In this episode, Sohrab Amari, author of The Unbroken Thread, joins host Emily Edwards ( ) and guest Seamus of FreedomTunes ( ) to discuss the culture war, religion, and cultural Marxism.
00:00:55.000And they're trying to hide behind science to make these things a reality.
00:01:00.000In reality, it's a non-theistic religion.
00:01:03.000Wokeness, intersectionality, critical race theory, critical theory in general, or as some people call it, cultural Marxism.
00:01:09.000So it's a Friday night and we're going to be chilling and talking about political Catholicism or just Christianity in the United States, the moral frameworks, things we have to talk, we talk about that quite a bit sometimes, and cultural Marxism.
00:01:20.000And I think one of the core components of the culture war right now is that wokeness, critical race theorists, intersectionality feminists, whatever you want to call it, social justice warriors, have an absolutely different moral framework.
00:01:56.000And most recently, I wrote this book, The Unbroken Thread, Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos, which is a book I wrote for my four-year-old son.
00:02:05.000Although when I started writing the book, he was two.
00:02:12.000I don't think we had any slated for tonight, but we got into this really interesting conversation and all decided that we should continue it on air, so I'm happy to be here.
00:02:19.000I think this will be a really interesting show.
00:02:21.000Fridays are pretty conversational, and, you know, we're planning on discussing cultural Marxism, critical race theory, and the more traditional moral framework, which is Christian values, and Seamus is a perfect person to join that conversation.
00:02:37.000I listened to a lot of Graham Hancock's work.
00:02:39.000He's an archaeologist and talks a lot about ancient history and cultures and about looking back to remember, you know, a lot of the wisdom that we've lost over the ages.
00:02:47.000I think it's such an important conversation.
00:02:49.000And now, but Graham Hancock believes that there were advanced civilizations in prehistory, correct?
00:02:54.000I think he thinks that it is highly likely.
00:02:58.000I don't know if he's ever found any proof of it.
00:03:00.000I think he's actually making a great case for lost wisdom by thinking that.
00:03:04.000I watched a video of this guy who could move like 200 pound stones, 200 ton stones, by digging a hole under one side and then bouncing it back and forth, using its own weight against itself to slip it.
00:03:19.000So that's, you know, and using sand to push things, you know, lowering... And, like, vibration.
00:03:24.000They used to have these temples where they'd go in and they'd, like, strike the key of A in one area of the temple and the entire temple would start to vibrate.
00:03:30.000You know, your bones are made of this crystal.
00:03:31.000You can move very heavy rocks, very heavy objects by vibrating.
00:03:35.000And now science is developing acoustic levitation.
00:03:37.000So we're seeing like it's like almost like we're rediscovering not.
00:03:41.000I mean, I think we have a more powerful power source than we've ever had with like fusion and nuclear power.
00:03:45.000I don't I don't see any evidence that we've ever had that amount of energy before, but it seems like we're like, you know, recursing technology.
00:03:52.000And that's what Ian will bring to this conversation about theocracy and religion and cultural Marxism.
00:03:57.000We also have Lydia pushing all the buttons.
00:03:58.000I think it's going to be a really fun conversation tonight.
00:04:00.000I am Lydia and the reason the camera switch smoothly.
00:04:04.000Before we get started, head over to TimCast.com.
00:04:07.000Click that beautiful Members Only button, and you can become a member at TimCast, which gives you access to the Members Only area with a bunch of really amazing Members Only segments.
00:04:20.000Tons of full podcast episodes available if you are a member.
00:04:24.000But when you become a member, the money you are paying into TimCast.com is allowing us to hire journalists, expand the operation.
00:04:29.000The new website and the newsroom will be launching hopefully in the next week or two.
00:04:33.000And we're going to take this operation to the sky, baby.
00:04:35.000I want to have five journalists working in the newsroom within the next couple of weeks.
00:04:38.000I want to have 50 by the next year or so, and I want to actually start cranking out fact-checking the fact-checkers and all the fake fact-checks, and actually doing the groundwork on journalism, producing documentaries, producing podcasts.
00:04:49.000That's why we've got to get as many members as possible, so with your support we will do that.
00:04:53.000And let's just jump into the conversation.
00:04:55.000So, why should we have an authoritarian theocracy?
00:05:00.000Yeah, but, uh, so, uh, today we saw Critical Race Theory was trending.
00:05:04.000And one of the things that really worries me the most about whatever this is, right, I think, I actually think Critical Race Theory is the wrong way to describe it.
00:05:12.000We are giving the battlefield to the left by using their terminology.
00:05:17.000This battle, this culture war has been going on for a very, very long time.
00:05:20.000And you can say the first modern battle in the culture war was Gamergate.
00:05:25.000Then we see, you know, movies, video games, Cometgate, et cetera, where you started to see this critical theory, whatever you want to call it.
00:05:33.000Some people called it cultural Marxism.
00:05:34.000I think that's a bigger umbrella term, a better umbrella term for a lot of what it is.
00:05:37.000Wokeness is an easy way to explain it colloquially.
00:05:40.000But when we talk about critical race theory, It's easily masked by the woke.
00:05:45.000They just say, oh, it's just an academic theory and you're overthinking things and we shouldn't ban academics for children.
00:05:50.000But what's happening is critical race theory is a core component.
00:05:54.000It's just the racial component of critical theory, which is quite literally an advance on, or I should say developed off of Karl Marx's thinking and the Frankfurt School.
00:06:18.000You look at what Ben Franklin said about it's better that a hundred guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer, which was just taking from Blackstone's formulation.
00:06:27.000It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer, which was just taking from the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah, which I believe he quite literally said.
00:06:34.000So we end up with a society where you have a lot of secular liberals, atheists, etc., who are living by this moral framework.
00:06:44.000You know, over time, we've moved away from the more, I guess, societally enforced, you know, I don't want to call it theocracy, but societally enforced religious views or faith, and understanding why we have these moral frameworks.
00:07:00.000By losing that, something else comes in.
00:07:03.000These woke people believe there is no truth but power, and therefore they're entitled to lie, cheat, and steal to get whatever they want, until they gain power.
00:07:11.000So I'm curious, your thoughts, you wrote, and you can talk about your book and explain to us what your thoughts are.
00:07:16.000I think you called it political Catholicism, but yeah.
00:07:18.000Sure, no, I mean, I think that's right that the fact that they're moving in to me shows is proof that there was never going to be any kind of a neutral public square, that our societies will one way or another always enshrine some orthodoxy, some authoritative view of what it means to live a good life, Some account of the highest goods of human life.
00:07:43.000One way or another a society will enshrine that and for a long time the society had a as you said a kind of Christian I would say kind of a Protestant establishment a Protestant consensus and then in the you know much of the 20th century Catholics and Jews were added to the picture and we started using terms like Judeo-Christian and that was the consensus and but a certain element of liberal ideology, which I think our society is ultimately a liberal civilization, has this tendency to be very suspicious of orthodoxies, of attempts to enshrine ultimate meaning in the public square.
00:08:22.000And so it chipped away at those, culturally, politically, over a long time.
00:08:27.000And we see that in the vacuum that was created, the woke's moved in, right?
00:08:32.000So and now they're moving very quickly.
00:08:34.000Every element of national life, you know, corporate businesses, you know, universities, almost certainly, obviously, but now K through 12 education, there's not a not a one dimension of American life where you can escape it.
00:08:47.000So, to me, that just shows neutrality is over.
00:09:29.000So, for example, it has an element of original sin.
00:09:33.000But the original sin in biblical religion is something we all inherit.
00:09:38.000And you have to seek redemption through faith and so forth.
00:09:43.000But the opportunity for redemption is open to everyone, and everyone is equally fallen, except the Blessed Virgin Mary.
00:09:54.000So now we have the concept of original sin, but it's sprinkled across different groups.
00:09:58.000Depending on your skin color, you are forever tainted by racial sin and have to spend your life trying to expiate this racial sin.
00:10:07.000And if you're a minority or, you know, fit whatever intersectional boxes, the more the better, like trans, disabled, black, blah, blah, blah.
00:10:24.000Well, I think this is interesting because, so you were sort of suggesting that this wokeness, leftism, critical race theory, any of these similar types of thought are A moral system in and of themselves, and you were sort of alluding to them being a lack of a moral system.
00:10:39.000I think what it is is a moral system without any virtue or any emphasis put on virtue.
00:10:43.000And so it can be very confusing to suss out exactly what it is.
00:10:47.000And I think you're also right that it was impossible for there to be any kind of neutrality.
00:10:51.000Ultimately, what the government has to have is some kind of definition of what a human being is, because you can't govern something without reference to what that thing is.
00:10:59.000And so, if humans are created in the image and likeness of God, and the government believes that, it's going to govern a certain way.
00:11:06.000If human beings are just blobs of organic material that happen to have amassed consciousness through some information processing at the level of the brain, and there's nothing inherently value about us metaphysically, the government's going to govern in a very different way.
