The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West—and Why Only They Can Save It by Melanie Phillips with Richard Messing and Jesan Sorrells

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Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this

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is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast. And this is a

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bonus episode. Picking up,

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well, maybe not picking up from our book today. We’re going to summarize some

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information from our book today.

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This book that we are going to be talking about today

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is a book that was written In the

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aftermath of the October 7th attack on

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Israel. And we’ve never actually talked about

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that on this podcast before because, well, for a couple of

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reasons. One, we haven’t really had a need to.

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But also, we haven’t really had a grounding to

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be able to talk about that event and to

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be able to to position that event in such a way that

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leaders can take something from it and understand what to do and what

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to think about it. This book today gives us such a grounding.

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There is an idea buried in this book, actually not even buried.

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It’s right on the front cover of this book that

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only, only 2 religious

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practices in the West can

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actually save the West. Now, also

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buried in this book is the idea that the West is on a knife edge

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and about to fall or may have already fallen into the abyss.

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And as you know, if you’ve listened to this show for any length of time,

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I do believe that the Fourth Turning, which is when

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chaos and despair really reign in a society

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at the end of an 80-year seculum cycle, I believe that the

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Fourth Turning is almost over, and that we

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are in the process of turning the corner into

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a veritable civilizational spring, but one that

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won’t look like the last civilizational spring that we

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all have hagiographied in our minds.

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This book lays out the ways in which

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religion— and I do believe that religion is key to this— that

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religion and religious practices and religious traditions

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will buttress that turn

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and will take us into someplace. Now, for those

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of us who have historical memory of the last spring,

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well, we may not recognize it, but it will be spring nonetheless.

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Now, one of the things that I’ve done, and one of the things that I

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do in my life, is I pursue knowledge and insights from many different areas.

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And theology is one of those areas. And as

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a person attempting to live a Christian life, I spend a lot of my time

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studying and thinking about Christian and Jewish

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theological approaches to explaining reality.

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When you do this, by the way, such thinking and such research and such

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exploration reveals how far most of it is from the

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secular world’s assumed default setting.

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Theology, I have come to understand and I’ve come to deeply

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believe, lies at the headwaters of most of the issues and challenges we have

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in the world today. Theological thinking influences

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worldviews, and worldviews influence how we engage with culture and

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politics, and even how we engage with the technology that is

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bringing you this podcast episode today.

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Even people who think they don’t think about God Think about something,

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and that something is at the headwaters of their worldview,

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and every other decision comes from those

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headwaters. However,

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having a theology is not enough, particularly when

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that theology is not as efficacious as it could be in producing

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outcomes we desire in a world full of confusion, A world

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full of chaos and a world, a fallen world.

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Just look at Genesis 4, a fallen world in despair.

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When we wind up at this spot, when we wind up in the

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place that October 7th revealed, or when we wind up at the

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place that September 11th revealed, we need

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to return to the headwaters of our worldview and take

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stock so that we can move forward.

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Today on the show, we are going

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to be covering— we’re going to be summarizing, we’re going to be discussing

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some of the larger ideas from this book, uh,

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The Builder’s Stone by Melanie

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Phillips. By the way, the subtitle of this book is How

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Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only

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They Can Save It.

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Leaders, the stone which the builders rejected, the same stone has

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become the cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is

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marvelous in our eyes. And we have to

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rebuild the Western way of thinking and behaving by

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first acknowledging that fact.

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And today on my show, today on our show, Today, today in

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the podcast studio virtually joining us

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on this bonus episode is our returning guest from episode number

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200 and other episodes about

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leadership and ethics, particularly from a Jewish or

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Judaic perspective, but also a broader ethics perspective,

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Richard Messing. How you doing today, Richard?

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I’m doing quite well. Thank you, Ehsan. And it’s, it’s always a

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pleasure for me and an honor for me to, to, to be on your podcast.

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Uh, I admire what you’re doing and, uh, and it’s

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extraordinary and it needs to be done. And to be able to

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participate in this with you, uh, for me is, is a real privilege. So thank

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you very much. Absolutely. So, um, you and I were talking before we

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hit record. We were sort of, sort of prepping the pump a little bit and

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priming the pump a little bit for, uh, for our show today. Warming up.

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Warming up. Warm it up. Yeah, warming. I was warming Richard up a little bit

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here. So I know it’s been— it’s probably been a minute since you’ve read

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The Builder’s Stone specifically. But why don’t we start

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with this? Let’s go into the hard parts first. Okay.

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So on October 7th,

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Hamas militants engaged in

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a terrorist attack on Israel. As

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a result of that attack, Israel

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engaged on a— what

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some of my more anti-war listeners would call

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a scorched earth

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posture towards the West Bank and the Gaza

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Strip and any place else where they could find Hamas militants.

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And many of my more anti-war folks

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Would say that

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that engagement in and of itself, that

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response to the attack was out of

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proportion to the attack itself, or was disproportionate to the

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attack itself. By the way, Melanie begins her book with this idea:

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the response to Israel’s response from

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the overall secular and quite frankly Western world.

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Right now, she’s you know embedded in Britain.

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And, and, and being part of the European continent,

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it’s a lot more sharp there than even it was here. But we even saw

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this in the United States. I mean, we had, you know, students

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protesting. We had all kinds of different things happening, right?

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Melanie goes into this in the first part of her book. And so that’s why

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I kind of wanted to open up with this. I

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know you were probably impacted very deeply by the October 7th

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attacks, not just as a Jewish person, but just also as a person who focuses

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on ethics. Why don’t you kind of

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walk us through a little bit of what your thoughts were around that

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and what you kind of remember or recall from this book and Melanie’s sort of

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approach to this and whether you agree, disagree, think that she didn’t go

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far enough, think that she went too far, or think that she landed on it,

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on it correctly. Why don’t you kind of walk us through a little bit of

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that just to start?

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Well, first of all, it’s

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natural to defend yourself when you’re being

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attacked. And so it’s

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hard to really understand why

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anyone would think

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that Israel should not have reacted in a

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defensive manner. And so

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to think that, just, I mean, I just don’t understand it. I mean,

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someone’s attacked unprovoked. I mean, it’s not like Israel was attacking

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Gaza. I mean, you can have all kinds of beliefs and thoughts about, you

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know, the way Israel should treat

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the Palestinians and all of that,

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which is fine. You know, there’s many opinions about this, and

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it’s a very controversial thing.

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But nevertheless, Israel was attacked.

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viciously, horribly. And I

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think what most people don’t realize in the world is that after

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the Holocaust, the Jewish people, you know,

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Israel in particular, Jewish people

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realized that they have to take full responsibility for

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their own existence. They can’t rely on anybody else,

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and they’re never going to allow such a thing to happen again. And

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so I think, you know, I don’t think the world really

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realized the extent to which the Jewish people have made that

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decision and will act on it when they think it’s

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necessary. You know, the Jewish people, I think,

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generally speaking, are not malicious. They’re not

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warmongers historically. There’s just— I

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don’t think one could defend that position that

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they’re a an antagonistic and

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militaristic empire-seeking,

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land-seeking, land acquisition-seeking people. I think the

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opposite history testifies to the opposite.

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And I think that the Jewish people, Israel in particular,

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decided enough

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is enough. They have to do what’s necessary to

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absolutely eliminate this from ever happening again. And I

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think that’s why they embarked on the kind of military

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reaction that they did. I would also add to this, and

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Melanie doesn’t talk about this in her book, but what you just stated matches

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up almost exactly with what she talks about in the first part of The Builder’s

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Stone when she’s building her argument, right?

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Her screed, really. I mean, I’m going to be honest. There were This book

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was hard to read, not because I disagree with anything fundamentally

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in her position. I could smell the fear

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coming off of this book, right? And I get why

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Melanie is afraid, if I may call her Melanie, Ms. Phillips. I

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understand, right? If you’re a Jewish person

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who happens to be living in Britain, watching this

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happen in light of also

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immigration woes and everything else happening in Europe around Muslim

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immigration, if you’re watching the

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turn of London from London into

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Londonistan, as I have often heard it referred to. If you’re

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sitting at ground zero watching this, and Melanie, just to give you a

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little bit of background on her, she was born in 1951.

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She originally started off as a left-wing writer, a political left-wing writer

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for The Guardian in the early ’80s, and then began to

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migrate and left the paper and began to migrate

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intellectually and politically more towards, more towards the right.

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She actually describes herself more in the mode of like a neoconservative,

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which are— the old joke about neoconservatives is

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that they are liberals that have been mugged by reality.

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And so I think— I don’t think Melanie would maybe adopt that

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position, but I do think that she would say her views

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evolved, such as it were, over time. And

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one of the things— She was mugged. Yeah, she was

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mugged. I mean, she wasn’t physically mugged, but

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they started to mug her, you know, at work. Exactly. Yeah,

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exactly. Yeah, they started to like push back on her. And, and as Britain started

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to change, these— Ostracizing her. She asked— they

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ostracized her. They, you know, I mean, she became the enemy of it.

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Exactly. Yep. And, and

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she, she writes this book from

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that perspective. Right. And so

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one of the things I think that she missed, though, and I think this is

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one of the things that we do have a problem with in the West in

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looking at any military action in the West. And

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really, this became sharp. Well, no, the seeds for this

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were laid during the Vietnam War in the United States

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and the loss of the Vietnam War in the United States. I think in Britain,

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the seeds for it were laid far earlier due to

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Britain’s lack of cultural confidence after World War

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II and the giving away of their colonies. So they had about a

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20-year run on us, on the United States, before this even showed up here

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on our shores. But now it’s here fully in the West. And I think the

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thing that we’re, that we in the West are lacking, and Melanie again does not

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talk about this in her book, but I think I think it’s

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critical and key to understanding us, or critical or

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key to understanding an anti-war position, not agreeing with it, just understanding it.

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The anti-war position does not understand what a just war

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is. There’s no concept of just war theory anymore in

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the West. Just war theory comes out of Catholicism.

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Just war theory is the idea that it is

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just to engage in not just

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self-defensive warfare, but warfare,

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period. Right. Not necessarily to advance the

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gospel or advance a religious position, but to be able

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to— and this is something that’s key— to be able to eliminate evil

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from the world. And that war, a just war

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that seeks to eliminate evil, is not a

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war that can be— that needs to be

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fought brutally or extemporaneously or whatever. But it is a

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war that needs to be fought in order to,

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to totally destroy that evil. So this is where you

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get the biblical basis for World War II, right? Or you get

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the biblical basis for, in America, the American Civil War,

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right? Now, what runs

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alongside that track of just war theory is also the

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track of the tragedy of warfare in and of itself.

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All warfare is a crime. All of it. All throughout time.

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Everybody can agree with that. But what a, what a, what a more

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secular anti-war position does is once it’s lost that just war theory,

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that just war theory position, which I think we have lost,

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then it becomes all about tragedy. And only thing that can be seen is the

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tragedy. And there’s, since there’s tragedy everywhere,

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and by the way, since evil and good cannot be fully defined

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because morality is relative, which we’ll get into that with Melanie as well,

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relativism. The triumph of relativism. Well, okay,

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then everybody is evil in a war, or

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everybody is good, or no one is good and no

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one is evil. And thus you get the squishiness that you saw around the

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Iraq War in the United States, the Afghanistan War in

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the United States, the Afghanistan withdrawal. And you get the

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protesting and the pushback that Melanie

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found so offensive and so shocking. Against Israel.

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Again, I’m not saying that this is, this is an agreeable— I’m not saying

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I agree with this position. I don’t. I think it’s a fundamentally naive position.

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But I also think that it’s one that deserves an explanation or deserves

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a sort of an understanding for folks about what we have abandoned. And it

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is, we’ve abandoned just war theory and we’ve avoided— we’ve abandoned a tragic

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view of human nature.

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So in The Builders’

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Stone, her subtitle is like how the Jews

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and Christians built the West and why only they can save it.

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Okay, let’s, let’s go to that. Why

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are, why are, why are Jews and Christians— and Richard, just for the full

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disclosure of folks on the show, Richard is Jewish.

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Richard is knee-deep right now. I believe you’re knee-deep right now in the Pentateuch. Is

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that correct? Like, you’re going deep into the Torah, right? The last time I talked

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to you. Well, I’m Orthodox. So

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Orthodox Jews, that’s what they do, is

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they’re learning the Torah. The Torah is the— it’s not— is the Tanakh.

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It’s the entire 5 Books of Moses, plus the Kings

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and the Writings and, you know, the Prophets. So it’s the

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whole Tanakh, the whole canon. Okay. Okay. So

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we’re just out of curiosity, where are you in the Tanakh right now?

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If you don’t mind me asking. Well, the Jewish people just finished

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the 5 Books of Moses, and we

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literally this today, we, or

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yesterday, we actually started back from the beginning. We

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started learning Genesis right at the beginning of

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Genesis. Okay, that’s interesting because actually in my church and

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right now we’re actually going, we are preaching through the entire Book of Genesis. We’re

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going to spend the entire next 9 months preaching through the entire book of Genesis

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because I go to one of those churches that actually preaches the Bible. I know

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it’s shocking. You do actually have churches in the United States that actually do that.

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It’s stunning, I know. But, and we’re all

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reading it together and we’re all walking through it together and we’re all doing studies

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together. So the whole church, from the children to the old

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people, we’re all engaged, going to be in Genesis for the next like 9 months.

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Interesting. Which is great. That’s interesting. So, and then, so how long does

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it take you to get through the whole thing, the whole 5 books? Um,

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you mean from Genesis all the way through to Deuteronomy? I’m sorry, Leviticus.

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Yeah. Um, so if we went through all, that would be

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probably 3 years to go through all that. Really? That’s, that’s the

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cycle? That’s, uh, oh wow. We did the whole, we did the

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whole thing in 1 year and then we start over. Okay. Well,

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we— there’s a lot of commentary. There’s a lot of Christian commentary and a lot—

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there’s a lot of accretion in Christianity around,

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around all these books. And so

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sometimes you get the accretion that also seeps in, right?

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Well, also, there’s a lot of different— a lot of different versions of

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Christianity, right? And so they all do their own different customs and

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practices. And yeah. So that’s, that’s a— Yeah. So

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we go to, yeah. So we, my wife and my, my wife and I and

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my kids, um, attend a, we’re,

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we’re, we’re, we’re one of the, one of the sects of Christianity.

