Liberalism Q & A

Conversations That Matter

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on the Conversations That Matter podcast, here to talk about liberalism.

00:05

Once again, this is part five of our series, and when I say our, I mean myself,

00:11

Ben Crenshaw, and Tymon Klein. Hey, guys. Hey, John. Thanks for being here, man.

00:16

Hey, John. Thanks for keeping this going. Yeah, this is it. Despite all the things in our personal lives,

00:24

I know, Ben, you were saying you have all these construction projects and stuff, which is, it's good for your

00:30

Christian nationalist, you know, you grow muscles and that kind of thing, but. Yeah, the country scholar.

00:38

Yeah, exactly, and it's hunting season here. I'm sure it's hunting season there, too, but I was in the woods earlier today, freezing my toes off.

00:46

I saw nothing except squirrels everywhere. Very annoying, but anyway, we all have our different things we're doing, but this is something that we've been talking about for, what, like five weeks, maybe?

00:58

I don't even know, maybe a little longer than that, and lots of people have emailed me questions or said they're gonna be here to ask questions, so we're gonna keep it fluid tonight.

01:09

Tymon and Ben are here to answer any of the questions you have, and if there's any hate or any problems with the previous things that were said, it is all

01:17

Tymon's fault, and you can ask. It's 100 % correct. Let's go to Matt Baruch.

01:23

Matt Baruch has been waiting. He's in the channel right now. He has a question. Hey, Matt, can you hear me?

01:30

Yeah, I can hear you, and it's boarish, by the way. I think I knew that because Matt at the retreat.

01:36

Sorry about that. No problem, no problem. One out of 1 ,000 people spell it, one out of 100 people say it, so it's boarish.

01:43

Boarish? That's correct. I mean boarish, okay, got it. It's East Prussian. Okay, yeah, my question for you guys has to do with economics, because I've been listening to the discussion, and when

01:58

I was in college, I was a big free trader, kind of a classical liberal guy. I was really in support of NAFTA, and I was just listening to this, and my question for you guys is, in a non -classical liberal society, how does economic mobility or economic opportunity work?

02:20

Because it seems like before World War II, there didn't seem to be much of a middle class in the

02:27

United States, at least, or even in the European aristocratic countries, and I'm just wondering how somebody can get ahead economically in that type of situation when there isn't free trade or a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities that, say, a classical liberal society with globalism would allow?

02:50

That's basically my question. I think my question is that. My basic view on this,

02:55

Matt, is I'd call it economic nationalism, that the economic powerhouse of a society is subjected or it's subjugated underneath the political ends of the people as a community, so they have to be controlled and channeled by ends outside themselves.

03:21

So this is where you have something like the confusion between economic value and virtue, so that there's a subjective value evaluation of something in society, a consumer good, precisely because of supply and consumer wishes that drives the demand and supply.

03:46

It doesn't mean that it's good, so you have to start with a moral theory, a political theory that judges and evaluates.

03:56

Well, just because people want to consume a lot of pornography doesn't mean that that should be allowed.

04:02

In terms of economic mobility, you go back to the early Whigs in the 19th century, you find basically this economic protectionism, tariffs, a specie or money that is unique to America, and internal improvements, trade with other countries that is favorable to the

04:24

United States and helped industries in America. All of that actually went into creating flourishing industries and the creation eventually of a middle class and economic mobility, but it was oriented and directed nationally toward the people themselves.

04:41

It didn't mean you had to give up things like free trade per se, but, or exchange of money and goods and production and consumption.

04:52

But all of that has to be kind of recalculated within a, I'd say like a nationalist ethos or teleology that's clearly anti -global, at least anti -global in the sense that it's not going to put money and profits over the good of the people collectively.

05:12

So I think that you can have some of those quote unquote classical liberal elements, but they can't become the end all and be all of a society.

05:25

Basically what's happened in America is that there's been a flip of who rules the roost between politics and economics.

05:36

Politics has been sublimated and like an economic way of doing life has kind of taken over and that's changed the character of the people, their relationship to each other in the outside world and so forth.

05:53

So that's a little bit of an answer. Much more could be said. I don't know, Tymon, if you've got any thing you want to add.

06:00

Sure, yeah, I agree with Ben in terms of the, well,

06:07

I guess you could, so I agree with everything Ben's saying, but that you could say there's two questions kind of involved.

06:12

One is the scope of economic freedom, we might say. So if a more illiberal view, you know, that's kind of like there's no archetype of like what the illiberal view is, but it's something, you know, behind or prior to the way we conduct ourselves now.

06:31

And so we just look at an older American view, such as the American system, which basically made us prosperous enough to then step onto the world stage and dominate for a while.

06:44

You know, it's more of a protectionist view, as Ben said. It certainly has national interest in view with in terms of manufacturing and trade as a country.

06:56

But then, you know, Matt, you're kind of getting at also the individual level or, you know, how we conduct our domestic economy.

07:03

So you could have a more protectionist view, nationalist view in terms of delegation of big resources and direction of companies that are major, you know, that produce significant goods instead of farming out either their production or the goods themselves.

07:19

You know, we direct them towards things that are in the national interest, but at the more domestic level, sort of,

07:26

I don't think there's anything wrong with having an idea of, you know, some kind of free exchange, we might say, and self -determination economically.

07:37

But it's always like, you know, it's always kind of, where do you want to draw the lines?

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Because of course, we've never had anything that is just total free exchange or a free economy. There's always regulation, in fact, introduced by many, you know, many

07:52

Reaganites themselves. So it's like the, you know, what are we talking about? And so that is where I think also, so Ben was talking about the ends -based direction of, you know, economy towards these higher goods.

08:05

There's also the question, just politically, it always needs to determine this. What are the, what kind of limitations are we comfortable with and which ones are we not with?

08:13

And that requires political process. And to pretend that it's sort of an algorithmic thing, the economy that is,

08:20

I think is a liberal view and it's not actually true. And so that would be a illiberal critique to say, the thing, the bill of goods you're selling is not actually real.

08:28

There is no such thing. And so what we need to do is just be more explicit and honest about the political process as well, where we determine what are we good with, what are we not good with?

08:38

So that's, I mean, I'm just throwing some more things on top of what Ben was saying. Yeah, I'll just stop there so I don't ramble.

08:47

To add like a controversial issue, you could say like, well, should we let women work in the public sphere?

08:54

So you could say an illiberal view, a pre -liberal view would return to a kind of social hierarchy which would say, depending upon your wealth or your status or your gender or something like this, you kind of can only rise so far and no further.

09:11

And I'm not, personally, I don't think that, a future America that's post -liberal or returns to a pre -liberal has to necessarily lock in some kind of feudal social hierarchy as it was in the past per se.

09:25

But I think we have to be willing to entertain why people did things in the past the way they did and maybe a return to that can be good.

09:36

And so like take women serving in the military or something like that. A woman might wanna have that kind of economic or social or career opportunity.

09:47

And you could say, well, putting up barriers to entry is discrimination.

09:53

It's employment discrimination or it's sexist or could be racist or something like that.

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And that would be a kind of dominant liberal value that would kind of destroy every other counter -argument or consideration.

10:09

So a post -liberal America would not idolize these, well, just as long as we have non -discrimination and no barriers to entry, then everything will work itself out and society will be awesome.

10:21

It's like, no, actually there's a greater good, like men should fight because fighting is physical, it's psychological, men are created bigger, stronger or powerful, analytical, their brains are completely different.

10:34

There's all of these reasons why we should say, we could say, no, some women should be barred from certain professions or something like that.

10:42

And here's another one, Ben, that goes maybe right to, I mean, you'll see this now applied in various forms and it's kind of a buzz, it's like a stand -in for this idea.

10:51

So the famous Lochner versus New York case in 1905, basically introduces the principle that you can contract away anything.

11:02

So it's rooted in absolute sort of individual autonomy and self -determination. And so if New York wanted in that case to limit the hours that bakers could work, recognizing that there was some sort of predatory relationship involved where they could work 60, 70, 80 hours a week and be forced to, and then

11:21

New York decided to limit that. And that was overturned by the Supreme Court, right, as violating this freedom to contract that they found.

11:29

In a post -liberal society, I would say, those considerations should also be front and center.

11:37

If you're running an economy subordinate to higher and political goods, you do think about conditions, some of these economic relationships, and you don't leave everything up to pure choice because actually the choices are loaded and don't work.

