Right Wing Woke? & the New Antisemitism Laws

Can I retweet this or something? Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, we're live now. People are, people are listening in. We have CJ Engel. Yeah, go ahead and retweet it if you want so people know. CJ is a host of the Chronicles podcast and the Contra Mundum podcast.

He's going to join us today to discuss this anti-Semitism bill, as well as the woke right. Before he gets to that, though, I just want to let everyone know that I am going to be in your area this coming, what is it?

I guess Friday, I think, or maybe Saturday is when the conference actually starts. I'm flying in, though, to Minneapolis on Friday. Here's the conference. It is called the Be Not Conformed 2024 Conference at Eureka Baptist Church, also co-sponsored by TruthScript.

And you can find out more about that at truthscript .com. You can register. You need to register if you're going to come. It's in St. Croix Falls. It's a beautiful area. CJ, I don't know if you've traveled much in the Midwest.

I was surprised, though, in Wisconsin. It's actually very pretty in many areas. You think it's all going to be wheat and cornfields, and it's not. Yeah, I haven't been up there. Yeah, the Northwoods, they call it.

It's an interesting area. We're going to talk, though, today about two things. I'm grateful that you're on the podcast to talk about this because I think you can clearly explain some of the working issues in both of these subjects, which perhaps are really the same subject from different angles.

We have this bill that is, as I understand it, passed by the House, is going to the Senate. So our hope in the Senate is that Chuck Schumer somehow says no to it. But it's this anti-Semitism law. And people were freaking out last night because it actually makes parts of the Bible, it frames them as anti-Semitic and would make them qualify as hate speech.

Is that your.

Understanding as well? Yeah, it's so vague that you can, I mean, and they refer to this third-party nonprofit organization for their definitions without actually defining things in the bill itself, which is always dangerous because these third-party definitions can change as political dynamics change.

But yeah, but they really clearly say in one of the definitions in the third-party definition area that one of the examples they give is claims that the Jews killed Christ. And the Bible, you know, in its own way, and they're subject to interpretation, you have to contextualize these things.

But it does indicate, at least in certain ways, that the Jews rejected the Messiah. And they did this by cheering for Barabbas and against Christ. And all these things are structured into Second Thessalonians, Gospel of John, and then Acts.

And so it's like, what are they going to do with this? Do you trust the regime to hold out in defense of Christians? I don't. And so it's very clear that these things can be very easily go against us.

Yeah, they've handed.

A tool to the enemy in a sense by which they could justify limitations and persecutions and those kinds of things. This is a larger issue than it was even just a month ago when I did a podcast on the state laws that mirror this, or I should say this mirrors the state laws, DeSantis, Kristi Noem, I think, in Texas, they had a law just like this.

And they seem to be working off of a commonly shared definition of antisemitism that was codified, I think, in the early 2000s by a, I don't remember the name of the organization, but it's a organization concerned with the Holocaust.

And it has a very broad understanding, I would say, of what antisemitism is. And so other people were upset that criticizing Israel essentially, or in certain ways is now antisemitism. And so things that perhaps our parents who are concerned about antisemitism, and their only category for that is Nazis.

And I'm not saying my parents specifically, but I mean, our parents generation, that's kind of what they're thinking is, you know, war that their parents fought. This is beyond that kind of image that you might have in your head when you hear the term antisemitic.

And so I want to talk about that a little, this broad definition given to it. And, you know, in helping us talk about it, I want to show you all, those who are listening, just a little sample of what evangelical leaders have been doing with this term.

So Russell Moore says that, and there's a number of things from Russell Moore, I just picked one. He posts an article, this is fairly recent, My Thoughts on Campus Antisemitism and the Lessons We Should Learn from a Nazi-Occupied Church.

He wrote an article for Christianity Today, where he, again, he uses that very, I say simplistic, but that archaic in a way that this category from the World War II era, that I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about, but it's, he's applying it to what's happening now.