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Um, that, uh, that is very biblically focused. So

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the Bible first and then everything else after that. Then we can get into

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everything else after that. But like we went— When you say the Bible, you mean

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the 5 books, the 5 books of Moses. I mean, the 5 Books of Moses.

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I mean, the wisdom literature. I mean, the prophets. I mean,

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I mean, I mean, the thing. And then, of course, you know, because we’re Christians,

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the New Testament, then we go into the New Testament and we try. So,

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you know, we’re, we’re, we’re focused on, we’re focused on that. So there’s a lot

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of material there for us to, for us to cover. But, but

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currently right now, we, like, we just, we, my, my, we just

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did a whole message on

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Genesis 2,

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going through Adam and Eve, the creation of

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Eve, and sort of what that actually means for male and female, and how does

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that tie into the world and the kinds of dynamics

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we see around, to my point in the opening,

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misapplied theology or lack of understanding of theology.

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So we had a whole message on that. Just on that

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alone, right? And so it’s, I mean, it’s just, I’m just

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saying it’s interesting. So we’re kind of, kind of running a little bit, a little

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bit parallel. Okay. That’s why I wanted to find out where you were, because maybe

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you’re, maybe you’re wandering around in Jeremiah right now. I don’t know. But,

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but, I mean, there’s the, there’s

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the traditional weekly

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recitation of a portion of the, of the, of the

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5 Books of Moses. There’s that, that, that, that’s standard across,

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across the world, uh, for Orthodox Jews. Uh, also

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conservatives, I believe, also follow that same cadence.

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Uh, uh, but, but, but every— but this, this is— there’s a

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ton of literature that’s been derived from the,

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from the Torah that’s, that’s, uh, phenomenal. Uh,

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philosophy, Jewish philosophy, Jewish thought. I mean, on every aspect of

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life. So people are— Everybody’s into their own, you know, stuff.

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I love Jewish philosophy. I’m interested in what the Torah teaches us

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about the human condition and our behavior, how we make decisions, what motivates

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us, why we have chronic problems, and all of that.

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So that’s— free will is one of my favorite topics, and

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also idolatry. You know,

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why did people, you know, worship the sun and the moon and the

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wind and the the trees. And how did people do that? Like, what

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was that? How did that happen? By the way, I think that— I think if

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you don’t understand that, then you’re liable to

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fall into some kind of idolatry yourself. It may not be

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that kind of idolatry, but some form of worshiping something that’s not

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really real. Right, right. Well, and one of the points

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I think, and I’ve sort of adopted this from Jordan Peterson after

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listening to his biblical lectures, where he went

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through Genesis and, and most recently he’s gone through

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Exodus with The Daily Wire. But,

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but one of the, one of the things that I sort

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of gleaned from that is, and Christians have a

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broad understanding of idolatry beyond just, to your point,

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the sun, the moon, and the stars. Idolatry is anything,

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whether it’s material, spiritual,

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financial, anything you’re placing either in your heart

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or in your head or even in your material world that is above

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the transcendent. So if money is number one, I’ll use a

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nice simple abstract one. If money is number one and God is number

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two, money— And this is the brutal thing that

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Jordan Peterson brought up, and I actually agree with this. And I think this is

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at the root of most of the idolatry in the West. if money is number

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one, then money will judge you. And anything that’s—

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that’s anything that’s less than the transcendent that’s at the top of your hierarchy,

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that thing will judge you harshly and brutally, and you will always be found wanting.

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So Rabbi Jonathan— Lord Jonathan Sacks, who was the, uh,

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the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom for 22 years,

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he says that— he says that in our, in our era

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What people are worshiping is the self.

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The self. Self-development,

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self-development, this, that, it’s all self. The selfie.

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Why do you think people are taking pictures of themselves? A selfie. This is what

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people are worshiping, the self. Right. And the

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self, of course, you’re placing it above the transcendent. And now the self

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becomes the thing at the top of your hierarchy. And you will always

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be found wanting. And that’s the brutal part of it. So if the

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transcendent is at the top of the hierarchy, there’s an opportunity for repentance

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and forgiveness. But if the

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self is at the top or money, right, or the sun

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or anything else, that’s not, that’s not— You

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have, if you have negative self-talk, you’re

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worshiping the self. The self, right, exactly.

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Yeah. And Melanie touches on some of this in her book where she talks about

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particularly In, in

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the, one of the really good chapters, chapter 2, Judaism and Western

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Civilization, she talks about the Bible’s core role in creating the

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values of the West. She talks about the root of the

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values of rationality and science, the importance of the Talmud,

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what is the core of British and American values. And then, of course,

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how we went through the looking glass in chapter 3. She talks about how the

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West unraveled through demoralization, deconstruction, and

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decline. And of course, she opens up with a,

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with a little bit of an anecdote talking about social media

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influencers. And yet, to your point, worshiping of self,

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which is what a lot of social media influencers are pushing.

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Somebody once told me that we have successfully— and I don’t think this person’s religious,

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he’s just observant. He said, he said, we’ve

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successfully monetized all of the 7 deadly sins.

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That’s what we’ve actually done. We’ve successfully monetized every single last one of them.

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And I was like, that’s, that’s genius. That’s a genius insight.

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I never heard it put that way, but that’s probably correct.

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Um, so the thing,

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yes, self and the rationality of picking

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self is the other idol that we have, the idol of rationality. We

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can reason ourselves out of anything. Or into

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anything. And when we do

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that, and I think Melanie would agree with that, and I think this is part

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of the reason why she wrote this book. When we do that, we wind up

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in a space where, to my point earlier about not

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understanding just war theory, we believe we can throw away anything

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and then just adopt anything else, and one thing will be as good as another.

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So there’s a lack of a value schema. in there, a lack of an

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understanding of weight. And so to come back to this, just,

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just ask a question here. She says how Jews and Christians built the West and

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why only they can save it. Do you agree with that? Because I

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do, but I have my reasons. I want to get yours. Do you agree

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that Jews and Christians built the West, and do you agree that we can save

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it? I,

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I personally think Melanie Phillips probably has the

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best overall understanding of what’s

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going on in Western civilization and with the decline of

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Western civilization. Yeah, I mean,

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most scholars agree that Western civilization is

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founded on Judeo-Christian values,

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especially the United States, especially the United States,

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you know, In God We Trust. And so the

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philosophers that the founders of the United

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States were reading, those philosophers

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were studying the Old Testament. They weren’t necessarily

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religious, but they were studying the Old Testament,

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which is fundamentally about how to create an ideal

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society, a functioning society. And

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so if it’s true, if it’s true

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that those values came from the

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Judeo-Christian tradition. I mean, Melanie talks about how, you know, it

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was the Jews that brought those values into

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the mainstream through, you know, the 5 Books of

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Moses and the Talmud and all of that. But it was the

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Christians that actually made it worldwide.

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They took those values and they spread it worldwide. And

450
00:28:53,777 –> 00:28:57,063
so I do believe that that’s what happened.

451
00:28:57,905 –> 00:29:01,546
I do. Well, and we

452
00:29:01,546 –> 00:29:04,147
talk a lot, we talk a lot on this show.

453
00:29:07,178 –> 00:29:09,673
We talk a lot about the Bible. We do. And when I want to be

454
00:29:09,673 –> 00:29:13,505
very clear for listeners, when I talk about the Bible versus what maybe what

455
00:29:13,698 –> 00:29:17,208
Richard is talking about, when Richard talks about the Bible, he’s talking about the Tanakh.

456
00:29:17,273 –> 00:29:21,011
He’s talking about, you know, the 5 books. He’s talking about that. When I’m talking

457
00:29:21,027 –> 00:29:24,171
about the Bible, I’m talking about everything from Genesis to what we have in our

458
00:29:24,171 –> 00:29:27,283
book, the New Testament, you know, the Book of Revelation. Right. I’m talking about the

459
00:29:27,283 –> 00:29:31,005
whole— that whole corpus. Right. And what we talk

460
00:29:31,005 –> 00:29:34,854
about on this show quite a bit, actually, is about how

461
00:29:34,919 –> 00:29:38,688
the Bible is the one book that lays at the foundation of

462
00:29:38,688 –> 00:29:41,993
Western civilization that we can’t dig past.

463
00:29:42,939 –> 00:29:46,757
Many philosophers have tried, from Nietzsche and Kant even,

464
00:29:46,789 –> 00:29:50,526
but Kant was actually more Christian than Nietzsche. But anyway, from, from

465
00:29:50,639 –> 00:29:54,025
Nietzsche on down, through all the philosophers, and this is kind of what she

466
00:29:54,154 –> 00:29:57,975
covers in her book, how the West sort of defenestrated itself,

467
00:29:59,452 –> 00:30:03,081
going from Nietzschean nihilism all the way

468
00:30:03,162 –> 00:30:06,084
to Derridean and Foucauldian deconstructionism

469
00:30:07,015 –> 00:30:10,756
in the ’70s. There was a long path

470
00:30:11,013 –> 00:30:14,658
of trying to dig past the Bible in order to

471
00:30:15,108 –> 00:30:17,838
find a way for human beings to

472
00:30:17,838 –> 00:30:21,389
self-create their own values. And now

473
00:30:22,433 –> 00:30:26,258
we’re at the end of that experiment, as well as

474
00:30:26,290 –> 00:30:29,680
being at the end of the Enlightenment experiment. And we found, much to our

475
00:30:29,680 –> 00:30:32,589
surprise, that the Bible is still there.

476
00:30:33,440 –> 00:30:36,992
That book that if you’re— and if you’re a

477
00:30:36,992 –> 00:30:39,755
secular atheist person, you know, I,

478
00:30:40,928 –> 00:30:44,339
I don’t know what to tell you. That book influences

479
00:30:45,080 –> 00:30:48,819
every single thing you take for granted as

480
00:30:48,948 –> 00:30:51,657
just being, quote unquote, the way things work.

481
00:30:52,600 –> 00:30:56,324
Case in point, if you are a person

482
00:30:56,341 –> 00:30:58,211
who is more oriented towards feminism,

483
00:31:00,170 –> 00:31:03,975
feminism came out of a biblical corpus. Feminism

484
00:31:04,007 –> 00:31:07,560
came out of Christianity, which

485
00:31:07,839 –> 00:31:10,604
stood in opposition to Roman paganism.

486
00:31:11,598 –> 00:31:15,433
that looked at women as not only property, but also

487
00:31:15,689 –> 00:31:19,027
as particularly babies in the Roman Empire.

488
00:31:19,701 –> 00:31:23,536
Female babies were thought of as being trash and less than.

489
00:31:24,691 –> 00:31:28,462
And so in 1st and 2nd century Christianity, do you know

490
00:31:28,606 –> 00:31:32,377
who was the people— who were the people who took those babies and

491
00:31:32,474 –> 00:31:35,201
brought them in and took care of them when they were left out on the

492
00:31:35,201 –> 00:31:38,539
trash heap outside of Rome or these other provinces?

493
00:31:39,055 –> 00:31:42,669
It was Christians that did that. Christians brought these

494
00:31:42,685 –> 00:31:46,316
babies in, raised these girls. And guess what? As the Roman

495
00:31:46,316 –> 00:31:50,122
Empire was collapsing and falling, Roman men

496
00:31:50,396 –> 00:31:54,044
who were looking for women to marry, guess

497
00:31:54,237 –> 00:31:58,047
what? They were going to marry these Christian girl babies that had grown up into

498
00:31:58,047 –> 00:32:01,668
these Christian, Christian women. The root of

499
00:32:01,668 –> 00:32:05,517
feminism. Yes. And feminism is the secularization,

500
00:32:05,549 –> 00:32:09,155
the full secularization of That idea,

501
00:32:09,171 –> 00:32:11,849
that ethic, that women have value

502
00:32:13,833 –> 00:32:17,673
and that they are not just complementary to men,

503
00:32:17,705 –> 00:32:20,671
but that they are equivalent or not equivalent, equal to men.

504
00:32:21,655 –> 00:32:25,324
That idea in feminism, if you are a feminist, you have to

505
00:32:25,340 –> 00:32:29,037
admit comes from Christianity. And then Christians have to

506
00:32:29,037 –> 00:32:32,766
admit that even more, the root of that idea comes

507
00:32:32,862 –> 00:32:36,504
out of Judaism. In particular, when we’re talking

508
00:32:36,504 –> 00:32:39,742
about how Caleb’s daughters were treated

509
00:32:40,902 –> 00:32:44,682
when, when territory was divided up among the Jewish

510
00:32:44,779 –> 00:32:48,361
people in the Book of Joshua, and then later on was referenced early in the

511
00:32:48,361 –> 00:32:52,146
Book of Judges. Those ideas

512
00:32:52,178 –> 00:32:55,933
came from somewhere, and the somewhere that they came

513
00:32:56,046 –> 00:32:59,399
from is, quite frankly, the Bible.

514
00:33:00,318 –> 00:33:04,052
And the Pentateuch and the Tanakh. That’s where those ideas came from.

515
00:33:04,117 –> 00:33:07,770
And so to try to dig past them, to try to dig past that

516
00:33:07,834 –> 00:33:09,956
stone, you’re not going to get anywhere.

517
00:33:11,683 –> 00:33:15,243
But what you can do, and I think Melanie would agree with this, what you

518
00:33:15,243 –> 00:33:18,884
can do is you can lose the plot by cutting yourself away from the

519
00:33:18,884 –> 00:33:22,607
anchor. And we talk a

520
00:33:22,655 –> 00:33:25,947
little bit about that on this show. I do think that we do think— all

521
00:33:25,996 –> 00:33:29,550
right, not we. I do think not all my guests agree, but I do

522
00:33:29,614 –> 00:33:33,117
think that the West has successfully or not successfully has

523
00:33:33,213 –> 00:33:36,539
tried to successfully cut itself away from the anchor of

524
00:33:36,587 –> 00:33:39,817
Christianity because— and Judaism, quite frankly,

525
00:33:40,139 –> 00:33:43,690
because Christianity and Judaism

526
00:33:43,690 –> 00:33:47,098
also, while being enervating and

527
00:33:47,228 –> 00:33:50,867
uplifting religions, they also tell you what you

528
00:33:50,948 –> 00:33:54,637
cannot do. And they tell you

529
00:33:54,831 –> 00:33:57,922
where you are sinful. There’s that word.

530
00:33:58,860 –> 00:34:00,705
And where you could be convicted around

531
00:34:04,476 –> 00:34:08,240
what you have done that is sinful. And Western man

532
00:34:08,900 –> 00:34:12,328
really doesn’t like being convicted on his sin.

