J.D. Vance vs the Proposition Nation

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I did want to give some of my impressions on the RNC and specifically the vice presidential candidates speech and also

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President Trump's speech from last night. I thought President Trump's speech, although it was long, it kept my attention and I was pretty impressed, especially with the beginning of the speech where Donald Trump just seems to be a different person after that incident.

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And why wouldn't he be? I think most people would have a hard time getting back to their normal self after almost dying.

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And to hear Trump multiple times credit God, God's providence even, he used that word with the reason that he's still around is just encouraging.

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And I am praying for President Trump. I hope you're praying for President Trump, that that leads to more, more, well, ultimately that it leads to salvation in Christ.

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I know some of you out there may think that he is a Christian. I'm not sure in the born again sense of the word, an actual

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Christian. I, I haven't seen the evidence for that. I see that there's a respect for Christianity.

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I see that he grew up with a certain cultural Christianity. He talked about his father really respecting

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Billy Graham last night, but Trump hasn't ever really articulated that in terms that would make you think that he actually has a relationship with Christ or has been justified by grace and understands what that means.

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He seems to instead want to tip his hat to Christian morality, at least the morality he grew up with.

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He's done this really his whole entire political career as far as I can tell. And he enjoys the approval of evangelical leaders and evangelical votes.

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And I think as JD Vance said, I think it was yesterday at the RNC that evangelicals have a place at the table.

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And it certainly seems that president Trump agrees with that, but they're certainly not driving the bus. If they were,

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I don't think the platform would have changed the way it did this year on issues like abortion and marriage.

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So Trump is influenced by that. He seems respectful of that.

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He's said a lot of nice things about Franklin Graham, but I would hope that an incident like this would cause him to reflect.

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And it certainly seems like it is and think more about his eternal destiny. And so let's just pray, let's just pray that that is the case.

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And I'm very thankful though, let me tell you, I'm thankful that he's not only okay, but that he has this new outlook, or at least he's developing hopefully a new outlook on life.

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And I think he said at the end of his speech that every life or every moment is what he said is precious and given to us by God.

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And I think he, you could just sense he feels that. And I just, you know,

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I don't really know what else to say that other than it almost brought a tear to my eye at the beginning of the speech.

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It was just so touching and moving to see him up there and to see not the braggadocious

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Trump that you're used to. He just seemed humble. He seemed somewhat,

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I don't know, like he wasn't the same Trump. He was subdued.

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And then somewhere around the halfway mark, I think it's when the chart came up, he showed the chart, same chart that he was looking at before he was, someone attempted to assassinate him of the level of illegal migrants flowing into the country.

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And somewhere in there, the old Trump started to come back, but still I would say somewhat subdued.

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So anyway, that's my thought. I don't really have a lot of other things to say about his speech other than I thought all the points he hit were good.

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Obviously, as a Christian, I think there are deeper moral things that also need to be discussed.

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But he did hit on some of the major issues that are affecting our country. And I would say, and I've said this before,

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I think the migration issue is probably the number one thing, number one issue of this election as far as what the government should do and can do and isn't doing.

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And that will change the character of this country forever. I've even said this to people who are very anti -abortion, as I am, that if you really want to do something on the abortion issue, you have an avenue to do it right now through a federal arrangement, through the states, through local regions.

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And you can get something done under President Trump, much more so than you can under Joe Biden.

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But let me tell you what, if you have four more years of the levels of migration that we are seeing into this country, you won't have that option.

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You just won't. What happened to California will happen to the rest of the country. And I think we're in that process.

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And the question is, does that process stop? Does it end? Are the mass deportations that the

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Republicans are talking about, do they come to fruition? If that happens, we actually can reverse some of the changes that we've seen over the last four years.

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And if you whether you're concerned about the life issue or you're concerned about other moral issues, this will be the thing,

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I think, that guarantees the Democrats get a permanent voter base if Trump loses.

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They will have majorities from here on out. That's really the truth of the matter.

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So just on a practical level, if you care about any of the issues that you care about on the right, that's the main thing you should be concerned about.

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And the integrity of elections is another one, which he did talk about. I was so glad he talked about needing to take measures to ensure the integrity of our elections in the

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United States. So those are just some overall first impressions, I suppose. But I really wanted to talk more about J .D.

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Vance's speech, because I think J .D. Vance said something that is. Well, it's been taboo for quite some time in the

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Republican Party, it's not the kind of language you are used to hearing. In fact, I had many people on X tagging me and saying, is

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J .D. Vance listening to John Harris? And people like Stephen Wolfe, it sounds like the same things they say.

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I haven't heard this from a Republican politician before. And no, you haven't. You haven't heard it probably in a very long time.

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J .D. Vance essentially said that we the United States is more than an idea to people. And although I would prefer he probably just said it's not an idea, it's not what he said certainly was.

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A big shift in direction from what you usually hear, which is America is an idea,

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America is a bundle of propositions, America is equality, America is freedom, America represents freedom to everyone in the world, we need to spread democracy.

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These are the kinds of things you are used to hearing and you didn't hear him as much this year. That is a shift. And I explained in a podcast,

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I would encourage you to go back earlier this week if you haven't seen it, where I talk about the history of the

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Republican Party and their interaction with the religious right. In fact, this was turned into an article along with William Wolfe.

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William Wolfe and I, I guess, co -authored because there was a long Twitter post he made and then there was one

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I made and they got merged into an article. You can go to American Reformer and check that out. But I talked in more detail on this podcast about I think what happened in the early 90s was a deal was cut and throughout the 90s really a deal was cut.

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But most especially in the election of George Bush, there was a deal cut between the religious right, which was a populist movement and the

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Republican establishment. And this really in a concrete form, I think, is seen in what happened between Pat Buchanan and George Bush when evangelicals backed

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George Bush, the establishment figure over Pat Buchanan. And and I write about this.

