The Right's Epistemology Crisis

on the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. This will be a rather short podcast. I'm just gonna be going over an article that I wrote that I published yesterday on my sub stack on the epistemology crisis afflicting the right.

I did a whole podcast, I think it was almost two hours long, about two weeks ago, where I talked about the vision of the good that different members of the right have, depending on the group they're in, the subgroup they're in.

And I think that was helpful. Someone asked me recently, who was going on a show bigger than mine, if I had any resources and I sent them that, but I was really hoping to, before they went on this particular show, give them another angle.

And unfortunately, I didn't meet that deadline, but I am talking about this now. I've thought this for a while and I had actually a really good conversation with someone.

I know I'm not naming names here because they haven't given me permission to name them, but someone else who has a bit of influence in Christian right circles,

I suppose. And I thought the conversation we had was just very clarifying. This person was seeing the same things

I'm seeing and even helped put some language to it. So I am maybe borrowing a few angles from someone else in conveying what

I'm about to convey to you. But this is something I have been thinking about for quite a while. And I think it's very important.

I think if we don't have a solution for this, we are going to be very vulnerable.

We will be taken advantage of by the worst elements, unless the Lord is very gracious to us.

We will have people who know how to manipulate, know how to control crowds, know what to say, know what image sells.

And there are people who simply understand those kinds of things. More so than I do. I do not understand those things sometimes in ways that surprise myself.

Like I can be ignorant of them. Everyone thinks differently. But I think that if you are strongly emotionally intelligent, if you know the kinds of rhythms and speech patterns, kinds of look and pleasing things.

And at the moment what people want to see, if you are a salesman in that sense, then this is your time.

This is your time. I think the people who used to be entertainers, actors, comedians, and let's be honest, shock jocks, they are the opinion shapers of today.

The people who used to be in those roles. And I think it's because we live in a particular time and we are under a particular set of circumstances.

It's not just one thing. And I want to explore that a little bit today. Why are we in this particular set of circumstances?

And I want to open myself up to you as well. That's why I'm doing a live stream. As I read through my article and maybe expand on some of the ideas in it,

I'm gonna be looking at the comments and seeing if you have any pushback or questions or anything that would be helpful in exploring this further.

Because I do think this is one of the main reasons you see fragmentation happening in the political world.

And right now it's not happening on the right. The left has its own fragmentation and there's some similar things going on there,

I think. But the right is really the one under the spotlight right now, the one that is changing at a very rapid pace.

So that's what we're gonna talk about a little bit today. And the shift from institutional mechanisms that were grounded, supposedly at least, in truth adjudication principles and those standards that used to, at least we thought, we trusted in to convey truth to us and give us well -informed decisions.

Those things have been outpaced and replaced now by well -crafted manicured personalities.

And that's a huge thing. That's not small. And so I wanna talk about it.

That's what we're gonna do on the podcast tonight. So thank you for Bri of the

Leash. Is that how you pronounce it? 15, gonna watch while doing the dishes. All right, well, don't cut yourself.

That's my, I cut myself yesterday. I don't even know how. I was in the bathroom and I had brushed my teeth and I noticed there was always red on my toothbrush.

And I thought, well, what's that? And then I looked at my toothpaste, a little bottle,

I guess, and it had red all over it. And I looked at my thumb and piece of my thumb is gone.

Not to be graphic, sorry, guys. I know some of you don't like talking about blood, but it's just weird.

I don't even know what happened. I don't think what happened to my thumb. Did I touch my razor? I don't know.

So don't cut your thumb if you're doing dishes and you're listening. And I actually just came in.

I should also mention for those who, like the personal aside, I know a few of you do, a few of you don't, but I was outside just now.

We actually have a fresh blanket of snow, the first one of the season, probably about five inches or so outside.

And so I was shoveling and I just came in and I thought, you know, I'll do a little podcast here before I get my supper and all that.

So that's what we're doing today. All right, well, let's talk about the article here.

And if you haven't subscribed on Substack, if you're a, what do they call people on Substack? Substackers? I don't know.

I'm pretty new to this. But if you like Substack, go ahead and subscribe. It is johnharris .substack

.com. That's where you can find it. And the title of this article is When the

Right Rejects Rules, the Collapse of Institutional Trust and Its Consequences. First subtitle,

The Fragmentation of the Right and the Crisis of Truth. Much ink has recently been spilled on the so -called recent split on the right.

Depending on the outlet, this fracturing is framed as MAGA versus America first, or conservatives versus the far right, or institutionalists versus populists, or another competitive effort between two groups with different visions of the good.

I offered my own analysis a few weeks ago and concluded that there is essentially a three -way split between traditional conservatives, classical liberals, and emerging post -liberal dissidents with hybrids in between.

However, it is very important to recognize that this fragmentation concerns far more than teleology.

Teleology is just purpose, the end for which one lives.

These divisions are being driven by a civilizational crisis over epistemology, meaning how do you know truth?

That is appearing in the mainstream for the first time. There were foreshadows of the times we are now in during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential run.

The term fake news was originally a legacy media dig on Donald Trump's supposedly incorrect opinions.

You remember this when fake news first started? I remember it very well, because Donald Trump is now credited with using that term, but it was the media using it against him.

And he would say things like, man, I could go out on whatever street it was in New York City, I could shoot someone on the street, and I'd still win.

And essentially because people liked him so much and they didn't believe the mainstream media. The mainstream media could report something happened and no one would believe him.

And this was the situation, we're talking about a decade ago.

Trump would turn the term back on them for their own hypocrisy. So you're calling me fake news. No, you're fake news.

I remember this press conference. I remember it was clear as day. I loved it. I was working at a furniture repair job.

I was in the Sullivan County, I remember this, in the Catskill Mountains. And I was in the middle of nowhere at this guy's house.

And he had Trump's press conference on. It was on, I think it was on CNN. And Trump is saying to CNN, on CNN, you're fake news.

And I had never seen a president do anything like that. It was just glorious. I thought he's, that's what you gotta do.

You gotta dish it back right to them. They're saying that you're fake news. You turn it right back at them. Tell them they're fake news.

And I remember I was fixing this couch and the guy who was watching it with me, we're both just laughing.

I just met this guy, obviously he was a client, but we're both just loving it. I just thought, this is amazing.

What is gonna happen next, right? George Bush never would have done this. So I remember that they needed to be called out for it.