533
00:34:14,217 –> 00:34:17,785
Really doesn’t enjoy that. By the way, no human being does, but

534
00:34:17,785 –> 00:34:20,659
Western man really doesn’t like it. And so we have successfully

535
00:34:21,742 –> 00:34:25,467
attempted to cut ourselves away from that. But the book still

536
00:34:25,548 –> 00:34:29,234
lies down there. The book is still there. And the most widely read

537
00:34:29,234 –> 00:34:32,938
book ever written and still is. It still is. Yeah. And it will be. It

538
00:34:32,970 –> 00:34:35,849
will be until the end of time. My God, it’s, it’s unbelievable.

539
00:34:37,005 –> 00:34:40,431
I think one publishing company in the United States, I read this,

540
00:34:40,705 –> 00:34:43,134
some statistic from like a while ago.

541
00:34:45,066 –> 00:34:48,438
And I don’t think it’s Zondervan or any of those other big publishing, big Christian

542
00:34:48,438 –> 00:34:52,005
publishing houses. But I think one publisher

543
00:34:52,005 –> 00:34:55,692
published like 90 million versions, translations of the

544
00:34:55,692 –> 00:34:58,770
Bible in like a year. That’s unbelievable.

545
00:35:00,261 –> 00:35:04,012
Well, if you actually look at the stories, everything about the human

546
00:35:04,012 –> 00:35:07,844
condition is in the 5 Books of Moses, the good and the bad and the

547
00:35:07,940 –> 00:35:11,322
ugly. It’s all there. Yep. You know,

548
00:35:11,787 –> 00:35:15,378
and the Jewish people, you know, did the good, the bad, and the ugly.

549
00:35:15,540 –> 00:35:19,000
I mean, it was, you know, that’s right. I mean, it’s, it’s, uh,

550
00:35:19,000 –> 00:35:22,720
it’s, it’s, it’s supposed to teach us something about ourselves. And

551
00:35:22,720 –> 00:35:26,380
so, uh, uh, it’s not just meant for Jews, it’s meant

552
00:35:26,380 –> 00:35:30,140
for humanity. It’s a, it’s a book that was given to humanity. It

553
00:35:30,140 –> 00:35:33,540
wasn’t just given to the Jewish people and then handed to the

554
00:35:33,540 –> 00:35:35,790
Christians. No, it was given to humanity.

555
00:35:36,220 –> 00:35:40,020
Right. Okay, let’s talk about— and Melanie does address this in her

556
00:35:40,020 –> 00:35:43,820
book, um, in, um, in chapter 7, The Historic Attrition of the Jewish

557
00:35:43,820 –> 00:35:47,216
People. She talks about the

558
00:35:47,782 –> 00:35:51,452
ways in which Jews survived from

559
00:35:51,500 –> 00:35:55,177
the 1st century AD and

560
00:35:55,677 –> 00:35:59,479
all the way through the destruction of the temple in 60

561
00:35:59,479 –> 00:36:03,104
or 64 AD, whenever it is the Romans destroyed the temple. I can’t— I can

562
00:36:03,104 –> 00:36:06,923
never remember if it was 60 or 64. I think it was 64 AD,

563
00:36:07,680 –> 00:36:11,255
all the way through to the Holocaust. She, she, she does

564
00:36:11,834 –> 00:36:15,281
an excellent job in chapter 7 and chapter 8 of her book in

565
00:36:15,281 –> 00:36:18,857
tracking this history, because she does want to be fair

566
00:36:19,084 –> 00:36:22,906
in acknowledging the challenges that Jews and Christians have had with each

567
00:36:22,906 –> 00:36:26,693
other. Because this

568
00:36:26,693 –> 00:36:30,311
is a, this is a definite critique of Melanie. I think that she was

569
00:36:30,344 –> 00:36:34,101
trying to lead off at the pass. So we’re

570
00:36:34,133 –> 00:36:35,021
not going to avoid that.

571
00:36:38,141 –> 00:36:41,844
A person looking from the outside, I’ll frame the question this way. A person

572
00:36:41,844 –> 00:36:45,339
looking from the outside who has no religious thinking,

573
00:36:45,707 –> 00:36:49,090
or at least they don’t think they do, with what minimal—

574
00:36:49,779 –> 00:36:53,226
minimally they understand about Judaism, which may come from an understanding of the

575
00:36:53,226 –> 00:36:57,073
Holocaust, and what minimally they may understand about Christianity, which may

576
00:36:57,073 –> 00:37:00,584
come from whatever they are taught about the Crusades, you know,

577
00:37:00,904 –> 00:37:04,737
in school. would look at Jews and Christians and would say, how can

578
00:37:04,769 –> 00:37:07,543
you save the West when you can’t even get along with each other?

579
00:37:10,492 –> 00:37:13,806
I kick that question to you. How can we save the West if we have

580
00:37:13,822 –> 00:37:16,113
not even been able to historically get along with each other?

581
00:37:19,775 –> 00:37:22,721
An excellent question. And, you

582
00:37:22,769 –> 00:37:24,971
know, the

583
00:37:24,971 –> 00:37:28,709
Bible

584
00:37:28,778 –> 00:37:32,150
very much contains a lot of warfare and

585
00:37:32,572 –> 00:37:35,230
fighting and this sort of thing.

586
00:37:37,119 –> 00:37:38,351
And so

587
00:37:40,945 –> 00:37:44,365
what has to happen is there has to be interfaith,

588
00:37:45,616 –> 00:37:49,364
an interfaith effort for the different faiths to

589
00:37:50,221 –> 00:37:53,727
come together and to realize that, you know,

590
00:37:54,422 –> 00:37:56,838
The Bible was given to everyone, to the whole world,

591
00:37:58,028 –> 00:38:01,281
and to respect each other’s differences.

592
00:38:02,710 –> 00:38:05,633
Every human being, you know, has dignity and has to be respected.

593
00:38:07,170 –> 00:38:10,723
And it’s inevitable that people are going to have different worldviews.

594
00:38:11,386 –> 00:38:14,439
So we have to respect the fact that people have different worldviews.

595
00:38:15,469 –> 00:38:18,985
But there’s probably truth in every

596
00:38:19,051 –> 00:38:22,807
worldview, some truth in every worldview. And there’s probably some falsehood in

597
00:38:22,807 –> 00:38:26,261
every worldview. So really, the different

598
00:38:26,261 –> 00:38:29,843
religions need to come together and to work together to

599
00:38:29,876 –> 00:38:33,410
discover more of the truth and to be open to the

600
00:38:33,410 –> 00:38:37,072
possibility that maybe some of the way they think is based on something

601
00:38:37,088 –> 00:38:40,767
that’s false. And that’s actually—

602
00:38:41,747 –> 00:38:45,586
that principle is very basic to the work that I’m doing,

603
00:38:45,763 –> 00:38:49,580
that I’ve developed. Right. It’s actually logically inevitable that

604
00:38:49,580 –> 00:38:52,360
our beliefs are going to be an undifferentiated

605
00:38:52,940 –> 00:38:56,080
mixture of true and false information about the world. It’s just inevitable,

606
00:38:57,079 –> 00:39:00,520
just, just by the fact that human beings lie. And when

607
00:39:00,520 –> 00:39:04,120
people lie, they’re telling you something that’s false, and they’re going to try to make

608
00:39:04,120 –> 00:39:07,040
sense out of it. Otherwise, you’re not going to believe them. And if you believe

609
00:39:07,040 –> 00:39:10,860
them, you just acquired a false belief, false information about the world, and

610
00:39:10,860 –> 00:39:14,470
you don’t know that it’s false. But yet all your beliefs are coded as true.

611
00:39:15,036 –> 00:39:18,596
This is the fundamental problem with the human condition, and there’s no way

612
00:39:18,596 –> 00:39:21,193
around this. This is inevitable.

613
00:39:22,428 –> 00:39:26,003
And so it— but people don’t understand this. And

614
00:39:26,195 –> 00:39:29,627
if you really understand it, everybody’s in the same boat when it comes to the

615
00:39:29,627 –> 00:39:32,657
true versus false and knowing the difference. Then

616
00:39:33,170 –> 00:39:37,018
instead of fighting, we should sit down and have a civil conversation when we

617
00:39:37,018 –> 00:39:40,754
have disagreements or we contradict each other. Well, and this is

618
00:39:40,850 –> 00:39:43,479
what I think— this is where I think Jews and Christians have wound up at.

619
00:39:43,753 –> 00:39:46,860
This is where we’ve wound up at. Now, it took us a long time to

620
00:39:46,876 –> 00:39:50,483
get here. 2,000 years. Very long,

621
00:39:50,579 –> 00:39:54,206
very long, very long time. It’s a long time. We have to acknowledge that it’s

622
00:39:54,206 –> 00:39:57,778
been a long— it’s been a minute, right? And so

623
00:39:59,249 –> 00:40:03,063
I think of— there was a— I didn’t listen to the whole episode. I

624
00:40:03,080 –> 00:40:06,843
saw clips of it. But there was an episode that Ben Shapiro did of some

625
00:40:06,891 –> 00:40:10,670
interview that he had with the late, the

626
00:40:10,670 –> 00:40:13,910
late Protestant preacher, John MacArthur.

627
00:40:15,452 –> 00:40:19,003
And MacArthur, of course, came on and did his MacArthur thing. And John

628
00:40:19,003 –> 00:40:22,276
MacArthur has been doing his— was, was doing his thing all his life. And his

629
00:40:22,308 –> 00:40:26,104
thing was, we will convert everybody to Christianity, period, full stop.

630
00:40:26,428 –> 00:40:29,599
Okay. And Ben Shapiro being, you know,

631
00:40:30,742 –> 00:40:34,124
Orthodox. Somewhat Jewish. Somewhat Jewish.

632
00:40:36,602 –> 00:40:40,251
Was, of course, you know, resistant to this call to, to, you

633
00:40:40,251 –> 00:40:43,809
know, convert. And, and John MacArthur did his John MacArthur thing,

634
00:40:44,161 –> 00:40:48,007
and Ben Shapiro did his Ben Shapiro thing. And one of

635
00:40:48,007 –> 00:40:51,853
the points that Ben made, I think, if I remember correctly, in this

636
00:40:51,853 –> 00:40:55,459
interview was he said, you know, Jews have just

637
00:40:55,459 –> 00:40:59,225
decided to stop having that argument with Christians about the Messiah. We’ve

638
00:40:59,225 –> 00:41:03,055
just decided to stop having the argument because it’s not— it doesn’t

639
00:41:03,135 –> 00:41:06,214
matter. anymore. It mattered

640
00:41:06,702 –> 00:41:10,332
probably 1,500 years ago more than it matters

641
00:41:10,446 –> 00:41:14,101
now. But he’s like, at this point, it doesn’t matter because

642
00:41:14,279 –> 00:41:18,066
our bigger problem is all of the people who

643
00:41:18,098 –> 00:41:21,052
are outside of the canon who have—

644
00:41:21,954 –> 00:41:24,982
and now I’m going to use my, my own words here— who have screwed up

645
00:41:25,111 –> 00:41:28,781
theology that’s actually going to drive us over the cliff. And

646
00:41:28,781 –> 00:41:32,465
actually, weirdly enough, MacArthur agreed with him. I did not expect that. Because

647
00:41:32,499 –> 00:41:35,827
MacArthur was a stubborn old man. But,

648
00:41:36,474 –> 00:41:39,660
you know, even he had to acknowledge the truth of that.

649
00:41:40,938 –> 00:41:44,560
So I think when Melanie lays out the

650
00:41:44,560 –> 00:41:48,401
history of pogroms and the

651
00:41:48,401 –> 00:41:52,178
final— all the way up to the Final Solution, when she acknowledges

652
00:41:52,275 –> 00:41:55,884
that history in an attempt to cut off critics, conservative or

653
00:41:55,933 –> 00:41:59,695
orthodox or reformed, Who would say, well, why should we work

654
00:41:59,695 –> 00:42:03,188
with these folks? They’re just gonna— they’re just gonna accuse us of being

655
00:42:03,204 –> 00:42:06,425
Christ killers, and we’re all alone. We’re all alone.

656
00:42:07,210 –> 00:42:10,751
I don’t think she’s laying it out as a way of condemning Christians, although

657
00:42:10,751 –> 00:42:13,796
initially you could read it that way. I think she’s laying it out as a

658
00:42:13,796 –> 00:42:17,081
way of— a way of talking about and

659
00:42:17,081 –> 00:42:20,670
engaging with the history, acknowledging it,

660
00:42:21,151 –> 00:42:24,339
and like we just said here, saying that that history is history.

661
00:42:25,034 –> 00:42:28,602
it’s dead, and now we’re in a different— we have to be in a

662
00:42:28,602 –> 00:42:29,235
different spot.

663
00:42:33,179 –> 00:42:36,963
Well, she’s saying that let’s

664
00:42:37,607 –> 00:42:40,893
at least agree that the values

665
00:42:41,795 –> 00:42:42,745
that the Christians

666
00:42:45,017 –> 00:42:48,836
proliferated around the world, you know, are

667
00:42:48,900 –> 00:42:52,007
in common with Jewish values. Right? So

668
00:42:52,735 –> 00:42:55,760
the Jews didn’t spread it around. The Jews are very tiny people.

669
00:42:56,682 –> 00:43:00,225
The Christians, you know, are huge. So they— and they have this whole

670
00:43:00,241 –> 00:43:03,849
program to spread their theology around the world, which

671
00:43:03,897 –> 00:43:05,974
includes these values. And so

672
00:43:08,131 –> 00:43:11,926
let’s come together and realize that we have this in common. And

673
00:43:12,040 –> 00:43:15,739
so just because, you know, we— you know, the Jews, you know, don’t

674
00:43:15,739 –> 00:43:18,996
believe in Jesus, that he’s the Messiah, uh,

675
00:43:19,606 –> 00:43:23,423
that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work with the Christians, you know. Let’s work together to

676
00:43:23,423 –> 00:43:27,095
help the world, you know, to repair the world. Right. And, uh,

677
00:43:28,025 –> 00:43:31,393
and so that’s what she’s advocating, is that, that, that the Jews need to,

678
00:43:31,794 –> 00:43:35,642
to get, to get off their, their butt and start, you know, you

679
00:43:35,642 –> 00:43:39,058
know, working with the Christians, just like the Christians should work with the Jews,

680
00:43:39,475 –> 00:43:42,218
and stop fighting and stop, you know, uh,

681
00:43:43,404 –> 00:43:47,028
this Until the Messiah. When the Messiah comes, everybody will know what the

682
00:43:47,028 –> 00:43:49,961
truth is. And, and that’ll be it.

