:03:33.640 But that's always where it comes.

02:03:35.240 I have a chair outside my, I take a sauna every day, not for health reasons.

02:03:39.740 I'm obviously like one of the more unhealthy people you'll meet.

02:03:44.680 I plan to buy a tin of chewing tobacco today.

02:03:47.300 So I'm not a health guy at all, but I am a silence person.

02:03:50.440 And that's why I do it.

02:03:51.780 And it's known as my cedar church.

02:03:53.300 And I was like, you know, if I get 15 minutes to sit butt naked in a hot room in silence, like that's a massive improvement over not doing it.

02:04:02.380 And I have a chair outside my sauna.

02:04:04.280 I used to write my whole script just sitting there, you know, like you just in silence, only in silence can you receive, you know, actual clarity and wisdom.

02:04:17.560 So I'm not articulating it for you.

02:04:19.120 You are.

02:04:19.420 No, you got it.

02:04:19.960 And that's historically, again, to take it back to the tradition that I'm bound by, there was so much emphasis on finding these times for silence, right?

02:04:31.240 To imitate Christ going into the wilderness, to hang out with the monks, to get out of the situation you're in and allow this voice to speak to you in a way that allows you to be both critical and creative.

02:04:42.480 It seems like a pretty scary religion you've signed up with, Charlie. 0.85

02:04:45.040 I can see why people hate it.

02:04:46.760 It turns out.

02:04:49.960 Silence and nonviolence and imagination and critical thinking.

02:04:55.540 Who wants that? 1.00

02:04:57.160 Caring for disabled kids. 0.99

02:04:59.060 Yeah, man.

02:04:59.640 Whoa, slow down, man.

02:05:00.700 You're freaking me out.

02:05:02.100 Sorry about that, Tucker.

02:05:03.820 I sure appreciate you're taking all this time.

02:05:06.760 That was absolutely my pleasure.

02:05:07.500 To talk about all of this.

02:05:08.780 Last question.

02:05:10.160 If people are interested in, and I interrupted you so many times.

02:05:14.440 I'm afraid we didn't get to a lot of things, but for people who want to understand more about how you think and the way you've connected a lot of seemingly disconnected trends in our society, which are of a piece, I think.

02:05:28.340 Yeah.

02:05:28.560 Where can they read you?

02:05:31.040 So, my Twitter handle is at C Camosy.

02:05:35.160 So, at C, C-A-M-O-S-Y.

02:05:38.040 But probably the book I've written, I'm starting book 10, or I'm trying to finish book 10 by Thanksgiving.

02:05:43.660 But probably the book that makes, I'm actually writing a book right now, trying to finish a book on how understanding what a good death looks like can resist physician-assisted suicide.

02:05:52.740 So, maybe we could talk about that some other time, too.

02:05:55.160 But to answer the question you asked me, I wrote a book called Resisting Throwaway Culture, How a Consistent Life Ethic Can Unite a Fractured People.

02:06:03.920 And that book really offers the kind of vision that I've been trying to articulate.

02:06:08.460 I hope you'll come back when your death book comes out.

02:06:10.800 I actually have seen a good death.

02:06:12.640 Yeah.

02:06:13.040 I was privileged, really privileged to see that.

02:06:15.380 It was someone I love.

02:06:16.880 And, boy, you know it when you see it, don't you?

02:06:18.980 Yeah.

02:06:19.400 Yes.

02:06:19.820 Yeah.

02:06:20.340 So, but I haven't thought very deeply about it.

02:06:22.380 You clearly have, so I hope you will come back to talk about that.

02:06:24.820 I will. Thank you. Thank you, Tucker.

02:06:25.680 The one thing that unites us all.

02:06:28.140 It's going to happen.

02:06:29.060 Charlie, thank you very much.

02:06:30.400 My pleasure. Thank you.

02:06:33.420 Thanks for listening to the Tucker Carlson Show.

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The Tucker Carlson Show - October 03, 2024

Medical Ethicist Charles Camosy Debunks Media Lies About Abortion and Kamala’s Love for Infanticide

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