11:53

They're not as fulfilling for the baker as it seems like it would be. So of course the baker's gonna do it to keep their job and to make more money.

12:01

But if you, I guess I would say a post -liberal economy would consider taking certain options off the table because it's detrimental to domestic life and higher goods such as good families and going to church, whatever.

12:14

So the same rationale is behind something like blue laws, which is to shut down economies on Sundays so that Christians are privileged and aren't penalized for not operating economically on the

12:27

Lord's Day. So anyway, that's - Can I boil down what you guys said into maybe one paragraph?

12:34

And then we'll let Matt determine whether we answered the question or not. Probably not.

12:40

I think what you guys are saying is the middle class would not, you're not attributing the success and the rise of the middle class necessarily to an unrestrained free market in every sense.

12:51

You would challenge that. I know you haven't gone into detail about that, but you don't think that there would be anything that would disrupt that relationship necessarily.

13:03

You could still get ahead. We would still have private property. But the difference would be is that instead of the market being an end, it becomes a means to an end.

13:14

And the end then is living in the created order that God has established and trying to ensure that the traditions that we have developed over time so that we can live together peaceably aren't rattled too much and just steamrolled by free market forces that then do things like, well, in this case you could look at the

13:42

Southern border, you could look at the moral degeneracy sexually speaking.

13:47

We've applied free market principles to just about every moral question now. So that would be off the table because that would contradict the obligations that God has given us towards higher ends that he wants us to pursue.

14:00

So the libertarian will look at that and say, well, you're not free market, right? Of course, there's never really been,

14:07

I guess the closest maybe would be like pre -National Bank, pre -Jackson,

14:12

I guess, but people were more self -regulatory at that point. So that fear that the middle class would just disappear if there was a post -liberal order is not necessarily a realized, it's not something that we should be afraid of.

14:29

I think that's what you guys are saying. So if no one's gonna correct me on that,

14:35

Matt, I know that was a mouthful from all three of us. Does that help at all, do you have follow -up?

14:41

Yeah, that was helpful. I mean, I'm thinking that there's a couple of things that concern me is obviously rising prices.

14:50

And the dogma I was always taught was protectionism will actually increase prices.

14:57

And like the reason we can buy cheap goods at Walmart and be able to afford maybe more than we can is because of global free trades.

15:05

So what you're saying though, is if there's a moral restraint on Adam Smith's admissible hand, some of those forces will actually allow like single income homes or single income households to once again, be able to afford to live.

15:19

Whereas what you're saying is the non -moral or non -God -based reign of free market economics has caused some of these issues like inflation, bidding up of wages or barriers to entry, et cetera.

15:36

So you're saying that by having moral components in a society that would check unrestrained or secular free market economics, we will get to a society like say, more like in the fifties and sixties when you could have a

15:53

Levittown house and get dad to work and mom could stay home and raise the children and be able to afford to live.

16:00

Yeah, well, I mean, that's not, some of the things you're talking about obviously are caused by the

16:06

Fed. We can blame inflation on the Fed, right? And tampering into our economy from the government,

16:14

I suppose. But I guess the main point that I'm hearing from Ben and Tymon and I agree with is that it's not necessarily this unrestrained in every sense of the word market that has caused the rise of the middle class and the success that America has enjoyed post -World

16:35

War II, which is really, when you say post -World War II, we're talking about the GI Bill, really. I mean, that's what I think most histories that attribute the rise of the middle class and the

16:44

American dream, they say it's the GI Bill that caused all this. So even that's a government, originating with the government, but there's never been, like even

16:53

Adam Smith had certain things he wanted regulated. So it wasn't like, there's always been an assumption that there's a certain moral vision that has to channel the economic resources and it's inescapable.

17:08

So we're at a time now, I think, where we just don't have an option. Like it's gonna be either the pagans controlling that moral vision and channeling it into all kinds of depravity and devaluing our dollar and everything that we're seeing right now, or it's going to be a return to a more

17:28

Christian understanding of where there should be some limitations placed on what people can do with their resources.

17:35

And there's gonna be a limitation either way, I guess that's what I'm saying. It's inescapable.

17:40

Would you guys agree with that? No, I think that's exactly right. And we are already, as Ben said, economic categories have taken over, free market economic categories have taken over almost any policy consideration.

17:56

So that's certainly true of immigration and even conservatives ostensibly here today.

18:01

You still have some Reaganites hanging around. It's like, as long as they, well, immigration is great because you're just getting more workers and they grow the economy.

18:10

So don't worry about the cultural aspects of what assimilation looks like, how much social disruption a country can handle.

18:18

And so all these externalities that are non -economic, at least in the first instance, they have economic implications, are almost never considered.

18:27

And not only are they not considered, but not considering them becomes like a dogma. That if you do insert those, you're not sufficiently free market, therefore not sufficiently

18:37

American or something like that. But of course you do still have things, regulations that are still in play, as long as they can be justified under like consumer health or to reduce fraud or these sorts of things, because those are thought of as hampering the consumer's autonomy in the market.

18:55

That's why those are okay. But you will see, you're not allowed to sell certain things or certain types of goods. That is in some way, it is a moral -ish consideration, even if it's predicated on something that's kind of amoral or we're less concerned about in this discussion.

19:09

So your point, John, being that you're always gonna do some kind of limitation in this way. So you might as well try to make it limitations that are rooted in a higher vision of politics and what man is and do it that way.

19:24

You still can recognize that man is also, a rational and creative creature and a social creature.

19:31

So there's certain, there's no reason to restrict freedom where you don't have to. Freedom of movement, any other kind of freedom, but being comfortable with doing that for higher ends,

19:41

I think is necessary. Matt. We would probably have a more free, if society in a post -liberal, like if it was our vision of post -liberalism, a

19:52

Christian -influenced post -liberalism, there would actually be more freedom than there is now. That's the thing.

19:57

No, I agree with you. Yeah, I agree with that, yeah. I would just say my kind of last comment for me,

20:04

Matt, is that, I mean, there is a body of literature that's very fascinating to study that does critique capitalism in and of itself as being perhaps initially a force for good, but eventually and inexorably a disintegrating force on a people's morals, their wealth, their national cohesion and self -identity and consciousness.

20:32

So you used to have someone like Adam Ferguson writing in the 18th century from the highlands in England and Scotland, contrasting

20:42

British commercial republic with say the ancient contest between Athens and Sparta, where Sparta was a closed community and their middle class was built on the basis of a helot population, which were slaves.

20:58

And so they didn't trade internationally in Greece. Whereas Athens did.

21:04

But how did Athens do that? They did that by having an empire and basically controlling all the islands around them and loving them as vassal states to tax them.

21:16

And then they had to build a massive army, a Navy, and they had to control their neighbors.

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And they did have kind of a commercial middle class, but it was very, we might say secular or pagan.

21:31

So there is this worry and this concern. And the question is, can you hit that sweet spot where you have something like the protection of private property and the appropriate work of your body to produce good things and the accumulation of some capital equity and wealth without it destroying your morals and your religion and your consciousness and self -identity as a people.

21:54

You see these debates going on in the early 19th century between the

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Jeffersonians and the Whigs. And they were debating that the introduction of paper money would destroy the people's morals.

22:09

So there's been this recurring theme, this question, this issue. The thing today though, is that it's become a dogma.

22:16

Capitalism can't be questioned. And what we're doing is we're questioning it. And of course we're getting excoriated for it.

22:22

But questioning it is as old as America. I mean, this is what Americans have done from the beginning is to interrogate these ideas and to say, is there something here that we should be cautious about?

22:35

Yeah, even the bailouts where, I mean, they're justified on market principles. That's the funny thing. Like even the government tampering into the market and that's what you're getting at.

22:44

It's like, it's an end. It's like everything that's done can be justified if it's good for the market.

22:50

If it's not good for the market, then maybe we shouldn't do it. And I recall I was in a small Southern town earlier this year and a gentleman who was there told me that there was a man from Michigan who had moved down.

23:03

I think, Matt, you're from Michigan, right? Yes. I thought so. I remembered that, yeah. But you, and you're now,

23:09

I think, what, in South Carolina? Or Georgia, sorry. No, I'm in Northern Atlanta suburbs. Right, Georgia.

23:15

So maybe, I don't know, Atlanta's Atlanta, but maybe you've seen some of this in Georgia where this gentleman from Michigan came to Alabama, got on a town board, very conservative, right?

