A Boomer Gets Redpilled

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I am your host, Jon Paris. We have an important discussion today on redpilling. Some of you who are in the internet discourse, you understand exactly what that is, especially if you're younger.

But if you're a little older and you haven't maybe seen the Matrix movies, which I don't necessarily recommend, or you haven't just been part of the political discourse over the last few years, that may be a new term for you.

But I wanna talk about this a little bit with my guest, and he's actually waiting, if I can push the button.

There we go.

StreamYard's been a little laggy with me today, but Mike D 'Virgilio.

Perfect.

I hope I got your name right. We were practicing this beforehand.

He did well, he did very well.

I live in New York where there's a lot of Italians. Is that where your family's from?

Well, Sicily to Boston and Brooklyn, and then out to the West Coast, and it's a long story,.

But yeah.

Okay, it sounds like my family.

It's like one

Went through Ellis Island, that whole thing.

Side of the country to the other, and all that. But you wrote this book, and of course, you're a graduate of Westminster Seminary, you're a businessman, and an author, and The Way Forward is the name of the book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward.

Going Back, right.

Is the full title, and so before we get into it, where can people find your book if they wanna buy it?

Amazon, Barnes Noble.

Okay.

Going Back to Find the Way Forward, it's there. My website has, which is just myname .com, which I could spell later or whatever.

With the apostrophe?

We talked about that.

Okay, so go to mikedivergilio .com if you wanna get Going Back to Find the Way Forward. I want to just kinda let you talk, because I went through your book, and I was saying this beforehand, but I'll say it for everyone else out there publicly, that what I've noticed over the last few years, really since 2020 especially, is huge shifts happening in the way people think about politics, and the conditions they live in, and as generational things happen, as Gen Z also becomes a voting age, they have their own perspective on what's happening, and it seems to me, and I've talked about this before, but sometimes baby boomers get offended at me for saying this, but I try to do it nicely, that baby boomers grew up in a world that was so different.

I mean, it was literally, it was a different country. When my parents talk about when they were kids, it's hard to even relate sometimes, especially if you're in Gen Z. As a millennial, I at least remember the 90s, but just running around the neighborhood, and it was safe, and schools weren't pushing all the propaganda they're pushing now.

They pushed some propaganda, maybe they didn't realize, but there was prayer in schools. We could talk forever about just the differences, I'm sure, socially speaking, but what I thought was interesting about your book is that you are a baby boomer, and you've kind of made this transition, and I think many baby boomers are making this transition to adapting their political thinking, and it's not just their political thinking, it's more than that, their social paradigm, and Christians included, to suit the situation we're in now, realizing that we don't live in the 1960s and 70s, and we're never getting back to that, and so maybe start with just autobiographically explaining to us the transition that you made in your thinking on politics and social matters, and then why you made that transition.

Why it's a long story, because I became a born, we called it back then, born again Christian in 1978, and found out, I discovered Francis Schaeffer probably a couple years in, and being Italian, my dad was Catholic, Italian, Democrat, and he would never change, and I ended up voting for Jimmy Carter, don't say that to anybody, but I found out with Reagan, I was a conservative, and then I was weaned, and this tells part of the story, politically on the Wall Street Journal editorial page and National Review, and I call it con ink now, as a con, but post-World War II, consensus, conservatism, that was the thing, and I bought it, hook, line, and sinker, but it's interesting because I became politically involved, got disillusioned with, we were in California at the time, but the Republican Party hated social conservatives, look what that's done for them now, and just slowly got disenchanted with the political process, the Republican Party only seemed to lose, progressivism and the statism just got bigger and bigger, and what did the Republicans do?

Then Bush came along and I bought all of that, we bought globalism and the whole thing, free enterprise, you name it, and then 2006, the midterm election, and the Republicans got destroyed, and I was distraught, it was like, nothing changes, so I started an organization called The Culture Project, because Breitbart hadn't come around yet, this idea of politics downstream from culture, so I thought, that's the answer, because we've been on politics for how long?