683
00:43:50,895 –> 00:43:54,615
Right. There you go. One of the things that I,

684
00:43:54,631 –> 00:43:58,292
that I found fascinating in her book, and I did not know this. So again,

685
00:43:58,582 –> 00:44:02,155
chapter 7, chapter 8 were about that history. Then she goes

686
00:44:02,187 –> 00:44:05,710
into, she delves into and does a long

687
00:44:05,742 –> 00:44:09,264
history of what is the secret sauce of Jewish

688
00:44:09,377 –> 00:44:13,225
resilience. I love that. I love that title of chapter 8, how

689
00:44:13,273 –> 00:44:15,682
Jews are able to survive

690
00:44:16,325 –> 00:44:19,858
persecutions and form Israel. And then she

691
00:44:19,858 –> 00:44:23,311
talks about in chapter 9, and I wanted to get your opinion about this, the

692
00:44:23,456 –> 00:44:26,250
evils of deracination or deracination.

693
00:44:27,150 –> 00:44:30,330
And I did not know how

694
00:44:30,522 –> 00:44:34,152
radically different— I didn’t understand before reading this book how

695
00:44:34,296 –> 00:44:37,911
radically different Jews in Israel are versus Jews in the

696
00:44:37,992 –> 00:44:41,754
rest of the West. I didn’t realize

697
00:44:41,850 –> 00:44:44,904
how deeply those divisions went.

698
00:44:47,029 –> 00:44:50,730
And the way Melanie lays it out is you have Jews

699
00:44:50,827 –> 00:44:54,528
in America who have been captured by leftism and

700
00:44:54,641 –> 00:44:57,383
are Jewish ethnically,

701
00:44:58,592 –> 00:45:02,350
but not religiously practicing, versus Jews

702
00:45:02,447 –> 00:45:06,222
that you have in Israel who are not just or not

703
00:45:06,222 –> 00:45:09,719
only ethnically Jewish, but who— but also who are

704
00:45:10,891 –> 00:45:14,372
practicing. And as a result of October 7th, she also

705
00:45:14,420 –> 00:45:18,110
predicts, and I think that she’s correct on this, that there was going to

706
00:45:18,110 –> 00:45:21,768
be an uptick in Orthodox practice among

707
00:45:21,944 –> 00:45:25,714
even those folks that were— I believe the term is Reform, not Reform, but— well,

708
00:45:25,730 –> 00:45:29,211
yeah, Reformed. Even those folks that were Reformed in

709
00:45:29,259 –> 00:45:32,790
Israel. Because the people who were attacked on October

710
00:45:32,790 –> 00:45:36,368
7th were not the Orthodox, though the vast majority of them were not Orthodox.

711
00:45:36,865 –> 00:45:39,465
They were the ones that— the people who were attacked were the ones that had

712
00:45:39,465 –> 00:45:43,252
adopted more of a, shall we say, liberal worldview or

713
00:45:43,300 –> 00:45:47,103
progressive worldview. And that progressive worldview turned

714
00:45:47,216 –> 00:45:50,329
out to be, as a result of those attacks, proved false.

715
00:45:51,789 –> 00:45:55,608
I don’t know if you agree with Melanie’s framing on this,

716
00:45:55,801 –> 00:45:58,785
but as I said, that to me was one of the more

717
00:45:59,443 –> 00:46:02,623
surprising chapters. And maybe it’s because as a Christian,

718
00:46:03,782 –> 00:46:07,160
I only see our divisions and there are massive divisions all over in

719
00:46:07,160 –> 00:46:10,636
Christianity. We’re always having intramural fights with each other, the

720
00:46:10,636 –> 00:46:13,606
Baptists and the Presbyterians and the Lutherans and the Catholics.

721
00:46:15,077 –> 00:46:17,261
We’re— you don’t have to go 5 minutes. You don’t have to search for more

722
00:46:17,261 –> 00:46:20,594
than 5 minutes on the internet before you can find somebody yelling at somebody else

723
00:46:20,594 –> 00:46:24,287
on Reddit about, like, you know, whatever among the Christians,

724
00:46:24,386 –> 00:46:27,994
right? There was even a post on LinkedIn.

725
00:46:28,817 –> 00:46:32,510
Yesterday, uh, because we’re recording this early October of

726
00:46:32,510 –> 00:46:36,268
2026. So there was a post on LinkedIn, Richard,

727
00:46:36,364 –> 00:46:39,672
about tithing where the guy in the

728
00:46:39,672 –> 00:46:43,252
post was claiming that tithing

729
00:46:43,750 –> 00:46:47,009
was only an Old Testament thing and didn’t apply to the New Testament.

730
00:46:47,764 –> 00:46:51,280
And yet there is a story of Jesus,

731
00:46:51,875 –> 00:46:55,701
who was Jewish, by the way. Pulling a fish out of the

732
00:46:55,701 –> 00:46:59,174
water, which had a tithe or a

733
00:46:59,720 –> 00:47:02,759
coin in its mouth that he gave to Peter to pay the temple tax.

734
00:47:07,155 –> 00:47:10,235
Don’t tell me there’s no such thing as tithing in the New Testament. And by

735
00:47:10,235 –> 00:47:12,796
the way, that’s just one example. Then you go into Paul, and there’s a whole

736
00:47:12,828 –> 00:47:16,643
bunch of other things in the letters of Paul that’s just around this topic.

737
00:47:16,708 –> 00:47:20,393
That’s— I know virtually nothing. I know virtually nothing about the New Testament. I

738
00:47:20,393 –> 00:47:23,283
know, it’s okay. I do. I know things. This is what I’m talking about inside

739
00:47:23,283 –> 00:47:26,735
of Christianity, right? And so the number of comments on this person’s post,

740
00:47:27,361 –> 00:47:30,717
who’s ostensibly a Christian, from other Christians

741
00:47:31,231 –> 00:47:34,876
blowing him up was unbelievable. So, so when I, so when

742
00:47:34,988 –> 00:47:37,734
I look at a chapter like what Melanie wrote here,

743
00:47:38,922 –> 00:47:41,587
I then look at my own thing and I go, oh my God, all the

744
00:47:41,587 –> 00:47:45,088
divisions we have. Like, I’m consumed with that, fighting those

745
00:47:45,200 –> 00:47:48,922
fights. Those intramural squabbles, as I sometimes call them.

746
00:47:49,945 –> 00:47:53,580
But you don’t really realize, I will say, when you’re fighting your own

747
00:47:53,628 –> 00:47:57,228
intramural squabbles, you don’t realize that there’s all these other squabbles going on on this

748
00:47:57,324 –> 00:48:01,002
other team as well. I don’t know what your

749
00:48:01,034 –> 00:48:04,657
experience has been like, you know, being in

750
00:48:04,673 –> 00:48:08,457
America and being an American, an American Jew, I guess,

751
00:48:08,554 –> 00:48:12,340
is a way that we could frame it. I don’t know what your experience has

752
00:48:12,453 –> 00:48:16,296
been like, but Is Melanie’s way of

753
00:48:16,296 –> 00:48:19,853
framing this correct in this chapter? Are

754
00:48:19,981 –> 00:48:23,699
there riven divisions among the Jews in

755
00:48:23,747 –> 00:48:26,999
between America and Israel and Britain? Or is

756
00:48:27,897 –> 00:48:31,438
it more unified than what she is— than how she’s framing it?

757
00:48:31,902 –> 00:48:35,508
First of all, I grew up with no religion at all. Virtually no

758
00:48:35,508 –> 00:48:39,273
religion. So I had no concept

759
00:48:39,273 –> 00:48:42,256
of what it meant to be Jewish. I didn’t even know what it meant to

760
00:48:42,256 –> 00:48:45,917
be a Jew. I knew I was Jewish. I didn’t go to any

761
00:48:45,933 –> 00:48:49,080
religious schools or anything like that, so I really didn’t know what it was about.

762
00:48:49,787 –> 00:48:53,480
And I had no relationship with Israel whatsoever. Israel was just another

763
00:48:53,480 –> 00:48:56,483
foreign country as far as I was concerned. I had no attachment

764
00:48:57,414 –> 00:49:00,978
to Israel. And I think there are many Jews in the United

765
00:49:00,978 –> 00:49:04,206
States who grow up like that.

766
00:49:04,800 –> 00:49:07,512
They don’t grow up in a religious home. They really don’t know what it means

767
00:49:07,528 –> 00:49:11,329
to be a Jew. And Israel is just another foreign country to them.

768
00:49:12,195 –> 00:49:15,915
And so that’s a reality. There’s probably

769
00:49:16,108 –> 00:49:19,828
a lot of Jewish people like that, a lot. Only, I think,

770
00:49:19,956 –> 00:49:23,789
about 10%, between 10% to 15%

771
00:49:24,158 –> 00:49:27,509
of all Jews are actually practicing traditional

772
00:49:27,509 –> 00:49:30,556
Judaism the way it was handed down from Sinai.

773
00:49:31,278 –> 00:49:34,616
It’s a very small percentage. And, and so

774
00:49:35,194 –> 00:49:38,903
in Israel, it’s, it’s most of the people in Israel, most of

775
00:49:38,903 –> 00:49:42,403
the Jews in Israel are not really, not quote traditionally

776
00:49:42,435 –> 00:49:46,193
religious. They’re not observing the Sabbath, uh, the

777
00:49:46,193 –> 00:49:49,805
way they’re supposed to, that, you know. So there’s a tremendous amount of

778
00:49:49,805 –> 00:49:53,643
secular, secular Jews in, in Israel. And,

779
00:49:53,659 –> 00:49:57,416
um, and so the, the Jewish state, the current Jewish state, was

780
00:49:57,529 –> 00:50:01,207
founded by non-religious Jews, secular

781
00:50:01,207 –> 00:50:04,613
Jews. So, um, it’s very

782
00:50:04,613 –> 00:50:08,341
secular there, uh, but there’s also a tremendous amount of

783
00:50:08,373 –> 00:50:11,586
Torah learning, and there’s, you know, Orthodox Judaism there. There’s a

784
00:50:11,586 –> 00:50:15,137
tremendous amount of— first of all,

785
00:50:15,908 –> 00:50:19,427
that Israel itself, the land itself, is considered to be a holy land.

786
00:50:19,604 –> 00:50:23,299
There’s something holy about the land, the land itself. And so

787
00:50:23,476 –> 00:50:26,536
those who are religious feel that. They— when they—

788
00:50:27,325 –> 00:50:30,545
I’ll tell you, I’ll just tell you a brief story, my own experience. The first

789
00:50:30,545 –> 00:50:34,115
time I went to Israel, I wasn’t hardly religious at all.

790
00:50:35,943 –> 00:50:38,926
And, and when I was— I went down on vacation, uh,

791
00:50:39,560 –> 00:50:42,683
and I think I went there for a wedding. And to me, it was just

792
00:50:42,683 –> 00:50:46,492
another foreign country. It was an interesting thing. It was

793
00:50:46,509 –> 00:50:50,084
an interesting country. 9 years later, I went back.

794
00:50:51,216 –> 00:50:54,575
Between— over the course of those 9 years, I became significantly

795
00:50:54,607 –> 00:50:58,239
religious. When I went back there after 9

796
00:50:58,367 –> 00:51:01,446
years, it was a completely different experience.

797
00:51:04,903 –> 00:51:07,852
I felt something that I didn’t feel the first time I was there. It was,

798
00:51:08,222 –> 00:51:11,479
it was tangible. It was amazing. And so,

799
00:51:11,788 –> 00:51:15,557
um, uh, there is a, there is, there is a very big

800
00:51:15,557 –> 00:51:18,873
spectrum within the, the Jewish people

801
00:51:19,450 –> 00:51:22,158
of completely non-religious Jews,

802
00:51:22,815 –> 00:51:25,442
atheists, self-hating Jews,

803
00:51:26,340 –> 00:51:30,025
literally self-hating Jews, meaning they, they wish they weren’t Jewish. And

804
00:51:30,041 –> 00:51:33,710
then there are, you know, then there’s that, then there’s that, that very

805
00:51:33,710 –> 00:51:36,210
solid and very growing rapidly

806
00:51:36,835 –> 00:51:40,504
Orthodox, uh, uh, segment

807
00:51:41,177 –> 00:51:44,221
that’s following the traditional Jewish ways of living

808
00:51:45,023 –> 00:51:48,553
handed down from Sinai, starting Moses, you know, handed it

809
00:51:48,553 –> 00:51:52,211
down. And so that’s the reality of the situation. There’s only

810
00:51:52,243 –> 00:51:55,965
15 million Jews in the world. That’s it. Right,

811
00:51:56,719 –> 00:52:00,457
right, exactly. Yeah. So I, like I said, that

812
00:52:00,586 –> 00:52:04,228
chapter that she had written sort of really surprised me.

813
00:52:04,757 –> 00:52:08,527
Because to your point, with there only being 15 million, I

814
00:52:08,592 –> 00:52:09,747
would think there would be a lot more

815
00:52:14,125 –> 00:52:17,749
Unity, I guess, maybe is the term. One of the things that she

816
00:52:17,749 –> 00:52:21,069
talks about is diaspora Jews. I love this

817
00:52:21,293 –> 00:52:25,094
subtitle she has underneath the evils of deracination, Diaspora Jews

818
00:52:25,206 –> 00:52:28,044
Losing the Plot. And she says here,

819
00:52:29,279 –> 00:52:32,759
this anguish, talking about the anguish around the October 7th response,

820
00:52:33,224 –> 00:52:36,399
was felt by liberal Jews across the West, but particularly in America.

821
00:52:37,074 –> 00:52:40,494
Around 3 quarters of the US Jewish community supports the Democratic Party,

822
00:52:40,927 –> 00:52:44,749
which has largely signed up to quote unquote intersectionality, the dogma of

823
00:52:44,845 –> 00:52:48,442
overlapping systems of presumed prejudice based on race, gender, and class.

824
00:52:49,855 –> 00:52:53,676
This doctrine, which divides the world into oppressors and oppressed along Marxist

825
00:52:53,676 –> 00:52:57,144
lines, places Jews squarely in the oppressor’s camp.

826
00:52:57,947 –> 00:53:01,560
Israel is therefore axiomatically an oppressor state and can never be a victim.

