Breaking news out of Philadelphia about a plane crash that left multiple people dead. Federal Reserve advisor accused of spying for China. A trans woman accused of being on a Black Hawk helicopter. And more! We're talking about it all on today's episode of The Culture War!
00:01:09.000Some information about the transportation security announcing the new FFA action to ensure safety in airspace.
00:01:15.000That comes on the heels of the accident in D.C. at DCA where the Blackhawk and the American Airlines commuter plane.
00:01:27.000We've got some information about the J6 protesters, about the prosecutors.
00:01:33.000Interim U.S. attorney fires more than two dozen January 6th prosecutors in D.C. We had some of the J6 defendants and people that were pardoned and had their sentences commuted this morning on the culture war.
00:01:47.000We had a great conversation about that.
00:01:49.000So we're going to talk about that a little bit.
00:01:53.000We've got some information about the Federal Reserve advisor that's been charged with economic espionage.
00:02:00.000Apparently he has been giving trade secrets or information to the Chinese Communist Party, which is obviously a big problem for the United States.
00:02:11.000The CBS News is reporting agencies are asked to scrub federal government websites to remove diversity-related content.
00:02:23.000The walls had diversity, inclusion, and all kinds of slogans, and they've been painting those over with the standard government gray, which, as much as the government gray is not really aesthetically pleasing, I think that it's a better option than diversity, equity, and inclusion.
00:02:41.000And then we've also got the information about the Joe Ellis, the trans woman that was alleged to be on the Black Hop helicopter, but that is not the case.
00:02:55.000But before we get into that, head on over to castbrew.com and buy yourself some coffee.
00:03:02.000Normally, this is the time where we talk about how many bags of Ian's...
00:03:07.000Graphene Dream have been sold, but they're all gone.
00:03:33.000You can get Two Weeks Till Christmas, which has got a cool picture of myself dressed up like Santa Claus.
00:03:38.000So head on over to Casper and get your coffee.
00:03:41.000Head on over to Boonies HQ and you can get the newest...
00:03:47.000The 28th Amendment, chickens being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep, bear, and breed chickens shall not be infringed.
00:03:57.000Whereas that does seem like a little quip and a play on the Second Amendment.
00:04:03.000The idea is that you are free to take care of yourself, whether it be using the Second Amendment to protect your right to defend yourself or the 28th Amendment to protect your right to grow food.
00:04:15.000And be a homesteader or to take care of your family.
00:04:19.000These are all things that are part of your humanity.
00:04:23.000And then we want you to head on over to TimCast.com and join us.
00:05:16.000I make videos defending Christianity, arguing for the evidence that supports it, arguing for the truth of it, God exists, that kind of stuff.
00:05:25.000You can find me at Inspiring Philosophy on YouTube, Twitter, or X, I guess it's called, as well as Instagram, TikTok.
00:06:06.000Some local coverage of the plane crash in Philadelphia leaves multiple houses on fire, causes an explosion.
00:06:13.000CBS News is reporting, emergency crews are responding to an explosion in northeast Philadelphia after a small medical jet crashed in the area of Roosevelt Boulevard and Cotman Ave.
00:06:22.000Philadelphia police confirmed to CBS News Philadelphia.
00:06:25.000The plane, a Learjet 55, was going from Philadelphia to Springfield, Missouri, leaving the northeast Philadelphia airport when tragedy struck.
00:06:33.000The plane crashed into a neighborhood outside the Roosevelt...
00:06:37.000I don't know if you've seen any of the video, but the video of the actual crash...
00:06:44.000So this is actually from someone where the crash has crashed into a neighborhood.
00:06:54.000The debris field, I've been hearing reports that it's about the size of a football field, so about 100 yards.
00:08:29.000No, but the nature of the political discourse and everything that happened in the last couple of days.
00:08:34.000So when we were, right when this happened, we were watching live on some of the, I think it was like one of the Fox affiliates here.
00:08:40.000And they had live chat while they were, you know, on the ground reporting.
00:08:43.000And a whole bunch of the discussion from the people who were watching or the people who were following along in the live chat were simultaneous discussions about whether it was some type of an attack or whether this was something.
00:08:55.000DEI-related, which really, more than anything, just gives you an idea of where the public barometer is for how people feel about these types of events in the culture right now.
00:09:03.000Do you feel like there's conspiracy brain now?
00:09:11.000The point is, when these things happen, I think it said 1,500 plane crashes a year or something, but the idea here is that you are now connected on the internet and connected to the news 24-7.
00:09:23.000So before, when you only checked the news maybe once a day when you got home from work, maybe you read the newspaper when you were getting ready for your day.
00:09:31.000Now, because you are constantly connected to digital communication, you are seeing these things every single day and not just in your area.
00:09:38.000Whereas usually you'd be watching local news.
00:09:41.000Maybe they would have stories on an international level, but most of it was local news unless you were watching cable news like Fox or CNN or like that.
00:09:49.000So you are seeing far more things, which makes you primed to think that there's connected events when there may be, there may not.
00:09:59.000I mean, you go back to how humans evolved.
00:10:03.000We were sort of evolved to see patterns because you're more likely to survive.
00:10:07.000If you go back and you're the ancient hunter-gatherer and you hear a ruffle in the weeds, it's better to think there's a predator there.
00:10:14.000Than it just being the win because you're more likely to survive for the one out of a million chance that there's actually a predator there.
00:10:20.000And that evolutionary thinking just carried over into our modern thinking.
00:10:53.000Basic instincts, I guess you could say, and just have a more rational take on this kind of stuff.
00:10:57.000And people have been gaslit for God knows how long, but it's really come out over the last decade, you know, with COVID, where they said, don't wear masks, they don't do anything.
00:11:04.000And then a couple months later, it's like, actually, masks do do something.
00:11:07.000We just lied to you because we needed the first responders to get the masks.
00:11:10.000You know, the vaccine prevents transmission.
00:11:11.000Oh, actually, it doesn't prevent transmission, they found.
00:11:14.000It was a bat, but it turns out that it was actually the lab where it was grown.
00:11:19.000Yeah, so people are hypersensitive to being lied to and they're willing, I think, overcompensating and saying so the opposite must be true then of what I'm being told.
00:11:28.000But then there's also that you can make a living by being by being a conspiracy theorist literally online.
00:11:36.000If you if you see something happen and you say, I'm going to say that it's this this crazy.
00:11:49.000I think that, like, I mean, both your points, I think, are very solid.
00:11:54.000My instinct was going to be to say what Ian said, because I think that the fact that the institutions that even normies, like, trusted, right?
00:12:05.000Everybody that was a normal person, they always figured, well, the government is here to take care of us, particularly people on the right, right?
00:14:38.000I mean, if you go back even to the founding of this nation, you read a lot of the papers in the 1800s, very hostile towards their political opponents.
00:14:47.000I mean, like, the idea that, like, the right for a short time was, like, pro-government, yeah, I see that.
00:14:52.000But I think it's just going back to the way more aligning with how humans tend to be.
00:14:56.000We're just suspicious of anyone outside of our tribe.
00:16:05.000I think me and you have even probably talked about this before.
00:16:07.000Like even if there was— You know, nobody wants another 9-11, but even if there was, the way information is disseminated now, I don't think there would be the same type of coalescing around a nation the way that there was after 9-11.
00:16:21.000One, because of things like this, because people will automatically be suspicious, whether it involves our government, foreign governments, but there isn't going to be the rah-rah nationalism that united more people from both sides of the aisle back in, say, 2001, what, at the latest, and even that didn't last for all that.
00:16:39.000I mean, I agree that it didn't last for all that long.
00:16:42.000I just don't think we'll ever see something like that again in the age of the internet.
00:16:45.000I feel like the charity that was given was really wasted by the Bush administration.
00:16:53.000I mean, I was a guy that was very much a Republican kind of dude after, well, I mean...
00:17:02.000In the late 90s and early aughts, I was very much a Republican.
00:17:05.000And then when George Bush squandered all of my trust, and I was like, okay, well, there's no good guys in D.C. And then I was, you know, I started looking into people like Ron Paul and the Libertarians, and I started looking at the government as, you know, you should always be, at least to some degree, suspicious.
00:17:25.000And I do think that – I think Brett's got a point.
00:17:28.000I don't know that we would have the same kind of coalesce around the government, especially considering the way that the American people, younger generations, they haven't been taught that America is a good place.
00:17:41.000They've been taught that America is a bad place.
00:17:46.000Fundamental principles that our country is supposed to have been founded on, we've been taught that they're all lies.
