How Should Christians Engage Politically with Auron MacIntyre

Conversations That Matter

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00:11

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, as always, for a riveting discussion.

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I mean, hopefully I'm not overselling this. An interesting discussion to say the least, but I really think it will be riveting.

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I think it will be a little outside the box, different than what we've talked about many times in the past.

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We've talked a lot about social justice and evangelicalism, but it's been hard to give sources. It's been hard for me to bring you to good information that will help you in a political sense, think through these issues.

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From a biblical sense, from a spiritual sense, from a theological sense, there's materials out there, but it's been hard identifying who's a good political commentator, who's

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Christian, who has really a good understanding of politics. And I think I found that person.

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I think I found one person like that. And that is my guest today, Aron McIntyre. Aron, thank you so much for joining me.

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I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I'll try to be riveting here. Yeah, you gotta be riveting. You sold it now.

01:12

I don't have any other option. Well, your podcast is super interesting to me. And I think, like,

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I don't want to miss one. Like, and it's very rare for me on podcasts. Like every podcast you have seems to be outside the box.

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You don't seem to follow the news cycle closely, although you do some things that are in relationship to what's in the news, but it's always helpful.

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It always makes me think. And I know you're a Southern Baptist. You're a Christian. I guess first question for you, because I know that you work for a big media corporation.

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You work for the Blaze. Does your Christianity, in your mind, impact the way that you approach politics, or is there no relationship there, or what?

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I think it has to. There's a concept called political theology, which we might get into here.

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But I think it's just true in general that our politics will reflect kind of our relationship with the divine interaction with the metaphysical.

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And so I think that it's kind of inescapable, especially that our kind of values will be reflected in the kind of politics we pursue.

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Now, that doesn't mean everything is a one -to -one. It doesn't mean that the Bible has strict instructions on what your trade policy with China should be.

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But I think in anybody who has a proper relationship kind of with politics or religion understands that those things will intersect.

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So you work for the Blaze. I'm just curious because the Blaze, obviously Glenn Beck is

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Mormon. I know there are Christians who work for the Blaze. I think Ali Beth Stuckey is there, if I'm not mistaken. But you,

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I don't know how to even phrase this question quite because I view you as different in some ways a little bit.

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Don't take that the wrong way, but you seem more unconventional. I'm not sure what it is. So I'm just curious, what led to you being on the

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Blaze? And what do you think you bring to the table that might've been different than some of the other commentators there?

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I think it's probably because I went a very different route. I have a background that has nothing to do with broadcast journalism or radio or kind of political commentary.

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I have a degree in political science, but I spent a lot of time as a teacher, as a journalist,

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I worked in some political campaigns. And then I just started kind of explaining political theory.

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I kind of looked at things that happened in 2016 and 2020. And I said, okay, politics doesn't work like I thought at all.

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And if it doesn't work that way, how does it actually work? And so I started looking for a lot of thinkers that I think were kind of off the beaten path.

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They're not really your William F. Buckley style kind of thought leaders and conservatism.

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And that led me to kind of have a different look at politics. And so I was tweeting,

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I was doing YouTube videos and podcasts and such. And I started peering on kind of more mainstream things and eventually the blaze kind of took notice and I ended up there.

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But I think that's probably why I'm a little different there in the sense that my approach tends to be more about the political theory and kind of how things work rather than kind of reacting to the news cycle, which a lot of people do and is very valuable.

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It's just not my niche. Sure, yeah, and the market's flooded. There's a lot of people doing that. But in major media companies,

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I don't see a lot of people doing what you're doing. And I appreciate that so much. When you approach politics, you said that you've been influenced by not your

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William F. Buckley style. Who are some of the names? Because I wanna create a list too for people who might wanna read beyond the,

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I guess, conventional conservative names. Sure, so I think a lot of people are pretty familiar with the kind of thought leaders you'd expect in Republican politics.

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But there's a lot of, I think, older thinkers that are really essential.

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I found them by starting with someone who's a little newer. People may or may not be familiar with Curtis Yarvin.

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He also wrote under the name Minchus Mulbug. He's appeared on places like Tucker Carlson now. So he's a little more mainstream than he was kind of when

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I first discovered him. But he is somebody who is definitely thinking about politics in a very different way.

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He was basically revivifying a tradition called the Italian elite school,

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Italian elite theory, which has a lot of thinkers like Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto.

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Guys like James Burnham, who was a co -founder of the National Review, was also somebody who was very heavily influenced by their kind of thought.

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And they had a very different understanding of kind of how politics operated.

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It was a little more Machiavellian in nature, less about how we think politics should operate and then the mechanics of how it actually does.

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And from there, I kind of fleshed out, I think, a larger number of people, people like Bertrand de

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Juvenal, who are really essential, people like Carl Schmitt, who are very good at explaining how and why politics operates the way they do.

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We could probably go for quite a while, Joseph de Maistre, another thinker who I think is really essential.

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But these kind of thinkers help me kind of put together a number of different things that I'd never seen in the conservative tradition, but I think were essential for understanding and having an accurate reflection of how politics actually operates.

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So how do you look at yourself, categorize yourself if you do that kind of thing?