23:25

Like Michigan conservative, but was always running up against the town board because he wanted what was good for the market.

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That was his ideology was, hey, if we need to build a shopping center here, let's zone it for shopping.

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We're gonna bring more money in. And the community was like, we don't want that though. That's gonna change us. So that's what

23:45

Ben is getting at, I think, is like there are these identity and character issues that must be considered as well.

23:55

It can't just be whatever's good for the dollar, whatever's good for the market, because then you're living, you have the potential to live in really a terrible place with terrible morality and congestion and eyesores and all the rest.

24:09

It's just not a place you really wanna live. And people escape those places to get to like a nice place in the suburbs.

24:15

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, Jesus talks about that in Luke 12, build bigger barns and bigger barns and your life will be required of you.

24:23

Yeah, I totally get that. It's just that I was always,

24:29

I mean, that's why I wanted to ask that question about, well, how do you, in that context, how do you still provide for your family, even keeping those moral things?

24:42

I mean, maybe, but that's why I'm glad I had to listen to you guys. They did an Old Testament Israel, right?

24:48

I mean, that was a system that valued private property. And also there is a lot of regulations on what kinds of moral things were acceptable.

24:58

So, I mean, it's not like a new thing really. Okay, that's great.

25:05

No, that's awesome, Matt. Great question, thank you. Good to see you. Thanks, Matt. Thank you, I appreciate it, guys. SLE, I don't know who that is, but SLE is standing by, but there is no microphone.

25:18

So if you turn your microphone on, SLE, I will come to you. We have a number of chat. I should probably go to the

25:24

Truth Dispatch first because he has now spent $30 on asking us questions.

25:29

So, and he has, I guess - Talk about capitalism. Yeah, talk about capitalism. Late stage capitalism.

25:36

Let's get some ads in here. I appreciate that, the Truth Dispatch. So here's number one. I have two questions for y 'all.

25:43

Number one, can you all address Christians who think they do political theology because they believe in modern application of God's law, but don't know what they're talking about?

25:53

That's a little bit of a loaded question. Hey, can you address people who don't know what they're talking about? I think you're talking about the

26:00

Theonomist there, so. Theonomist? Well, he said modern application of God's law. Yeah.

26:06

Well, that's the first question. So the second one looks different. So maybe we should start there. Sure, address it.

26:14

I mean, I've written some critiques of Theonomist. I mean, most of the Theonomist I know are good guys and co -belligerents in many ways in our present moment.

26:25

So I don't dislike them as people, but there is a, my fundamental beef with Theonomy is their, as I've written before, miscategorization of law.

26:37

So they miscategorize what the Mosaic system is. What civil law is, which is really human positive law, but God acts as the legislator.

26:47

So it's the perfect application of the natural law, which of course is inscripturated in the

26:52

Decalogue, but we're talking about all the other regulations. And so it's a perfect application of natural law to a particular context and a particular people that's fitting for them.

27:01

And so what the benefit of the Mosaic code is to show you how to do that with higher ends in view as well.

27:07

I mean, exceedingly higher ends in view at that point, but it's a model legislation.

27:14

It doesn't mean that if something is fitting for a polity now that you couldn't use it.

27:19

There's obviously nothing wrong with those laws insofar as they could possibly apply to our condition now, but that polity has expired and therefore have the, so have those civil laws as the

27:31

Westminster Confession says. So I think it's, I think their problem is the mis -categorization of what the

27:38

Mosaic code is in terms of the Thomistic taxonomy that I'm using, that everybody kind of uses.

27:45

And so I think it's instructed, the Old Testament law is instructive. We, you can apply it, you know, insofar as it reflects the natural law and you would adjust for your own conditions and time in that application of natural law, but it doesn't mean that it's the only possible ceiling and floor, which is how theonomists treat it, right?

28:05

Ceiling and floor, a way to govern a polity legally. There could be many more styles of governance and legal codes that would be equally agreeable to the natural law, but be different because people are different and cultures are different.

28:21

And so I think theonomists don't respect not only the right categorization of that law, but the human element of law in society.

28:30

And so it makes it confusing. The good thing about them is they love the scripture. They love, you know, do think about political things and that's,

28:40

I appreciate that. And then there's, you know, culturally with a lot of theonomists, there's sometimes more is owed to their libertarianism than it is to the theory of theonomy itself that they're getting, you know, even

28:51

Rush Dooney's leans that way. And so anyway, that's like a side discussion, but I would just say that those people that do that, that are like hardcore theonomists are not sufficiently in touch with the

29:05

Protestant tradition and should just do more reading. These questions have been answered centuries ago.

29:12

I always say Franciscus Junius' Mosaic Polity is what everyone should read. He doesn't know what theonomy is, but he obliterates it.

29:20

It's the same question. Magistrates have asked him, what do we do with the Old Testament law? And so he explains these things.

29:28

And I just think they should read that and realize that their political and moral concerns that they have, which is they want a

29:34

God -honoring just polity can and have been answered in different ways that don't require such a formulaic transportation of this code that was made for one people at one time to everybody.

29:48

And so, and they get really goofy, of course, right? If that's the ceiling and the floor, you can't have like traffic laws because there's no scriptural referent.

29:57

And I'm like, that's, I'm sorry, I just don't want 16 -year -olds driving tons of metal down the road to not be regulated in the way they do that because it's harmful.

30:05

The other thing would be their theonomist general aversion to laws that are preventative in nature.

30:12

They only want things to be punished after the fact. So that gets very kind of sticky.

30:18

So there's lots of more practical problems like that, but the principle, I wanna treat them on principle and not just like the quirks.

30:27

And so I've already laid that out. That's my beef with them. I don't think they, sometimes they know what they're talking about.

30:35

Maybe other times they don't. Well, you know, one of the laws that this, cause

30:40

I was definitely at one time, very influenced by especially Greg Bonson's version of theonomy.

30:46

One of the scriptures though that challenged me was when Jesus talks about Moses, because of the hardness of their heart, implementing laws about divorce.

30:58

And then of course the allowance of polygamy. Obviously Kings weren't supposed to multiply wives, but it wasn't a, for the general person, like the main concern was intermarrying with other nations, not multiple wives.

31:14

And we've developed in Western societies, a monogamy that, or at least

31:20

I should say a legal tradition that values monogamy to such an extent that you will be in trouble.

31:26

You will be a bigamist if you marry someone and then you go marry someone else, you know, that kind of thing. So is that a positive development?

31:33

That's what I would want to ask someone who's just, you know, living and dying on the Mosaic law. Like, don't you think that's a good thing that we've, that that's been a, not that that means that God's law is less than perfect cause it is perfect.

31:45

It's, but as you were saying Tymon, it's for a specific application in a specific context, which is exactly what

31:51

Jesus says. That because of the hardness of their hearts, they had to, the law had to be crafted in such a way.

31:56

And so I think that just shows you kind of how this is supposed to be used and -

32:02

Totally. I mean, I've talked to theonomist self -professing ones that will tell you, you can't even,

32:10

I think the hypothetical I've used is even publicly. So even like public pornography, you can't regulate it.

32:17

Are you serious? I've never heard that. I've talked to people that way. But yeah, you know, I should assume that they're

32:24

Christian brothers. They're not being like funny about it. I don't think that's most the, I don't think that's most people who would say they're theonomist. No, but it, but it's, yeah.

32:31

I mean, Bonson doesn't say that, right? Bonson also has, I mean, one problem too, is that Bonson, Rush Dooney, Gary North are, were very smart guys also.

32:41

And their progeny is, it performs a little under par compared to them, I would say, most of the time.

32:47

So those were very smart guys. There's some profit in reading them, especially what is it, North's Poly Piety is an interesting book.

32:54

But they also have historical problems. Bonson has historical problems that are, that are replicated by today, by like Joe Boot and his use of the tradition, especially

33:05

Puritanism. In that sense, to truth dispatch this question, they have no idea what they're talking about.

33:11

But that doesn't mean everything about their theory is like just way left field. And Bonson and those guys do real work and you gotta, you can wrestle with it.

33:19

But I think the root idea is problematic. And then that is sometimes, not to commit a logical fallacy, but sometimes demonstrated by crazy conclusions that people can come to following those principles.