827
00:53:02,123 –> 00:53:05,839
Liberal American Jews have thus subscribed to an anti-Jewish belief

828
00:53:05,839 –> 00:53:09,376
system, even though most either ignore or deny this.

829
00:53:10,930 –> 00:53:14,048
That’s right. It’s

830
00:53:14,581 –> 00:53:18,184
unbelievable what’s happened. Right. Yeah.

831
00:53:18,943 –> 00:53:22,616
And so it’s very, very

832
00:53:23,308 –> 00:53:26,513
difficult to turn something like this around. I mean, it’s

833
00:53:26,835 –> 00:53:29,802
just based on lies. It’s just based on lies.

834
00:53:30,619 –> 00:53:34,401
And, and, you know, you get enough people to believe a lie, for them, this

835
00:53:34,401 –> 00:53:37,575
is the truth. We’re talking about myths. That’s what a myth is.

836
00:53:38,232 –> 00:53:41,757
A myth is based on, on false beliefs. These are, these are

837
00:53:41,757 –> 00:53:44,947
myths that, that, that, that have been strategically

838
00:53:45,540 –> 00:53:48,152
cultivated over decades

839
00:53:48,745 –> 00:53:52,463
intentionally for, you know, for whatever

840
00:53:53,056 –> 00:53:56,870
diabolical reasons these people have, for whatever they, whether

841
00:53:56,918 –> 00:54:00,656
they’re trying to achieve in the world. I don’t know. But it’s very

842
00:54:00,768 –> 00:54:04,140
difficult. And this is— but this is Western civilization.

843
00:54:04,541 –> 00:54:08,283
We’re talking about, you know, the fundamentals of Western civilization.

844
00:54:09,342 –> 00:54:12,650
And so Western civilization is going to crumble if the

845
00:54:12,907 –> 00:54:16,632
original values upon which the West was founded is—

846
00:54:16,969 –> 00:54:20,726
everybody believes was actually developed by oppressors.

847
00:54:21,160 –> 00:54:23,103
And so we got to get rid of all these values and we got to

848
00:54:23,103 –> 00:54:26,475
start a whole new— world based on other

849
00:54:26,475 –> 00:54:28,302
principles, good luck.

850
00:54:31,180 –> 00:54:35,029
Well, and I don’t know that, I don’t know that the—

851
00:54:36,291 –> 00:54:39,914
so there’s an idea buried inside of

852
00:54:40,901 –> 00:54:44,117
what we would call the Old Testament, but there’s also buried inside of what Christians

853
00:54:44,134 –> 00:54:47,852
call the New Testament. And there’s an idea buried

854
00:54:47,852 –> 00:54:51,529
inside of there of a, of a remnant. Being left, or

855
00:54:51,995 –> 00:54:55,404
a small number being left of genuine believers,

856
00:54:55,597 –> 00:54:59,362
right? And either being left and then the Messiah

857
00:54:59,702 –> 00:55:03,501
returns or the Messiah arrives, right? There’s this idea

858
00:55:03,501 –> 00:55:07,042
of that buried inside of the

859
00:55:07,042 –> 00:55:09,080
religious traditions of both Jews and Christians.

860
00:55:13,673 –> 00:55:16,863
However, and I’m going to irritate my Christian friends now,

861
00:55:21,620 –> 00:55:25,271
I don’t believe that either Christians or Jews should be chasing remnant

862
00:55:25,271 –> 00:55:27,839
thinking. I just don’t.

863
00:55:30,108 –> 00:55:33,804
I’m a big believer in, in confidence. If you have a particular

864
00:55:33,820 –> 00:55:37,613
theological idea and you genuinely believe it, and this is where we’re

865
00:55:37,613 –> 00:55:40,958
going to turn the corner and talk about Islam here, if you have a

866
00:55:41,104 –> 00:55:44,469
religious idea and you genuinely believe it, then you should have confidence.

867
00:55:45,395 –> 00:55:49,118
You should be ruthlessly confident. When I

868
00:55:49,182 –> 00:55:52,977
look at Islam, I believe

869
00:55:52,993 –> 00:55:56,839
a lot of, a lot of the religion, the Muslim religion is, is absolutely

870
00:55:56,919 –> 00:55:59,815
incorrect. I’m going to be generous and say incorrect.

871
00:56:01,214 –> 00:56:04,725
It is. It does not match to reality for a whole variety of

872
00:56:04,741 –> 00:56:08,285
reasons that are way beyond the, the

873
00:56:08,285 –> 00:56:09,091
subject of this show.

874
00:56:12,010 –> 00:56:15,850
Also, I’m not gonna get— I’m not gonna— I’m not gonna— I’m not asking

875
00:56:15,850 –> 00:56:17,970
you— I’m not asking you to get into that. No, I’m not asking you to

876
00:56:17,970 –> 00:56:21,670
get into that. I’m saying that I’m getting into that. Richard’s just

877
00:56:21,670 –> 00:56:24,950
sitting here being quiet. I want to be very clear. Richard’s sitting here being quiet.

878
00:56:25,370 –> 00:56:28,730
I am saying this. Send me your emails. I can handle

879
00:56:28,730 –> 00:56:32,570
it. It’s fine. And everything I’m saying on this program

880
00:56:32,570 –> 00:56:36,344
is just my personal views on things. That’s nothing to do with the

881
00:56:36,361 –> 00:56:40,085
World Ethics Organization. I’m not talking— I’m not speaking for the World Ethics Organization,

882
00:56:40,101 –> 00:56:43,923
which I’m not affiliated. So I just wanted to make that clear. There

883
00:56:43,923 –> 00:56:47,151
you go. And

884
00:56:49,047 –> 00:56:51,672
because the

885
00:56:51,948 –> 00:56:55,578
confidence of Muslims

886
00:56:56,567 –> 00:56:59,955
is so overwhelming, they have

887
00:57:00,149 –> 00:57:03,373
made inroads into Western culture

888
00:57:04,712 –> 00:57:08,389
with their beliefs. And the reason they’ve been able to

889
00:57:08,406 –> 00:57:12,118
make these inroads is because of an outrageous

890
00:57:12,118 –> 00:57:14,155
level of confidence that they are correct.

891
00:57:15,917 –> 00:57:18,649
When I look at Jews and Christians,

892
00:57:19,876 –> 00:57:23,326
and maybe it is there and I’m missing it, I don’t

893
00:57:23,358 –> 00:57:26,970
see a comparable level, particularly in the West, a

894
00:57:26,970 –> 00:57:30,268
comparable level of outrageous confidence that their ideas are correct.

895
00:57:32,936 –> 00:57:36,784
I just don’t see it. Well, in the Orthodox world, there’s

896
00:57:36,848 –> 00:57:40,471
enormous confidence. Okay. Enormous confidence.

897
00:57:40,936 –> 00:57:44,784
I don’t know about the Reform and the Conservatives. In the Orthodox

898
00:57:44,784 –> 00:57:48,567
world, we are very confident about what we believe

899
00:57:48,567 –> 00:57:52,414
in. And yeah. Okay. But the Orthodox world is a

900
00:57:52,495 –> 00:57:55,909
percentage of that 15 million overall.

901
00:57:56,407 –> 00:58:00,180
Right, right. It’s not the whole thing. No, it’s not even close. Not

902
00:58:00,180 –> 00:58:03,953
even close. Right. And so I guess the question would be for Orthodox folks,

903
00:58:04,194 –> 00:58:07,759
how do you imbue confidence into the reform and the conservative end?

904
00:58:08,369 –> 00:58:11,725
How do you do that? Because, by the way, Christians, by the way, Christians,

905
00:58:12,640 –> 00:58:16,108
just to say this, Christians also suffer from a lack of

906
00:58:16,156 –> 00:58:19,159
confidence. One of the biggest knocks I have

907
00:58:19,689 –> 00:58:22,894
against Christianity is our

908
00:58:23,072 –> 00:58:26,324
overwhelming, seemingly overwhelming lack of cultural

909
00:58:26,324 –> 00:58:29,964
confidence, not only in our theology and the rightness and the

910
00:58:29,964 –> 00:58:33,246
correctness of our theology, but the willingness to actually

911
00:58:34,071 –> 00:58:37,903
push it. Now, there are people who are

912
00:58:38,048 –> 00:58:41,838
around me who will disagree with me vociferously, and I’ve

913
00:58:41,838 –> 00:58:44,014
had those arguments before in Christian circles,

914
00:58:46,239 –> 00:58:49,227
but I do You see this reflected

915
00:58:50,147 –> 00:58:53,697
because what winds up happening is the most

916
00:58:53,697 –> 00:58:57,326
confident voice, the most confident idea in an arena

917
00:58:57,633 –> 00:59:01,017
tends to win the arena. And right now, the most

918
00:59:01,017 –> 00:59:04,595
confident voices in the arena are voices of secular atheism,

919
00:59:04,643 –> 00:59:07,209
secular materialistic atheism, postmodernism.

920
00:59:09,420 –> 00:59:13,261
They are the voices of Marxist socialism with intersectionality and everything

921
00:59:13,293 –> 00:59:16,799
that goes along with that. And it is the voices of, quite

922
00:59:16,831 –> 00:59:20,585
frankly, Islam. Those

923
00:59:20,634 –> 00:59:22,662
are the 3 voices winning the day in the West.

924
00:59:25,020 –> 00:59:27,746
How do Christians and Jews get the confidence

925
00:59:29,344 –> 00:59:32,974
to speak louder in the arena? Because I just don’t— I just don’t

926
00:59:32,974 –> 00:59:36,510
see it. That’s why we’re having this discussion. That’s why Melanie wrote the book.

927
00:59:41,191 –> 00:59:44,569
I think one of the most phenomenal things that

928
00:59:45,019 –> 00:59:47,577
she says in the book is that

929
00:59:48,960 –> 00:59:50,638
the enemies of the West

930
00:59:53,104 –> 00:59:56,753
better understand the West than the West understands the West.

931
00:59:57,970 –> 01:00:01,771
Yeah. That they understand, they know that there’s a weakness in the West,

932
01:00:03,081 –> 01:00:06,834
and they know how to take advantage of that. They know how to take

933
01:00:06,834 –> 01:00:09,451
advantage of And the West has to wake up.

934
01:00:10,567 –> 01:00:13,445
That’s what’s gonna— that has to— that’s what she’s trying to do with the book,

935
01:00:13,575 –> 01:00:16,970
is to wake up the West and say, you know,

936
01:00:17,439 –> 01:00:21,191
you can’t appease these people. You have to

937
01:00:21,191 –> 01:00:24,700
stand up to them. You have to oppose

938
01:00:24,894 –> 01:00:28,655
them. And, you know, just being nice

939
01:00:29,190 –> 01:00:32,109
is not gonna work because they

940
01:00:33,840 –> 01:00:35,874
They want to take over the world.

941
01:00:37,877 –> 01:00:41,481
And, you know, and then not being nice about it. You know, October

942
01:00:41,481 –> 01:00:45,134
7th was not nice. Right, right. Not only was October

943
01:00:45,134 –> 01:00:48,557
7th not nice, immigration, global

944
01:00:48,557 –> 01:00:51,262
immigration, global migration is not nice.

945
01:00:52,413 –> 01:00:55,523
It’s just not. What about what’s going on in England with

946
01:00:56,412 –> 01:01:00,048
these disadvantaged girls that have been— Oh,

947
01:01:00,209 –> 01:01:03,678
yep. You know, like traffic for the past 3

948
01:01:03,678 –> 01:01:07,004
decades. Right. And they know about it. And the

949
01:01:07,148 –> 01:01:10,714
administration, they know about it, but they let it happen. Right.

950
01:01:11,164 –> 01:01:14,779
Right. And this— and this is— this is exactly my

951
01:01:14,859 –> 01:01:18,280
point. That’s— that’s where you get the meeting

952
01:01:18,393 –> 01:01:22,088
between the secular relativistic

953
01:01:22,088 –> 01:01:25,831
thinking that there is no ultimate morality,

954
01:01:25,863 –> 01:01:29,710
thus we cannot judge evil or good. We can merely be neutral

955
01:01:29,710 –> 01:01:33,521
on it, which neutrality is a position even of itself. I’m going to borrow

956
01:01:33,521 –> 01:01:37,284
that from the progressives and the Marxists. Neutrality itself is a position.

957
01:01:37,868 –> 01:01:40,854
Okay, so you’re going to be neutral

958
01:01:41,698 –> 01:01:44,867
because you can’t judge another, another, another

959
01:01:45,885 –> 01:01:49,636
culture’s ways in which they deal

960
01:01:49,685 –> 01:01:53,533
with their women, which, which the lack of being

961
01:01:53,581 –> 01:01:57,018
able to judge comes from a place of a lack of cultural

962
01:01:57,034 –> 01:02:00,616
confidence in being able to discern

963
01:02:00,809 –> 01:02:03,990
good from evil, and then being able to tell

964
01:02:04,745 –> 01:02:07,427
a group of people, no, that’s evil, stop it.

965
01:02:08,600 –> 01:02:11,813
I think there’s a tremendous amount of

966
01:02:11,813 –> 01:02:15,042
confusion in the West. And even

967
01:02:15,492 –> 01:02:18,913
within the religious traditions, people are very

968
01:02:18,962 –> 01:02:22,673
confused. I mean, and I think

969
01:02:22,737 –> 01:02:26,526
this is a major problem. And just

970
01:02:26,526 –> 01:02:29,705
like anything else, you need great leaders. You have to have great leaders.

971
01:02:30,479 –> 01:02:33,625
And there’s a leadership gap, a huge leadership gap in the

972
01:02:34,290 –> 01:02:37,863
world, particularly in the West. Yeah. And so

973
01:02:40,607 –> 01:02:44,237
you really have to have courage. You have to have courage to be ethical in

974
01:02:44,269 –> 01:02:48,087
an unethical world, you know, and you have to be able to, you know,

975
01:02:50,513 –> 01:02:54,036
Yeah. And yeah. Well, and what Melanie does in her book, and this is,

976
01:02:54,294 –> 01:02:57,717
I love this. I love her for doing this because a lot of books

977
01:02:58,151 –> 01:03:01,976
will just give you the problem, right? A lot of books will give you

978
01:03:02,850 –> 01:03:06,059
99% of it will be a description of the problem. Yeah. Right.

979
01:03:06,789 –> 01:03:09,677
And then they’ll put maybe 2 things at the end as a solution.