00:11:19.000This is actually really interesting because I think we had a conversation about aliens on this show, maybe a few months ago.
00:11:26.000Would the Constitution protect the rights of an alien?
00:11:29.000If like an alien spaceship landed on Earth and these, you know, little grey men came out, would they have free speech rights?
00:11:35.000Would they have constitutional rights?
00:11:36.000And, you know, typically when we talk about this, people are like, well, of course!
00:11:39.000I mean, they're presumably people, and it's like, okay, well, if it's a different, entirely different species of being, then why do not dolphins or elephants have constitutional rights?
00:11:48.000In which case, there is a presumed definition of who the law applies to, and it's a human being.
00:11:54.000I would also say, too, when people get into discussion on aliens, obviously, it gets extremely theoretical, but the question is, are we talking about a creature which has free will?
00:12:04.000Because people will say things like intelligent life.
00:12:06.000Well, how are we defining intelligence?
00:12:08.000I think, ultimately, it's, does this have free will?
00:12:10.000Does it have a soul, so to speak, or a rational soul?
00:12:12.000Well, you know what else is our people, is corporations, according to our government, legally.
00:12:17.000And you want to talk about modern day religion, we're living in it, the corporate, corporatocracy.
00:12:21.000Maybe that's what this should be, a corporatocracy, not a theocracy.
00:12:24.000Yeah, it's interesting, you know, and you were sort of talking about this, but how a lot of this intersectional stuff is really just a corporate religion, too.
00:12:31.000It helps them because you can look the other way on how they're abusing their workers, as long as they're giving money to the right causes and promoting wokeness.
00:12:37.000You know, they all changed their Twitter bio picture to a rainbow flag this month, so I guess they're nice and progressive and we don't have to worry about anything they're doing.
00:12:45.000But yeah, I think it's interesting that Wokeness, you can kind of trace its birth, I mean, Gamergate is interesting, but that it came after Occupy Wall Street.
00:12:57.000Well, no, but the thing was, Occupy was making, I think now, at the time as a conservative, I was like, oh, these crazy leftists.
00:13:03.000But in fact, after what kind of big finance did with the Great Recession, in fact, those demands weren't, now in retrospect, I think weren't so crazy.
00:13:15.000Because the idea that you would privatize all the gains, but then socialize the risk onto people, That's outrageous, and that was crazy.
00:13:26.000And what instead it turned to is instead of a kind of class-based movement having to do with legitimate economic injustices and overweening corporate power in this country, it shifted to wokeism, which is really, really easy for corporations to accommodate.
00:13:42.000I actually think that was intentional.
00:13:43.000During Occupy Wall Street, during the first week or so, actually, I know a lot of people are like, where's Luke at?
00:13:51.000So, our friend, he's like an ANCAP libertarian, or Luke, whatever you describe yourself as.
00:13:55.000We met during Occupy Wall Street, and he's libertarian right, and I was very libertarian left, but we both met during Occupy Wall Street in New York.
00:14:04.000There were conservatives down there, sitting down, holding up the American flag during Occupy Wall Street.
00:14:10.000It was very much just a general populist movement.
00:14:27.000All of a sudden, the conversations around wealth inequality turned into racial inequality.
00:14:32.000All of a sudden, when you started making demands about the big banks stealing from the working class, they said, you're white, shut up.
00:14:38.000And then, immediately, conservatives and libertarians started leaving, not wanting to have a part in this, probably not wanting to sleep in a park, probably.
00:14:45.000That's fascinating, I didn't know that.
00:14:46.000And then we started seeing the rise of the I am the 47% movement, which to me was also very strange.
00:14:52.000Why were a bunch of people deciding to be opposed to an economic populist movement?
00:14:59.000I mean, I think Bannon just the other day said, tax the rich.
00:15:03.000Yeah, so to me, I was kind of like, I was like, oh, I totally understood what they were saying.
00:15:08.000But the people who initially came down and were protesting, the establishment and the elites, ultimately, what I ended up experiencing, I went to the Deplora Ball when Donald Trump was elected.
00:15:26.000I didn't realize Trump supporters, you know, like watched my live streams on my YouTube channel.
00:15:30.000And they were like, no, no, no, we were down at Occupy Wall Street.
00:15:33.000And I was like, and your Trump supporters, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, like, screw the establishment, screw Hillary Clinton, Trump's the one who's gonna knock that all down.
00:15:39.000So what happens is, wokeness shattered the economic populist movement after 2008.
00:15:45.000And now we've been entrenched in that battle where I think we are very much distracted by it.
00:15:49.000The problem is, They saw an opportunity to move in.
00:15:55.000And they saw an opportunity to manipulate.
00:15:57.000And I think most of these corporations saw an opportunity to as well.
00:16:01.000If you shift this to this kind of stuff, as my friend Christopher Caldwell says, where he says, Various realms of life, whether it's public corporations or government, they will say like, well, you know, we've done nothing for the working class.
00:16:18.000We've done nothing for the working poor.
00:16:24.000And so it's just you shift power within elites according to like hierarchies of intersectionality without actually shifting economic justice one iota.
00:16:36.000Now Oprah Winfrey is oppressed and a homeless white veteran in a wheelchair is the oppressor.
00:16:43.000And his privilege is more dangerous because he doesn't recognize it.
00:16:47.000I think that everything you're saying rings true and also there was this period of time, I'd say right after the Occupy movement, and this was really all post-financial crisis, right after 2008.
00:17:04.000And so, on the right and left, you saw the rise of these populist movements.
00:17:07.000And you had Occupy Wall Street, which was generally considered to be more left-leaning, and you had the Tea Party, which was generally considered to be more right-leaning.
00:17:13.000And I think the media and the establishment were terrified of people realizing just how much overlap there was between those two groups, because then you could actually have the left and right working together to pursue some kind of economic justice.
00:17:24.000Then you had a revival of these populist movements as a result of, I would say, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and then they were split between those two groups.
00:17:31.000But I would say for as much as I dislike Bernie Sanders, I would get along with a Sanders supporter a whole lot better than I'd get along with a Biden supporter in terms of what their aspirations are for the country and what problems they identify and how they view the political class.
00:17:49.000Look, and I have never, as I've said, never been a fan of Sanders.
00:17:54.000I think I'm sympathetic to, at least in some way, the desires of his followers.
00:18:00.000I think I agree with them when they point out certain problems, though I very much disagree with their solutions.
00:18:05.000However, Sanders was very disappointing.
00:18:06.000It was almost like he just begged the establishment to take that nomination from him the second He was never very solution-based.
00:18:13.000I liked the guy's fervor and vehemence, but he was always like, we need to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.
00:18:18.000And I was like, if he says crumbling infrastructure, I'm going to lose my... And he would never say how.
00:18:22.000I never once heard him say like... The 1%.
00:18:24.000The 1% has all the money that we need to take.
00:18:27.000And it was also very much, you're right, it was just highlighting grievances.
00:18:30.000And he would talk about democratic socialism, and there would just sort of be this vague notion of we will do what Europe does.
00:18:35.000This is, you know, the most frustrating thing, is the left doesn't understand what the economy is or what it means, and they assume that by simply having money, people will be able to do something they were already able to do.
00:18:50.000Just because if you, like, you don't need the money to do it, you just need the movement within an economy to do it.
00:18:56.000If everyone decided right now to go spend money, you don't need to tax anybody.
00:18:59.000The economy would just be on, it would explode.
00:19:01.000People would just buy and spend and the money would be circulating really quickly.
00:19:04.000The amount of money is less relevant to people actually just spending it.
00:19:08.000They don't understand that the real core of the economy is the labor within it, not the digital number in a bank account.
00:19:18.000I think, for me, I've shifted on economic issues.
00:19:23.000You know, I used to work for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and that's obviously just, you know, your typical, you know, the absolute end of all government is to cut marginal tax rates and promote growth.
00:19:36.000Over time, I mean partly personal experience and partly you see the response, the populist response, and you're like, well, there's something wrong in American society.
00:19:46.000The way I put it, actually I should quote Tucker Carlson where he says, I don't just want growth.
00:19:54.000A society where it's just based on maximizing growth or maximizing, you know, the economic rights of individuals isn't necessarily a good society.
00:20:03.000So there are things where, as a conservative, I've come around to the, you know, at least the diagnosis.
00:20:08.000Maybe the solution, Sanders and I will disagree, like you said, Seamus, but for example, health care is legitimately a problem in this society.
00:21:01.000It's complicated, and this is another area where I agree with the Sanders types in terms of their diagnosis of the problem.
00:21:06.000I think the solutions they propose are really bad, because often it's been state involvement and just lobbying from health insurance companies In government overreach, that has led to healthcare becoming such a disaster in this country.
00:21:16.000And they'll say things like, well, we should have Medicare for all.
00:21:19.000Well, even in Europe, most of the universal healthcare systems are not single payer like that.