33:33

Well, we've been going over half an hour. We've gotten to a whopping two questions. So we gotta move it on a little. And Ben, if you could just be, if you could answer this one,

33:41

I'm gonna just go through the three from truth dispatch. Second question, can you all interrogate the liberals universal and global view of law?

33:49

Christians who believe in modern application of God's law have adopted this by conflating Christ's rule.

33:56

I'm trying to understand the question. Well, I'll say something like this, kind of a universalist perspective on law.

34:07

I mean, you could say in one sense, the modern application of that comes out of Kant's work where he wants to have a moral ethic in which anything that you do, and this gets translated into law, anything that you do has to be able to be universalized so that everybody can do it and it doesn't create harm or conflict, kind of pie in the sky.

34:30

And this is done on the basis of just pure reason, pure rational analysis. You can't take any kind of material conditions or self -interest or utility into view whatsoever.

34:41

And so this idea of having this perfectly universal moral ethic or principle, these moral precepts that can then get translated into moral law, in some ways, this is the foundation of international law today.

34:55

And of course, Kant wanted an international federation of states. So it is this

35:03

Kantian driven, Kantian dream of a perfect moral universe in which we can have, everyone can agree on these things.

35:14

And then if we just can implement them and get people to go along with it, we can have world peace.

35:20

And this is the title of one of Kant's works, Perpetual Peace. This is what he wants, complete and total perpetual peace.

35:27

We're going to overcome human conflict and war and death. And we're gonna do it by the power of human reason.

35:35

We're not gonna do it by God's grace or God's kingdom or the gospel or anything like that.

35:40

So I do think that that's a huge kind of driving factor. It's also a massive motivation.

35:46

I think Christians don't know this. When they come to reason about morality and law and society and that they've completely lost the element or the possibility of prudence, which always takes into consideration definitely basic precepts of the natural law and the conclusions, basic natural conclusions from those precepts, but then they have to be applied and they're always applied variously depending upon one circumstance such that you could have a statesman on one day apply the same principle and conclusion exactly the opposite on the next day because the situation changed.

36:27

This seems messy. It brings up the problem of inconsistency and being hypocritical and so forth.

36:34

And sometimes like these decisions are the privy of a president who needs secrecy and dispatch.

36:42

And of course, that's why you need a great man in the presidency who is virtuous and trustworthy and a

36:48

Christian. And I think this is exactly the view of the founders. So there's the loss of prudence is a misunderstanding of the natural law as being just kind of these timeless and eternal kind of set of just rules of rights and wrongs.

37:03

And this is what, if you read any kind of Christian ethics texts from the past like 30 years, this is just how it goes.

37:10

Like they set forth kind of basic biblical principles of ethics and then they go down the issues like abortion and stem cell research and marriage and euthanasia.

37:20

And they try to come to like the perfect biblical Christian evangelical principle and ethic for this thing for all times and all people in all places.

37:31

That's a really anemic, very shallow and very kind of crippling way of doing ethics and law.

37:40

Yeah, no, good. One more question from Truth Dispatch. Ben engaged

37:46

Brian Mattson on American Reformer. Brian, along with Boot and Sandlin, so there's

37:52

Ezra Institute guys, are some Christians who have generally adopted that liberal view of law and political theology.

38:00

Why are they wrong? That's okay. These are very direct questions. I love the directness here.

38:07

So that's for you, Ben. Why are they wrong? Let me tell you, they're very, very wrong.

38:13

The most wrong they've ever been. I mean, okay, like the critique here could go on forever, but I mean, one of my major critiques is they do essentially adopt a quote unquote liberal conception of politics, which says that government bad, okay, big government really bad.

38:36

And so we need limited government. We need small government. Now, the view of the founders was not just limited government.

38:42

It was that the national government should have certain limited ends, but unlimited scope to achieve those limited ends.

38:52

And then the domestic sphere had, the states had other limited ends and unlimited scope to achieve those ends.

38:58

That's the kind of limited government that the founders were talking about. And then what like Sandlin and Matson will do, again,

39:06

Sandlin will go back and say like, we've got rules, we can't break these rules, the left is breaking the rules and if the right breaks the rules and all hell is gonna break loose.

39:14

I'm like, the whole tectonic plate has shifted like an entire continent from the 1770s and 80s.

39:24

And they are rearranging the deck chairs and they're worried about rules. And then something like what

39:32

Matson will do is he'll say that if you limit government, then you increase the private sphere, this culture.

39:42

So you have free culture. This is how you get freedom. This is how you get free markets. This is how you have sound families and so forth and so on.

39:49

So it's a very negative and pessimistic view of government that has to be kind of cordoned off into this little sphere and contained over here.

39:58

And then you have culture that's basically gonna run the show because guess what?

40:04

Politics is always downstream from culture. That's another kind of little truism that they kind of bang away at.

40:12

And I don't think that that's, I mean, it's not the case. It's not false that culture influences the political sphere but it's just as much the other way around.

40:21

I mean, look at Obergefell. How many Americans were polling in favor of gay marriage before 2015?

40:27

Or it wasn't, it was what, 50 -50 maybe? And now it's way majority.

40:33

So law obviously inescapably shapes people. It shapes the culture.

40:39

It drives things all the time. And as long as you have this liberal, this kind of neoliberal, modern liberal conception of law and politics the way that these guys do, you're never going, you're always gonna be a perpetual loser.

40:52

You're never gonna be willing to take the reins of government and policy and actually use them to shape people's hearts and minds and to shape a law of fashion that's going to be prohibitive against them doing things that they shouldn't do anyway.

41:07

So we have to be comfortable doing that because all law does that. Every government's always done that.

41:12

The left does it unashamedly. And they say, we're right to do it because our morals are better than yours. And they're wrong.

41:18

We actually have better morals. And we have the truth. We have like the God of the

41:24

King of Kings and Lord and Lords on our sides. And we're like, oh, we can't use power. The ironic thing to me is the,

41:31

I've run into this a number of times where people be like, they'll repeat Bonson's, there is no neutrality, right?

41:37

Of course there isn't. And then the next conclusion though, is that all of the liberal neutrality that we have comes from God's law somehow.

41:47

So that become, it's like a parallel, like the neutrality we're supposed to somehow protect and defend is also one in the same with the status quo

42:00

God wants us operating in. And it strikes me as odd. Like it's a weird,

42:06

I don't know. I don't know if you've seen that, but it just came to my head. No, I totally agree with that. And here's how

42:12

I would describe it. This is what I think they're obviously subconsciously doing. It's like, there is no neutrality because it's either

42:19

God's truth or whatever else they'll say. What they've bought it, the

42:25

Kool -Aid they've drank though is all, is the fundamental, a fundamental liberal conception of politics, which is you need, the reason it's rules -based is to mitigate against conflict.

42:38

And they buy into the same rationale for that that other liberals do. So what they want is to say, in the public square, whatever that means to them, where there's like, it's like a boxing match and it's like an arena and there's a referee and there's certain things you can and can't do.

42:54

And this is the fair way to like handle this. And obviously no one's neutral, one side versus the other side, but we've got to keep this civil, guys.

43:02

It's got to be constrained and that's the best way to do it. And again, as Ben was kind of pointing out, it assumes this sort of one dimensional aspect to the contest and this linear,

43:14

I was going to say fake word, I guess, linear direction of the flow of influence in society.

43:21

I would agree with Ben. I mean, law, if anything, law influences culture and politics. This is why

43:26

Tocqueville says that the lawyers in America are the natural aristocracy. Since there is no natural aristocracy, the lawyers have taken that place.

43:34

They will dictate everything. And that's basically true. And it's not actually that improper because the laws do direct people as an ordinance for action.

43:48

They of course direct people. And then they do have a way of influencing not only your intellect where you make this, but also even your will in a very real sense.

43:59

So this is all totally appropriate. It is coercive, coercion is fine. Like it's just a fact of life.

44:05

And so I think they just have a very, they have a very juvenile view of how society works and how politics works.

44:12

And that that fact is not necessarily good or bad. It's just a question of what's going to direct it.

44:19

And if you, my favorite quote from Nathaniel Ward in Simple Cobbler Vagawam is, I'll have to paraphrase this,

44:25

I'll actually memorize, is he's talking about religion and like these people already shouting, like Roger Williams for religious liberty.

44:32

And he's like, whoever won't enforce their religion is either like a coward or doesn't actually believe it.

44:39

And I would say that in a general sense to some of these guys, I'm like, either you think like Ben was saying that our morality is the true one and is better.

