Culture, race, and “black culture”

Daniel Bell’s definition of culture
“Culture is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential questions that confront all human beings in the passages of their lives.” — Daniel Bell (paraphrased by the host as “society’s attempt to come up with a coherent set of answers to the existential questions we face throughout our lives”)

The host’s argument about “black culture”
In a college English class, the host’s professor kept talking about “black culture.” The host challenged him: if culture is a society’s attempt to answer existential questions, then it can’t simply be tied to melanin levels. A black person in Los Angeles, Mobile (Alabama), Paris, and Moscow will not automatically share the same “culture” just because they are all black.

His core point:

Race ≠ culture. Culture is shaped by history, institutions, geography, religion, class, etc., not by skin color alone.

Talking as if there is a single, monolithic “black culture” determined by race slides into a racist essentialism where race is treated as destiny.

Activists and academics who insist on this framing can then label any criticism of certain political or cultural traditions as “racist,” because they’ve already fused race and culture conceptually.

So he uses Bell’s definition of culture to argue that what people often call “black culture” is really a set of particular historical and political traditions, not something inherently dictated by race—and that conflating the two is both intellectually sloppy and a powerful rhetorical weapon.

Philosophical Summary

1. His Big Map of Traditions

Lindsay is really doing macro-philosophy of politics. He sorts the major figures into three broad “schools”:

Hobbesian / Monarchist – strong ruler, order over liberty.
Classical American Liberalism – Locke + Scottish Common Sense + biblical moral culture.
Continental Liberalism / Liberationism – Rousseau → Romanticism → Marxism → modern leftism and “woke”.
Almost everything he says about particular philosophers is in service of that map.

2. The “State of Nature” Philosophers

Thomas Hobbes

Core idea (as Lindsay presents it)
- Humans in a “state of nature” live in an anarchy: “war of all against all.”
- People form a social contract to escape chaos by submitting to a single powerful authority (Leviathan).
Lindsay’s evaluation
- Treats Hobbes as the philosophical ancestor of monarchism / absolutism.
- Sees his model as overly pessimistic and tending toward tyranny: order purchased at the price of too many rights.
Role in Lindsay’s map
- One pole of his triangle: “monarchists,” not where he wants America to go, but a coherent tradition.

John Locke

Core idea (as Lindsay presents it)
- State of nature: autonomous individuals who consent to form society.
- Emphasis on:
  - Natural rights.
  - Property.
  - Consent of the governed.
  - Representative government.
Critiques he grants
- Locke’s “state of nature” story is also somewhat fanciful—we are born into families and institutions we never consented to.
- Locke alone doesn’t give you the full grounding the American tradition actually uses.
Lindsay’s evaluation
- Broadly positive: foundational to liberalism and the American founding.
- But incomplete without the Scottish common sense layer and a biblical moral framework.
Role in his map
- One of the main pillars of classical American liberalism.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Core idea (as Lindsay presents it)
- “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
- Idealized “savages” as free and authentic; sees modern civilization as corrupting.
- Social contract as expression of the general will; people “become more free” through collective self-rule.
How Lindsay portrays him
- Thinks Rousseau:
  - Romanticizes non-European peoples via fantasy projected onto missionary reports.
  - Wants a libertine, “as free as the savages but with city comforts” lifestyle.
  - Believes we can be liberated from the constraints of reality and tradition.
- Says Rousseau’s logic (people become more free by sacrificing their liberties) is dialectical nonsense.
- Sees him as a key origin point for later Marxism and continental liberation politics.
Value judgment
- Very negative.
- Calls Rousseau part of a “continental monstrosity,” jokes about using “both bullets on Rousseau” in the famous “three bad guys, two bullets” thought experiment.
Role in his map
- Foundational villain: father of continental liberalism, romanticism, and the liberation-from-reality mindset that leads to modern leftism.

3. The Scottish Common Sense Tradition and the American Founders

David Hume

How he appears
- Mainly as the foil Rousseau is reacting against.
- Hume is linked to the British/Scottish Enlightenment and more sober empiricism.
Lindsay’s evaluation
- Thinks Hume didn’t fully embody “common sense realism,” but was closer than Rousseau.
- Sees Rousseau’s rejection of Hume as a fateful wrong turn for the continent.

Thomas Reid & Scottish Common Sense Realism

Core idea (as Lindsay presents it)
- Humans share sense-making faculties in common—perception, reason, basic intuitions.
- Ordinary people can test claims by appealing to shared reality and simple methods (measurement, observation, math).
- You don’t need elites or priestly castes to tell you how the world works or how to read Scripture.
Why he loves this tradition
- It underwrites:
  - Rule of law (facts can be publicly checked).
  - Ordinary juries and republican self-government.
  - Private reading of Scripture without ecclesiastical monopoly on interpretation.
- It fits his anti-technocratic, anti-elite stance: people have common access to reality.
Role in his map
- The backbone of “classical American liberalism,” often neglected when people only talk about Locke.
- Distinguishes American liberalism from both monarchism and continental romanticism.

American Founders (Jefferson, Madison, Adams, etc.)

They’re not “philosophers” in the academic sense, but he treats them as key carriers of a philosophical synthesis.

Jefferson
- Influenced by Locke and Scottish common sense.
- A deist who rejected miracles but lived as what Lindsay calls a “cultural Christian.”
- Represents the blend: Enlightenment rationalism + biblical moral culture.
Adams
- The one who famously said the Constitution is fit only for a “moral and religious people.”
- Heterodox theologically (denies Trinity), but still reinforces the need for a religiously grounded citizenry.
Madison and others
- Draw on common sense realism to justify a system where people can govern themselves through institutions, not enlightened despots.
Lindsay’s view of the Founders
- Overwhelmingly positive:
  - They were right to enshrine religious liberty (state not competent to adjudicate doctrine).
  - They were wise to separate church and state at the federal level while allowing robust religious practice.
- He thinks we should reaffirm rather than repudiate their settlement.

4. Continental Liberalism, German Idealism, and Marxism

Hegel and Marx (and their lineage)

Hegel
- Only mentioned briefly, but placed in the “three shots” joke with Rousseau and Marx.
- Stands for German Idealism, dialectical thinking, and historicized metaphysics.
Karl Marx
- Seen as inheriting Rousseau’s imaginative liberationism:
  - Alienation.
  - Anti-property impulse.
  - Belief in a qualitatively transformed future society.
- For Lindsay, Marxism is the parasitic ideology par excellence:
  - Negative idealism: knows what it hates (capitalism, inequality) rather than what it concretely wants.
  - Uses critique and purity spirals to destroy existing institutions (race, class, etc.).
Role in his story
- Hegel → Marx → critical theory → woke/CRT.
- This is the continental track, distinct from the American one. It is mystical, utopian, and ultimately totalitarian in his view.

5. Critical Theory and the Modern Leftist Philosophical Line

He doesn’t name all the Frankfurt School names in this transcript, but he is clearly talking about that tradition:

Critical theory (Frankfurt School, later CRT)
- Key traits as he describes them:
  - Focus on critique rather than blueprint.
  - Obsession with “structural oppression” (e.g., racism) as the explanation for all ills.
  - Constant escalation: if results aren’t perfect, conclude that oppression is deeper and more hidden.
- He coins (for himself) “negative idealism”:
  - They believe in a better world, but define it only by negation—abolishing what they loathe.
  - This produces endless witch hunts and purity spirals rather than stable reforms.
    Function in his framework
Critical theory is the intellectual bridge between Marx and woke/CRT:
- Same utopian impulse.
- Same hostility to reality and tradeoffs.
- Same tendency to weaponize moral language (“racist,” “oppressor”) to delegitimize opponents.

6. Popper and the “Paradox of Tolerance”

Karl Popper

Where he comes in
- In the debate over how to treat militant ideologies in an open society.
- Lindsay cites Popper’s “paradox of tolerance”: if you are infinitely tolerant, intolerant movements will destroy you.
Lindsay’s take
- Agrees with the basic paradox: you can’t tolerate ideologies whose goal is to abolish tolerance.
- But thinks Popper’s footnote solution is insufficiently precise:
  - Hard real question remains: Where exactly do we withdraw tolerance?
  - How to distinguish legitimate dissent from parasitic, revolutionary ideology in practice?
Role in his story
- Popper represents a self-aware liberalism that knows it must defend itself.
- Lindsay wants to push that line further into practical policy and doctrine.

7. Burke, Hazony, and Traditionalism vs Nationalism

Edmund Burke (implicitly)

Burke isn’t named much, but Lindsay endorses a distinctly Burkean thought:

Societies are slow-moving; deep change must respect tradition, habit, and accumulated wisdom.
Exporting liberalism by force (Iraq) or importing huge populations from non-liberal cultures too quickly is a mistake because traditions cannot be swapped overnight.
Even if he doesn’t expound Burke systematically, he tacitly draws on Burkean gradualism and respect for organic development.

Yoram Hazony

Cites Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism for:
- Distinction between nationalism (independent, non-expansionist, Israel-type model) and imperialism(expansionist, Nazi/communist-type models).
Uses Hazony to frame:
- Some ideologies (communism, Islamism) as imperialist in nature, seeking to colonize other nations and institutions.

8. Sam Harris and the Moral Landscape

Sam Harris

Lindsay briefly references Harris’s “moral landscape” idea:
- The notion that societies can be evaluated according to how well they allow human flourishing, analogous to peaks and valleys.
He:
- Is sympathetic to the intuition that you can compare societies morally by outcomes.
- Thinks existing indices (like the Gini coefficient, some “happiness” indices) are flawed, but he likes the basic project of measuring which cultures approximate the universal principles better.

9. Scripture as an “Anthropological” Guide (Not a Philosopher, but Philosophically Central)

Not a philosopher in the academic sense, but Lindsay treats the Bible as a crucial philosophical text:

He calls it at least “anthropologically true”:
- Its moral laws and narratives map well onto human nature and social reality.
For him:
- God’s laws are not arbitrary commands; they fit the actual nature of human beings.
- Thus, even an agnostic like him can see Scripture as a deep resource for understanding:
  - Property.
  - Justice.
  - Incentives.
  - Social stability.
    In his narrative, Scripture + Locke + common sense realism = the deep moral-philosophical ground of American liberalism.

10. Overall Synthesis: How All These Philosophers Fit His Argument

Putting it together:

Villains / negative track
- Rousseau → Hegel → Marx → critical theory → woke.
- Characterized by:
  - Imagination over reality.
  - Liberation from constraints as the highest good.
  - Negative idealism (knowing only what they hate).
  - Tendency toward totalizing, top-down “general will” or revolutionary politics.
Partial allies / incomplete track
- Hobbes: right about the dangers of anarchy, wrong to solve it with Leviathan.
- Locke: crucial but incomplete without common sense and a richer moral frame.
- Hume: an important empiricist foil to Rousseau but not the final word.
Heroes / positive track
- Scottish Common Sense Realists (esp. Reid): human beings share basic rational faculties; they don’t need elites to interpret reality.
- American Founders (Jefferson, Madison, Adams, etc.): synthesize Locke + common sense + biblical ethics into a constitutional order of ordered liberty.
- Popper (partially): helps articulate the problem of defending an open society against its enemies.
- Burke & Hazony (in effect): remind us that traditions and nations are real, must be respected, and that imperial ideologies are dangerous.
- Scripture: provides an enduring, anthropologically sound moral vocabulary aligned with human nature.
  In short, Lindsay is using philosophy to justify this strategic position:
Re-anchor in the American liberal tradition (Locke + common sense + biblical morality).
Reject the continental liberationist tradition (Rousseau → Marx → critical theory).
Use a Popper-informed awareness of militant ideologies, a Burkean sense of continuity, and a Hazony-style nationalism to protect that tradition in the modern world.

Main Summary

Core of the episode: Lindsay is defending what he calls classical American liberalism (Locke + Scottish Common Sense + biblical moral framework) against both the woke left and the post-liberal/right-reactionary crowd who want monarchy/theocracy or very heavy-handed state action.
He argues:
- The constitution and classical liberalism did not “fail”; they were infiltrated by parasitic ideologies (Marxism, wokeism, jihadism).
- The right should want to restore and update that classical American tradition, not replace it with monarchy, integralism, or some kind of right-wing illiberalism.
- The main long-term battleground is education and digital-era problems (social media, digital property, information warfare).
  Below I’ll:

Summarize each major segment in order.
Explain the philosophical ideas involved.
Fact-check or correct where needed.
Add a “What Lindsay is really saying” distillation each time, since he meanders.

1. Where Lindsay Places Himself on the Right

What they’re talking about
Nick breaks the right into three rough camps:

“Tech bros” who want to roll back to something like 2005.
Classical liberals who want to preserve the founding principles but fix structural weaknesses.
Post-liberals / reactionaries who think the whole liberal project is broken and want radical alternatives (monarchy, integralism, etc.).
Lindsay puts himself very clearly in camp (2).
Lindsay’s view

He calls himself a classical liberal, more specifically a defender of what he later calls classical American liberalism.
He thinks the core liberal principles are universal truths and do work when actually applied:
- Individual liberty
- Equality before the law
- Private property rights
- Limited government / rule of law
The problem is not that liberalism failed, but that we stopped applying it consistently (e.g., equality before the law is badly broken).
He sees this as a 25-year repair project, not a 2-3 year emergency fix. People who want instant restoration are panicking and sliding into illiberal solutions.
He thinks we also need to update classical liberalism to modern technology:
- Example: what does private property mean in a world of memes, digital content, and difficult authentication?
  Concepts explained
Classical liberalism (in his sense)
Historically, this is the tradition of Locke, Montesquieu, Smith, Mill, etc.: individual rights, limited government, rule of law, free markets, religious liberty.
“Universal truths”
He’s not making a detailed meta-ethical argument; he’s basically saying: some political principles work across cultures because they describe enduring features of human nature (incentives, property, reciprocity, etc.).
What Lindsay is really saying here

“I’m not a monarchist or a post-liberal. I want to restore the founding liberal principles—especially equality before the law—and adapt them to the 21st century. It’s a long rebuild, not a quick coup.”

2. Classical vs Continental Liberalism: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Common Sense

2.1 His three “state of nature” pictures

He caricatures three big “state of nature” theorists:

Hobbes
- Humans in the state of nature = “war of all against all”.
- Solution: create a powerful sovereign (“Leviathan”) via social contract, trading many freedoms for security.
Rousseau
- He portrays Rousseau as imagining noble savages: free, “as free as the savages again,” projecting his own libertine fantasies onto travel reports.
- Social contract as expression of “general will”; people become “more free by sacrificing their liberties” (Lindsay calls this dialectical and nonsensical).
- He sees Rousseau as leading toward Marxism and as a radical departure from the English/Scottish Enlightenment stream.
Locke
- Lindsay thinks Locke’s state of nature is also “fanciful”: autonomous individuals and tribes mutually consenting into society.
- He points out that in reality we’re born into pre-existing institutions (family, duties to parents, etc.) we never “consented” to.
  Nuance / corrections
Hobbes and Locke: his sketches are roughly accurate as broad summaries.
Rousseau:
- Rousseau does see early humans as solitary, peaceful and non-possessive, but he is very aware that complex societies change character once property and comparison enter. Lindsay’s “libertine fantasies” comment is more polemical than charitable.
- Linking Rousseau directly to Marx is a common move on the right; there are lines of influence (critique of inequality, focus on alienation), but the relationship is not a straight pipeline.