And he called them out. Milo Yiannopoulos, whom the mainstream media associated with what they called the alt -right remarked, we live in a post -fact era, it is wonderful.

And he was referring to the way the general population no longer trusted the mainstream media to perform even basic fact checks.

It is undoubtedly good that people do not trust legacy outlets that lie and tip the scales toward destructive political ends, but has the right offered any serious alternatives?

This is the most important question right now. And it really is the most important question right now for politically for the right, not the most important question in the grand scheme of things, obviously.

Where you go when you die, that's more important. There's a lot of questions more important, but for the purposes of this article, for the purposes of the political position the right is in right now, this is a very important question.

And it's not just in the realm of journalism, it's also in the realm of education, in the different fields in education, history.

Does the right have institutions that we trust to correctly give us the true story, right?

People are watching Ken Burns' American Revolution documentary, which I have not seen. And they're walking away with different opinions of it, mostly positive from what

I understand. I know there's a lot of critiques on Twitter among right -wingers, but Ken Burns has this very legendary, almost mythic kind of aura about him.

And it goes back, I think, to his Civil War documentary series that was so popular and just the

Ashokan Farewell kind of melodrama in the background. And how did he use pictures and music to make us feel like we were there?

I mean, he does a decent job of storytelling in that way, but he is definitely slanted left. Anyway, that's a trusted personality, but he's got institutions behind him.

He has PBS behind him. I think that's where it aired, if I'm not mistaken. He has all sorts of educational institutions.

I mean, he makes the rounds. He's on tour, basically. We have, I don't know how many universities that crank out left -leaning historical propaganda that we just trust, well, we used to, that it gives us something true, right?

I mean, there's a peer review process. And if you know what you're looking for, if you're trained in that kind of field, then you do actually know how to weed through that stuff.

And you can find the good field research. I mean, you probably can do that with any field if you are a good researcher or at least know the field decent enough, right?

You could do that probably with psychology, even though it's built on so many faulty foundations. If you know what you're looking for, you can probably find here's the study they did, here's what it revealed, that kind of thing.

Anyway, the right has to be able to have counter institutions if they can't take back the legacy institutions that once belonged to them or were supposedly neutral that don't belong to them anymore because the left runs the table.

They own entertainment, they own education, they own journalism, they own all of it. If the right can't do that, they can't form new institutions, they can't give you an alternative, then nature abhors a vacuum.

People who have conservative instincts and people who just don't want the left, we'll put it that way, people who don't want what the left is selling are going to find each other.

They are going to find some way of encouraging each other, reinforcing each other's beliefs, rallying around something, finding leadership, hierarchy is inevitable.

You're going to have it. Even in an egalitarian place like the internet, which is extremely egalitarian, Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it,

Facebook, these places are places that anyone can post anything. And with X in particular, you can actually access people who are high level.

So it's extremely egalitarian the way that the whole format is set up. But even in a realm like that, a hierarchy inevitably forms, right?

Some people recognize it, some people don't. So for example, let me give you just a quick example on X. If you ratio someone, right?

This is considered a sort of a conquering thing. You are, how embarrassing for them, how great for you if you're the one that's benefiting from it.

And if you do it more and you really use controversies to your advantage, you can level up. Now, especially elites, not everyone is going to look at that favorably.

Not everyone takes that seriously. Not everyone thinks, I mean, it's X, right? This is X, it's not a serious platform.

It's an egalitarian platform where anyone can spout anything. And if the crowd could be wrong, right? Especially the more elite you are, probably the more you think, oh, the crowd could be wrong.

Who cares if I was ratioed? I mean, truth is truth, right? I mean, I have a, I don't wanna say I'm an elitist, but I have some of this in me where I'm like, and I think maybe living through the woke stuff made me this way too.

I mean, I remember there was a time, there was actually a few times when I was pretty alone.

Like no one would defend me. I was going after the social justice guys and they're trying to say, I'm this racist,

I'm this quote unquote neo -Confederate. I just, I want these racist statues up.

And it was like looking around, there was like no one to defend me, right? There was, it felt pretty lonely, but I knew

I was right. I knew that what I was saying was true. I knew where my obligations lay and I knew

I cared about the people, including my own ancestors more in this audience than I did the people who were from larger platforms trying to besmirch me and that kind of thing, right?

So I think when you live through those kinds of things, hopefully that does a work on you and you realize, okay, the crowd's not always right, but that is the mechanism in an egalitarian environment where mass democracy is the flavor of the hour that you start seeing new hierarchies form.

They are formed on the basis of popularity contests. And of course, if you are in charge of the levers on a place like X, I'm just using

X as one example. I know X is only like 8 % of social media bandwidth online, but the other ones have their own unique ways of approaching this, but X is the one

I'm probably now more familiar with. You end up becoming, if you're popular in that way, a leader, a thought leader, whatever.

People pay attention to what you're saying. Nature abhors a vacuum, there's gonna be hierarchy. And the question is how responsible is that hierarchy?

If you have journalism, which is supposed to give you truth, it's supposed to at least inform you about things that you should know, then is it doing so responsibly?

Are you actually getting what you need to know to make good decisions, even if it's to steward your vote well? And the right hasn't been able to do this.

They've done a few things, there's been attempts, but to take back what they've lost has been exceedingly difficult.

So here's what I read. I said, like other cable news networks, Fox News tends to appeal to older viewers as their commercial content demonstrates, like, you know, hair loss stuff and AARP stuff, right?

These are the commercials that, at least you used to see on Fox. I haven't watched Fox in a while. After the network called the 2020 election for Biden and dismissed their top host,

Tucker Carlson, its reputation suffered among more conservative viewers who were more skeptical of its commitment to honesty.

So Fox News took a hit and I remember this. They were already taking some hits, but then in 2020, that was kind of it.

If you were a Trump supporter, I still remember they immediately, before I think even the other mainstream networks announced

Biden's the winner, we call the election. And then after that, it was like a cone of silence.

You weren't allowed to challenge it on their network. And Trump was basically blacklisted.

They didn't talk about Trump. GOP's moving on, Trump is old. Now, Trump had such immense popularity, he was bigger than Fox, you know?

He was able to come back and kind of make Fox have to go along with him. That's my perception of it, at least, from where I was sitting.

And this also helped other organizations. Immediately, it helped OAN. OAN got in trouble because then they were kicked off of the

Dish network, but it helped Newsmax to some extent. And most of all, it helped personalities.

It helped people who were willing in that moment to say, you know what? I don't think Trump necessarily lost.