44:48

It doesn't mean because we're finite human, there won't be mistakes, but you either believe that or you don't. And this kind of just free for all contest, even as they're shouting no neutrality from the ring and they're getting their face pummeled by Mike Tyson in the corner.

45:01

I'm just like, what is this? I don't know. That's a total ramble. We should move on before. No, that's good.

45:06

It's a good ramble. Let's, one of you can start to tackle Ayn Rand.

45:12

We have a question from George Silas. Are you familiar with Dr. John Robbins' book,

45:17

Without a Prayer, Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System? Robbins was a Presbyterian, a great takedown of objectivism.

45:24

And I think he later on followed up, oh, I can't find it. Oh, would love to hear her thought on Ayn Rand.

45:33

So have you heard of that book? And then what are your thoughts on Ayn Rand? I mean, is

45:39

Ayn Rand, is she liberal? Like is libertarianism, liberalism on steroids?

45:46

How do you distinguish them? I'm kind of curious about that because we haven't actually gone through that in our series yet.

45:53

Either one of you. I've never heard of that book. And I will be honest and proud of the fact that I've never read

45:59

Ayn Rand. So I haven't even read Atlas Shrug, believe it or not. Maybe I will, but you know, do

46:06

I need to? Probably not. Yeah. I mean - William F. Buckley once said he had to flog himself through it.

46:14

You know, they hated each other. Is it? Yeah, right. Or particularly like either one of them. So the question, the question there,

46:21

John, is kind of, you know, the relationship between, you know, objectivism, libertarianism and liberalism.

46:31

Of course, you know, you could go a couple of different directions with this. The question basically, as far as I understand objectivism, like the main ethic there is one of self -interest and you always act out of your own self -interest and you have these, you know,

46:48

Twitter Rand bros even saying that God always does everything out of his own self -interest.

46:58

And so it's now become a theology as well as a political theory or a social ethic.

47:04

And so then the question becomes, what's the role of self -interest in a liberal polity? You know, if you go back to Hobbes, do you enter civil society because it's a war of all against all and you're alienated from everybody else and you only care about your own self -preservation?

47:20

Is that a form of just naked self -interest? You know, is Adam Smith's version of the invisible hand and the market, is that a form of self -interest?

47:31

You'd have to answer those questions and you'd have to compare them to, you know, a specifically what

47:36

Rand is saying in her work that what self -interest is. So my view on this is that libertarianism is a, how would you put it?

47:47

It's like a, it's a privation of liberalism basically. It's a twisted and kind of deformed, you know, stepson in a way.

47:59

It takes some of the principles of liberalism and then totally destroys the counterbalancing ideas and principles for the proper context, the religious and the moral presuppositions of it for other purposes, you know, progress or the destruction of heritage and ancestry or custom and tradition, whatever it may be, or just unleashing, unleashing, yeah, avarice, greed, self -interest, your best life now, whatever it may be.

48:35

So I think libertarianism feeds off of liberalism and in kind of like the worst possible way.

48:45

And it does run with the kind of naked self -interest as kind of the highest goal, this autonomy, this choice.

48:53

And as long as you maximize that choice, and of course, all men are perfectly rational.

48:59

So then you get some kind of rational choice theory that comes out of that. You know, you can't have a better society.

49:05

You can't have a more free society. And then of course, what they do is they take that ideology of freedom and they read it back into the best of the early liberal or proto -liberal tradition that did talk about liberty, but it talked about the liberty of the people in relationship to each other, you know, horizontally, but also the liberty they had before God.

49:28

That was a liberty that was constrained by religious and moral ends. And it was concerned more with the inner development and liberty of the person, not just, you know, is someone somewhere trying to stop me from, you know, what is it now?

49:45

Zoophilia, you know, basically bestiality. Bestiality is now the raging thing with Peter Singer going, praising that article on Twitter today.

49:54

It's like, this is the new libertarian fad now. So - Did not see that. Oh gosh. So I don't know.

50:01

That's about all I have on Rand. Yeah. To be fair, it said in some situations it may be morally permissible to have some sexual relations with animals.

50:10

Yeah, that's what he said. He was promoting an article from a journal that I believe he's an editor on that's called the

50:17

Journal of Controversy, something like that. Is Peter Singer a libertarian? I don't know what he would categorize himself as.

50:27

I mean, he's a liberal. I don't know if he's ever embraced libertarian, but I think

50:33

Ben's application of the point is fair. That's kind of the, there's a libertarian aspect to his ethics that I would just, this is all

50:43

I'll add so we can keep moving on. It's like the, both those, so Peter Singer and then

50:48

Ayn Rand, I mean, they have a very, we talked about this with Hobbes a couple of weeks ago or whenever it was.

50:55

It begins with, I think, a reductionist anthropology that's, you know, they use the term rationality, but it's in this very extreme, as Ben said, self -interested way that does not, in its scope, is not the full man in his higher ends, much less his social ability or relational ends.

51:14

It's all, again, self -interest. It's all, you know, this is how, this is like man's highest existence.

51:22

The people who are super rational and cynical and self -interested will survive. And it's almost, you know, got that sort of eugenicist aspect of like, then you would keep having a society.

51:32

Maybe you should say Darwinist would be better, but that's like the view. So it's a reductionist anthropology, and that leads you always to bad places.

51:41

And I think that's where Rand and the objectivists begin. And that obviously influences your epistemology in these things.

51:48

And it's very simple. I think that's why it catches on. Libertarianism is very simple and you can apply it and it allows you to be mad at everything and everybody.

51:57

And like, that's a good place to be, you know, especially whether you're an old guy, like sitting on his back porch or a young guy on Reddit, like you get the same kind of cathartic experience from that.

52:08

So I just consider it goofy and I think it's eventually dying. But I will say this, that the objectivism of Rand, insofar as I understand it, is not, it's not incongruent with certain things, even though it's a more intellectual project.

52:23

You will see out of like the BAP crowd, right? The Nietzschean right has similar views of like man's purpose and political goal and things.

52:32

And it is very, it's not this simplistic, but it is similar in like the, and it influences their reading of like even

52:39

Greek mythology and like Homer and these things, which I think are off. But there's something similar there in the way

52:46

Rand will talk about, you know, like the sort of ideal man and what he's supposed to be is not unlike the modern interpretations on the

52:55

Nietzschean right of those things. So maybe it will always live on in new forms, just like the

53:00

Sith or something. We just come back. But anyway. I've always thought about it as like an ideology that has two basic tenets, right?

53:09

The non -aggression principle and the free market. And pretty much on those two principles, you can solve any political question.

53:18

And so, right, so they, you don't have to know hardly anything to be a libertarian.

53:24

It's very simple. And I think, as you said, I mean, that's been my observation too.

53:30

They tend to not get along well with others, play well with others. They tend to be very arrogant too.

53:37

And they've never really had a lot of political power or been able to test their ideas in, you know, any kind of, you know,

53:47

I mean, they might take cases in like, I don't know, Switzerland. Even Switzerland's a hard one to take, but I've heard them try to appeal to, you know, pre -Jackson

54:00

America and Switzerland. And these are places that have kind of more their ideals, but even those places don't really fit

54:10

Randian libertarianism. So anyway, yeah. I don't know if there's anything more on libertarianism you wanted to say.

54:16

I would just say to like Christians, don't like use the term or fall into these things, for sure, but use the term libertarian just because you're frustrated and see problems and fractures in like the current government or regime.

54:31

And don't just default to, well, you know, I need to be able to get government out of everything. On principle, it always mucks everything up.

54:39

You can walk and chew gum at the same time. All of us recognize problems. It's part of our whole conversation.

54:45

You don't have to go to this extreme of, well, everything would be great if we just had no government.

54:50

One, that doesn't comport with man's nature. Two, it's certainly never been tried at scale and I think would be bad.

54:58

And also you have in this objectivist kind of world, I never see an outlet in there for things like, well, certainly not altruism that's famous, right?

55:09

That like she rejects that. But what goes along with that is sort of a nationalist, you know, patriotism and sacrifice and these things.

55:16

I just don't see how you fit that into the equation or the system, which I find abhorrent and is certainly something that we shouldn't emulate.

55:25

If you can't do anything for other people, I don't really understand what would be the rationale for fighting and dying for your country or doing anything else for its good, even protectionist policies that consider the lives and cultures and traditions of the people.