00:21:24.000And Medicare for all would be unbelievably expensive at a time when we're already massively in debt.
00:21:28.000I can't claim to know what the exact solution is.
00:21:30.000I tend to be in favor of limited government solutions, but healthcare is, it's such a complicated mess right now that I can't say one way or another this is This is my preferred policy.
00:21:39.000I have some ideas, and I think it would be good for lower-income people, for example.
00:21:44.000I think what we have to do, what we absolutely have to do, is reconnect people to prices, but in a way that allows for people who are low-income to be treated when they need it.
00:21:53.000I think most healthcare spending is not emergency spending, so people really could be shopping around, but instead they go, my health insurance company will pay for it, so they don't look at how much the services cost, and it allows Hospitals to inflate the price of basically everything they sell which makes it impossible for poor people to get treatment.
00:22:09.000So I For a long time was very pro universal health care and even up till sort of recently Idealistically, I very much like the idea of universal health care kind of like how other countries do it There's a basic level of coverage Everyone has access to and then you supplement with private insurance and we do try to save as many people as possible However, in the United States, we have two really, really big problems, which makes me feel like maybe, maybe this is not going to work.
00:22:39.000The first of which is Bernie Sanders saying, abolish private health insurance.
00:22:43.000And immediately I'm like, okay, no, no, no, no, no, no one.
00:22:46.000He's like, we should have universal health care like everybody else.
00:22:49.000And then abolish private health insurance.
00:23:06.000If critical race theory, wokeness, are the driving forces for how we implement policy, and it seems to be the case these days with them flying Black Lives Matter flags at the embassies, the last thing I want to see is them going, okay, now we have your life-saving emergency medical treatment and What's your race?
00:23:48.000You know, whether it's corporate or what have you.
00:23:51.000And I think in any other marketplace, you might be able to say, well, people can shop around, and if the insurance company decides that they want to discriminate against white people, they can find a different insurance company.
00:23:59.000But in a country where your access to health insurance is tied basically directly to your employment 90-something percent of the time, that's just not realistic.
00:25:02.000Lucia, Kiribati, Palau, Micronesia, and Tuvalu.
00:25:06.000So thanks for calling that sounds like per capita.
00:25:08.000They're doing the measurements by like America is a fat country that you're correct.
00:25:11.000Oh, wait Yeah, so yes, so America's a fat country I'm actually glad you called that out because I don't want to spread any misinformation But at the same time we are a very unhealthy country We basically eat garbage and people see the time to take care of themselves As being when they're at the hospital and really it should be when you're going to get something to eat This is what I'm talking about.
00:25:28.000The sugar industry is so involved in our government.
00:25:47.000It's like having big heroin or big cocaine in your government.
00:25:50.000And I wonder how connected the insurance companies and the sugar companies are making you sick and then making you pay to get healthy again.
00:25:57.000Bro, we do have big heroin in government.
00:26:00.000The doctor is giving out opioids like crazy and it's creating a pandemic.
00:26:06.000Like when you, when you see how our healthcare system is being used in these unbelievably corrupt ways, you also see like, maybe this isn't just a question of public versus private.
00:26:13.000It's also, um, I think it's just a massive issue with, with virtue as well.
00:26:17.000I think we can get into this at some point, but no matter what kind of system you have, if people are just looking to screw each other over and get one up on the next guy, no system, like nothing's going to work.
00:26:27.000That's, so that brings me back to, we were talking about moral frameworks, religion, and you know, and things like that.
00:26:33.000Yeah, if people have no shared value system, they don't care about anybody.
00:26:38.000You know, so I'll throw it to Luke, right?
00:26:40.000So our good friend Luke, who's coming back soon, he has a video, and I think it's called Just Keep Going, You've Got Nothing to Lose, where he basically says, you know, New York City, this transit system, millions of people ride the subways every day, and they never talk to each other.
00:26:55.000And so one day he decided to just go and start talking to people and asking them questions.
00:26:58.000And then, you know, it gets a little conspiratorial or whatever, but it's a good message in the beginning.
00:27:41.000And it was like, on the door, and it said, like, next to the apartment number, and it was like, this apartment's favorite shoes, and it was Bricks.
00:27:48.000And I was like, do you know the name of the person who lives next to you?
00:28:16.000My wife better than I do, actually, but upstairs and downstairs we don't.
00:28:20.000Yeah, I mean, this is why I wrote this book, basically.
00:28:24.000I have this son, he's four years old now, he was two when I started writing it, and I guess I'm just worried about the kind of man our civilization We'll chisel out of him, and I think a lot of it has to do with a wrong account of freedom.
00:28:39.000I think we define freedom, and this is a product of I think maybe the past three, four hundred years.
00:28:47.000I'll blame the Enlightenment as a Catholic who's bitter about the Enlightenment.
00:29:54.000Of course he hated the communist regime.
00:29:56.000But he spent most of his time criticizing the West and what he saw as it's that the West had also somehow gone wrong, that it had been deformed.
00:30:06.000And specifically he picked on this idea of that you mentioned that we're all just out to Yes.
00:30:11.000just to get ahead and one up each other.
00:31:38.000If I convince someone of their own free will to give me something that was their choice, And that's the way it should be.
00:31:46.000And I said, so you think that, like, powerful institutions can say whatever they want, and if it convinces people to act a certain way or give up something, that's fine.
00:31:54.000Coercion to enforce something is fine.
00:31:57.000And they were like, for the most part, and I was like, just like how the mainstream media lies to us every single day to get people to vote for people who extract from our economy and destroy our country, and then they were like, Yeah, no, that's really bad.
00:32:09.000And I'm like, right, I don't know how we get past that.
00:32:11.000And there's a very serious challenge then when you have basically the entirety of the corporate press lying every single day in every possible way.
00:32:21.000Donald Trump cleared a protest for a photo op.
00:32:25.000And when conservatives came out and said, I think it was Molly Hemingway, the Federalist, There was already a plan to clear the protest to put up secure fencing.
00:32:34.000It was incidental that Trump came out afterwards.
00:33:12.000Where they say, you must not tolerate intolerance, otherwise intolerance will wipe you out.
00:33:16.000But the funny thing is, they're the ones intolerant.
00:33:18.000They're the ones banning conservatives and anti-establishment actors from the internet.
00:33:22.000Meanwhile, they're the ones who get away with whatever they want, and it's the conservatives who keep letting them do it.
00:33:27.000Of course, they push back and say, you shouldn't do this, but we still sit here and say, Look, I understand basically the entirety, every single media organization was lying about everything Trump did almost all the time.
00:33:40.000Five years of Donald Trump as a Russian spy.
00:33:43.000And we just say, but our principles dictate that we allow them to say it.
00:33:48.000I believe also Karl Popper, who they're quoting in The Tolerance of Intolerance, or yeah, he was also a critic, a heavy critic of communism as well.
00:34:00.000But of course, that's not that's not going to be something that makes its way into a little viral comic.
00:34:26.000You mentioned these media outlets, and you're right.
00:34:27.000It's really complicated, because on the one hand, they do have freedom of speech.
00:34:30.000On the other hand, they are saying things that we know to be lies.
00:34:34.000Not necessarily to come down one way or the other here, but I would ask myself the question, are these people who would be comfortable silencing me?
00:34:40.000Now, I'm not saying someone's rights are based on whether or not they would give you the same right.
00:34:51.000So for example, if you lie about and smear a teenage boy because he's wearing the wrong kind of hat and it fits your narrative, then there is good reason for there to be legal penalty because you've attempted to destroy somebody's life with bad information and your job as a journalistic outlet is to spread the truth.
00:35:10.000You were sort of talking about freedom a moment ago and the fact that freedom is really, in antiquity and the classical tradition, the freedom to do the right thing.
00:35:19.000And with that comes this robust understanding that freedom and rights are very much duty-based.
00:35:24.000The reason I have a right to own a gun is because I have a duty to protect myself and therefore you're not able to prevent me from doing the things that I have a duty to do.
00:35:32.000And it's similar with the freedom of speech.
00:35:34.000I have a duty to speak truth when necessary, but if I'm prevented from doing that, I don't think it matters whether it's the government preventing me or a giant corporation.
00:35:55.000I have a right to keep and bear arms, to defend myself and defend the free state.
00:35:59.000If they start using their right to bear arms to aggress against me, I have a right to defend myself, you're entering open conflict.
00:36:05.000If I have a right to free speech to express and defend a free state,
00:36:08.000and they start using speech to suppress and oppress, you're entering conflict.
00:36:12.000But we don't take away people's rights. We just enter that conflict and try and combat those
00:36:17.000ideas. The challenge becomes when you are losing. I mean, two points.
00:36:24.000I would say, first of all, one of my big battles within conservatism, and I famously picked a fight with David French a couple of years ago, but one of my big battles within conservatism is this tendency to say, if we use power, God forbid, they'll use it against us.
