Psalm 82, the Judge of All the Earth

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:33

Well, greetings and welcome to the Dividing Line. Had somebody on Twitter say it had been two months since we had done a

00:38

Dividing Line last. Man, I take a week off. And you know, most people take two weeks off.

00:46

I did, for those who care, all three of you, you know, for years

00:55

I've been going up to Colorado and doing these rides and stuff. I think I've mentioned the fact that the

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COVID panic caused the cancellation of all these rides. Think about that for just a second. There is no place on the planet that you would be safer than whipping down, going down, well, safer from COVID, not safer in other ways.

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Oh, that's right. Yeah. I can guarantee you, if I had missed any corner in one of those races, died of COVID, that's how you get the numbers up.

01:30

Anyway, all of that stuff was canceled. Just, you know, it's Colorado. So it's a blue state.

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And so all that stuff got canceled. And so I came up with a crazy, wild idea. I'll be very, very quick here, because I've got a lot of other stuff to get to.

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Crazy, wild idea with a friend of mine back east to do something called Everest, which is where you ride a bike climbing as many feet as Mount Everest, which is 29 ,029 feet.

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So 29 ,030 feet is what you need to do, minimally. And I want to do it differently than most people do it.

02:05

I want to do it at high altitude. Most people do it, you know, down near the seashore, so you've got lots and lots of oxygen.

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Because you're climbing steep, steep, steep grades, very, very steep grades. That's the only way to get it done without riding 500 miles.

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And so I went down to, week before last, I went down to Mount Lemmon, the beautiful, beautiful little,

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I guess you call it a village, it's a, well, it's a city technically of Summer Haven at the top of Mount Lemmon.

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And which is the largest inhabited, it's the highest inhabited spot, I think, in Arizona.

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I would assume so. I mean, I can't think of anything higher. There may be something way over in the east toward New Mexico, maybe, but I don't think so.

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But anyways, it's nestled in right at 7 ,800, 7 ,900 feet above sea level. Rented a little place there.

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And I did some training the week before, because you don't just run up to high altitude and then start running around. And then this past week,

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I went up there and with the, did I tell you?

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Oh, yes, I think, I'm not sure if I told you. With the great assistance of Dr.

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Nicoletta Wibrew, I got it done. But I guess I didn't tell you that after the first day, the first day

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I did 12 ,600 feet of climbing, 11 hours, 8 hours and 30 minutes on bike, woke up in the middle, woke up like four hours into, because you've got to be able to rest, woke up four hours later with a light sensitive,

03:40

I'm going to lose my cookies migraine, which I haven't had in ages. And I knew exactly what it was.

03:45

It was my neck. And there's only one thing to fix it. And I have the world's best chiropractor.

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And unfortunately, she's two and a half hours away from the top of Mount Lemmon. But I drove it.

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I did a five hour round trip, got fixed. And by the time I got back, I still had time to do some riding that day.

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And so that's how I got all this done. So I got it done 29 ,156 feet over 289 kilometers, 18 hours and 40 minutes on bike.

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So yeah, that's what I was doing up there. And the internet, for those of you who are young, won't understand this, but I think the internet

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I had up there was about 14 ,400 baud, something like that. Some of you who remember the olden days know what that meant.

04:28

So I feel like I've been a little bit disconnected. When I was in my car,

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I could catch up on Fox News. But a little bit disconnected.

04:39

So it's been a little while. In fact, this is the first time I've been on the air since Justice Ginsburg passed away.

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And so we have a lot to talk about. Much has taken place. The stuff going on in Southern California with Grace Church, the stuff going on in Moscow, Idaho, and the

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Moscow, Idaho Police Department, which seemingly was attempting to do its best impersonation of the

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Moscow, Russia Police Department at one point recently. But lots and lots of stuff going on.

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And so we are back and have lots to talk about.

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And really excited that today, a bunch of the stuff for the new studio.

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When I say new studio, I could foresee doing a dividing line from in there.

05:33

Don't you think it would be a possibility? Yeah, I would think so. We're not going to give this one up. This is nice and easy.

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It's all set up and stuff like that. But the studio for doing debates and stuff, the key central stuff came today.

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And so Rich is going to be running around and playing with gadgets and things like that.

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And so we're excited about that and seeing progress there. And I don't have any dates or anything.

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We don't do anything yet, but progress is being made. And that's pretty exciting.

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So also, no, I haven't seen the room. Oh, good. Oh, good.

06:16

OK, so the air conditioning is being worked on because the air in there has been marginal. So you put people in there and gadgets and stuff that puts out heat.

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That's not a good thing in July. So you got to have decent or November.

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OK, all right. If you want to put it that way. Also, just to remind everybody, hopefully we will have a link to put up fairly quickly.

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This Friday evening and Saturday morning are the two debates with Dr.

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Jeffrey Riddle on The Longer Ending of Mark and Ephesians 3 .9.

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This is a debate on the Textus Receptus Only position. I've already said straightforwardly,

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TR -Onlyism is not a sexual critical position. Therefore, Dr. Riddle will, by necessity, have to use two different standards in defending

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The Longer Ending of Mark and the reading at Ephesians 3 .9

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and TR. There is absolutely no similarity whatsoever. Whatever arguments you're going to use to defend

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The Longer Ending will be completely different arguments than you're going to use to defend Ephesians 3 .9. That's the whole point.

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That's the key. As long as you don't care about that, as long as you're good with saying, hey,

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I will use whatever arguments I need to use to defend my base text, which is exactly what

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Mormons do and Muslims do and everybody does, that has a text that is ahistorically derived, then you're good.

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But that's not what Christians are supposed to do. That's the whole point. That's what I've been saying all along, is that this position is destructive for Christian apologetics, and we're going to demonstrate that.

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And it almost would not matter which texts we addressed, because you can't come up with a coherent, consistent methodology to look at the data and arrive at a text.

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Terrorism starts with a text and then does whatever it needs to do with the data to arrive at the text it started with.

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So that puts you in an impossible position in dealing with people who have other religious texts or whatever else it might be, such as changes in the

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Book of Mormon, the textual history of the Quran, whatever else it might be. There has to be a consistency in dealing with those things.

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So with all that said, that will be Friday and Saturday. We'll try to get a link up once the...

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I guess you can put YouTube links up like days ahead of time. I'm not sure how that works, but maybe it's already been up.

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I don't know. We'll find out and make sure that you know about that. Before I jump into the text

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I want to start with, it's always dangerous.

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It's almost charismatic in some ways. But when I see things in Twitter, right before the program, it starts a thought process.

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And here is Chris Larson from Ligonier. Actually, Kofi retweeted this, and Kofi, I'm trying to look for your kuji for you,

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I really am, but I've got to tell you something, bro. I don't know what's going on, but this year, pfft, few and far between, man.

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I am really, I don't know. No, I'm serious. I went on eBay because I want to replace the kuji that he lost in the fire.

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And I'd say there's a tenth as many as there were last year at this time.

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Guys with guns like kujis? Oh, no. Can't get guns, can't get kujis.

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I really don't know if there's actually any meaningful connection between the two. It is 2020.

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That's why I said there's no meaningful connection, because there's really nothing meaningful about anything going on in 2020.