55:41

So it's a very thin dogma and I just find it super boring and gave up reading about it a long time ago.

55:48

I would just add, I remember back when I read David Boaz's, who's the head of the

55:53

Cato Institute, or at least he was, I don't know if he's still there, his little book, The Libertarian Mind.

56:01

And I was back when I was flirting with libertarianism because I was a Ron Paul fan and I had read his book,

56:08

Free to Choose. I don't know, maybe it was to take off of - That's Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman, it was another book. I forget what it was called.

56:15

But anyway, literally like in the first chapter, in the first 10 pages,

56:21

Boaz like pulls the definition of liberty from Justice Kennedy's Planned Parenthood versus Gacy.

56:28

And he's like, you know, freedom is, liberty is absolutely like the right to define one's concept of existence and meaning and universe and the mystery of human life.

56:39

And I'm like, you're dead to me, dude. This is the end of libertarianism. It was so shallow and it was so selfish and it just had no restraints, no way to direct any, it was just,

56:51

I mean, the absurdity of it was so far gone to me. I was, I can't believe this anymore.

56:56

So, you know, if that's the version of libertarianism that you're dealing with, run for the hills.

57:02

Yeah, there's no higher ends in that. It's all, it terminates with you. Yeah, and if anyone,

57:08

Ben and John, maybe you've read this, if anyone wants to like a masterful takedown of Milton Friedman, not like a policy prescriptive level, but like the internal thought, you know, behind the system is in Rusty Reno's chapter in Return of the

57:23

Strong Gods. There's not a better takedown of Friedman. And he does it masterfully. And it's like, he's a liberal.

57:30

He's a total post -war liberal. I can't believe, you know, it's like me extrapolating for Reno, I can't believe conservatives bought into this guy.

57:38

Oh, to Milton Friedman. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've read Free to Choose and, you know, like maybe 15 years ago and thought, oh, this is great.

57:47

And I mean, there are some good things. I mean, I like the free market. I wish the Mises Institute would run our economy.

57:54

Like I kind of feel like they understand like market principles, but obviously I don't, you know, like I don't want morals coming from them necessarily.

58:03

But that's the thing with like, with Friedman too, like he's, some of the things that he talks about are so true as far as the connection between supply and demand and like where the government can muck things up.

58:17

Like he tends to be so right. I think that's the reason time. And that's why conservatives see those things and then they'll buy into the whole philosophy.

58:25

Yeah, I mean, I've read a bunch of Thomas Sowell and I benefit from him when I need like nuts and bolts on an economic matter.

58:32

Right, right. But he totally leaves the religious and moral element out of it completely. And in which case it's reduced to a complete laboratory theory, right?

58:42

If you're leaving out fundamental human elements and don't have a well -constructed anthropology that's operative, you're doing a lab theory that sounds great.

58:52

I mean, if it would work that way, but it just doesn't because motivations are too diverse. Yeah. And I don't think it accounts.

58:58

So I remember someone saying, I can't remember who that, the economies were better before economists ran them.

59:05

They were run by like classicists, because these guys kind of, anyway, they get caught up in theory and they should work.

59:13

Like, I'm sure it's super frustrating for them. It's like, why doesn't this work the way it's supposed to? It's just human life.

59:19

So anyway, I think you have to have the same thing for political theories. There's certain things that would be, makes perfect sense on paper, but -

59:28

They seem to like look at people as numbers sometimes. Like it becomes all a math equation. And I noticed that with Thomas Sowell's treatment of history sometimes, it is so one -dimensional and it leaves out certain, like the one that people talk about a lot is his black rednecks, white liberals, and the whole theory about the, where he talks about the cracker culture being the inspiration for today's kind of gangsters and so forth.

59:55

And it's so bad historically. It's just, it's not a good argument, but it plays well politically today.

01:00:05

And he's looking at a lot of economic factors to try to make it work. And not everything's economic.

01:00:11

Like most things are actually, they come down to cultural factors, but we probably should get off the libertarian thing for, unless people have follow -up questions, because there are two more questions

01:00:22

I really want to get to. No, I was just going to say, my favorite thing about Thomas Sowell is every book cover since the 80s to now is the same design.

01:00:32

It's red, white, and black letters, block, no pictures, black background. Every book is the same.

01:00:38

And it's amazing. It's like, he's doing it as like a 30 -year troll. They look like they're on Amazon, like self -published.

01:00:45

Like there's just no, like no work went into it. They're just, they're great. I love in basic economics, it's like literally to get the notes, you have to go online and download a

01:00:55

PDF. I don't care about notes. Notes. All right, here's a question for $5.

01:01:03

Have any of you read George Fitzhugh? Any thoughts, if you have, from Evan Gerber?

01:01:10

Any of you read George Fitzhugh? Yeah, I've read some of him. We read him in a class here at Hillsdale that we have to take, and it was his

01:01:21

Southern Thought from 1857. It was just excerpts of it. And from what

01:01:27

I remember, I don't, I mean, he was one of the more intelligible defenders of slavery and of the

01:01:34

Southern culture. And he was a very interesting and passionate thinker and writer. And he basically made the argument that the

01:01:42

South was going to lose the slavery argument because it was too focused on the specific issue of Negro slavery in the

01:01:52

South, as opposed to defending and making good arguments for slavery and the abstract.

01:01:58

And then, of course, he followed that up with attacks on Adam Smith and laissez -faire capitalist economies, saying that the

01:02:09

North had its own problem with this. It's not slave labor, it's actually worse.

01:02:15

It's these day laborers who have no relationship whatsoever to their capitalist overlords, and they're being absolutely ground to dust, and they're worse off.

01:02:27

And so he had a more paternalistic argument in favor of slavery. So, I mean, those are some of the elements that I remember from him.

01:02:34

And he wrote some other - I think he went to Yale or Harvard. I think it was Yale, and he presented there his arguments.

01:02:40

And he wrote a couple other books, like Cannibal's All, and I forget the other ones. But he's a very interesting thinker, worth reading.

01:02:48

But he was a more eloquent defender of Southern culture. I haven't read him.

01:02:55

Well, I've probably read excerpts from him. I've never read a full work of his, but I'm somewhat familiar with people who have read him.

01:03:04

Not that that makes it any better. I'm no expert. But one of the things that I remember, because I actually just heard a speech on George Fitzhugh not long ago, that was arguing for a

01:03:15

Caesarian figure to come forward. And that based upon George Fitzhugh's arguments, that basically hierarchy is inevitable.

01:03:24

And so not arguing for a labor relationship, but a political arrangement.

01:03:31

But my understanding was, his arguments defending slavery in the abstract were not necessarily -

01:03:39

They weren't the mainstream arguments in the South. I mean, they're highly philosophical arguments. The South, I mean, even if you read

01:03:46

Calhoun, Calhoun is not, he makes it clear, I'm not defending this in the abstract. It's this particular situation that we have right now.

01:03:56

And most of the Southerners were gradual emancipationists who thought it's gonna die out and stuff.

01:04:03

But Fitzhugh was unique in that he was like, actually, no, slavery is embedded into the human condition somehow.

01:04:09

Like we're all gonna be slaves of something or there's gonna be this economic relationship that it comes out and you can't suppress it.

01:04:18

And in some ways, I don't know enough and I certainly don't want shadow slavery or anything like that.

01:04:25

I'm glad it's over. But the thing is, you do look at the development and you see that these hierarchies do tend to emerge in other places.

01:04:34

We just don't smear them or categorize them as such, but we still go and buy from sweatshop labor as we go into Walmart to purchase clothes.

01:04:43

We still have a prison system in which people are essentially slaves or welfare system is essentially, if it's not slavery, there are people generally racially in it who have a very tough time getting out of it.

01:04:57

You see in the coal towns, people could not get out of those economic conditions. It was basically a form of slavery.

01:05:03

You see it with the immigrants coming across the border illegally and how they're abused and the sexually, I mean,

01:05:08

I can go on and on and on. But - John, did you see that piece at National Affairs like a couple of months ago about opioids in Appalachia over the centuries and how it was introduced?

01:05:21

I didn't read it, but I think someone sent it to me. Yeah, it was an amazing piece. It gets at what you're saying.

01:05:27

So this was beginning in like late 19th, early 20th century is where the kind of the scope of time here.

01:05:34

So it's not, it's after slavery, but just pointing out like how the coal companies would only pay people in basically like monopoly money.