00:36:41.000And I always say, They are using it against us, right?
00:36:47.000And there's no movement that should say, our goal is to not use power.
00:36:52.000But why are you then a political movement?
00:36:54.000You are in politics to exercise power towards some substantive vision of what is a good society, what do I want to do?
00:37:00.000If I just come in and say, we're here because we don't want to use power, that's obviously an invitation to progressives.
00:37:07.000That sounds like basically every Republican.
00:37:14.000So it's an interesting paradox because you have the left which is entirely power-based.
00:37:18.000I mean that's how they analyze everything and it seems to be all they want.
00:37:21.000And then on the right you have people who just don't want to go anywhere near any kind of political power because they view it as inherently corrupting.
00:37:27.000And it's true that that power does corrupt so you have to be careful with it and we don't want to Ignore that.
00:37:31.000But you're also right that they're using this against us and we have to do something to defend ourselves.
00:37:35.000And look, the point of having a political movement is wanting to change something about society and political power is the vehicle for doing that.
00:37:42.000And then on the speech point, I would say just because I'm not a free speech absolutist, actually, that there is a kind of retconning going on where people look at the founding and they impose basically a post-war consensus on speech.
00:37:59.000And they retconned it into the founding era.
00:38:03.000The founding era, the founders would have been appalled by the idea that there is a free speech right to teach kids about transgenderism.
00:38:13.000It just would not have, because they had a sense of obscenity, right?
00:38:36.000Into the 19th century, you know, you had blasphemy upheld as a kind of common law charge.
00:38:42.000So, if you're not a free speech absolutist, then you think, okay, well, there has to be some public authority to regulate the abuses of the kinds of things we're talking about, like, you know, big tech or media.
00:38:57.000And in this sense, I think it's a battle line where, you know, people like me are often called authoritarians, but I'm like, well, yeah, but the vision, the libertarian vision you have is literally a kind of a 50, 60 year old fantasy.
00:39:11.000It is not, it does not have even roots in the founding.
00:39:14.000I think we made tremendous improvements in terms of free speech and expanding the ability to speak.
00:39:20.000I think a lot of obscenity laws were dumb.
00:39:33.000They'll put the communist red salute in a children's cartoon on Nickelodeon with a drag performance, but then if you tell a journalist Learn to Code is a joke, they ban you.
00:39:42.000So quite literally, there is no free speech in this world for those who are anti-establishment or conservative or even just not woke.
00:39:51.000But the woke have all the free speech in the world, While claiming free speech is bad, and therein lies the victim.
00:39:57.000It makes me think about, like, a bunch of people hanging out in a public space and then talking, and then one guy, Johnny, starts to—sorry, Johnny, if you're out there— starts to make a lot of noise and be disruptive.
00:40:07.000And then everyone's like, stop, stop, stop.
00:40:08.000And then a couple minutes go by and he does it again and again.
00:40:11.000And then you're like, you know, you do that again, we're going to throw you out by force.
00:40:14.000And he's like, but I have the right to do this.
00:40:18.000I mean, what's happening is a conservative will go on to Twitter and make a comment about transgenderism and get instantly banned for simply having an opinion.
00:41:01.000So the second part of what I was saying is like, then the government, so eventually you throw Johnny out, he comes back, he's like, I'm not, the government comes in and says, you can't stop him from being disruptive.
00:41:09.000And that's what it feels like, this government Forcing of us to listen to this bizarre... I don't know what you want to call it.
00:41:18.000A twisting of faith or a twisting of morality.
00:41:21.000How are they forcing us to listen to it?
00:41:24.000Like, you can't say, you can't tell a transgender man that he's a woman on Twitter.
00:41:36.000It is a flying, which is a form of government, unfortunately.
00:41:38.000But I mean, I think the way to to deal with that is, first of all, reform this law, Section 230, which, you know, we at The New York Post, if I publish libel in our pages, our publisher, you know, God forbid, can get civilly held liable, sued.
00:41:58.000But in the 1990s, before there was ever a Twitter, before there was ever a Facebook, Congress enacted a law called the Communication Decency Act of 1996, where it gave these platforms, at the time they were like internet bulletin boards, they were completely nascent, so no one had any idea they would become so big, the right to act like publishers, meaning to censor kind of violent threats, truly kind of prurient content, child pornography or what have you, And nevertheless not be subject to a traditional publisher's liability.
00:42:30.000That's the provision that Twitter and Facebook use where they act like publishers, but if you publish liable on their website, they cannot be held civilly liable.
00:42:40.000The law actually extends rather uniquely to literally any web service.
00:42:45.000So interestingly, I think you actually have an argument for not being able to sue the New York Times.
00:42:50.000I'd love the New York Times to just cite Section 230 as a legal defense because it would probably work.
00:43:05.000There's interesting conundrums in that regard then, because I brought this up with Wikipedia.
00:43:09.000Wikipedia uses the 230 shield, where they say, you can't sue us for what a Wikipedia article says about you because it was written by users, not us.
00:43:18.000However, the published page on Wikipedia was not written by users.
00:43:23.000It is an amalgam of a bunch of different comments from a bunch of different people, but then formatted and published by Wikipedia with a banner that reads, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
00:43:35.000Considering that they have now claimed publisher of this article and you don't see the user's name or picture or the link.
00:43:43.000That's I think Wikipedia is the biggest grounds for a lawsuit in terms of libel.
00:43:47.000And the clearest case is to me is Twitter, though, because Twitter has now it has its own editorial voice somehow, where if you look at the trending material, Some, like, hack has written something like, people are talking about Governor DeSantis banning the teaching about racism, obviously, and in this kind of completely New York Times-y, stupid lie framing.
00:44:09.000But that is no longer just like a neutral platform.
00:44:17.000You could sue Twitter for what they write.
00:44:20.000So when, for instance, Twitter said that James O'Keefe was operating multiple accounts, James O'Keefe sues Twitter saying that was a false statement of fact.
00:44:27.000Oh sure, no, but I'm saying that the fact that they act like that, the fact that they have their own editorial voice, just makes it clear that they're no longer any kind of a, just a web service.
00:44:36.000They're a publisher, and therefore they should be subject to liability.
00:44:40.000I think the bigger problem is Times v. Sullivan.
00:44:42.000Well, I should say it's Times v. Sullivan as well as Section 230.
00:44:45.000For those who aren't familiar, Times v. Sullivan created the actual malice standard and defamation suits.
00:44:51.000So there has to be a reckless disregard for the truth or you had to know you were lying, which is actual malice.
00:44:56.000I think what's happening now that needs to be challenged, what separates Twitter deciding what is allowed to exist on their platform
00:45:04.000in terms of other people writing things and the New York Times separate, you know,
00:45:08.000deciding what's allowed on their platform and choosing what appears on the front page.
00:45:13.000Twitter through algorithms and through their rules will remove and shadow ban conservatives
00:45:47.000The only thing that appears on the front, you know, on the newsfeed for everybody is exactly what Ian said, and I banned everybody else.
00:45:53.000So it's this really fascinating thing where they're like, I didn't choose to put his writing on the front page.
00:45:59.000I just asked one million people to write their opinion and banned all of the opinions I didn't like, so quite literally exactly what I wanted appeared on the front page.
00:46:07.000Whereas the New York Times says we have 30... I mean, the New York Times probably has thousands of contributors who all write articles and then they say, We looked at all of them, and we've decided this is the one that will go on the front page.
00:46:24.000I'll create the TimCast Community User Board, where I'll ask people to contribute to writing whatever wild and cockamamie garbage they want, and we'll put it on the front page!
00:46:40.000I think the difference is that the New York Times has a human choosing it and curating it, whereas the Twitter has an algorithm doing it.
00:46:47.000So they're kind of like hiding behind an algorithm.
00:46:49.000So Twitter, I could argue that I'm willing to bet New York Times has filters for their contributions that come in that, you know, stupid things get thrown in the trash and spam folder, right?
00:47:01.000I'm sure the New York Times has an email account and a Gmail account and their spam filters an algorithm that sorts out what doesn't get to go on the front page.
00:47:07.000I think it's arbitrary if a human does it or if an algorithm does it that a human built.
00:47:12.000If a human built the algorithm to pick it for you or if you pick it, it doesn't really matter.
00:47:54.000So one of the things that happens, interestingly, on Twitter is that a Twitter account, that
00:48:00.000Twitter is, we'll write something libelous.
00:48:02.000Twitter as an organization is protected by Section 230, but Twitter as an organization
00:48:06.000is the only one who knows that account belongs to.
00:48:09.000So, what's happened in the past is that there'll be an account called, like, you know, Ianisdumb, and they'll say, you know, uh, Ian wants, uh, whatever, punched a goat, right?
00:48:18.000That's the go-to thing for absurd statements?
00:48:20.000And then when Ian says, I'm going to sue this person for libel, Twitter says, we will not turn over the records of this user.