These protests against Israel are in league with that. It's the same kind of thing. And there's not a whole lot of thought given to widely or specifically really defining antisemitism. You have Danny Akin from Southeastern, the president there.

He's retweeted by Brent Leatherwood at the ERLC and the Southern Baptist Convention. He says, antisemitism has always been ugly and evil throughout the history, and it is evil and ugly in our own day.

It must not be tolerated, but vigorously opposed. The government must speak against it. Good people must speak against it as well. Shame on those who remain silent. Again, not defining it, but just, we ought to do something about this.

Brent Leatherwood from the ERLC, and the ERLC is an organization, also promoted the legislation that CJ just described. You have the CREC. This is the end of last year. In December, the Knox Presbytery adopted a statement onto antisemitism.

And I'll just read it really briefly. It says, we believe the conversion of the Jews is key to the success of the Great Commission, and it is incumbent upon us to pray and labor towards that end. Well, apart from Christ, the Jews are, as all others, alienated from God.

They have remained an object of God's care. It goes on to say, God's plan for converting them is for them to see Gentile nations under the blessings of Christ's Lordship, thus leading them to long for the same.

Hence, the cancerous sin of antisemitism has no place in God's plan. Again, fairly, what does that mean? Dan Darling, Owen Strand, the same thing. Antisemitism is not fake. It is all too real. Going on and on about it, but what is it?

And we found out last night what it is, I think. We had a rude awakening. Oh, that's what it is. So what do you make of all this, CJ? Do you think that evangelical leaders who pushed all this stuff, were they just dupes?

Were they playing into something they didn't realize they were playing into? Is this ideological liberalism taking its course?

How do you understand it? Yeah, I don't think, like even the top dogs like Russell Moore, I don't see him as like this, you know, cigars in a backroom kind of person. I think he's very easily duped into certain meta-narratives that the regime wants to play up.

And that's kind of the function that he plays within the evangelical world, is he is a catalyst for regime narratives to enter into the subconscious of the evangelical world. I think that's the function that he plays and so he's doing his role, you know, very well.

So when they want to, you know, build up for the, you know, mass acceptance of a law like this, they need representatives to kind of speak to the base to make these things happen. And I think that's why these phrases are coming out.

I also don't think people like Owen Strand, I don't think, I wouldn't consider him like a top dog, but I do consider him as very easily absorbing regime narratives. And so I think that's more the function that they're playing.

But I think it's, you know, a lot of, you know, you can look at the anti-Christian nature of what's going on in politics, but I also think a lot of it has to do with the well-being of the state of Israel from the state of Israel's perspective too.

I mean, it's becoming very much obvious to those of us on the right, to those of us who have a, you know, are aware of our constitutional past and the wisdom of George Washington to not have these entanglements with foreign powers, that these things are not good for us, that sending billions of dollars overseas so that other countries can prop up their, you know, their interests and their objectives and their priorities, that actually sucks wealth and culture and opportunity away from America.

And so this return of this American first mentality is actually bad for those who live off of the government welfare in foreign governments, including Ukraine, including the state of Israel, all these things.

And so the best way to get people on board with, you know, continuing the relationship with Israel is to speak in terms of the Third Reich and Nazism and all these things. And so it's very easy to drum up the emotions, especially in the evangelical world with its, you know, deep history and dispensationalism and, you know, this eschatological reference to the state of Israel, all these things.

That's a very easy narrative to play up and get what you want for the state of Israel is to tinker with the, you know, the puppet strings of the evangelical conscience. And so I think that's more what's going on.

And I don't think people like Russell Moore, maybe Russell Moore, but definitely not Owen Stray and really understand the implications of what's happening and why they're being used for these ends. You know, it seems to me just.

Watching this that it goes so far beyond the dispensational circle, though, because you saw, was it 260 or something, Republican senators or congressmen vote for this. You see, even I had an example in there from the CREC, which they would certainly oppose dispensationalism, but also wanting to take this very strong stand against a vague kind of antisemitism.