2.2 “Three liberalisms”: Hobbesian, American, Continental

Lindsay then re-labels the landscape:

Hobbesian / monarchist: strong Leviathan, order over liberty.
Classical American liberalism:
- A blend of Locke + Scottish Common Sense Realism + biblical/Christian moral culture.
- Emphasizes ordinary people’s ability to reason about reality and Scripture without priestly or elite mediation.
Continental liberalism (especially French & later German):
- He says it’s a romantic “liberationism” rooted in Rousseau:
  - Imagination over common sense.
  - “Mysticism posing as politics.”
  - Self-defined self: I decide my obligations, relationships, identity.
- He thinks this is the stream that morphs into modern leftism, identity politics, etc.
  Scottish Common Sense Realism
Core idea:
Ordinary people share basic sense-making capacities—perception, memory, logic—so they can check claims against reality without needing a philosophical elite.
Politically:
- It supports rule of law, jury trials, and the idea that Scripture can be read and understood by ordinary believers.
- American founders like Jefferson, Madison and others were strongly influenced by Scottish thinkers like Thomas Reid and the “common sense” school. ({{meta.siteName}})
  What Lindsay is really saying
  
  “Don’t lump everything called ‘liberal’ together. The American founding draws on Locke + Scottish common sense + biblical ethics. Rousseau and the continental tradition are a different animal—romantic, mystical, easily captured by leftist liberation projects.”

3. Leftism as Rebellion Against Reality / “Negative Idealism” / Critical Theory

3.1 Liberation from reality

Nick suggests continental liberalism looks like “liberation from reality,” and Lindsay agrees:

He says the continental/left project defines evil as whatever limits my self-actualization.
They treat ordinary facts of existence—work, scarcity, tradeoffs—as if they were oppressive structures (e.g., “capitalism makes me work for food”).
He ridicules the idea (he saw online) that “poverty doesn’t exist in nature, capitalism created it,” and counters that poverty is the default state; civilization is what lifts us out of it.
Philosophically, he’s contrasting:
A realist view: reality and human nature impose constraints; politics works with those.
An idealist/utopian view: reality is seen as malleable, and anything that frustrates the utopia is called oppression.

3.2 “Negative idealism” and critical theory

He introduces the idea of negative idealism to explain critical theory:

They believe in an ideal society but don’t really know what it looks like.
What they do know is what they hate about the current order (racism, sexism, etc.).
So they embark on a purity spiral:
- Identify some evil (e.g., racism).
- Make war on it everywhere.
- When the world doesn’t become perfect, conclude the evil must be deeper and more pervasive.
- This turns into “witch hunts” → critical race theory, racial Marxism, etc.
  This is his reading of critical theory (Frankfurt School et al.): critique existing society relentlessly, trust that clearing away oppression will make a qualitatively different world emerge.
  Fact-check gist
Critical theory really does emphasize critique over blueprint and aims to reveal hidden domination and “false consciousness.” (Scholars Crossing)
It’s fair to say it tends to be negative, but many critical theorists do outline positive visions (Habermas’s “ideal speech situation,” Marcuse’s “liberated” society, etc.). Lindsay is emphasizing its perpetual-critique side.
What Lindsay is really saying

“Left-continental liberalism and critical theory are driven by resentment against reality. They don’t know what utopia is; they just keep purging sins (racism, etc.) in the belief that a perfect world will magically appear afterward.”

4. Common Sense, Moral Truth, God, and Religious Liberty

Nick pushes a classic criticism of liberalism:
common sense can tell you what works, but can it tell you what is morally right? Don’t you ultimately need a transcendent moral lawgiver?

4.1 Lindsay’s answer

He gives a layered answer:

Some moral truths are discernible by common sense
- Golden Rule–type reasoning (“if it hurts when done to me, it probably hurts when I do it to others”) doesn’t require revelation.
Classical liberalism is wrongly accused of secularizing morality
- Most founders were sincere Christians (or at least “cultural Christians”) and were not trying to expel Scripture from public life.
Why religious liberty then?
- Because they distrusted state control of religion.
- Different denominations read Scripture differently; the wars of religion in Europe showed that state-church fusion leads to persecution and bloodshed.
- So:
  - The state must stay out of adjudicating correct interpretation.
  - Individuals and churches can and should look to Scripture as moral authority.
His own position on Scripture
- He’s an agnostic, but thinks the Bible is at least “anthropologically true”:
  - Its laws and stories fit human nature and social reality remarkably well.
  - So it’s an excellent guide for law and politics even if you’re unsure about its metaphysical claims.
- He argues God’s laws fit human nature, so you can and should ask: “What feature of human nature is this law tracking?” That makes them useable in secular legislation.
  Fact-check / nuance

Founders and religion:
- It’s accurate that the founding generation was broadly Christian or deist and saw religion as important for virtue. (EEOC)
- The First Amendment’s establishment and free-exercise clauses were indeed intended to prevent a national established church and protect religious conscience.
State churches at the state level:
- Several early states did have established churches; these were gradually disestablished in the decades after the founding, largely because they conflicted with religious liberty and pluralism. (Wikipedia)
  What Lindsay is really saying
  
  “You can reason your way to a lot of moral truths, and the Bible is an extraordinarily good ‘user manual’ for human beings. The state should protect people’s ability to pursue Scripture and doctrine, but must not declare one denomination’s reading the official truth.”

5. Universals vs “Just Western” – Culture, Immigration, and Inequality of Cultures

Nick raises the Iraq / mass immigration problem:

If classical liberalism is universal, why:
- Did Iraq not become liberal when we “gave” them democracy?
- Do some immigrant groups from non-liberal societies resist assimilation and import hostile norms?

5.1 Lindsay’s universalism

He answers:

The underlying principles (truth, justice, love) really are universal:
1. Truth: societies that track reality better (science, honest accounting, accurate information) out-compete those that live in fantasy.
2. Justice / equity (in the pre-woke sense): people getting what they deserve and not getting what they don’t deserve.
3. Love: a pro-social, high-trust attitude toward neighbors rather than enmity.
Cultures aren’t equal:
- Cultures that align better with these principles flourish more (higher productivity, better institutions, more resilience to disaster, etc.).
- GDP per capita is not everything, but it’s one rough proxy that societies are doing something right.
  This is basically a moral realist + civilizational excellence position: there are better and worse ways to structure a society.

5.2 Why export/import attempts often fail

Exporting liberalism to Iraq:
- You can’t bomb a country and then expect it to instantly adopt your values.
- Traditional habits, corruption, tribal structures, and sheer resentment make rapid “democratization” unrealistic.
Mass immigration:
- Bringing in huge numbers of people from very different cultures too quickly overwhelms assimilation and can import harmful practices (corruption, clan politics, etc.).
But he warns against racial essentialism:
- He rejects the idea that “desert people” (or any race) are inherently incompatible.
- He points to adoptees raised in American homes who are fully culturally American regardless of their genetic background.
- So the problem is culture, not race.
  Nick’s anecdote about “black culture” in a college class is used to make the same point: race ≠ culture.
  Fact-check
There is strong empirical support that institutional quality and rule of law are major drivers of GDP per capita and disaster resilience. (Wikipedia)
Assimilation and immigration:
- Rapid, large-scale immigration can strain assimilation, especially when combined with welfare states and weak integration policy. That said, outcomes vary widely by policy and context; it’s not automatic that “importing people makes you third world.”
  What Lindsay is really saying
  
  “The principles behind the American system aren’t just ‘ours’; they’re human universals. Not all cultures approximate them equally well. That matters—but the issue is culture and institutions, not race.”

Nick raises the post-liberal charge:
If the constitution and the founding were so good, why didn’t they prevent wokeism and left capture of institutions?

6.1 Immune system analogy

Lindsay’s reply:

Think of the constitution as an immune system:
- It’s designed to defend the body (polity) from disease (tyranny).
- But immune systems still get overwhelmed or fooled; that doesn’t mean the immune system is worthless or should be replaced entirely.
There are parasitic ideologies:
- Communism / Marxism.
- Radical Islamism.
- Other imperial ideologies.
These ideologies actively look for ways to infiltrate strong institutions rather than fight them head-on.

6.2 Catholic Church and liberation theology

He uses Catholicism as an example:

Catholic Church historically put up a strong intellectual resistance to communism (papal encyclicals condemning socialism/communism in the 19th and early 20th centuries). (Wikipedia)
The Soviets allegedly responded by promoting liberation theology inside the Church:
- Reinterpreting Scripture through Marxist “liberation” categories.
- Encouraging communists to become priests, rise through the hierarchy, and push this line.
  Fact-check / nuance
The Catholic Church did indeed issue major anti-communist encyclicals (e.g. Qui pluribus 1846, Rerum Novarum 1891, Divini Redemptoris 1937). (Isidore)
The claim that the KGB created liberation theology comes primarily from defector Ion Mihai Pacepa; this is cited often in conservative circles but is disputed by scholars who see liberation theology as a largely homegrown Latin American movement later influenced and sometimes exploited by the Soviets. (Catholic Culture)
So Lindsay is presenting one contested interpretation as if it were settled.

He also points to social gospel in Protestant churches:

Early 20th-century progressive theology that reframed Jesus as a kind of proto-socialist.
He sees this as another channel by which socialist ideas entered religious institutions.
What Lindsay is really saying

“Institutions as strong as the Catholic Church or Protestantism or the Constitution can still be subverted from within. Parasites adapted, exploited loopholes, and infiltrated. That’s not proof the core principles failed; it’s proof we have to guard the institutions more intelligently.”

7. Militant Ideologies, Bans, and Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance”

Nick asks:
If communism and jihadism are openly hostile to your framework, shouldn’t we ban them from public life next time?

7.1 Lindsay’s caution

He’s sympathetic to the concern but very cautious:

Parasite problem:
These ideologies rarely show up waving a hammer-and-sickle flag.
- Woke/CRT didn’t announce itself as “Marxist” at first.
- Many people sincerely believe they’re just “anti-racist,” not ideological revolutionaries.
Weaponization problem:
- Give the state power to ban “communism” and people in power will quickly stretch that to censor whatever they don’t like under that label.
  He references Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance”:
Popper argued that an open society cannot tolerate unlimited tolerance; if it tolerates militant intolerant movements, they will destroy it.
Popper allowed that there are circumstances when intolerant movements must be suppressed, especially when they advocate violence or refuse rational argument. (Practical Theory)
Lindsay says this answer is not enough; the real argument on the right now is: where exactly do we withdraw tolerance?
What Lindsay is really saying

“There is a problem of militant ideologies that exploit liberal tolerance, but blanket bans are dangerous and easy to abuse. The hard question is where, concretely, you draw the line and how you enforce it without turning liberalism into its opposite.”

8. Concrete Uses of State Power: Immigration, Law, Universities, Crime

Nick pushes hard on:
“I get that you don’t want monarchy or right-authoritarianism, but what specific uses of state power do you support?”

8.1 Immigration, naturalization, and refugees

Lindsay’s suggestions:

Restore ideological screening for immigrants
Historically, U.S. immigration law did screen for anarchists, communists, etc. (Justia Law)
He wants that revived:
- People who openly hold militant ideologies should not be admitted.
Naturalization & denaturalization
- He thinks revoking citizenship should be possible (rarely, with due process) for naturalized citizens who:
  - Join terrorist organisations.
  - Engage in sedition or conspiracy against the state.
- Current law already allows revocation for certain fraudulent or treasonous behavior; he wants it used more seriously.
Border and asylum games
- He argues radicals can deliberately cause instability (wars, conflicts) to generate refugee flows that then enter Western countries under asylum rules.
- He wants asylum/refugee systems treated more as potential military/strategic questions than purely humanitarian.
  Fact-check
The U.S. has historically barred anarchists and some communists, especially during the early Cold War. (Justia Law)
Denaturalization is already legally possible but rare; it usually requires evidence of fraud, war crimes, or treason. (Wikipedia)
The claim that radical clerics or regimes systematically manufacture refugee crises for infiltration is more speculative; sometimes true (e.g., ISIS explicitly encouraged migration and foreign fighters), sometimes not.

8.2 Equality before the law vs “equity” and disparate impact

Here he gets very specific about law:

He wants a return to strict equality before the law (14th Amendment’s equal protection clause).
He attacks:
- Affirmative action executive orders (esp. LBJ’s EO 11246 for federal contractors).
- Disparate impact doctrine:
  - Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971): Supreme Court held that even neutral employment tests can be illegal if they disproportionately affect protected groups and aren’t job-related. (Legal Information Institute)
  - Civil Rights Act of 1991: codified disparate impact liability in statute. (Miami Law Repository)
- He says this shifted civil rights law from protecting individuals against discrimination based on classification to enforcing group outcome parity.
He claims:
- LBJ’s affirmative action EO violated equal protection from the start.
- Trump has removed “Johnson’s affirmative action EO” and is also attacking disparate-impact enforcement.
  Fact-check / correction
EO 11246 (1965) did require federal contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure nondiscrimination; it’s been a central pillar of affirmative action policy. (Congress.gov)
In 2025, Trump issued an order directing federal agencies to stop enforcing disparate impact liability as much as possible. (Reuters)
In addition, he has now revoked EO 11246, effectively ending that particular affirmative action order, though some legal challenges are ongoing. (Congress.gov)
Lindsay’s 75% claim:
He says “75% of the American legal system is based off the Hebrew Bible, at least, is what they said.”
- There is scholarship arguing biblical influence on Anglo-American law, but there is no serious empirical basis for a “75%” number. That’s at best an over-confident talking point, not a research consensus. (Robert Clifton Robinson)
  On “equity”:
Historically, equity in law means fairness/relief where strict rules would be unjust, not strictly “getting what you deserve.”
In modern DEI jargon, equity is often defined as equality of outcomes or condition, which is closer to what Lindsay is attacking. He’s right about the DEI usage, less so about the word’s full legal history.
What Lindsay is really saying

“A lot of what we call civil rights now is really Soviet-style outcome-balancing. We need to rip out disparate impact and outcome-based ‘equity’ and get back to equal protection of individuals under the law.”

8.3 Universities, funding, and liability

Nick asks whether defunding radical universities is a legitimate use of power. Lindsay says yes:

He supports:
- Cutting or conditioning federal funding for universities that engage in open sedition, terrorism-support, or blatant discrimination.
- Opening civil right of action pathways so students can sue universities for fraud when they don’t deliver the education they promised.
He emphasizes deterrence:
- You don’t need to imprison hundreds; a dozen high-profile prosecutions or defunding actions changes incentives radically.

8.4 National Guard, crime, and constitutional limits

They discuss using the National Guard/federal force in high-crime cities:

Both are cautious about Posse Comitatus and the long tradition against using the military for domestic policing, except:
- Where federal law enforcement is being obstructed.
- Or where there is genuine insurrection or severe breakdown.
Lindsay’s main point:
- If you do federalize force in DC (which is constitutional), you should also wage a media and messaging campaign showing:
  - How much safer it’s become.
  - That the goal is to restore local policing and then pull the feds back.
- Use DC as a proof-of-concept that cities need not be hellholes under soft-on-crime regimes.
  What Lindsay is really saying
  
  “I’m not against using state power. Use it: to secure borders, screen ideologies, revoke citizenship from actual traitors, defund radical universities, enforce equal protection, and prosecute crime. But stay within constitutional limits and be very wary of vague bans and permanent militarization.”

9. Education and the Digital Age: Where the Real Long War Is

Near the end, he says the biggest missing piece in the whole conversation is education:

Kids in both public schools and universities are being formed in:
- Conflict theory (oppressor/oppressed lens).
- Identity politics.
- Narratives that reject the founding proposition “all men are created equal.”
Two reactions:
- Left: “The system doesn’t work for me → burn it down.”
- Radical right: “Neutrality and equal rights are impossible → impose our side.”
He argues that unless education is reoriented toward:
- Building competence (people who can build, create, lead).
- Teaching the actual philosophical and historical foundations of the American system.
- Rejecting indoctrination in conflict/identity narratives.
  …the republic will keep generating radicals on both sides.
  Then he raises a new frontier question:
  What does classical liberalism look like in the digital 21st century?
Digital property:
- Intellectual property, software, AI outputs, memes, “right to repair.”
- Hard to define and enforce property rights in a world where copying is nearly costless.
Information warfare / online invasion:
- Social media platforms saturated with accounts from abroad (he throws out ~250m “third world” accounts on X; that’s more an illustration than a rigorously documented stat).
- Foreign states (China, Russia, Iran) wage information war and “people’s war” through online propaganda.
- This is a kind of invasion the Constitution didn’t anticipate.
  He suggests we may need:
A serious discussion of a “digital bill of rights”.
New doctrines for:
- What counts as a foreign invasion or hostile operation in the information sphere.
- How to protect citizens’ liberty while countering foreign information warfare.
  What Lindsay is really saying
  
  “The real long war is over how we educate our children and how we handle digital property and information warfare. If we don’t solve those, arguing monarchy vs liberalism is just rearranging deck chairs.”