00:48:28.000So Ian has to sue Twitter first to figure out who defamed him in the first place.
00:48:33.000And then Twitter blocks it and files a bunch of billion- with their billion-dollar corporation legal apparatus, shutting your lawsuit down, and then you'll never figure out who actually defamed you, and you can't sue them anyway.
00:48:44.000We've got a very, very serious problem.
00:48:46.000The mainstream press has been pumping out trash lies.
00:48:49.000I'm sure the corporations love a confused and demoralized population.
00:48:53.000We have no reasonable means to actually do journalism and stop misinformation when big tech corporations shield defamation and CNN is propped up by YouTube and the Minister of Misinformation, Brian Stautter himself, is given preferential access on his content.
00:49:12.000Yeah, I mean, I think we need a regulatory.
00:49:19.000And then, I mean, to go to your point, Tim, about the press, I mean, I'm so, so embarrassed for my profession.
00:49:26.000You know, in February 2020, we ran an opinion column in The Post by the China scholar Steve Mosher, where he speculated, he didn't definitively say, but he speculated that the virus could be man-made in origin.
00:50:10.000We were talking about this on the After Show the other day.
00:50:14.000Francis Boyle, he's the author of the American implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the, I believe, the Biological Weapons and Terrorism Act of 1989.
00:50:26.000And it's basically the rules for what kind of meddling with different germs is legal, what's biological warfare, what isn't.
00:50:34.000And at the beginning of the pandemic, he said that he believed That the coronavirus was a bioweapon, that's how he defined it, and he's the person who wrote the legislation that is the law of the land of the United States, and he is referred to as a conspiracy theorist, which is insane to me.
00:50:50.000I just heard a crazy new conspiracy theorist from the sage Duncan Trussell on Joe Rogan's 1666 podcast just recently.
00:50:58.000What if some crazy eco-terrorist went to Wuhan and released it right next to the biolab to make us think that it came from the biolab?
00:51:06.000It's just a much simpler explanation to say it was released from the lab.
00:51:14.000At this point, I would say, now that we're learning that early on scientists believe it may have been engineered, that kind of changes everything.
00:51:20.000We didn't know that, and Fauci wasn't telling us that.
00:51:25.000I think Bret Weinstein mentioned that when they were studying the structure of the actual virus, that they were saying it looks like it's been tampered with.
00:51:33.000We have a bipartisan elite that so benefits from the relationship with China, is so bound up with the idea that opening up China was a good idea, Even though it decimated the middle class in this country, even though it empowered this vicious, horrible totalitarian regime.
00:51:48.000But they're so wedded to this idea that I think it just cannot be acceptable to them that this was a lab leak issue.
00:51:59.000So it just embarrasses our entire... Again, a bipartisan elite.
00:52:34.000And even now, Considers are still like, Antifa riots.
00:52:37.000I'm like, I don't know, maybe that's insurrection.
00:52:39.000Maybe after a year of burning down buildings and throwing bricks at people and beating cops and challenging the authority, subverting it and infiltrating institutions, you can call it...
00:54:34.000That, for instance, feminism, as we know, intersectional feminism and critical race theory, is only able to exist because we live in this beautiful protected bubble that no one can invade.
00:54:45.000If we were actually dealing with international conflict and we were facing civilian attrition, people were dying and being killed and cities were being bombed, you better believe they would lock down free speech and go nuts arresting random people.
00:55:09.000The people who are willing to get aggressive and violate principles are the ones who in many instances end up winning, and that's horrifying.
00:55:18.000So we want to maintain our principles, we want to believe in freedom, but now what we're starting to see in the U.S.
00:55:23.000is a lot of people, and this is the crazy thing, not even the U.S., I was in the U.K., and some British conservative activists told me that they used to be classically liberal, now they're fascists.
00:55:31.000And I'm like, get out of here, you're not really a fascist.
00:55:33.000And they would tell me, no, but they're full-on authoritarians.
00:55:36.000They think that the only way to combat the incursion of Marxism and these insane ideologies and this moral corruption within society is by force, to ensure the protection of your values.
00:56:51.000Well, I think you can get more nuanced, though, and say, well, yeah, the North were the good guys, and the Allies were the good guys in World War II, but war crimes were committed, and we should condemn those.
00:56:58.000So, for example, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific war crimes.
00:57:03.000Sherman's march to the sea just burning down civilian homes and making warfare on innocent people was unbelievably horrific.
00:57:09.000Was that the first iteration of Scorched Earth?
00:57:53.000Leftism doesn't quite come into the picture.
00:57:55.000Not certainly not like an economic Marxian left.
00:57:59.000In the late 18th century, these were liberals.
00:58:00.000They were bourgeois liberals who want to unseat kind of traditional authority, specifically the church.
00:58:07.000And that meant guillotining priests, raping nuns, stripping altars and putting up like, you know, the goddess of reason instead of the virgin or the cross.
00:58:20.000So liberalism has come to power because it's been nearly two, three hundred years.
00:58:26.000It's got this glow of sepia tone that it's this kind of gentlemanly, powdered wig people who just wanted rational discussion.
00:58:35.000But it itself was an intrusive force in the world.
00:58:38.000And a lot of people weren't prepared to say, well, here's an ideology that wants to divorce the individual from political community, from tradition, from local places, and just wants to have just a rights-exercising, rational individual alone on his own.
00:58:55.000To bring that world about involved tremendous violence.
00:58:58.000And it continues to be, as my friend Patrick Deneen argues in a wonderful book, Why Liberalism Failed, it's not the case that we face a battle between individualism and statism, or a tension between those two.
00:59:11.000The two grow in tandem, because the more you kind of individualize the person, remove him from these traditions that guided us over centuries, and kind of gave you a sense of what the good life is, the more you remove him economically and make him atomized, The more he has to rely on the state to enforce his rights, to protect him.
00:59:35.000Yeah, I think excesses of individualism end up leading to authoritarianism and collectivism.
00:59:39.000And part of why I invoked the left when you were talking about the French Revolution is because this is something I've said on this show many times before, but it's part of why Catholicism and leftism cannot be reconciled, because the intellectual origins and foundings of leftism Come from this time period.
00:59:54.000We get the terms left and right from the French Revolution, and the purpose of the left since its inception has been to oppose traditionalism, to oppose specifically Catholicism in the church's interest.
01:00:04.000The left side of the National Assembly.
01:00:07.000So, pulling up Sherman's march to the sea, one of the most horrifying things The end of slavery.
01:00:14.000What was a contributing factor, one of the contributing factors that led to the eventual surrender of the Confederates and ultimately to the Reconstruction era and the abolition of slavery?
01:00:24.000It was when, wow, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army began to march from Atlanta, burning down and destroying industry, infrastructure, and civilian property.
01:00:36.000The operation broke the back of the Confederacy and helped lead to its eventual surrender.
01:00:40.000Sherman's decision to operate deep within enemy territory without supply lines is considered to be one of the major campaigns of the war and is considered to be, uh, considered by some historians to be an early example of modern total war.
01:01:10.000It is horrifying, but also I think there could be a better way, because every other developed nation ended slavery without committing similar war crimes.
01:01:16.000I mean, I'm on the side of the North here, but other countries mostly, I believe the United States is the only developed country that ended slavery through a civil war.
01:01:24.000We're going through some kind of new iteration, fourth or fifth generational warfare with what's happening in this country.
01:01:31.000And I think it's fair to say that those who believe in freedom and liberty or classical liberalism, these ideas, have probably already lost.
01:01:39.000I know a lot of people say that, and I think James Lindsay said something to that effect.
01:01:41.000There are people like Michael Malice who are much more optimistic and say there's no way we can possibly lose.
01:02:34.000It forces you to, this is the most totalitarian aspect of it.
01:02:38.000It forces you to say that something that you know is not true, right?
01:02:43.000The fact that there are two sexes and gender has this kind of embodied component that you cannot overcome just by willing it or with surgical mutilation.
01:02:52.000But you have to say that, you know, there are, first of all, that there are 135 or however many genders.
01:03:04.000There are two possible roles that a person can have, and your subjective sense of self-expression doesn't change that at all.
01:03:10.000We talked about this in the last show we did, and I think it was on the After Show segment, but part of my belief here is that this is just the inevitable outgrowth of a contraceptive culture, because once people lose sight of the sexual act as being procreative, it becomes about pleasure and self-expression.
01:04:34.000This is the point I was making earlier.
01:04:37.000With these violations of people's ability to express themselves, it's not as if it's my opinion versus your opinion, and the conservative opinion just happens to not be allowed on Twitter.
01:04:46.000It's not a conservative opinion that there is such a thing as a woman, and that women are different from men.
01:05:04.000But when you have a group of people who are dominating our cultural institutions, who are in every major corporation and advertising network, and are making the rules for social media, then you get governors and politicians locking you down so you can't go and talk to people.
01:05:18.000They wouldn't let people go to church.