That hasn't worked, obviously, so it's culture, which of course it is, it's obviously both, and so started that organization, and Herb London, I don't know if you've ever heard of him, but he was the president of the Hudson Institute, in 2009, I was at a trip, I tell this in the book a bit, in New York City, and got a meeting with him at their headquarters, and it's interesting, because I was on the culture kick, and I was being my demonstrative self, and he says, well, politics is pretty important, because it's the distribution of power in a society, and as I say, it wasn't a rebuke, but it was like, oh, very wise man, so it's like my thinking started to, and then Breitbart came, and everybody's like, okay, now it's culture, we really have to fight for the culture, and then Obama, and then Trump, because that's my book, the premise of my book is he kind of broke everything and everyone, and I was no fan, as I explain in the book, at all, I despised Trump, the idea of Trump was distasteful to me, but interestingly enough, my daughter went to Hillsdale College, 2010 to 14, and I became a huge fan of Larry Arnn, and he started the Hillsdale Dialogues with Hugh Hewitt, who is as establishment of conservative as you can find in the universe, but they talked about Trump, 2015, 16, and sort of opened my mind to him, and Larry Arnn especially, I was just like, hmm, okay, maybe I should listen to this guy, and of course, the people who were anti-Trump were so irrational and unhinged, I thought nobody can be that evil, then in February, I got national review since the early 1980s, and they had the anti-Trump issue, and I read some of it, and I was disgusted,.

I was just like, really?

And then fast forward to the, we were in Illinois at the time, to the primary, and Cruz or Trump, and I was really, and my mother-in-law, I called her, and she's Trump, pro-Trump, and she talked me into it, and I guiltily voted for Trump, and my wife voted for Cruz, but then my thinking just started to see what the left was doing, and the media was doing, and how the Republicans were, just went along with it.

There would have been no Trump-Russia collusions if the Republicans didn't hate Trump, and sins of omission, just let it go along. So that was, all that time was opening my eyes more and more, and I was reading different things, and like the idea of free trade, and offshoring all production to China and Asia to save a few cents at Walmart, at one time, I thought that was a good thing.

I'm ashamed to think that. America first, right? Our countrymen first, and so, but then the big thing was COVID, which, you know, you were talking about boomers and re-assessing. I talk about it in the first chapter about my red pill journey, but also liberals, and I distinguish between real liberals who believe in truth, because my second chapter is that's the dividing line in Western culture, it's truth.

If you believe in truth, and we know, you and I, John, that truth is a person, and it's metaphysical, it's not just the way things are, and so liberals, so, we know that now, how many, Naomi Wolf, I saw her become, back to becoming a theist on Steve Bannon's War Room.

Yeah.

You know, the last thing I could imagine happening, and on and on. So that was the thing, so that, so I started questioning every authority, experts, my cousin's a doctor, and he said the first month of COVID, it's a scam.

I said, really? Oh, and he started going against vaccines, and so my whole, just studying and reading about that, and so, and I couldn't look at anything the same way, you know, I mean, I realized too many people become cynics, and everything's a conspiracy, and so I try, you know, try to develop some kind of wisdom that hopefully God's given me, to say, okay, you can't throw out the baby with the bathwater, you know, because the medical industrial complex, big pharma, big food, big agriculture, all of it, you know, it's killing people, and there's not one good Republican, and everything anybody does is, you know, tainted, and so on and so forth, and I mean, I'm rambling a long time, so I don't know if you have any questions or where to go,.

But.

Yeah, yeah, no, I do, I always do, I just don't know what to ask you.

I could not help. Right, no, no, thank you. It's been amazing, you know, I'm 60, I'm gonna be 64 at the end of the month, I'm not really sure how that happened, but God's teaching me, I mean, as I say in the book, I hadn't really, I was going to go to get a PhD, to probably study political philosophy, but since then, I got involved in business, and it was just raising kids, and all that stuff, just, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

And then it was this whole situation that I need to have a Christian biblical philosophy, a political philosophy, it's like, and this book really has helped me, I'm still in the journey. I got this book called The Real Lincoln,.