10. So What Should the Right Want? – Distilled

Nick gives a closing summary and asks Lindsay to correct it. The distilled version:

10.1 Nick’s paraphrase (which Lindsay mostly accepts)

The right should want to restore the American classical liberal tradition:
- Individual liberty.
- Private property.
- Free and competitive markets.
- Limited constitutional government.
- Representative institutions.
Recognize the importance of the transcendent (moral/objective truth, often via Christianity) but:
- Do not use state power to compel religious belief.
Use state power aggressively but lawfully to:
- Fix civil rights distortions (disparate impact, outcome-equity).
- Control immigration and naturalization in ways that protect the polity.
- Sanction and possibly denaturalize people engaging in subversion/terrorism.
- Defund or legally challenge universities and institutions that are openly subversive.
Reaffirm that:
- The Founders got a lot right.
- The system does not protect itself automatically; it depends on citizens who understand, love, and defend it.
  Lindsay’s main additions:
This fight repeats every generation—secret societies, Jacobins, communists, woke activists—so vigilance is a permanent duty.
The key battlefields are:
- Education (schools, universities, pedagogy).
- The digital/technological sphere (property, rights, information war).
Updating classical liberalism to the 21st century means:
- Keeping its core principles.
- Figuring out how to apply “securing rights” and “repelling invasions” when “property” and “invasion” now include digital assets and social media psy-ops.

Final Take

In this episode, Lindsay is trying to thread a needle:

Against the left, he says:
Your liberationism is a revolt against reality; your equity and critical theory are corrosive and parasitic.
Against the post-liberal right, he says:
The problem isn’t that the founders were wrong; it’s that we let parasites capture our institutions. The answer is not monarchy or theocracy, but a more serious, better-guarded version of the American liberal tradition.
Philosophically, he grounds this in:
- A realist view of human nature and moral universals.
- A high view of common sense and Scripture (anthropologically, even if he’s agnostic).
- A suspicion of utopianism and dialectical schemes (Rousseau → Hegel → Marx → woke).
  Where he overstates or simplifies:
He’s hard on Rousseau, and he compresses a very complex intellectual history into a tidy “three schools” story.
The KGB-invented-liberation-theology narrative is one contested reading, not settled fact.
The “75% of the legal system is based on Leviticus” line is not supported by serious scholarship.
But conceptually, the through-line is clear:

The right should want: a renewed, better-guarded, technologically updated version of the American founding order—rooted in truth, justice, and love; open to religious moral foundations; ruthless toward parasitic ideologies; and absolutely relentless about education and rule of law.