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I show you exactly what I'm talking about. The Christian Coalition, really the main organization driving that.

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And this meant something, I think, for decades, I think until this convention, it really meant something.

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It meant that Republicans would get the evangelical voter base. It meant that evangelicals would have their talking points at least referenced and they would get to feel good about themselves because they got to sit at the table with the establishment

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Republicans. But what good the question is, did it do the evangelicals and their concerns?

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Not much. It took a populist. It took Donald Trump, who was not a part of that deal,

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I would say, just as Pat Buchanan was not part of that deal, who was a populist as well. It took

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Donald Trump to really put the things in motion that ended

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Roe v. Wade ultimately and give the ability of states today to do things to limit abortion.

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I'm going to have someone on the podcast next week, Josh Turner, who's been arguing on behalf of the state of Idaho and their restricted restriction on abortion, who's been arguing that this is constitutional and this can be repeated in other states.

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So we're going to talk to him and get more details on that. But that's the kind of thing that would not have happened even a few years ago.

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This is a shift. This is a change. So evangelicals have benefited somewhat. But I think the evangelical base has it's still the foundation of the

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Republican Party in many ways, but their influence has shrunk. I think Donald Trump knows that Donald Trump doesn't really come from that world.

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He doesn't see things the same way. He's wrong on some things socially.

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And he wasn't part of that original deal. And so he doesn't really have to abide by it. And the question is, what happens next?

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And that remains to be seen. What is going to happen between evangelicals and populists? Because evangelicals themselves, their instincts are populist, the voters themselves.

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I'm not talking about the institutions, not talking about focus on the family. I'm not talking about the ERLC. I'm not talking about even the

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I mean, I respect a great deal. Probably one of my favorite evangelical right organizations would be the

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American Family Association. But I'm not talking about them either. I don't know that any of these evangelical organizations, although they will have some influence to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the organization,

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I don't know that any of them really was highly influential in previous administrations before the

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Trump administration in getting their agenda through. There are little wins here and there you can look to, but it's really insignificant stuff around the edges.

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They don't have the voice. They didn't have the voice to really do much on the marriage issue. I remember going to a conference in 2021,

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I think it was at the Bible Museum. It was this religious right group, very influential religious right group.

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And I got to sit in on a number of the sessions because I had a friend who was speaking there. And I noticed the shift in the language because throughout the 90s, evangelicals in evangelical right organizations started saying things like family values,

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Judeo -Christian values. They watered it down and it got watered down even more after,

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I don't know, I think 2015, the Obergefell decision. It seems like it's family values you still hear about quite a bit, but there's this shift to,

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I would say, more of an expansive, quote unquote, inclusive.

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You know, we are for like when they talk about the marriage issue, I'll say,

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I remember this at the event, they'll say things like, oh, you know, we are for the integrity of marriage.

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They never flesh out what it means. They never tell you, yeah, there's two guys getting married down the road and that's wrong.

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You don't hear the specifics. It's just that we're for the integrity of marriage or we're for the success of families.

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We want families to thrive. And of course we do. Right. But what does that mean? That can mean all kinds of different things to different people.

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You're not really specifying exactly what you mean. And I think this is the direction that the evangelical right establishment has been going on for quite some time to the point that they just need to be replaced.

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That's my feeling on it. I think that evangelical right establishments, organizations need to be by and large gutted and replaced.

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New leadership needs to come in. That's more unapologetic, hardcore. I think that it's the same thing with the

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Republican Party. It's a swamp. It needs to be replaced. And we are in the beginning of that process of that replacement.

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That's what's happening. Populists have pretty much taken over. You didn't see Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney or, you know, some of the previous influential people like Paul Ryan at the convention.

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And it's simple. The reason they're not there is because they're not really welcome. It's not their convention anymore.

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It's not their people. So who are the evangelicals who will have a seat at the table under a

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Trump and potentially in the future, if things go the way the Republicans want to advance administration?

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That's the question moving forward. That's something you need to pray about. That's something you need to think about. If you are a working class evangelical, these things matter to you.

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Maybe consider running for office. And I'm serious about that. Consider getting involved in politics in the local area.

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See where it takes you. We need more good men of character in these positions. We're lacking that.

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And it's easy to, I think, cast aspersions at Donald Trump. But we ultimately need someone who has the kind of courage he has and more so spiritually speaking in the position that he's in and other positions surrounding him.

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That's what we need. We're just we're lacking it. That's our main problem right now. So consider what you will do with that.

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OK, well, I said that I wanted to talk about the speech by J .D. Vance. That's more the subject of this podcast, because as I said, he talked about America not just being an idea, but a people.

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15:30

Equipping the Persecuted. With that said, I want to play for you this clip from Ben Shapiro, the

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Ben Shapiro show, which I would assume some in this audience probably listen to. I would encourage you not to listen to Ben Shapiro or at least not get your opinions on politics from Ben Shapiro necessarily.

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It doesn't mean all his opinions are bad. Many of them are very good. I used to listen to Ben Shapiro in 2015, 2016, because I thought that he had a lot of good sequences on his show of the news.

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I could get in a very short form the main headlines. And I had to stop, though, because Ben Shapiro is clearly not a traditional conservative.

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He is more of a neoconservative slash libertarian. And I would find 80 percent of the issues

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I would probably agree with him on. But he was so wrong on that 20 percent.

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And I just thought I can't support this guy anymore. And I got to look for alternatives, which I found at this point.

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So that's just my personal advice to those who are listening. You're still listening to Ben Shapiro. Maybe consider finding your source of information from other places.

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Maybe listen to someone like an Aaron McIntyre on The Blaze. I think he's pretty good as far as he's a

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Southern Baptist. And he talks about some of the same issues Ben Shapiro talks about. But from, I think, a more traditional conservative point of view.