And I've wondered to what extent this is a post-war liberal instinct and dispensationalism in certain forms is perhaps a resulting from that or a byproduct of that. At least some of the enthusiasm we see for the modern nation state.

I mean, I don't know what your thoughts on that, but I see some people in the comments sometimes they'll say like, if you just get rid of dispensationalism, this problem goes away, to which I say, I don't think so.

I don't think that's actually what's driving this. There's something, it seems like that's deeper. And I don't know exactly what that is. I suspect it's some kind of a liberal consciousness.

Yeah. I think that the, we'll call it the American empire. After World War II, Europe basically was torn apart by the Soviet Union on one side and the American priorities in Europe on the other side. And so, say what you want about the very difficult topic of World War II, it's much more nuanced than we grew up with, just the struggle for power and what was going on there.

But I think in so many ways, the late 20th century and the 21st century really had its founding origins in the mythos of World War II. And so, recreating those dynamics is important for the maintenance of power for the American empire.

I don't think any of them, it's funny, like you see these Palestinian proponents versus the pro-Israel side. These are basically two post-war movements battling each other out. None of them represent heritage America or constitutional America or anything like that.

So, I think you're right that a lot of this is the reinforcement, the struggle for post-war liberalism versus the woke left. I mean, we can talk about those dynamics a lot, but one of the important things to realize is the woke left, the pro-Palestinians, the ones that are seeking to couch Israel as this massive villain, that left is not the liberals.

They are very illiberal. They very much want to suppress what they can see as oppressive forces, Christianity and patriarchy and white supremacy and all these things that they talk about. They are very much anti-liberal.

And then there's the liberal establishment that's trying to hold onto its power. And one of the ways that it seeks to do that is it has to reinforce the myths of World War II, that there's these Hitlers out there that they have to rise up and address.

And I think that's where a lot of the anti-Semitism comes into. It's just that they need that reinforcement mechanism that bolsters their ability to continue the post-war liberal order. Now, very quickly before we move on, I wanted to find this a little.

Deeper if we can, because we do have people listening who perhaps are questioning what the difference between the woke left and liberals are. We've done a whole series on liberalism on this podcast, but I know we always have new listeners who probably see those as the same thing because they grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and he just talked about liberals.

And then towards the end of his life, what emerged as the woke movement is kind of the same thing. But you're.

Saying there's a difference between them. I think there's a difference between them. I think the difference is very important. On one hand, there's lots of liberalisms. If you look at the genesis of English liberalism in the 1700s or something, it's very different character than the 20th century liberal establishment.

The liberal establishment adopted this word liberal, but in its own way, it was very much not continuous with John Locke or something like that. And John Locke today would be considered a Christian nationalist.

John Locke himself, the founder of liberalism, said that Christianity has to be the metaphysical basis of English society and that Hinduism or Islam, these things needed to be rejected from political society because they had nothing to do with the English way of life.

Here was Mr. Liberal himself in the 1600s, John Locke, speaking in this way, he would be considered dangerous like Stephen Wolfe or something today for speaking in those terms. So that classical liberalism is kind of done.

It doesn't exist anymore. People like to use the classical liberalism so they can return to it, but that liberalism I don't think adequately describes 20th century liberalism. 20th century liberalism was really built on the interests of the New Deal establishment, the managerial revolution in the 1930s.

And then it kind of was infused with this new radicalism in the 1960s. The liberals at that time had things like thinking in terms of only of individuals. They emphasized multiculturalism. They emphasized feminism, the emancipation of females from the patriarchy and all these things.

These are liberalism. And if you look at the woke left, they do not speak in terms of everybody gets a fair and equal chance. They very obviously have a political agenda that seeks to suppress its enemies.

I mean, if you think of the woke left today, they are very much against our way of life. They're tearing down our statues. They're erasing our documents. They're firing people who stand for those things.