00:17:52.000Now, whether or not that's true, I think that there's probably a kernel of truth to it, and that's only because human beings are fallible.
00:18:00.000But generally, I think the ideals that the country is founded on and the aspirations that we have for our country are good, and I think that the United States has been a force for good in the world, but I still think that...
00:18:13.000I think millennials and Gen Z feel less that way than I do.
00:18:18.000I think a lot of it actually has to do with the declining religiosity rates.
00:18:22.000You go back to the 90s, most people, whether blue or red, were Christian.
00:18:26.000But that was the core of their identity.
00:18:28.000I remember being in church and my parents were like, oh, they're voting for that person.
00:18:35.000That's – the declining religiosity is – especially on the left, they've moved away from that.
00:18:39.000So now their core identity then moves to politics, and this is what sociologists have talked about.
00:18:43.000When you get rid of traditional religiosity, it makes room for political religiosity to move in, and that becomes the new god, the new religion, and everything starts to revolve around that.
00:18:53.000So when left and right people are now fighting, it's not so much, hey, we'll see you on Sunday even though we disagree.
00:19:01.000It's going to create more polarization.
00:19:03.000So this – as religiosity has been declining unfortunately, politics moves in to fill that gap.
00:19:08.000Everyone gets more tribal, less trustworthy, and of course sociological research does show Christianity correlates with less tribalism, less prejudice.
00:19:17.000I mean like – so I mean like what do you expect is going to happen?
00:19:21.000So you would see blue dog Democrats next to maybe a Republican at church on a Sunday.
00:19:38.000They went to church on Sunday, and they were pro-union.
00:19:41.000And I was trying to – I had to try to explain.
00:19:43.000explainer said yours they don't support this anymore just the fact that you like firearms is something that if you were to try to be involved deeper within the party you will be expelled for because it is one of their main selling points when they are trying to fundraise whether it's anti-nra anything anti-weapon especially with school shootings and things like that and they hadn't yet realized because they weren't as politically active as some of us were just how easy it was to be expelled from the group because the tribalism was so heavy now
00:20:12.000yeah i you know you you mentioned the the fact that we're less christian less religious and i mean i i as a a novice uh person who has limited experience to philosophy it still makes me think of nietzsche saying that god is dead and and the average kind of angsty teenager thinks that that was some kind of triumphant statement and Nietzsche was like, this is going to be a horrible thing for humanity
00:20:40.000and then we saw the horrors of the first half, well, the horrors of the 20th century where it was, you know, first it was communism and Nazism and the fight for which of those two, I mean, I want to call them theologies because they both had a significant spiritual element I want to call them theologies because they both had even if, you know, The communists said that they weren't religious.
00:21:30.000If you're on the right and you start moving away from traditional religiosity, they keep a lot of the Christian symbols, but they reinterpret them into political ways.
00:21:38.000Now Christianity becomes a civilization we have to defend, not an actual religion.
00:21:44.000Nazism has been described as a political religion in a lot of ways.
00:21:47.000We start moving away from traditional.
00:21:49.000We start worshiping the state or, in terms of the Nazis, the Aryan race and that thing.
00:22:18.000And G.K. Chesterton called it Christian ethics gone mad because you take some of the ethics you like, you detach it from its foundation, and it goes off into some wild extremes that just result in a hole.
00:22:28.000I've heard someone describe communism and socialism as that.
00:23:39.000Yeah, that without God to tell you what's right or wrong, and if we're all only here for an instant in the grand scheme of things, in the universal time scale, if you're only a...
00:23:56.000I don't see why being quote-unquote good would matter to someone that didn't have any kind of religion.
00:24:16.000And that's what you see with the whole...
00:24:20.000You know, the communism, it's like, well, you know, you want to be good to people and you want to take care of people.
00:24:24.000And it's like, well, if we're all going to die and your life is actually only a spark in history, you know, of eternal history, why does it matter?
00:24:50.000But then you need to ask, why are they doing those good things?
00:24:54.000Will they want to provide for their family?
00:24:57.000Ultimately, what the Christian would argue is that's going to go back down to power, and this is also kind of what Nietzsche was going there.
00:25:03.000Eventually, all that's left is trying to obtain power for you and your tribe or your family at that point, and that's what we see slowly come out.
00:25:11.000I mean, if you are a traditional religious person, like a Christian, God has all the power.
00:26:14.000Secretary announces new FAA action to ensure safety in airspace.
00:26:18.000This comes on the heels of the crash in Washington, D.C.
00:26:23.000So it's the Department of Transportation is saying Washington, with the support of President Trump and in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, effective today, the Federal Aviation Administration will restrict helicopter traffic in the area over the Potomac River around Ronald Reagan, Washington National Airport, D.C.A., the Federal Aviation Administration will restrict helicopter traffic in the area over the Potomac River around These areas include Memorial Bridge to South Capitol Street Bridge, excluding the Tidal Basin, Haynes Point to Wilson Bridge, over the top of D.C.A.
00:26:51.000The restriction exempts helicopters entering this airspace for life-saving medical support, active law enforcement, active air defense, or presidential transport helicopter missions that must operate in this restricted area.
00:27:04.000Any helicopter operations outside the These exemptions will be prohibited.
00:27:08.000These restrictions will remain in place until the NTSB completes its preliminary investigation of the air carrier incident, at which point it will be reviewed based on NTSB's report.
00:27:18.000Now, I don't if you've ever been to that area and I'm assuming, you know, there there are a lot of people that are listeners that have never been to DCA.
00:27:27.000I've flown in and out at the DCA multiple times.
00:27:30.000I go down there to pick up my girlfriend when she flies in or out.
00:27:33.000Her family's in Florida, so she goes in and out of there a lot.
00:27:37.000If you look, you can see in this actual picture, I think, the...
00:27:43.000Pentagon is very close to DCA, and the Pentagon itself has regular flights of Blackhawks flying around all the time.
00:27:54.000I assume that that's generals flying from other air bases or from other military bases.
00:28:06.000Maybe there are people from Langley, from...
00:28:11.000The CIA headquarters flying to the Pentagon.
00:28:16.000So it's a very, very busy area, and it's not really a surprise that they're making these kind of limitations.
00:28:23.000I guess what I do find a little surprising is that with it being such a busy area, and because they're supposed to have two people on staff, one person for aircraft, regular planes, and then one...
00:28:40.000What do you guys think, you know, what do you think of the fact that they didn't have people on?
00:28:45.000Now, I know there's a lot of talk, you know, DEI and stuff, and I know that the more that I hear about this after the accident, that they were having significant problems actually staffing the people, and they were, if I understand correctly, they were turning people away based on their race.
00:29:02.000Do you think that this kind of action is actually going to solve the problem?
00:29:07.000And furthermore, do you think that the Trump administration, with their efforts to undo the DEI mess that we have in the government, do you think that that's going to prevent further accidents and further negative consequences from DEI policies in general?
00:29:21.000This looks more like they're trying to quell the fears of the public, like, look, we're going to get rid of some helicopters so it's still safe.
00:29:30.000Because after this, I was like, I'm not flying out DCA for a while.
00:29:38.000Also, maybe general safety, dude, with the whole helicopter hitting the airplane, and they said that it was supposed to be two people watching that, and there was only one.
00:29:46.000I was like, is this because Trump just fired a bunch of people and they were short-staffed?
00:29:50.000I do want to point out, just because I don't want people to lose their minds, the last time there was an accident of this magnitude was 2009, and that airspace has been this busy.
00:30:16.000But I want people to have a sober look or sober thought process when it comes to air travel and when it comes to this stuff.
00:30:23.000We are not in a situation where planes are going to start falling out of the sky all the time.
00:30:29.000These policies do have ramifications, but it's still the safest way to fly, and you really don't need to be on edge just because you have to get into an airplane.
00:30:40.000I know that I'm throwing the wet blanket on the conspiracy theory people here and stuff, but it is important to remember, this is an accident, and there have been no accidents since 2009. This is exceedingly rare.
00:30:56.000When there are accidents, it is almost all...
00:30:58.000There's always multiple human failures.
00:31:00.000Planes don't just fall out of the sky.
00:31:04.000The plane looked like it fell out of the sky in Philadelphia, so maybe I'm eating crow about that one.
00:31:08.000One of the things that really shocked me was they showed video of the actual, what the screens that the air traffic controllers are watching, and it looks like Atari 2600, no, no, not even 8-bit graphics, like 2600K graphics, I don't know what they were, crappy little, an X and an L indicating an airplane, or it was an F, I think, in a triangle.