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And yeah, I mean, I think Jesse Kelly might be another guy that you could listen to that is much more populous, much more,

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I think, traditional conservative. But I'm about to show you why I say what I just said about Ben Shapiro. And in this clip,

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Ben Shapiro does us the service of also playing for you some clips from the RNC. He talks about a veteran and he shows you the clip saying essentially that we are not just an idea.

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We are a country with actual people. It's the same thing that J .D. Vance says and J .D.

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Vance talks about how people don't actually go to war to fight for ideas. They go to fight for people. They go to fight for the ones they love back home.

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And Ben Shapiro just has a cow over this. And well, here you go. Vance's speech is getting a lot of attention is his point.

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And it was also made by the World War Two veteran who spoke yesterday that America is not just an idea. It's a homeland, which, of course, is absolutely true.

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Here is here is Senator Vance last night. The America is not just an idea.

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It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

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Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our

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American family, we allow them on our terms. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

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And if this movement of ours is going to succeed and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first.

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Now, again, I agree with everything he's saying, I'm just not sure what he's arguing against. Because obviously,

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America is a nation. France is also a nation. Poland is also a nation. And when he says that America is a land.

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Yes, so is literally every other land. That's true. And America happens to be the best land. I mean, it's absolutely incredible.

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It's the best land and it's the best nation. But why? Why? And the answer is the idea that's connected to those things.

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He says that America is not just an idea. And of course, that's true. I think the thing that he's arguing against and here

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I agree with him. I think the thing he's arguing against is this sort of abstracted idea that Joe Biden uses all the time where he says it's not who we are.

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And what he means by that is it's not who the left is. In the attempt to universalize American values in the sense that they can either be exported to Iraq or imported from Guatemala.

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That's silly and it's wrong. And I think that's what he is saying right there. But when he says that people don't fight for ideas, obviously, that's not true.

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That's certainly not true. I mean, I'm sorry. The Cold War was a war of ideas. It turns out it was not just a war of territories.

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Otherwise, it would be like most European wars, which are wars of territory. Turns out that people fight for ideas all the time.

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The idea is connected to the home. That's what America, that's what makes America a nation. And I think that's what he's trying to say.

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I hope that's what he's trying to say, because otherwise I'm not sure what the exact kind of what is he arguing against?

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That that's that's really the question that I'm asking here. And I know there are a lot of people online who are taking like significant pleasure in this particular line, but it's obviously self -evident.

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America is not just an idea. Lots of things are just an idea. Right. Quantum physics is just an idea.

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It's not a nation. It's not a home. And obviously that's true. Obviously, that's true. But the point of the

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American idea is even stated by J .D. Vance there, which is you can join if America were only a nation or if it were only a home, how would you join it?

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Obviously, he thinks you can join it, which means that the idea is very much in contention. If what he means is like baseline patriotism, wave the flag.

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This land matters. It matters where I'm born and where I die. Obviously agree. Obviously agree. I assume that's what he means by that.

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All righty. Meanwhile, so I think the key part of what you heard from Ben Shapiro, it's funny to me, I should say this first.

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It's funny to me that he says what he says, because it shows it. I can't believe he's that dim.

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That's what I can't believe. I really can't because Ben Shapiro, I thought, was more well read. It's just odd to me to hear him confused over this.

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How could J .D. Vance say this? What must he mean? It's a little nebulous. We don't really know.

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We got to try to parse it out. It's obvious what J .D. Vance meant. In fact, before I even analyze

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Ben Shapiro, let me play this for you, OK? This is the intro to the 1607 project, which

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I directed. I made this intro. This whole intro I made. I just took clips from various presidents and other influential people.

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And it's really knocking on the 1619 project. But I'm showing that even the Republican establishment has supported the basic premise of the 1619 project, which is that America is an idea.

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It's an idea we haven't lived up to. Now, many Republicans say, no, we have lived up to it.

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That's what the civil rights movement was. That's the 1776 commission, which honestly, I think is kind of ridiculous.

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And yeah, there's a lot of Republicans. I think Victor Davis Hanson and Claremont guys were involved in that.

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But guys, it's just not true. And both agree. Both agree. America is an idea. One says we've lived up to it.

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One says we haven't lived up to it. That's the major difference between those two projects. But this is what

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I wanted people to understand going into the 1607 project, which if you haven't seen, you need to watch the whole thing.

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We are still looking for people to promote this. If you have a connection to anyone who's got a platform, we're doing interviews.

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We're trying to get the word out there. We are making the case for what J .D. Vance said. But here's the introduction.

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Here's the overwhelming narrative that you hear from both sides of the political aisle that America is an idea.

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All right. Coming up straight ahead. What advice would

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Condoleezza Rice offer? She joins us live next. America is an idea. It is not nationality, religion, ethnicity.

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It's an idea. Human rights invented America. I was was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded explicitly on such an idea.

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This idea that is the United States. We rededicate ourselves to the very idea of America.

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Four years after the invasion of Iraq, 3 ,192 U .S. troops have been killed. Our vision of spreading freedom throughout the greater

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Middle East. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal. America is an idea.

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Folks, America is an idea. Many large entities in the U .S. have taken a stand against transgender inequality.

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University of Pennsylvania swimmer Leah Thomas taking first place. America wasn't founded on a government or a political system.

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America is the only nation founded on an idea. Officials are overwhelmed as thousands of migrants are crossing into the

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U .S. from Texas to California. The May Day march by immigrants demanding a piece of the American dream.

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America is the only country that was founded on the idea of individual rights and liberty that was founded on the idea of God given inalienable rights.

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None of those other European. I mean, these were monarchies. They weren't founded on the idea that every person had equal rights, but we were.

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Black lives matter. Black lives matter. Black lives matter. Black lives matter.

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Black lives matter. Which country do we want to be? Do we want to be the country that begins in 1619 with the practice of slavery?