The woke left is not liberal. The woke left is very illiberal and they seek to dominate every aspect of our lives. So I think liberalism itself is crumbling, but I do think it's important to keep the left separate from the liberals.

I think these two need to be kept separate. And I know this is going to pour into our conversation about the right, because the right is actually this forgotten option away from liberalism in the 20th century and also away from the woke left.

One question I have, this is on a personal level, because I'm actually speaking on this topic this weekend on Christianity and liberalism, i .e. post-war liberalism. But I know that they gain some inspiration from Locke and Hobbes and maybe even Montesquieu.

And they try to go back to these objectivities, what they sometimes call it, this objective way of looking at the world and at the government. And they see individual rights, which I think you and I probably would agree that this was maybe a freeze frame.

They were trying to conserve what English common law up to that point had given to us, and then it got universalized. And so they believe in this universalized version. But the left today, they also sometimes use these same rhetorical devices.

They'll say that, for instance, this year with the issue of abortion, they'll say that we're restricting a woman's right to choose, which is very much the language of liberalism, I would say. And the woke left doesn't have a problem using that.

So there is some overlap, wouldn't you say?

I think the overlap is very Machiavellian. I don't think the left is doing rhetoric. I think the left is the master at appropriating rhetoric for their own political agenda. I think the left is much more devious about the way it uses rhetoric and strategy.

I mean, if you look at Antonio Gramsci, he was a Frankfurt School cultural Marxist far leftist who wanted to basically liquidate Western culture. But he recognized the fact that if you radicalize the rhetorical framework of the culture itself, then everybody drops their swords.

They drop their guard because your opponents are speaking in terms that you yourself appreciate. And I think that's a very key aspect to the left is appropriating liberal rhetoric and using it for its own purposes.

Because, I mean, you can see this during COVID. I mean, where was the personal right to choose then? They use it selectively, not absolutely, whereas a classical liberal like James Lindsay might use it much more universally and absolutely.

Yeah. And it seems maybe 15 years.

Ago when I was in college that the term tolerance was used all over the place. That was the main thing that you could probably headline over the left, that they're the liberals, that they were about tolerance.

And now you've seen the same people in that group essentially move on from that. They don't talk about tolerance anymore. It's really just conformity. And it's a contradiction, you would think, if you're a liberal.

So, well, let's move on then to the woke right stuff, because I want to talk about this and I want to reach an understanding, which I think we have, and then talk about this new term that it seems to be developing.

I think you and I mentioned, you mentioned before that maybe Kevin DeYoung was the first, at least in Christian circles, to talk about the woke right when he reviewed Stephen Wolfe's book. He accused it of wokeness in some way.

Here's just a little, two little videos that I wanted to play. One's from a commentator who's commenting on Tucker Carlson, calling him woke right. And the next one is from Doug Wilson in a recent interview on the Room for Nuance podcast with Sean DeMars, and he's asked about the.

Story of Tucker Carlson and the woke right. Tucker and his producers are perfectly entitled to invite the guests they want to discuss the subjects they want. But the incident made it obvious to me that Tucker was not a truth-seeking journalist, and that when it came to Russia and the war in Ukraine, at least, he had no intention of being objective.

Not much is obvious, especially after the events of the last week. But the real question is why? Why is the dissident right going.

Woke? I should say that that's about the Vladimir Putin interview. He's calling Tucker woke because he's taking what he considers to be a pro-Russian side. And then this is Sean DeMars asking Doug.

Wilson about the woke right. Do you believe in the woke right? The woke right? The woke right.

Like basically the equivalent of the woke left, but the dissident right, guys, is that what you.

Mean? Yeah. Think about GK Beal, sort of you become what you behold. You spend so much time interacting with the woke that you begin to mimic their tactics. Well, I wouldn't say mimicking their tactics, although there is some of that.