01:05:20.000The only way to get your news was through social media, which has filtered out even fact-based news articles we know to be true, like the New York Post.
01:05:30.000So the only opinion in news you're getting is the one they deemed you're allowed to get.
01:05:59.000I know why we use Twitter, because when Parler attempted to launch, the massive companies got together and said, we're not going to allow that.
01:06:47.000See, Michael Malice has it right in that regard.
01:06:49.000However, I don't completely agree with him when he points out someone being dumb on Twitter, and I'm like, dude, a zombie horde can wipe out a civilization.
01:07:08.000Anybody who's played, like, OG Warcraft, you just spam from the barracks a bunch of knights or grunts, and then just keep sending them non-stop and overwhelm your opponent.
01:09:09.000These companies and these mayors and these Democrats know they have zero to worry about from people who challenge their orthodoxy.
01:09:15.000Yeah, I don't want a government of reactionaries.
01:09:17.000I don't know if they think that there's nothing to worry about, though, because they're working very hard to ensure that people get censored.
01:09:22.000You always see these op-eds written about large YouTube celebrities who have larger platforms at this point than these media conglomerates do, or some of their favorite properties on their networks have.
01:09:34.000And you almost always get the feeling that this is because they want these social media platforms to step in and start silencing creators who the media deems as problematic because, again, they're competition.
01:09:44.000But that said, yeah, I think they really are afraid.
01:09:46.000They wouldn't be trying to censor us otherwise.
01:10:35.000I think part of the censorship regime, I think Oliver Bateman made this point in an American Greatness essay where he said, It's not really about not letting the rabble access information, or that's not solely about that.
01:10:49.000It's also for the elites themselves to create a bubble in which they don't hear from what the majority, you know, normal people think.
01:10:58.000Normal people don't want stupid wars in the Middle East.
01:11:03.000They don't want socialism, but they also don't want, like, a kind of predatory capitalism.
01:11:07.000And they don't want their kids being taught, like, they want their kids to learn about, you know, the Napoleonic Wars and Homer and poetry, and not to just sort of endlessly solipsistically meditate on their own race and gender.
01:11:17.000So normality, like sane politics are possible if you just minimally listen, I think still, to ordinary Americans.
01:11:24.000But elites, by censorship, they actually just block themselves off.
01:11:29.000And I think that's very dangerous because you can't have a superpower whose elites don't actually know what the F is going on in reality, right?
01:11:37.000Well, that's why we're not going to be for much longer.
01:11:50.000It puts a million people in camps, whatever.
01:11:53.000But, you know, they don't have an intelligence agency that does its recruiting by being like, I have anxiety disorder and I work for the CIA.
01:12:03.000Like, just kind of imagine the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party or inside the Kremlin, like, looking at the Americans, you're like, they must be laughing.
01:12:12.000If someone, I can imagine someone going to, I guess there's no name for the Chinese intelligence, they just call it Beijing, but imagine, you know, there's a Chinese national going to Beijing and saying, I've got an anxiety disorder, I'm gender non-binary, and they're like, interesting, interesting, right this way.
01:12:25.000They put him in a room and they put a pry bar in front of it and weld the door shut and walk away like they did to all the people who got sick.
01:12:31.000They do not tolerate anything that could be a threat to their system.
01:12:34.000They literally killed their own citizens for it.
01:12:50.000Partly like the way our government's set up right now is if you want to contact and communicate with like a representative, you can't, you can contact their office and like leave a message for their aid or something, but there's no way to like talk to, you know, Rand Paul right now if I needed to.
01:13:03.000If we had like internet video where like, as your job as a, as a congressman is to sit down and listen to like 20, 30 YouTube videos a day, you know, minute, one minute clips or like, uh, you know, 120 of them a day, two hours.
01:13:16.000You sit there and you listen to people's suggestions and complaints.
01:13:27.000I think it's... I mean, the media is supposed to do that for the representatives.
01:13:32.000The media is supposed to reflect public opinion in part.
01:13:36.000But instead, what they've done is to think of themselves as mediators between what power wants to do and the stupid rabble that doesn't know what's good for them.
01:13:46.000And the media's job is sort of to like massage the messages of power to the people rather than reflect it to power and hold power accountable.
01:13:53.000The root of the word mediator is media.
01:14:42.000One guy called him the minister of misinformation and said, at this point, if you do the opposite of what CNN says, you'll probably be better off.
01:14:49.000So I tell people, we can't just be doing shows where we complain about it.
01:14:55.000It's a good thing to spread awareness, but you have to do more than that.
01:15:22.000We do not have the resources of these massive corporations or the privileges that YouTube grants them.
01:15:26.000But in that skate park, when a dude shows up on his BMX and grinds the grind bar and it's his big deal, he has a Gadsden flag right there.
01:15:33.000That means some little kid who watches that YouTube video is gonna see the Gadsden flag.
01:15:37.000And he's not gonna know too much about it, but then one day when he's in school and his teacher says some stupid critical race BS about the Gadsden flag being racist, he's gonna go, what?
01:15:45.000No, the Castle guys have one of those.
01:16:18.000We have to be very, very careful about what we talk about when we do it on channels like YouTube.
01:16:22.000But once we get the website up and running, we get a bunch of journalists, we can say whatever we want.
01:16:28.000Yeah, I tend to agree with what you're saying here.
01:16:31.000I believe conservatives need to put more emphasis on creating culture.
01:16:34.000This is part of why I do Freedom Tunes.
01:16:36.000I like to do these little animated shorts that are promoting these values.
01:16:39.000I really just make them because I want to make something funny, but because my values are conservative and Catholic, they'll come through in the content.
01:16:46.000But the problem is, conservatives generally scoff at media.
01:16:50.000They'll lament the fact that they don't have enough representation in media, but when someone says they're going into media, they tend to laugh at them.
01:16:56.000And they definitely won't let their children pursue a career in media.
01:16:59.000But the reality is, the way the left has gotten their morality across is by very passively asserting it in the background of the things that they create, or in the foreground, but not in an overt, heavy-handed way.
01:17:09.000So they'll just have characters in their films agree with certain lifestyle choices that other characters have made without beating you over the head with the fact that the producer thinks that that's an okay thing to do.
01:17:19.000They'll have characters talk about how they have casual sex, but it won't be a driving part of the plot of the film.
01:17:25.000They'll have characters discuss abortion in a way that isn't condemning it or homosexuality.
01:17:29.000They don't sit there like conservatives do and say, here's what we believe about X, Y, and Z. They just show you those things happening and say that those things are normal.
01:17:37.000And if conservatives want to have any shot at winning the culture war, they need to do the same thing with the media they create.
01:17:41.000There's this tape from, uh, like the Nixon tapes, uh, and he's talking to some of his advisors.
01:17:47.000Um, you can find this online and he's like turning to, I can't remember who it is, but he's like, you see on the TV, they're making the working man look stupid, like an oaf.
01:17:56.000And the urban homosexual, they're making him look cool.
01:18:01.000I don't think it's... But I think it's true, fathers are always depicted as complete idiots.
01:18:37.000We talk about when everything went bad and everyone says Harambe is a joke, but maybe, you know, we used to have TV shows that were like family-friendly, wholesome shows about like moral messages about improving yourself and being better.
01:19:54.000Well to be fair also Roadrunner had magic powers like when Wiley would draw the fake tunnel on the wall and Roadrunner would actually run through it and then he wouldn't.
01:20:02.000Maybe Roadrunner was part of his imagination and he was tripping.
01:21:28.000Do you guys think there's a peaceful, like, um, I don't know if there's a solution is the right word, but transition, kind of?
01:21:35.000Because it seems like our free speech has gone so far.
01:21:37.000Out of whack that we're allowing things that maybe shouldn't be allowed. Ah, that's not what I want to say. Well
01:21:43.000You said it then you're like, ah, what is wrong with i'm gonna be emperor here and say good
01:21:49.000I want to say this though. I think there is something flow through you
01:21:54.000There is something really interesting to be said about this though
01:21:57.000Because you just said something and went. Oh, I don't want to say that. Uh
01:21:59.000I mean, you're exploring your thoughts here.
01:22:02.000And when you make a public statement, you're sort of connected to it for the rest of your life, even if two seconds later you disagree with what you just said.
01:22:15.000But at the same time, This conversation is occurring live and in the back of our minds, there's this question of, am I going to say the right thing?
01:22:41.000Exactly, and we spend our entire lives practicing conversation totally in private, and the skill sets for a private conversation don't necessarily map onto a public conversation because you don't know how your audience is going to understand you the way you do the person sitting across from you will.
01:24:26.000You were about to say what the secret of the universe is.
01:24:29.000I was going to say something really sinister, but no.
01:24:30.000No, I think I think I I'm a I've become a kind of big government conservative, but a conservative who believes
01:24:39.000that we we do need a government to to mediate between these different actors in society and and and to, you know,
01:24:48.000authoritatively guide people to virtues.