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Or do we want to be the country that was conceived in 1776 with the ideas of liberty and equality?

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The question I have is how come Ben Shapiro living in this country, commenting on these politics, doesn't see what

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J .D. Vance is talking about? Obviously, this is in the water. It's part and parcel to American politics.

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This notion that America is the shining city, this ideal, this thing that you can import and export and spread.

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And it's kind of it doesn't really have a concrete foundation in anything other than abstractions.

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So you can plant it in the Middle East. It'll grow there. It despite the fact that the culture is very different and hasn't had the generations of development that we have had in an

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Anglo American or an Anglo influenced country. Ben Shapiro should know what's going on.

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He should be familiar with the debates between Harry Jaffa and Mel Bradford. If you don't know,

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Harry Jaffa is, I think, the main one responsible for crafting this Americanist idea. And by the way, the

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Democrats are the bad guys because of their history on the right. This is picked up by Dinesh D'Souza and David Barton and a number of other people of other people who don't seem to see the big picture of history there.

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They follow a, I would say, very narrow line to try to get you from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama or Joe Biden and show you all the bad things the

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Democrats did. And they're the bad guys. And Republicans are good because Republicans have conserved this idea of America.

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You're probably so used to hearing that now that you hear me describing it. You're like, oh, yeah, I've heard that. I hear that all the time. Yeah, you hear it because Ben Shapiro is one of the people who talks about it.

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And so that's why this shouldn't be confusing to Ben Shapiro. He's talking about you, Ben. J .D. Vance is talking about people like you,

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Ben. That's why it shouldn't really be confusing. What do you mean, John? Well, I didn't do extensive research on what

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Ben Shapiro said, but I did go to because I read his book years ago, The Right Side of History, which the name of that should imply to you that Ben Shapiro believes there that this right side of history, because oftentimes it's one that used it's by the left, but that we are on the side of what?

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Pushing forward equality in some ways. You're on the right side of history. If you're for gay marriage, you're on the right side of history.

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If you support transgender athletes, you're on the right side of history. If you were against all the horrible things of the antiquated past, divine right of kings, arranged marriages, slavery, feudal labor relationships, children working 12 hour shifts.

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The you take whatever you want. Women voting, you know, you're on the right side of history.

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If you picked the more equality side of those debates. Right. The side that's going to and I'm not saying that the side that wanted to end some of these practices was always wrong.

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But the idea, the notion that we have today, this emancipation myth that you're going to hear from the

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Democratic Party of history, I say myth in the sense of like we all need myths, not that it's not true, but that it's following this.

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Well, some of it isn't true, but it's following this trajectory and saying we're on this progressive move upward into greater and greater levels of equality and freedom because we are leaving the past behind with those dark.

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The dark forces of inequality. That's the myth of history that the Democrats push on you.

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The emancipation myth. Now, what you heard from the Republicans last night in Donald Trump's speech was very different. Donald Trump actually gives it's very fascinating.

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If you go back and look at the end of his speech, he talks about the fact that the United States is a country that has the people of which have endured various struggles.

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So from the settlers who came here, the call of the colonizers, if you want to call them that, to those who pushed out

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West, they suffered deprivation, they scaled mountains, they achieved great things. It's this it's a different narrative than the emancipation narrative.

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OK. And for a long time in our country, we didn't really have the emancipation narrative to sustain us or to give us confer us any identity.

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What we had was this this sacrifice narrative that many people who came before us, our forefathers have sacrificed to make

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America what it is. And we should conserve that. That is what you're going to hear on the right. Often, if you're not hearing that,

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I mean, this is sometimes merged with the American is an idea, but I would suggest to you it's somewhat incompatible with the

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America is an idea because this is a very tangible flesh and blood. Our ancestors came here and did this.

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If you came later and your ancestors weren't part of that, there are ways to be assimilated. But don't claim that.

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Don't don't say that your ancestors were necessarily part of that. You need to be it.

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You need to be integrated into our story. And then your children, as in intermarriages and so forth happen, you know, your children are integrated into that story.

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But but this is a story for as the Constitution says, we the people ourselves and our posterity.

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Right. We and those who are coming after us, who are sons and our daughters and their sons and their daughters and their sons and their daughters.

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That's that's every country in the world. OK, that's the foundation of this country. And those who are now living generations later can look back and say, our ancestors really did some amazing things to bring us the benefits that we enjoy.

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And these benefits were not sacrificed by other people's ancestors. And they don't get to enjoy those benefits.

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They didn't put they don't have skin in the game. We we are the ones who determine who is able to benefit from these things and who is not.

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That's the bottom line. If we choose to confer it to some people, then that's our choice.

30:03

But it belongs to us. OK, that that's what you heard from Trump. That's very much, I would say, in keeping with this populist right, populist understanding of history.

30:12

In fact, I just had an article come out yesterday on or today, actually, on TruthScript, where I talk about the movie

30:19

Horizon, Kevin Costner's new movie Horizon. It is very much this. It is that version of history as well.

30:25

It's the it's the inspirational sacrifice, courage and determination and achievement myth of history.

30:34

That you heard Trump say this is very this is different. I think that sometimes I said they're merged, but this is very different than the

30:40

America is an idea narrative. Ben Shapiro very much is an

30:47

America is an idea guy. He's a proposition nation guy. That's who he is. OK, and I know this because I read his book,

30:54

Right Side of History, years ago. Here's a quote from Ben Shapiro. He's speaking to Vox about his book,

31:00

The Right Side of History. And he says there are basically two visions of American history. You ready? One is that America was founded on great moral principles that we failed to live up to historically, and we've been striving to fulfill.

31:12

OK, well, that what is that? I'm not going to tell you yet, but what is that? Think about what

31:18

I just conveyed. Think about the 1619 Project. Does that sound familiar to you? America is founded on great moral principles, but we fail to live up to them.