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Anyway, Chris Larson, Kofi retweeted him. Listen to this statement.

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Keep your head down and strive to do work that is relevant 1 ,000 years from now. There's a reason we still talk about Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Wycliffe, Luther, Tyndale, Calvin, Turretin, and others.

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Uh, there's an assumption behind that.

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I'm not sure how many of those people necessarily share that assumption. But it does impact what you're even going to choose to address to do.

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What you're even going to choose to address, even to talk about. And I don't think of 1 ,000 years.

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I'm just thinking to my grandkids and maybe great -grandkids, something like that.

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My dad has seen great -grandchildren, so I've got a shot anyways. But if you don't have that far -reaching perspective, then there's a lot of stuff you're just going to let slide by.

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You're just not going to talk about it. You're not even going to address it. It does help provide some level of, how shall we put it?

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Organization to your thinking and to what you're thinking about. Now, I want to talk about a text that we have addressed in this program a number of times before, and some of you, only a few of you, only a few of you have been listening long enough to remember when we spent a lot of time on Psalm 82.

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Now, I would imagine if Rich is listening, he thinks Psalm 82, and you start thinking about either

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Michael Heiser or Mormonism, because that's two of the primary areas where we have addressed the issue of the 82nd

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Psalm, is in regards to Michael Heiser's utilization of this text in the Council of the

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Gods and all these intermediate beings and that kind of stuff. And then

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Mormonism, in that Jesus quotes from Psalm 82 in John chapter 10, and hence you need to have that background to be able to explain to a

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Mormon what's going on in John chapter 10. And when Jesus says what he says, you are gods, he's not identifying his enemies as deities on earth and this type of thing.

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But the actual context that I was referring to there is, I don't remember which year it was now,

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I think it was, was it 08? When did I debate

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John Dominic Crossan? I think it was 2008 -ish somewhere around there. Maybe 2010.

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Anyway, it's been over a decade since my debate with John Dominic Crossan, and therefore, a period of time on The Dividing Line where I dealt with Crossan's views very in -depth.

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Back then, debates weren't nearly as regular as they are now on YouTube, and therefore you would spend a great deal of time preparing for said debates.

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And that required me 2005. Wow, really?

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So that was even before I did, okay, yeah, that's right, because that's when the great weight loss challenge started.

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So yeah, okay, 2005, it's been 15 years. Anyway, you spend a lot of time preparing for debates back then, which for me involved reading

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John Dominic Crossan's autobiography and most of his major works and all sorts of stuff like that.

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And he was very, very, very focused on the 82nd Psalm in some of his understandings of theology, even though he wouldn't really identify as being, as really believing in a personal deity in that way.

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So let's look at Psalm 82, and then I'm going to make some applications, and they are going to get me into a lot of trouble.

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So if you want to watch a program where I'm going to most definitely get into a lot of trouble, this is definitely going to be one of them.

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Psalm 82, God takes his stand in his own congregation. He judges in the midst of the rulers.

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How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Selah. Vindicate the weak and fatherless.

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Do justice to the afflicted and destitute. Rescue the weak and needy. Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.

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They do not know, nor do they understand. They walk about in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken. I said, you are gods, and all of you are sons of the

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Most High. Nevertheless, you will die like men and fall like any one of the princes. Arise, O God, judge the earth, for it is you who possesses all the nations.

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Now, it's only eight verses long. It's not a lengthy psalm. But what it means and what it's talking about is key.

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Now, I'm not going to spend any time today dealing with the assertion that when it says he takes his stand in his own congregation, he judges in the midst of the rulers, that this is some type of intertestamental

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God counsel and all the rest of these things. God is judging the judges of Israel who he himself has established to do justice amongst his people.

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You can see now where we're going, because the psalm is talking about the fact that God has established mechanisms whereby justice is to be done amongst his people.

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And remember, before there was a king in Israel, there were judges in Israel.

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The judiciary, and be careful to place that in the context it is being used in, the existence of judges is vitally important in God's economy.

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A righteous judge is a blessing upon a people. An evil judge is, well, an evil judge is described here in Psalm 82.

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So, God takes a stand in his own congregation. He judges in the midst of the rulers, and the term there, rulers, is theos in Greek, the

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Elohim. That's why they're called gods, because they are standing in the place of God.

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They're judging with the authority of God, which is what gives them such tremendous authority, as well as tremendous responsibility.

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This goes all the way back to the days of Moses. Remember when Moses was just wearying himself with judging amongst all the people, and then

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God says, no, you need to assign judges to all these different levels of people. This is the first form of theocratic judgment and theocratic government amongst the people of Israel, which they rejected in favor of the standard, we want a king who can stand up to the other guy as king, and so on and so forth type of a concept.

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To have judges requires communal responsibility.

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It requires the people in the nation to know the law, love the law, and the one who has given the law, which is

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God. So, in other words, the original idea as expressed here is of a free people who exercise that freedom in the worship of God, recognize

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God as the origin of the law, rejoice in that law,

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Psalm 119, read through Psalm 119 if you haven't recently, it'll take you a while, and its repetitive nature is good, because it will sort of pound something into the brain.

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Recognize the divine nature of that law, rejoice in that law, love that law, and then hold one another accountable to that law, because you know it is divine in origin, and therefore carries divine approbation and divine judgment.

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When you have a people who are united in that way, you don't need all the other structures.

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The fulfillment of love your neighbor as yourself is going to be the essence of what is good and honorable and just within that society.

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But you then have sin. You then have sin. So, when you look, and we've talked about this, especially in regards to quote -unquote social justice, when you look at the biblical law, the biblical law is intent upon protecting the innocent.

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The standards of evidence are high, and as in any situation in the fallen world, the greatest danger is when the judge becomes corrupt.

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So, the standards can be played with, made variable, but the intention of God's law is not to bring about cosmic justice in this life.

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It is always understood that God is God, and God is going to accomplish his purpose, and justice is going to be done in the presence of God.

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But law has to address the fallen nature of man, and hence, the focus is going to be on protecting the innocent, knowing that those who are guilty will not forever be able to get away with what they've done.

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There will be judgment. That's vitally important today.

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We've lost sight of that. We are now trying to do cosmic justice in the earthly realm.

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We can't do it, and it's causing chaos on planet

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Earth today. That's what's going on. That's what this problem, that's what this social, the whole social justice thing is, we've got to fix everything in this life because there will be no final judgment.

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God will not do what is right. So, the fundamental assertion of scripture is the judge of all the

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Earth will do right, and that's talking about God. So, he's the judge of all the Earth, and so there is a final judgment coming.

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That is a given in the biblical worldview, and that is why Christians have been able to bear with patience in justice in the past and to fight for biblical justice, not for the establishment of some kind of cosmic justice, which involves seeing into the hearts and minds of men.

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We can't do that. God's law does not give us a mechanism of looking into the hearts and minds of men. And so, yes, there are people who can get away with things and will get away with things in this life, not in the next.

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Deny that there's a next, and now you become desperate to do justice in this life, and that's when you end up destroying liberty, freedom, and innocence, and responsibility, all these things.

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So, the point is, in Psalm 82, God takes a stand in his own congregation. He judges in the midst of the rulers. How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?

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That's the accusation that echoes out through the congregation of judges. You are judging unjustly and showing partiality to the wicked.