980
01:03:10,927 –> 01:03:14,487
And then they run away and they end the book because

981
01:03:14,520 –> 01:03:17,889
problems sell, solutions don’t. However, on this

982
01:03:17,889 –> 01:03:21,595
podcast, we have moved more in the direction over the last couple of

983
01:03:21,595 –> 01:03:25,205
years of being way the hell more solutions-oriented in our

984
01:03:25,205 –> 01:03:28,735
conversations. Because I don’t think, I don’t think,

985
01:03:29,842 –> 01:03:33,612
I don’t think more talking about problems is what we need. Yes,

986
01:03:33,628 –> 01:03:36,195
I think we need to describe the problem. Yes, I think we need to lay

987
01:03:36,275 –> 01:03:39,227
it out for people. Absolutely. And I think we’ve done that so far in our

988
01:03:39,227 –> 01:03:42,067
conversation. We know the problem is, part of the problem is a lack

989
01:03:42,067 –> 01:03:45,593
of cultural confidence. Part of the problem is in both

990
01:03:45,593 –> 01:03:48,138
Christianity and Judaism. Part of the problem is

991
01:03:49,539 –> 01:03:53,289
the fractures and the disruptions and the disjunctures, both in Christianity

992
01:03:53,466 –> 01:03:57,312
and in Judaism as religious traditions. Part of the problem also

993
01:03:57,424 –> 01:04:00,940
is secular thinking

994
01:04:01,440 –> 01:04:05,040
that comes out of a religious tradition, unmooring itself from that

995
01:04:05,153 –> 01:04:08,976
religious tradition. And to your point Earlier, or just now,

996
01:04:09,056 –> 01:04:12,392
actually, the confusion that results from that unmooring.

997
01:04:13,245 –> 01:04:14,889
I think we’ve laid out the problem fairly clearly.

998
01:04:17,158 –> 01:04:20,437
And I’ll add one more thing. Then the

999
01:04:20,550 –> 01:04:24,216
enemies of that thinking who have an oppositional worldview

1000
01:04:24,345 –> 01:04:28,038
and have confidence with that worldview and who understand the

1001
01:04:28,151 –> 01:04:31,971
weakness in our worldviews and then take advantage of those in

1002
01:04:32,019 –> 01:04:35,836
military and in a, in a, yeah, in a military fashion.

1003
01:04:37,263 –> 01:04:39,819
Right? Those are— that’s the problems. That’s what we’ve laid out.

1004
01:04:41,065 –> 01:04:43,477
What Melanie does in her book, and I loved her again, I loved her for

1005
01:04:43,477 –> 01:04:47,117
this, is she actually takes a good chunk of the last part of the

1006
01:04:47,201 –> 01:04:50,595
book and talks about what exactly the solutions are to the problem,

1007
01:04:51,525 –> 01:04:55,221
which I love. One of the

1008
01:04:55,221 –> 01:04:58,783
things that I’ve come to, one of the conclusions I’ve come to after interviewing a

1009
01:04:58,783 –> 01:05:02,115
lot of people to talk with, a lot of guests on this show, Is

1010
01:05:02,293 –> 01:05:05,463
that the, the,

1011
01:05:06,029 –> 01:05:07,582
the person, the author,

1012
01:05:09,749 –> 01:05:13,510
the 2 of us as commentators, those folks who come up with a solution,

1013
01:05:13,851 –> 01:05:17,500
you win the arena if you come up with a solution. Now, if somebody

1014
01:05:17,500 –> 01:05:20,714
doesn’t like your solution, well, come up with a solution. If you don’t like my

1015
01:05:20,714 –> 01:05:24,492
solution and you’re a person who is of a different worldview or a

1016
01:05:24,492 –> 01:05:27,129
different bent, come look at the exact same problems.

1017
01:05:28,510 –> 01:05:31,948
And come up with a different solution and actually articulate it.

1018
01:05:32,791 –> 01:05:36,298
Don’t just talk. Don’t just critique my solution. I’ll take a

1019
01:05:36,298 –> 01:05:39,599
critique. That’s fine. But actually offer an opposite solution.

1020
01:05:40,967 –> 01:05:44,235
And where it often ends is, and Melanie’s experienced this,

1021
01:05:44,670 –> 01:05:48,292
there’s an author and pastor named Doug Wilson out of Idaho that has

1022
01:05:48,324 –> 01:05:51,681
experienced this. You

1023
01:05:51,779 –> 01:05:54,787
know, when you offer a solution that people don’t like,

1024
01:05:55,816 –> 01:05:59,611
They just critique the solution. They don’t actually offer one of their own. Yeah.

1025
01:06:00,499 –> 01:06:02,776
That’s not what we’re going to do here. What we’re going to do here is

1026
01:06:02,776 –> 01:06:06,198
we’re going to look at Melanie’s solution and we’re going to talk about whether or

1027
01:06:06,198 –> 01:06:09,959
not any of her solutions, whether we, what, not whether or not,

1028
01:06:10,216 –> 01:06:12,788
we’re going to talk about how we think about each one of these solutions. So

1029
01:06:13,013 –> 01:06:16,282
she offers a 10-point rescue program for the West.

1030
01:06:18,040 –> 01:06:20,313
She offers up number one, a coalition for civilizations.

1031
01:06:21,934 –> 01:06:25,256
Talking about it as a resistance movement, where

1032
01:06:26,010 –> 01:06:29,798
this coalition would bring together like-minded but currently marginalized people in the

1033
01:06:29,798 –> 01:06:33,376
churches and synagogues, universities and schools, legal profession,

1034
01:06:33,408 –> 01:06:37,099
publishing houses, arts and media to run campaigns involving educational

1035
01:06:37,099 –> 01:06:40,790
programs, publications, videos and podcasts, symposia and other

1036
01:06:40,790 –> 01:06:44,176
public events. It would also use the mechanisms of civil

1037
01:06:44,176 –> 01:06:47,995
society such as the courts, grant funding bodies, and grassroots campaign movements.

1038
01:06:48,479 –> 01:06:51,879
That empower the silent majority to take back control of the

1039
01:06:51,879 –> 01:06:55,698
institutions such as the educational, medical, psychiatric, and other professions that have

1040
01:06:55,698 –> 01:06:59,338
been hijacked by left-wing ideologues. And that’s her first

1041
01:06:59,371 –> 01:07:03,155
point. Her second point is Jews— we talked about this already,

1042
01:07:03,220 –> 01:07:05,491
actually— Jews must step up to the resistance plate.

1043
01:07:07,591 –> 01:07:10,710
To play their part necessary in such a resistance movement, Jews will need to change

1044
01:07:10,710 –> 01:07:14,201
their attitudes. Overall, they have traditionally shied away from active

1045
01:07:14,201 –> 01:07:18,018
engagement with the non-Jewish world. In part, this is due to the fact

1046
01:07:18,018 –> 01:07:21,728
that Jews don’t seek to convert others. All they ask is to be left alone

1047
01:07:22,097 –> 01:07:25,791
to practice their own religion and culture. It’s also the outcome of centuries of

1048
01:07:25,791 –> 01:07:29,437
persecution that have created a default pattern of keeping heads below the parapet whenever,

1049
01:07:29,710 –> 01:07:33,388
whenever possible. And it’s part because too many of them have

1050
01:07:33,500 –> 01:07:37,274
themselves come to endorse the shibboleths that threaten both Israel and

1051
01:07:37,274 –> 01:07:41,065
the West. She’s asking Jews to stop doing that. Gotta put your head

1052
01:07:41,065 –> 01:07:43,982
above the parapet. Got to start, got to start engaging.

1053
01:07:44,697 –> 01:07:48,404
Number 3, talking about fighting moral bankruptcy in the culture wars.

1054
01:07:49,100 –> 01:07:52,791
Number 4, giving religion a PR makeover. And she

1055
01:07:52,791 –> 01:07:55,702
keeps going. There’s 10 of these right in the back of the book.

1056
01:07:57,114 –> 01:08:00,700
Number 6, reempowering Christianity, which I found that one to be very

1057
01:08:00,749 –> 01:08:04,351
interesting coming from a practicing Jewish person. Number

1058
01:08:04,351 –> 01:08:08,111
7, doing, not dogma. Number 8,

1059
01:08:08,837 –> 01:08:10,996
This one, law, not laxity.

1060
01:08:12,636 –> 01:08:16,291
Number 9, a culture of attachment, going back to an idea

1061
01:08:16,436 –> 01:08:19,823
that is actually starting to float around more and more in Christian circles of a

1062
01:08:19,823 –> 01:08:22,453
covenantal society versus a

1063
01:08:23,066 –> 01:08:26,824
non-covenantal society. And of course, she, she references, as you

1064
01:08:26,856 –> 01:08:30,566
have already referenced, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and his ideas of a

1065
01:08:30,566 –> 01:08:34,324
covenantal society. And then number 10, which I thought was probably the most interesting

1066
01:08:34,357 –> 01:08:38,189
out of all of them, repudiating victim culture, which

1067
01:08:38,238 –> 01:08:40,488
has wound its way through.

1068
01:08:42,799 –> 01:08:46,390
This is her 10-point program. She’s offering a solution.

1069
01:08:48,976 –> 01:08:52,727
Yeah. Just want to say, yeah, yeah, I

1070
01:08:52,776 –> 01:08:56,479
was gonna— yeah, go ahead. I think, I think you need

1071
01:08:56,592 –> 01:08:59,898
to have courageous leaders to make this happen.

1072
01:09:00,489 –> 01:09:03,632
Because Biologically, we are

1073
01:09:04,749 –> 01:09:07,953
designed to survive. And if you don’t

1074
01:09:07,970 –> 01:09:11,507
understand this, you’re going to shy

1075
01:09:11,621 –> 01:09:15,435
away from risks. You’re going to shy away from activism. You’re

1076
01:09:15,435 –> 01:09:16,750
going to shy away from discomfort.

1077
01:09:19,163 –> 01:09:22,732
It’s biological. We’re biologically driven this way. So, it’s

1078
01:09:22,797 –> 01:09:25,555
wonderful to have this program, but a lot of this requires courage.

1079
01:09:27,116 –> 01:09:30,523
And if people don’t have the courage, it’s not going to happen. So you have

1080
01:09:30,523 –> 01:09:33,993
to have inspiring leaders who

1081
01:09:34,282 –> 01:09:38,085
have courage and know how to inspire people and motivate people.

1082
01:09:40,179 –> 01:09:43,553
Yeah. And I don’t think until that

1083
01:09:43,553 –> 01:09:47,168
happens, you know, her program is possible.

1084
01:09:48,309 –> 01:09:51,388
Well, and I think I would add another point to it, and she didn’t sort

1085
01:09:51,388 –> 01:09:54,557
of— she sort of gilded the lily a little bit around this idea.

1086
01:09:55,337 –> 01:09:59,095
I didn’t see it absolutely reflected, but I think there is an idea that is,

1087
01:09:59,287 –> 01:10:02,049
that is in the Tanakh, and it’s in the New Testament as well,

1088
01:10:02,804 –> 01:10:06,079
that there are individual sins, obviously,

1089
01:10:06,818 –> 01:10:10,254
and then there are corporate sins or nation-level sins.

1090
01:10:11,314 –> 01:10:15,151
And the only way to turn back to God

1091
01:10:16,050 –> 01:10:19,085
is through repentance of those national sins.

1092
01:10:20,967 –> 01:10:24,227
And I’m not talking about repentance in terms of like Black Lives Matter

1093
01:10:24,760 –> 01:10:28,036
or any of the kind of secular thinking around repentance that is

1094
01:10:28,311 –> 01:10:32,074
totally unmoored from a transcendent and is really about material gain.

1095
01:10:33,382 –> 01:10:36,936
I’m talking about genuine repentance, like the kind of

1096
01:10:36,936 –> 01:10:40,591
repentance that the Ninevites did after Jonah came by,

1097
01:10:41,303 –> 01:10:44,247
or the kind of repentance that

1098
01:10:46,075 –> 01:10:49,753
various folks in the biblical corpus, various groups

1099
01:10:49,801 –> 01:10:53,542
did. Sackcloth and ashes, actual repentance.

1100
01:10:54,377 –> 01:10:58,135
And to your point about leadership, I don’t think you can

1101
01:10:58,135 –> 01:11:01,828
have such a repentance program, if you were going to put it that

1102
01:11:01,828 –> 01:11:05,553
way. And I hesitate to even put it that way. But okay, let’s go ahead

1103
01:11:05,553 –> 01:11:08,925
and put it that way. You can’t have a national repentance program without having

1104
01:11:09,069 –> 01:11:11,622
leaders that are humble enough to admit

1105
01:11:13,200 –> 01:11:16,714
in a real genuine, salutary way. And this takes courage as well,

1106
01:11:17,795 –> 01:11:21,567
that we as a culture, we as a nation state— and I’m talking

1107
01:11:21,567 –> 01:11:25,390
now about America specifically— have to repent of our sins,

1108
01:11:26,302 –> 01:11:29,960
our national sins. Matter of

1109
01:11:29,960 –> 01:11:33,156
fact, I would, I would assert that probably the biggest sin we have to repent

1110
01:11:33,269 –> 01:11:37,111
of is abortion. Oh.

1111
01:11:39,399 –> 01:11:42,714
Yeah, at a national level. And I don’t think— I don’t— right. And I don’t

1112
01:11:42,730 –> 01:11:46,434
think— I think God is disgusted by that. I think God is absolutely disgusted

1113
01:11:46,434 –> 01:11:50,254
by that. It’s hard. I just,

1114
01:11:50,485 –> 01:11:51,591
I’m not clear.

1115
01:11:54,550 –> 01:11:57,651
It’s— I know what it means to repent as a person, as an

1116
01:11:57,651 –> 01:11:59,864
individual. Right. Yep.

1117
01:12:01,770 –> 01:12:04,499
It’s for a nation to repent.

1118
01:12:06,670 –> 01:12:09,669
I just don’t know how that works. I—

1119
01:12:10,153 –> 01:12:13,942
so, so, well, you know, like, like I said, I, I go back

1120
01:12:13,942 –> 01:12:17,656
to like, if you take slavery, for example. Sure. Take slavery, for

1121
01:12:17,656 –> 01:12:21,485
example. Yep. Historically, the truth is slavery

1122
01:12:22,325 –> 01:12:26,168
existed all over the world. Yep. The United States didn’t invent slavery.

1123
01:12:26,704 –> 01:12:29,415
No. It was, it was, this is an economic thing.