Transcript

Intro
0:00
Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to a special edition of Making the Argument, where we are asking the
0:05
question, what should the right want? We all seem to be fairly clear on at least
0:11
one thing we’re all fighting against. We’re fighting against wokeness. And our guest today has probably done I I would
0:18
argue has done the best job of anybody of explaining the political and the philosophical underpinnings of wokeness.
0:26
Talking about how it’s manifested in a place like communist China, how it’s infiltrated in the United States. If you
0:32
want to go down the rabbit hole of wokeness, James Lindseay is your guy. And I would highly encourage that you go
0:39
take a look at the video he’s put together over at New Discourses. His bullet points are fantastic. If you’re
0:44
looking for a crash course in wokeness, James has provided it for you free of charge. But today, we’re going to talk
0:51
more about this problem that we see within the right. Because, as it’s been put before by one guest before,
0:57
co-elligerents are not necessarily allies. And so, if we can really have
1:02
any hope of not just defeating wokeness, but then coming out the other end of this with something that we really
1:08
believe in and want to fight for, we’re going to be in trouble. Now, for the purpose of this conversation, we’re
Three Groups on the Right and Where James Lindsay Falls
1:14
we’ve ident identified kind of three groups on the right. One group is what you might kind of call the the tech bros
1:21
or it’s the people that are fairly new to the right, but they don’t see any massive problems. They just kind of want
1:27
to reset to 2005. That’s where they want to start back over. And other than that, they’re
1:33
pretty happy with what’s going on. Then you have this crowd that is still very very much involved in the classical
1:39
liberal tradition, but they are also very very aware of some of the problems that we’ve seen transpire within our
1:45
country. They they understand some of the ways that wokeness infiltrated and they want to preserve classical
1:51
liberalism, but they do want to make some structural changes to make sure that we can be better for the fight. And
1:57
then you have a third category. And this third category is at the point where they’re kind of questioning everything. They don’t want to reset to 2005. they
2:04
might want to reset back to monarchy which again is not in the American
2:09
tradition but they make an argument that you know you didn’t see wokeness of this
2:14
variety springing up in the sort of environments that protected tradition and they are trying to look for some
2:21
sort of solution to this problem because after all as they argue if the constitution could have prevented this
2:27
from happening it would have it didn’t so what should we do going forward so
2:33
names. Looking at those three groups, is there is there any one group I I think I know the answer to this, but is there
2:38
any one group that you would kind of more closely identify with? Yeah, definitely. I’m in the group that
2:45
just wants it to be 1995 specifically. Again, no, I’m just kidding. I want I’m the classical liberal group. Um, pretty
2:51
obviously. Um, I think that the principles of classical liberalism uh work. I think that they are in fact
2:57
universal truths. And since they’re universal truths, they work for everybody. They work when they are
3:03
applied however and they don’t work when they’ve been abandoned. So my uh prescription would be that we have to
3:09
get back to those roots and we have to apply uh our principles um consistently
3:15
and evenly which includes equality before the law which is one of the most broken ones that we have doing that I al
3:22
I also think is a hard project. It’s a long project. It’s not a two-year project or a three-year project. And so
3:28
a lot of the difference that I think I have with a lot of people kind of in this discussion space is that I see this
3:34
as a 25-year repair project and they are freaking out
3:39
that if we don’t fix it in two or three years like maybe while Trump is still in office that all is lost and so they they
3:46
see it as a insufficient circumstance that we’ve you know pass the point of no return. But I’m in that general
3:51
classical liberal uh position. I do actually I don’t know that I have a critique of classical liberalism at
3:58
large specifically but I do think that there is fruitful ground for a discussion which is how does classical
4:04
liberalism and I’ve given a very long podcast on this by the way so I’ve thought about it and talked about it
4:10
it’s been a minute but um how does classical liberalism update to the 21st century technological frame that we find
4:16
ourselves in which I think is a very legitimate question for example just to give you a taste of what I mean how do
4:22
you secure for somebody’s right to private property when you have digital property and it becomes almost
4:27
impossible to authenticate whose property is whose can you steal a meme is like a joke within that space.
4:34
Well well let me let me ask you this like if we to try to define our terms here when I think of classical
Classical vs Continental vs American Liberalism
4:40
liberalism I generally think of kind of more of a lock in view of classical liberalism. So I mean Loach was
4:47
obviously a very dedicated Christian. He actually went so far to say that atheism should be outlawed. But um but leaving
4:52
that aside for a second, we would probably associate a lock in version of classical liberalism with the ideas of
4:58
individual liberty, private property rights, um generally free markets. I
5:04
mean that doesn’t mean no restrictions, but generally free markets. Um he would have also argued for representative
5:09
government. He would have uh he he obviously advocated for um the the
5:15
strength and the importance of of the family and and cultural institutions and religious institutions, but he but he
5:21
also would have looked at it from the standpoint of kind of like different provinces of of responsibility.
5:27
And I I think when you look at the American founding, you see a lot of John Lock along with other things. Um now
5:34
some people will say, “Okay, Nick, that’s one version of classical liberalism, but then you also have like the Zjac Rouso version of classical
5:41
liberalism that really goes it’s it’s almost kind of this battle between the French Revolution and the American Revolution. Um, how would you def that?
5:49
That’s kind of like how I see maybe the the positive manifestations of classical liberalism was within that lock in
5:55
tradition built on a on a firm foundation of like uh you know Christian morals and Christian culture. But I I
6:03
can’t deny that Rouso also comes from this tradition to some degree. So how would you define it? I mean, I think
6:09
Rouso was in a gigantic argument and debate with the English and Scottish philosophers that outlined that
6:16
enlightenment. And I think he’s a departure from it. I think it’s very helpful to realize that these three guys, I’m going to name three, one being
6:23
Lockach, one being Russo, the other being Thomas Hobbes, were trying to work out, they were obsessed at the time, and
6:29
I I think this is generally a waste of time and a bad way to think philosophically, but it was like this the fashion of the era to think about um
6:37
so-called state of nature. What is the human being if we stripped civilization away? And so, you get generally three
6:43
answers. Hobbes has this, you know, we’re a bunch of basically Mad Max savages and if we um, you know, we’re
6:51
going to basically form a bunch of cartels and we’re just going to bully each other, endless war of all against all. And he says, we solve that problem
6:57
by generating a social contract through a powerful church state object he called
7:03
Leviathan that basically becomes something like a tyranny. We we we sacrifice many of our rights in order to
7:09
have order and security and so on. And then um Rouso was kind of the exact
7:16
opposite of this. He was like, you know, the social contract is basically whatever people consent to. It’s a
7:22
manifestation of the general will and that we’re going to become more free by sacrificing our liberties, which
7:28
actually doesn’t make any sense. It was a dialectical notion. He had fanciful notions that he was taking, you know,
7:33
the writings of missionaries who were sending back what what’s it like in Barbados or whatever,
7:40
you know, and then he’d read these things which were just these kind of fairly poor descriptions of what was
7:45
actually going on in native life with not a ton of understanding from an outsider, a French outsider looking in.
7:50
Then he would transpose on that all his weird fantasies of basically a lentious
7:56
um libertine lifestyle that he wanted to live. and he believed that we could oh we could be as free as the savages again
8:02
but we’ve got to keep you know all the benefits of the city at the same time and you actually get Marxism out of that
8:08
so I don’t see this as a is a is a continuous stream within classical
8:13
liberalism and of course third you have lock and his state of nature is not a whole lot better in terms of being
8:20
they’re a bit fanciful he’s got this idea that all these kind of autonomous individuals and sometimes groups or
8:26
tribes end up work you know working out through mutual consent the society that
8:31
they want to have but that’s obviously not how things really work either. Uh you know there were existing social
8:37
structures people do make contracts and can break bonds or whatever but we don’t live according to only a set of
8:44
principles that we’ve totally consented to. Nobody consented to who their mother is for example and there are duties and
8:49
obligations that you have to your parents for a wide variety of reasons and you’re just stuck with them. I mean
8:56
you can rebel against them but I mean there’s a reason that that’s one of the ten commandments is not to do that and
9:02
so you know they were obsess I just want to put that out there to say first of all here’s these three distinct frames
9:07
second of all that they were coming at the question from a particular philosophical lens that’s sort of like
9:15
really I know they weren’t all the same era you know Thomas Hobbes was a century before lock and lock was a bit before
9:23
Rouso but um this period of time had this kind of
9:28
weird way of thinking about things like let’s get all the way down to like these weird brass taxs that actually are not
9:34
indicative of reality and then impose our vision on of the world through it. So the three visions are in my opinion
9:42
effectively Hobbes Lockach and Rouso and that means they’re not the same thing.
9:48
So I don’t see the continental liberalism that Europe that that particularly France first and then
9:54
Germany later picked up as continuous with the lock and then Scottish common
10:00
sense realist which is a totally different um tradition that came
10:05
obviously from Scotland that got imported to the Americas and that Jefferson and uh Madison and and all the
10:12
rest were so invested in this idea of common sense is not present in Russo and
10:17
it’s not fully present in in lock. So there’s this other idea that’s so
10:22
essential. So when you say if you do want to boil it down to you’ve kind of got the monarchists who are following
10:28
the idea of hobbs and then you’ve got the um the the American revolution
10:34
that’s doing this classical liberal thing or as I’ve just to be clear about this I’ve started calling it classical
10:40
American liberalism just to be very clear that I mean the thing that came through you know this combination of
10:47
lock and common sense realism and Leviticus and Thomas Jefferson who didn’t believe in the miracles of the
10:53
Bible but was still very heavily rooted as a use the bad word cultural Christian
10:59
uh even though he was a deist and didn’t believe in the miracles and all this stuff and the other founders and then
11:04
you’ve got this continental monstrosity um of liber liberationism ultimately
11:10
that comes out of the romantic rousoian frame and these are three distinct schools and so if we confuse them
11:19
continental liberalism versus American liberalism It’s very hard to have this conversation. I don’t think there’s a
11:25
lot of redeeming qualities in continental liberalism. In fact, I think it’s largely mysticism posing as
11:31
politics and it’s self-serving. Um, you know, Patrick Denine, who would be in a
11:36
very different camp than I am, says that he says the liberal, but it’s not the liberal mind. It’s this continental
11:42
thing or the leftist thing. He says that they that they have this concept of the self-defined self that they’re going to
11:48
define themselves and you can be whoever you are and whatever you want and all of your um you know relationships and all
11:54
of your duties and obligations are totally of your own choosing and so you’re defining who you are and and what your life will be and that’s I mean it’s
12:02
a straw man to the American liberal tradition because it doesn’t fit. So the word liberal there is no good from
12:07
Denine but the continental liberal tradition kind of does veer that way and I think it’s a disaster. So when I say,
12:14
you know, that I veer toward the classical liberal, I don’t accept Russo. There’s the old joke, you know, you go
12:19
back in time, you got two bullets, you got three people. What do you do? You know, and you can pick any three people you want. It’s like become a dangerous thing in Virginia
12:25
these days. Yeah. Well, um, you know, the old the old joke was it’s like, you know, I
12:30
don’t know. We got to pick three awful people. Hegel, Marks, and Rouso. And the the answer is that you go back and put
12:37
both bullets in Russo to be sure. Um, and I I I kind of agree with that. So I
12:44
do bend less toward lock though in my view of classical liberalism and its foundations and more toward people like
12:49
Reed with the common sense tradition. Common sense meaning we all have sensemaking apparatuses and sensemaking
12:57
processes uh in common and therefore we don’t need no elite to tell us how the
13:03
world works. We don’t need somebody else to inform us how we’re to understand the
13:08
world around us. And at the end of the day, even with scriptural matters, we technically don’t need some authority to
13:14
tell us how to exede the text. If we have the scripture before us and we take that as the authority, we don’t need a
13:22
priest or an intermediary or a bishop or anything else. Though they might be a helpful expert, we don’t need one to be
13:28
able to read the text and discern for ourselves what it means. So this common
13:33
sense tradition is this, you know, it’s this red-headed stepchild mentioned
13:38
Thomas Jefferson, uh, you know, backbone running through the American tradition that’s not present on the continent. And
13:45
when I said that there was this argument, it was specifically and it was David Hume who’s not perfect either, but
13:51
it’s David Hume who Rouso is rejecting at the time. And so they had I I
13:57
secretly kind of think it was a lover spat. I’m just going to say that, but I don’t know. Um, I’m just speculating
14:03
based on how badly Russo took the reputation. I’m not on boarding everything Hume Hume said. I don’t think
14:09
that Hume was fully invested in this common sense thing. I don’t think he had everything right. But what I do know is
14:15
that that Rouso some for some reason got very mad at what Hume was saying and was doing this kind of like defiant
14:22
rejection of it. And I just think he messed up the continent and it’s not representative of what I think is is
14:28
useful going forward. that common sense element has to be there at the foundation.
Leftism’s Rebellion Against Reality
14:33
No, I so I I find myself when I’m talking with somebody that’s traditionalist or neo-reactionary or
14:40
whatever else, you know, they they want to categorize as and they’re and I’m looking at their critiques of classical liberalism, my my response is usually,
14:46
look, I’m I’m I I’m fine with understanding critiques of any man-made system. Um my problem though is that
14:53
when I when I look at Russo, that seems like such a massive departure. And and you said something in there that I think
14:59
it’s important when you talk about the continental system, this liberation concept. It’s almost as if they’re trying to liberate themselves from
15:04
reality. They are. And and and anything which anything which is perceived as some sort of
15:10
restriction on their reaching self-actualization or whatever else is like that’s the very definition of evil.
15:16
It is staining in the way of the way they view themselves and they want to be. It it’s one of the reasons why you’ll you’ll look at some of the
15:22
critiques that you get from that that kind of school of thought and they will um they will assign to like capitalism
15:29
for instance they will assign to capitalism a a sin which is just a process of existence like it it’s you
15:36
know I can’t believe I have to work for my food. Yeah. That’s existence. It’s not capitalism. Like I I don’t know what
15:42
to tell you. Yeah. I had a total rant about this. Not to divert you. Just the other day, I it was funny cuz I was at this this uh I
15:50
was at this thing in Michigan and this poor lady just overhears me go off on
15:55
this I was in a restaurant actually in Michigan with a guy and so I don’t know who’s around me and I just go off on
16:01
this terror where it’s like I had just seen it on my social media where some leftist some some communist was
16:08
complaining you know exactly what you just said. basically capitalism is, you know, where you have to work for your
16:13
food and poverty doesn’t exist in nature. And I’m like, what the heck are they talking about? Poverty is literally
16:18
the default state of nature. Have you watched, I don’t know, any animal anywhere ever? Like their whole life is
16:25
scrabbling for food and to not get eaten all the time. Like base poverty is in
16:31
fact the the the thing that we’ve all worked to build civilization not to be in. And so yeah they there is this
16:39
desire to liberate from reality there the to liberate from any sense of restriction of what they can imagine for
16:47
the the parameters of their lives. So it’s an imagination driven or an idealism driven picture and just because
16:55
you know it’s my expertise in critical theory I’ve kind of recently come to understand that this is what’s going on
17:00
with critical theory is that they don’t actually know what that perfect world looks like. They just know what parts where they feel oppressed, like reality
17:07
is oppressing me. And so they they they don’t know what they want. They just know what they don’t want. And so what
17:12
you get out of that situation, which I call negative idealism. They have an they know there’s an ideal or they
17:18
believe there’s an ideal state of society, but we don’t have it. And we know we don’t have it because say
17:23
there’s racism. So what they then do is go on this like puritanical witch hunt against racism. And since things don’t
17:30
magically get perfect, as you know, maybe they do correct some racism. I don’t know. Um, we have a civil rights
17:37
movement or something and everything’s a little bit better and it doesn’t all get better that, you know, they go on the witch hunt turns into this purity spiral
17:44
and then what you end up with is critical race theory and, you know, basically racial Marxism. Uh it’s like a
17:49
downward spiral because their belief is that a qualitatively different world
17:57
will exist when they purge the existing world of the great sin that is the thing that’s not supposed to be in their
18:02
ideal. And so that’s again with Russo this focus on imagination
18:08
um kind of as the basis for how you know you’re going to see the future parameters of society. And this is again
18:14
why it’s at odds with this common sense. Common sense is definitely I mean it sounds like it has its feet on the
18:19
ground but the idea actually is that the reason that we can have unity of belief
18:26
in a common sense tradition is because we all have the sense apparatuses necessary to check the answers that
18:32
somebody gave. So if I come in and I measure your living room and I tell you it’s 27 feet across and you’re like I
18:38
don’t think it’s that big and I’m like well I measured it. You’re like give me the tape measure. Actually I don’t trust yours. Let me get mine. Right. And you
18:44
can we can actually defer to to some objective standard outside of ourselves
18:51
to make sense. And where it’s confusing then we have a debate and we try to apply reason and other tools sometimes
18:57
rhetoric and whatever. But in the thing that we got going on over in the continent where it’s imagination and
19:03
idealistbased um where reality becomes the enemy, the problem there is that there is no
19:10
standard to appeal to except the imagination of the guy who’s in charge and his gang of thugs that he that he
19:16
puts around himself. So you end up with an arbitrary standard. you end up with this, you know, totalitarian vision
19:23
ultimately because you have two options ultimately for how you can get massive political unity um which these guys
19:31
believe you have to have to have a functioning polity. And one of those answers is that we appeal to the most
19:38
objective standards that we can find and that’s the common sense rule of law, classical liberal and the American sense
19:44
tradition. Then the other one is, well, if we’ve got to have consensus, we’re just going to manufacture it and force
19:50
it on people. And that’s where you start getting jackabins and and Marxists and Boleviks and fascists who are trying to
19:58
force a manufactured consensus about reality and the limitations, the the
20:04
lack of limitations of human potential really uh that that come with their imaginative vision. So again, a huge
20:10
diversion and that common sense thing being the key element for me that’s that’s got to be there that and common
20:16
sense doesn’t mean oh yeah you know it’s common sense don’t put your hand on the stove. It means that which anyone with
20:23
the proper approach which is not some special magical ritual you know it’s just observation reason do the math or
20:31
whatever it works out to is able to discern or determine for themselves independently of what other people do.