Because of you.

You know, because I'm really kind of processing Lincoln, and it is, I imagine so, because I've been ambivalent, but, and libertarians despise the guy,.

And I'm like. Yeah, they used to,.

I'm not sure if they still do, I mean, libertarians have gotten so left. They're, see, they seem like a party committed to leftist social issues, and gay rights now, to me.

No, they are. I mean, yeah,.

Who they voted,.

Who they nominated, I mean, really?

Ron Paul's, you know, I don't know where that wing went.

It's gone. Well, they're secularists, and I argue in the book against secularism, that it's, we're on the other side of it. Secularism is a lie. The myth of neutrality is a lie, that somehow we can have this naked public square, where we all get along, around the wedding table, and we all have our little religious positions, and then we'll kind of debate, and see which one wins,.

And whatever,.

And it's just garbage.

That was a very transitory moment, I think, and you happened to live through it, as someone who's a baby boomer. You grew up in a world, where it seemed like that could be possible,.

Especially,.

I don't know if you grew up in California,.

That's where I'm from.

I did, LA, yeah.

I say,.

Because my parents grew up probably, very close to where you were.

I mean,.

They were in like, Van Nuys, Panorama City.

Yeah, I was in the San Gabriel Valley, so that's the valley.

Right,.

And they grew up in a world, and they still have fond stories about it, and it seems like,.

Oh, it was just awesome.

It's an amazing world. It seems like it was the high point of America, almost, you know?

Well, you know,.

California was, my grandfather, Sicily, to Boston, 27, he moves to Montebello, which is outside of LA, and it was just,.

Nothing, you know?

And it was the golden state, right? Everybody came. In the 60s, I was born in 60, you know,.

It was just,.

It was awesome, and I grew up,.

You know,.

As a teenager in the 70s, and it was rock and roll, and it was just beautiful.

I loved it,.

And they,.

Have so destroyed my home state, that is,.

Oh,.

It's just depressing.

Yeah, you probably don't like going back. That's what my parents.

Yeah, everybody, well, a lot of my relatives have moved out.

Yeah.

My mother's 91. She and my sister, and her husband moved to Phoenix recently, just to get out, because it's just bad, you know?

But it seemed like, especially there, but, you know, not just there, the whole country, you could, multiculturalism worked,.

You know?

You had people that, generally, seemed to respect our values, believed in God, celebrated our holidays, participated in our national pastimes,.

And.

Well, Aaron Redd calls that a positive world,.

Right?

It's a Christianity, it's a good thing, right? And those traditions, even if you were Jewish, or whatever, agnostic, you still do.

Yeah, and you were expected to speak English, and, you know, this stuff went without saying,.

And,.

And of course, we had the Soviets, you had the Cold War, to just, juxtapose what America was,.

And,.

And now, it seems like that has all totally come undone, and people are going back to what, seems to be actually, in some ways, more natural, as far as, as larger groups, especially in California, as larger groups of people, that share more in common with each other, move in, to that state, they tend to conglomerate together,.

And,.

Seek their own self-interest, over the interests of the state. There's that participatory spirit, that you probably remember in the 60s, being more prevalent, just isn't there.

And,.

What I find with a lot of people around your age, is they, seem to think, that the institutions can still be trusted, that the medical establishment, the education, the government, even to a certain,.

You know,.

Sense, in a certain sense, is still seeking our good, and wants to do the right thing, even though there's people, that have their strong disagreements, but they're all on the same team, which is Team USA.

And what we really need to do, is just replace the people, who are overseeing these things, because the mechanisms aren't the problem. In fact, if we had the right people in charge, we could probably get back to, prayer in school, because,.

You know,.

We'll find these little things that, make us think that that's the key,.

You know,.

That unlocks every door. Prayer in school would unlock every door, not realizing the actual conditions, in our, in our schools, and in the medical establishment, and everywhere, and the quality's gone down.

I mean,.