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So, the very reality of the wicked has to be accepted.

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And I say to you, we now live in a society where what God says is wicked is now considered good, and no one is allowed to say that anyone's perspective is wicked unless you hold to godly standards.

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Now, you're being called wicked. But we within the church have been so deeply influenced by this within our society that we don't call anything wicked anymore.

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We don't want to be like the fundies who call everything wicked. When they call pantsuits wicked and a 3 -4 beat or a 3 -3 beat or whatever,

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I don't know. This one guy, man, what a life it is. The IFB Preachers clip guy.

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What a life having to review these things and post these clips. But there's always something about some type of music being wicked.

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And so, that's wicked, and pantsuits are wicked, and stuff like that.

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We look at that, and man, I retweeted one yesterday. Oh, did you see that one yesterday?

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Oh, my goodness. And these poor, sad people will tweet me going, that's what

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I grew up with. And the one guy did that this morning, and my response to him was, I'm sorry. Because I cannot even imitate that kind of breathless, constant stream of words, quote -unquote preaching, that I guess is really, really common in that particular group.

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Anyway, we don't want to be like that. And so, we will now not identify anything as wicked.

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Now, when I was a kid, it was common. It was a given.

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We all understood that what the communists were doing in Russia and East Germany was wicked.

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It was evil. It was destructive of human life, liberty. It was degrading.

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They were attacking churches, and the gulags, and the concentration camps.

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When the Russians came into Berlin and took over the closest concentration camp to Berlin, which was sort of Hitler's private place, it's called

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Sachsenhausen, they didn't close it down. They expanded it. They expanded it to almost twice its size.

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You can go visit it today. I've visited it. It's still got the Arbeit Mark V over the top, and all the rest of the stuff.

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But they didn't close it down. They expanded it. What they did was wicked. Marxism, wicked.

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Communism, wicked. It is opposed to human flourishing. It's opposed to God's truth and freedom that comes from the gospel.

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Do you hear that today? Today, what you hear is, well, people have differing opinions, you see, and there are different positions, and none of it's really wicked.

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And we don't want to be like the fundamentalists and say something's wicked. But the second verse, how long will you judge unjustly?

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That means there is a standard of justice, and it does not derive from mankind. This is God speaking to the judges.

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He's made the judges the judges, and they are to judge based upon what he has revealed, not what they've come up with in some congress or anything else.

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There is a divine standard. Vindicate the weak and fatherless.

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There's nothing here about vindicate the weak and fatherless of a certain skin color, background, economic status.

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No, it's vindicate the weak and fatherless. Do justice to the afflicted and the destitute.

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So, vindication and justice on the basis of God's law, which never said that what you do is you take from everybody else and give to these people so that everybody has the same.

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That's never in God's law. Their vindication and doing justice does not mean you move them into the rich person's homes and kick them out.

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No, that's not even close to the biblical worldview. But they are not to be mistreated.

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They are to be treated justly. There is built into God's law the provision for these people, both in the tithe system and if they're willing to work to be able to provide, the community had that way, that means of doing so.

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But people were greedy, and so people were destroying the ancient boundaries.

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And so they would start putting boundaries together, destroying the ancient landmarks, and so they wouldn't have to provide for the poor and things like that.

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So God says to them, vindicate the weak and the fatherless, justice the afflicted and destitute, rescue the weak and the needy, deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.

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And so it is the oppression of the wicked in the land who are breaking God's law that the judges are to be actively involved in counteracting, in bringing

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God's justice to bear in that context. Rescue the weak and the needy, deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.

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So the wicked are exacerbating the situation that people fall into in poverty and things like that.

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There's nothing here about colors and skin colors or anything like that at all.

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It's not there. This is what they're to be doing. This is the command from God to the judges.

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But when they don't do so, what's the result? Verse five, they do not know, nor do they understand.

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They walk about in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken.

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So when those who are supposed to be God's agents in bringing about justice are ignorant and do not understand their role as they have been put in that position by God.

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Now, some of them might stop and say, this only has to do with Israel. If it does, then why are the foundations of the earth shaken?

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Well, that's one of the foundations of the earth in Israel. They walk about in darkness. Well, it's the only darkness in Israel.

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No, these are general realities. I would like to suggest to you that when you have judges who do not see themselves as creatures of God, who will be judged by the judge of how much of the earth?

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80 %? 90 %? No, judge of all the earth. That was back then.

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You're back in the Old Testament. You got to get in the New Testament. So when Paul goes to Mars Hill, his sermon is stopped when he does what?

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He says, God's going to judge all of you by the man he raised from the dead.

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Oh, it sounds like he's got the same idea. Yeah, he does. They do not know, nor do they understand.

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There is a lack of knowledge of who God is and who they are. They do not understand what their role is and that they will be judged by God for how they undertake their position.

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They walk about in darkness. They have no light from the word of God. That's where light comes from, comes from God.

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As a result, all the foundations of the earth are shaken. You cannot have a government amongst men that is going to do anything but produce injustice and misery if you do not have a recognition of what mankind is, the very creation of God and what mankind is called to do.

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Look at what has happened in the history of man. Look at the fact that in Africa today, tribes continue to murder each other, sell each other into slavery in Africa in 2020.

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And in 2019, I don't want you to think it was just 2020 that all of a sudden started happening. That's a possibility.

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But 2018, 2019, it's still going on. It's still happening. I read a book while I was doing all the stuff

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I was doing this past week, listened to a book, excellent book on the American Revolution.

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And just in passing, it mentioned the warfare that was ongoing between Native American tribes.

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And what was fascinating that I did not know is that one of the things that caused great problems for the

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American tribes that were on the frontier at that time, the frontier back then was the Appalachian Mountains, but one of the things that caused great trouble is for many of the larger tribes, it had developed the idea that farming, horticulture, agriculture was beneath men.

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So only the women did it. Only the women did it. That was beneath men.

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There was such a huge, massive division in that sense.

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And that caused tremendous problems and weaknesses, because the men are off doing hunting and raiding.

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And that's why they were so willing to go with whoever would, French, British, whoever paid them to go raid settlements was because that's all the guys did anyways.

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And until they had the white man to attack, they didn't do each other. That was just said in passing.

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It's just part of history. The scalping and all the rest of that kind of stuff doesn't get taught much in schools these days, but it's there.

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So all the foundations of the earth are shaken when you do not have a proper understanding of who mankind is, and that there is going to be a judgment and that law that keeps popping up all over the earth, wherever man is, there are these certain things that just realize you're not supposed to do that kind of thing.

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Find ways around it, but you realize that all the foundations of the earth are shaken. Unjust judges.

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A judiciary is absolutely necessary because there's a law. And so there has to be people put in a position to judge justly in light of that law.

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And so the judgment, verse six, I said, you are gods, all of your sons, the most high. I placed you in this high position.

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I said, your sons, the most high. You have the tremendous opportunity of speaking my truth and judging my people according to my law.

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Nevertheless, you will die like men and fall like any one of the princes. You think you're going to outlast the judgment of God?

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You're not going to. Someday, every judge will face the judge.

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Someday, every judge will face the judge. That is a very vitally important reality and truth for any society that wants to last.