20:39
Uh therefore we have sensemaking in common with one another. I want to thank True Classic because
20:45
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Where do Moral Truths Come From?
21:49
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Go try them out. So, let let me ask on this because one of the one of the critiques that is coming from, you know,
22:19
part of the the coalition against wokeness, for lack of a better term, is that, okay, that’s all great. I we we
22:26
share your belief in common sense. Um now the one thing that that will get brought up and that I I think is a fair
22:32
critique is that okay but common sense can tell us a lot of things about what we should do with respect to let’s say
22:39
ordering our lives to achieve uh better security or prosperity or comfort but it
22:46
can’t ultimately tell us like morally right or wrong what you ought to do. It
22:51
can say that if you do these things, it’ll yield these results. And then it’s that quest for the transcendent like if
22:56
there is objective truth, if there is objective morality, well then it it it
23:02
would suggest that there is an objective like moral lawgiver, right? And that’s where you get into the question of of
23:08
God. And and to your point, you had someone like Jefferson that would would definitely fall more into the deist
23:13
camp, but then most of the other, you know, signers of the Declaration of Independence, for instance, were
23:19
definitely more like what you would call solid Christians. They they solid in Christian doctrine. Sure. So part of the argument there is
23:26
like okay this class this classical liberalism this idea of common sense this idea of being able to use things
23:32
like the laws of logic um to be able to use things like the scientific method in order to to come to you know reasonable
23:39
and rational conclusions about how our environment exists and how natural processes exist. All of that’s great but
23:45
it has to be built upon something. It it doesn’t sustain itself in and of itself.
23:50
Um what how would you respond to that sort of statement? Well, I mean I think it is possible to
23:57
discern some moral truth just through interaction and experience. So there is
24:03
this capacity for common sense to apply at least to a degree. Like it doesn’t
24:09
take a whole lot of figuring out that you know if somebody if I hurt somebody
24:15
it it’s probably pretty similar to if they hurt me. So the golden rule as it’s
24:21
given in in the Bible for example both in Leviticus and from the gospel is um
24:27
not that like it’s a lot of people treat it as a much more profound observation
24:32
than it is but it doesn’t come pulled out of you know the universe. it’s it’s actually discernible. But at the same
24:39
time, um, classical liberalism often gets straw manned as kind of uh secularizing the world to the point
24:46
where it eliminates this ability for say a scriptural authority. And as you said,
24:52
you know, all but a handful, a small number of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, of the framers of the
24:58
Constitution had at least a, you know, pretty, you know, solid Christian belief
25:04
or cultural. I mean, like I said, Jefferson didn’t believe in the miracles and was a deist, but he was certainly a
25:09
cultural Christian in in the vast majority of the ways. I know that a lot of Christians get upset about that term
25:15
cultural Christian, but we’re going to have to recognize that it’s a thing to live by those same ethics and have been
25:20
raised in those same ethics and so on, but you have to ask yourself at that point, well, okay, so let’s say we have,
25:26
you know, 50 of these guys thereabouts and they’re going to sit down to frame this country and then the first
25:32
amendment that they put in literally number one is like, okay, so
25:37
nothing’s going to impinge upon belief. We’re going to put in fact two clauses in the first amendment to prevent uh you
25:44
know the free exercise clause and the establishment clause to prevent the state from mcking around in religion.
25:50
Now a lot of people would argue well they left that to the states but by 1831 pretty much every state had decided holy
25:55
crap this isn’t working this isn’t a good idea. So why would such strong Christian men framing the country decide
26:03
that religious liberty was so so important? And the answer is because
26:08
they didn’t trust man to be the ultimate authority on how the scriptur is going to be read. They believed that different
26:14
factions which we might call denominations can read the scripture for themselves and have the debates in a
26:20
civil manner unlike the religious wars that they that they were rejecting and fleeing from and outright religious
26:27
oppression in some cases. Calvinists in particular were pretty heavily oppressed uh that they were fleeing from in Europe
26:33
which is where you had these monarchial episcopets. you now have the state and the church wedded together and what was
26:39
happening was people were reading the scripture for themselves and saying I don’t think it says that like this isn’t
26:45
my reading of the scripture right or wrong you know I mean Luther famously said it this way you know here I stand
26:51
so help me God for I can do no other and the same mentality extends to a lot of these other other Protestants later and
26:58
so they come to America and the idea was like you know are we going to impose you
27:03
know Thomas Jefferson’s wacky razor knife Jefferson Bible. Are we going to impose uh John Adams universalist
27:11
congregationalist denying of the trinity? Are we going to impose you know whoever? It doesn’t matter. We could
27:17
pick whichever ones we want. Patrick Henry’s are we who’s whose Christianity are we going to do? And the answer that
27:22
are we going to take George Washington’s which seemed to be pretty solid and certainly he was an extremely devout
27:28
man. Whose are we going to pick? And the answer seemed to be like no no no we left that behind. It’s more important
27:33
for people to be able to pursue the scripture for themselves to try to
27:38
determine as accurately as they can what it means and to be given the liberty at least from the state to do that. And so
27:46
what they were relying on is actually the same common sense. So if we take that the scripture is a moral authority
27:51
which is nowhere prohibited in anything in the classical liberal framework. So if we take that the scripture is in fact
27:57
a moral authority that it is a source book a guide book by which we can discern moral truths and even absolute
28:03
moral truths then the matter of of the question becomes well how do we figure out what they are and the answer that
28:09
the framers gave was well the state has no authority to tell somebody they’re reading scripture wrong. That’s a matter
28:16
left to a different sphere of life. the state is going to stay out of that because we’re going to protect people’s
28:22
ability to do that because the state back in Europe would have maybe cut your head off or some awful torture or burned
28:28
you at the stake like Lad Vladimir and Redle were burned to the at the stake in Oxford. I mentioned them because I’ve
28:34
been on the you know I’ve stood on the spot where it happened and they didn’t want any of that. They wanted people to
28:40
be able to appeal to the common sense of their ability to read the scripture and apply exogetical methodologies according
28:46
to the the various confessions of of belief that they had had and to allow the debate in a safe and not murderous
28:54
method to to go back and forth to where if a Methodist wants to challenge a Presbyterian they may in a debate hall
29:01
or in you know everyday debates here and there. It is true. Like I said, they set up state state churches, you know, all
29:08
not all of the different states. I’m in Tennessee, which wasn’t one of the original 13, but it came along in 1796,
29:14
so not much later. And I don’t know which number it is. I should look that up. But at any rate, Tennessee in its
29:20
state constitution explicitly prohibits the idea of any state church because
29:26
anything that would be the state imposing a matter of conscience is prohibited in our like article one,
29:33
section two or something. It’s right at the beginning three maybe I think it’s article 1 section three of our state
29:38
constitution. So some states didn’t but a lot of them did and what they ran into were problem after problem after problem
29:44
of religious liberty issues coming up where it was in opposition to the idea of the the liberty-minded
29:52
you know primary ethos that they had for establishing the country in the first place. So that by the time the civil war
29:58
rolls around, very few states still have this on the books at all and very few states are practicing it. So the answer
30:04
seems to be, you know, first of all, we can answer some moral questions through
30:10
regular common sense, general revelation of of moral truth is still possible. But
30:16
then if we have to appeal to special revelation, literally nothing stopping anybody. Nothing’s actually stopping
30:21
people from imposing it on their own sect if they want to. as a matter of fact, as a matter of church discipline
Politics and Theology
30:27
or whatever else. But what is actually uh prohibited is that the state is going
30:33
to step in and tell you that you have to believe this way or that way and your reading of the of the the scripture is
30:38
therefore right or wrong and your denomination is therefore approved or unapproved.
30:43
I mean, my question for the people that want it to go the other way is which three-letter agency do you want to
30:48
handle determining whether or not your church should exist? Yeah. Well, and and my my question on
30:54
this is I guess it’s a little bit more broad. So when um like for instance when Adams like like you said Adams was not a
31:00
he didn’t believe in the trinity. Uh when Adams says that our constitution was written for more and religious people and it’s totally unsuited to the
31:06
government, you know, of any other. Um there there seems to be an implication that seems to at least be broadly shared
31:13
with most of the founders. Thomas Payne would probably be um an exception to that rule. But even Benjamin Franklin,
31:18
who was probably the the least religious um next to Payne, really cautioned
31:24
against that. And you see the same thing in Washington with his farewell address. This idea that there was a that the
31:30
transcendent um was something of a necessary component
31:35
in being able to prop up this notions of of what you might call ordered liberty. Speaking of another term that is has
31:42
fallen out of favor in certain circles, but this idea that we we want liberty to be ordered in such a way to where um you
31:48
you are generally free to live your life the way you want, believe what you want, worship the way you want, provided that you don’t infringe on the rights of
31:54
others to do the same. I think the question comes down and and I’ve gotten this before as a I’m I’m a state
32:00
legislator in Virginia, like we’re we’re very very proud of Jefferson’s, you know, Statute of Religious Liberty. Um,
32:07
but it’s this idea of when somebody says, “Well, Nick, you can’t legislate
32:12
morality.” I always remind them that it’s the only thing you can legislate. That literally every single law hearkens
32:18
back to some sort of moral premise. And I don’t think it’s inappropriate for me to use my Christianity as a source of of
32:27
morality that I can refer to when when determining, you know, legislation on
32:32
murder or what the punishment should be or or things of that nature. By the same token, I am not permitted to use the
32:39
power of the state to compel you to believe in Christianity. That that is
32:44
that would be heretical uh to the Christian of my faith in in in my opinion. Yeah, I agree with you by the way.
32:50
Yeah. So, so where do you where do you see as kind of the balance between this idea of um you know appreciating the
32:57
necessity of the transcendent and hopefully we want that to be you know true um while at the same time allowing
33:03
for religious liberty. Well, the idea of the li religious liberty is that the approach to the
33:09
transcendent is the thing that the state’s not going to mess around with. But as far as any of these practical
33:14
matters of morality, murder, theft, and so on, it is because these things are
33:19
true. Like I kind of see it the other way around. Of course, being that I’m not religious, I look at the scripture a
33:25
very different way. A lot of people don’t. They’re like, “Oh, James hates, you know, God or something.” And it’s like, that’s not true. I don’t reject
33:31
the scripture. I just don’t know if it’s literally true. I’m one of those pesky, annoying agnostics. Okay. So I believe
33:38
in fact that the Bible is at least anthropologically true. And I want to pay I want to draw attention. I’m not
33:44
going to elaborate but on every one of the words I just said at least which means it might be more anthropologically
33:50
true which means it is true for human beings in individual and societal circumstances which means it is an
33:57
excellent guide for that. I would very much want legislators like you using
34:02
your Christian faith to, you know, inform how you’re going to uh legislate
34:08
how you’re going to deal with the issues of the day. Um because if it’s anthropologically true, it’s true for
34:14
human beings. But if it’s anthropologically true, it’s true for human beings. Not merely because it was
34:19
dictated, but because it’s actually true about something to do with humans. So my weird view is not in fact that God gave
34:26
us a bunch of uh arbitrary laws. He gave us laws that match our nature
34:33
which means that we can appeal to the realities of human nature in crafting our laws. And if the scripture becomes
34:40
the reason that you look there and then you have to dig one layer deeper than God said it. I believe it that finishes
34:47
it. Then I think not only is it great that scripture pointed you there, but
34:52
that it’s going to be much firmer for clarifying your understanding, your application, and so on. And it avoids
34:59
the imposition if you can get that one layer deeper. Okay, God said that this is the law, but the law accords to human
35:06
nature because that’s the law God would give us as it is for human nature. So what is it in human nature that this law
35:11
is addressing? And I don’t believe any of it’s arbitrary. Unlike a lot of these other kind of mystical traditions, I I
35:18
actually think that the that the law that we find in whether it’s Leviticus, which 75% of the American legal system
35:24
is based off of the Hebrew Bible at least is what they actually said. Leviticus has a lot of it,
35:30
whether it’s even in New Testament stuff, whatever, a lot of that stuff is there because it actually speaks truths
35:37
about human nature. It’s a guidance on how to organize a life and a society such that it will be functional. So that
35:44
allows a legislator to use the um sincerity or the depth or the absolute
35:50
fidelity of their Christian faith to inform their legislation and encourages
35:55
them to take that one step deeper and to say why is this law part of why would God have given us this law in the first
36:01
place? Well certainly it must accord to something in human nature. What would it be? Oh well humans like to get stuff for
36:07
free. Therefore we shouldn’t allow stealing. Why? Because when we start stealing, what we do is we under, you
36:13
know, we could go into the whole details of why people shouldn’t steal. We could even do it like, you know, like aliens
36:20
came down and looked and said, well, these societies that rip each other off get pretty dysfunctional pretty quickly.
36:25
You know, you steal something from me. I figure out you stole it from me. The next thing you know, I’m outside your your house with a pipe ready to beat you
36:32
on the head when you come out the door and get my thing back. You know, things get dysfunctional really fast. And so,
36:38
you can actually get down underneath this and say, “Well, what’s the human nature?” The human nature is people want stuff for free. People want to be free
36:43
riders. Not all people, but some. And it might only be two or 3%, but they cause
36:49
massive problems. So, let’s go ahead and legislate against that. And then you can do it without imposing, you know, God
36:55
said it, that’s why we’re going to do it. Well, and I think it’s interesting when when I’ll even look even when you look at something this idea of people want
37:02
things for free. You could say that, okay, this is this is the notion that people want to attain wealth or property
37:08
or whatever it is with the least amount of effort possible. That’s not necessarily in and of itself
37:13
bad, provided that you’re not harming someone else in the process. If you can find a more efficient or better way to do something, that’s great,
37:19
right? It’s actually very good unless you’re robbing somebody. Incentive structure, the incentive
37:24
structure and the consequences matter when when when looking at all those factors.
37:29
That’s exactly right. And that is actually the basis of wealth and abundance is that we are trying to
37:34
figure out how to solve our own problems as quickly, effectively, efficiently,
37:40
um, economically and so on as we possibly can even with innovative ways.
37:45
And all abundance comes from this. Once you add in the securing of private property to what we what I just said,
37:51
this is where wealth comes from. Period. because now I have the ability to secure my private property, set the terms of my
37:57
exchange, and if I solve a problem for myself or if you’re my neighbor and I solve a problem for you and I think, man, this could help a lot of other
38:03
people. You know, a lot of people have this problem with the type of pipe they have in their bathroom or whatever it is
38:08
and I come up with some, you know, quick solution to it and I figure out how to make that thing and sell it. Now, I can
38:13
make a profit off if it cost me 100 bucks to make the thing. I sell it for 120, I take out $20 home every time. But
38:19
if I can figure out how to keep selling it at 120 but make it for 80, you know, by innovating by blah blah blah blah
38:25
blah, it’s more efficient. It’s more economical. You start getting people willingly building surpluses for
38:32
strangers to solve problems that strangers have without ever having to know them or care about them. Like I
38:38
don’t need to know you to sell you a pipe for your bathroom. And so you get everything out of this. So wanting to
Not All Cultures Are Equal
38:44
get things with the smallest number of resources expended as possible is a good impulse. But like you said, it all comes
38:51
down to legislation having to set the incentive structures so that we get a positive sum game played in society out
38:57
of this situation which means property rights etc. rather than a negative sum
39:02
game which is you know well you have it I want it you weren’t there so I took it you know which is going to end up
39:08
costing everybody all over the place. So, so everything we’re talking about right now when we talk about and and
39:14
again I I I like the fact that you kind of zeroed in a little bit more on not just using this kind of broad term of
39:20
classical liberalism which might be over to a little bit more interpretation but but zeroed in on kind of like this
39:25
American tradition uh within it and what that represents and how that’s distinct from what we might call the continental
39:31
tradition or even aspects of of maybe the the English tradition and you know in incorporating these
39:37
aspects of the of the transcendent and the idea of objective objective truth and objective morality. So, and then
39:42
it’s just a question of okay, how do we it but there there was something else you said. I don’t want to misquote you.
39:49
I want to make sure I get it correctly. You were talking about how there’s certain aspects of that classical tradition that you see as being
39:55
universals. And that’s where again some people would push back on that and say, “Okay, well,
40:00
they may be universals to us and and as long as Nick Freighus and James Lindseay are the ones setting the rules for Nick
40:06
Freighus and James Lindsay, this is all fine, even though we would disagree on certain things.” Um, but what they would
40:14
also say is that when we look at what is going on in the United States right now, when we look at what’s going on in the UK right now and Europe right now, what
40:21
we see is this this mass importation of people that it turns out they don’t share any of those values. and and
40:27
somebody that as somebody that fought in Iraq where all of a sudden we were gonna we were going to overturn Saddam Hussein
40:33
and bring them the benefits of of classical liberal thought and and representative government and all these
40:38
wonderful things that we valued in the West and of course they were going to adopt it because all they had to do was see see the genius of how it all worked
40:45
and and turns out yeah it didn’t work that way and and so the part of the question here is we we we now have
40:52
people that are they’re starting to question what they see as some of the presuppositions within classical
40:59
liberalism and they’re saying no, we need to understand that the reason why
41:04
this works in the west is because it’s a creation of the west and it actually came from the way that our own
41:10
traditions were produced organically over centuries and that’s why it works for us and it and it would be absurd to
41:18
plop this down in you know the Middle East where there is no such tradition and expect it to work and likewise it
41:24
would be ridiculous to import a bunch of people from a place that have never had this tradition and expect them to be
41:29
able to successfully integrate and so that’s why what we need to be is we need to be more protective we need to
41:35
understand that this isn’t so much universal as it is just a western tradition would would you have any push
41:41
back against that yeah a huge amount because I actually think the principles underneath are universal but it doesn’t mean that every
41:46
culture has decided to adopt them I don’t believe cultures are equal I believe that the more you adhere to