31:27

It is. It's also, unfortunately, kind of, it's Harry Jaffa's 1776

31:34

Commission. It's the same narrative you're going to hear from those guys, right? OK, so that's one narrative.

31:40

The other is that America is rooted in racism, bigotry, sexism, and homophobia, and that these great moral principles were the founders merely flattering themselves.

31:49

Now, which narrative is that? You might say, wait, that sounds like the 1619 Project. That also sounds like the 1619

31:58

Project, but what the 1619 Project attempts to communicate to you is that we don't have to be that America, right?

32:06

So that there's these two, you know, light and darkness. There's these two sort of versions of America running parallel.

32:15

There's this one that's racism, bigotry, sexism. That's the past, and we're overcoming that.

32:20

We're moving past that, but it still saddles us. It still keeps us back from achieving greater things.

32:26

And then there's the more authentic real America that we have yet to achieve, which is 1776.

32:35

And the 1619 Project, you know, the people behind it pretty much admit this.

32:43

They admit this, that that is what the real America that they're trying to achieve. 1776

32:49

Commission, the conservatives, you quote unquote neoconservatives say, we have achieved it though, right? That's the difference.

32:55

So what is Ben Shapiro saying in this quote? There's two visions of American history. One is the proposition nation, basically.

33:01

And one is that we're terrible. And he says, well, obviously I'm the proposition nation guy.

33:07

And he only gives you two options. That's it, two options. And obviously that's, this is fairly,

33:18

I would say, innovative in the history of mankind. What other country would say this? What other, would

33:23

Germany say this? Would Ecuador say this? Would China say this? Would Russia say this?

33:29

Would any other country say, well, you know, there's two versions of French history. There's the one that were founded on great moral principles.

33:35

And then there's the one that we're terrible. Actually, they probably say like, well, what are you talking about?

33:41

That wouldn't even make sense to them. No, two visions. I mean, there's, we're French. We've had centuries and centuries of interaction and shared experience and law and revolution and war and all kinds of things that have shaped who we are and religion and these things.

34:01

And mostly parents passing on to their children property and certainly ways of living are part of this.

34:11

Ideals can be part of this story, but these are fashioned within a context in which the children then marry within with other children and trust is built along generational lines.

34:22

And you know where the families are. And they would just say, French history is that. French history is our story.

34:28

French history is the, it's the experiences we've shared. We're proud of it. This is who we are. Bring it down to the family level.

34:33

Would you say of a family? Well, there's two versions of the Johnson family. There's one that they are founded on great moral principles.

34:40

And then there's this other version that they're kind of crummy. You'd say, what are you talking about? You know, maybe they are crummy, but the

34:45

Johnson family, you know, pick your name out of the hat. That doesn't get at who they are.

34:51

The Johnson family is a family that has, it has a mother and a father, and they've had a lot of shared experience with each other.

34:59

And then their traditions and their experience and their ways of living were passed down to the children and cultivated within a home.

35:07

There's a place where this happens and there's certain things they ate from the surrounding area. There's food that they enjoy, cuisine, and there's music and entertainment and leisure that they enjoy.

35:18

And there's, they worship at this church and they, that's what you would say, that's the Johnson family.

35:23

I know them. I know them when I see them. I don't have to give you a bullet point list. That's who they are. And this is how they look.

35:30

They got the glasses and the freckles and the, you know, that's the Johnson family. Like you wouldn't say, you wouldn't turn that into, it's an ideal, it's an ideal, right?

35:37

So I don't want to belabor the point. There's another long quote though. This is from the Right Side of History. I thought this was a particular telling quote.

35:44

It spans two pages. So I'm gonna probably summarize it, but he talks about Ben Shapiro, guys like Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, and Vox Day.

35:54

And he says, they're a group of racists who have sought to promote white pride. And they use IQ data to explain racial disparities while claiming that the roots of Western civilization lie not in ideas, but in race.

36:04

And so what Ben Shapiro does is he uses this as his straw man. He continues to argue in his book that these guys are your alternative.

36:14

If you don't embrace the proposition nation, then you just believe everything reduces down to IQ, that IQ determines everything, which of course we all know that's not true.

36:23

IQ does not determine everything. It's not an explainer for every reality we have around us.

36:30

But that's an easy straw man, I would say, to punch and knock down in favor of your idea.

36:37

And so Ben Shapiro's idea is that that's fringy, but he said, this is interesting.

36:43

He goes, tribal identity is alive and well. So now he shifts it to tribal identity, which

36:48

I used to hear this all the time from big evangelical names. I heard this at seminary quite a bit, that tribalism is our problem.

36:55

This tribalism, having an in -group preference is what they're talking about. Believing that your group, that you should sacrifice for your group, that you should take ownership of your group, have obligations towards your group.

37:06

That's tribal identity. That's when they talk about it. So Ben Shapiro says, hey, tribal identity is alive and well. Tribal identity though, cannot provide prosperity, but it can provide meaning.

37:15

The problem of course is that tribal identity also tears down the civilization that is granted to us, our freedoms and our rights, our prosperity and our health.

37:22

So he continues to argue that tribal identity is the problem here. That when we have this in -group preference, when we look at, we have an idea in our head that there's us and there's them, that that's a problem.

37:34

Now I would argue to you that that is inescapable. There will always be an us and a them. Even Ben Shapiro has it.

37:39

Ben Shapiro continues to argue that, let's see if I can skip ahead here. He says on page 210 of his book, the fantasy of the new humanity promulgated by the left continues to romance us.

37:52

We cycle between attempting to fulfill that dream, suffering for that attempt, abandoning that attempt and taking up the dream again.

37:57

Our only alternative would be to return. So he's saying the left gets in on this identity, politics thing, the rights, they're doing this tribal thing.