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Are you paleoconservative? Are you dissident right? Where do you stand? It's hard to say because what do even some of those labels mean, right?

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The paleoconservatives are actually a reaction to the neoconservative movement. So a lot of people, like the

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Pat Buchanan wing, I certainly feel a lot more tied,

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I guess, to many of those thinkers than I would the neocon thinkers. Dissident right is one of those terms that I think is anybody who isn't in the conservative mainstream at this point.

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I've seen a lot of people who are really adjacent to the conservative mainstream use that title at this point. And so again,

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I'm not really sure what that means. I can say that reactionary is one that gets thrown around a lot.

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That's kind of using the terms of your enemies. So I'm not a huge fan of that one either, but it probably is more accurate than some of these other ones.

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It's more about, again, kind of looking at those tools of political observation. That is more where I spend my time than trying to kind of classify where my policy positions sit specifically.

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I think, and we might get into this, but I think one of the main things that a lot of people mess up is we try to think of our politics ideologically, instead of thinking of our politics as something that is supposed to reflect the values and traditions of our people and our heritage and our nation.

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And I think that's a mistake. I think trying to put ourselves in an ideological box, instead of saying we do what is good for those that we have been entrusted with,

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I think is a mistake. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. I had CJ Engel on not long ago to talk about this and just a political approach and the conservation of identity, protecting the tangible things that we love.

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That seems to be not the way that the conservative elites today think.

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They think in terms of abstractions and forcing certain visions. And you've been,

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I think, somewhat of a critic, correct me if I'm wrong, of the liberal order, the liberal establishment, classical liberalism, we'll say, this idea that there's neutrality.

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I think that's one of your greatest contributions, at least that I've gleaned so far, is that you seem to be saying a lot of the times there is no neutrality with these institutions and we should not try to pursue a neutrality between, say,

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Christians and the LGBT mob or something. And this is something in seminary when

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I was studying to be a pastor, I drank heavy from this and I disagreed with it the whole time, but this is just what all the pastors at the

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Southern Baptist Seminary that I was going to were pretty much inculcated with, this idea that we should have a principle pluralism and that the gays can have their stuff and the

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Christians can have their stuff and they can interact fine in the public square because we're committed to this kind of liberal neutrality.

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You say no, can you flesh that out for us? Why is that not an option? Yeah, we were sold this kind of idea that we were gonna set up a really neutral government, that we're gonna have this public square which was open to everybody and there was never gonna be any kind of ideological push one way or another.

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We had this government that was constructed by the constitution and it would make sure that it kind of operated on its own in perpetuity without kind of the ideological influence of one side or the other.

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And this would not only be the way that we ran our government, but also how we would also operate most of our public institutions in general, education, even those that are supposed to be private, but obviously have a public role like corporations.

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These things, we're gonna always be interested in something specific like making money or making sure that we have the best roads or making sure that kids can read and write and do math.

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And they're not gonna actually instill anybody's worldview because we're this multicultural, multi -value milieu of different ideas that come together.

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And so we all have to be governed by something neutral that wouldn't impose one group's values on the other. Now, that was never true.

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That was always very clearly not the case. The only reason that we even had the illusion of neutrality in our institutions is that we basically had a cultural consensus of Protestant Christianity.

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And because everyone was kind of some flavor of Protestant Christian, our main thing was like, okay, we just don't want you to push your version of Protestant Christianity onto us.

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We wanna be able to worship the way we want to. But we all had the basic assumptions of like what a Christian worldview would be.

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Now, maybe those ended up not being sufficient to hold together. I guess, looking at our situation, you could say that may be probably a good case for that.

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But the point is, the only reason institutions ever felt neutral is we all shared a very similar set of values.

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And now we've seen that without the imposition of those values, by just assuming that those values would perpetuate themselves forever, we actually opened up a situation where other values took over those institutions.

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So because Christian values, because Protestant Christianity wasn't obviously recognized as kind of the bedrock structure of our nation, and our values, and our morality, and our identity, we then allowed other things to enter in.

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And that's why we're seeing, I'll be far from the first person to recognize this, wokeness seems to operate as a religion for this reason.

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It is filling that void. And it is trying to do what Protestant Christianity used to do, which has become the bedrock assumption of morality.

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And it is so desperately different from what we're used to as being moral, that our moral visions have now become completely existentially opposed.

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Like you simply cannot have a scenario in which you hold Christian values and also it's okay to mutilate children.

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It's one of those things or the other, they can't coexist. And pretending that they're gonna coexist is a mistake.

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Well, this is the whole debate right now surrounding even terms like Christian nationalism, where there's this recognition that we must have a

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Christian identity in order to have Christian values again, like we used to have in the public square. And if we don't enforce that somehow through even the arm of the state, if necessary, then we'll lose it all.

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It'll all be surrendered to this kind of sexual anarchy. A lot of practical questions.

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Christians being shut out of various industries. They can't even now compete in those industries. They're at very low levels,

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I would say, they're being disqualified for moving up the ranks in different industries.

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What's the solution to this or solutions? Because this is where I think the conservative mainstream kind of lacks.