41:52
universal principles of effectively What boils down to, it’s going to sound a little weird, but the three legs of the
41:58
stool, as far as I see it, are truth, justice, and love. And I mean love in the kind of literally Christian biblical
42:04
sense that if you adhere to those three principles that your society flourishes, truth is whether or not you’re getting
42:10
right answers to questions. You’re finding out actually accurate facts about reality. That the degree that you
42:16
deviate from that is the degree that eventually reality punishes you for your deviation. So you’re going to start
42:22
losing out. Whoever, if you have two people that are running businesses and they’re competitors, it doesn’t matter the scale or scope of the business. If
42:29
one of them is adhering to or discovering valuable truth more
42:34
efficiently and more accurately than the other, they will out compete the other, all else being equal. Justice is what we
42:41
were just talking about. Uh this this idea that, you know, um you you we don’t
42:46
get to just take from one another. This is unfair. In other words, this this concept of equity, which by the way,
42:51
doesn’t mean what the left says it means. The concept of equity does not mean what the Russians called actual equality. The Soviets, I should say, not
42:59
the Russians. The Soviet program of actual equality is the thing we call equity. If you wonder why it seems like
43:04
it sucks, like Soviet Union, it’s because it’s literally a Soviet Union import um that’s been forced upon us by
43:10
communists. But equity means getting what you deserve and not getting what you uh you don’t deserve. That’s what it
43:18
means. But that’s also what justice means. So equity and justice are two sides of the same coin. Equity is just
43:24
your actual return on a just system. And a just system is one where people get
43:29
some close approximation to what they deserve. And they do not get what they do not deserve, leaving out, you know,
43:35
the fortunes of chance which are kind of beyond any if if a meteor hits your house. Nobody deserves a meteor to hit
43:41
your house but you can’t do anything about it. It just happens. And so um if you don’t have a injust society I think
43:48
this is going to start tearing things apart over time. So the degree of injustice the degree of graft the degree
43:55
of um bribery that makes your system work which I’m sure you saw a lot of in Iraq um this kind of thing which we’re
44:02
all dealing with now that you know import the third world become the third world is sort of true. If you bring in too many people too quickly um they
44:09
won’t assimilate. If you try to plop down a system that they don’t recognize, it goes against their traditional
44:16
long-standing ways of life and how they’ve adapted to participate in those, they’re not going to change overnight.
44:22
They’re not going to get it overnight. But and then love of course is I just want to put that out there as the third
44:27
leg, which is do we generally want a pro-social situation or do we operate in a low trust enimical situation? Is it
44:33
it’s love versus enmity? And I’m I I think that the reason this one of the secret sauces of the West is not only do
44:40
we use this common sense approach to get very close to truth and to compete in our our free market economies with truth
44:47
as the kind of arbiter, including the truth of what people want, not always what they need, right? Life would be
44:54
awful if all we had was our base needs being met and then we all get to live in, you know, gray slop. That’s the
45:00
porridge in the matrix nobody wants. You know, the guy goes back in for the steak. And if we have a just society, a
45:06
truthbased society, these are the secret secrets there because we’ve we’ve done like if you look at our constitution
45:11
with the presumption of innocence, no cruel and unusual punishment and so on. We have a lot of justice built in. A lot
45:16
of that came from like I said the Hebrew Bible, 75% is what the rough estimate that I’ve seen is in some papers I’ve
45:23
read. But if we have one, if we approach these truth and justice things in a frame of we want generally for our
45:31
neighbors to succeed, although we don’t necessarily care about them, we want them to succeed in the abstract versus,
45:37
you know, some kind of enimical he gets his, I get mine, and we’re at loggers, we’re at loggerheads and kind of brutal
45:44
competition. Then if if if we’re in the the we want our neighbors to succeed situation, then we’re in this positive
45:51
sum situation. And this is why I think that the west has a long tradition that is rooted in Christianity and Judaism
45:58
both that have uh come up with this secret sauce that’s made America so successful. So it’s a little bit like
46:05
blaming metal for rust. It’s like you’re it’s not quite but like the s the fact
46:10
is these universal truths are there but not everybody takes them. And you actually I agree. I know that this is a
46:16
Sam Harris thing with his moral landscape, but I agree that we could actually in some sense measure the
46:21
outcomes. I don’t think the Jinny index or any of these stupid indices they’ve come up with have worked. But you we can
46:27
at least um intuitively perceive that some societies are doing a lot better than others in very material and even
46:34
immaterial ways. But the material ones matter because you know you can have a very tightlyk knit society where there’s
46:41
this hierarchy and everything seems very you know gener generationally knit and
46:46
people report having high degrees of happiness and family cohesion etc. And there I mean this is one of the big
46:52
arguments and their GDP is absolute crap. Well everything’s great until you know a hurricane shows up. If your GDP
46:59
is crap, your per capita, your your your hurricane is going to kill a lot of
47:04
people and it’s going to cause a lot of suffering and misery. If your GDP per capita is high, what you’re going to be
47:10
able to do, just think of it like imagine something bad happened to two people in your neighborhood. One of them
47:16
has a lot of money and can go hire people to fix the problem and one of them doesn’t have as much money and cannot hire anybody, right? And so
47:23
having this the the outcome of GDP per capita being high is a sort of proof of
47:30
concept that you’re doing something right. Not everything right, but doing something right in your society. It’s not a beall that ends all. This is a
47:36
very multi-dimensional complicated situation. So when you say, okay, let’s look at these real situations you you
47:43
asked. You offered two situations and they’re effectively the same situation in two different domains. One is we’re
47:50
going to go over to Iraq, bomb the out of them, and now we’re going to tell them, “Look how good classical liberalism is, which is what built us
47:55
all of our bombs, and don’t you all want to live this way because we said in the Declaration of Independence that we see these truths as self-evident, and they
48:01
aren’t ready to see the truths as self-evident, because they’ve got a lot of other blinders in the way, including
48:07
the bombs we dropped on them. It’s not going to work.” Right? There is a
48:12
correct argument from the kind of Burkian traditionalist perspective not to be confused with the perennialist
48:19
traditionalist perspective of Julius Ebola. Um this Burkian tradition model
48:24
is there is this thing where people have to come to understand and this is there’s a lot a society is a slowmoving
48:31
object. There is a lot of time, a lot of experience where people have to learn lessons
48:37
generationally where the old-timers don’t give up their ways and the graft
48:42
in the system is so easy to come back in because that’s just how it’s always been done. It’s going to be a slow slow
48:49
process and it’s actually better just kind of like with Christianity. It’s actually it works because I think it’s a
48:55
truth is that you’re going to do it mostly by a more of a great commission program rather than a colonialist program. you’re going to come in and
49:01
you’re going to say, “Look, this stuff works. If you want help doing it, we got you.” And if you don’t, you know, enjoy
49:06
fighting with sticks in the desert. And then on the other hand, if you import more people, this is, I think, the
49:12
crucial argument here that’s happening because there’s a dirty, ugly little slip here. Okay? So, you say, “Okay,
49:19
let’s bring all these people from the desert or wherever else. We plop them down a million at a time in the US or
49:24
Canada or whatever or the UK or Germany.” And now there’s stabbings everywhere and everything’s, you know,
49:29
they’re out running around in the streets. People are, you know, grabbing cats or whatever and frying them up.
49:34
Actually, it’s not cat. I just saw a video. It wasn’t like a pet, but you know, they were catching they were
49:39
catching salmon in a in a river. So, it’s wild animal, but they’re catching salmon that are doing a run in Canada,
49:45
which is illegal because of the populations of that particular salmon or whatever, and they’re just catching them out of the river. And um obviously, you
49:52
get all these problems. That’s the point. And this question of assimilation rates is real. But the slip in the
49:59
argument is that you start going into an essentialism. That there’s something fundamentally wrong with the people who
50:04
come from the desert. That their culture and their ethnicity and their race are
50:10
actually somehow tied together in some fundamental way, which I frankly see
50:16
very little evidence for. There may be issues of race and IQ and whatever else
50:21
that have some statistical re uh realization, but the fact is that I’ve met people who were born in America, who
50:28
were raised American, often in adopted situations. So, they were raised from being a baby. a lot of them from China,
50:36
a lot of them from uh other countries including in the Middle East who were raised 100% in, you know, stereotypical
50:44
pro-America, you know, white Christian homes. And guess what? They’re
50:49
Americans, right? So, it has nothing to do with their genetics. has like they didn’t
50:54
magically import these bad ways of thinking or backwards ways of thinking or even just you know less clear ways of
51:01
thinking from their parents who they maybe never met. And so when we slip in that argument you lose something but no
51:07
you cannot in you can’t incorporate an entirely new culture in huge numbers. We
51:13
saw the same problem happening in the US uh you know a century and a half ago
51:18
when we were importing enormous numbers of Germans and enormous numbers of Irish all at the same time for similar but not
51:24
as you know messed up on the government end reasons. There were wars. There were
51:30
famines where they were. They came over in huge numbers for the opportunity of a better life. And it turns out that they
51:37
ended up making lots of pockets that assimilated very very very slowly. And
51:42
this carries over. I mean, it’s got some of its charms, but this is a big problem when you have other countries or other
51:49
cultures that are actually not just different to the broader American
51:54
culture, but enimical to it. And well, and that’s this is interesting because I remember it was I I was um I
52:02
was finishing up my college degree after I got in the military and I was actually at Northern Virginia Community College for this English class. I needed this
52:10
English credit. I needed and all of a sudden in the English class, what are we doing? We’re reading Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. We’re we’re reading
52:16
deconstructionism and dereda and I’m like, “Yeah, nothing screams English literature like this stuff.” But um but
52:24
I I’ll never forget we’re watching this one thing and the professor, white, white liberal professor keeps saying
52:29
black culture, black culture, black culture. And Northern Virginia Community College used to have the distinction of
52:35
having the mo most diverse student body in the country. And I’m probably 31 at
52:40
this point. I raised my hand. I’m like,“What are you talking about when you say black c? You keep saying black culture. What are you talking about?” He
52:48
goes, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, first of all, what do you mean when you say culture?” And he looks back at me goes, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well,
52:54
for lack of a better definition, I’ll use Bell’s definition of culture is society’s attempt to come up with a
52:59
coherent set of answers to the existential questions we face throughout our lives.” Right? I don’t even think that’s the best one, but that’s the one
53:06
I had at the time. Mhm. And he goes, “Okay, we can use that.” He goes, “What’s your question?
53:11
Are you telling me that if I talk to a black person in Los Angeles, Mobile, Alabama, Paris, France, and Moscow,
53:17
Russia, I’m going to get the exact same answer because of their melanin levels?“
53:22
And all of a sudden, he gets kind of nervous because he understands the implications if he says yes. Because
53:28
what he’s he’s then saying is that culture is essentially determinist based off of your race. And the argument I was
53:34
making is that there’s yes, you can have a group of people that might all be treated a particular way because of
53:39
their race develop cultural institutions or responses to questions. I said, but
53:45
that’s because of the conditions that they found themselves in at a particular place of time and geography. To to just
53:51
say that race determines culture, I think is a very racist way to look at culture.
53:57
And so and and the other thing that I have a problem with that is that I feel like they were doing that intentionally so they could say if I have any problem
Did the Constitution Fail?
54:04
with your cultural traditions I must be a racist. When it’s like no I’m just I
54:10
don’t like your political tradition. I don’t think your political tradition merges well with our political tradition
54:16
and therefore if you take a lot of people of a particular political tradition which is contradictory or
54:21
diametrically opposed well then of course you’re going to have you know you’re not going to have social cohesion
54:27
right and then but this comes to the other question right and this this kind of goes into this what are we fighting for
54:33
so if we’ve looked at this kind of American version of the classical liberal tradition and we we agree that
54:40
things like repres representative government and certain limitations on government power and private property
54:46
rights. Like all of these things are are positive things that we believe are not only true for us, but they tend to be
54:52
universally true, which is to say that they produce the best results provided
54:57
that people voluntarily accept them, adopt them, and apply them.
55:03
What do we I mean obviously we have lived in a country that was was theoretically built upon these
55:08
principles and yet there has been this infiltration and we can look at you’ve
55:14
done a a great job of looking at um you know Antonio Grahamshy and Herbert Marcusa and you know Jean Posartra and
55:21
the postmodernist and everything that is what do you say to the response that
55:26
well great I it’s wonderful that we had all these great ideas James and we had a constitution that was supposed to
55:32
establish this and protect this and do all these things. And yet here we find ourselves in 2025 where almost every
55:39
single significant culturally shaping institution is dominated by leftist
55:44
ideology by specifically maybe woke ideology. When I look at arts and entertainment, when I look at Hollywood,
55:50
I see woke. When I see the when I see academia, I see woke. When I see my public school system, I see woke. When I
55:56
see the the bureaucracy with I see woke, right? So, how would this if all these
56:02
ideas were so good, how come they didn’t protect us from this?
56:07
Yeah, that’s a um that’s a that’s a interesting argument. Of course, Lander Spooner put that one. I get the
56:13
spoonerism all the time, you know. Yeah, basically that if the constitution either um enabled this or wasn’t able to
56:20
present it. So, in either case, it’s worthless. And I’ll just point out uh just kind of a couple of things very
56:27
quickly. One is, you know, your body has an immune system and it’s designed in
56:32
some sense therefore not to get sick, but it still somehow manages to get sick about once a year, once every year and a
56:39
half or so for most people, maybe two or three times a year if you travel a lot or whatever. And it’s like, you know,
56:45
the the saying often is the purpose of a system is what it does. The body gets sick, the immune system flubs. You know,
56:52
does that mean that the immune system should just be ejected? should we just get rid of it and try to make a new immune system? Um, and so you know the
57:00
thing is is there are the metaphor is that there are invading
57:05
foreign pathogens and they do wish to infect societies. Communism is one such.
57:12
Um, Islamism or radical Islam is another. It deliberately and explicitly
57:18
has the intention of colonizing and conquering other uh other systems. So,
57:25
you know, not to praise the book too much because I don’t love the book, but in the virtue of nationalism, Yoram
57:30
Hazone writes about kind of the Jewish model of nations, which is nationalism,
57:35
and then the the not Jewish model of nations, which is basically imperialism, and he kind of contrasts, of course,
57:41
there there’s a spectrum, but uh but you know, you don’t have to be totally an imperialist nation like Nazi Germany,
57:47
and you don’t have to be totally an um a nationalist, you know, entity in the mean the way that he means it, which
57:53
would be Israel. um at least traditionally or historically. There’s there’s a lot of
57:59
places you could be between, but basically this idea is that there are imperialist ideologies and imperialist
58:06
um um militant imperialist ideologies that are actively trying to figure out
58:11
how to crack the code on other institutions including other countries or civilizations and get inside them.
58:18
And so let’s take for example um Catholicism. That’s an institution
58:24
that’s famous for its ability to have withtood communism. In fact, the Soviets
58:29
were in insanely mad about the Catholics. They put a lot of effort. They had no trouble conquering Eastern
58:35
Orthodox because Russian Orthodox, I really should say, because uh Russian Orthodox was in Russia, which they
58:42
controlled. So, they were able to use tons of evil state power to just basically cal the church. um most of the
58:48
religious dissident in Soviet Union were not Russian Orthodox because they had this so-called registered church and so
58:54
on. But Catholicism was this outside force. You have popes writing missives against communism. I think it’s true. I
59:02
don’t know. I’ve said this before. I’m pretty sure it’s true that while Karl Marx was in Paris in 1844, he’s in this
59:10
apartment there near the S bomb and he’s writing uh the Paris manuscripts. the
59:16
so-called economic philosophic manuscripts and out the window some distance away I don’t know if it’s a direct line of sight you have whichever
59:22
pope I want to say it’s not Leo I 13th I want to say it’s pious 12th but I’m not
59:28
positive of which one it is writing this famous 1843 1844 this famous attack on
59:35
the idea of communism which the man the communist manifesto hasn’t even been written yet it’s four years out and he
59:41
this pope is like bombarding this idea of communism as awful and terrible and
59:46
against, you know, Catholic thinking and allegedly they were in, you know, a
59:51
stones throw apart writing these two things at the same time. So there’s a maybe within a direct line of sight of
59:57
one another, but the the point is that the Catholic Church has put up a fight against communism historically that is
1:00:05
really admirable and lasted a very long time and was some of the strongest resistance to it in the the 19th century
1:00:12
and early 20th century for certain. So then the Soviets, the KGB comes up with this cool idea called liberation
1:00:18
theology. And they take this idea and they cook up a way to reinterpret the
1:00:23
scriptures in terms of their Soviet liberationist Marxism. And rather than trying to
1:00:29
defeat the Catholic Church from the outside, they decide to subvert it from the inside. And so what they do is they
1:00:34
tell priests or sorry, they tell people that are communists, they say, “If you were raised in the church, go back. Go
1:00:41
become a priest if you can rise through the ranks. become a bishop if you can, be a cardinal if you can. Your communist
1:00:48
duty is to now go bring this liberation theology doctrine into the church and start to poison it from within. So one
1:00:54
could say on the same logic that all of the encyclicals, all of the great rits
1:01:01
of the, you know, one holy and apostolic Catholic church were insufficient to
1:01:08
prevent the infiltration of liberation theology or they enabled it and therefore they’re worthless. Or one
1:01:14
could go back further and say the Bible itself was insufficient. And you say, well, the Catholics, you know, it’s more
1:01:20
of church authority and they’re not necessar I mean, the priests and things are reading the scriptures, but historically, you know, the the the
1:01:26
scripture was not in vernacular languages. So maybe the ley wasn’t reading it as much. But then you have
1:01:32
the social gospel which was cooked up by the Fabian socialists with Walter Rashinbush who comes into Hell’s Kitchen
1:01:38
with his Baptist congregation there in New York City and ends up spreading the same progressive garbage that you know
1:01:45
Jesus was the first socialist being kind of a premise in both of these through the Protestant Bible reading churches.
1:01:52
And you have this huge thing. In fact, a lot of the great revival that you see in the the early 20th century and then
1:01:58
later in the mid- 20th century that kind of gives us the very conservative Protestantism we’re familiar with today
1:02:03
are huge reactions to the social gospel move movement taking over. So, are we supposed to conclude that the scripture
1:02:09