I would say that, and this is something I'm actually quite concerned about on the right, is identity politics is very much a danger on the right. We don't want to just do it better than them, which is what a lot of people on the right are doing.

These are people who have been taunted their entire adult lives for being white. And finally they say, okay, I can't do anything about it. I might as well be proud of it. So I might as well embrace it.

And I'll take a page from your book. And not your book, a page from the woke left. So I'll take a page from Saul Alinsky. I'll take a page from those guys and I'm going to be white and proud. I'm going to start hating Jews.

I'm that is a big concern of mine and I regard it as almost entirely the creation of the left. Oh yeah. Right. They invented it. But can you fill out the almost? Almost entirely? Yeah. Oh, I think a bunch of it comes from Adam.

In other words, everybody's a sinner. And so basically vain philosophies oftentimes grease the skids, but we don't really need help coming up with sin. A lot of this, a lot of the agitation on the right is envy driven and envy is something we get from Adam, the material and the lies and the stories that are told we can get from the propagandist.

Yeah. Okay. So I'll just give you the floor CJ.

With those clips we just heard. What's your analysis? Yeah. The woke white, I think it's a, first of all, I don't, I don't know. I don't think Doug Wilson, like, you know, he, he himself, I don't think he was just responding to the question and they, you know, they set up the question for him.

So he was responding in that context. I think the woke right is a really silly concept. I think what it is, is the inability to differentiate between the revolution and the counter revolution. I think that's the best way to put it.

You know, whenever, whenever people start recognizing that liberalism is failing and that there's gotta be some sort of quest for, for power, and that if you don't feel power, then your enemy's going to feel power and use that power against you.

Whenever you start thinking like that, because that's, that's legitimately what's happening here. You, whenever that happens, people don't know how to handle it because we've been so we've come from a liberal, you know, background, like the classical liberal and that's, that's part of the way that we frame our political rhetoric.

It's part of the way that we treat the constitution. It's part of the way that we treat the rule of law, you know, equal protection under the law. These are all, these all are downstream from liberalism, you know, as a, as a concept.

And so when, when that starts to become liquidated and as the left, you know, reigns in power, there's this revolution going on and they're trying to attain power so that they can wield it against their enemies, which, you know, a lot of times are heritage Americans.

And when the heritage Americans, you know, initiate some sort of counter-revolution against that revolution to call both of them woke, I think it's just the inability to grasp the failings of liberalism and you know, they're unwilling to cope with it.

But I think, you know, a good example of this, I think there was a speech in 2014 by Viktor Orban over in Hungary, and he gave the speech in Romania and he called for Hungarians to embrace an illiberal democracy.

And what he was doing was he was, he was denying the right of individuals around the world to place themselves into Hungarian society and transform it in the interests of their own interest groups. He was saying that Hungary exists for the Hungarians and that we are not going to embrace this Western liberalism because we want to do what is good for us.

He differentiates between Hungarians, those who inherited the Hungarian way of life and the Hungarian political structures, and that he thought that it was important for the government of Hungary to fight specifically for those who were part of it, part of the soul of the Hungarian history.

And he called for this illiberal democracy, not because he was a woke rightist, but because he recognized that there were enemies in the world that were seeking to liquidate Hungarian particularity, and he wanted them to not fall for the rhetoric of liberalism as the West has done, but rather to assert and uphold the Hungarian way of life.

And I think that needs to be recognized in what the new right, you could call it the new right, it's actually just a return to the old right, but I think you should see this in what the new right is doing.

It's not woke because it's actually a counter-woke. It is recognizing that what the woke wants, what its objectives and priorities are, and we are addressing it in a way that is feasible politically with where we are with our political empowered.

Dynamics. So I don't know if you've seen the clip. I was looking for it just to see if I could display it, but I think I have part of the transcript where Doug Wilson talks about the.

Jewish blood in his family. Have you seen that? I didn't. I think I saw, I read clips of it.