01:24:52.000So your friends in Britain who call themselves fascists, that's horrible because fascism is more kind of raw exercise of power and tyrannical.
01:25:04.000Yeah, sort of the people you met at the rally.
01:25:06.000But I think a government that authoritatively guides people to be a little bit more virtuous through policy and so forth, that's just what the purpose of government is.
01:25:19.000You know, we're one way or another, we're guided to some morality.
01:26:02.000It's just this strange totalitarian Marxism LARPing as traditionalism.
01:26:06.000Ultimately, I believe that a country as large as the United States, especially with a government as big as ours, is fundamentally impossible.
01:26:13.000I don't think it's going to last in the long run.
01:26:14.000I think the kind of social and cultural decay we're seeing is probably going to continue.
01:26:18.000Ideally, we would have States with much more autonomy to implement the kind of I think in those individual states virtue based governing strategies because what you try to implement now in a place like Georgia probably isn't going to fly somewhere like California, but the problem is the nation is so tightly interlinked because of a massive our federal government is
01:26:41.000That everyone is invested in what's going on in states that they might not even visit in their lifetimes.
01:26:47.000So I would say we really need to roll back the power of federal government.
01:26:51.000And so in that way, I'm very anti-big government.
01:26:54.000They won't leave you alone in your like red state readout.
01:26:57.000Because that's the nature of the ideology.
01:27:06.000See, I think it's possible that at some point the federal government will become incredibly weakened.
01:27:12.000I don't see it happening in the immediate future, and maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part, because I agree with you that if you have the federal government, especially with the power that it has, people on the left are never going to be able to tolerate the existence of a right-wing society.
01:27:27.000And even if you haven't... So it's complicated.
01:27:30.000I mean, there is something about unvirtuous people who are living unvirtuous lifestyles where they cannot tolerate the existence of people whose existence challenges their conscience fundamentally.
01:27:43.000I don't want to slide into this thinking where we reject any and all use of power, but I just don't see a lot of these right-wing strategies working effectively at the federal level in terms of development of virtue among the populace.
01:27:57.000So look, you have to have private exhortation to virtue.
01:28:04.000Family matters and so on and so forth.
01:28:06.000But at the bottom line is I think we're in a really, really bad state.
01:28:58.000You'd be surprised how quickly people will change their minds and then they will forget that a week earlier they held the contrary opinion.
01:29:05.000So you have as power shifts, they're like, oh, yeah, I've always been here, you know.
01:29:09.000So so for me, what that means is for conservatives, you know, they often say, well, we don't have the culture with us.
01:29:16.000The vast middle of people go this way and that.
01:29:18.000What really matters is if you can capture the elite, as an elite enter positions of power, you can very quickly shift the ship of state as it were.
01:29:30.000I'm definitely going to really strongly consider that.
01:29:32.000My point has more or less been that I think the United States government Yeah.
01:29:37.000is just too gigantic in this is too large a country to be governed under one
01:29:41.000main governing body i mean you seem to be saying something different i do
01:29:44.000really want to consider that so i'm open-minded here what would you think i would
01:29:49.000ask over that will know i guess i guess my point is
01:29:52.000when you have fifty states in initially when the united states was set up
01:29:55.000it wasn't intended to be a country where you have this monolithic
01:29:58.000federal government running this gigantic country
01:30:00.000It was more or less smaller states governing themselves, and then the federal government could come in and regulate trade or dictate a common currency, solve other disputes, ensure that the Constitution is being held to.
01:30:11.000But now it's as if people almost go directly to the federal government whenever they want a law changed, instead of looking at how they can implement change on the local level.
01:30:20.000And I fear that it becomes an impossibility for $330 million to be guaranteed by the same— We have a national economy, we have an international economy, and therefore localism doesn't really work.
01:30:35.000And I think, you know, certainly the kind of Hamiltonian strand of the founding is not quite As you describe it, it's more like energy in the executive is constantly the phrase that Hamilton uses.
01:30:48.000They were not all of one mind on this, of course.
01:30:50.000I'm always open to the idea of subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching, which is that problems should be solved at the level appropriate to them.
01:30:57.000So if a family can solve a problem, then the local municipality shouldn't interfere.
01:31:01.000And if a local municipality can solve a problem, then the state shouldn't interfere.
01:31:05.000But I think we're at a point where all the crises we're facing, unfortunately, can't be solved at the level of family, local, municipal.
01:31:12.000It has to go all the way up because they're kind of global or national problems.
01:31:17.000So I hear what you're saying, yeah, in this idea behind subsidiarity.
01:31:20.000It goes as far as to say that the most local possible authority should be the one to solve it.
01:31:25.000But then we have that conflicting with solidarity as well.
01:31:29.000I think over the past hundred years, We have moved so much away from subsidiarity and maybe that's what's created this problem where it's as if nothing can be solved at the local level.
01:31:40.000I have to consider that more strongly as well.
01:31:43.000What would be an example, you think, of some way the federal government could shift or change policy to enact what you're talking about, like a psychological shift in the will of the people?
01:31:57.000I think we should promote people forming families and having children.
01:32:01.000And so I would do what the Poles and the Hungarians are doing, which is if you have four children or more, you're exempt from income tax for the rest of your life.
01:32:12.000you get a cash subsidy even, or you get a loan for a van so you'll be able to carry your,
01:32:17.000you know, but that means that conservatives have to believe that it's good for people
01:33:28.000I mean, think about it for two seconds.
01:33:29.000CNN was lying to us for years about Russia, and YouTube will still put them on the front page as the authoritative source.
01:33:37.000So in all seriousness, if you think that's a problem, you can share this show.
01:33:42.000You can become a member at TimCast.com, and just know that your membership is going to go towards hiring more journalists and reporters, and working on building up this newsroom, as well as a bunch of other shows.
01:33:51.000Of course, we do have the Paranormal Show we've been working on.
01:35:13.000It was like some lightning strike fried up the line that went into the box and it only damaged some of it, but they had to replace the line.
01:35:36.000So we're trying to get, we're trying to do live events.
01:35:38.000There's a bunch, there's a couple hurdles we have to overcome.
01:35:40.000One of them is structural, but we just had some guys be like, look, we don't think you can do steel because the prices are way too high to, like, open up the building and make it better.
01:35:59.000Alright, OneEyeGaming says, Ian, a few days ago you said you were worried about who Russia would side with if war broke out between America and China.
01:36:23.000Firstlast says, Can I still be a Christian without going to church and liking the Pope?
01:36:27.000Is reading the Bible, hearing people like JP and Cliff Nectal from YouTube, Ask Cliff, a good way for spirituality and one with God?
01:36:36.000This is a really, really good question.
01:36:38.000I'm sure Saurabh has an answer for this as well.
01:36:40.000I would say that Jesus Christ came to earth and he died for your sins and came back from the dead and he founded a church.
01:36:48.000And through that church he has delineated clear rules for the ways a person must go about getting to heaven.
01:36:55.000And one thing that we're bound to do is attend mass every Sunday.
01:37:00.000And so, well, you spoke about the Pope and you also spoke about Christianity without referencing Catholicism.
01:37:06.000I assume you're probably asking a question about Catholicism because of that invocation of the Pope.
01:37:12.000And I would say one of the requirements to be considered a practicing Catholic is to observe all the necessary holy days, which would include the Sunday obligation to attend Mass.
01:37:23.000I would say you should do it, and I'm not sure if you're in an area which is particularly locked down or if you've been to a Catholic Mass before, but I would recommend going to your first if you haven't and talking to the priest there and asking him some of these same questions.
01:37:38.000And furthermore, if you can, try to find a TLM, a traditional Latin Mass, because I promise if you do, that priest will have Solid answers for you.
01:37:46.000I got a question for you guys about Jesus.
01:37:47.000Do you think that he was the meat body of Jesus or the spirit that inhabited his body?
01:38:00.000And it's various Gnostic movements in late antiquity which basically said that You know, what you are is this divine spark that happens to be trapped in a kind of fleshly apparatus that's bad.
01:38:14.000And you see it, by the way, echoed in modern transgenderism, right?
01:38:17.000I talked about that last time I was on the show, yeah.
01:38:19.000The idea that I'm just the kind of mental material, that's my real self, and this body means nothing, therefore I can do everything with it.
01:38:27.000Orthodox, historic Christianity always made a point of saying that that Jesus
01:38:31.000Christ was fully man and had a soul, true God and true man, but also had a body.
01:38:37.000His mother bore him to term just like any other person and therefore it resists those Gnostic tendencies.
01:38:46.000So Christianity, especially in its Catholic iteration, is incredibly concerned with matter, too.
01:38:52.000It's not just this kind of airy-fairy spirit.
01:38:55.000The spirit is important, but we're human beings, we're embodied, and the fact that Jesus is fully man, fully God, therefore gives us a bodily claim on heaven, not just the spiritual one.