00:31:30.000Like, you have people looking at these things.
00:31:32.000They update every second, and it shows it appearing in a new position.
00:31:36.000Like, dude, we need some top, like, high-tech monitoring systems that give you a warning if it shows that a craft is approaching another craft ahead of time.
00:31:48.000I think that I saw the same screen that you're talking about, and above the two planes, they had red CA collision alarm, right?
00:31:54.000And I... I think, and tell me what you think of this, I think the reason why they go with very simple-looking graphics is because the less information, because there are so many planes, right?
00:32:07.000I think that they go with simplified graphics like that because it's to keep the actual...
00:32:13.000Only the most important information being fed to the people that are watching, because if there's too much stuff, you can get overwhelmed.
00:32:23.000Now, granted, I would absolutely agree that you have to be well-trained, and maybe that is a training issue, but what do you think of that, Ian?
00:34:05.000Again, when I was in the RAPCON, you would see the planes and it would indicate 5,000 feet or 6,000 and you would say things like descend and maintain 5,000.
00:34:13.000And also the elevation or the altitude indicates direction, right?
00:34:18.000If you're at certain altitudes, you are for east-west, certain altitudes are for north.
00:34:23.000And I'm just like throwing it out there.
00:34:26.000But if you're at one altitude, that altitude means you're supposed to be heading on one direction.
00:34:32.000If you're at a lower altitude or a higher altitude, that...
00:34:34.000That altitude is for a different direction.
00:34:37.000The altitude not only is telling you how high you are, but if you're paying attention and flying properly, the altitude will also indicate what direction you should be going.
00:34:48.000So this thing was at the wrong altitude, so it indicated to the controller they were flying in a different direction?
00:34:54.000I think when they say they're on approach, that means that they're going to be going through.
00:34:59.000But you know how it takes like 20 minutes to get out of, like, when you're at altitude and they're like, they're going to start descending?
00:35:09.000And then once they get close enough, then they say, I think on approach means you can actually begin descending and heading towards the runway.
00:35:22.000But yeah, they would slowly descend and you would see the elevation going down.
00:35:26.000But again, if there's only one guy in there working and he's looking at multiple screens, he's got multiple planes.
00:35:32.000What I remember from seeing on X is that...
00:35:34.000He did send a warning, like, did you see those?
00:35:37.000And that's all he can do at that point, is, hey, I warned you.
00:35:39.000And then he probably was looking at something else, and then...
00:35:41.000They also said even when there's multiple people scheduled, a lot of times if somebody goes on break, they go down to just one and that this has been going on.
00:35:49.000It's like you said, this has been going on for a long time without anything happening.
00:35:53.000And, you know, maybe today is just the day.
00:35:55.000And the problem is, to me, is like, especially given how close this is to the inauguration and all of the policies that Trump is now implementing through executive orders, is that DEI is a very big discussion that's going on right now.
00:36:09.000now, and this is not new to just this incident.
00:36:12.000I mean, over the last year, depending on how often you are on X or anything like that, there is a discussion where people talk about DEI specifically as it relates to flights and plane crashes.
00:36:21.000So in something, you know, whether it's like people getting on airplanes and stuff like this, so this has unlocked a lot of fear that people have regarding those things.
00:36:29.000So, like I said, we were watching that crash earlier, and a lot of the discussion that was going on in the live chat, whether it was Fox News covering this, is people asking if this is something related to policy that...
00:36:41.000And that's not an unreasonable thing for people to be afraid of, even if they haven't really looked for evidence of it in a particular case.
00:36:48.000What it does is it indicates that when somebody has that the first thing on their mind, it means that that's something that's in the consciousness of the public.
00:36:55.000And to Brett's point about this being an ongoing conversation, even though these are the first actual accidents that have happened in a long time, if you watch these kind of...
00:37:08.000Air traffic controller, exit counts, and stuff like that, you would see that there are a lot of near misses.
00:37:15.000That kind of thing happens fairly frequently, and I don't know how much that is because of, you know, errors in the tower, errors with the pilots, you know, and I don't know that we can quantify it either, you know?
00:37:29.000How do you guys feel about integrating artificial intelligence into the control itself?
00:37:33.000So, you've got a machine saying, look out.
00:37:37.000Like, maybe there's still a dude sitting there, but on top of that, you have different...
00:37:40.000If a guy has to get up and go take a piss, there's still an artificial intelligence, or like nine of them, all watching the monitor, all warning crews and pilots, prepare, look, you know, incoming, look out, this, that, and, like, fail six.
00:37:54.000Again, you might be more of an expert on this than I am, but isn't, like, isn't...
00:38:42.000Like, this is a government, basically, assault, an unintentional assault on the civilianry.
00:38:47.000I don't know if I would go that far, because the...
00:38:51.000The way that I've heard some of it described is they were talking to the pilot of the Blackhawk, and they were saying, stay behind the regional jet.
00:39:00.000But there was a regional jet that was taking off, as well as one coming in.
00:39:04.000And so, if I understand correctly, the tower and the helicopter pilot were communicating, and they were telling him, stay behind the regional jet.
00:39:16.000And it seems like, again, I'm not saying that I have inside knowledge or whatever, but it seems like he, the pilot of the Blackhawk, thought he was talking about the plane that was taking off.
00:39:28.000And actually, the tower was talking about the plane that was coming in because they were both the same type or a similar type of regional jet.
00:40:18.000I use the word unintentional for sure, but, like, if a soldier unintentionally drops a grenade into a foxhole and kills nine other soldiers, you still court-martial the guy.
00:40:26.000I mean, it doesn't matter if he intended to do it or not.
00:41:06.000Well, we need to probably kill this Steve because Steve forgot to make a sacrifice to the temple the other day.
00:41:11.000We just want to blame someone to fix the solution.
00:41:14.000What you're feeling is perfectly natural.
00:41:15.000And that's actually why, like you asked at the beginning, you said you listed what the government plans to do and you asked, like, is that even necessary in this case?
00:41:24.000And that's because people have the primal urge to blame someone.
00:41:27.000So the government has to be seen doing something when something like this happens, even if there isn't necessarily known whether it's...
00:41:36.000I mean, you know, you can crucify the person that's the air traffic controller, but it doesn't mean that it's going to, and I mean figuratively, but it doesn't mean that it's going to prevent the next issue.
00:41:49.000I think that sober approach to figuring out why it happened and...
00:42:02.000But yeah, I don't think that an emotional attack on the guy that's running or the person running the air traffic controller is a good idea.
00:42:13.000But we're going to jump to this next story here.
00:42:16.000Intern U.S. This, in my opinion, is good.
00:42:35.000But we're going to go ahead and read on.
00:42:38.000Interim U.S. attorney Ed Martin on Friday announced the dismissal of roughly 30 federal prosecutors who worked on Capitol riot cases in the Washington, in the Washington, D.C. office over the past four years.
00:42:49.000Two people familiar with the matter said Friday.
00:42:51.000The employees were hired to permanent career positions after serving under special or short term status as the office surged to manage nearly 1,600 prosecutions after the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
00:43:04.000The prosecutors remained under probationary status, which allowed the firings without recourse under Justice Department policy, the people said.
00:43:12.000So, today on the culture war, we had four people that were, three people that were pardoned, and one person whose sentence was commuted.
00:44:03.000He's the one who had his sentence commuted, but he's still considered guilty of the crimes.
00:44:10.000I think he was going to get like 20 years or a long, long time.
00:44:14.000But they were all saying, look, You know, the prosecutors essentially were doing things that were illegal.
00:44:22.000They were not—it was not a fair—none of them felt like they had a fair trial.
00:44:26.000The entire jury was all out of D.C. They felt like if those trials were held anywhere other than D.C., they would have gotten a fair trial.
00:44:50.000You can't miss the guy on January 6th.
00:44:52.000You know, I mean, the QAnon shaman went on to, you know, people were, actually, Jay had worn a QAnon shaman Halloween costume after it happened the year, like, you know, the following Halloween, and that was part of the reason why he got such a bad outcome with the court.
00:45:25.000I understand why, not that I agree, but I understand why the Oath Keepers got looked at the way they did, why the Proud Boys got looked at the way they did, and why Jacob was looked at the way he did.
00:45:38.000But when it comes to Jay, I mean, he was treated really, really badly for no reason.
00:45:44.000And that's, my understanding is, out of all of the people that were arrested, all these guys did sometime in, or no, Jay didn't, but all the other guys did sometime in solitary confinement.
00:45:56.000Some of them did long stints in solitary confinement, which is like torture.