Clips of it. Yeah. So, I mean, it was, some people were bringing this up and I'm not trying to do like a gotcha on Doug Wilson or anything like that. I think this is more representative beyond Doug Wilson, but he talks about in the clip I just played from Sean DeMars that, you know, you're going to be proud of being white, right?

And this is like a negative thing. I know he's written articles like white boy summer or how republics rot. And I know this frustrates some guys, younger guys, some of them who, who have been vilified for so many years for being white.

But he had said, and this is back in, I guess, 2021, but he talks about that many of his members of his family, his immediate family have some significant amounts of Jewish blood in their veins. The ancestry of his grandchildren includes Rabbi Cohn.

And so anyway, and then he gets into kind of like God's promises to Israel and so forth, but there seems to be like a broadly speaking, an aversion to seeing European lineage as a positive. And, and when it's any other lineage, it's seen as positive for some reason.

Like that's something that you can declare or be proud of. And it means something, it confers identity, but you're not really supposed to have any identity conferred if you're European in heritage. And a lot of young guys have noticed this and it's upset them to some extent.

And maybe there has been some overreaction. I'm open to that where I don't know if I've seen a lot of that, but I'm trying to think of examples where, where they become really just obsessed with this and it kind of takes over everything else.

But I, what I've seen more is just younger men who have been deprived of this feel like they've been, they've been given a raw deal. Like they've been cut off from their own heritage in a sense, traditions, ways of living.

And they're told that they must live in these neutral ways that don't prefer their own. And then when they finally kind of break free from that in their minds and they're like, okay, like I, I love my family.

I love my people. I'm proud of my heritage, that kind of thing. They're, they're told that they're woke right. And I, I don't know.

If I'm reading that exactly right, but I think I am. Do you agree? I agree. One of the ironies of all this. So Stephen Wolf in his Christian nationalism book, and people still can't wrap their heads around this and it's bizarre to me, but he's very much a two kingdoms guy.

So we have our Christian identity. We have, we belong, you know, spiritually or invisibly or however you want to put it to the kingdom of Christ. But we also belong to these networks of net, of what he calls natural familial relations.

And these things are not founded in grace, but they're founded in nature. And so one of the, one of the, one of the hilarious aspects to all this is that Stephen constantly, all of us, you know, myself and you, we talk about the fact that these natural relations are, are good to claim that we belong.

You know, I have, you know, German and Swiss or not Swiss, Swedish heritage. And these are, these are not founded in Christ, but they're founded in the natural kingdom and that the, we can belong to those and we can fight for those and we can represent those familial dynamics.

We can see ourselves as belonging to them. And that's allowed for all of these other ethnicities and cultures in the world that they belong to this very specific natural relations heritage. And they're allowed to speak of this, but somehow when, when people of European descent speak about this and say, no, your identity is in Christ.

You don't belong to, you're not first a Jew or a Greek, you belong to Christ. And we always get scolded about this. So I do see what you're saying and I do agree with it, but we need to recognize the fact that, you know, a lot of our political work and our political interests has to do with the fact that we have a, a God-given duty to, an obligation to represent and stand for our natural relations, not merely our spiritual relations.

We live in two kingdoms and it's okay to fight for those within the natural kingdom, you know, within the pre-grace arrangement of familial dynamics.

You know, CJ, I think that the liberal order and everything that's come with it and not just the liberal order, but that coupled with industrialization has left many of us very fractured. So we've moved around the country a few times.

There's divorces. I mean, I probably know more friends of mine in my age group who come from broken families than do not. They come from stable families. We have different groups that you can be part of when you're in high school that are, have interest in different things.

And so there's all these, in my opinion, confusing groups to belong to. And it renders kind of an interesting situation where people grow up and they start attaching themselves to groups that probably that natural relationship mold that you just described do not fit that.

They, we see young men sometimes becoming furries, right? And they're identifying with a My Little Pony TV show. I mean, that's a weird kind of extreme example, but gamer groups and that, and I'm not saying all of that's wrong.