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And even I would say in our Southern Baptist elites who aren't as political, but even the way that they think about things, they're still committed to this neutrality and they don't seem to have an aggressive way or a way at all to handle these kinds of challenges.

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So I'm just curious, what can people do to try to oppose what they see right in front of them?

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Yeah, I mean, obviously this is the most difficult part because we're in a situation and a lot of Christians don't want to acknowledge this.

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A lot of people even laugh at this when it's said out loud, but it's just true. We are in an era of Christian persecution.

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That is happening right now. Luckily, we're not in the era where people are being martyred or anything, but it is very clear that it has become culturally and even legally unacceptable to be

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Christian in many different instances. You're not allowed to run Christian businesses. You're not allowed to have a business that would select for Christians in the way that a business now can and does select for woke people, radical progressives.

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It is, I don't know if the pride flag that appeared on the set of The Chosen, I don't know if you saw that, right?

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Jeremy Boring of The Daily Wire was saying, well, it's not these guys' fault. They're required by law to hire these people.

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They can't tell them by law to get rid of them. It's like, well, isn't that interesting? That by law, it is enshrined into the law that you as a

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Christian cannot operate as a Christian, that you as a Christian, that even a production making a series about the life of Jesus Christ cannot say, no, we don't want a pride flag here.

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Amazing that the law itself enforces that ideology and insinuates it and injects it directly into your organization.

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And so what we have is a very difficult situation. I don't think many Christians understand. They say, oh, we should stay in neutral.

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Oh no, the law is not neutral, guys. The law is already against you. The law has already chosen that you are not allowed to be a

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Christian in public, or you're not allowed to associate the way you want to, you're not allowed to set a business as the way you want to, you're not allowed to run churches the way you want to.

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This is already built into the law. This is already built into these institutions. You're not dealing with neutral institutions.

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You never were. They're now just captured by your enemies and they want to persecute you. And they are, that's already happening.

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And so we're in a tricky situation because a lot of people who didn't realize they were even in a fight have already lost it and they don't even know.

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And so what do you do when you're kind of already behind enemy lines, when you didn't even realize you were in a fight in the first place?

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Well, there's a couple of things. I think we can probably take some inspiration from other cultures, other religions.

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If you're Jewish or Islamic and you move to a Christian country, what's the first thing you do to protect your culture?

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This isn't rhetorical. I don't know. You form a community, I guess, of like -minded individuals near you.

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Yeah, you live together, right, in small communities. We used to call them ghettos, right? Before that was an offensive term.

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It is that the people from the similar community with similar values would live together specifically.

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They would move into the same area so that they could have a certain level of political and social and cultural power to project in that area and control over it.

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They also usually set up separate schools, right? Even if you're Catholic, right? When you're Catholic and a Protestant nation, you didn't need

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Protestant private schools because every school was a Protestant school. You needed

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Catholic private schools because if you wanted to be Catholic and in a Protestant nation, you needed a school that would teach

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Catholicism and not Protestant Christianity. This is, again, also true of Jewish schools, Islamic schools.

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If you want to have a separate culture behind kind of enemy lines, like inside a culture that is either hostile or at least pushing against what you're doing, you can't let people who hate you educate your children.

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And so you have to find a way to educate them separately. You tend to see people who form businesses and mutual aid societies that work with their groups.

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So Christians helping Christians, creating fraternal orders that go out of their way to make sure that people are taken care of if they're canceled, if they're fired, if they fall on hard times.

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Now, the good news is we already have that to some extent in the church, but I think that many churches don't understand that has become a portion of their mission is not just feeding the homeless or taking care of kind of other members of their society in their local community that have fallen on hard times, but also taking care of their members who are actively actually being persecuted for their faith.

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And not just those who are persecuted, but you need to work to employ these people, right?

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You should favor people you know who are Christian and who go to your church when it comes time to staff your business, to put people on your payroll.

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Like these are just really basic things about building community, but we've forgotten them because we just kind of assumed that community would always be default, that the

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Christian nature of our communities would be eternal. But we lapsed, we let the garden grow.

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You know, we let it kind of decay and overgrow and now we have to tend it if we wanna have these communities again.

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Well, this will take sacrifice. This will take in -group preference. It will take resources to be able to establish schools and then help people who are canceled by the mob.

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Do you think that's one of the big hangups that people just, they've been used to kind of a cushy life and it's just like to get off the couch and to have to go get involved in all these things just doesn't seem attractive?

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Yeah, 100%. But to be fair, like we've done this in a large, like this is why the church doesn't have the impact that it used to, right?

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Because we've outsourced so many of these, what were local community duties to the federal government.

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These are no longer the duties of the church. These are no longer the duties of the body of Christ. These are now the duties of the tax man collects my money.

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He can take care of these people, right? We've kind of outsourced a lot of that. Same thing is true of Christians on a one -to -one level.

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We just give our money to the church if we even do that. And then we just kind of assume the church takes care of all these functions for us.

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But yeah, we don't get to coast on that anymore. We don't have that option. We grew, again, we kind of grew decadent sitting around, assuming that all of these things have been established by our fathers and our grandfathers and they were good to just last forever, but they aren't.

