Charles Haywood on No Enemies to the Right, Foundationalism, & other Scary things!

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Hey everyone, welcome once again to the

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Conversations That Matter podcast. I am pleased to have a guest on today that many of you have actually asked me,

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John, can you have this person on? John, check out this video that he did with Tucker Carlson.

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Check out this video or this article that he wrote on No Enemies to the Right and all these different views that are being debated right now.

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His name is Charles Hayward. How are you doing, Charles? I'm doing great and pleased to be here.

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The website, if people want to check out more of your work after this, is theworthyhouse .com.

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You're a businessman. You call yourself an internet scribbler. I called you a political philosopher. What you're doing,

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I think, is fairly interesting to me. I just want to say this before I ask you some questions and we hear from you.

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I've listened to a few of your interviews, Charles. The thing I think that people find endearing about you is that one thing is you don't care about what other people think.

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Am I right? This is true. Okay. You're very honest. You're sometimes maybe blunt, but you say what you think.

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What you say are sometimes things that need to be said that other people, maybe they think them, but they're not going to say them.

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There's a bravery element to this as well. I appreciate that. Let's not overstate that. The reason

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I can say these things is because I'm independently wealthy and don't have any points of vulnerability. Let's not ascribe something to virtue that's more than a circumstance.

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Okay. All right. Well, you're humble too now. All right. I want to start off with a question for you.

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There's so many things I'd love to talk to you about, but the main one, the reason that I initially wanted you on the podcast was my audience,

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I would say, is primarily evangelical Christians. They're conservative, right? They don't like what's happened to their churches, to their country.

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And recently, I would say, what, in the last year, there was an incident that you actually were part of, which

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I thought was interesting. I didn't realize this is how the No Enemies to the Right thing developed, but there was a headmaster at a

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Christian school, Thomas Accord, and he had an alt account, apparently, that he had posted some things on that were considered racially insensitive.

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There were some things I remember I thought were not great about marriage, but it was an anon account that had been exposed.

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And this became a big deal to try to pin him on anyone who had a relationship with him or even associated with him on a podcast or something.

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Rod Dreyer got involved. And you, I didn't realize, you got involved and you just, you don't know anything about this headmaster, but you said

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No Enemies to the Right. And that's where this whole thing... I still don't know anything about this headmaster. I deliberately have made no attempt whatsoever to get any of the details of what

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Dreyer was accusing him because I don't care. It's completely irrelevant what he said.

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And hence my point, No Enemies to the Right, which I'm actually writing a follow -up piece to that.

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A better phrasing might be No Enemies on the Right. That's a technical distinction, but the same basic principle is the one that I was trying to enunciate.

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Okay. And then you had people though, in our circles, I would say, well, in the more conservative religious circles, but evangelical circles in particular, that just,

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I guess, could not abide this. Like people like Neil Shenvey, there's a, there's an account called

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Local Distance. And they started putting out materials basically saying, you're trying to blink, you're trying to wink at Nazis.

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I'm summarizing that we should be fine with Nazis. So is that what you were trying to say to everyone is we should just all be fine with Nazis?

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Well, no. I mean, I mostly don't care about Nazis is,

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I guess, my point. My point is that this, and I wrote a long piece. So I did that thing, I responded, it all started with a throwaway comment on Dreher.

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So Dreher, as usual, was ranting in his kind of impotent fashion, trying to signal to the left that he's one of the good guys and he, you know, he's busy policing the right actively in order to benefit the left.

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And one of the things he was doing was attacking this Accord guy, who's, I think, a schoolteacher at his kid's school, though, of course, had nothing whatsoever to do with his teaching.

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So Raj's claim was not that his children were being mistaught. His claim, though he tried to elide that difference, his claim was that this person is not a good person and I need to tell everybody that to virtue signal and show that I am on the side of advancing the causes of the left, even though I claim to be advancing the causes of the right.