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If you have judges who think they're just, well, in the

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Star Trek analogy, ugly bags of mostly water, fizzing chemicals, stardust, whatever.

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If your judges think that's what they are, then they are going to try to act as gods in this life.

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They're going to elevate themselves. There is going to be no objective standard and hence no justice amongst people.

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And they're going to be willing to do whatever they feel is best in their lives because when they die, that's it.

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No judgment after that. No judgment after that. And once you have a society like that, don't be looking for liberty, freedom, objective truth, anything like that.

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Just look for totalitarian tyranny. It's all you can get. It's all it can produce.

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So the final prayer, Arise, O God, judge the earth, for it is you who possesses all the nations. There's the part about God judging the earth, not just Israel, for it is you who possesses what?

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All the nations. All the nations. All the nations are possessed, owned by God.

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And so the godly man cries out, judge the earth. That's what

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Psalm 82 is about. A few of you, not many, but a few of you saw a little article that I wrote after Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death.

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I posted it on my own private blog, but I did link it elsewhere. And I decided what

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I wanted to try to do was to let some time pass because it just seems these days that everything is moving so fast, especially with the election coming up, and that there's no time for reflection and consideration and listening to reason.

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There's not much reason being produced in our society right now. It's at a premium, and those trying to produce it seem to be on the margins any longer.

38:12

And so I wrote a brief little thing, and I responded to the fact that what

38:19

I was seeing once again struck me as so very different than at earlier periods of my life, in the first 30 years of my life, let's put it that way.

38:38

And what I refer to is how Christians themselves were responding to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death.

38:48

I'm not talking about the leftists who turned her into a saint, and Jen Hatmaker, I think, was one of them that was saying, well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter into the presence of thy

38:59

Lord, et cetera, et cetera. This kind of hagiography that was going on in that context.

39:07

But I'm thinking more of orthodox Christians who think often of worldview.

39:17

And yet, I could see with one person over here and another person over there said a little something.

39:24

There were a few people sitting out there who had to honestly say, as I have to honestly say,

39:34

I had been praying that we would be released from the evil, tyrannical judgments of Ruth Bader Ginsburg for 15 years.

39:48

And if you weren't, I just have to ask you, why weren't you? I can look directly in that camera and say,

39:55

I prayed that God would deliver us from Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

40:03

I left it to him as to how that would happen. That's how God does things. But am

40:10

I the only one that remembers that we are to pray to be delivered from those who would promote ungodliness amongst us?

40:22

Who would pervert justice? Do I need to remind anyone that every single decision upholding, strengthening, protecting the murder of unborn children in the

40:42

United States had Ruth Bader Ginsburg's signature on it from the

40:47

Supreme Court? Every single one. The Obergefell decision. Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

40:56

I cannot think of anyone who was more consistent in their life of promoting that which is destructive to human life, godliness, and morality.

41:09

Promoting that which will bring the eternal judgment of a just God. Promoting that which nailed

41:16

Jesus Christ to a tree than Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And you go, that's impossible.

41:22

She was a little old grandmother. There's the point, isn't it?

41:29

Judgment not on basis of action, but looks, appearance.

41:35

Yes, she was a little grandmother and she and Scalia were the best of friends and she wore little lacy things.

41:44

And as a result, we close our eyes to the screams of the unborn children.

41:51

We close our eyes to the profaning of marriage. We close our eyes to the destruction of human life and homosexuality, transgenderism, bisexuality, polyamory, and everything else that has flowed through the doors that were kicked open purposefully, consistently by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

42:14

Was she alone? Of course not. But how did she become the notorious

42:20

RGB? Because she was an icon. An icon.

42:27

Now, look, none of the founding fathers who are now so demonized in the minds of so many.

42:37

Demonized. This had to happen. This is why this has been happening in universities for decades now.

42:44

Demonize this nation so you can get to this point. But none of those founding fathers ever, ever, ever, ever dreamed that any justice of the

42:56

Supreme Court could become as powerful as Ruth Bader Ginsburg became.

43:03

The court was never to function the way that it is functioning now. It is a weakness of system that has been exploited.

43:12

The system could have been kept in balance if it were not for the enemies within.

43:20

If the people of the country were dedicated to the principles that the founders sought to enshrine, and then with a love of that country and those principles and the freedom and responsibility that is to come with citizenship in the

43:40

United States, were to function in such a way as to correct any errors they did make, that's how it was supposed to work.

43:47

That's not how it's working. What has happened is the enemies within are exploiting the fact that, as John Adams said, the

43:57

Constitution is sufficient only for a moral and religious people.

44:03

It is utterly incapable to the governance of any other. He was absolutely right.

44:13

So yes, she has taken advantage of a change that has taken place.

44:18

The left, knowing that it could not accomplish the type of social re -engineering that would bring this nation to its knees through the legislative process, turned to the courts.

44:35

And she just represents that. She's representative of that.

44:43

But what I'm hearing, what I heard, it's amazing how fast this has changed.

44:48

All right, I mean, who's even talking about it anymore? Everything is now about Judge Barrett and everything else associated with that.

45:03

I better not even start down that road right now. We'll get to it. Got plenty of time. But most of the,

45:12

I mean, I think Ginsburg is still lying in state. The flag is still flying at half -mast,

45:19

I know that. And everything is moved on. That's how quickly, that's how shallow things are.

45:28

But those who did speak of it immediately, spoke of her consistency and yes, her brilliance.

45:37

Yeah. No one's going to doubt for a second the woman's mind, her consistency.

45:46

Hey, she was married to one guy and outlived him. Had kids, grandkids,

45:52

I think. Wonderful. Great. But consistency in what?

46:02

Consistency in what? Think about it. She had already beaten, well, had survived cancer numerous times when

46:12

Barack Obama was president. She was already in her eighties.

46:19

She could have stepped down and allowed Barack Obama to put another wild -eyed leftist on the court in her place.

46:32

By the way, that's not her seat. That's a traditional way of talking about things, but the seats belong to the people of the

46:40

United States of America. And the people who sit there are supposed to impartially judge on the basis of the constitution, not their feelings about the constitution.

46:52

If I may say that in passing. Anyway, she could have stepped down.

46:58

She did not. Why did she not? Because she wanted her replacement to be named by a woman,

47:09

Hillary Rodham Clinton. Oops, didn't see that one coming.

47:16

And so with the election of Donald J. Trump, what did she do?

47:23

She set her mind on survival. Survival till 2021.

47:31

I've got to make it to 2021. Well, she didn't.

47:38

She didn't. But the point is she forced the court to work around her dying.

47:49

She's been dying for a year. I mean, how many times over the past year, 18 months?

47:56

Well, Ginsburg wasn't there to hear arguments today and da -da -da -da -da -da -da.

48:02

And we all knew why it was. We all knew what was happening, but she would not step down.

48:10

Why? Because she was absolutely dedicated to the protection of what she saw as her mission.

48:24

And here's the issue. It was a mission of wickedness.

48:32

If you cannot see, if you are unwilling to even consider that the worldview she represented in its application within the

48:44

United States of America produced wickedness, evil, the

48:53

Obergefell decision is evil. Roe v. Wade is evil. All the decisions that have supported

48:59

Roe v. Wade are evil. They're wickedness. They're destructive of human life. There is not a single one of the founding fathers, even the most secular of them, and there was secularism in that day, would have been able, every one of them would have been aghast at the decisions that have been rendered by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

49:26

Just shocked right out of their wigs. Couldn't believe it.