00:46:01.000I mean, solitary confinement is where the worst of the worst go.
00:46:06.000The people that are violent to other inmates, people that are a threat to other inmates, people that are a threat to themselves, and none of these guys were that.
00:46:13.000Even if you have a distaste for the Proud Boys, Nick was not.
00:47:17.000But, you know, if these guys were hired specifically to prosecute J6 people, I imagine that the argument or the directive that they got was, look, these people are guilty, we all know these people are guilty, and essentially the court cases, the actual trials, are kind of just for show.
00:47:40.000Yeah, it essentially, that's the way that it sounds like, especially when, you know, when they articulate it.
00:47:46.000And again, I understand there are people that were here this morning that a person that is not sympathetic to the J6ers at all, they wouldn't be sympathetic to their plights, except for, like I said, you know, Jay Johnson, he was, you know, he was there.
00:50:00.000They feel like they won the 2020 election, and then when they saw this, the way the media blew out of proportion, they wanted what – They wanted justice and they wanted these people to pay because they keep calling it an insurrection, insurrection.
00:50:10.000They were trying to destroy our democracy.
00:50:12.000And so it just enabled the people in power to really just throw the books at them in every way they can because… Again, as I was talking about earlier, this tribalism stuff just comes up, and with declining religiosity, your political side becomes the new god.
00:50:27.000These insurrectionists, in the eyes of people on the left, were going after...
00:52:17.000Look, even doing this show, I'm not the most political person.
00:52:21.000Certainly most of my social media, you wouldn't see that.
00:52:23.000And I had friends, or what used to be friends, who reached out to me and wrote very long messages about the evils of this event, even though I had not said anything about it, nor did I really care about it in any way, shape, or form.
00:52:36.000I was out skating when this happened and had no idea what was going on until I got home that day and lost friends over this event where I had to read, like, 12-page diatribe.
00:52:46.000It's about why I was a bad person because I did not, I guess, call this out despite the fact that I had nothing to do with it nor talk to them at all about my political beliefs.
00:52:55.000If they said I voted for someone, they certainly didn't hear that from me, so they wouldn't have noted anyways.
00:53:00.000But for the people who are the most politically indoctrinated, the lack of speaking is sometimes worse because they believe that silence is violence and they will take anything you don't say as a crime as well.
00:53:11.000And that was probably one of the bigger awakenings for me at that moment that it's not just going to affect other people.
00:53:18.000It's also possibly going to affect you as well.
00:53:21.000And it was shocking to me because, look, this is also one of those cases where you have to do a ton of research if you want to refute them and talk about it as well.
00:53:29.000Like if I have to talk to them now and point them out and say, when you talk about how many police officers died on January 6th and you don't acknowledge that they were suicides after the fact.
00:53:57.000And to see people who probably agree with me on a fair amount of things still end 20-year friendships over something like this that had nothing to do with them.
00:54:36.000If you don't participate in the rain dance, the gods are going to be mad, and they're not going to send rain.
00:54:42.000It's a similar psychological phenomenon where you have to participate.
00:54:46.000I mean, when St. Augustine was around, a lot of the pagans were blaming the collapse of the Western Roman Empire on Christianity because the gods are now mad.
00:54:54.000And he wrote City of God to refute that and say that's just not the way the world works.
00:55:00.000So the same kind of stuff is happening.
00:55:03.000It's just carried on into new modern fervor, I guess.
00:55:06.000I had to point out, I said, look, did you care when people entered the chambers when Brett Kavanaugh was being confirmed?
00:55:14.000Let me tell you about what was going on when Brett Kavanaugh was going to be confirmed because there was plenty of people, and this happens in local governments all the time, especially when leftists and leftist groups dislike something that's going on in the government.
00:55:27.000They feel emboldened to be able to protest.
00:55:29.000Because they understand that the legacy media will never frame them in the way that the legacy media framed the, you know, Donald Trump supporters when this happens.
00:55:38.000So it emboldens them to go out and continue to act that way because they know they're not going to face any repercussions for it.
00:55:44.000Yeah, we were talking about that this morning and that was kind of everyone's sense that like, especially again, I... Keep referring to Jay because Jay was the kind of the most normie guy that kind of got swept up in it.
00:55:57.000Like everyone else was, you know, politically active.
00:56:00.000I mean, even the QAnon Shaman, he, Jacob, he was, he's very politically active, very politically aware, shares a lot of the sentiments about, you know, about what the left is doing in the United States and stuff.
00:56:12.000And Jay was, you know, very much an L.A. normie.
00:56:15.000And when this stuff happened, he was kind of shocked because he went from being a dude that would get parts and get jobs, and after that, all of his work dried up, he lost his job, his agent fired him, you know, or, you know, quit on him and stuff.
00:56:31.000And that, as someone that comes from the music industry, I... Didn't experience that same thing, because I was already persona non grata, you know, almost seven, eight years prior to this, because I was one of the people that would say, no, it's important that we have free speech.
00:56:48.000It's important that we are able to, you know, we should listen to people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro talk, because even if you don't like them, you know, what they say might, you know, inspire a good dialogue.
00:57:00.000And the response from people in the music industry was like, no, we should punch Nazis.
00:57:37.000I started losing friends long before, you know, the January 6th stuff.
00:57:42.000But I understood what he was going through because he was just like, oh, this all was dropped in my lap.
00:57:47.000And for some reason, now everyone looks at me like I'm persona non grata.
00:57:52.000And I was even getting, as someone that everyone knew, you know, I was on Twitter.
00:57:57.000Just memeing the whole thing all day long.
00:58:00.000I was sharing the Mars Attacks meme where the old lady stands up, they blew up the Capitol, you know, and I'm sending that meme out and laughing about it and making jokes about the riot because it was also my sense that we had just gone through a year of violence night after night after night after night protests and Kenosha and You know,
00:58:24.000there was all the stuff that happened in D.C. and the May 29th attack on the White House and all that stuff.
00:58:30.000And so from my estimation, it was like, oh, just another another riot that happens.
00:58:36.000You know, when Donald Trump was elected, there was riots.
00:59:05.000And as far as I was concerned, there was never a time where Pence was actually going to do.
00:59:14.000What the few Trump supporters that were hoping he would not certify, there was never a time that was going to happen.
00:59:20.000It was absolutely ridiculous from as soon as the idea was presented that maybe it was an insurrection, that maybe Donald Trump was trying to take the presidency.
00:59:31.000I was like, there is no way on earth that any other outcome is going to happen aside from Joe Biden will be the president.
01:00:43.000I mean it's just – everyone's just throwing gasoline on it instead of trying to look for national unity.
01:00:47.000I mean isn't it a big part of that because the majority of the fighting that's happening is being done digitally and it's very easy to other a person when you're arguing with an avatar rather than the actual humanity of a person right in front of you?
01:01:01.000You probably don't even have any pants on and you can say whatever you want.
01:01:04.000But that just – I mean honestly, social media is proving one of the main Christian doctrines called total – I mean, I remember Michael Roos, who's an atheist, said like, yeah, total depravity, that's the one thing the Christians definitely got right.
01:01:33.000And it's, you know, facial, when we see each other's faces, we do have more empathy for each other because, you know, we are a tribal species.
01:02:19.000If the guy, it's a pickup game, it's like a five-on-five, and one of my teammates just is terrible, I'll find myself seeing some pretty horrible stuff to him.
01:02:27.000And then I think later, like, that could have been a nine-year-old, a 12-year-old.
01:02:30.000And I just ruined the next 20 years of his life because I made him question his own humanity.
01:02:36.000And, like, is he really a good person?
01:02:38.000Does he have a good, does he not have a father in the house?
01:02:40.000And I'll just, like, go with these sometimes.
01:02:42.000And I'm like, I've got to stop that hate from coming out of me.
01:02:46.000At those moments, when it's the easiest, you gotta—I don't know, man, I don't know, but it's in me.
01:02:52.000It's obviously in me if it comes out like that.
01:03:19.000And that was human nature for the longest time until, I mean, like, as Tom Holland and others have talked about, you know, like, for example, if you read, like, the book, like, Christian Virtue Ethics, or When Children Became People by Owen Bakke, I mean, like, Christianity is really...
01:03:34.000We've added something into the mix that has really calmed us down and given us a far better view of ethics.
01:03:40.000Human rights comes out of the Christian tradition.
01:04:01.000But I mean, like, you study the ancient world, it will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
01:04:05.000Why don't you expand on that a little bit?