itself wasn’t sufficient to prevent communism? It’s it’s like the best thing against it. So, what are you talking
When Power Should be Wielded
1:02:16
about? it. Well, it’s interesting because if you wanted to if you wanted to continue to reduce that back, you
1:02:21
could say, “Okay, was was God not sufficient in keeping Satan from falling or tempting Eve or whatnot? Or are some
1:02:28
of these things in God’s wisdom permitted to take place for whatever his purposes might be?” But that doesn’t
1:02:33
mean we eliminate God as as a possibility as a result. So, I I So, here, let me ask you this then.
1:02:39
Yeah. So, let let’s say um let’s say wokeism has been defeated. Okay. But just like
1:02:46
I’m old enough to remember when the Soviet Union was defeated and I remember watching the Berlin Wall fall and think, well, we settled that. Turns out we
1:02:54
didn’t. These things come back. Nothing is new under the sun. These things come back.
1:03:00
There will there will be some that will say, “Okay, okay, fine, James. I agree with everything you just said. I agree
1:03:05
with everything you just said, and we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a home
1:03:11
defense weapon and it is locked up in a safe, it’s not a home defense weapon.” That’s right. Because when you really
1:03:16
need it, you don’t want to be fumbling around with a complex combination in order to get access to your firearm. But
1:03:21
Nick, I have little ones in the house. How do I protect them at the same time? Great question. That is where Stopbox
1:03:27
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1:03:34
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1:03:39
design. You can use it very easily. one hand get access to your firearm in order to protect your loved ones and protect
1:03:46
your little ones who are not yet ready to handle those firearms appropriately. So, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go to
1:03:51
stopboxusa.com/mta. That’s stopboxusa.com/mta.
1:03:58
You’re going to use that code MTA. Why? Because you’re going to get 15% off your order. That’s right, 15% off your order
1:04:04
when you use code MTA. Go check out the link in the description. You’re going to like them. protect the Constitution.
1:04:12
We’re going to protect classical liberalism within the American tradition. We’re going to try to get back to that. However,
1:04:19
based on your own words, you’ve acknowledged that certain ideologies and belief systems, communism, Islamism,
1:04:26
like jihadist Islam, etc., these things are antithetical
1:04:31
to the philosophy and the worldview that you’ve espoused. And so therefore, next time there’s going to be certain things
1:04:38
we don’t even allow into the public space. Would you say, “Okay, that’s
1:04:43
reasonable.” Or would you say, “No, these you still have to have freedom of inquiry. You still have to have freedom
1:04:48
of speech. You still have to have freedom of thought.” Or so are there any legal restrictions or is it one of those
1:04:54
things where it’s like, “No, these are just ideas that we have to defeat through better argumentation.” Well, you know, the challenge is um the challenge
1:05:03
is that it’s very difficult to identify these things. They’re parasitic. Like if you I don’t know if you’ve ever managed
1:05:08
to get a leech. Did you feel it? You ever had a tick? Did you feel it bite you? You don’t typically notice a
1:05:15
parasite when it latches on. So, parasites develop strategies like even most people like there are some
1:05:21
mosquitoes when they bite you, you’re like, “What the heck? I felt that.” But a lot of times they bite you and they’re already gone before you even feel them.
1:05:27
They have lots of sophisticated mechanisms by which they will hide themselves. As a matter of fact, one of
1:05:32
my favorite stories, I’m not wearing it today, but I have these t-shirts that say anti-communist on them in a variety
1:05:37
of different styles. I wear them all the time. I wear them in public. I don’t care what state I’m in. I don’t particularly care what country I’m in. I
1:05:44
probably wouldn’t do it in China. Um, but you get me, right? Yeah. So, I wear these shirts all over the
1:05:50
place. And people compliment me on these shirts all over the place. And the funny thing is is sometimes people with like I
1:05:57
refer to them as visible Democrats with the colorful hair will just be very polite in our description. A fair amount
1:06:05
of extra body mass, not very sharp clothing, um, and a mask on a lot of
1:06:10
times will come up to me and tell me, I mean, I can I’m thinking of this one older lady, as a matter of fact, that
1:06:16
I’m describing here, you know, rainbow hair, pretty fat, wearing sloppy clothes, mask on her face, sees my
1:06:23
shirt. Oh, I love your shirt. And I’m thinking, you do? Like, do you know it’s about you?
1:06:30
And you know, I just kind of probed a little, had a little conversation with her and she had no idea. I mean, I
1:06:36
didn’t like put her on the spot. I just probed to see she had, oh, I don’t like communism. Communism is really bad.
1:06:42
Those people, it ends up causing all this starvation. She has no idea that she’s fallen into this communist
1:06:48
picture. So, if you want to pass these laws, you’re going to have this kind of set of um problems that open up, these
1:06:55
cans of worms. One of which is that uh you may not be able to detect the thing
1:07:01
that you’re trying to prohibit because it’s probably not going to be so stupid as to wander around with a hammer and sickle. In fact, woke didn’t until quite
1:07:10
late in the game and people started to finally notice it. I still remember trying to convince people, not even that
1:07:16
critical race theory is Marxist, that it’s critical theory. It was like a two-year project in 2021. And it’s like
1:07:23
all you have to do is put your finger over the word in the middle and it’s like right there. And you know, quotes
1:07:29
directly from Kimberly Krenshaw who created it, saying that it’s critical theory, and then people are like, I don’t know if it really is. It’s
1:07:35
different. And so, you know, this subtlety of the of the parasite is a problem. So, you may not even be able to
1:07:41
detect it. And then the second can of worms is kind of correlary to that which is that this will get weaponized. People
1:07:47
will start c let’s say you outlaw communism of of whatever Marxism or whatever you’re going to have whoever’s
1:07:53
in power trying to find convoluted arguments to name something they don’t like as communism so they can ban it. So
1:07:59
you have this real problem on your hands. And so I think that it’s actually
1:08:04
there is a big question here which is what do you do with militant ideologies? This question was raised by Carl Pauper
1:08:10
in uh open society and their enemies in that infamous footnote where he outlines the paradox of tolerance and he gives an
1:08:17
answer but the answer is obviously not sufficient and I think all the the discussion that we’re all having and
1:08:23
about these things really the rubber meets the road as to where do we withdraw tolerance from a militant
1:08:29
ideology and I think we do have I’m sorry can I let me just say one thing on with the Carl Popper because I
1:08:35
think this is important this really does I think get to the the crux of some of the problems between the people that
1:08:42
five minutes ago, I know people that five minutes ago were libertarians and now are like, raise the black flag. I’m
1:08:49
never allowing this to happen again. And and their argument is, well, look, if if
1:08:55
you’re going to tell me I’m not allowed to engage in, you know, vigilanteism, fine. I’ll I accept that. Well, then
1:09:01
state power has to be used for something. What’s the legitimate use of state power if it’s not to protect our
1:09:06
civilization and our society from this kind of invasion? And they might even say, “Look, I I get it. We have to be
1:09:12
specific because nuance can be dangerous.” But they’re tired of hearing the, “Oh, what if the shoe was on the
1:09:18
other foot?” It is, right? That’s their argument. They come back and and I and I get it because I share that frustration,
1:09:24
but I also share the skepticism, right? this concentration of power and we’re going to use it like I I I’ll put it
1:09:32
this way. I agree that the reason why the state wields the sword is because
1:09:38
there is at times a a very necessary and legitimate use of power in order to
1:09:44
achieve justice and stability. Yeah, me too. But we’re also trying to do that while preserving these concepts of freedom.
1:09:52
And and so we do have to be careful on how we wield the sword. So, are there are there any ways that
1:09:58
you would look at that and say, “Okay, here are some of the ways that the sword should be wheeled and maybe in ways that
1:10:04
it’s not currently being wielded or to to an extent that here are ways that it should be wielded that would actually
1:10:10
address those concerns, those legitimate concerns while still preserving those those aspects of an an you know, the
1:10:17
classical liberal and the American tradition, those elements of society. Yeah, absolutely. I mean there’s a lot
1:10:22
of things that can be done and there are things that have been being done in the past that are not being done and there are some things that I like I said at
1:10:29
the very beginning that are technologically based that are some real questions that actually have to be answered. We actually have to figure out
1:10:36
how to wield power in order to secure rights and prevent invasions in the digital sphere. This is seriously a big
1:10:44
problem and an open question. But for example, um obviously the the program
1:10:49
has slipped in terms of repelling invasions. When you know that you have people of other ideologies outside of
1:10:57
the country who are trying to come into the country and they want to come in in large numbers and of course we’re mostly thinking of Muslims here. We’re not
1:11:03
necessarily thinking of uh communist but yes communists too. We used to screen
1:11:08
for ideology for letting people in but this this has been degraded that can be easily restored. um very limited numbers
1:11:17
ideally maybe zero of people who hold and express militant ideology should be
1:11:22
allowed in. I am very cautious around this and of course it’s constitutional
1:11:28
so it would require an amendment but I do think that there is cause to look at
1:11:33
some aspects of naturalization. It is clear that the so-called anchor baby game is somehow illegitimate. It is also
1:11:41
clear that we naturalize people and 5 minutes later they’re out screaming, you know, death to America and this is
1:11:47
somehow a problem, right? And you say, “Oh, well, they’re an American citizen now, therefore, you know, you can’t do
1:11:52
anything about it.” And I don’t think that that’s actually true. I don’t think that um denaturalization should be an
1:11:58
easy process by any means. It should be taken quite seriously. But if you have people joining ter it’s already a law
1:12:05
that if people are joining terrorist groups or engaging in sedicious or subversive activities against the
1:12:10
country or engaging in conspiracy against the state that these people can lose their naturalization and they
1:12:16
probably should and should get sent home. I mean I think we should be very serious about that and looking into it. We are going to have to address either
1:12:24
one or the other. the poorestness of our border, which given airplanes is a thing
1:12:32
or some provision about the anchor baby as it’s called circumstance. Um because
1:12:38
this is creating a gigantic loophole in in in immigration law. We also are going
1:12:44
to have to figure out how to um deal with this. I like one of the ways
1:12:50
that we’ve been gamed on this by communists in particular is this stupid
1:12:55
refugee status game. Yes, asylum seekers. Muslims too. You
1:13:01
know, the radical the radical mullas know exactly what to do. They cause massive amounts of instability and war
1:13:07
in a region that’s filled with their people. Those people claim that they need to get asylum and then they pour
1:13:13
into western countries in the name of asylum even though the whole thing was an operation to get them into western countries in the first place. These kind
1:13:20
of things have to be understood as military operations against the United States and need to be governed as such.
1:13:25
And I think that there is a lot that could be done in that regard. And to be honest with you, I think that the Trump administration is actually showing
1:13:31
hopeful steps in the right direction, but it’s a longer problem than we probably want. Um, but can I ask you the
1:13:39
short answer though is yes. I do see things that we can be doing. The state has two essential functions according to
1:13:45
the constitution. One is to secure the rights of individuals in the United
1:13:50
States and the second well I mean it has a few others too but the second is to prevent invasions from from other parts
1:13:57
and so we should from hostile foreign enemies. So we should definitely be doing that. A lot of the woke stuff, a
1:14:05
lot of it, and a some of these ancillary problems that come in with these militant ideologies can actually be
1:14:10
addressed through rigorous and firm application of equality under the law.
1:14:17
Because what we actually have is badly two-tiered systems that have been cooked through, I don’t know, five to seven
1:14:24
decades of leftist manipulation of the legal field. All of which can be walked
1:14:29
back. If we could have Roie Wade overturned, we can have a lot of things reconsidered. If we can have the Harvard
1:14:35
case and the UNCC case roll back equity and diversity in university admissions,
1:14:40
I know they’re fighting back, but this has just begun and the Supreme Court has been on our side and is going to be on
1:14:46
our side more. Then we can actually push back on this two-tiered justice system, this liberating tolerance justice system
1:14:53
they’ve established. It’s just going to take time and clarity and deliberate
1:14:58
consistent work to achieve it and we have to in my opinion do that and start
1:15:04
literally today. Let let me ask you a couple other questions just like hot bed issues that have come up right now that Trump is
1:15:10
either doing or considering doing. Um, for instance, would you say that it would be like an appropriate use of
1:15:16
state power to start like defunding universities which are engaging in some of this more radicalized behavior or or
1:15:24
whatnot? Would you do you think that would be an appropriate use for the state to not necessarily use its power aggressively as much as it is just
1:15:30
refuse to fund these things? Yeah, absolutely. Um, like I think that some mass I mean well I think what
1:15:37
Trump’s been doing with Harvard is fantastic and I think that this kind of pressure granted resources are a
1:15:44
problem. This kind of pressure tactic has to be put almost on every university. The thing is though is there’s another thing that a lot of my
1:15:50
black build friends don’t understand which is the the nature of the liability
1:15:55
field. It seems like this insurmountable problem. They all just do whatever they’re going to do. I’m telling you, you you do something like a funding
1:16:02
crush on like or you know, somebody ends up in jail for their terrorist supporting activities or whatever about
1:16:08
a dozen times and all of a sudden most of this stuff starts going back underground. The deterrence factor
1:16:14
actually kicks in and it currently has not kicked in. So, it’s a different liability field as we actually play the
1:16:21
game. So, we do need to be playing the game. I do support these kinds of things. Um, absolutely. uh the
1:16:27
ideological territory cannot we we can’t just stand by and watch things that are
1:16:33
openly and actively sedicious to the country being the fundamental program of our
1:16:40
universities but we have to be in our schools we have to also though be very
1:16:45
very clever in how we go after these things um I would love to see actually huge pathways to private action be
1:16:52
opened up to people who can claim that they were defrauded by the university that did not provide them the education that that it’s sold.
1:16:58
I’ll tell you what, as someone that is as someone that has carried legislation, not specifically in that field with
1:17:03
education, but in other areas, the moment you do civil right to action, you will you will never meet so many
1:17:09
lobbyists in your life on behalf of these these large organizations. That’s right. Will come and try to fight against it. Um, let let me let me throw
1:17:17
out another one here because this is one that I’ve been I’ve been struggling with. um
1:17:25
the the use of the National Guard for you know crime areas and and whatnot and
1:17:30
um because you know posi commitatus and we have this long tradition that we don’t utilize we don’t utilize the
1:17:37
military in order to handle what we would call criminal activity unless it rises to the level of insurrection and
1:17:43
and this is this is a very very long and and proud tradition within the United States and one I generally and and one I
1:17:48
support now when Trump nationalized the situation in or federalized in DC
1:17:56
perfectly constitutional that is the that is the District of Columbia is a federal district simply because they’ve
1:18:02
given him some home rule components did not strip the federal authorities of being able to do that right
1:18:07
now I I thought now when there was first discussion of going into like Chicago I
1:18:12
was like okay this is a little bit problematic because if you’re going in there simply because they have a high
1:18:17
murder rate that that is I don’t care what you want to call it I don’t care how a part of me would love to see it.
1:18:24
We’re crossing a line now. Now, God bless the mayor of Chicago. The moment
Winning the Argument
1:18:30
he set up ICE free zones, I’m like, “Okay, well, now what you’re doing is you’re engaging of obstruction of
1:18:36
justice on federal law enforcement authority. So now if he has to send in additional reinforcements to carry that out, you’ve actually provided the legal
1:18:43
ramifications for him to be able to potentially say that’s insurrection because it’s it’s now a city mayor
1:18:50
actively engaging in obstruction of justice. You you can’t do that. That that’s a violation. Um, but that was one
1:18:58
thing that I kind of struggled with was this idea of when is it appropriate because I feel very confident that
1:19:05
Donald Trump using the National Guard or other federal resources descending on Chicago, you could demonstrate very
1:19:11
quickly just as it’s been demonstrated up in in DC that wripping everyone of
1:19:16
their liberties or stripping everyone of their their civil rights, without doing any of that, simply by actually having
1:19:22
sufficient resources and actively and aggressively prosecuting the law. It turns out cities
1:19:29
don’t have to be cesspools of crime and degeneracy. Um, but man, there there was a line
1:19:35
there that I’m like, ah, I’m not I’m not comfortable with this. I’m with you on the line and I think you actually
1:19:40
articulated the position that I have pretty well which is um you know what’s within the constitutional authority and
1:19:46
if it’s uh him deploying um reinforcements in order to
1:19:52
uh deal with federal law enforcement being hindered, obstructed, attacked or
1:19:59
whatever it happens to be whether it was in the Los Angeles riots in June whether it’s whatever in the universe is going
1:20:04
on in Portland like you said these ice-free zones in Chicago, etc. He’s within his authority to do that and he
1:20:10
should. But what I I I see that the DC case is actually instructive here. And I
1:20:15
think that he’s not doing what he should be doing with it. Uh not to say that the city’s not safe because I think he’s
1:20:20
doing that part right. The goal like basically the messaging apparatus or I don’t want to call it propaganda in the
1:20:27
charged sense, but the propaganda campaign in the neutral sense of of propagating information that he’s doing.
1:20:32
This is the same problem, by the way, in the Charlie Kirk letter to BB Netanyahu where he’s like, you know, where is your
1:20:38
media game? Like, there should be a media game like nobody’s business on how great and safe Washington DC is. There
1:20:45
should be a media game saying that the that that the priority is to restructure
1:20:50
and reorganize the DC Police Department so that it can defederalize as quickly
1:20:55
as possible, but that we’re going to prioritize security and order. And meanwhile, it’s constant positive
1:21:01
messaging about how much safer, how much more secure DC is. So it becomes a marketing mechanism against these other
1:21:06
cities that are resisting because ultimately what you want is you want the citizens of Chicago, of Portland, good
1:21:13
luck, Seattle, and Los Angeles and so on saying, “Wait a minute. Our mayors have been telling us, the
1:21:18
Democrats have been telling us there’s no solution here.” So Trump could be turning this into a big political
1:21:24
opportunity by having cleaned up one of the worst cities for crime in the country, DC. But I don’t like when I
1:21:32
open my phone, I don’t see this every day or even once a week. It’s like I should be seeing this this messaging
1:21:37
campaign every day, which would sell a lot of Americans. A lot of people are
1:21:42
lost in this like black pill left versus right. It’s the left versus the right, but it’s like I don’t know what the
1:21:48
percentages are, but there’s a bunch of people, believe it or not, who are floating. They’re not floating like they
1:21:53
lean pretty strongly one way or the other perhaps, but they’re still floating. And there are a lot of people
1:21:58
like like you look at the changes in the vote outcomes in the 2024 election. How many people went to Trump in so many
1:22:05
urban areas in New York City, Los Angeles, and so on. That was just, you know, it wasn’t enough to turn the
1:22:10
county or whatever the district red, but it was shocking. And in some cases it did these numbers. I mean, what was it?
1:22:16
Wasn’t there this map that came out and it’s every county in America except one or all of them maybe went more to the
1:22:23