49:35

The problem is today we have, as Christians, become unwilling to identify evil as evil.

49:49

We have gone with the society and the society says, well, you know, she just had, and I've heard

49:55

Christians say, well, you know, we disagree with her judicial philosophy. So do you disagree with Stalin's judicial philosophy too?

50:08

Let's not use Hitler because Hitler's overdone. Besides that, in comparison to Stalin, Hitler was an amateur, an absolute amateur.

50:18

Stalin killed 10 times the number of people that Hitler did. Mao, another big one way up there.

50:30

Are we limited to saying once they die, because it seems like when you die, it's the automatic get out of jail free card.

50:40

And you know why? Because we've even bought the idea there's no cosmic justice.

50:48

Once you die, that's it. It's not gonna be justice done. Oh yes, there will be.

50:53

The judge of all the earth will do it right. And there will be judgment. And what is evil in this life will remain evil and will be judged as evil.

51:04

That's the way it is. That's a great hope, actually.

51:11

But even we have bought the idea, at least functionally, that once you die, well, you know, you don't want to say anything bad about someone who's died.

51:24

There were a few people, a little bit here and a little bit there, who just sort of threw up on their status page or something that there's great rejoicing in the city when the evil pass away.

51:39

You know, when evil rulers who've been depressing the people, there's a shout of joy. They just sort of said it and just let it lie.

51:49

Why? Because it requires us to think through what represents evil. And there are a lot of people in the church today telling us that we can't do that.

52:02

That turns you into a one -issue voter that makes you imbalanced.

52:09

What they're really saying is, there's... you can have someone who fundamentally said,

52:17

God doesn't get to determine what life is. God doesn't get to determine what sex is. God doesn't get to determine what marriage is.

52:25

God doesn't get to do any... God can't touch mankind. Mankind is absolutely autonomous.

52:32

We get to determine all of it ourselves. But we can't call it evil.

52:39

It's one view. That's a viewpoint that's out there and we just all need to get along with all the different views is what we're being told.

52:50

I drew the parallel between Ruth Bader Ginsburg in my article and Jezebel. Jezebel seemed to have been a very dedicated, industrious woman, moved about in the halls of power.

53:08

She knew what she was doing and even persecuted Elijah. Of course,

53:14

Elijah then prophesied what her death was going to be like and it was fulfilled in 2 Kings 9, verse 37. But who mourned her?

53:25

Who mourned Jezebel's death? Even Jehu said, well, go bury her.

53:35

But there wasn't anything left to bury. The dogs had already eaten her. There was no mourning for her. She was dedicated and she was consistent, but she was evil.

53:47

She was wicked. Is there any room for a recognition of that left in Western society?

53:55

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. But literally, we are in a situation where you can look at what you there is objective history.

54:10

Maybe that's the other problem. There is objective history as to exactly what Ruth Bader Ginsburg did to promote ungodliness in this land and she was consistent.

54:23

Let's be honest, one of the biggest problems we're facing today, let me mention this while we've been passing.

54:35

I ran out of that. We're talking about the

54:40

Supreme Court and I'm literally listening to people right now saying how vitally important this is.

54:51

That right now, we've got a 5 -4 conservative and this will make it 6 -3. To which

54:56

I go, how naive? I mean, these are experts.

55:02

These are experts. Roberts is not a conservative and we don't really yet know fully where Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are going to come down.

55:17

But why is this? Because when you put a leftist on the court like Ginsburg, when it came to a worldview decision, did she ever break with that?

55:30

No, they can't. They vote as a bloc. They're ideologues. You know exactly what we're going to do.

55:37

It's the conservatives who will sometimes go, well, no, I think there's really an argument to be made from the constitution that it could be read this way.

55:45

They're the ones willing to do that. The left never does that. They always just vote as a bloc when it's a worldview issue.

55:51

There can be technical issues about some union law or something that they might split up on where it's not a worldview thing.

56:02

But when you have a leftist worldview issue involved in the case, it's just like the

56:09

Senate. It's just like the House of Representatives. The leftists will vote as a bloc.

56:14

There is no longer any bipartisanship, anything like that. It's the conservative justices, even

56:22

Barrett, would do that. If she was convinced that there was merit in the case, they would be willing to do that.

56:32

The left won't do that. They just won't. They're not interested in actually deciding cases like that.

56:39

So keep that in mind. What we will see over the next few weeks, and by the way, think what you will of him.

56:54

Trump is a brilliant tactician. He doesn't come off like that, but that's part of the whole shtick too.

57:04

Because by doing what he's doing, he has taken over the entire content of the news cycle for the rest of the election.

57:17

And he's put a brilliant, well -spoken mother of five kids and two adopted kids in the middle of the spotlight and is just basically begging the leftists, please, go ahead, do your best, make my day.

57:38

That's exactly what he's done. If you can't see it, you just ain't paying attention. It's brilliant.

57:46

Hate him if you must, but you just gotta sit back and go, okay, well, I'm not sure that anybody else that was running in 2016 would have had the guts to do this.

57:58

I gotta admit, that's pretty wild. There's no two ways about it. Give him credit for that one.

58:06

But that's what you're gonna see. Now, I've heard some people on the left say, no, no, no, they're not gonna go after her.

58:18

That would be the wrong direction to go. He picked the right kind of person right before an election.

58:28

There was such a massive kickback on the Kavanaugh stuff. They tried something like that again.

58:35

No, they're not gonna do it. I don't know. I am not a prophet nor a son of a prophet.

58:43

But it just seems to me that in 2020, the brakes are off on everything. I can't see how there's a brake pedal to even press anymore.

58:51

How can Kamala Harris have gone after Kavanaugh the way she did and then sit back and do nothing? I don't know.

58:57

I don't know. I don't see that happening. I don't see it happening.

59:03

Anyway, all right. Let's talk a little bit about Moscow.

59:15

I have not sought to interrupt proceedings up there.

59:24

Actually, proceedings are gonna be moving to Nashville this week because all the folks up there are gonna be in Nashville for their conference.

59:32

That's where Jeff and Luke are as well. That's why I'm preaching next Sunday at Apologias because I'm gonna be the only one there, actually.

59:41

Everyone else is gonna be out of town. And I didn't get invited to come.

59:47

So, you know, I think Chocolate Knox is behind that because I just make him really nervous.

59:54

If you've ever seen him, when I walk into the room, he just sort of starts sweating.

01:00:02

It's sad. No. Anyway, being funny.

01:00:09

Trying to be anyways. So, I have not talked with Doug. I have not talked with any of the folks who were arrested and things.

01:00:18

I could. I'm sure that they'd put me in contact and want to. I just haven't. Most of you know what is taking place.

01:00:29

I made a brief comment sometime this morning right before I went out and continued my attempt.

01:00:39

There have been some amazing articles appear on the internet about what has taken place up there.

01:00:50

Let me just put it this way. There are certain people, we all know,

01:00:57

I've said before, there is Trump derangement syndrome and there is Doug Wilson derangement syndrome.