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Like we are the generation that has to bring these things back, that has to rebuild.

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And we don't realize, and the problem is we didn't realize how far this had kind of fallen. But now we have to pick up these pieces and we're gonna have to put the effort in.

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And yeah, that means a lot of people are gonna be made very uncomfortable, but sacrifices wanna be made. If you want your kids to live in a society where you don't have a bunch of trans porn in your kids' libraries, you're gonna have to get off the couch.

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There's just no other way to avoid it. So you're talking about the bottom up, and I would assume this would blossom into, someone had sent me an article a few weeks ago of some small town in the

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Midwest, where I guess a bunch of, I don't know if they called themselves Christian nationalists but just really right -wing guys ended up winning some local elections.

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And as soon as they won, they started implementing favorable policies for Christians.

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And this of course, I think it was like a hit piece against them for doing this. But that is the kind of thing you would see.

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Yeah, it sounds like a blueprint more than a hit piece. Exactly, right. And it needs to be done more.

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That's the bottom up. What about the top down? Because there was a controversy. I don't know if you saw this or talked about it, but a friend of mine,

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Josh Abatoy, had tweeted out a few weeks ago that we need a Protestant Franco and the internet lost its mind.

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There's a reluctance I have in a way, just because I know authoritarian figures can be deceptive.

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And also this might be incentive for people to still sit on their couch because, oh,

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Trump will take care of it. We've already seen that. So what do you think about that idea though?

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There is part of me that is attracted to it. I mean, so that rhetoric is sloppy just because of the optical nature of it.

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A lot of people don't really understand anything about the Spanish Civil War. They don't understand that priests were being thrown like Frisbees off of cliffs, that nuns were being murdered.

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They don't understand kind of the horrific nature of what the left was doing in the

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Spanish Civil War. They just know that at some point, Franco got some stuff from Hitler and so he's a fascist.

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And so therefore that's the only thing you need to know. So that history is complicated and difficult.

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Most people aren't gonna spend enough time on it. And so statements like that might have some, they're always just gonna have a rhetorical baggage that that's gonna kind of put you behind the eight ball.

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There's kind of two questions here. What should happen and what will happen, right?

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And I am always more interested in what will happen. That's kind of the approach I take in my political analysis.

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That's why mine's a little different. I'm less talking about what in an ideal world should happen and what's gonna happen.

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So what is likely to happen? Yeah, we're probably gonna get a strong man. Like that's probably gonna happen.

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I don't know if it's gonna be in some kind of near future or some kind of long -term scenario.

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But if you just look at the cycles of civilizations, Caesarism is a real thing. People look for when the problems of society have become too many, when the oligarchy is out of control, when the bureaucracy has grown fat and ineffective and the trains don't run on time, people start looking for someone who can solve the problem.

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Now that doesn't always mean, by the way, you get someone like Franco. Sometimes you get Stalin, right?

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Sometimes you get, you know, Stalin stops the revolution by just killing everybody, you know, and so it's not always just some right -wing guy.

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It could very easily be a left -wing person as well, though I doubt you'll see the left -wing emergence of a kind of a blue Caesar in this scenario.

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But I do think that it is very possible that that could happen. Do I think you should be working towards that?

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Well, not really, because like you said, it incentivizes people to just not really do anything.

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Oh, eventually, you know, someone will come in and swoop in and solve this problem. Look, whether or not a strong man eventually comes in and kind of just cuts the

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Gordian knot and starts, you know, kind of putting things right, you have a responsibility to your locality, to your family, to your church, to your city, to your friends, to the people around you.

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And so whether or not this gets solved in some kind of traditionally democratic fashion or whether it gets solved because a strong man kind of steps in into the situation, either way, a strong community that is taking care of those around it will be essential to kind of cultivate the type of leadership and political capital necessary to affect either of those changes.

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So no matter how the change comes, the thing that you need to do is the same. That's good advice.

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When it comes to building these local connections and communities, one of the things that I've seen is if you sort of step out in front and are the leader of that effort, you will obviously get attacked.

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I've had cancellation attempts on me. I'm sure you can relate to that. And what I've found so far,

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I think things are changing, but this was like maybe a few years ago. I remember when there was an attempt to really disparage me online.

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And people that I thought were my friends, even people, if I named them, a lot of my audience would recognize these names from big leaders in Southern Baptist and Christian circles, they visibly distanced themselves, right?

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And behind closed doors, I would hear the whisper, whisper, John, this isn't right, we're with you, but they weren't actually with me.

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They would publicly do everything they could to not be associated with me.

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And I'm not bitter about any of that, by the way, I'm not bringing it up for that reason, but I'm sure you've had similar things happen to you.

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I think anyone probably who's advocating the kinds of things you are has. I even saw just the other day,

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I think James Lindsay was going after you for some, I don't know, some Nazi connection. I couldn't figure it out. Yeah, it's

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James. Every month or two, he decides that he's angry that day and starts yelling at me from behind a block.

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I don't find out until someone shoots me a screenshot. Yeah, was it Schmidt? I think it was Schmidt that you -

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Sure, yeah. I mean, yeah, you've read political theorists who had bad connections.