I live in a, kind of a sleepy town, someone would say, apple orchard country here in New York right now. And my local school had a controversy, a scandal really last year, where in the gym, apparently, you know, I don't know all the details, because a lot of this is hidden, and there's controversies, but a lot of the parents are saying, that people at the school knew,.

That,.

In the locker rooms, kids were being essentially raped, and by, gang raped, by people on the sports teams, and that this was a common thing, and it came out, because one

Small town New York.

Yeah,.

Small town in New York, one kid squealed about it, and then it became a huge thing, but the school was trying to protect itself,.

And, you know,.

This really only got local, I think it was in a local paper once, that there was a meeting about it,.

And,.

But my only point is to say that, the schools are in shambles,.

You know?

Right.

The local school actually, is the one that came over down the street from my house, to paint a mural, about our local area,.

Right?

And you would think, I live on the Hudson River, there's apple orchards,.

And,.

They put all this homosexual stuff, there's two lesbians, it's a farmer with a rainbow flag, on his chest.

See the beauty of your story, even that, proves the premise, that I argue in the book, that secularism, we're on the other side of secularism, which has basically become a new paganism, and you can't, secularism is a lie, and as I, there was a bumper sticker, I saw, in church some years ago, that said, an empire built on lies cannot stand,.

And,.

The doomers as I call them, the people who are just, negative about, oh it's all going to hell in a handbasket, and hope Jesus comes back tomorrow, or whatever.

No,.

No,.

This is, as bad, as it is,.

Is, it's good, because,.

So I'm slowly reading through Isaiah, with John Calvin, and the first six,.

I mean,.

I think I'm in chapter six, and the judgment, that God is threatening them with, because of who they are, and what they're doing, see we tend to think of judgment, as an end in and of itself, that God is just going to crush,.

Gone,.

Put them in prison forever,.

No,.

God's judgment is a mercy, so I see, it's sad, that it's a disaster, and so many have to suffer, but we can't see, we're just human beings, we're sinners,.

Unless,.

This,.

Conflagration of, garbage happens, and that's what's happened, that's to me, why. This is a great, great awakenings happening,.

Well you hit on something, that I've been hearing my whole life, as I have gone to, Christian political events, and so forth is, you will hear over and over, that if we don't repent, God's going to judge us right, as if it's this impending thing,.

Right,.

And we still have the ability,.

If he's not judging us now,.

Yeah we can avoid it somehow, if we just do what they say, which means usually,.

You know,.

Electing the right people,.

Exactly,.

Praying be more spiritually disciplined, and usually we blame ourselves, it's because the church did this or that,.

That we're,.

Well you hear people say, we this, it's like no we don't,.

Yeah right,.

Oh I've realized now,.

How ridiculous that is, it's a you know, we and, but I think the mindset of, your generation, and I'm not saying you, in particular,.

No that's great,.

People in that generation, who still have a memory of this general,.

Christianity,.

Is that, that's really what needs to happen, we just get our act together, as the church, and we do evangelizing, and change hearts and minds, and for the power structure, it's fine. Basically, you could leave that alone, everything is working, as it should, except for the fact, that there's just some evil people in these spots,.

And we need to,.

Just have a revival, so good people can enter these spots, which you know, what's wrong with that, that sounds pretty.

What's so interesting about that, is that, there's some kind of amorphous, kind of if we just, Jesus, I don't know, there's no like plan,.

There's no,.

Okay we need to do X,.

Y,.

And Z.

No, no,.

Give to my organization,.

That's the plan.

Sadly that's true, and so I gotta tell more of the story, because after, so COVID was like boom, so the stolen election, to say it's not stolen,.

Whatever,.