38:06

But our alternative would be to return to the Judeo -Christian values and Greek reason that undergirded

38:11

America's founding. It's not enough to make the case for the utility of the enlightenment. The enlightenment was the ground floor of the building, resting on certain foundational ideas and basic premises.

38:23

We must shore up those ideals and premises if we, ideas and premises, if we hope to keep building skyward rather than adding weight to an already shaky superstructure.

38:32

What is Ben Shapiro saying? Or he is saying that the identity of America, the foundation of America, the intrinsically, when you peel back all the onion layers of America and you find the core of its being, what it is, it's enlightenment premises.

38:49

That's what it is, enlightenment premises. And these enlightenment premises, he thinks, come from Judeo -Christian values and Greek reason.

39:00

So those things united to create this amazing hybrid called the enlightenment.

39:05

And the enlightenment is what America really is. And that's going to keep us from this tribalism. And so what would that be?

39:12

That would be things like the individual's freedom and the freedom of the individual to participate in a market and exercise their choice in the most expansive way possible without the government or any other institution telling them that they can't do what they want to do.

39:34

This is the liberal project. This is where liberalism really stems back to, that the problem is people's choices are stifled by mediary institutions and the government and social obligations in some cases.

39:49

And so they need to emancipate themselves from that. And so greater and greater degrees of emancipation from these things, that confers a real identity to humans.

39:58

That's how you're on the right side of history. So Ben Shapiro, what he wants to do is he wants to take the left. The left has this, we're on the right side of history narrative.

40:06

And he wants to say, actually the foundation for the right side of history and greater strides of equality comes from the right.

40:13

It comes from Judeo -Christian principles and Greek reason. He wants to rest it on a different foundation so he can claim it.

40:19

And this is, I think, one of the reasons you find Ben Shapiro supporting in the public sphere.

40:26

Someone called me out on this, by the way, the other day. Someone said, this isn't right, what I'm about to say.

40:32

Ben Shapiro does not support same -sex marriage. And I'm telling you, he does. Yes, he does.

40:38

And I've heard him multiple times do this, where he says that, well, personally, as an

40:44

Orthodox Jewish practitioner, I cannot support this. But publicly, yes. I mean, you should have the choice or the option to marry someone of the same sex.

40:52

That doesn't affect me in my life. That's just about being freedom. I'm libertarian on this. He says this, he said this so many times.

40:59

That's Ben Shapiro, guys. And how is that? I mean, I don't know if Trump uses that same kind of reasoning.

41:06

I think for Trump, it's all more pragmatic. I mean, he's just kind of like reading the winds of change in this country.

41:15

And he's, hey, these guys are gonna support me, sure. I think if the majority didn't feel that way, he probably wouldn't.

41:23

I think Trump's less ideological about these things, is what I'm trying to say. Ben Shapiro is ideological about it.

41:28

He's got a very rigid system that justifies that kind of thing, all right?

41:35

So this is tip of the iceberg with Ben Shapiro. There's been so many things he's said over the years that I'm just like, yeah, that guy's not conservative.

41:42

Maybe he can make someone who's a very dim leftist, not smart college student at one of his events look stupid, which probably isn't that hard to do really.

41:56

And you get a satisfaction from watching that. But I would love to see him with some actual paleo -conservatives or populist figures who know what they're talking about.

42:05

I'd love to see him in a conversation with, I don't know, someone like an

42:11

R .M. MacIntyre or someone like a Carl Benjamin or someone who writes for Chronicles for a living or a

42:19

Chronicles magazine, like a Paul Gottfried. I'd love to see that. Or Don Livingston from Abbeville Institute. It would be fascinating to see him interact with a smart person on the right and talk about their differences.

42:29

I just don't see it happening. I don't think it would probably happen. But that explains why

42:35

Ben Shapiro is the way he is about what J .D. Vance said, what you heard J .D. Vance said, which I think is extremely clear.

42:43

Ben Shapiro said, and this is his basic argument, ideas, America is ideas connected to a home.

42:50

And that's what makes America a nation. That's what he said. It's ideas connected to a home. That's what makes America a nation.

42:56

And he said, well, how else would you join a nation? You can't, you have to be able to join it. So if you can't, if you can join it, then it's gotta be this.

43:04

It's gotta be ideas connected to a home. And that's what makes America a nation. You couldn't say that from any other country in the entire world, just ideas connected to a home.

43:14

So there's a place on a map and there's some ideas on that that live in that place or exist in that place, or the institutions in that place promulgate those ideas.

43:24

And if you come and you promise to continue their promulgation or not to inhibit it, I guess you can become an American.

43:30

That's Ben Shapiro's world. That's Ben Shapiro's United States. That's not any other country in the world. And I would tell you that's not the

43:37

United States either. I think of the United States more as an empire than I do a nation, because I think it has multiple nations in it.

43:42

It's a conglomeration of nations, but the United States is a tangible thing.

43:48

There are founding fathers, fathers in the legitimately real sense of the term, who had children, who had relatives, who had nephews and nieces, who had ancestors of which we are part.

44:02

The minute you start saying that that's racist or that's bigoted, you're just denying reality.

44:07

You're denying centuries of what everyone has always believed up until about five minutes ago. And you're doing it, honestly, on an insane basis.

44:16

You're saying that those connections don't matter. Your lineage doesn't matter because of some abstracted ideas that you can adopt and choose to adopt.

44:26

I'm sorry. Try to look at the family level and see if that's even possible. What if you have a rebellious child?

44:34

Is he no longer part of your family just because he starts doing rebellious things? Now, he may have to be neutralized. He may have to go to prison.

44:40

You may have to discipline him. You may have to shun him in some way. I mean, there may be things you have to do depending on how destructive that person is.

44:46

Do they cease to be your son? They're not an American anymore.

44:52

Well, they may not act like an American. And maybe if you say it that way, it makes sense, I suppose. Hey, he's not an American in the sense that he's not acting that way.