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Well, Plato was connected to the tyrant of Syracuse, so can't read the Republic, sorry, he's canceled, it's over.

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Right, right, and so it's juvenile thinking in my mind, at least, but this is what passes.

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And even on the conservative side, I see this all the time, supposedly conservative. They will try to connect you to something, even if it's like two or three connections out, to something that's unfavorable, and then use that as a wedge to try to separate you from the movement.

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And I think this is one of our biggest challenges in trying to build the communities you're talking about, because everyone's always looking over their shoulder, looking out for themselves, afraid that someone's going to cancel them if they say something that's just one inch to the right, too far.

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I'm sure you thought about a lot of this issue, about this issue. What do you think is the right approach?

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Like, how do we overcome this hurdle? I mean, it's a real one. When I said we were facing persecution,

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I meant it. Like, if everyone around you is glancing over their shoulder and whispering about, oh, you can't do that, you can't say that, that's because you're in a state that is in control of what you can think and say, right?

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Like, people, again, United States, land of the free, obviously that's not true. And if it wasn't true, you wouldn't be so constantly scared of anyone around you figuring out what you actually thought.

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So I think there's kind of a first need to realize kind of what time it is and where you are and what kind of situation you're in.

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But at the same time, while we do live in what is a different type of totalitarian state, we have to be honest,

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I mean, we don't have it the worst. There are Christians who paid way higher prices for their faith, and you just, you know, you gotta find your courage, guys.

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Like, this is your time. You know, you can't stand around hoping to protect everything that you hold dear.

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It was never yours anyway. It was given to you by God, and it's his to do what he wills with it.

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That doesn't mean to be stupid with it, but, you know, if you're sitting around hoping to never be called a bad name, then you kind of chose the wrong faith.

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You're in the wrong time because it's gonna come for you. I say there are some practical things that you can do to kind of avoid this to some extent.

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First, be thoughtful about who you spend time with and kind of who you, you know, there are people who do want to be involved with kind of these efforts just because they think this is the new punk rock, that they think this is the new edgy boy thing.

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You know, they're gonna get a lot of credibility for being the scariest guy in the block. Don't spend time with those people.

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Those people don't have your goals, they don't have your values, and they certainly don't have your wellbeing at heart.

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Don't, you know, spend time with people who genuinely want to build a better community and understand that these ideas might be necessary to do so, but are only engaging with them for that reason, not because of their like edgy cachet.

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The other thing is don't be overtly political when possible. Make your groups, you know, community building.

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Have them do good things in your community. Build a fraternal order that helps people out, that beautifies your area, that has the capability to fill a pothole or to, you know, repair a roof, do things that are essential to the functioning of the community and the area around you that do good and build social credit.

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And by the way, just happen to share the values that'll kind of align you naturally into a single political cause.

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And if you do end up running for school board or that kind of thing, then great, but like, just don't make it about your,

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I'm a, you know, whatever nationalist, like 19 letter, you know, political organization.

30:45

Like don't worry so much about your ideological labeling and name and worry more about binding together with people who share your community, share your values, are gonna better the lives of the people around you, and then can move that into influencing kind of the political organizations that then operate inside that community.

31:04

I found this to be very true, what you're saying, especially libertarians who have come out of libertarianism say this, where it's like we all shared the same label.

31:12

We all shared the same approach supposedly to politics and yet none of us could get along, but yet I do tend to get along with friendship, with people that I have shared experience with.

31:23

And my fishing buddy and I think could probably run this town better than me and my libertarian friend who supposedly agree on things.

31:30

And I just think that's an interesting dynamic. And I suppose that's how humans have always interacted. That's how

31:35

God wired us, but we've somehow gotten away from that. And the other thing that you mentioned is we've gotten away from courage and there's a lot of cowardice right now.

31:44

I'm curious, since you've thought about this problem, where do you think that comes from?

31:51

Like, why do we even have this challenge in the first place? Because in my mind, like I wouldn't throw my friend under the bus, right?

31:58

If my friend's being attacked, I'm gonna defend my friend. If my friend made a stupid decision, even let's say

32:04

I'm still gonna defend my friend. And I might say, hey, knock off the stupid thing you're doing. But like, there was a loyalty that used to exist more and it's less so now.

32:16

And along with it, courage has been diminished. And I'm trying to understand why. Some people will say feminism. What do you think it is?

32:23

I mean, there's a lot there. I think one thing is again, that loyalty is to like ideology and principle and not to individuals.

32:32

And so we can always, that sounds nice, right? That sounds like I'm principled.

32:40

I have a loyalty to something higher. Okay, but you're willing to sell your friend down the river because actually it turns out you can always shift your principles just slightly to the left.

32:51

And now you're the good guy and he's the bad guy and it's okay to betray him because you're principled, right?

32:57

And so you don't have to worry about your loyalty to an individual when it becomes inconvenient.

33:03

You know, ideological definitions are easy to budge with.

33:09

Direct loyalty to friends and family is not. And so I think a lot of people, because they focus on their duty to something else, something ideological, find it easier to then justify saying, oh, well, you know, you crossed the line.