There's still questions about this. Or, you know, I think that the COVID narrative, this is all the same year, right?

The COVID narrative doesn't make any sense. I think the

BLM stuff doesn't make any sense, right? All of these things converged at one time. And you also had the

Me Too stuff running in the background and the hardcore LGBT stuff to the point that you had men in women's sports.

And I think it just created this environment where there was a few people, whether they saw an opportunity, some of them could have been opportunists, or they were real brave truth -tellers.

They said, you know what? Not going along with that. And I've pointed out before, that's something to actually to look for.

That doesn't mean that someone's 100 % right on everything, but that you do wanna see that if someone's a real truth -teller.

I'm more skeptical of the people who later, like end of 2021, 2022, sometimes 2023, now they're starting to say the things that their truth -tellers were saying in 2020.

Now, if you're preaching and you've got a mask on and your congregation's not present or they're all social distanced or something,

I don't know. If you're kowtowing to all the government narrative on this, you shut down your church and you're a pastor, and then years later, you're gonna make out like you were one of the ones who was brave in that moment, right?

You weren't, obviously you weren't. You just, you can see where the winds have shifted. But there were people who genuinely were brave, and I think they gained credibility during that time.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Anyway, Fox News was a legacy media company.

They lost, and legacy meaning they're only, what are they, like 30 years old? I mean, they're not that old,

Fox News. Not even 30, I don't think. But after that election, that hurt them.

And then the other most prominent company that I know of is The Daily Wire, and they're only about 10 years old. And they have actual reporters in addition to their opinion shows, but they are also increasingly viewed with suspicion for being too pro -Israel, for letting go of some of their most popular personalities.

And as traditional Christians and paleo -conservatives like myself, as we probably would feel,

Fox News is not exactly our jam. Neither is Ben Shapiro's social libertarianism, right?

I've critiqued Ben Shapiro in the past, things like supportive gay marriage, or at least a libertarian perspective on it.

He wouldn't say he supports it, but he wants the government out of it, that kind of thing. Which effectively means that the same -sex wedding ceremonies don't hurt his marriage.

I don't know if he'd still say that, but that's where his social policies at least would align.

And it's not my jam, all right, whatever. But what I can say about both those institutions is they were actual institutions that at least, and still are, that are at least supposed to have field reporters.

They're supposed to have the things that accompany a journalistic enterprise. And this is not something that you automatically have with a personality, even myself, which

I'll talk about in a moment. So to provide an alternative requires several elements than a simple talk show host is not incentivized to offer.

And I phrased that purposely. Like a talk show host can offer some of these things, but they're not incentivized to. Like I have no one to answer to other than those who support me, right, financially.

I mean, at least I could be that way. I mean, I listen to people who are around me. I do have wise voices that I'll talk to. So I choose to do that, but I don't have to.

I'm not incentivized to do that. They must abide by the rules of the discipline if you're gonna offer an alternative, including measures to prevent bribery.

So I was just with someone recently who came from an organization, a publishing company. I was not allowed to give them a book.

I was not allowed to pay for a meal. It's bribery, potentially. These are the kinds of standards that used to exist.

They still do in legacy institutions. So that's one thing. Primary source research, that's important.

You're not quoting Wikipedia. You're not quoting Grok. You're not, if you're putting out a finished product that is meant to be true, that people can hang their hat on.

They're making their lives, they're staking their lives on this. You aren't going to secondary sources.

Or at least if you are, you let people know that, right? That's, I think, part of it. And I'm talking specifically about journalism here.

Objective reporting. So if it benefits the party that you are against, then you still got to report it.

And a peer review process, most importantly. So this is where awards and things like that come in.

It's also where you can be fired from an organization, stripped of your license, because you engaged in something that was unethical.

There was a conflict of interest. I mean, I didn't even say that, but that's another portion of this. That's all out the window with personalities who are just talking heads online without any institution, no even pretense of having any of these kinds of rules in place.

So these are the factors that ought to produce institutional respectability. But guess what? Unfortunately, a large portion of the political right is now inoculated, not only against legacy institutions, but also against the very rules those institutions fail to uphold.

If slogans such as fair and balanced or democracy dies in darkness meant to convey illegitimacy merely serve to cover for illegitimacy, then perhaps the rules these institutions claim to follow contributed to their failure.

They created a false sense of security that their work was accurate when in reality, they were patting each other on the back in pursuit of access and prestige.

And I know many of you feel that way because it's true. Many of these institutions failed you and they failed me.

They failed the American people because they claimed to be one thing and they did another.

They said that they were not biased, that they were just after the truth, that they cared about you. But in reality, none of that was true.

And that's something I think we're still dealing with. And we haven't figured out a way around it.

Institutions now, I think by nature are not trusted. If you're an institution, if there's too many people working there, you're not trusted.

Someone pointed this out who wasn't me, but I thought it was a really good point that in the war, if you wanna call it that, the whole kerfuffle between Stephen Crowder and the

Daily Wire, when the CEO of the Daily Wire made a response video and he's in this state -of -the -art media organization and he's doing these

Jeremy Razors ads that are just high budget and they're meant to look gaudy.

He's sending a signal that we're elites now. We have resources.

We're in this strata. We have institutional respectability. That's not the style right now.

Institutional respectability is not the style. And that's a problem.

We have to figure, because we're in a knee counter institutions. How do we form institutions if you have a population that is inoculated against institutions?

And they're inoculated against the standards those institutions represent because it's like the kid who grows up in a home where the parents said we're

Christians and then live like the devil. He's gonna walk away, but he's not just gonna walk away from his parents.

He's gonna walk away from Christianity oftentimes because those standards didn't seem to work.

And there's something similar going on here. The standards are fine. Standards are good.

We actually need many of these standards, but because people who said they upheld them, abused them, didn't live by them, were hypocrites, there's a large portion of the right that I think just doesn't want anything to do with any of it.

And they're more willing to trust a talking head who has good intuitions, or at least they look like they do.

It's imaging. It's an emotional kind of reaction they give.

I mean, I was talking to someone the other day who was just very suspicious about a number of things that I thought, why are you suspicious of this?

Like everything's a conspiracy. And none of it was rooted in any research.

None of it was, and research isn't watching a documentary on YouTube, right? Like actual sitting down, getting into the actual sources.

None of it was that. It was just, well, don't you think the government lies to you? That's all you need, right?

You don't think the government tells the truth, right? So, well, the government definitely is capable of lying and they're incentivized to if it benefits them.