44:58

But on a definitional level, ontologically, if that person has been, they're from here, they've been raised here, their family goes back a long ways, they've sacrificed in our wars, that kind of thing.

45:12

Why not? Why aren't they an American? Even if they disagree with your particular belief. I would say for those who are coming in, for immigrants, whether legal or illegal, it doesn't really matter.

45:23

Those who come into this country are not automatically Americans because they set foot on our soil.

45:29

It's not like you land here on a plane because you had a layover on your way to another country and that automatically makes you an

45:38

American. You have the ideas in your head and you're on the tarmac and that's the place called America. That doesn't make you an

45:43

American. That makes no sense, right? I think what makes you an American is ultimately,

45:50

I mean, we have a process of citizenship and that's assimilation where we're trying to, I guess, make people

45:55

Americans. But I think that process has somewhat failed, to be honest with you. What makes you an American is shared experience over time, integrating yourself into the communities that already exist here.

46:06

If you're from the outside and you're coming in, it takes time to make that happen. You're going to be an outsider.

46:11

In fact, people who come from other countries, I don't care what country you're going to. If I moved to Turkey today, right?

46:17

I would be an outsider my whole life. I would, I could help, even if I believe, let's say all the things the

46:24

Turkish believe and I have Turkish pride and I could do all those things. And there would be, during the course of my life, shared experience built, hopefully.

46:31

And I would start to, people would start to view me with more trust and I would, eventually, as I sacrifice for the country and those kinds of things,

46:42

I would be more and more viewed as one of them. But I would never be totally that because I've had 35 years in this country and my founding, the founding fathers of this country and my ancestry going back a long ways and the experience they had that they passed to me is not

46:58

Turkish. My children, on the other hand, if I married, let's say, I'm being hypothetical, but let's say, you married a

47:04

Turkish woman and you had children in that country and they speak the language and that kind of thing. Well, yeah, they're going to be more

47:12

Turkish than you. And if that process continues and continues, there's a full integration that happens over time.

47:18

I can't ring a bell and tell you exactly when that happens fully. I can tell you, there are people,

47:25

I've told people before in this podcast, I go to a very diverse church. There are people in my church who are first generation from other places, second generation from other places that are very different than the

47:35

United States, speak different languages, all of that. And those people, at least the ones that go to my church, they try very hard to assimilate, to integrate, learn the language, be an

47:47

American. And some of them have done, I think, a fantastic job, a very good job, but it takes hard work.

47:54

It takes time. It takes, and frankly, if you're first or second generation, most of the time, you still have your ancestral homeland in the back of your mind.

48:03

Your children are still going to possibly yearn for that ancestral homeland because that's natural. That's the roots that they've come with.

48:11

And there's no, there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong if your kids are Puerto Rican and they know that they're

48:17

Puerto Rican and they haven't really been to their homeland because that was grandma and grandpa and they're third generation.

48:23

I don't think there's anything wrong. In fact, I would encourage, yeah, they should probably know something about where they came from.

48:29

That's part of the fulfilling, that's a fulfillment of their identity. That's who God created them to be in this tangible world.

48:35

But knowing that as they continue to live in this country, that as they marry within this country and they see their lots and their futures as tied together with the people that live here, that changes.

48:49

That the ties to Puerto Rico, we'll say, are less and less and less.

48:55

And the ties to the United States or their region in the United States are more and more and more. This is common sense.

49:01

This shouldn't really surprise anyone. Anyone who's thinking like, oh, that's just so bigoted or something.

49:06

They're probably practitioners of the proposition nation. They probably think that America is just an idea and it makes no sense.

49:13

You wouldn't say that about families. You wouldn't say that about anything else. These are tangible realities.

49:19

And the fact is, I mean, Ben Shapiro has a really hard time with people going to war for, well, for J .D.

49:28

Vance saying that people go to war not for ideas, but for their people. Ben Shapiro has a hard time with that, but that's the truth.

49:34

You don't go, you can justify the war with whatever language you wanna use. You can say, this is for freedom.

49:39

You can say, we're doing this to spread democracy or whatever you wanna say.

49:45

But the long and short of it is people, I remember 9 -11, why did people join up? I had friends who joined up that were older than me.

49:51

Why? Because they were just attacked and they had a tribalistic mindset,

49:57

Ben. They had an us versus them mindset. That's what made them go to war. That's what made them join up.

50:04

Yes, it was justified by the politicians that this is about freedom and that all of that kind of thing. That's not why they joined up.

50:09

They joined up to defend their families. And that's pretty much the same with every war. It's about your people.

50:14

And once you get there, it's about the guy in the foxhole next to you. Tangible, real people. I'm convinced that's why people do these things.

50:21

You might have armchair generals who aren't sacrificing as much. You have, they have interests in mind that other than that, they want to make things, they wanna line their pockets or spread not just American democracy, but American business.

50:37

They want to create a political arrangement that benefits them or something. I mean, that's certainly, yeah, right.

50:44

But the people who actually fight the wars, that's not why they're going into these things, generally speaking.

50:50

And so, and if they are, we would usually say that that's a bad motivation, right? That we wouldn't look up to that as a good thing.

50:59

So when someone, I'll just wrap it up with this on that point. How can someone be made a part of the

51:06

American nation? Well, first of all, like I said, I think America is an empire. I think it's a lot easier to become part of an empire.

51:11

Think the Roman empire or the USSR. It's a lot easier to become part of that than it is a nation. I think that's why it's so easy for many people.

51:18

Yeah, you can come be a part of America. That's pretty easy. We're so big, we're so diverse. Our human scale is so large anyway.

51:25

So sure, yeah, you could be a first gen, you'd live somewhere else your whole life and come here and be an American in that sense, sure. It's not a very high bar, right?

51:32

So if anyone who quotes John and saying, he doesn't think you could be American until third generation, well, obviously you haven't listened to podcasts because I'm saying you can.