01:04:06.000Because I think that people, especially young people today, again, I think we touched on it a little bit earlier, young people today really look at the United States and Western society.
01:04:17.000They look at it as this total evil because it engaged in slavery, right?
01:04:57.000And the fact that you have any peace at all in your entire life is actually the rare, wonderful, fortunate thing that Western society in particular has provided for the world.
01:05:10.000Well, if you go back to the ancient world, just look at how they treated children.
01:05:15.000There's like a letter from one Egyptian father – husband to his wife said, by the way, if it's a girl, just kill it because that was normal in the ancient world to just commit infanticide through exposure, especially deformed infants or weak children like Seneca talks about that.
01:05:31.000And so like, yeah, we can look back at like surveys of like ancient families and like only like a – Six out of like 600. Owen Bakke talks about this in his book, When Children Became People.
01:05:41.000Only six out of 600 had more than one girl in the family.
01:06:10.000The Christians come on the scene, and John Martins talks about this in his chapter, Children in Late – or yeah, Children in Late Ancient Christianity.
01:06:16.000Christians invented a whole new word to describe it because they refused to use the term child lover.
01:06:21.000They invented a new word called child corrupter.
01:06:23.000That's a rhetorical to say, like, you can't be doing this.
01:06:26.000And so they really pushed ethics forward.
01:06:30.000They invented – When did that idea – what was the spawn of that idea?
01:06:34.000Because – Here, again, we grew up steeped in Christianity, and to us, the idea of abusing a child like that, we think of it as abuse.
01:06:42.000And it makes a gut reaction in most people, and the people that don't have that gut reaction, they are looked at and they are treated as some of the most horrible monsters that...
01:06:56.000I mean, you put a pedophile into prison and word gets out, and they're going to end up dead.
01:07:01.000And that's in a prison with some of the worst, most violent people our society produces.
01:08:02.000I mean you still had infanticide in the Middle Ages because even though the church was condemning it, it took a while to saturate the culture that Tom Holland talks about.
01:08:09.000But the reason why we think these kinds of things, that slavery is wrong, that human rights exist, that humanity has intrinsic value and that children should be cared for, this comes out of the Christian tradition.
01:08:20.000In the ancient world, they were – Beat routinely.
01:08:23.000They were turned into sex slaves as children, boys and girls.
01:08:32.000No one ever questioned the idea that slavery should be abolished until the Christians came on the scene.
01:08:37.000The first one to say slavery should be abolished was Gregory of Nyssa working on what he was learning in the scriptures and reading Paul in Genesis.
01:08:50.000And the wider culture did ignore him for a while, but you start to see throughout the Christian tradition them slowly moving to end slavery that by the time you get to, like, St. Ansem, like, it's...
01:09:01.000Sort of getting abolished from Europe in a lot of places.
01:09:04.000And so then the Europeans later on going, well, we're not allowed to enslave Christians.
01:09:10.000And that's how you get the transatlantic slave trade.
01:09:12.000And then the funny thing is, is if you read about the transatlantic slave trade, a lot of the plantation owners were trying to keep their slaves away from missionaries.
01:09:20.000Because if the missionaries come in, they're going to evangelize these slaves and turn them in to Christians, and then we'll have to free them.
01:09:26.000And so they were like, you know, a lot of the Quakers were like being oppressed in the Sugar Island.
01:09:31.000Because they were trying to evangelize, and like, no, you can't do that because we need slaves.
01:09:35.000Human nature has always been butting up against the Christian tradition, and Christian tradition has been trying to move humanity slowly but surely in a much better direction.
01:09:44.000You can read about that in Catherine Gerbner's book, Christian Slavery.
01:09:48.000It's a very interesting history of the Sugar Island stuff.
01:09:51.000Did the Jews take slaves in the early days?
01:09:53.000They did, and then early – sometime in the first millennium, a lot of the popes started to outlaw Jews owning Christians as slaves, and then they started outlawing Muslims or Christians being sold to Muslims.
01:10:02.000And then you saw slow reforms happening.
01:10:05.000Like slowly they're like, okay, no more slavery here, but we'll allow it here still.
01:10:10.000So yeah, you saw – I think one of the popes in one of the 600 or 700s said no more Jews owning slaves and no more owning – and then one pope came along and he attacked the Venetian slave trade.
01:10:22.000By the way, he bought all the slaves and then freed them.
01:10:25.000And then even Isabella of Spain did some horrible things, but she also outlawed enslaving Native Americans unless they were hostile or cannibals.
01:10:33.000So again, we saw slow reforms moving us by the time the abolitionist movement comes along.
01:10:37.000Yeah, it was deep in this Christian tradition that there's something wrong here.
01:10:43.000Go to Ephesians 6 where Paul says – everyone quotes that.
01:10:46.000Slave masters or slaves obey your masters.
01:10:49.000But no one quotes right after that in Ephesians 6 where Paul says, and masters do likewise to your slaves.
01:10:55.000So he doesn't outright say slavery should be wrong, but he undercuts any sort of reason for slavery to exist.
01:11:00.000If masters need to do exactly to their slaves as slaves are doing, there's no institution of slavery at that point.
01:11:07.000So the Christian values slowly start to undercut it, and this is why Tom Holland says Christianity was like a depth charge.
01:11:13.000It took a while for these explosions to go off and spread.
01:11:16.000At the end of the 1800s, we had what was called the men who made America, the robber barons, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller.
01:11:25.000And they basically, I don't know if they particularly, but they would have underpaid workers and they would pay them in script sometimes, like company currency, and they could only buy products.
01:11:35.000They basically created a slave class of workers.
01:11:37.000They weren't called slaves because they were getting paid something.
01:11:48.000But is it now, like, do people just kind of justify slavery, like, if we're going to pay them something?
01:11:53.000Like, the guy's digging cobalt out of the sub-Saharan African mines or wherever they're with their bare hands, like, breathing in the toxic fumes.
01:12:00.000And we're like, that's fine because they're getting paid something.
01:12:05.000I mean, but Robert Fogel wrote a great book called, like, The Fourth Great Awakening, where he just talks about how...
01:12:10.000In America, there's been not one, two, but four awakenings.
01:12:13.000And the Third Great Awakening was addressing what you were talking about, this idea that it's kind of like slavery, but we're not calling it, and we need more social reform to fix this kind of stuff.
01:12:24.000So there was a lot of push in the Third Great Awakening for the social gospel to go out and try to fight that kind of stuff, end child labor and that kind of stuff, because we as humans just tend to try to...
01:12:35.000Act in selfish ways where it's all about us.
01:12:40.000And I don't really care who I oppress, and I'll justify it in whatever way I can.
01:12:43.000That's unfortunately human nature that once again is constantly fighting with the gospel.
01:12:48.000So I want to jump back to some of the stuff that we were talking about earlier when it comes to the way the...
01:12:55.000The left had been behaving leading up to January 6th.
01:12:59.000Benny Johnson has this tweet, Breaking Hakeem Jeffries just called for violence against President Trump's agenda, pushing for fighting in the streets.
01:13:06.000We are going to fight legislatively, we are going to fight it in the courts, and we're going to fight it in the streets.
01:13:24.000I don't think that there's any ambiguity in that.
01:13:29.000Like, there's nothing ambiguous about that.
01:13:32.000And if it were, again, this is the intended double standard, but if it were any Republican saying that, the reaction would be, you know, absolute They would be apoplectic.
01:13:49.000They criticized fight, fight, fight after he was almost assassinated.
01:13:52.000Yeah, and trying to make it as if Trump wasn't the victim of the attack, but Trump was looking to victimize people.
01:14:04.000And yet, here's the Democrats, you know, Hakeem Jeffries, who I don't think he's the leader of the...
01:14:34.000Literally every time she opens her mouth.
01:14:35.000And that's the back and forth you have to be willing to have with people whenever they want to call out what they consider to be political violence or political posturing is that they consider it to be political violence from one side.
01:14:47.000But from the other side, it's to be taken as some type of avant-garde, off-the-cuff response that doesn't actually mean what you think it means.
01:14:54.000They're telling you to not believe what you see with your own line of eyes.
01:14:57.000Yeah, and Hakeem Jeffries is the leader of the – he's the minority leader of the House of Representatives.
01:15:03.000So, you know, he's in a position of authority.
01:15:08.000It would be interesting to know if somebody there, you know, if there was a journalist who actually wanted to ask a question, like, sir, could you quantify what you mean by, like, I get what you say legislatively.
01:15:19.000What do you mean by fight it in the streets?