You know, I made the furries is, but, you know, being involved in hobbies and various things. But, but you, you talk about natural relations, I think of region, I think of your local church context. I think of the people that you're obviously at the root of many, much of this is the people you're related to the lineage that you have.

But there's all kinds of factors that I think go into this. And I've told people before that in the area I live in now, and I've grown up most of my life, I've been here. I realize I'm an alien in some ways coming from California, but in this area of New York, you know, I go to a very diverse church ethnically.

There's people from all over the world. And I spend time there shared experience there. Right. And so when I talk about my people, I'm thinking of them as well. It's not, this isn't just boiled down to genetics, which is what I think the, the right, not the right, but like liberals here, and they freak out that this is going to be a, just a genetic thing.

I think it's certainly kinship plays a role in this, but it's so much, there's so many other things and shared experience is certainly one of those things. And the region that you live in, render shared experience, so forth.

So I just want to bring that up. I suppose to offset some of the critics that I'm anticipating when you talk in these ways, just to say that we're talking about the real world. I think that's what I'm hearing you say is like real world relationships that you have, and that starts in your home, right?

And the people that are very similar to you, that's how you learn to live with other humans. That's how you order your loves as Augustine talked about. And the liberal order seems to just kind of wipe that clean.

That doesn't, those things, those connections don't really matter as much as being deracinated individuals in a certain political structure that was made in someone's mind, some kind of forced, forced principles, forced propositions that everyone must live by.

That becomes the thing that binds us. And that's just not true in the real world. That's not what binds us. It's not propositions or abstractions. It's real.

Shared experience in life that God ordained. So I use the phrase heritage Americans a lot, and I know there's a question in the chat about, there's a number of them. Yes. Yeah. So yeah, well, heritage Americans is one of my favorites.

So people say, you know, like people on the hard right, let's say, why don't you just say like, you know, white Americans or European Americans or something like that. It's like, because the dynamic of American history played into the native Americans were here.

There was a fusion of culture, a struggle in some ways, a cooperation in other ways. If you look at things like the old South, there was a certain dynamic between white and black, and it's a lot more nuanced than people understand, but there are these, when you speak about heritage America, I'm really speaking about like, you know, pre Ellis Island America.

And so it's not racially essentialist, you know, back then we have this shared experience. We have these dynamics. Like if you look at the, you know, race relations between native Americans and Americans, we had a conflict, but we had this shared history of something unique.

Like, have you ever seen like the Davy Crockett, you know, movie, the Disney Davy Crockett? Oh, sure. Yeah. Many times. Yeah. Yeah. So there's this like dynamic and there's tensions involved, of course, but there's also cooperation.

And it's this like mosaic of how do peoples interact in the American experience does integrate these different types of people. I mean, that is what heritage Americans mean. And so there's this fusion and it's not a melting pot idea in the 20th century where you can just take anybody from around the world and plop him down in America and he'd be fine.

You can import, you know, millions of Somalis or millions of Haitians or millions of Palestinians into America and they'd be fine. That's not what melting pot originally was meant, but this organic shared experience that kind of grows together over time.

So I think you're right that region and particularity is exactly what's going on here. Now, our institutions were very much Anglo-Saxon, for sure. The political institutions in America are very European derived.

I mean, the Native Americans and the Southern Blacks, they all grew.

Into... No, no, no, the Iroquois Confederacy, CJ, that's where we got all our ideas, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But these do stem from Western European institutions and ways of political thinking, for sure. And we, I mean, the Europeans did dominate the continent for hundreds of years, but I'm not a racial essentialist.

So like, you know, I think anybody could recognize that those in charge are like people of European descent that are completely liquidating the institutions and the heritage of this country, for sure.

I'm not a racial essentialist, but I do think that there is a dynamic there where you cannot just import the third world into America and expect.