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So I commented on this because I was bored one evening. Who cares, Raj? No enemies to the right, which, of course, is a inversion of the original political philosophy enunciated by Alexander Kerensky in his combats with the

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Bolsheviks in 1916 and 1917. There are important distinctions there, which we probably won't get into here, though, as I say, this piece

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I'm writing does give those distinctions between how that philosophy is applied on the left and on the right.

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My point is that, and I followed this up with a colloquy with Daniel Miller in I Am 1776, the online magazine, enunciating the, wow, like using the word enunciating like three times today.

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I must be, my vocabulary improvement calendar is right there. It must be on it. Anyway, so the core point is that all that matters for the right now, that is the present day right, is defeating the left and these attempts to police the rightward boundaries of the right, which a huge percentage of prominent people on the right or prominent conservatives, a huge percentage of those people spend a huge percentage of their time policing the right.

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A court is just one of innumerable examples, in other words, trying to cancel people who are deemed in their view, which is typically dictated to them by the left as too far to the right.

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So my point is that we should spend no time whatsoever on this. That doesn't mean we necessarily need to spend our time like embracing literal

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Nazis or something like that, or people who we disagree with. We can have disagreements on the right. We can have tactical disagreements.

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We have political disagreements. We can have philosophical disagreements. But those disagreements should not be aired in public, which is done merely to benefit the right and to benefit the individuals supposedly on the right who are, who want to kowtow to the left, should not be done in public and should not be done in a way except with an eye on the prize, shall we say, which is total, permanent, utter defeat of the left.

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And so anything that is done that is not advanced, that goal should not be done. This is just a very practical way of approaching politics.

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That's all I'm hearing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and so there are enormous amount of straw men floating around about this as well as just total ignorance as well as some good pieces.

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And again, this is why I'm writing a follow up piece on it. But this is basically common sense.

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And anyone who attacks it typically doesn't address that point. They try to gussy up their underlying belief.

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And their underlying belief is that I don't care enough about winning. I don't care enough about my principles.

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Instead, I want to continue to allow the left to have total power forever in this country.

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So let me just make it concrete for everyone so everyone understands. If you did have someone, let's say,

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I don't want to say any names, but someone prominent, let's say on the right to, oh, I don't know, a show on Fox News or something, and a video came out and this particular person had said some very racially insensitive thing.

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What would Charles Hayward do about that? What would you would say? Absolutely nothing.

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It would not. Well, I mean, I might want my daughter to marry that person, but I want that person to be like my buddy at the barbecue or I might, frankly,

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I mean, that remains to be determined. You can it's very there's no reason why people with unplatable, unpalatable political views should necessarily not be socially acceptable.

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That's a case by case determination. There's no general rule. Certainly the left makes no such general rule, nor should the right make such a general rule.

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As I've written, I actually wrote a review. My original line of thinking on this was some years ago, actually, in a review of Rod Dreher's Benedict option.

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Now, Dreher has been spending the past year running around lying about me in various forums and then canceling my subscription to his sub stack when

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I commented on it. And so on. But my point was, my point was the that the everybody associates into just taking this into a more directly

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Christian context. People associate with sinners. And as I put it in my Benedict Option review, in fact, it may surprise you to know that I too am a sinner.

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So I'm not saying that the people who sin, for example, racism is not any special sin.

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If it is a sin, it's a merely a variation on the core sin of pride.

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That's all. There's nothing special about racism as an instance of pride as opposed to things that have no racial component to an instance of pride.

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There's nothing particularly heinous about racism at all. That's just the truth from a Christian theological perspective.

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And so it may be the case that I would, in fact, socially associate with such a person that I'm getting sidetracked.

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My point is that if that comes out, I just don't care. If there are things that I can do politically that advance my overall goals with that person that I regard as beneficial, then

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I do those things. And if I didn't, there weren't things that I wouldn't pay any attention to that person at all.

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The end wouldn't think about it again. What about someone like a Lauren Boebert who has a moral failure that's on camera, who's advancing the goals of the right somewhat?