01:15:21.000Honestly, I mean, I wish that I were influential enough where I could make phone calls to other news outlets and be like, hey, hold these Democrats' feet to the fire.
01:15:33.000This kind of rhetoric, if the right doesn't push on it and doesn't try to bring the same kind of consequences on the left...
01:15:46.000As would be brought on the right, and if we don't make us think about it, then it's going to continue.
01:15:52.000I mean, I would love to see, I would love to hear Donald Trump, you know, make a statement about this.
01:16:32.000But I mean, I do think that it's worth – it would be worth having the right push on these things because until it's made clear that this is unacceptable, you're only going to get more of it.
01:16:44.000I would say at some point, though, someone needs to take the high road.
01:16:49.000And I totally call out the double standard here because Trump definitely said fight, fight, fight after, and people in the media tried to misinterpret that.
01:16:59.000I just really think at some point it'd be really good to see one side go, we don't want to play the game you're playing.
01:17:12.000Republicans do that all the time and it never works.
01:17:15.000I think that not looking to the DOJ to bring charges is actually taking the high road because that's the kind of response that you get from the Democrats.
01:18:06.000But let's get back to working, and that will impress average Americans far more.
01:18:09.000I think that speaks to the difference between people on the right and people on the left in the U.S. today, the conservatives and progressives.
01:18:18.000And I think I said this earlier, but I don't believe in the blank slate.
01:18:21.000I don't believe that people are only created by the conditions.
01:19:11.000Or part of why Republicans and conservatives don't do that kind of stuff and attack this stuff so viciously because it would actually turn off their base.
01:19:20.000Whereas when it comes to Democrats and the progressives, they really do.
01:19:32.000You can show them evidence, you can show them all the evidence you want, but in their heart, they believe that he would do the things that Hitler would do if he was given the chance.
01:19:44.000And I see it regularly with the Democrat kind of operatives on X. There are some that obviously are doing it just for money, but there are a handful that they're...
01:20:02.000There's a couple that come to mind that I'm not going to name because I don't want to promote them.
01:20:05.000Also, ignore the politicians for a second.
01:20:08.000If the media was doing its job, people who are politically motivated, people who are either in government or the ones that are already politically partisan, meaning those who are already considered a Republican or a Democrat.
01:20:20.000Maybe the Republicans shouldn't be, you know, in the eyes of some Republicans, they shouldn't be wasting their time going after something that they believe to be just something that was misspoken, right?
01:20:29.000But it's the media's job, and unbiased media should be doing their job to at least ask this guy, what did you mean by that?
01:20:35.000And one thing this country could do if they wanted to actually heal the divide a little bit is if both sides of the aisle, if we were in a world where there wasn't as politically partisan of a news...
01:20:45.000Of news networks, as we have now, is if MSNBC was willing to ask him a question, what did you mean by that, and then print his answer, or CNN, ask him a question like that and print his answer.
01:20:55.000And if both sides did that to their own parties and held them accountable, it is possible that you wouldn't see the divide in the way where now, anytime somebody cites an article for something in the news, whether it's pro-Trump, they say, well, that was just from Fox News.
01:21:10.000I disregard it because your news is biased and it doesn't matter.
01:21:15.000CNN asked a couple of questions of people that were Democrats.
01:21:18.000It might engage people to start asking those questions from both sides and get people a little bit more in the middle, but they're not going to do that.
01:21:27.000Yeah, I think that there's a lot of substance to what you're saying, and I think that I wish that you could see, or you would see, you know, outlets like MSNBC and CNN. I think it's possible with CNN. I don't think it's possible with MSNBC. MSNBC has picked their lane.
01:21:42.000Yeah, well, they've picked their lane.
01:21:43.000They may not have a huge viewership, but they have a viewership that they have to cater to, and I don't think they're going to change that.
01:21:51.000I have seen plenty of far-left people on X who call CNN a pro.
01:22:20.000Ex-Federal Reserve advisor, the Washington Post reports, ex-Federal Reserve advisor indicted on charge of economic espionage.
01:22:28.000A former senior advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was arrested Friday and accused of leaking inside information from the Fed to the Chinese government over a period of several years.
01:22:38.000At one point receiving a $450,000 payment, then lying about it to Fed investigators.
01:22:44.000Economist John Harold Rogers, 63, of Vienna, Virginia, worked in the Division of International Finance of the Fed from 2010 until 2021, according to an indictment unsealed Friday in federal court in the district.
01:22:54.000Last year, he told a podcaster that he'd retired from the Fed in May 2021, approximately a year after he had been questioned by investigators for the Fed's inspector general and allegedly lied about how he accessed and transmitted sensitive information to two unnamed Chinese co-conspirators.
01:23:09.000Do you guys think that there is any level or bureaucracy in our government that is not infiltrated by China?
01:23:32.000Worked in the Division of International Finance.
01:23:34.000I just imagine that there's so much dark money and bad stuff going on there.
01:23:41.000Yeah, to answer your question, Phil, you'd have to define the word infiltrated exactly because if they, maybe they just talked to some Chinese guy on the phone, I think they've all been connected to the Chinese.
01:24:28.000It would be too much to say everybody, right?
01:24:33.000But I think that at least the bureaucracies that...
01:24:45.000I think it's reasonable to say that China has, you know, has at least some kind of relationship with people, whether knowing or unknowing, because there are people that...
01:24:56.000That end up doing spy stuff for other countries without realizing they're doing it.
01:25:01.000If you talk to Swalwell, talking to the Chinese spy, he didn't know that he was talking to a Chinese spy.
01:25:10.000But Fang Fang, she was telling him the things that he wanted to hear.
01:25:16.000And I'm sure that that happens plenty.
01:25:22.000That likes Chinese women and some Chinese woman is like, oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, talking to him.
01:25:27.000And pillow talk will end up, you know, exposing a lot of information.
01:25:32.000And I think that that kind of stuff, that kind of espionage is probably more common than, hey, here's a bunch of money, get me information.
01:25:41.000But I do think that it's probably very common.
01:25:43.000And I think that the United States, it's possible that, you know, previous administrations had looked the other way.
01:25:54.000I mean, there was plenty of evidence that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden had dealings with Chinese companies, and there's no reason to think that they weren't, you know, giving information to the Chinese government.
01:26:09.000Knowingly or unknowingly, because who knows what Hunter Biden was...
01:26:13.000If Hunter Biden goes to China, you know they're loading him up with coke and hookers and he's running his face and you know that they're filming and recording everything.
01:26:37.000I'm not sure how you would clean it out and make sure, you know, how the Trump administration would come in and make sure that it's cleaned up to the best of their ability.
01:26:45.000But I do think that it's reasonable to say, hey, we need to take care of this.
01:26:49.000If I'm, I'm still, sometimes I'll be dating.
01:26:51.000And if I meet a girl that's Chinese from China.
01:27:10.000I think China is trying to grab a lot of power before it's too late because they got a huge population crisis.
01:27:16.000I mean, infanticide was rampant for years and they sent a lot of girls into the wilderness and now they've got to...
01:27:22.000An aging population, a lot of boys that can't find women, and I think they see the writing on the wall, so I think they're just trying to grab as much power as they can right now before it's too late.
01:27:31.000What do you think the chances of some kind of political upheaval in China, how realistic are that, or is that because...
01:27:37.000I mean, it's an old saying that too big of a young male population with nothing to do is a recipe for a disaster for a society.
01:27:47.000How bad do you think the situation is in China?
01:27:51.000Obviously, China has significant controls over their population and the information that gets out, but do you have a sense of what kind of situation is going on in China, or is it just kind of your gut instinct because of stuff that you've read in the news?
01:28:05.000It's going to be a lot of my gut instinct.
01:28:07.000I'm not like an expert on this, but first of all, let's remember Trump's in the White House, so it's pronounced China, okay?
01:28:16.000So, I mean, I think you can never really predict because a lot of like East, Far Eastern people are going to have a far different culture where...
01:28:25.000A lot of people in the West, we want to stand out.
01:28:28.000It's the exact opposite mentality over there.
01:28:30.000Like they want to sort of just blend into the crowd.
01:28:33.000There's a lot more collectivist thinking than individualist thinking in the West.
01:28:37.000So I think a lot of the assumptions or intuitions we would have are just completely wrong on how they're going to react.
01:28:42.000I think they would rebel if they're not – if they're running low on food, if they come – But until that kind of thing happens, I think they're just going to try to continue with their cultural norm of trying to stay in the crowd, not create too much fuss, because that's very much the mindset of collectivist cultures, whereas we in the West, we're very individualistic.