01:01:04

When it comes to the theological realm, Wilson derangement syndrome is just as clear and obvious to anyone looking outside as Trump derangement syndrome is in the political realm.

01:01:19

There are people with Wilson derangement syndrome who will not even use his name, who will use euphemisms and descriptions, but just will not even use his name, who have taken this opportunity to just fill articles with slander, just repeat every accusation for the past 25 years as if somehow this proves their point or whatever else is.

01:01:46

Rather than dealing with the reality that what we're seeing taking place in the

01:01:52

United States is the left is using lesser magistrates in the way the right should have been using them.

01:02:01

That is, look at what happened during the riots. You've got the police arresting people right, left, and center, and then running into them the next night because the lesser magistrates, district attorneys, city attorneys, mayors are with the rioters.

01:02:23

They're on the same side. They want the same thing, the destruction of the city and the overthrow of the system of government that goes with it.

01:02:35

You can be in Idaho, which is as red a state as you can be, but if you've got a school anywhere nearby, and they do in Moscow, not

01:02:48

New St. Andrews, there is a secular school, got a university nearby, you're going to have a cesspool of blue because the left owns the educational system.

01:03:02

Therefore, the mayor of Moscow is on the left. What needs to be said to every police officer in the

01:03:18

United States today? You have to ask yourself a question. Why are you doing what you're doing? You take an oath.

01:03:29

The question is, what is the basis of the oath?

01:03:37

If you take an oath, see, remember how this used to be? Remember how even the president, why did you have a hand on a

01:03:52

Bible? So now you have people doing it on Dr.

01:03:58

Seuss books and the Quran or whatever else. Why did you have your hand on the Bible? Because it was a representation of the authority that was to bind your oath.

01:04:11

Once you enter into secularism, we're just ugly bags of mostly water, we're just chemicals fizzing, we're space dust, stardust, whatever.

01:04:20

So stardust can put its hand up and say anything. It doesn't matter. An oath means nothing in a secular world.

01:04:30

Nothing. That's why this has disappeared. That's why you don't have it there.

01:04:36

Because when you put your hand on what you're saying is, I am being bound by the authority that is invested in this, which we as the people see to be the word of God.

01:04:49

And therefore there is a higher authority binding me. And so I'm swearing an oath by that God that gave us this word to fulfill my oath and to protect and defend the

01:05:04

Constitution of the United States, which becomes the secondary authority.

01:05:11

But if you are a secularist, then what binds you to that oath? What is that supposed to even mean?

01:05:19

That's the question. And so to every police officer, I have to ask you, why are you doing what you're doing?

01:05:28

I have, since the troubles started back in March, I don't know how many times

01:05:33

I've been out on a ride. I don't know, two months ago.

01:05:40

It was after a particularly bad night somewhere. Don't remember what it was. I was coming down.

01:05:48

What is it? New River Parkway? Is that what they call it? The old 99th Avenue comes. It's the one that goes right past your place.

01:05:56

And I looked over and there were like three cop cars pulled over in the dirt along the side of and the cops just stand out.

01:06:04

What? New River Road? Yeah. The old 99th Avenue. And I just pulled over.

01:06:13

So here's this guy all kitted out and I've got my computer and my light and my radar and yeah, my bike's all,

01:06:22

I've been riding in the dark and the sun's coming up and I'll pull over and I will just thank them for doing what they do and to let them know that not everyone hates them.

01:06:37

And they're always extremely appreciative. But these days, you can just see in their eyes the conflict because a lot of them were sitting there probably standing around talking about when they could get out and stop doing what they're doing.

01:06:54

I know that. So police officers, you know that we're actually your best friends.

01:07:01

We're not the people robbing, looting, and doing all that kind of stuff. But we are the people who will sing psalms outside City Hall.

01:07:12

And we also happen to be the people who know enough to critically think about things like mask mandates and to realize how foolish they are.

01:07:21

That we're being lied to. We actually look the numbers up and go, what you're saying ain't true.

01:07:28

What you're saying is contradictory to what you said before. And there's a whole lot more to this than that.

01:07:34

And you're gonna have to make a choice. You're gonna have to ask yourself the question, when is it that the mayor of my town tells me to arrest people that I know no founder of this nation would ever, ever thought should have been arrested by any person with governmental authority at all?

01:07:58

If you take the time to read something about the founding of this country, what it was reacting against, what had happened during the colonial period under British rule, and then look around and go, oh, oh, things have changed.

01:08:18

Yes, they have. And so to every police officer, when do you turn around and say, no, no,

01:08:29

I will not do that. That's unconstitutional. You don't have to be a constitutional lawyer to know when rights and liberties are being trampled upon, when a government is becoming oppressive.

01:08:42

That is, by the way, why there is something called the Second Amendment. I know if you're a young person and you've gone through the public education system, you think that they put the

01:08:52

Second Amendment in there so that we'd always be able to go squirrel hunting. That was not why the

01:08:57

Second Amendment was put into the Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment was plainly put there as the means of the people to control a tyrannical government.

01:09:10

There is no question about it. None. I don't know how you can read anything back there and come to another conclusion, but that's the whole point.

01:09:17

Who reads anything back there anymore? I think that should be something that is forced by the government, to be honest with you.

01:09:24

Some forced non -governmental education of what really happened. Yeah, that was called civics.

01:09:33

That's become pure propaganda now. Anyway, to the police officers, think through why you do what you do.

01:09:43

I'm not saying you should leave. We need good, righteous police officers, but you need to be just that, righteous.

01:09:49

You need to be able to stand up and say to your superiors, that's wrong. That's wrong.

01:09:55

We should not be doing this. We are here to protect the Constitution and the liberty of these people, not imprison them on specious, absurd charges.

01:10:06

Very, very important. Let me see here. Yes, go ahead.

01:10:15

I pointed out that if you watch that video of those arrests, there's some things you don't see.

01:10:25

You don't see them resisting arrest. You don't see them fighting with the police department.

01:10:32

You don't see the other people in the group going over to the cop car and lighting Molotov cocktails and throwing them in.

01:10:38

You don't see them turning around and deciding they're going to try to burn the police station down. There are a number of things that you don't see there.

01:10:47

And you know what they call that? If we're going to call it at all, we're going to call that peaceful.

01:10:54

They didn't resist. The only thing that you can point out that Gabe Ranch did was his repeated, and you can hear it on the tape, repeated reminder of the police officer to his oath.

01:11:07

Yeah. If it's wrong, you know it. This is wrong. You shouldn't be doing this.

01:11:13

And you need to stand up to the mayor. Yep. And that is completely in balance, but it was peaceful.

01:11:23

The stark contrast between the two is tremendous. I actually saw one or two people online,

01:11:31

Christians, saying that the crowd should have attacked the cops. Yep.

01:11:38

There were a couple. There were a couple. But you're right. That's the exact thing you did not see. And now, of course,

01:11:44

Gabe has a national platform. He was on Laura Ingram and all over the place.

01:11:52

So yeah, there you go. There you go. That's important. That really is.

01:11:59

All right. I'm going to go ahead and do this. I know it's all been on pretty much one topic today, even though we did spend a fair amount of time on Psalm 82.