Okay. I can see that there's a lot of evil people in government. So it's like, I mean,

I guess you're right. There's certainly reasons for government agencies to say things that aren't true, but that doesn't prove that what they're saying is not true, right?

Or it doesn't, sometimes the government is even mixed in with the media organizations as if they're all in cahoots, right?

Then the media, the mainstream media has been very critical of Israel for years. And the government, at least in Republican administrations,

I would say even Democrats, Democrats and Republicans have both been fairly pro -Israel, but I would say

Republican administrations the last few years have been more pro -Israel, like Donald Trump moving the embassy to Jerusalem, that kind of thing.

And there's this perception though, that a very popular perception, though they're just like all in cahoots.

They're all in the cahoots is they're all pro -Israel, right? Which is like bonkers to me. I'm like, have you read what the mainstream media says about what's going on in Palestine?

So I just use that as one example to say, they're not always in cahoots.

There are times the stars align. There are times it's like COVID. There are times, but these are also people at the end of the day that are in charge of organizations that have jealousies.

Remember your biblical anthropology that want to outpace and throw people under the bus and climb ladders.

And that's the negative end of it. There's also people who do genuinely care about trying to produce a good product and give you the truth and conduct their job well.

And it's hard to sometimes tell the difference between those things when you don't know the people, but that's the nature of navigating life in a fallen world.

And it always has been, but especially when virtue is on the descent and Christianity is fading and rules are not followed as much, of course, that's gonna be more and more of a concern and there's gonna be more of a crisis over it.

You read something or listen to something, you may not be able to trust it unless you can actually sit down and do the research.

Because before you might have a legacy institution that you trusted, because they would have negative repercussions against them if they reported something that wasn't true.

And the more journalists got away with not having repercussions, the more people saw that and said,

I can't trust what they say. So that's kind of the front end of all this.

That's the problem, that's the situation we're in. So I write about revolutionary voices in the market for sensationalism, because there is a market, there's a truth market right now.

And especially since there's a void that I just described and who's gonna fill it. Add to this the fact that younger millennials in Gen Z are primed for revolutionary solutions through their own dilemmas.

And we arrive at the current situation in which often erratic personalities claiming to be on their own quest for truth are able to connect with younger audiences as one of their own.

They present themselves as victims of the same systems and as people able to call foul on the standards of older generations who drove the cultural car into a ditch.

I have noted this in the way younger right -leaning Christians have increasingly adopted sexually perverse language and profanity, but it appears in many other arenas as well.

Professional degrees and certifications are becoming meaningless. Financial affluence makes one suspect, not successful as Tucker Carlson recently discovered when he reacted angrily to a student who suggested he was worth $50 million.

Tucker could have said, I'm rich, so what? That's not what happened though.

That was a bad thing to be rich, right? We're getting to this moment where it's like really bad to be rich. It's really bad to have the success.

I mean, and I'll just be honest here. Yes, we've lived through DEI, but even living through DEI and as bad as that's been, it has not determined everyone's outcome.

There are genuinely impressive people who because they were so impressive in their fields, they were able to get jobs in universities and think tanks on the basis of that.

Because at some point, these universities and think tanks do have somewhat of an incentive to have an excellent product at the end of the day, even if they're shooting themselves in the foot with these

DEI policies. Like I know some people at Harvard who are actually pretty conservative, white guys who recently had gone to Ivy League schools.

It does happen. And I think there's sort of this black pilled perception that like the game was so rigged, no one could ever get through it.

Well, that's not true. The game has definitely been rigged, but it's not like none of these places had, like there was no one who got through who had actual excellence.

There still are people who are impressive. There still are people who have excellence. The trusted brand no longer wears expensive suits in the state of the art studios though, or collects professional awards from recognized institutions and no longer must answer to peers, face ostracism from polite society for unethical shortcuts or explain itself to a chief executive.

It is now found in independent voices that can vindicate popular sentiment through curated images and entertaining often edgy drama.

The comedians, shock jocks and self -styled edgelords of yesterday are the opinion shapers of today.

The market now demands the transgressive, the juvenile and the amusing over the responsible, the mature and the professional.

Obviously, if this continues, it represents the demise of all standards and excellence. Candace Owens now hosts the largest podcast in the world.

Now, let me just stop there for a minute before I get onto Candace Owens. I remember millennials, people were concerned about them maybe 15 years ago because so many of them were going to Jon Stewart and Comedy Central for their politics.

And I remember articles that written about this thing. This isn't good. Those guys are making jokes. You shouldn't be going to like Saturday Night Live to figure out what's going on in the world that so many people do.

Well, that is accelerated times 10 with the internet. There are so many people who they don't even read anything news related.

They just watch people making fun of it. If that's all they might see. And that is what forms their opinion and they vote and they vote.

And so entertainment is a big thing. And I think Candace Owens at the end of the day, I do believe she's an entertainer.

Now I watched her from a distance. I don't follow Candace Owens. Like I don't listen to her show.

I've just been aware of her because I'm aware of politics. And I've seen interviews with her and seen clips of her and those kinds of things.

Well, Candace, I've never, man, how do I say this? I have never considered her intellectually a very impressive person.

I will say this though. I have respected in the past, her determination to go against the crowd at times, especially in the black community.

I've respected the fact that she appears to be brave. Now, I don't know if this is a counterfeit virtue at times. I'd like to think that there's some actual bravery there, but I haven't thought of her as a deep political thinker.

I think she's fairly good at communication, at least on a high school level.

That's I think where she's at as far as like the communication level. I'm not saying she's at a high school level in her own mental process, but the kinds of words she uses, the vocabulary, it's aimed at a very popular level and that's fine.

Not my thing, but Candace Owens has now the largest podcast in the entire world.

That says something. Her message is that we are being lied to by virtually everyone, which may be true, but her escape hatch from this epistemological prison seems to be her own intuition, not a process of adjudication that journalists used to represent.

For example, and I give just a few examples here. I could have given more, but these are just things I felt the most secure about giving with the limited time

I have to dig into all her claims. She claims that Scottish right Freemasons founded the

United States based on her conversations with Catholic priests and Nicholas Hager's 2016 book, The Secret Founding of America, where the author posits that even concepts like federalism were taken from old

Freemasonry by the founding fathers for the purpose of establishing the new world order. Now it is true that we have been lied to, our leaders have failed and many of our institutions cannot be trusted.