01:29:57.000They don't even understand, like, the reality of being from a collectivist culture and how you view the world as being fundamentally different from, like, a Westerner or an individualistic standpoint.
01:30:05.000But I also, and you're right, it would be a last chance to effort to, like, make this last-ditch attempt to take Taiwan.
01:30:13.000But the problem that I see with it is that...
01:30:16.000The only thing they really want for Taiwan would be, like, a propaganda victory.
01:30:20.000The people they don't really need, there's more mouths to feed for China.
01:30:25.000You're just getting, like, TSMC's factories and fabrications that you can essentially build in a couple years' time, which is some, there is some stopgap time period to, like, some lead time to build these things up and have them.
01:30:35.000But I just, I personally, I lived in Singapore in high school, so I'm not speaking from a little bit of an understanding of the region here.
01:30:41.000I don't know if they're really going to do it because it doesn't seem like, like, Good point, yeah.
01:30:47.000I mean, you could say, like, maybe for the legacy of She, because his zero COVID... Zero-COVID policy didn't really go anywhere.
01:30:55.000It just caused China to slip years into the past.
01:30:59.000Essentially, it's a real economic problem for them right now, on top of the one-child policy that it caused.
01:31:24.000I mean, but yeah, again, they're the collectivist culture.
01:31:27.000They don't want to make too much of a fuss.
01:31:28.000But I do think they're trying to grab as much power as they can right now in hopes that somehow they can deal with their declining population.
01:31:35.000I think that's probably what they're trying to do right now.
01:31:37.000And infiltrating the U.S. government would be one of those aspects.
01:31:42.000If the Americans were to take the Panama Canal, I think the Chinese would seize Taiwan and just be like, there you go.
01:31:49.000And also, not only is it what they get, but it's what is being removed from the table, which would be basically a liberal economic imperial stronghold right off their coast, which they don't want.
01:32:00.000It's like a British colony, essentially.
01:32:16.000They decided that we're not going to wait the whole 50 years we agreed to.
01:32:19.000We're going to make it China tomorrow.
01:32:20.000It seems like after the Tiananmen Square riot massacre, where the Chinese just shut down a potential revolt, it was like, what happened if the American Revolution failed?
01:32:30.000Would there ever have been another one?
01:32:32.000or would the British have just seized and clamped down?
01:32:35.000And then like how long after 1776 would there have been the second American attempt at independence?
01:32:41.000Considering the fact that Canada became its own country, Australia became its own country, New Zealand became its own country, and India, like the British stopped the colonial rule of India, I do think the United States would have become its own country.
01:32:55.000It might have become its own kingdom because Canada is a kingdom of Britain.
01:32:58.000Australia and New Zealand are all kingdoms.
01:33:08.000Even if they'd have lost the revolution, the founders had lost the revolution, I think that the spirit in the United States of that kind of looking for independence was something that was in the...
01:33:20.000And I don't think that would have burnt out.
01:33:22.000And I think that had there been a revolution that the Americans lost, I think whenever they actually did achieve their own independence, I think they would be looking back and saying, remember what the king did.
01:33:36.000Now that you mention it, I wouldn't have been surprised if they had made the United States, it wouldn't be called that, but made this, whatever, its own kingdom, just like Canada.
01:33:45.000And they're like, now you have your own.
01:33:47.000Prime Minister and your own, you know, autonomy under the reign of our King.
01:33:52.000Remember, it was 150, 150, 160 years between, or 140 maybe years between when the United States was formed and you actually got fast passage across the Atlantic.
01:34:06.000Because even boats, it took a couple weeks to get across.
01:34:10.000The Titanic and those class of liners, it wasn't like you could get across.
01:34:16.000So the logistics of keeping a colony under control the way that England had, that was a tall order.
01:34:31.000The revolution, even if the revolution had failed, I think that there quickly would have been some kind of second revolution and so on and so forth because the sense of indignation towards the king wouldn't have changed.
01:34:46.000Maybe instead of being a couple years, it would have been a longer war.
01:34:54.000I think it was kind of inevitable that the United States was going to become its own country.
01:34:58.000I don't know what sparked the Tiananmen Square riots exactly, if it was dissatisfaction with the, not the emperor, the Chinese are no longer an emperor, but with the CCP, basically, there was dissatisfaction with the totalitarian government.
01:35:10.000I don't know what, do you know what sparked the Tiananmen Square riots by any chance?
01:35:45.000If you know anything about China right now and you start seeing the stuff that they're doing now, a lot of Chinese people are freaking out about it.
01:35:49.000But the problem is that there are also an equal number of people that have been so...
01:35:57.000It's hard to understand what it looks like from another man's shoes or from another man's perspective.
01:36:00.000They've lived their entire life within the bubble of China and their idea that Zheng Guo, their center of the universe for them, is that they're like an American.
01:36:08.000They think of their country as the best.
01:36:50.000Before the revolution in the United States, or about 500 years, they made the king sign the Magna Carta.
01:36:55.000And the Magna Carta was a big, big deal.
01:36:58.000It established the rule of law, limited the king's power, guaranteed rights to barons, protected the rights of property and barons and stuff, established that all free citizens could own and inherit property.
01:37:13.000And so this tradition that the American...
01:37:16.000The Englishmen in the colonies, because they all considered themselves Englishmen, right?
01:37:21.000Even though they were Virginians and Massachusettsians and New Yorkers, they considered themselves English.
01:37:28.000They all had that strong tradition of we're free men, that we have a king, but the king is not actually the totalitarian king that other societies had and other kings and other monarchies had.
01:37:42.000The rights of the men of England, they had a lot of rights and because of the Magna Carta that kind of Self-ID, awareness of themselves, that was something that was expressed in the revolution here in the United States.
01:38:00.000So to compare the United States or the U.S. Revolution and what came before it in England and English common law to China, it's really, really, really, really different stuff.
01:38:57.000There's a book called The Romance of the Three Kingdoms that was written in, like, the 1400s by Liu Kangzhao, and it's basically a historical fiction about, like, the year 200 AD, where China split into these three kingdoms.
01:39:09.000there was this revolt called the Yellow Turban Revolt and then all these local governors formed armies to fight this revolt and one of the governors seized the emperor and took control and was like, I'm ruling through the eight-year-old emperor now.
01:39:29.000But the whole obsession and love of the Emperor, which has been throughout that country for thousands of years, is something different than what England...
01:39:38.000England didn't even exist until 900 AD or whatever.
01:39:41.0001066 is technically when they go back to William the Conqueror.
01:40:59.000So it would probably have to be someone that was like, hey, I'm dissenting because I don't think...
01:41:08.000Personally, I think it's most likely that it would be Tulsi, and it would be someone from a red district that would say, oh, I think that she's actually somehow a spy, which is, on its face, ridiculous.
01:41:20.000She's been a major in the National Guard for 20 years.
01:41:23.000She's had five different background checks, and she's had a clearance the entire time.
01:41:27.000If there was anything nefarious in her past, that...
01:41:56.000If it ends up being someone like Murkowski or like Collins, probably not.
01:42:01.000If it's McConnell, I don't think that there would be a primary challenger as well.
01:42:06.000But I don't—do you guys have thoughts on— Well, all three of those, Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel, I feel like if they don't get in, there could be someone that's put in that's way more partisan, way more dangerous.
01:42:18.000Like, those guys are balanced, obsessed with constitutional law and doing things by the book.
01:42:24.000You're not going to get much better than that across the board.
01:42:28.000They might be flashy personalities, but you don't want some sycophant getting in there.
01:42:35.000I think Kash Patel is going to get it probably pretty easily.
01:45:10.000Because if you go back and you just look at what the Prophet Muhammad was saying, I mean, like, you read the Hadiths, their violence.
01:45:16.000I mean, you read, like, Sunnah Abu Daud.
01:45:18.000I mean, like, there's one story that I was just talking with David Wood about today.
01:45:21.000Like, there was a slave girl that was attacking Muhammad, and they killed her, and then they went to the Prophet, and he said, yeah, that's fine, because she was insulting me.
01:45:29.000So, I mean, like, a lot of, like, there have been Reformation attempts in Islam.
01:45:34.000It's called – they're called Salafis, and a lot of them actually get a little bit more radical and traditional.
01:45:40.000It didn't – Islam didn't start like Christianity.
01:45:42.000Christianity started with a guy, Jesus Christ, who was God incarnate.
01:45:49.000He died the death of a criminal, lived the life of a pauper, and then his followers were called to go out and be persecuted to spread the gospel, and they were for hundreds of years until Constantine helped them.