33:26

You went the other direction. It's okay. I mean, look at all of RFK's family members denouncing him right now.

33:32

Like however you feel about whatever he said. Like, you know, I don't really care one way or another about how you feel about what he said.

33:38

Like publicly getting up in front of the media and destroying a family member for their approval is gross.

33:47

Like you are a bad person. I don't care what that person did, right? Like you are a bad person for getting up there and doing this.

33:57

I mean, there are obviously lines, you know, that would be worth denouncing, but like this guy did not do anything to that level and you are just getting up there and destroying a member of your family.

34:06

Again, for people who don't care about you, who couldn't care less, but you just want their approval. And I think that's a big part of kind of where we're at because the social media mob has made personal destruction instantaneous, people feel the need to immediately denounce, right?

34:21

Again, it's all of the totalitarian control of something like a

34:27

Nazi party or a communist party. I mean, you're related to somebody who spoke against the party.

34:33

Well, a commissar is gonna find out, so you better denounce that person before they get around to you because they'll add you to the list, right?

34:40

This is also true in our social media age. You know, somebody says something that you disagree with, even if you don't share their opinion, if you don't actively and proactively denounce them in public, then that could blow back on you.

34:53

So you better get out in front of it. So I think that's part of it too. And again, I think it's just, people have turned

35:00

Christianity into something it's not. They've turned Christianity into something that's just a slightly more conservative version of social justice ideology.

35:10

And so they find a real ease in kind of, again, just abandoning and betraying their brothers because at the end of the day, their

35:18

Christianity is not really biblical. It's just kind of a hodgepodge of things that are politically correct painted over with some

35:26

Jesus stuff. Well, of course, Jesus was in trouble for sitting with tax gatherers, right?

35:32

And prostitutes and they wanted to repent obviously, but this was the accusation against him.

35:39

And we have something similar now with like, you're connected to racists or sexists or something.

35:44

And that becomes the wedge issue to try to separate you somehow from the pack and denounce you.

35:51

And I saw the president, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J .D. Greer do this a few, maybe it was a year ago in a sermon at the

35:58

Southern Baptist Convention, where he, maybe it was two years ago, but he basically said we have all these deplorable people in our convention.

36:06

And he's talking about Trump voters, but he calls them terrorists. He says there's all these neo -Confederates running around in our denomination as if that's such a bad thing.

36:16

I mean, I'm more of a paleo -Confederate, but I'm like, what are these people actually tangibly doing to harm your, the denomination?

36:25

And really it's nothing. You can't point to anything tangible. It's just to look good, I think, for the cameras.

36:30

And so this fascination with getting approval from our overlords seems to be one of the most pernicious issues that we have to face moving forward.

36:42

And one of the things you talk about on your show quite a bit is how to face this, what to do, how to think about it.

36:50

And so I just, I think that's so helpful. What role do you think ideas do play, or principles,

36:56

I'll say, what role do principles play? Because I think of like a principled person as a good person, right? But you're saying, so show me where the disconnect is there.

37:04

So I think it's very obvious that principles matter. But what

37:10

I think is dangerous is that principles, and again, we need to, we have to in some ways separate our political principles, our cultural principles, and our principles of faith, right?

37:23

These are not, these are connected, but they're not all the same thing, right? So there is some level of difference here.

37:31

So for instance, our cultural principles tend to be organic constructions of our folkways, our traditions, our culture, our language, right?

37:43

So those things tend to arise from the people and from their interactions with each other.

37:50

They're not a top -down thing. They're something that is grown from kind of the spirit of the people.

37:57

And so in that way, you're not really betraying principle. Your principles should align with your social interactions.

38:05

They should be informing, and they should already be kind of an organic part of that interaction.

38:10

Now, then obviously we have something like religious principles. Those come from God.

38:16

So that's not something we get to fudge, hopefully, right? That's something that we need to follow directly.

38:22

But it's, again, very easy for us to, when we have this interpretation game, align them with power.

38:31

And it's funny because a lot of people who love to talk about kind of how the church might've aligned itself with fascists or something in the 1930s don't seem to understand that the church could just as easily align itself with social justice today because that's what's in power.

38:46

Like people who bring that criticism of the church in say like the 30s or 40s don't ever seem to bring that criticism to the current iterations of the church.

38:56

Like I guess that principle, that tendency just kind of evaporated, right? And so we don't need to notice that anymore.

39:03

Here's the thing. In all organizations, disagreement is an opportunity to rule, right?

39:10

Anytime there's disagreement, there's an opportunity to gain power, right? And this is seen most often when there's another source of power above that organization.

39:21

So whether it's a fascist party in Germany or it's the Democratic Party of the

39:28

United States and its woke agenda, if there is a party above the church that wields more power than the church, then aligning yourself with that power is a great way to wedge open and increase your power inside the organization, right?

39:44

It's a good way to hold people accountable. The only other, to the desires of that higher power.

39:51

The only other option is to act as a resistant power, a competing power and authority.

39:57

But a competing power and authority is always a danger to that power that wants total control, that wants total sovereignty.