However, that does not mean Scottish right Masonry, which had hardly any influence in the

United States until after the ratification of the constitution is where things went wrong. And in fact, the whole like 33 degree

Mason thing, that was in 1801, I believe in South Carolina that that even emerged.

It didn't get popular until like the 1820s or 30s. It was not a force to be reckoned with in this country.

Certainly it was not something that was influencing the founders in a significant way for the crafting of the constitution.

So it's just factually wrong. You can fact check her on this, but fact checker remember what Milo Yiannopoulos said that we're in a post fact era.

So I guess it depends on who's doing the fact checking, right? If it's some other personality you trust, then you have a dilemma, but if it's a institution that's doing the fact checking, you don't need to listen to them because they have bad motives, right?

They're on the wrong side of the friend enemy distinction or something like that. It is true that we've been lied to our leaders have failed and many of our institutions cannot be trusted.

That is true, right? I wanna emphasize that. Yet most people are not going, they're not gonna fact check

Candace on free Masonry, especially if they've already moved on to following her shifting insinuations about who killed

Charlie Kirk or questioning whether the United States even went to the moon or suggesting that Jewish bloodlines rule the world, even though they cannot seem to de -platform the world's largest podcast, which is hers.

I just saw something yesterday that she's, cause I can't avoid the clips, you know, and that's all

I saw. So, but it seemed to me that she's now, maybe not now, but a few days ago, she was using the

FBI as a, and the White House as a positive source. Like ask the

FBI, ask the White House. They know that there's a hit against me from the

Macron's in France. They're aware of this. And I was just thinking, I was like, wasn't the FBI just like a few weeks ago, wasn't she saying that you can't trust their narrative?

Well, now she's justifying her narrative, a new narrative about a new potential assassination based upon what the

FBI knows. And I thought, this is so weird. This seems contradictory to me, but I think that's where she's at. And I think if you're listening to it, there's an entertainment factor here.

There's a feeling of camaraderie with the hosts, which is natural to some extent.

I know people feel that with me at times, that they know me. And it's like, I don't, I can't see you out there.

I can see comments and things like that, but you're hearing my voice. There's an intimacy there, a closeness that you feel because my microphone is only a few inches from my mouth.

And that's what's going into your ear as if you're only a few inches from where I'm sitting. So I understand that.

But the attachments to Candace Owens, I think are more emotionally driven.

I think they're very much about questioning the prevailing narratives and the legacy institutions that are no longer trusted.

And she's perceived as on the other side, fighting those things, fighting these forces that we're all against.

And so she must be trusted in the minds of some, at least. And I just don't think that's the way you do this.

That's my point. I don't think, you don't just operate based on simply an intuition based on emotional response to something.

You do have to actually examine some of the claims. And if you examine enough claims and find out that this person actually is doing their homework and they have a process of adjudicating these things, it builds trust.

But if the more they fail at claims, and especially if they fail to own it when they're called on the carpet for it, that's a problem.

That's a big problem, right? If they double down on ridiculousness, right?

If they, and there's plenty of things with Candace that I could point to that are along these lines.

Like I think she was pranked not too long ago talking about an address. I think it was in Delaware or something that was tied to Charlie Kirk's assassination.

It turns out to be where her lawyer has an office. And it's like, but then when she's called on the carpet for it, she doubles down on it.

And it was a tip, it was an anonymous tip that she received probably from someone joking. I mean, that would be,

I suppose, I can't prove that either. So I don't know, maybe her lawyer's office is where, right next to it or something was where this whole thing's coordinated.

I mean, what are the chances of that? It's just very unlikely. But yeah, things like though we doing a whole episode on, we never met, went to the moon and that kind of thing.

It's like, if you start looking into that in any kind of detail, you'll find there are tens of thousands of people involved in that operation.

To keep that silent would have been crazy. You'd have all these guys going to their deaths without these astronauts, without ever leaking anything.

You have the Soviets who were against us trying to find an angle to prove that we were faking it.

You have, I mean, there's just, there's so many things, right? Like the fact that, oh, look at the flag, all the things that are used, like the flags waving.

It's like, well, they had, they literally had like a wire basically on the flag.

This show's not about the moon, but just go with me for a second here, to hold the flag up so it would appear like you could actually see it, right?

Because if a flag is hanging down, you don't see it. So, no, it wasn't waving. It's, there's just, there's so much misinformation about this.

You can still, with high powered satellite telescopes from other nations as well, see exactly where the footprints were, where the whole landing happened.

The evidence for it is still there. There are reflecting, I don't know, what do you, mirrors basically that were left there that we still use to bounce things off of the moon.

I mean, it's like, but you're gonna just say that, no, it didn't happen. It didn't happen. Nobody believed the government, right?

This is the kind of thing that, I don't know the right survives if enough of us commit the epistemological suicide and just say, you know what?

I'm gonna believe what seems to be convenient for my outlook and it supports the conclusions

I want rather than going with what is actually true and admitting sometimes you don't know.

And that's what we have to do at times. There's times, there's things I don't know that people are very adamant about that I don't,

I can't weigh in very well because sometimes even if you try to weigh in and you start doing the research, you find out this is an incomplete picture.

I don't know what to tell you. And I think it takes a humble person to do that. And we have to be able to do that.

When we don't know, we don't know. All right. So I'm probably getting a lot of comments right now but I'm gonna keep going and talk about Gasset and Le Bon.

Gasset and Le Bon, because I think they offer a window into what's happening. Why is this sensational content attractive?

Two books that a century ago at least partially predicted the world we live in and now offer some answers. In Jose Ortega, Gasset's 1930 work,

The Revolt of the Masses, the philosopher envisions a future Europe shaped by mass man who prizes averageness and harbors an empty negative attitude towards the liberal world he inherits.

Even while feeling entitled to its blessings which he takes for granted. Even experts join in this mass man posture for they are often little more than specialists who behave ignorantly toward anything outside their narrow field of knowledge.

Gasset wrote, a characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups traditionally selective of the mass and the vulgar.

Thus in the intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo -intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable and by their very mental texture disqualified.

Now, he's not talking about masses in the sense of just like a mass of like people.

Like, so he's not saying that you get enough people together or sometimes people would say like the middle classes.

Like this is not a class thing of like the majority of people occupied this particular economic bracket.

And so he's talking about the mass of people in there. That's not what he's saying. What he's saying is there's mass man is a kind of man.