01:05:46

You can't take it outside of, and you'd have your grocery store that would accept it. So it becomes this constrained little commune and everything is wrapped up in the, your dependency is extreme on the coal company or whatever.

01:06:01

And then it was going into talking about how doctors treated these people, just pumped them with opiates for decades and decades and decades without restraint.

01:06:11

It was just awful. I mean, it's an awful, what was done to that, those are my people, that's where I'm from, that what was done to Southern Ohio, Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee was pretty terrible.

01:06:23

West Virginia, of course, pretty terrible. And it is very much, I mean, if earlier political theorists have looked at it, they would be like, that's slavery, plain and simple.

01:06:33

That is a slave relationship. And a bad form of it too. And exactly a bad form of it.

01:06:39

You don't have magnanimous masters at all there. And so they're just drugging people, killing people essentially.

01:06:46

And with labor, it's like a labor camp. So the point, and we have this today, no one talks about those episodes, they're buried.

01:06:56

Everyone wants to defend basically the Muslim East for everything they do, but they actually still have just plain and simple slave trade still.

01:07:05

It's alive and well, it's never gone away. They, of course, some of those same countries are the greatest offenders of sex trafficking and all these things.

01:07:14

And no one talks about that because it's the wrong people. So I consider the castigation of white

01:07:21

Americans because of slavery forever, perpetually, to be a bit of a psyop so that you don't pay attention to the other abysmal economic and otherwise relationships that currently support the liberal order and are necessary to economically and politically to just sort of turn a blind eye to.

01:07:39

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the funny thing, my iPhone even, you know, like liberal,

01:07:45

I mean, this is the device of liberalism, really, and yet it is built on the backs of people in third world countries, you know, working for nothing, we're living in poverty.

01:07:57

So we have another question. Man, these are really deep questions. I'm kind of impressed here.

01:08:05

Chandler Bard says, have you read any of Carlyle's thoughts on the industrial revolution?

01:08:13

Many can easily apply to libertarians as well. Maybe you - I've only read from Carlyle a few essays and thoughts on French revolutions or whatever, or the history of the

01:08:24

French revolution. So I have not read him on the industrial revolution. Yeah, I haven't either.

01:08:30

I don't have much to say on that. Yeah, I don't, I guess he lived, I mean, he died in 1881. So he would have seen, he certainly would have seen the beginnings of it.

01:08:39

I don't know. I haven't read anything from him either on that. So sorry, I know it's $5 he paid, but -

01:08:46

I know, we're not very good new right representatives because everyone reads Carlyle now. He's a back and vote.

01:08:52

Yeah, if anyone else has a Thomas Carlyle question, or if Chandler, if you want to put another question,

01:08:58

I'll go to it. In other words, a question on the French revolution and Carlyle since Timon and Ben are familiar with that.

01:09:07

Well, let me do this. We've been going over an hour and there, I don't think we have any,

01:09:14

I think I've gone through the questions. There's kind of a war erupting in the chat. I'm not exactly sure where this came from, but it looks like it's about women keeping silent in church and divorce and marriage and all kinds of things.

01:09:29

But yeah, not what we're talking about here today. So I hope it's a productive conversation, whatever's going on there.

01:09:37

I wanted to play a clip. Aristotle says silence is the glory of women. So I don't know. You just want to get in trouble.

01:09:44

That's what you want to do. Let's do this. There's a, I wanted to play this. This is from last night.

01:09:51

Did any of you guys watch the Republican debate or? Absolutely clips. Yeah, all right. Yeah, I didn't,

01:09:57

I just watched clips, but I guess before the debate, I don't know if this was aired publicly or where this came from.

01:10:03

It's a Republican Jewish organization and I thought it fits so well. I'm sorry,

01:10:11

I have to just show this. Aristotle is not Jesus. So I just wanted to clarify that for you,

01:10:16

Timon. So you're on mute, so he can't even hear you. Trump meme, this is the first I'm hearing of this.

01:10:24

Thank you. All right, so anyway, here's a, this is from last night and I want to play it and then just maybe any reflection you have on our liberalism discussion.

01:10:34

The RJC's work right now is more vital and important than ever. And that is why for the very first time in history of either party, the

01:10:41

RNC has partnered with the Republican Jewish coalition to be part of our next debate in Miami.

01:10:47

The RJC is vital right now more than ever. We see the atrocities in Israel.

01:10:53

We see attacks on our own streets. We need the Republican Jewish coalition taking a strong stance and we should stand with them.

01:11:01

The Democratic party is divided and has abandoned this cause.

01:11:06

Democratic party, unfortunately, has turned its back on Israel. They are home to some of the most rabid anti -Semites in politics.

01:11:14

We have to know the difference between good and evil. And I believe the RJC is going to be a big part of that. I think that people who share the founding values of the

01:11:21

United States of America and believe in the founding values of Israel as the Jewish state, absolutely should be voting

01:11:28

Republican. If you believe that the state of Israel must be protected, the only way to make sure

01:11:34

America does that is to vote Republican. If you care about the safety and security of Israel, the only choice is to vote

01:11:42

Republican. If you love freedom -loving countries, if you believe in democracy, if you believe in pro -American values, if you believe in the difference between right and wrong, you should be standing with Israel.

01:11:54

That also means that you stand with the RJC and you vote Republican. I stand with Israel, the

01:11:59

Republican party stands with Israel, and that is why we need you to vote Republican. Okay, I mean, the music just puts chills down your spine, makes you want to send

01:12:10

Tom Cruise over there to bomb, you know, somewhere. Chris Christie looks so bored. What am

01:12:18

I supposed to be saying? Chris Christie doesn't know why he's running. He's like - He has no idea.

01:12:24

I hate skinny Ron DeSantis. I liked him when he was plump and a little thicker.

01:12:31

The diet at Ron DeSantis is less compelling. I'll tell you what's going on here, John. Yeah, tell me.

01:12:37

I was listening to a couple of clips recently of wealthy Jewish leftist donors yanking the cord on their giving to Columbia and Harvard and other

01:12:50

Ivy League institutions that they've literally given millions and at times billions to.

01:12:58

And the Republicans are like, there's these donors out there and they're

01:13:04

Jewish and we're going to toot this horn and we're going to snatch them up. So it's literally like, it's a political infighting between the

01:13:12

Dems and Republicans over money and donors. That's a lot of it. And you know, it's just the war hawkishness as well.

01:13:21

And it's such an easy out. You know, Nikki Haley had this brilliant line, the difference between good and evil.

01:13:28

It's like, wow, really? Never heard of such a thing. Come again?

01:13:33

You know, it's too easy to major on the

01:13:40

Israel issue because to them, it seems, it allows them to not tackle the difficult issues at home.

01:13:47

Well, Vivek's, I think that's how you say it, Vivek Ramaswamy, but his line about the founding values of America and the founding values of Israel and defending those, that was the one that got me.

01:14:00

And I thought, I should play this on our liberalism discussion because that's what we were talking about with Ukraine and Israel, that like the war drums are to go there, or the drumbeat is to go there because we are fighting a global war against the forces that would threaten democracy and threaten freedom, these very like nebulous kind of terms that we have such a strong emotional attachment to.

01:14:26

And that becomes the liberal glue. That's the thing that like mobilizes a war effort.

01:14:32

And you see it in that video, like the very inspirational music and just extremely simplistic moral statements for a country that is, and nothing against Israel at all, but it is halfway across the world.

01:14:49

And we have some severe problems of our own here, especially on our Southern border right now, that we should be using those resources to stay, but we're going to instead talk about what we can do over there with the government's resources as if it's an obligation.

01:15:06

So it's like, that's the liberalism thing. It's like, that's the obligation, not to our own, but to -

01:15:11

This is the thing I said too, when no one's talking about Ukraine anymore, you got to put up the new flag in your bio, right?

01:15:19

Ukraine's old news. It's still going on as far as I know, I assume Taiwan's next and we just have to trust that.

01:15:25

Great. Again, I think Israel has every right to do everything they're doing.

01:15:33

I think it's great. Again, it's like that meme from the prosperity gospel preacher of Jesus. I see what you've given others and I want that for me.

01:15:41

They're like, they don't mess around. It's great. I think they should do it. And if there is a geopolitical reason, real politic reason to support them in various ways because of other interests that we have both, whether it's in our relationship with them or the stability of the region, whatever you want to say.