1124
01:12:31,267 –> 01:12:35,024
And, you know, human being, every single human being has resources.

1125
01:12:35,842 –> 01:12:39,534
Every single human being has a body, has a mind, has some

1126
01:12:39,551 –> 01:12:43,146
knowledge, has some skills. You know, there’s

1127
01:12:43,162 –> 01:12:46,582
valuable resources there. And slavery was

1128
01:12:46,758 –> 01:12:50,354
an economic way of capturing those resources and using

1129
01:12:50,370 –> 01:12:53,966
them for, you know, for the slave owner’s gain.

1130
01:12:54,720 –> 01:12:58,461
Yep. This is not unique to the West or to America. It

1131
01:12:58,477 –> 01:13:02,156
happened historically. And so, so, and

1132
01:13:02,493 –> 01:13:06,285
I think you can’t, you can’t hold the

1133
01:13:06,365 –> 01:13:10,060
descendants of slave owners responsible for

1134
01:13:10,060 –> 01:13:13,739
what their ancestors did. Because they didn’t, they

1135
01:13:13,739 –> 01:13:17,530
didn’t choose their ancestors. Right. You don’t choose your parents.

1136
01:13:17,755 –> 01:13:21,370
Yeah. Not only that, I would assert that the,

1137
01:13:21,546 –> 01:13:24,808
that the sin of slavery in America has been

1138
01:13:24,840 –> 01:13:28,548
repented for. And it was repented through the

1139
01:13:28,708 –> 01:13:32,416
600,000 to 750,000 people

1140
01:13:32,464 –> 01:13:35,963
that died in the American Civil War. And then it was

1141
01:13:36,139 –> 01:13:39,799
repented of even further through Jim

1142
01:13:39,911 –> 01:13:42,944
Crow and through what happened

1143
01:13:42,977 –> 01:13:46,475
with Dr. Martin Luther King— Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King

1144
01:13:46,572 –> 01:13:50,247
Jr.’s assassination. The repentance is over on

1145
01:13:50,360 –> 01:13:54,126
that topic. I don’t think the repentance has

1146
01:13:54,303 –> 01:13:58,016
even begun on our most recent sins. That’s

1147
01:13:58,016 –> 01:14:01,744
where I go to. I— so abortion became legal

1148
01:14:01,744 –> 01:14:05,439
with Roe v. Wade in the 1970s. We have

1149
01:14:05,455 –> 01:14:09,070
not even come close to repenting of the— I think

1150
01:14:09,070 –> 01:14:11,801
some estimates are up to 300 million dead babies.

1151
01:14:13,370 –> 01:14:17,111
Babies that never got a chance to be born. I do not

1152
01:14:17,138 –> 01:14:20,920
think that God looks at that and says, that’s okay, I’m just gonna wink and

1153
01:14:20,920 –> 01:14:24,439
nod at that. The

1154
01:14:24,439 –> 01:14:28,239
Egyptian Pharaoh, he said, throw the

1155
01:14:28,288 –> 01:14:31,996
babies into the river, into the river. And look at

1156
01:14:32,028 –> 01:14:35,424
what happened to the Egyptian Pharaoh at the end of Exodus. Right.

1157
01:14:35,846 –> 01:14:39,660
He was swept away. I think,

1158
01:14:40,132 –> 01:14:43,621
I think there’s help to take for this. You Bingo

1159
01:14:44,082 –> 01:14:46,884
and bingo. And there will continue to be hell to pay until cultural,

1160
01:14:48,090 –> 01:14:51,629
national repentance of just that one alone.

1161
01:14:52,048 –> 01:14:54,590
Although I could get into other sins as well.

1162
01:14:55,962 –> 01:14:59,393
I could, but I’m not going to. I picked that one because it’s a hot-button

1163
01:14:59,425 –> 01:15:03,258
one. Yeah. But it is the one that, quite frankly,

1164
01:15:04,982 –> 01:15:08,586
I believe, and many Christians believe this way,

1165
01:15:08,988 –> 01:15:12,463
whether they say it or not, if you’ve— they’ve read their Bible, they

1166
01:15:12,463 –> 01:15:16,035
believe this absolutely, that the stench of that

1167
01:15:16,099 –> 01:15:18,629
sin at a cultural national level

1168
01:15:20,502 –> 01:15:24,280
has reached the nose of God. And there will be, to

1169
01:15:24,297 –> 01:15:28,035
your point, hell to pay until we repent. And maybe part of

1170
01:15:28,035 –> 01:15:31,233
that hell to pay is losing the country or

1171
01:15:32,418 –> 01:15:35,233
losing a civilization Or losing a nation state.

1172
01:15:36,461 –> 01:15:39,998
There are some Christians that believe that. In

1173
01:15:40,207 –> 01:15:43,597
order for such repentance to happen, and the reason why I brought this up with

1174
01:15:43,597 –> 01:15:46,858
repentance, the reason for such— the reason the leaders

1175
01:15:47,437 –> 01:15:51,100
on such repentance would have to have moral courage to even say

1176
01:15:51,228 –> 01:15:55,068
that. And I don’t see any leader on the horizon that

1177
01:15:55,068 –> 01:15:58,698
has the moral courage to even say what I just said. And I’m not, I’m

1178
01:15:58,698 –> 01:16:01,528
not a political leader. Neither are you.

1179
01:16:05,170 –> 01:16:07,649
We need, we need political leaders with the moral courage to say what I just

1180
01:16:07,649 –> 01:16:11,385
said, and then to go to the synagogue, go to the

1181
01:16:11,385 –> 01:16:14,751
church, and to kneel as at Nineveh in

1182
01:16:14,767 –> 01:16:18,180
sackcloth and ashes and beg for repentance,

1183
01:16:18,584 –> 01:16:22,320
beg for forgiveness for the nation state that they are leading. And I

1184
01:16:22,385 –> 01:16:25,870
think God would listen to that. I absolutely think the transcendent would listen of that.

1185
01:16:26,463 –> 01:16:30,168
But that has not happened. And until that happens, it’s not even on the

1186
01:16:30,296 –> 01:16:34,049
radar, not even on the radar screen. And until that happens,

1187
01:16:34,402 –> 01:16:37,898
we’re now committing a triple sin because now we’re in pride and rebellion.

1188
01:16:38,812 –> 01:16:42,228
Well, we do have a government that

1189
01:16:42,998 –> 01:16:46,430
opposes, you know, I mean, it’s—

1190
01:16:47,296 –> 01:16:51,065
Well, we have a government that opposes it. We have, I believe the statistic

1191
01:16:51,065 –> 01:16:54,837
is, I think 1 in every 4 or 1 in

1192
01:16:54,837 –> 01:16:58,433
every 5 women has had an abortion. So we have

1193
01:16:58,545 –> 01:17:02,029
that to deal with. Then we have the

1194
01:17:02,061 –> 01:17:05,545
twin, the twin dynamics of feminism and birth

1195
01:17:05,609 –> 01:17:09,333
control that also— Is this related to Melanie’s book?

1196
01:17:09,767 –> 01:17:13,218
It is absolutely related to Melanie’s book, because if we can’t get our

1197
01:17:13,298 –> 01:17:17,039
arms around something, to my mind, as simple as

1198
01:17:17,103 –> 01:17:20,491
national repentance, How are we going to get,

1199
01:17:20,860 –> 01:17:24,377
how are we going to get coalitions to work together? The most

1200
01:17:24,393 –> 01:17:28,054
powerful way to get a coalition to work together is for one person,

1201
01:17:28,167 –> 01:17:31,539
to your point about moral courage, to have the moral courage to

1202
01:17:31,700 –> 01:17:35,297
literally do the sackcloth and ashes thing I just said. Oh my

1203
01:17:35,297 –> 01:17:38,942
God, the amount of movement that would happen. I’ll, I’ll

1204
01:17:38,942 –> 01:17:42,748
frame it very practically. If the Prime Minister of Britain,

1205
01:17:43,743 –> 01:17:47,277
if the Prime Minister of Britain were to come out

1206
01:17:47,277 –> 01:17:51,053
tomorrow, stand in front of 10 Downing Street and say,

1207
01:17:51,680 –> 01:17:55,279
we in Britain have committed sins that have,

1208
01:17:55,857 –> 01:17:59,505
that have the sins of pride and rebellion that have led to

1209
01:17:59,569 –> 01:18:03,281
natural consequences that have offended the nose of God. And I’m

1210
01:18:03,329 –> 01:18:06,607
now going to the church or the local synagogue down the street, the Anglican church

1211
01:18:06,639 –> 01:18:10,254
down the street. I’m going to kneel in one of those pews and I’m going

1212
01:18:10,254 –> 01:18:13,403
to pray for us to be culturally forgiven. And I would ask all of you

1213
01:18:13,403 –> 01:18:16,903
to join me. I think if the British Prime Minister did that tomorrow,

1214
01:18:17,401 –> 01:18:20,307
the amount of movement you would see in the West would be

1215
01:18:20,596 –> 01:18:24,256
unbelievable. And by the way, and by the way, I

1216
01:18:24,465 –> 01:18:27,708
think that while the secular atheist types

1217
01:18:28,142 –> 01:18:31,867
would cock and crow on the internet and mock, which is what they do,

1218
01:18:32,958 –> 01:18:36,683
I think the Islamic folks who have cultural confidence would look

1219
01:18:36,747 –> 01:18:40,597
at that and would go, oh. They wouldn’t say anything. But

1220
01:18:40,661 –> 01:18:43,963
all of a sudden, a lot of things that are moving forward would get hitched

1221
01:18:43,963 –> 01:18:47,538
up all of a sudden and stop. Because

1222
01:18:47,634 –> 01:18:51,385
what that action would show is, to our point earlier about

1223
01:18:51,417 –> 01:18:54,960
confidence, actual confidence and an actual belief in the

1224
01:18:54,960 –> 01:18:58,727
transcendent. And an actual belief that the transcendent is what we actually kneel

1225
01:18:58,791 –> 01:19:02,623
and bow to when we put our hands on the Bible and

1226
01:19:02,703 –> 01:19:04,932
swear to uphold the laws of

1227
01:19:04,964 –> 01:19:08,814
Britain. Uh-huh. That’s what I’m

1228
01:19:08,814 –> 01:19:12,503
talking about at a practical level. And if you can’t even do that,

1229
01:19:13,530 –> 01:19:17,203
I love Melanie’s program. Thank God she’s proposing solutions. But these

1230
01:19:17,219 –> 01:19:20,813
kinds of solutions will merely be moving

1231
01:19:20,909 –> 01:19:23,620
through systems that haven’t fundamentally changed.

1232
01:19:24,598 –> 01:19:28,448
Right. Yeah. Yeah,

1233
01:19:28,528 –> 01:19:32,138
I don’t think there’s any— there’s no escaping this. That’s just my

1234
01:19:32,138 –> 01:19:35,928
opinion. There’s no escape. There really is no escape. There’s no

1235
01:19:35,928 –> 01:19:39,765
escape. No. And I think, and I want to be very clear, I think

1236
01:19:39,765 –> 01:19:43,490
that people as individuals do absolutely need to repent. And I think individual repentance is

1237
01:19:43,490 –> 01:19:47,248
an actual thing. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. You know,

1238
01:19:47,392 –> 01:19:51,182
you need to be convicted and then repent and realize you live in a

1239
01:19:51,182 –> 01:19:54,762
fallen world. Yes, I think, I think individuals absolutely have,

1240
01:19:55,340 –> 01:19:58,857
have a handle on this. But I, I

1241
01:19:59,195 –> 01:20:02,471
think that there is absolutely a difference.

1242
01:20:02,825 –> 01:20:06,663
Not a difference, not in kind, but in degree. There’s a

1243
01:20:06,663 –> 01:20:10,197
difference in degree of the repentance of a leader

1244
01:20:10,438 –> 01:20:14,181
for their nation state versus the repentance of an individual

1245
01:20:14,871 –> 01:20:18,051
in their own town or neighborhood or family. Well, in

1246
01:20:18,084 –> 01:20:21,473
Judaism, Judaism, you had like the head rabbi would

1247
01:20:21,537 –> 01:20:25,030
repent for the community. For the whole community. You would do that. Yeah.

1248
01:20:25,030 –> 01:20:28,650
Right. Yeah. So, you know, it’s in the Bible.

1249
01:20:28,890 –> 01:20:32,490
I mean, it’s, but it’s hard to even picture that

1250
01:20:32,490 –> 01:20:36,090
happening in today’s world. I know, right? Oh yeah, I know. When I bring up

1251
01:20:36,090 –> 01:20:39,170
that idea, I have so many people look at me like I’ve grown 3 heads.

1252
01:20:42,210 –> 01:20:45,590
But you know what? The fact that you’re talking about it, that’s

1253
01:20:45,590 –> 01:20:49,390
something. Well, I think it’s the only thing, you know, I think it’s the only

1254
01:20:49,390 –> 01:20:52,797
thing that gets us out of the bind we’re in. I don’t think there’s any

1255
01:20:52,829 –> 01:20:56,650
other way out of the bind. I think every other way that ignores

1256
01:20:56,763 –> 01:21:00,504
the spiritual aspects of this problem, of these problems that we’ve got, every

1257
01:21:00,761 –> 01:21:04,470
other way that ignores those things or seeks to move around them

1258
01:21:04,470 –> 01:21:08,131
or through them, um, only winds us up with

1259
01:21:08,163 –> 01:21:11,631
some delay back in the same cul-de-sac

1260
01:21:11,856 –> 01:21:15,629
another 80 years from now. And I don’t want my 9-year-old

1261
01:21:15,629 –> 01:21:19,479
boy And his grand— his kids and his grandkids to be

1262
01:21:19,479 –> 01:21:23,295
in the same cul-de-sac that I’m in right now, 80 years from

1263
01:21:23,327 –> 01:21:27,144
now. Just, you know, a cul-de-sac, just, you know, with AI and

1264
01:21:27,176 –> 01:21:30,864
robotics and whatever gee-whiz stuff it is that we’ll come up with 80 years from

1265
01:21:30,864 –> 01:21:34,087
now. I don’t need him to be in the same secular— in the same cul-de-sac

1266
01:21:34,632 –> 01:21:37,807
spiritually. That does absolutely no good.

1267
01:21:38,401 –> 01:21:42,105
That’s why ethics is so important, because ethics makes

1268
01:21:42,105 –> 01:21:45,659
no sense Unless a human being is free.