51:39

But the question is, then what about the nations who are here?

51:45

This is why there's such a debate over heritage American or, and there's

51:50

Southern nationalism, which I don't think is as big as it used to be, but there used to be a push for that.

51:56

We're distinct people. You have like black nationalism, like we're distinct people.

52:01

We've been here a long time, but we've kind of been, there's an us versus them. There's a tribalist mindset there. We have these different regions.

52:08

In fact, we have real tangible American nations, especially out West on reservations. In New York, there's actually, or in Florida, the

52:16

Seminoles, they have their own reservations as well. So you actually do have nations within America. Are they not part of America, right?

52:22

So you have these other nations, essentially, sometimes loosely, sometimes broadly, you go to Midwest, there's a lot of Germans and other groups.

52:32

So the question becomes, if you move into one of these communities, how do you become one of them?

52:38

And what I would say to that is this, you start a process. That's what you do. You start a process of becoming part of them.

52:46

It doesn't instantly happen the moment you adopt an idea. It's not, there's not some magic dust you get when you repeat the words,

52:54

I love freedom. I support the constitution, right? That might start a process that eventually lands you and your family in, and you're integrated into, you are

53:07

American. But we gotta get rid of this notion that you're just automatically that. In fact, marrying in is probably, people complain, some people are complaining online about J .D.

53:16

Vance's wife. How can he say this with his wife? Is she second generation? And it's like, well, she did marry into J .D.

53:23

Vance's family, which goes back generations and generations. That is one of the surest ways.

53:28

And your children now are part of that. They have J .D. Vance's influence.

53:34

And I think it especially happens when it's the male in the relationship. I talked to a guy not long ago who the, he has a wife from another country.

53:43

And I asked him about that with his kids. I said, how does, where, how do they feel about that other country and the

53:52

United States? Do they have like a bit of a kinship in both places or what do they think?

53:58

And he's kind of like, I set the tone. They're American, they're Kentuckian, I set the tone.

54:06

And that's how it has to be. And I was like, okay, that's what he said. And I think when you have the father, especially who's in that position, they do, they do set the tone for that.

54:16

This gets into one of the things that MSNBC said, one of the anchors on MSNBC about J .D.

54:21

Vance, which I thought was just rich. So here it is. Kentucky where his seven or six generations of his family are buried.

54:30

And his hope is that his wife and he are eventually laid to rest there and their kids follow them.

54:36

And I sort of understand the idea of sharing the burial plot, but it also is, it reveals someone who believes that the history that the family should inherit and indeed the history that should be determinative in the story of the

54:49

Vance family is the history of the Eastern Kentucky Vances and not the Vances from San Diego, which is where his wife is from and where her

54:57

Indian parents are from. But in America, it doesn't always have to be the white male lineage that trumps, that defines the family history, that that branch of the tree supersedes all else.

55:08

And I just think the construction of this notion reveals a lot about someone who fundamentally believes in the supremacy of whiteness and masculinity.

55:17

And it's couched in a sort of Halcyon, you know, revisitation of his roots, but it is actually really revealing about what he thinks matters and who

55:26

America is. And that America is a place for people with - So what you heard there is a commentator saying that J .D.

55:36

Vance is essentially racist, he's sexist, because he wants his family buried on the plot that his family has been buried on going back six generations.

55:47

And why not his wife's family who come from another country? Well, they don't have six generations in this country.

55:55

It's an obvious answer. They don't have a family grave. Where are they gonna be buried? You gonna ship the bodies to India? I don't know if they even have a cemetery there.

56:04

It's such an insane thing to say that a father wanting that for his children and his family is somehow racist because what about his wife's family who immigrated here?

56:16

That's actually an extremely loving thing for J .D. Vance to do, to say, I'm gonna include you in my family.

56:22

You're part of this story now because you know why? Love, shared love. And this is the bottom line of what

56:28

I don't think Ben Shapiro understands quite and many other neoconservatives. What does it mean to be

56:34

American? It comes down to love. It comes in every country in the world you could really say this to some extent,

56:40

I think. There's a shared, and I'm not just saying being an American, what does it mean to be a true

56:46

American or a true Midwesterner or a true New Yorker or a true, someone who's authentic, right?

56:52

It's someone who loves the place they're in, right? Now you could have someone who grows up and rejects it.

56:58

And I'm not gonna say they're not an American anymore just because they don't like it or something. Maybe they wanna disassociate themselves from the privileges that come with that, and that's fine.

57:07

Let that happen. But someone who likes the smells and the sounds and the pastimes and the cuisine and the language.

57:19

And they like to hear the music and everything that goes along, the fireworks on the 4th of July and the Christmas carols in December.

57:26

And just what they grew up with, that tangible reality of what it means to live in America or certain regions in America.

57:36

I think that that love that you have that is shared with other people who say, we didn't know you growing up.

57:43

We were two neighborhoods over, but we experienced some of those same things and we love it and wanna preserve it too.

57:48

There's a shared kinship, a binding influence that happens there that does not happen with quote unquote propositions.

57:55

It just doesn't. If Ben Shapiro's right, then someone from France or someone from China or someone from Australia, they're going to have the, as long as they value freedom,

58:05

I suppose, they're just as much an American as you are and you can have this binding relationship with it.

58:11

It doesn't work like that. No, it's the things that it's, you know, think

58:16

Americana, you know, whether you're in a city or a country or wherever, that's what binds you together.

58:22

It's those shared things, those shared loves and feeling an obligation to those loves and wanting to fulfill that obligation makes you a good

58:29

American. And that's really all I have to say about that. So I hope that was helpful for you.

58:34

Watch the 1607 Project and please, if you are a man and it's only for men and you want to come to our conference, the

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Fundamentals Conference, it's fundamentalsconference .com, fundamentalsconference .com coming up last weekend of September.