40:07

And so that's a more dangerous position to be in. That's how people get martyred. It's much easier to chastise those inside your organization who are not on board with kind of that overriding power, the overriding party's agenda, and say, oh, well, there's something about you that is not faithful, is not

40:26

Christian. And so I think the key is, again, to remember where your loyalties lie.

40:33

So principles matter, but you need to make sure they're your principles. They're not the principles of another power or another organization that has been imposed into yours for the benefit of those who would like to accrue power to themselves.

40:47

So for instance, let's look, if we wanna take a non -Christian example to make this concrete, look at Bud Light, right?

40:53

Bud Light, what's in theory their principle? Selling a lot of beer to people in middle

40:59

America, right? That should be the purpose of their organization. They slap

41:04

Dylan Mulvaney on the side of a beer can. Now, if you wanted to destroy Bud Light, if you,

41:09

John Harris, were sitting in a room with a cabal of enemies of Bud Light, and you were like, how do we destroy

41:15

Bud Light? Could you think of a better plan than slapping Dylan Mulvaney on that can?

41:21

No. No, right? But why do they do it? Well, they do it, I think, because they're playing to an elite audience that they think they can garner favor with and it'll benefit them somehow.

41:32

Exactly, right? The purpose of their corporation is ostensibly making money off middle

41:38

America selling beer, but they'll literally destroy their stated goal to secure their power with another power, right?

41:47

To secure their standing with another group of power. All these executives are terrified to apologize for putting

41:55

Dylan Mulvaney on a can because that'll destroy their ability to go out and get a job at another woke corporation, right?

42:02

And they care more about their jobs at other woke corporations than they care about the mission of Bud Light.

42:08

No, that's good. That's really good. There's a phrase, fraternity over orthodoxy, that I heard many times during the social justice incursion, which is still going on, but it was used to explain why so many men, let's say at a seminary, would all kind of circle the wagons.

42:25

They wouldn't talk about the social justice stuff coming in. And the idea was, well, they're just loyal to each other, and they're not loyal to the principles they should be loyal to.

42:33

But I've come to understand over time, and this relates to some of the things you're saying, that it wasn't so much a friendship type of loyalty.

42:41

It wasn't so much of a commitment to shared living or shared traditions and ways of life, but more of a commitment to themselves, really.

42:54

It was like this was a security ring that would ensure that their paycheck kept coming in and so forth.

43:01

And so there was this kind of unspoken agreement, and maybe this is something James Burnham's talked about, I don't know, but like this managerial elite that where you don't see this just in the church, you see this kind of everywhere, where they fail to criticize those who might actually be able to harm them, right?

43:18

That's kind of a self -preservation loyalty. It's not real loyalty. It's not actually even real fraternity.

43:24

It's fraternity that's not built on your commitment to orthodoxy, right? If you were bound in your mission to orthodoxy, then you wouldn't be betraying it to stand against what is basically a class interest, a mercenary interest, right?

43:41

If your fraternity was properly founded on the right principle, if that was your bedrock, then you wouldn't be joining ranks and closing ranks to serve a different power, a separate power.

43:52

Right, right. So yeah, it's just, it's a problem. And I would be curious to know what you think the future holds, because something's gotta give eventually.

44:03

I mean, people keep saying that. The polls that I keep seeing on, when they do them every once in a while on secession or revolution, or when a pollster company has the courage to actually ask these questions, the results are always like more and more inflamed of people who would love to see the

44:22

United States broken up, or they would love to see just something really shake it up. What do you think's coming?

44:28

And you mentioned the authoritarian figure, but like what steps would need to happen?

44:33

What do you think in the immediate future is a more likely scenario? So I talked about this a good bit in a book

44:41

I just finished called The Total State. I just got the manuscript done. So if people wanna kind of get a more fleshed out idea, that'll be coming here.

44:48

But basically, I would say that what we're looking at is probably a slow national divorce.

44:55

Now, a lot of people throw this term around and they just mean like, there's gonna be some kind of secession.

45:01

That's not gonna happen. The question of secession has already been answered in the 1850s, and the answer is they'll never let you go.

45:09

And so the question then becomes like, how is this gonna happen?

45:15

Well, I think the very likely scenario, and of course, predicting the future is always dangerous. So I'm sure

45:20

I'll be wrong on some of this and everyone can make fun of me. But I think that what is likely to happen is we're gonna see complex systems fail.

45:27

We're already seeing complex systems fail now, right? Have you tried air travel recently? You know, when we had the pandemic, obviously, like our logistics was just insane.

45:40

We found out that we don't make antibiotics in this country, that we don't make ventilators in this country, that if China decides to just stop delivering things on demand, all of a sudden, we just lose large chunks of our essential economy.

45:55

Like we are in a, we have globalized and outsourced, like Rome waiting for shipments of grain from Egypt in ancient times.

46:03

We have outsourced so much of our national security and wellbeing, and we have made the systems that deliver them so complex, that they're very, very vulnerable to small degrees of disruption.

46:16

And most people have probably already noticed that we're also getting less competent. We're producing, we're selecting for party loyalty and not competence.

46:24

We're doing this in our military. We're doing this in our education systems. We're doing this in our corporations.