1269
01:21:45,820 –> 01:21:49,374
In other words, has a free will. And that free will,

1270
01:21:50,084 –> 01:21:53,870
by definition, can’t be physical, because nothing physical

1271
01:21:53,870 –> 01:21:57,462
is free. Everything physical is governed by the laws of physics and

1272
01:21:57,462 –> 01:22:01,166
chemistry. There’s no freedom in the physical world. In order for there to be

1273
01:22:01,182 –> 01:22:03,987
freedom, there has to be a non-physical world.

1274
01:22:05,780 –> 01:22:08,641
For us to have a free will, there’s got to be a non-physical world. Well,

1275
01:22:11,472 –> 01:22:14,235
You can’t be ethical unless you’re equally free to do the right thing or the

1276
01:22:14,235 –> 01:22:17,144
wrong thing. You have to have that pure choice to go in either direction.

1277
01:22:17,682 –> 01:22:21,501
That is a source of power. That’s power. And

1278
01:22:21,501 –> 01:22:24,932
so, uh, if you can, if you can,

1279
01:22:25,272 –> 01:22:29,121
if you can teach people the necessity

1280
01:22:29,137 –> 01:22:32,560
for free will and to teach people the necessity for ethics,

1281
01:22:33,556 –> 01:22:37,313
that I think will open people’s minds to the possibility that

1282
01:22:37,345 –> 01:22:41,017
there’s got to be a non-physical world. The whole world can’t just be

1283
01:22:41,017 –> 01:22:44,850
physical. And so that is

1284
01:22:45,106 –> 01:22:48,634
why I firmly believe and why I’m doing what I’m

1285
01:22:48,666 –> 01:22:52,146
doing with ethics, because that will lead—

1286
01:22:52,482 –> 01:22:56,058
and I think that’s why ethics is so mysterious. If you ask people how

1287
01:22:56,090 –> 01:22:59,634
important ethics is, they’ll tell you, oh my God, are you kidding me? It’s so

1288
01:22:59,634 –> 01:23:02,152
important. I mean, look at the world. It’s so unethical.

1289
01:23:03,162 –> 01:23:06,655
Ethics is a 9 or a 10. So many people say this.

1290
01:23:07,248 –> 01:23:10,790
I’ve been asking people for many years this question, but

1291
01:23:10,934 –> 01:23:13,786
yet it’s not taught in public school.

1292
01:23:15,181 –> 01:23:18,546
The universities don’t require one course in ethics for undergraduates.

1293
01:23:19,171 –> 01:23:22,616
Why is there such a huge gap between the importance of ethics and how powerful

1294
01:23:22,616 –> 01:23:25,597
and important it is and our educational system?

1295
01:23:26,222 –> 01:23:29,316
What would this— it’s mysterious. And I

1296
01:23:29,444 –> 01:23:33,184
believe the mystery is the mystery

1297
01:23:33,360 –> 01:23:36,988
of that there’s a non-physical world also.

1298
01:23:37,068 –> 01:23:40,615
You can’t taste it, you can’t smell it, you can’t see it.

1299
01:23:41,546 –> 01:23:44,932
That’s the spiritual world. That’s the world of

1300
01:23:44,932 –> 01:23:48,624
theology. That’s the world of the transcendent.

1301
01:23:48,928 –> 01:23:52,427
Of the transcendent. Yeah. Well, and I think this is a good

1302
01:23:52,780 –> 01:23:55,366
place for us to close because I think That

1303
01:23:56,642 –> 01:23:59,922
I think that that in order to get a leader

1304
01:24:01,311 –> 01:24:04,540
to cross over from the materialistic,

1305
01:24:05,201 –> 01:24:08,928
this world is all there is, to there is something

1306
01:24:08,992 –> 01:24:10,138
else that’s outside of me,

1307
01:24:12,866 –> 01:24:16,642
ethics is part of. I don’t know that it’s the whole, but it’s part of

1308
01:24:16,642 –> 01:24:20,223
the boat that takes them to that transcendent.

1309
01:24:21,643 –> 01:24:25,004
I also think that their

1310
01:24:25,198 –> 01:24:28,154
worldview, their headwaters, whatever those headwaters are,

1311
01:24:30,290 –> 01:24:34,106
has to be very, very— has to already

1312
01:24:34,122 –> 01:24:37,678
be oriented. There we go. In the direction of the

1313
01:24:37,678 –> 01:24:41,088
transcendent. I also understand, or I also

1314
01:24:41,395 –> 01:24:44,760
need to acknowledge that we need to acknowledge on this episode that

1315
01:24:45,359 –> 01:24:49,131
everybody is going to believe in something. The, the, the,

1316
01:24:49,422 –> 01:24:50,892
the Catholic

1317
01:24:53,154 –> 01:24:56,940
writer and apologist G.K. Chesterton once said

1318
01:24:56,940 –> 01:25:00,521
infamously that when people back in the 18th century where all the Nietzschean stuff was

1319
01:25:00,521 –> 01:25:04,118
starting to really hit, that when Darwinian

1320
01:25:04,393 –> 01:25:08,021
theories of life and evolution and all that, when all this is really

1321
01:25:08,021 –> 01:25:11,565
starting to hit Europe, G.K. Chesterton once said, when people stop

1322
01:25:11,630 –> 01:25:15,239
believing in something, it’s not like they, they don’t go ahead and believe in nothing.

1323
01:25:16,655 –> 01:25:19,867
That’s not possible. People are going to believe in something.

1324
01:25:21,116 –> 01:25:24,572
I completely agree with you. You can’t not have

1325
01:25:24,685 –> 01:25:28,309
beliefs. But there are people that actually believe

1326
01:25:28,668 –> 01:25:32,453
that what you have to do is have no beliefs. Which is a

1327
01:25:32,453 –> 01:25:35,732
belief in and of itself. Which is a belief in and of itself. Exactly. And

1328
01:25:35,748 –> 01:25:39,575
so anyway, so that’s what we’re dealing

1329
01:25:39,591 –> 01:25:43,331
with. That’s what we’re dealing with. And the problem is a problem

1330
01:25:43,331 –> 01:25:46,981
that Is bigger than Richard’s life.

1331
01:25:47,046 –> 01:25:49,924
It’s bigger than my life. And it’s bigger than the lives of anybody who is,

1332
01:25:50,182 –> 01:25:53,642
who is still, I might’ve lost half my audience, but still

1333
01:25:53,739 –> 01:25:55,486
listening to the, to, to this show.

1334
01:25:57,447 –> 01:26:00,849
And I think we have to acknowledge that. We have to be

1335
01:26:00,849 –> 01:26:04,317
grateful for that. And we have to also understand

1336
01:26:04,317 –> 01:26:07,825
that if we want to save a civilization, these are the

1337
01:26:07,825 –> 01:26:11,384
directions that we have to go in if we’re genuinely interested in doing that.

1338
01:26:12,293 –> 01:26:16,044
And I think actually the vast majority of us, the silent majority that

1339
01:26:16,060 –> 01:26:19,571
Melody was talking about in here, the people who look at what’s

1340
01:26:19,571 –> 01:26:23,338
happening and, and are wondering why, I think they’re looking for a

1341
01:26:23,338 –> 01:26:26,608
program. They’re looking for an idea. They’re looking for a direction

1342
01:26:27,282 –> 01:26:30,199
which leadership can provide if leadership is ethical

1343
01:26:31,049 –> 01:26:34,800
and believes in the transcendent for them to help

1344
01:26:34,800 –> 01:26:38,633
them or to guide them and to lead them. towards doing

1345
01:26:38,665 –> 01:26:40,847
the practical things that will save the West.

1346
01:26:42,019 –> 01:26:45,613
There’s, I believe, a very large

1347
01:26:45,725 –> 01:26:48,550
segment of the population who do

1348
01:26:49,095 –> 01:26:52,032
believe that there’s something beyond the physical.

1349
01:26:52,851 –> 01:26:56,557
They believe it. They consider themselves spiritual, but they don’t

1350
01:26:56,557 –> 01:27:00,377
practice any religion. And those

1351
01:27:00,473 –> 01:27:04,116
people are, you know, need guidance. Those people really need

1352
01:27:04,164 –> 01:27:07,796
guidance. Yeah. Now, there’s one other thing, two other things I just want to mention

1353
01:27:07,813 –> 01:27:10,887
before we go. One, regarding October 7th,

1354
01:27:14,550 –> 01:27:18,097
that the, the thing about October 7th which was so,

1355
01:27:19,484 –> 01:27:22,273
um, transformational

1356
01:27:23,350 –> 01:27:27,159
was that most of the world, so much, so much, so many people

1357
01:27:27,159 –> 01:27:30,968
in the world were siding with the, the offenders, were siding

1358
01:27:30,984 –> 01:27:32,708
with were siding with the offenders.

1359
01:27:34,153 –> 01:27:37,608
Intelligent, educated, good people,

1360
01:27:38,073 –> 01:27:41,704
well-meaning people, people you would think would know better,

1361
01:27:42,331 –> 01:27:46,138
were siding with the enemy, with the people that were doing the killing

1362
01:27:46,138 –> 01:27:48,934
and raping and murdering and burning children.

1363
01:27:50,364 –> 01:27:54,171
They were justified. That’s the thing. That’s what

1364
01:27:54,300 –> 01:27:58,107
woke up the world, was seeing that, oh my God,

1365
01:27:58,497 –> 01:28:01,846
that the world, that so many people in the world have it backwards.

1366
01:28:02,980 –> 01:28:06,487
That’s number one. The other thing I wanted to mention is something. You ever hear

1367
01:28:06,487 –> 01:28:10,052
of somebody by the name of Daryl Davis? Daryl Davis?

1368
01:28:10,117 –> 01:28:13,166
No. Educate me on who Daryl Davis is. He’s an

1369
01:28:13,425 –> 01:28:16,652
African American musician. Okay. Whose

1370
01:28:16,684 –> 01:28:20,435
parents, whose father was part of the diplomatic corps. Okay.

1371
01:28:20,500 –> 01:28:23,846
So when he grew up, they traveled around the world. And

1372
01:28:24,264 –> 01:28:26,883
he was, you know, he went to school with other children of diplomats.

1373
01:28:28,136 –> 01:28:31,655
It wasn’t until he got older, when they came back to the United States,

1374
01:28:32,362 –> 01:28:36,017
and he learned about racism. He didn’t even know. He

1375
01:28:36,017 –> 01:28:38,464
couldn’t figure out, why do people hate me? They don’t even know me.

1376
01:28:40,134 –> 01:28:43,516
He’s famous because he figured out how to literally

1377
01:28:43,953 –> 01:28:46,187
befriend members of the Ku Klux Klan.

1378
01:28:48,527 –> 01:28:52,377
This guy. Okay, yeah, go ahead. 200 people. He convinced 200

1379
01:28:52,377 –> 01:28:56,108
members of the Ku Klux Klan to leave the Ku Klux Klan. And

1380
01:28:56,590 –> 01:28:59,560
he’s African American. He was able to do this.

1381
01:29:01,005 –> 01:29:04,762
That takes courage. Not just courage,

1382
01:29:05,340 –> 01:29:08,952
it takes conviction, it

1383
01:29:08,952 –> 01:29:12,581
takes grit, it takes a

1384
01:29:12,581 –> 01:29:15,936
huge commitment and ethics.

1385
01:29:16,595 –> 01:29:20,367
What could be more ethical than that? And so he’s—

1386
01:29:20,367 –> 01:29:24,083
there’s something about him. We, we, we have to, we have to

1387
01:29:24,132 –> 01:29:27,963
have a podcast with him. We would. I’m going to reach out to him.

1388
01:29:28,012 –> 01:29:31,361
I’m going to— you’re the, you’re probably the 2nd or 3rd person

1389
01:29:31,538 –> 01:29:35,088
that’s, that’s mentioned him to me in the

1390
01:29:35,104 –> 01:29:38,717
last 6 months to a year. And so

1391
01:29:38,733 –> 01:29:42,511
there’s something going on in the zeitgeist somewhere, and none of you know each

1392
01:29:42,511 –> 01:29:45,790
other. So when I get 3 different points of contact around one idea,

1393
01:29:46,048 –> 01:29:49,716
something’s trying to Something’s trying to tap me on the shoulder or get my attention.

1394
01:29:50,213 –> 01:29:53,404
Um, we’re gonna do— the WEO is gonna start doing

1395
01:29:53,500 –> 01:29:57,060
podcasts in the not too distant future, so maybe he could be our

1396
01:29:57,060 –> 01:30:00,572
first guest. We’ll co-host it.

1397
01:30:01,037 –> 01:30:03,170
I would, I would love to talk to him. I would love to find out

1398
01:30:03,379 –> 01:30:06,907
more about his story. That, that seems— it’s fascinating and amazing to me.

1399
01:30:07,468 –> 01:30:10,836
Well, he’s on YouTube. You can, you can just Google him on YouTube. And,

1400
01:30:10,916 –> 01:30:14,510
and yeah, I mean, okay. Cool. Yeah. Yeah.

1401
01:30:14,736 –> 01:30:18,110
Um, so yeah, courage, confidence, commitment,

1402
01:30:18,772 –> 01:30:22,582
uh, grit, ethics— these are the things that we need in order

1403
01:30:22,582 –> 01:30:26,112
to, uh, in order to save the West. And I think, I think Ms.

1404
01:30:26,193 –> 01:30:27,757
Phillips, I think she would agree.

1405
01:30:30,128 –> 01:30:33,786
She’s, she, she’s a leader. She’s a leader. She

1406
01:30:33,948 –> 01:30:37,412
is a leader. She is courageous.

1407
01:30:37,752 –> 01:30:41,362
She’s on the leading edge, and she, she doesn’t give a crap what people thinks

1408
01:30:41,362 –> 01:30:44,377
about it. She’s, she’s gonna say it like it is,

1409
01:30:44,650 –> 01:30:48,419
period. Maybe, uh, maybe that’s another person that we should

1410
01:30:48,419 –> 01:30:52,107
talk to on the, uh, on the podcast. Yeah, there you

1411
01:30:52,107 –> 01:30:55,828
go. All right, well, um, Richard, I want to thank you for,

1412
01:30:56,021 –> 01:30:59,356
uh, for stopping by on the show today. Thank you for having this conversation with

1413
01:30:59,404 –> 01:31:03,141
us. This was great, always a pleasure. Um, and, uh, of course,

1414
01:31:03,253 –> 01:31:05,402
with that, well, we’re out.