01:12:12

I'm going to try to remember tomorrow, talk a little bit about the Great Reset, because that's important for you to understand what's coming.

01:12:20

But there was an article by Peter Hitchens that I don't think most people saw. And Peter Hitchens, of course, brother

01:12:28

Christopher Hitchens, Peter's a Christian, and the

01:12:35

Hitchens boys are smart people. And they're also British, so you automatically get that extra little shot in there when you're

01:12:46

British. But he wrote an article September 26th in The UK.

01:12:57

I'm not sure if it's in London. And it's the October issue of The Critic. It's called

01:13:03

Democracy Muzzled. Covid masks are a potent symbol of the West's headlong flight from Enlightenment values.

01:13:10

This is from a British perspective. So that actually can sometimes help.

01:13:17

Their experience is slightly different than ours, maybe even more oppressive than ours, at least in most places.

01:13:23

So take it for its worth. But I could just simply say, hey, go look it up.

01:13:29

But I think it's important for people to hear this. The long retreat of law, reason, and freedom has now turned into a rout.

01:13:37

It was caused by many things, the mob hysteria, which flowered after the death of Princess Diana, the evisceration of education, the spread of intolerant speech codes designed to impose a single opinion on the academy and journalism, the incessant state -sponsored panics over terror, the collapse and decay of institutions and traditions.

01:13:55

These have all at last flowed together into a single force, and we seem powerless against it. Absurdly, the moment at which they have achieved maximum power is accidental, a wild, out -of -proportion panic response to a real but limited epidemic.

01:14:10

Outside total war and its obscenities, we have not seen what we are living through now. To list the constitutional events the last few months is to ask the complacent, chattering classes of Britain what it reminds them of, the neutering of Parliament into a rubber -stamp control by the executive, the death of political pluralism, the introduction of government by decree, the disappearance of the last traces of an independent civil service, the silence in the face of these events of media and courts, the subjection of the police to state edicts rather than to law.

01:14:41

Remember, this is the UK. They have hundreds of more years of legal tradition than we have in the

01:14:48

United States. Then those who have for years objected to campus censorship but are oddly silent now should surely list certain consequences for individual citizens, the cancellation of their unconditional freedom of movement, effective house arrest, arbitrary imprisonment, forced unemployment, restrictions in internal travel, disruption of family life, including compelled separation of living spouses at the ends of their lives, and bans on attending funerals, the abolition of the freedom of assembly.

01:15:19

Add to these a gap in the life of civil society so long that every remaining independent institution and corporation has been permanently wounded, and the habits of a free country have been forgotten and atrophied.

01:15:31

Add also the compulsory cessation of religious worship, the actual cancellation of Easter, the greatest and most subversive of all the

01:15:38

Christian festivals, the prevention or severe punishment of gatherings of all kinds except those approved of selectively by the authorities, and the suppression of education, the introduction of compelled speech through the forced wearing of face coverings which publicly signal both surrender to the state and acceptance of the utopian unscientific policy which guides that state.

01:15:59

Amen and amen, even in an American accent. I have been in some trouble supposedly making too much of that of the last of these, perhaps because I have spent so much time living or traveling in despotisms, understand the point and nature of mass propaganda better than those who have not.

01:16:19

It is not there to make you agree with it, it is there to tell you that you are powerless against it and must listen without protest to official lying.

01:16:28

That, let me stop right here, that is what gets me. That is what gets me, is the official lying.

01:16:38

That is why I am so opposed to the mask mandates. I know the science.

01:16:44

I've got the papers. No one can cite counterpapers. So, so it's the lying.

01:16:53

It's my mask protects you. No, it doesn't. And yet, I'm driving back from Tucson, there it is on the billboards and my tax money paying for it.

01:17:02

That's what gets me. You must listen without protest to official lying.

01:17:07

Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, right there. That's, is increasingly a disadvantage in any debate to know anything about the subject under discussion.

01:17:18

Let me read that one again. It is increasingly a disadvantage in any debate to know anything about the subject under discussion.

01:17:29

This obvious aspect of the face mask decrees has so far alluded those who have only just begun to live as citizens of a servile state.

01:17:38

Yet, I remain amazed that so many either cannot see or pretend not to see the enormous symbolism of a population compelled by fear of the state to sacrifice much of their individuality and to adopt a form of dress which is associated with submission.

01:17:58

I sometimes wonder where all the amateur Freudians are normally so ready to offer me analysis of my failings at moments such as this.

01:18:07

A cigar is sometimes merely a cigar, but a mask is seldom just a mask. The government itself, when it was still being honest, repeatedly and explicitly admitted in its own documents that these face coverings were of little practical use, the sacred science was then against them.

01:18:25

It said in a document published on 23rd June that, quote, the evidence of the benefit of using a face covering to protect others is weak and the effect is likely to be small, end quote.

01:18:35

And no experiment since then has altered this, and he is right. In any case, they were introduced long after the disease had done its worst.

01:18:46

If these admittedly futile things were party armbands or lapel badges or the little red flags which citizens of Warsaw -packed countries were once compelled to fly from their crumbling balconies on communist feast days, their purpose would be a bit more obvious.

01:19:03

But even those nasty totalitarian obligations lacked one important thing which the wearing of the face coverings does require.

01:19:10

The COVID muzzle demands an extraordinary act of personal self -cancellation.

01:19:17

At a recent anti -lockdown demonstration in Melbourne, police were observed forcibly placing these muzzles on the faces of arrested protesters already in handcuffs and powerless to resist.

01:19:28

The officers involved, many of them in heavy body armor, unwittingly illustrated their real purpose to turn us into mouthless, voiceless servants of power.

01:19:38

It is fascinating also to look back at the first pictures of prisoners arriving in Guantanamo, chained and humiliated in orange jumpsuits.

01:19:46

They too are wearing the little blue muzzles over their mouths which 20 years later are now worn by normal citizens everywhere.

01:19:54

Surely nobody can argue that this extra piece of subjugation and belittling was a health precaution.

01:20:01

No doubt this self -abnegation and self -cancelling appeals to some. Look and you will see that some wear them with a sort of pride, but most look baffled and captive as if they are peering out through a slot in a wall behind which they have found themselves trapped.

01:20:17

And the constant sight on streets and stations and shops and on TV of thousands of others, likewise suppressed, maintains the fear, alarm and panic which the government must now preserve for the foreseeable future.

01:20:32

Those who think this is scaremongering need to read an astonishing document still far too little known to the general public.

01:20:39

It is a paper submitted to the government's own SAGE committee on 22nd

01:20:44

March 2020 and it has the heading, Persuasion. The key segment reads,

01:20:50

Perceived threat. A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.

01:21:00

It could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group, although levels of concern may be rising.

01:21:08

Having a good understanding of the risk has been found to be positively associated with adoption of COVID -19 social distancing measures in Hong Kong.

01:21:18

This sentence is then emphasized by Hitchens. The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent and emphasis.

01:21:34

Using hard -hitting emotional messaging to be effective, this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat.

01:21:45

Documents of this kind are not supposed to get out. In better times than these, with active and critical media, this particular passage, with its clear implication that it was the task of the state to scare us into compliance, might have led to the fall of the government.

01:21:59

Now, I stop for a moment. Governments in the UK rise and fall a whole lot faster.