The trick of this, the election of 2020, so Trump loses so to speak, I was depressed, as I've ever been, I was just like, they won, this is over, America is done, I was just so depressed, and it was a week or two later, I found Steve Bannon's War Room on YouTube, and I knew Bannon somewhat, you know, from the administration, and Breitbart or whatever, and so as I say, he got me out of the fetal position, and to mix metaphors, he talked me off the ledge, and I actually, after watching him for a little bit, I had some hope, and so because his mantra is, we have agency, we can change things, we're made in God's image, of course we can, I used to mock the, because of my, I believe my eschatology, which I talk about in the book some, I believed that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, Satan down here wins, we lose, but of course we live forever and happily ever, and that's awesome, but I didn't realize how much that affected how I interpret everything, and here's Bannon, who's a Catholic, Irish Catholic agency, you can change things, and I used to mock the idea that I could change the world, because I've always been very idealistic, that's why the culture project, I can still change the world, and then I read, oh I'm forgetting it right now, but to change the world, by a sociologist from Virginia, James Davison Hunter, and he didn't believe that clearly, he saw faithful presence, you just hang out, be a Christian in whatever environment you are, and what,.

What,.

Do something right, but then slowly I became Amil, in my eschatological perspective, which seemed to turn me more negative, because there's just nothing you can do about this,.

You know just be faithful,.

And do what you can do, and preach the gospel, and then Bannon, it's just so bizarre, God has a sense of humor, and his other mantra is action,.

Action, action,.

We must do something, and his program is basically a platform, for people all over the country, lots of Christians, we got to get involved, we got to do something,.

Local, local, local, local,.

The precinct project, so we're involved in our local Republican party here, my wife and I, so he really did, and so after J6, I was depressed again, and you know. Bohm just, and we can do this, we can, and then I see the whole red pilling, wake of the, I own awakening of so many people, especially left liberals, and so on and so forth,.

And,.

Yeah,.

But I had, so I'm going to start writing this book, because it's positive, I tell my wife,.

I should,.

I have this idea about Trump, and this book, and awakening, and she goes write it, because I had another book in my mind, so,.

It was, tell me a little,.

Oh go ahead,.

Sorry, I don't,.

Okay,.

I'm sorry,.

Because,.

But I had no theological framework for my optimism, and I've got to figure this out, so I thought it was God's revelation in creation, which it is in a way, but in August of 22, I became post millennial, in my theological perspective, I mean it was a total shock to me, it's dropped out of my head, on my head out of the sky, and it's like,.

Ah,.

Christ is at the right hand of the father, ruling now,.

Okay,.

So I wanted to tell you this specifically, then I'm going to let you talk, if everyone says Ephesians six, even Naomi Wolf, Wolf said, that some guy at this, medical freedom conference, she asked him, why are you positive,.

And you know,.

He goes Ephesians six,.

So what's that mean,.

And he talks about a spiritual battle, and slowly she came to believe in God again, because there's evil,.

Right,.

But nobody talks about Ephesians six, in light of the context of Ephesians one, Christ ascended, he is now the king of kings, over all authority,.

All rules,.

All power, any name that can be named, he's over it now, so you can't look at Ephesians six in isolation, outside of Ephesians one, and that's why we can have confidence of victory, because Jesus is pushing back the fall, and the curse as far as it's found, joy to the world, as far as the curse is found, as far as the curse is found, so that's, that put it all together for me, and then I just.

Let me ask you, so I wanna, I have a lot of questions, I wanna start with the red pill analogy though, and for those who don't know that essentially, it comes from the matrix right, but it's this idea that there, you can have the truth, or you can decide to be asleep and live the lie, the red pill is the truth, so when you get red pill, that's when things,.

You know you're,.

You see things clearly for what they are.

When you,.

You talk about this in your own life, that you were red pilled, that you saw things for what they were, and that changed how you thought, how you lived, what your strategy was, what was the moment, or was there a moment, you talked about a few things, that made you see things for what they were, and then you know, what were things, what was reality when you realized, you know what lies had you believed before then?

Oh my gosh. Well, because it was political initially,.

Most all right,.

That, it just,.

It started to make sense to me, the whole idea of con ink, that conservatism, and you know I've learned so much since then, it's insane, that I call conservatism liberalism in a skirt now, because the post World War II, consensus, was Buckley, National Review, and this kind of idea of putting together, merging libertarianism, and basically it's liberalism,.