01:39:07.000Yeah, that's very, that's, that's, I mean, I couldn't have said it better myself.
01:39:17.000And as Catholics, we believe in a resurrection of the dead, which means that we believe at the end of time, everyone will be resurrected and given a body.
01:39:24.000Don't you think that someone just robbed his grave and took his body?
01:39:26.000Well, no, because there were eyewitness accounts of him being alive after the crucifixion, after he'd already been buried.
01:41:06.000So I think the first thing I would want to see is just a society that makes it a little bit easier to start a family, to have a family, and not to sort of be bombarded with, you know, let's say pornography, right?
01:41:57.000And as goes, as they say, you know, as goes sex, so goes the family, so goes the society, and we've allowed our sexual attitudes to be completely distorted by pornography.
01:42:54.000Thrall was, like, this orcish shaman that was, like, just transcended orcism and became, like, unified with the humans and the elves and just realized there was a greater purpose to fight the demons, really, I guess you would say.
01:43:06.000Or protect the other living organisms from the demons.
01:44:37.000It's, find a woman who enjoys laughing as much as Kamala Harris loves laughing when you ask her about human traffickers smuggling children.
01:45:05.000That's how I envisioned all of these interviews with Kamala.
01:45:08.000My favorite was when, I can't remember who it was, a PBS woman was asking her a serious question, and then she just sits there with her mouth open, smiling, eyes all wide, like, what are you doing?
01:45:19.000Because she laughs at the answer, and the journalist kept pressing, like, I want an answer to this.
01:45:48.000You see, you make things up when you're debating people.
01:45:51.000That's exactly it though, that's how horrible the discourse is where it's considered like a legitimate and fair debate tactic to call someone a rapist and a racist.
01:45:59.000Those are just accusations we throw around, those are just words.
01:46:02.000There was also recently, Kamala was asked about going down to the border and she's like, I'm not going to go to Europe either!
01:46:51.000I mean, Canada's had hate speech laws, which have made quoting scripture an offense.
01:46:55.000I will say that my entire Bible study, full of lovely, sweet Canadian ladies, is literally all ready to move to the U.S., like Florida and Vermont.
01:47:03.000Yeah, I've talked to other Canadians, too, who are like, I am done with this country.
01:47:44.000We probably need more devs if we really want to get the video game What I'm looking for, honestly, is more help creating the sprites, so if there are animators we could find who'd be willing to help, who could emulate my style decently, that would be a massive help, and it would allow us to get the game done pretty quickly, I think.
01:47:58.000At least more quickly than on our current trajectory.
01:48:01.000Have we talked about what the game was about yet?
01:48:04.000I don't know how much we should tease.
01:48:05.000It's gonna be really... So, Chris and I were playing earlier today, and we were playing the multiplayer mode he's been putting together, and it was so much fun.
01:50:12.000I think about the Aztecs, and they would, instead of kill their opponents in battle, knock them unconscious to drag them back to Teotihuacan and cut their chests open.
01:50:20.000People still thought that was horrible in the Aztecs.
01:50:30.000The fact that you're interiorly aware that something's wrong suggests there's an objective moral order, which means that That there is decency and indecency in any given age and across time and across civilization.
01:54:31.000No, I mean, there's, there's, there's simplification of saying the left and the right to for colloquial reason, but the actual core of the definitions make little sense outside of tribal signifiers.
01:55:16.000No, I agree that it's amorphous, but I also don't want to fall into this trap of saying it doesn't mean anything, because it is a very helpful term for identifying your enemy.
01:55:23.000Don't you think, as a Catholic, that if there was someone that actually exuded all the virtues except they were pro-choice, that they would be a better candidate than someone that's just rife with sin but was pro-life?
01:55:34.000No, because I don't know how you could exude all the virtues and be pro-choice, if I'm being entirely honest.
01:55:38.000Well, like six of the seven virtues or whatever.
01:56:24.000Matt Walsh sent aid to AOC's loyal as well.
01:56:28.000That was really pathetic of AOC to not take it.
01:56:29.000I just thought it would've been so amazing if she was like, oh no, you owned the libs, thanks for helping the poor people of Puerto Rico, and then it could've been like, you know what she could've done?
01:56:41.000She could've said, alright, I'm gonna take this money, and you know what I'm gonna do?
01:56:44.000We're gonna use what we need to for the repairs and donate all of the rest to another GoFundMe, and the left is gonna prove we can raise more money than the right to help the people of Puerto Rico.
01:56:55.000And then you get all the conservatives being like, come on, guys, we got to raise money for the people whose lives were destroyed by the hurricane than the left.
01:57:01.000And then the left and the right raise like 10 million each.
01:57:04.000And then the poor people of Puerto Rico have their homes fixed.
01:57:07.000I like Matt Walsh and we're friends on Twitter.
01:57:10.000But I have to say, I agreed with the she's a she's a great account.
01:57:17.000No, but she she said, you know, like, oh, wow, you really owned her by raising, you know, whatever, like, I don't think so.
01:57:25.000AOC should have turned it into a woke-off or a politics-off or whatever.
01:57:30.000At some point, I think people need to stop taking it as seriously or at least find a little levity and joy in life and the other people that you think maybe aren't your friends, maybe are.
01:57:41.000I think that concept of joy, as you're talking about it, is white supremacy.
01:57:53.000Ben Macklin says I'd love to see Carl from InRangeTV on the show.
01:57:57.000He has a firearms and cybersecurity background and made the news a while back for putting firearms content on adult hub to show that the info will exist somewhere.
01:59:09.000We got, uh, Mr. Toad says, those that are anti-colonial and want decolonization of institutions are the same people that want globalization, open borders, and call themselves citizens of the world.
01:59:50.000Yeah, and the Gates... Well, I guess they're not a couple anymore, but they spend a lot of money on ensuring that, you know, there are fewer black babies born.
02:00:34.000It's a normal thing that happens when there's no rooster.
02:00:36.000I think one in 10,000, they say, hens will start appearing like a rooster and crowing and acting like a rooster.
02:00:43.000But a lot of people informed me that alpha hens who
02:00:48.000Become like roosters are way more aggressive and could actually end up killing one of the other hens
02:00:54.000They're like you need to get a rooster Otherwise that alpha hen will seriously injure and you need
02:01:00.000like so we got to bring a dude in to kind of level thing The scientists called them
02:01:04.000Karen's I knew It's a really interesting thing because we would we had to
02:01:09.000call the fire department You know came out. It's like 3 in the morning and then all
02:01:12.000sudden I hear a And I'm like, what was that?
02:01:16.000And I look over and there's one like there's this chicken and she's just like staring at me and I'm like
02:01:21.000Staring back at her like what's going on?
02:01:23.000And then nothing happens I turn around and then I again and then I turn around and there she is But there's like other chickens that I'm like was it was a her and then all sudden she's just looking me in the eyes And I'm like, oh, what are you doing?
02:02:58.000You like bop them and then they just kind of flutter down and then you pick them up and give them to the chickens and the chickens eat them.
02:04:14.000But, uh, basically they're, like, beautiful castles and, like, European art styles.
02:04:21.000And then you look at the Horde, and it is a bunch of marginalized and disaffected communities with- who've, like, lost their homes, who band together.
02:04:29.000And it's also- the craziest thing about it is, like, how overtly racist World of Warcraft is.
02:06:04.000So make sure you follow us on Facebook and Instagram at TimCastIRL.
02:06:07.000If you're on Facebook, you can like the page and then help share our videos to get more people to watch.
02:06:11.000But I got to tell you, I am so incredibly excited for the launch of this newsroom because at a certain point, it just can't be me doing YouTube videos.
02:06:45.000Is he working harder than anybody else to challenge the corrupt?
02:06:50.000And I'm like, well, one of his big inspirations was Andrew Breitbart.
02:06:53.000And then I started thinking about, where are all these other conservatives, and not even conservatives, but anti-woke personalities, to start producing content and try and grow a business and just fight and fight and fight?
02:07:04.000And then I was like, man, Andrew Breitbart really did that.
02:07:38.000Anyway, so follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
02:07:41.000Look, really not big fans of them, but we put up clips, different clips, smaller clips, and you can share them because they're nice little snippets from the show and help people learn about the show.
02:07:50.000Then go to TimCast.com, become a member.
02:07:52.000Can't wait for this newsroom to launch, and we'll start having articles being put out there.
02:08:07.000I want to create market pressure for these news organizations that produce garbage out of New York City to have those journalists be like, it is not worth my time to write listicles about Brad Pitt's junk when I can actually get paid the same rate for one article about, say, Middle Eastern conflict.
02:09:51.000I want to say as you're going into this weekend that you guys need to notice that the left always projects when they talk about normalizing things.
02:09:59.000That's what they've been doing all along.
02:10:00.000They have control of all our TV, all our movies, all our theater, everything that's entertaining to us, and they make all of their ideas normal.