01:22:05

The fall of our government's a different thing, a different language. As it is, you will struggle to find mentions of it in the

01:22:12

British national press. They are there, but they are hard to find, and not on any daily front pages.

01:22:17

This is not because of censorship or because of any kind of collective action. It is because most people, having lived all their lives in relaxed freedom, are quite unable to believe what is in front of their eyes.

01:22:29

It is a Chestertonian paradox, which Chesterton himself never wrote.

01:22:35

A government changing the nature of the state successfully and without opposition because nobody can believe what they are seeing, and so everybody politely ignores it.

01:22:48

This could not have happened, in my view, 60 years ago. Rigorous education, especially of the elite, had at that time created a significant class of people who knew how to think and how to assess evidence.

01:22:57

There would always have been someone, whether it was a Tam Dalyell or a Churchill, to point out the true direction of events and warn against them prominently.

01:23:07

Most of the press would have given this dissent house room rather than obediently conforming in order to protect our

01:23:12

NHS. But in the intervening years, such rigorous schooling has been replaced by an egalitarian education system which teaches its students what to think, not how to think.

01:23:27

Criticism of the past is obligatory, but any cold -eyed assessment of the present, in which new ideas benevolently rule, is disliked and ignored.

01:23:37

As well as this, there have been the various spasms of panic and emotion that have convulsed the country after the Cold War ended.

01:23:44

These were profound attacks on reason. They were also attacks on limited government and the rule of law, which rests largely on the power of reason.

01:23:51

Most people quite like being afraid of something, and many dislike freedom and responsibility that comes with it.

01:23:57

The honest among us all admit it. Once before Charles Darwin, the

01:24:03

Christian religion answered those needs. The fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom, and the devoted service of Christ was perfect freedom.

01:24:09

Faith offered eternal life and helped people to accept temporal death as normal. This belief helped to sustain earthly liberty because, as Edmund Burke pointed out, the man who truly fears

01:24:19

God will fear nothing else. No despot can get very far if there are such men around in any number.

01:24:32

But fewer and fewer believed that, and the need for something to replace it had a lot to do with the rise of authoritarian movements all over an increasingly secularized

01:24:43

Europe in the 1930s. After the cynicism and the acceptance that ends justify means promoted by World War II, secularism grew still more.

01:24:52

But for 50 years, the Soviet and nuclear threat provided a substitute, an Armageddon to fear, and a reason to rally around the state in the free countries of the

01:25:00

West. It provided an unexpected bonus, which protected us all, though we did not realize it at the time.

01:25:06

Since the USSR was the arsenal of repression, political liberty in the Western lands was under special protection as long as the

01:25:12

Kremlin was our enemy. Freedom was, supposedly, what we fought and stood for. Governments claiming to be guarding us from Soviet tyranny could not get very far in limiting liberty on their own territory, however much they may have wanted to.

01:25:26

Isn't that interesting? Hadn't thought about that, had you? That protection ended when Berlin Wall fell.

01:25:31

Listen to this. In the same extraordinary moment, the collapse of Russian communism liberated revolutionary radicals across the

01:25:38

Western world. The ghastly, failed Brezhnev state could not be hung around their necks like a putrid albatross anymore.

01:25:45

They were no longer considered as potential traitors simply because they were on the left. Eric Hobsbawm, and those like him, could at last join the establishment.

01:25:55

Indeed, fortresses of the establishment such as the BBC now welcome political as well as cultural leftists onto their upper decks.

01:26:02

Antonio Gramsci's rethinking of the revolution, listen to this, sees the university, the school, the

01:26:09

TV station, the newspaper, the church, the theater, rather than the barracks, the railway station, and the post office could at last get underway.

01:26:19

At that moment, the long march of the 1960s leftists through the institutions began to reach its objective as they moved into the important jobs the first time.

01:26:27

And so one of the main protections of liberty and reason vanished exactly when it was needed most.

01:26:33

The BBC's simpering coverage of the Blair regime's arrival in Downing Street with its North Korean style fake crowd waving union jacks they despised and New Dawn atmosphere was not as ridiculous as it looked.

01:26:45

May 1997 truly was a regime change. Illiberal utopians really were increasingly in charge and the cultural revolution revolution at last had political muscle.

01:26:56

Then came the new enemy, the shapeless, ever -shifting menace of terrorism against which almost any means was justified.

01:27:02

To combat this, we willingly gave up habeas corpus and the real presumption of innocence and allowed ourselves to be treated as if we were newly convicted prisoners every time we passed through an airport.

01:27:14

Those who think the era of the face mask will soon be over might like to recall that the irrational precautions of airport security, almost wholly futile once the simple precautions of refusing to open the door of the flight deck had been introduced, have not only remained in place since September of 2001, they have been intensified.

01:27:33

Yet by and large, they're almost popular. Those who mutter against them, as I sometimes do, face stern lectures from our fellow citizens implying that we are irresponsible and heedless.

01:27:45

Now a new fear, even more shapeless, invisible, perpetual, and hard to defeat, how can you ever eliminate a virus?

01:27:52

Then al -Qaeda or ISIS has arrived in our midst. There is almost no bad action that cannot be used to excuse, including the strangling and already shaky economy for those eccentric or lucky enough to still be working will pay for decades.

01:28:06

Millions have greed this new peril as an excuse to abandon a liberty they did not really care much about anyway.

01:28:15

As a nation, we now produce more fear than we consume locally, hiding in our homes as civil society evaporates.

01:28:23

We queue up happily to hand in our freedom and to collect our muzzles and our digital

01:28:35

IDs. And those of us who cry out until we are hoarse to say this is a catastrophe are met with shrugs from the chattering classes and snarls of just put on the mask from the mob.

01:28:48

If I hadn't despaired long ago, I would be despairing now.

01:29:33

Yep. Anyway, well, I knew when

01:29:43

I came back, there would be plenty to talk about. And, and of course there, there is, and we didn't really get to everything, but all that stuff.

01:29:50

We'll talk, like I said, we'll talk a little about the Great Reset and maybe we'll talk about why white people owning dogs is racist though.

01:30:03

Or something might happen. I'm actually teaching a church history class tomorrow night during the debate.

01:30:11

I'm bummed by that. We scheduled it before we knew when the debates were scheduled. So we were sort of stuck, but yeah, it's probably just gonna be me and a television camera.

01:30:19

That'll be about it. That's going to be about, I would imagine, cause I would love to be watching. I'm sure it'll be, it'll be available very, very, very, very quickly on various forms of media.

01:30:32

But tomorrow night's debate will be fascinating and it'll be huge.

01:30:39

It'll be huge. It'll be, it'll be huge. It will be.

01:30:45

Anyways. All right. Thank you for watching the program today. We'll actually be back tomorrow.

01:30:51

Rich just wanted, I think Rich was starting to shake a little bit. He hadn't pressed his buttons and done the stuff and hit the rich cam and things like that for,

01:31:00

I don't know how long. So he said, let's do one tomorrow. I was like, okay, we can, we can do that.

01:31:05

And who knows the way y 'all are going, we might, we might do one from a half constructed studio just for the fun of it in, in the, in the not too distant future, just to let you know what's going on, but we'll see you next time.