It's a particular way of thinking that even someone who is in an elite field could have because elites now are specialists.

Think of a neurosurgeon who only knows neurosurgery but they're going to vote on politics and the art critics and these kinds of things when they don't know anything about that.

And because they're hyper -specialized. So they can even participate in this mass man kind of spirit.

And the mass man spirit is very anti -elite essentially. It's conforming.

It is against the, even sometimes in the name of hierarchy it is against hierarchies.

It is the conditions under which a dictator often forms and you get authoritarian governments because they have lost trust in the institutions that were supposed to guide them and help them and that kind of thing.

And so they ripped down, not just the institutions but the standards those institutions represent. And that's basically what we're living in.

Now he's talking about Europe. And I think this has been delayed in coming to America but it's certainly here.

These conditions, he says, actually, sorry, let me rewind. In pre -modern times,

Gasset explains the vulgar operated by beliefs, traditions, experiences, proverbs and mental habits, but it never imagined itself in possession of theoretical opinions on what things are or ought to be, for example on politics or literature.

Yet now they have decided to consider a bankrupt as bankrupt, that system of standards which

European civilization implies though they are incapable of creating others and do not know what to do. So they're ripping down all the standards because they're like, well, these must have failed us.

These conditions led to a situation where the citizen no longer feels any respect for his state as represented in parliaments or for the standards that were supposed to uphold them as courtesy, truthfulness and respect or esteem for superior individuals.

Gasset saw both Bolshevism and fascism as modern retroaggressions that promise salvation in the type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.

This is the new thing, the right not to be reasonable the reason of unreason, which

I see now a lot. It's like, if you question something, it's the immediate response is, well, what side are you on?

Like, it's like, okay, I don't know. Like, I'm just, are we allowed to be self -critical at all?

Where are the lines here? Well, everything becomes a friend's enemy thing.

There really is obviously a component of friends and enemies or enemies who want to rip down your civilization.

But if you platform stupidity, you're going to have a much rougher time at deflecting against those enemies, right?

So this is an attempt to prevent those who are the least qualified from gaining the access to the higher echelons of power.

You say predicted the rise of totalitarianism as the state absorbed the influence of every social institution. He also saw a future

Europe consolidated by market forces. Think about it this way. You have all the institutions fail you.

So I don't like my life. Things aren't going the way they should be. I was told, you know, something would, it would be different.

You're going to look for the strong man to come in and kind of clean up everything. And what mechanism does that person have available to him?

The state, the state's the only mechanism that has the force and can impose itself on all the others.

Yet his solutions are lacking. The word reads as if liberal democracy, sorry, the work reads this way that our scientific experiment in industrialism will simply bring about this brave new world of ignorant masses, superficial personalities and a lacking foundation.

So it's kind of a dismal read. It's like, well, this is just kind of the way it is. When I hear someone say that Nick Fuentes is brilliant simply because he does not use filler words or has a good memory,

I think of Gasset. How does one begin to critique someone who operates according to his own rules, which may shift with the occasion?

This does not mean that everything Fuentes, Owens or other personalities say is untrue. It means that the basis upon which we evaluate their claims, whether they align with our friend enemy bias, push a perceived

Overton window, appear convincing or enjoy popularity has become unstable. And I don't want people to mishear me on this.

I'm saying, I'm not saying that someone like a Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes don't ever say truth.

What I'm saying is if the way that you determine whether or not they're telling you truth is based on shallow things like, well, they're popular, right?

Look at all the people, they can't all be wrong, right? Or, well, they're against an enemy that I have, or I don't know, some of the other things

I mentioned there. That is a problem. That's outsourcing the, what that's doing basically is that is taking the mechanisms that normally have traditionally provided us with truth or at least a basis upon which to make decisions in a manner that is responsible.

We've cast it all aside. And now we're just saying, I'm just gonna follow that guy. I think there is something unique to the human spirit in this.

Like I've been pondering this. I'm like, does everything just break down to this eventually anyway? I mean, I understand there's like unique conditions because of technology and that kind of thing and mass democracy and liberalism.

But I mean, people tend to follow charismatic leaders, right?

This is in religion, this is in politics. And in fact, Christians themselves follow a person who says he's the truth.

I think a cult is a competitor to that where you have someone who says,

I am now the truth. And they put themselves in the seat of God. When Jesus said he's the truth, he's essentially saying he's

God. He's essentially saying that he is the standard.

All other standards emanate from him. All are the right standards at least. So we do have a person, we do have a creator.

That's because something has to be sourced somewhere, right? There's gonna be a personality behind it when you trace it all back.

But who are you gonna put in that chair, in that throne? That's the question. And I think the creator has given us tools on this earth by which to judge, adjudicate, things that he gave us through natural revelation, many of which are just common sense things, but to try to approach a problem, safeguard against error.

Anyway, this is where Gustave Le Bon's 1895 book, The Crowd, comes in. Le Bon allegedly had an influence on both high -ranking

Nazi officials and American advertisers. He observed that reason and arguments are incapable of combating certain words and formulas since crowds think in grandiose and vague images filled with emotional sentiment and religious devotion.

In other words, actual truth is not part of the value system mass is thinking. Therefore, whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master.

Whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. Individuals, people in a crowd operate with anonymity, that's interesting, and a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.

The French Revolution was one of Le Bon's chief examples of this dynamic where the great popular leaders were those whose intelligence has been the most restricted.

He says some very similar things to the previous work we were talking about from Gasset.

He's talking about something that applies to marketing and to political situations, but you can arise, you can come to a point in your civilization where people's educations are dumbed down, and this is

Le Bon's critique, this is what he thinks is going on. They're not, they can think of self -interest, but they're not educated enough, basically, like to make the decisions that they're being asked to make.

And so mass democracy is a problem in this kind of a sphere. You gotta have an educated class to be able to make responsible decisions if you're gonna have that mechanism.

It doesn't work when it's a bunch of ignorant people, essentially, and they can operate with impunity.

They can be a mass. In a crowd, you lose your individuality. And so, I mean,

I see this on social media, like you will say things under the cloak of anonymity you would never say to someone's face, right?

And is that healthy? It's definitely not healthy. It's definitely not good. Le Bon attributed these revolutionary conditions to the death of civilization, though.

He stated, after having exerted its creative action, time begins that work of destruction from which neither gods nor men escape.

Having reached a certain level of strength and complexity, civilization ceases to grow, and having ceased to grow, it is condemned to a speedy decline.