Republicans than the previous election or something? It’s it’s interesting. My my co-host on
1:22:29
making the argument, Christian Hines, so you guys have had some interesting uh debates on on X and whatnot. He started
1:22:35
pointing out several years ago, he called it the donut theory and he started pointing out that actually the inner cities are becoming far more
1:22:42
conservative. Yeah. And I remember telling him like, “You’re out of your mind.” He goes, “No, Nick.” He goes, “You don’t see it because it’s
1:22:47
not impacting congressional races.” He goes, “When AOC wins her race by 75%, you don’t think about it except that she
1:22:54
won it by 83 the year before.” That’s a huge shift. Mhm. And and he pointed out that every single
1:23:00
burrow in New York City had gotten significantly more Republican except
1:23:06
with the exception of Manhattan, which is interesting for other reasons. Um, and he goes, “People are getting sick of
1:23:11
what’s going on within their cities and and it’s it hasn’t reached a critical mass to impact like again congressional
1:23:17
races or even your town council or city council races, but gubernatorial races,
1:23:22
presidential races, like it can have some of impact there.” Yeah. And it’s been fascinating to see
1:23:27
that it’s actually not just in the United States. Javier Malay, who’s one of my favorite world leaders, won his
1:23:35
race largely because of young voters in Buenos Aerys. That’s right. That is that kind of flies against what
1:23:40
we’ve traditionally thought of your more like conservative voters versus your more liberal voters. But it it does say
1:23:47
that something is shifting. Um I think this is a huge opportunity, right? And it doesn’t have to be a
1:23:53
hamfisted, you know, government driven. It can it can have some elements of it. Trump is like a master of this kind of
1:23:58
thing. While he’s not bragging on his accomplishment more, I’m not sure. But like we’ve got all these influencers
1:24:04
who’ve decided like that they’re, you know, primary thing they need to do is go run speculations about Israel or
1:24:10
speculations about Charlie Kirk or whatever. Like why don’t you just go to DC and film how cool it is now that
1:24:15
there’s not people being murdered every five minutes? You love to make your little propaganda reels and stick them all over Instagram. Like why don’t you
1:24:21
go do that? Oh, wait. Because you need conflict and drama to drive your clicks. And but this pro this kind of a this
1:24:27
kind of a messaging or propaganda push in the neutral sense of the term again
1:24:32
to illustrate to voters in these other cities this donut theory is not a bad idea. Like Christian has some smart
1:24:38
ideas like that’s not in question. He’s a very smart guy. He’s just in my opinion radicalized. But um this this
1:24:47
observation’s correct and this can be strongly encouraged by looking at this particular example. Instead, we’re
1:24:53
focusing on the conflict and I even see people kind of accelerating the conflict like in Portland and in Chicago because
1:24:59
if it bleeds, it leads. But there could be this message like look at the hell hole that Chicago is and it’s stupid
1:25:05
mayors doing this and it’s just making the problem worse. Meanwhile, you know, it could be like a backtoback war zone
1:25:11
scene of Chicago, South Chicago or whatever. And then like people just enjoying lunch at a cafe in DC like the
1:25:17
sun is shining and it’s I thought one of the most brilliant things that was done and I was I was trying to wonder okay is this chance or
1:25:23
is this five-dimensional chest right but when when he was first talking about sending the national guard into
1:25:28
crimeridden cities you you all of a sudden you have these Democrat governors and Democrat mayors going why do you
1:25:34
keep picking on um you know blue cities and blue states why don’t you start focusing on what what about Memphis and
1:25:41
then all of a sudden Trump was like great idea and and the governor of Tennessee was like, “Great idea.” Well,
1:25:46
once again, now now you’ve moved something that, you know, if you’re just sitting in the National Guard, to clear
1:25:51
out the crime, that’s somewhat problematic constitutionally. But if you’ve got a governor of a state going,
What Should the Right Want?
1:25:58
”No, we need help down here.” Well, now all of a sudden some of those constitutional barriers that that might have been a problem before go away. And
1:26:04
like you said, it becomes a a it becomes a use case um of yeah, you these cities
1:26:12
don’t have to be this way. You’ve been lied to for six decades, right? They don’t have to be this way. Let let me I
1:26:17
I want to I want to I want to ask one other question. And that is because one of the things I
1:26:22
wanted to establish is no, James Lindseay is not just saying vote harder or argue harder. Yes, there’s legitimate
1:26:29
ways that we can use state power within the boundaries of the Constitution and that we can be aggressive while still
1:26:35
preserving our values. Like that that is not that’s not a contradiction. It’s not a contradiction. And you and you’ve articulated some of those here with
1:26:42
respect to immigration policy, with respect to um you know, crime and and things of that nature. Again,
1:26:50
let let’s say we get what we want and we have the the people in place um you know the the executive branch and we not just
1:26:56
have we don’t just have the Senate, we actually have a filibuster proof Senate where we can actually get Cloucher. Uh
1:27:02
we have the House, we have a friendly Supreme Court. Are there any structural changes you
1:27:09
would make to let’s say the Constitution or to existing amendments? Are there any
1:27:15
things that you would make that would that you feel would do a good job of addressing kind of how we got here while
1:27:21
still preserving, you know, the principles and the values that you want to preserve? Not at the level of the constitution.
1:27:28
Um, barring the discussion about immigration points that I raised earlier, that’s of course a a place
1:27:34
where I think there’s a fruitful debate to be had about these kind of two or three loopholes in immigration law that
1:27:42
that have been the excuses by which the both Democrats and Republicans, but
1:27:48
overwhelmingly Democrats have have exploited our country over the past, you know, 30 years. And so other than that,
1:27:54
no, not at that level. Um, what I would, especially since you said we have a friendly court, what should be happening
1:28:02
is a very strategic, very informed, claritydriven push not to play lawfare.
1:28:08
Although I watched Charlie Kirk’s video that has come around, it floated around a bunch about playing offense and, you
1:28:14
know, that the DAS and AGs and in conservative states should be indicting Democrats who do illegal things, playing
1:28:20
a game of tit fortat. I’m not opposed to a tit fortat indictment lawf fair game
1:28:25
either actually but that’s not the question you asked but um what I do think is possible is that we have to
1:28:31
have a strategy to look at where principles like the equal protection clause have been lost and all of that
1:28:39
has to start getting undone. So, I mean, some of it has been attacked, right? Um,
1:28:44
very successfully. Trump um removed Johnson’s affirmative action executive
1:28:51
order for the first time in, you know, 60 years or whatever. And that thing is
1:28:57
is a shock, right? So, you have the Civil Rights Act packed pass in ’ 64. No doubt Civil Rights Act needs reform,
1:29:04
but it’s mostly squared up. But what happened was in ’ 65 he signs this executive order that literally violates
1:29:10
it and the equal protection clause it’s supposed to be based on and then this kind of continues so that by 71 now you
1:29:16
have in backy versus no sorry wrong one uh you have Griggs versus Duke Power uh a Supreme Court case decided that you
1:29:23
know oh no the disperate impact doctrine of law is how we’re going to interpret whether or not there’s a discrimination
1:29:28
suit under civil rights law. So what you have is this shift from the idea of the protected classes meaning protected
1:29:33
classifications. Nobody gets discriminated against based on race because equal protection clause of 14th
1:29:39
amendment. That’s Civil Rights Act. Uh in some of those titles and it gets turned into, well, black people are not
1:29:45
doing as well in society. Therefore, you can’t discriminate against them. And if anything comes out to where the numbers
1:29:51
aren’t, you know, perfectly at par, then there is probably discrimination hiding somewhere and we can act as though you
1:29:57
did. This has got to go. That’s communist BS. That’s a straight Soviet import into our law. So what we would
1:30:03
need to be doing is using the court heavily to find and and smart people working in in in you know DC etc.
1:30:11
finding those particular court cases and getting these twisted interpretations of
1:30:16
law out finding where the loopholes that got exploited to get those and other
1:30:22
things in uh in legislation and get that out. For example, the 1991 Civil Rights Act actually codifies all this. That’s
1:30:29
got to go. If we’re going to have the Civil Rights Act, it needs to be based on the equal protection clause because there is no equitable protection clause.
1:30:35
And we’ve got to have that kind of mentality and be very hardline about it. You you said something earlier and it
1:30:42
reminded me of I had a journalist come up and ask me about a bill I had and he said, “What’s your guys’s problem with
1:30:47
the word equity?” And I said, “The way you use it, equity means a fair and just
1:30:52
outcome, but you interpret equity is equality of outcomes.” And equality of outcomes is not equitable.
1:30:59
it actually flies in the face of it. And and he goes, “Well, no, it’s not equality of outcomes. It’s equality of opportunity.” I said, “Oh, that’s okay.
1:31:05
That’s cute. So, let me ask you a question. How do I measure whether or not a quality of opportunity has been
1:31:10
achieved? If you’re going to tell me that the only way I can measure it is by the demographics of the country and then the
1:31:16
demographics of a corporate board and say, well, if these two don’t match up, equity has not been achieved.” Well, then what you want is equality of
1:31:22
outcomes and and that is again, it’s completely unjust. But and andviet program. So
1:31:28
it is. Yeah. Desperate impact all of this. So okay. So let me I’m going to do
1:31:33
I’m going to do kind of a quick synopsis here and you tell me how how close I was. James Lindseay is saying that if we
1:31:41
what we should be fighting for on the right is a country which once again
1:31:47
embraces kind of the American version of the classical liberal traditions. individual liberty, private property
1:31:54
rights, free markets, limited constitutional government, representative government, the all of
1:32:00
these things. We should uh appreciate and respect the idea of what John Adams
1:32:06
said, a moral and religious people, the transcendent objective truth, the objective morality, but we should never
1:32:11
use that as an excuse to use state power to compel a particular religious belief.
1:32:16
We have to use legitimate state power as it currently exists and and as as the federal government can or the executive
1:32:22
can within the current constitutional boundaries to push back against some of these you know bad legal decisions that
1:32:28
have been put in place with respect to civil rights like like things like desperate impact and you know this this
1:32:33
kind of uh communist infiltration or socialist infiltration of you know what we might what we might agree are are um
1:32:42
good ideas within the American tradition of equality before the law but not equality of outcome. We need to look
1:32:48
very very hard with respect to um you know what we mean by naturalization.
1:32:54
What what is it what does it mean to be an American citizen and if someone becomes an American citizen that but
1:32:59
then you know uh engages in you know
1:33:04
openly subversive or even terrorist terrorist activities denaturalization
1:33:10
should be a consideration that we should use carefully but should always be an option. Um, but ultimately what we need
1:33:17
to do is once again reaffirm that the founders got a whole lot right within our Declaration of Independence, within
1:33:22
our Constitution, our system of government. And really what this is about is once again recognizing that we
1:33:30
need to double down on what they created and we need to recognize that we have an OB we it doesn’t protect itself. It
1:33:36
requires human beings to believe in it, to fight for it, to insist upon it, and we can we can do that within a free
1:33:43
society. Uh but ultimately it’s it’s on us and that’s that’s what the right
1:33:48
should want and should be fighting for. What would you add or take away from that in every generation like this fight is a
1:33:55
is a fight that comes in every generation. Communism is coming to the world. There were actually parallel
1:34:00
evils even in you know the monarchal phase before. As it turns out, secret
1:34:06
societies like the Rosacruians, the Bavarian Illuminati, the League of the Just, these all still existed back in
1:34:12
the monarchy days. Monarchy couldn’t totally stop secret subversive societies
1:34:17
and some of them caused revolutions. And there’s I mean, look at the French Revolution, for example, um with the
1:34:23
Jacabins. So, you know, we we need to defend against this and we need to
1:34:28
therefore the piece that we haven’t discussed and it’s a lot and we don’t have to get into it a lot is education.
1:34:34
the the the biggest and most important fight still regard is still located in
1:34:39
how we raise and educate our children. And we have to be extremely serious about this. Um right now, even if they
1:34:48
come out as conservatives, our our kids are being just washed in a conflict
1:34:54
theorybased picture of society, an identity politics-based vision of society. And it’s no surprise that they
1:35:00
come out completely cooked and don’t know how to deal with a actual republic
1:35:05
based on the proposition that all men are created equal because they’ve had nothing but rejection of that. And
1:35:10
there’s two ways you can reject it. Of course, a lot of them on the left are like, “It’s not working for me, so it’s
1:35:16
crap. Burn it down.” A lot of them on the right are like, “It’s completely biased.” And therefore, you know, if
1:35:22
it’s going to be biased, it’s always going to be biased. There’s no value neutrality, therefore it’s going to be our way or the highway. And there’s two
1:35:28
ways you can step into that that game. And we call them, you know, leftism and and radical rightism. And if we don’t
1:35:36
get education back under control, if we don’t figure out that education should be about producing people for our
1:35:43
society, for our economy, for our communities, who can build, who can
1:35:48
create, who can lead, who can deal with these challenges, then we’re lost. The
1:35:54
only other point I didn’t touch on at all and I’ll just throw it out there. We don’t it would be a huge thing to get into is again we’ve got to think very
1:36:02
very seriously if we’re going to take a classically liberal approach in the American sense which is all about
1:36:08
securing rights. We don’t know what like the property right question I raised at the beginning
1:36:14
is extraordinarily challenging in the digital domain. We don’t actually know
1:36:19
what digital property represents and it is going to become more and more and
1:36:24
more important not less important over time. It’s easy to think of like you know can you steal a meme that’s like in
1:36:31
copyright domain but you have like right to fix for tractors you’ve got tons of
1:36:37
issues and and then within the digital domain how do you prevent it? So, the
1:36:42
Constitution authorizes the federal government to repel an invasion, but what about widescale people’s war from
1:36:50
the People’s Republic of China or Russia or Iran or our other coordinating enemies? What about propaganda warfare
1:36:57
coming in through social media beamed into our heads while we lay comfortably in bed thinking we’re safe at home? We
1:37:05
don’t realize, you know, something like, I think it’s on X, it’s something like 250 million accounts in the last 10
1:37:13
years come from the third world. That’s a gigantic percentage. So, they bring all their fun third world values and
1:37:18
that’s the people replying to you, often pretending to be American so that they’ll, you know, you’ll interact with them and they can get their their
1:37:24
Twitter bucks or whatever else it is. And so we’ve got this major problem where a lot of that is subversive, that
1:37:30
it is political warfare, people’s war, unrestricted war, whichever term we want to use, 5G warfare, whatever one we want
1:37:36
to use, from gigantic military budgets in China, in Russia, etc. And that’s an
1:37:43
invasion, too. That is an ideological and mental invasion. It’s not boats
1:37:48
showing up on our shore or planes crossing into our airspace necessarily or a rocket coming down from space and
1:37:55
ICBM or whatever. It’s a different kind of penetration and invasion. And we
1:38:00
haven’t even had a real conversation about what that looks like at all to try to deal with that kind of thing. Much
1:38:06
less to deal with, you know, what is a digital bill of rights? Is that a constitutional thing? It might be. Uh,
1:38:12
you know, what does that kind of look like? So this digital space, this technology space is also a ground state
1:38:19
that we’re kind of we’re floating around in all these philosophies and we’re forgetting that the technological universe that we operate in has shifted
1:38:26
like when the printing press was invented but times 10 or times 100 and
1:38:31
we don’t know how to reckon with that. I mean property before the printing press was pretty straightforward. intellectual
1:38:36
property wasn’t a thing more or less at all because you couldn’t just easily rip off somebody’s, you know, work of of
1:38:44
intellectual quality or whatever. And then you could and it became very easy later. But then as you know, Metallica
1:38:50
tried to prove for us with Napster back in like the early 2000s. Now we’re in this whole like if if you know Metallica
1:38:58
writes a song and now there’s an MP3 of it, can anybody just go get that? Should should Metallica get royalties? How
1:39:03
could you authenticate that? do we really want to enter into a world where you can authenticate that like with
1:39:08
blockchain or whatever else. These are hard questions that I don’t know if we’re actually grappling with. So, I
1:39:15
feel like this sleepwalk in the brave new world is kind of a backdrop to our problems. And I think that these are
1:39:21
more fruitful veins of debate than, you know, whether or not we have to upend
1:39:27
the constitution because we don’t know how to deal with kids with purple hair who’ve decided that they can be a cat or
1:39:35
whatever in large numbers. So this is a um this is a much more fundamental I
1:39:43
think part of the open question of what does classical liberalism look like in
1:39:48
the 21st century where something like digital property and mass communication on a global scale what does it actually
1:39:54
look like to to to to fulfill the constitution at that level that’s I think a more important conversation than
1:40:01
a lot of these airy fairy philosophical ones but we’ve got to have the philosophical ones too so that we can
1:40:07
orient in the right direction to deal with those problems. Yeah, you you got to you got to settle
1:40:12
on what the principles are before you orient them toward new technological innovations and problems and disruptive
1:40:17
technology etc. But no, it it is a very interesting question and and again I’ I’ve served on the uh technology or
1:40:25
communications technology and innovation committee and trying to deal with legislation on AI is difficult. People
1:40:31
are like why do you just do this? I’m like okay because there’s about 30,000 different ways that can go really really
1:40:36
wrong. Yeah. Um, but you can’t ban AI because it’s math, right? Yeah.
1:40:42
And it’s strategically unwise. Well, James, I I I also want to say I couldn’t agree with you more on the
1:40:47
education uh front. People have asked me several times, what’s the one issue I would I was the one hill I would die on
1:40:53
legislatively in the general assembly. And I always told him if I could get if I could get significant education reform
1:40:59
where I didn’t we didn’t live in this world of government monopolization of it, I would absolutely do it in a heartbeat. We ended up homeschooling all
1:41:06
three of my kids and I can look back on all the things that I wish I would have done better. I always say all my kids
1:41:11
love Jesus and they really can’t stand communism. So, you know, Victor, mission accomplished at least on that level.
1:41:18
But, um, and and on that education crunch, I would really encourage everybody to go check out new
1:41:24
discourses. Um, I think it’s really important to understand what it is that we’re actually up against. U, I hope
1:41:30
you’ve enjoyed the discussion, James, and I have had here today. I certainly have on what we should be fighting for,
1:41:35
but we still have a pretty formidable opponent that we’re fighting against. And like I said before, I don’t think anybody has done a better job of making
1:41:43
um that information and that understanding and the history of it more accessible than James has. James, can
1:41:48
you please tell us where we can find out more about the work that you’ve done? Most of the work is located at
1:41:54
newiscourses.com. The podcast platform is called the New Discourses Podcast. It’s everywhere you
1:42:00
listen to podcasts and I’m on all the social medias at conceptual James with the exception of Facebook which still
1:42:05
has me banned for life. So you can’t find me on Facebook but everywhere else. All right. Well, we’ll have to call Mark
1:42:11
after this. Not like he’s going to pick up our phone for us though. But once again, James, thank you very much for joining us and thank all of you. Please
1:42:17
let us know what you thought in the comments and we look forward to seeing you next episode.

What Should The Right Want? w James Lindsay Ep. 2