46:31

You can't have more complex systems with less capable people forever.

46:37

And so eventually that stuff will break. And as that stuff starts to break, I think we'll start to see the importance of regional leaders rise.

46:47

We already see this with guys like Ron DeSantis. However you feel about his presidential run, he's obviously the best governor in the country.

46:55

When COVID came, he was able to push back against the federal government in ways that nobody else was. And I think that's gonna become increasingly important as the federal government gets more and more insane with its dictates, and those dictates become more and more destructive to the people who they are applied to.

47:10

And so I think you'll start seeing a lot of governors do more things like DeSantis was doing, saying like, well, we're just gonna ignore that.

47:19

Like that's a nice court ruling. That's a nice executive order, but we're just not gonna do that.

47:25

And you're not gonna send the National Guard down here to fix it. So we're just gonna keep doing what we're gonna do.

47:32

And I think kind of over time we will see, and again, we've already started seeing this, people sort themselves into the more competent and socially cohesive states.

47:43

So Florida has already seen a massive influx, like Ron DeSantis went from barely winning his first election to winning it by a solid like 20 points in this last one.

47:52

And a lot of that is because so many people fled to Florida due to the COVID and kind of the gender and CRT madness.

47:58

They wanted to live in a state where that stuff was gonna be pushed back against. So I think you're gonna see a sorting of competent people and kind of religious people with similar values into particular states.

48:08

I think you're gonna see the federal government become more and more incompetent and unable to kind of force it's increasingly kind of degenerate and harmful will onto these regions.

48:20

And I think you'll see the rise of governors who are willing to kind of run more effective kind of political bodies.

48:27

And no one's gonna come by and be like, announce that this is the end of the empire.

48:32

That didn't happen with the Romans either, but kind of just slowly but surely these, kind of these satrapies, these provinces will fall out of the direct control of kind of the central authority and the ones that are more competent will kind of rise to the top.

48:47

Well, that is the kind of thing that would inevitably you would think lead to, because you already described nullification, basically you made your order now impose it.

48:56

But that would lead to secession, I would think, or could lead to secession, I should say down the road. It's just not the next step,

49:02

I suppose. Yeah, the formal declarations of that are incredibly dangerous. And you just don't want to do that at all or even dabble in that, because the government is very clearly gunning for people who talk like that.

49:16

Like, guys, you need to be thoughtful. You do not live in a free country, act accordingly.

49:23

And so like, there's just no reason to flag that particular talking point. Like, there's no one's going to do that.

49:31

Like no one's going to declare any kind of secession because, again, that question has already been settled. But again,

49:37

I do just think that like, there will be a natural growing apart. And if that eventually leads to some kind of political like division, just naturally over time, yeah, that does seem likely, that does seem possible.

49:50

But I just don't think that that's going to come anytime soon. Right, right. Okay, so that, no, that's interesting.

49:57

And that's already happening. My brother actually just moved. I'm in New York right now as we're recording. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, thanks.

50:04

He moved to Tennessee. And I think the church that I attend, probably five families moved to the same area.

50:12

And so they've, it's actually getting to the point where they could like form their own church there, but there's already some good churches.

50:17

So they've kind of integrated into the community. And I mean, he loves his life so much better than the stress.

50:23

He was a teacher here in New York. And I just, I hear this story over and over. And I don't know exactly, like,

50:31

I'm pretty, I encourage it, but like, there is this part of me that's like, what happens to those red areas that have like ingrained cultures when you have like, we know what happens with illegal migration from Mexico.

50:44

Like what happens with like immigration from California or from New York to some of these red areas?

50:50

But it's inevitable. It's like being against the weather if you want to be against it. It's going to happen, right?

50:55

Whether or not you want it to. So anyway, well, we're kind of winding down here,

51:01

I guess. People can go find your podcast. They can go to YouTube, I think, right?

51:08

You're on YouTube. Yep, YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, all those places. Yeah, iTunes, I think that's right. I listen to you on iTunes.

51:14

And check it out, Aron McIntyre Show. And then you're on Twitter as well. So people can follow you there, at Aron McIntyre.

51:21

And I would just recommend everyone who's listening, if you want more analysis like this, check out

51:26

Aron's content. It's really good. Any final thoughts that you have? Maybe something encouraging for the people out there who look at this situation and it gets depressing?

51:36

Yeah, I would just say, look, we have a duty to God and we have a duty to the next generation.

51:46

And now is just not a time for cowardice. We have like the misfortune of being the generation that follows like the cushiest existence of humanity.

51:59

So like everything looks harder by comparison, but it's really not that hard, guys. Like it's really not in comparison historically, it's really not that bad, but it does mean you're gonna have to work harder than your parents and your grandparents, probably in a cultural sense.

52:13

You've gotta be willing to plant the trees that you're never gonna sit under. Because if you don't plant them, they won't be there for your kids, they won't be there for your grandkids.

52:22

You probably will not see the benefits of what you're gonna be doing now. But if you don't start that now, then it simply won't exist.

52:30

So we gotta get on our horse, we gotta go. Like there's just no other option, there's no excuses. So think generationally.