01:16:01

I am open to geopolitical arguments all the time. That's great. I wanted the same thing in Ukraine, no one could ever give it to you.

01:16:07

It is totally a moral duty. And so that's one thing, but it connects to what,

01:16:15

I don't know if it was Nikki Haley or someone else saying, this is just one of the most amazing statements and I hadn't seen that till now that I've ever heard, which is to be running for in the

01:16:25

Republican primary. So you're not even the general yet. In the Republican primary and you say, if you want to defend

01:16:31

Israel, vote for me. And it's like, what country are you in? Like, what does that mean?

01:16:37

What does that mean? I don't understand. It only makes sense in liberalism. It only makes sense in a liberal global order.

01:16:42

It really does. That makes sense. Like who would have ever made sense of that 200 years ago? What does that mean? Yeah, exactly.

01:16:48

I mean, I went off on Twitter like last week on was it Glenn Beck? Who was talking about wanting dual citizenship with Israel and America.

01:17:00

And I thought this guy is totally total post -war consensus liberal brain.

01:17:07

He can't think, he's flagellating himself to get

01:17:15

Israeli citizenship as if that makes him morally better or a greater ally.

01:17:22

I don't know. To me, it was the epitome of just insanity. I mean, some of our listeners may not want to hear this, but the founders would have been extremely opposed to any kind of dual citizenship.

01:17:35

How are you going to give your loyalty to two different countries halfway that are separated by an ocean or something like that?

01:17:42

That's insane. It's absurd. That's, it's not treasonous per se, but it's asking for that.

01:17:49

So yeah, I had some choice words on that whole thing, but yeah.

01:17:58

Yeah. And you said that the dual citizenship issue is the same original, it's the impetus for Protestant problems with Catholics in America is they effectively have dual citizenship.

01:18:09

So if you have any kind of foreign loyalty, it's per se suspect. That's just strange.

01:18:15

Like it doesn't mean you have to hate the foreign loyalty they're talking about, but it just doesn't make any sense for national solidarity and having true identity with your people.

01:18:26

So what global liberalism has done is just completely exploded any kind of, any ability to think that way and almost has made it the undercurrent of this clip is that that would be wrong.

01:18:41

That's morally wrong. You need to do this. And they don't even appeal. That's what's amazing to me.

01:18:47

They're Republican candidates. They don't even appeal to anything that's like, look guys, you're nothing in those clips of, hey,

01:18:54

Israel has been, we could say generally a friend. This is about destroying radical

01:19:00

Islam. And this is the vehicle to do it. Like, let's go help these guys out. That's a huge threat to us.

01:19:07

Islam is terrible. Let's go destroy it. They don't even say that. It's just this moral duty, Israel qua

01:19:13

Israel, no matter what. That's just strange to me. I have no - It's like,

01:19:18

Israel therefore expand the franchise, vote GOP. It doesn't even make any sense.

01:19:26

I mean, I think - You both like Hamas. That's what you're trying to say. That's what I'm hearing.

01:19:32

My view on this is that the hawkish foreign policy that in some ways is a consensus between the

01:19:40

Dems and the Republicans, although there is now a growing dissent on the radical left of the

01:19:48

Democrats who are very pro -Palestinian, and they've been raised and educated in all the crit stuff, and they believe oppressor oppressed narratives and so forth.

01:20:01

But the kind of the consensus on the foreign policy to rush to Israel's aid, my view is actually that's a hindrance to Israel.

01:20:10

And it's really what's going on is the United States is trying to run the show, and it actually, we should get out of Israel's way because we're creating more problems than we're helping.

01:20:21

I mean, we're delivering bombs and munitions and things like that, but - Well, they also gave all that money to Iran, which purchased the weapons.

01:20:29

And I mean, Hamas apparently has weapons that went to Ukraine from us. And Biden pledged 100 million humanitarian aid to the

01:20:36

Palestinians, which you know is so fungible it's gonna get turned right around into missiles. So the American foreign policy is so schizophrenic.

01:20:43

There's deep infighting going on. The Republicans are using this as leverage against the

01:20:49

Democrats with their voter base. War always is, you know, pads the financial pockets of the elite.

01:20:56

So, you know, more war and more war. So these are a lot of the things interplaying and none of it's good for the

01:21:04

American people, and it's actually not good for Israel either. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I think the best tweet

01:21:09

I saw on any of this was Yoram Hazony's like a couple weeks ago that just said, get out of the way and let us fight.

01:21:16

Exactly. And I was like, that would be my total attitude on this. I think they're within their rights to do everything they're doing, and it's gonna be nasty, but they've got to respond with overwhelming force and it's totally defensive.

01:21:29

I'd say just get out of the way and let them take care of business. They, you know, they have more troops than we do, so they're good to go.

01:21:36

And none of their troops are, you know, like LGBTQ counselors and things like this, so they're in much better shape.

01:21:43

I mean, you could hypothetically make a commercial like the one we just saw and talk about Israel's extremely,

01:21:51

I guess, unrestrictive abortion laws, their extreme friendliness to homosexuality.

01:22:00

You could talk about the fact, you know, when they've used pornography in the past as a device in war to try to demotivate their enemies and stuff like that.

01:22:10

So, I mean, there's plenty of things here that, I guess my only point is like there's evil.

01:22:16

If you wanna do the good evil thing, like you can find it on both sides as most conflicts, you can find good and evil on both sides.

01:22:23

Like that's kind of the human condition, but we have a binary that we are supposed to be completely allegiant to.

01:22:32

A few comments here. One, Friedrichsen says, I am a secular

01:22:37

Jew and my Jewish friends hate me for saying that, but they do use Islam as a convenient way to use the

01:22:44

US. Islam has never been a threat to the US. Well, I don't know about that, but ask the people in Dearborn, Michigan who lived there 30 years ago.

01:22:54

Yeah, I was gonna say, look at Minneapolis. Yeah, I mean, it is a threat, but it's not, yeah,

01:23:00

I mean, perhaps the Warhawks overblow that to try to gain. This is the best comment on the whole night.

01:23:08

Hey, Tymon, go offer yourself as a ransom for the hostages in Gaza. Walk the walk. Yeah, Tymon.

01:23:14

And they've got a picture. Is this the same Bartholomew's Day Massacre? Is there a picture? Yeah, that is.

01:23:19

Wow, this is a Christian mama. The Christian mama wants you to go walk the walk, so.

01:23:26

All right, I don't know what that means, but. I don't know either, but it is my favorite comment. I do like that comment.

01:23:33

You should frame that one. Yeah, and then I just have, this is my second favorite question.

01:23:41

John, how many minutes would Tim Keller have lasted during the Civil War? So this is to me.

01:23:47

So I would say, I mean, I think about two, because he would probably go on the battlefield and try to do a third way thing and like be winsome with the other side and he would just get blasted, so.

01:24:01

Anyway, all right, well, that's it for our series on liberalism. We end with a bang there.

01:24:08

I appreciate Tymon and Ben both giving me their time and all of you their time.

01:24:13

You can follow them on Twitter. Tymon's is T -L -L -O -Y -D,

01:24:21

T -Lloyd. Is that? That's right, yep. All right, T -Lloyd Klein, C -L -I -N -E.

01:24:27

That's the Twitter handle. And then for Ben Crenshaw, Ben R. Crenshaw on Twitter.

01:24:33

Wow, you were the OG Ben R. Crenshaw. That's super convenient. Yeah, nice. Imagine having the name

01:24:38

John Harris. It's not fun. Like John Harris, 5 ,327. Okay, all right, that one's taken too.

01:24:46

All right, well. Imagine having the name Ben Crenshaw as a famous golfer. Oh, I didn't realize that. PGA golfer, man.

01:24:53

He's won Masters, he's made millions. He's my perfect alibi. You should have more followers.

01:24:59

The convenient thing about that though, of course, is that you can say all kinds of politically incorrect things and they can't just Google you and find it.

01:25:07

Yeah, it's true. Because they're gonna come up with the golfer. Like you're gonna be on like page nine of Google with whatever you said.

01:25:13

Yes, that's true. Anyway. Including this podcast. This podcast, it's buried already.

01:25:19

I mean, they might be able to find me and Tymon, but not Ben Crenshaw. That's right. All right, well,

01:25:24

God bless everyone who's streaming out there. Thank you for coming in the chat.