The hour of its old age has struck. But he does say, if there's any solution to this, it's gonna be getting out of these odious textbooks, basically getting rid of the education that is indoctrinating and is putting people in a position of responsibility they're not equipped for, and putting them back in the fields, giving them trades.

I think Mike Rowe would appreciate that. Give them actual hands -on experience. Let them figure things out from actual hands -on experience, because that's gonna be a better way to educate them than the abstractions of fantasy land, which is oftentimes what happens in education.

When it loses touch with reality. So he thought this would shield people from this charismatic kind of cult -like leader.

It would shield people from just going along with the crowd and not questioning. So to draw some conclusions, what they witnessed taking shape in Europe is now unfolding in the

United States. Those societies were lost because of the demise of Christianity.

That's what I believe. They just continue to cycle through revolutionary arrangements that are secular, whether it's fascism or socialism or communism.

And their utopian prophets have all been wrong. Paradise remains unrealized. And there's really not a lot of hope right now for Europe.

Fascism might be the most tempting thing for Europe, but it's like there doesn't, without a telos, without a purpose for the people, without a religious basis upon which the people find themselves a bedrock of truth and morality and significance,

I just don't see how Europe recovers. Islam is filling that void, and that's the future of Europe if things aren't reversed.

So I reflect on all of this at the end. I try to give a little bit of a white pill here, and I say, look, my concern is the

United States more than Europe. It's not like I'm not concerned about Europe. Just for the purposes of this article, I'm concerned about the

United States. And I think we have a little bit more of a Christian influence. It's waning, though, and we gotta secure it.

And so we need to find our purpose in that. It's not about spreading democracy.

It's not about spreading equality. We should be about spreading Christianity. And our professional standards need to reflect

Christianity. They need to be grounded and morally distilled through our unique traditions.

And those things are eroding, but we have to shore them up. And in the place of the new class of leaders, in place of the old institutions, we need to find people who are actually trustworthy.

Because I think the people that are off in platforms now just have little sense of being able to rebuild anything.

They can give you a show that's entertaining, but what about rebuilding the civilization that you've lost? So we ought to reinforce the valuable standards we've inherited rather than discarding them along with the institutions that failed to uphold them.

We ought to prioritize the education of our children so that they can think independently and resist the pull of mob mentality.

We ought to support efforts to build institutions and platforms that prioritize the accuracy. It's one of the reasons

I founded TruthScript. TruthScript, we'd love to take your donations if you have them.

I mean, I think it's Giving Tuesday, right? So it's 501C3 and it's, you know, there is a board, there is our mechanisms for this.

We do have editors. So we're trying to do this kind of thing. We must not look to leaders with virtue, we must look to leaders rather with virtue, even if they are not as popular.

Above all, we must look to God. The philosopher focused on grand narratives.

The historian, in contrast, looks at specific events and individuals. We need to look at both. We need to see where the patterns are heading, where the trends are leading, and at the same time, see ourselves as playing an important role because God put us here for the times in which we live because the future is not written except in the mind of God.

And he put us here for a reason. He will judge us in the life to come. The bottom line is the political right is splitting for multiple reasons, but the abandonment of traditional standards rooted in a once Christian civilization is one of them.

And I reflect on this. I say, look, this whole like Christ is king stuff. If you really mean

Christ is king, that's a really good thing. Even if it comes out of the mouth of someone who doesn't believe that, I still endorse the message of Christ is king.

But the problem I see is, I think many who are using this are using it like Navajo Go shirts.

It's, or sorry, Lakota Go shirts. And it's like, this is going to be the thing that helps us get out of here.

This is like a call to what we used to represent, what used to guide us. And if we're not actually following Christ though, the slogan will not save because it's empty.

And Jesus himself talked about those who honor him with his lips, but their hearts are far from him. So above all,

I think we have to get back to God. That's exactly where our efforts should be.

The true God of the Bible, Jesus Christ. So that's some reflections that I have on this whole split.

And there are additional reflections to just the vision of the good that I shared with you a few weeks ago. So I will take some questions if anyone has them, and then we'll end the podcast.

Data Zero says, is there a difference in teleology or epistemology between you writing articles in your personal sub -stack versus posting articles on TruthScript?

Some articles make it to TruthScript, some don't. So there may be some articles that are going to show up on TruthScript that aren't on my sub -stack.

Sub -stack is just another outlet I'm using. Sub Visual says, remember when they rolled out a hundred percent partisan shill disinformation experts?

Yes, I do. They still do that kind of thing. Bible Researcher says, he's not a

Christian, so shouldn't we expect him to have other views? I don't know what we're talking about here. Is this

Chris Stierwalt? Okay. Was fired for calling AZ for Biden too early in 2020?

Okay, so I guess maybe a defensive Fox News here. I don't know. People who aren't

Christians should still operate according to the laws of the creator that put them in this world. They're accountable to him.

Now, it doesn't mean that they're going to do so perfectly or know them perfectly or certainly know special revelation God has given.

But I do, like I said, I think it baked into the fabric of reality or certain common sense things that God has put on this planet.

And an astute observer can even tell something just about human nature from experience, from reading history and those kinds of things.

So I think that you can find truth in people who are not Christians who are doing a job. I mean, for example, I mean, you go to a doctor, do you question whether he's a

Christian or not? Is he operating by laws that the Lord has laid down? Hopefully, yes. But if that person is a

Christian and is following the Lord, you have a greater confidence, I think, in just... At least

I think I do. It doesn't mean that the label Christian is what's gonna make it. I mean, if they're actually following Christ, I know that they're going to have ethical limits and that is going to help me gain more trust, so.

John, you speak against liberalism, yet the left -right dynamic is a liberal framing of politics.

I mean, it goes back to the French parliament, right? I look at it this way.

Left is more egalitarian, right is more hierarchical. You can have revolutionary instincts coming from both,

I suppose. The right, at least in theory, will admit there are hierarchies. Whether, and they could be racial hierarchies too.

I mean, I do... This is where I know there's a debate about is fascism part of the right or the left because they're socialists.

I think the element of the right that they have is they actually do recognize that there are hierarchies in creation.

Now, they don't necessarily always get it right, but I do think that if you're an egalitarian, you are living in a pipe dream.

At least if you recognize hierarchy actually exists, you're gonna get much closer to the world that God has set up.

And the world God set up is a hierarchical world. So I just wrote an article today actually on feminism and patriarchy and paternalism, which hopefully will be released on Thursday.