Right?

Classical liberalism,.

Whatever you want to call it.

Fusionism I think is what they call it.

Fusionism is the word,.

Exactly.

And so, that was, to break out of that, and realize I'd been scammed, all these years, and I don't mean they intended to scam us.

Right.

But maybe there were some, but I don't want to be that cynical, because I think that's a sin, but that was huge for me, because it's like,.

Okay,.

Now what? And that's why now I'm a, what am I? I'm a populist, I'm a populist, nationalist, Christian conservative. So, Ben is a populist nationalist, and I know what conservatives think of populism, and how much they despise it, because they're globalist, they're elitist, they're top down.

Not really,.

I think, yeah.

Clyde Wilson I think made, he had the sort of seminal essay on populism in the 70s, and points out that populism in the United States has always been from the right. It's always been a conservative instinct against.

What did you call?

Who was that again? I just want to hear.

Dr. Clyde Wilson.

Clyde Wilson.

He wrote an essay in the 70s about populism. I can't remember the title of the essay, but it's considered one of those great essays on political thought, and he's a historian, but he makes the point that,.

Yeah,.

You can go on, probably Google and type in Clyde Wilson populism, but he makes the point that in the United States,.

It's always,.

Whether it's Andrew Jackson opposing the federal, the bank, the National Bank, or whether it's even like the Shays' Rebellion, and some of this stuff,.

We don't,.

Might not even necessarily like all of.

Sure, sure.

Some of the speedy characters that get caught up in these things, but it's always been the know nothing party, the sort of the concern over a Catholic in the presidency, and there's moments where a sort of, you don't know where it came from, but a wellspring of popular opinion, all of a sudden ascends to get really upset about something.

And usually it's because it's all, I think Clyde Wilson points out, it's always because the left is foisting some innovation on the people and they don't want it. And so that's a conservative instinct.

When political theorists today seem to think about populism though, they're thinking in terms of socialism, Marxism, European populism. That's my understanding at least, and I'm not a political philosopher by trade at least, but anyway, back to your book though, The Red Pilling.

So it sounds to me, you correct me if I'm wrong, you got to a point where you saw that these abstractions that you had been sold, which would be like, the free market is the participation and that is the highest good.

America's built on an idea.

America's built on an idea of freedom. Yeah, we're really just all deracinated individuals with individual rights, but we don't have obligations to each other. You can do whatever you want with your body.

You can be anything you want to be.

And conservatism basically bought into that.

Diversity is our strength. These are all things that, yeah, and that's what I would say, the conservative, like you say, Buckley National Review, but these guys bought into that. And every talk show host today, pretty much the major ones, at least in conservative media, they parrot all this stuff still.

They're still stuck on this. Eric Erickson, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and all these guys are parroting this stuff that's so innovative, so new.

But see, that's only appealing to a boomer set.

It is, I think it is.

No, it is. There's no doubt about it. But very few, I mean, young people are not, we don't get our, the younger folks don't get their information anymore from the boob tube, AM radio, blah, blah, blah.

So you just can't, that's what, the internet is the Gutenberg press of the 21st century. It is such a blessing. The Rome thought they could snuff out the Reformation and there's no possibility that the globalist elite, whoever they are, Uniparty, could snuff out this populist, nationalist, Christian

Well, it's still in its infancy stage, I think, because most of the podcasters are also, you know, Turning Point USA even, I would say is mostly that still, but I think there's shifts going on, certainly.

Well, and we are, see, we're so, we're building cathedrals we're not gonna live in, right? Yes, that's true. So we have such a narrow, myopic view of this has to happen tomorrow, and if not, everything's gonna, disaster.

But man, we, I look at this as an enlightenment experiment.

And so it started

You keep using that word, and I wanna zoom in on that a little bit, that there's an awakening or an enlightenment or something like that happening. What is the counter narrative then? Because we just described what we view as, or we blame for some of the mishaps over the last decade.