01:46:00.000But Islam started basically with – A warlord for the most part.
01:46:52.000But I feel like if he had been born in a time of bounty, like we have now on Earth, that God would have spoke to him in different ways and ordered him to do different things.
01:47:01.000Because it gives you different wisdom and direction depending on the situation.
01:47:07.000Ian, let's go on to read some more Super Chats.
01:48:00.000Wyatt Clayton Berg says, Phil, I think the anti-government right believes government is unnecessary because people are basically good, while the pro-government right, like me, believes we need government because people are basically bad.
01:48:13.000My take is, I do think, I think that I'm in agreement with you, but that doesn't mean, but because people are bad, you can't allow a strong government big, powerful government.
01:48:28.000So I agree, people are, You know, they're incentivized to take care of themselves and their family and their tribe first.
01:48:36.000But because of that, that's actually an argument against big government as much as it is an argument for big government.
01:48:43.000So, I agree with you in principle, but I don't think the solution is big government.
01:48:49.000I think the solution is localized government.
01:49:11.000Well, I mean, look, historically, there's been a lot of things like famine and food restrictions, and that was what was being proposed in England.
01:49:21.000So, I mean, I think that we can actually imagine what...
01:49:24.000Would be on the table if governments are allowed to run rampant.
01:50:29.000I mean, I'm planning a bunch of videos this summer, like how Christianity ended slavery, how Christianity created human rights, how Christianity created science.
01:50:37.000I did a video last year called How Christianity Changed the World, and I found all these studies that missionaries have just went out.
01:50:53.000But here's the silver lining in all that.
01:50:56.000As Christianity declines, we go to secularism, but secularists have abysmally bad birth rates.
01:51:00.000And so sociologists like Eric Kaufman, who wrote Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, says in about 100 years we're going to be right where we were because who's having all the kids?
01:51:09.000Conservative Christians, and they're just going to just come back.
01:51:13.000But now they're more polarized, so they're protecting their children more than they were in the 90s.
01:51:17.000That's the argument that Tim actually makes a lot, that because the left is, you know, The left is embracing what some people would call debauchery and aborting their kids and not having kids and looking at themselves and saying, we're not going to have kids because we want to spend our money on us and looking at kids as a problem and such.
01:51:41.000That eventually there's going to be a revival of religion here in the U.S. and that the right is ascendant because of that.
01:51:51.000G.K. Chesterton said, I mean, Christianity has died many times.
01:51:54.000It has a God that knows its way out of the grave.
01:52:19.00025 years ago now, so anyone that can beat that terrible, terrible disease, kudos to you, and here's to a long life.
01:52:27.000In a parallel road, I just was having swelling lymph nodes the last few days, and I went in the sauna for like an hour, and when I came out, the swelling was gone.
01:53:04.000It would have been one of our early shows, probably back in like maybe 2000, 2001, which is pre-release of our first record, back when we had no idea what we were doing at all.
01:54:01.000MF Damien says, do you think the right hollering DEI all the time will have the same boy who cried wolf effect that the left achieves screaming racism all the time?
01:54:09.000I don't, and the reason I don't is because right now there is so much DEI in the government, it is unlikely to find, we are unlikely to find out that it's not.
01:54:21.000If we were to compare it to the left screaming racism all the time, The left screams racism all the time when there's no racism.
01:54:32.000Like, the left screamed racism about the George Floyd situation.
01:54:37.000The left screamed racism and had most of your average normies thinking that 1,000 or 2,000 black men were murdered by police every year.
01:54:48.000And it was like 12. You sound so racist right now.
01:54:52.000That word has no effect on me anymore.
01:57:12.000know I guess we're gonna have to wait until until we hear more from the NTSB and all of that Crowag says Brett what are your thoughts of Stargate partnership with the Pentagon for nuclear projects considering the plot points of Terminator and war games I have no thoughts on it I I do think that everybody should rewatch Terminator 1, though, because it's an underrated film.
01:57:35.000As good as Terminator 2 is, Terminator 1 is just as good.
01:58:06.000I love it to death, but maybe it's because I'm older than you.
01:58:10.000I didn't get the sense that it was underrated.
01:58:12.000I guess underrated now is because when it's referenced in pop culture, most people reference Terminator 2 as one of the few movies that outdid its predecessor.
01:58:21.000You know, it's a sequel that's considered better than the original, so most of the attention goes to Terminator 2 more than Terminator 1. So, I mean, I might be, you know, might be showing my age here, too, but I also don't think that Terminator 2 outdid those.
01:58:33.000I mean, they're hard to compare, because they're not the same, they're not even considerably in any way the same type of film.
01:58:39.000I mean, look, just the Terminator 2, when I think of Terminator 2, like, I think of mostly daytime shots and well-lit shots when I think of Terminator 1. Because it was all action, it's under the...
01:59:12.000In terms of story structure, it's just, it's not, they don't do it well.
01:59:16.000I just enjoyed that they actually looked at the I only watch Lord of the Rings.
01:59:31.000Alright, so that one gamer says, Blindsided in a good way, seeing Iron Mike Jones here, with the rise of political tribalism, what's the best way to combat things like Christian nationalism?
01:59:43.000Would love to see you on a Culture War episode.
01:59:46.000I would love to be a part of that Culture War episode.
01:59:48.000Yeah, the best way to combat Christian nationalism is to go to church.
01:59:51.000Because again, studies show Christian nationalism arises among the least churched individuals.
01:59:56.000If we're going to define Christian nationalism simply, it's that the idea that Christianity should be in the business of protecting national borders and identities, and national governments should be protecting a specific culture and a specific identity, which is just completely antithetical to the gospel.
02:00:13.000Creating a kingdom for Jesus on this earth and bringing all people in regardless of background so we all become one great, big, beautiful people at the end of the day.
02:00:22.000So the funny thing is that Christian nationalists take pains to say they're protecting Christian identity, and when they get people in church, they start moving away from Christian nationalism and towards a much better understanding of Christianity where it's our job to go out and help people and love people, not just protect certain classes or certain ethnic groups or certain national identities.
02:00:42.000Yes, I believe absolutely we should be caring for our own people, but we should also be striving to help as many people as we can.
02:00:48.000And unfortunately, a lot of Christian nationalism moves away from that.
02:00:51.000And so, yeah, I have a lot of problems with it, I think.
02:00:54.000But again, you want to combat Christian nationalism, get people in church, and it will fix itself, surprisingly.
02:01:00.000I think taking the plank out of your own eye before you try to take the speck of dust out of the other makes some people...
02:01:06.000Leads them towards a Christian nationalist.
02:01:08.000Like, we need to protect and improve the United States, America first.
02:01:12.000But then at that point, once it's protected or once it's satisfactory, you can remove the dust out of your brother's eye.
02:01:18.000I mean, we have to fix problems at home.
02:01:20.000I mean, I think every Christian would agree with that.
02:01:22.000The problem is, I think, when I look at Christian nationalism, it's the idea the government should be enforcing, like, a certain type of Christianity on its people.
02:01:29.000Like, you know, some people have said, well, we should stay like a white Protestant nation.
02:01:52.000Young Pete Chang says, everybody should give Phil a round of applause for clearing six shows in a row, plus a Culture War episode under his belt with Lion Colors.
02:02:04.000You want to go ahead and give yourself a shout-out?
02:02:05.000Go ahead and tell people where they can find you?
02:02:07.000Yeah, you can follow me on Inspiring Philosophy here on YouTube, patreon.com slash inspiringphilosophy.
02:02:12.000This Sunday I'm releasing a video early for donors.
02:02:15.000We're going to call it something like The Secrets of David and Goliath, everything you've missed in that chapter.
02:02:19.000We're going to go into some things you probably didn't see.
02:02:22.000I'll be streaming on my channel this Monday talking about modern miracles and evidence for that.
02:02:27.000And Thursday I'll be streaming with a scholar talking about evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.
02:02:31.000So, got a lot of good stuff coming up on the channel.
02:02:33.000You can follow me there and donate at inspiringphilosophy.org slash give to help us keep going and keep making more videos defending Christianity.
02:03:00.000Guys, if you want to follow me, perhaps you agree or disagree with my take on Terminator, you can follow me at at Brett Dasvick on X and on Instagram.
02:03:08.000That's where you can see all the content where I like to talk about movies and television.
02:03:11.000Also, we do Pop Culture Crisis Monday through Friday at 3 p.m.
02:03:15.000Eastern Standard Time, which is noon Pacific, right here on YouTube.