And so I look forward to talking about that a little bit more. But is that the left -right dynamic a liberal framing of politics?

I don't know. I don't know if I see it that way. I mean, I think that those are the ways that I divided up.

I think that's the way it's traditionally been academically divided up. It is more of a modern phenomenon. The right generally is they're the guardians of tradition and they are against the innovations pushed on them by the egalitarian left, which is fundamentally utopian.

But I think the right can mimic some of these things, especially if they define themselves as against the left and just mirror whatever the left's doing, which is a problem

I'm seeing now more and more. A conservative, I do know this, in the

American left -right spectrum, a conservative and a member of the right have generally been one in the same.

That's changed it now. But a conservative is someone who seeks to conserve the traditions that have mediated the natural order.

And so it's a commitment to the natural order essentially that you see.

So when I say I'm a conservative, that's what I'm talking about. I'm Guardian also asks, is conservatism the right wing or whatever we name our cause defined by institutions?

No, I don't know the institution. It depends what you mean by institutions. Like if you're talking about the institution of marriage and the family and the institution of nationhood and things that are just part and parcel to the created order, then yes, those very much do define being a conservative or right wing.

I mean, you have to defend these kinds of things. If you're talking about institutions that are not fundamental to creation that are manmade, but are made to support institutions that are

God ordained, then I think those things ended up being necessary.

Voluntary associations, for example, will pick up the slack left behind by families that are broken and that kind of thing.

Charitable organizations do the same thing. They provide hierarchies and mechanisms for training and gaining wisdom and learning about life and fulfilling social duties and putting out fires when the house is on fire.

There's all kinds of things like that that I think have a good social function and create a thick society where the government is not going to easily come in and just dictate to individuals.

So that's the advantage of having institutions. Institutions play a good role. Now, if those institutions are all corrupted and they all become essentially outposts of the totalitarian state or something like that, then they're a joke.

But institutions that actually function the way institutions should function on a more localist level that even if they're national or international institutions, they are fulfilling responsibilities and functions that prevent the government from seeing a need and then taking power itself.

That's something conservatives have always been very interested in. Hopefully that answers the question. John, I was corrected about this.

The earth -based telescopes cannot see the lander, let alone footprints. That's why I didn't say earth -based telescopes.

I said, if I did, I was wrong. I shouldn't have said that. I meant telescopes that are in space from even foreign countries.

So comment goes on, those photos are from the orbiter. Right, okay. So, but earth lasers can reflect off a dish placed by astronauts.

Okay, that's exactly what I thought I said. So yes, it's not earth -based telescopes that can see those things. It is telescopes that are already in space in the space station, that kind of thing.

Let's see. Welcome to the machine. What did you dream? It's all right. We told you what to dream. I don't know what that means.

Is that going to haunt me later? What does that mean? All right, Chris Corbett. Sorry about that,

Chris Corbett. Is it Corbet or Corbet? I'm going to say Corbet. You can correct me if I'm wrong here.

When you say you are a paleoconservative, how do you find that? Paleoconservative is basically the way

I just define conservative. It is, paleo means old. So it just contrasts with the neoconservatives.

There's so many people that use the label conservative, but they weren't really conservative. They had more innovative novel ideas.

For example, looking at free market capitalism as a mechanism that you can insert into almost any situation, and it's a miracle drug that will solve it, and you shouldn't limit free market capitalism.

A lot of neoconservatives lean that way, where they really, they're more corporatist sometimes, but there's people who call themselves conservative who are just like very big on things like the free market, and maybe there's some social conservative stuff they bring in with it, but they're thinking in terms of formulas, whereas I think a paleoconservative thinks in terms of experiences and traditions.

So they have the experiment of history to rely on, not the experiment of abstractions in the mind to calculate.

That's the difference. So the free market needs to be limited by certain moral things, like you shouldn't be able to buy and sell for example, children on the free market.

You shouldn't be selling smut on the free market. There are certain drugs that in the social conditions with irresponsible people, it shouldn't be sold, things like that.

And so you put limitations there, whereas that's a violation to some neoconservatives and libertarians, and so they'll call themselves conservatives, but I mean, this is the thing you hear often today, like, well, what does conservatism conserve?

Well, conservatism, it's not really an ism, it's just an instinct. It's a approach, it's a way of thinking.

It's guarding against the innovations of the egalitarian utopian left. And so everything that you still have that makes your society function has been guarded by people who are operating on a conservative instinct, whether or not they had another philosophy also running in the background.

They were trying to preserve something that seemed like it was good, true, valuable, worked, was for the betterment of the people that you love and have responsibility towards.

That's what a conservative does. That's what a conservative is. So the conservative philosophy is very much embodied.

It is something that you study. That's why we're doing this. That's why Friday I'll be giving you the

John Tyler lecture, if you're a patron at least, because it's about conditions that existed with actual people in actual societies, determinations that were made, inheritances that were passed down.

And it's from the experience of history, interacting with human nature that you distill principles.

There are principles, but the universal principles in conservatism are based upon the way that humans act and the way that God set up the world.

And in our particular conservative environment, it's very much based on a biblical assumptions about these things.

And then it's the guide of history and tradition that distill and help apply those things to our life.

And that's why we have things like a second amendment, for example. Not every country has that. We have that because of particular conditions and the duty to defend yourself.

And the fact that we split from a king that was putting troops in people's houses and we wanted to defend against that kind of thing.

So anyway, hopefully that makes sense of it. Let's see, just a few more.

With all the godlessness going on in our government, like Trump lighting a Hindu candle in October, could

America be Sodom 2 .0? Yeah, he did that for Diwali. And I think that's the first time it's been done.

Not a good thing to do, obviously. I don't believe it's a good thing to do. How seriously he took it or people took it,

I don't know. It doesn't seem like they took it that seriously. Thanks, John. I always appreciate your insight and dedication through the decency.

Well, thank you Bassel. And that's about it. All right. Well, I appreciate everyone weighing in today on the podcast,

God bless. And hopefully I'll get out another one later this week. And if you have not yet,

I know I pushed this more than I pushed anything, but check out my sub stack. I don't know, I'm excited because it's new and go check it out.

Johnharris .substack .com. Got a new article drop in on Thursday and you can support me there as well.

In addition to Patreon, if you go to patreon .com forward slash John Harris podcast, that's another way to support me and to get exclusive access to lectures on this and other great conservative books, which is the trail we're forging and we're forging ahead.