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At least she's stalling the goals of the left. And now there's a dilemma because she doesn't share, at least in one instance, she was a sinner, as you just said, and didn't share

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Christians values. There are Christians calling for her to be, you know, she needs to be primary, she needs to step down, these kinds of things.

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What do you say to that? Well, I have a very dim, I don't really follow retail politics, so I have a very dim view of these, from what little

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I understand of a lot of kind of politicians on the right who adopt, who purport to speak for people on the right, or MAGA, or what have you.

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Because everything I hear about them, they sound like clowns. But my objection to them is that they're clowns, not that they're sinners. And that there's a heavy, it feels like there's a heavy grifter element, that they're not actually fighting for power, but they're attempting to either aggrandize themselves, gain money, what have you, who knows.

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But I don't care at all about these people's sinning, whatever, like Volbert.

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I mean, my objection to her is that she appears to be a clown, not that she appears to be a sinner. I hear you.

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And there are times that, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene, you could put some other senators and congressmen in there, and you have the same analysis.

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I think this has been instinctual for me and for many conservatives for a while, and it's just an understanding of the times we live in.

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Because I would say, I don't know if you've heard this term before, but Dr. Kerry Roberts has used this term.

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He's from Liberty University, the American virtue tradition, which he associates with John Adams. And he says there's three competing traditions in America.

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There's this Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, and then this Adams approach. And the Adams approach, he says,

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I think that's what maybe you're running up against, is this idea that the most important thing is the squeaky cleanness, the character of that individual who's in the public office.

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And so we should look for people with this great character. And that seems to ring true in a way.

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But in a world where there are so few with good character and those rules do not apply to the left, and you are fighting for your very survival in a war, as it seems, it seems like those priorities are second to survival.

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Is that kind of what you're saying? I think that's pretty much exactly what I'm saying. I'll add a few wrinkles here.

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I'm all for virtue. I mean, I like virtue. I try to be virtuous. But more importantly, from a political philosophy perspective, you mentioned political philosophy early, a successful society, which my aim is to recreate a successful society, which is not our society, the ruling class and the society as a whole, but in particular, the ruling class has to be largely virtuous, not 100 % virtuous.

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But you can't run a successful ruling class that is not virtuous. I mean,

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I prefer Christian virtue. There are other types of virtue, obviously, that you can talk about. Pre -Christian virtues are nonetheless virtues in their own frame.

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So I'm all for virtue. But right now, the left has all the power.

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So let's say in the future, the power of the left will be totally broken. And as I like to say, the left will be as discredited as Mithras.

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And people will say, oh, yeah, there used to be like Mithraism and there used to be leftism. And those things were long ago.

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And who really knows about them because they were stupid. And and but at that point, there will, in fact, be enemies on the right.

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I'm willing to cooperate with all sorts of people now, but in terms of forming and running the new post left society, new divisions and existing new divisions will arise and existing divisions will become important again, because there are plenty of people on the right who

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I would not necessarily want to be running the society. So, for example,

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I have no objection whatsoever in the current frame to what may loosely be called the pagan right.

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And I'm friendly with people indirectly like Bronze Age pervert and these kind of Nietzschean.

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But I don't really want to live in a society run by those people. Admittedly, it would probably be better than our current regime, but it wouldn't be the kind of society that I want.

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And so at some point, those people theoretically could become political enemies, and that's something you can you can deal with that.

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This is a present day admonition for political success, for the most important aim, which is breaking the power of the left, not some kind of philosophical determination that there are not theoretically no enemies on the right.

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This is just an aside, I suppose, but on that pagan right now, I don't know a lot of people on the pagan right, but the few

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I have known have been, interestingly, very attracted to Christianity. They they just seem like they they want they don't want the modern era that we're living in and classical liberalism or social justice.

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And so they want an anchor. And the paganism stuff doesn't usually offer that anchor, or at least they don't believe it.

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They don't really believe it. And that's always the problem with modern recreations of supposedly ancient beliefs or doctrines that they're fake.

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I mean, you can't you can't recreate something that is totally unmoored from the society which is developed and say, like,

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I'm a druid now. I mean, it's just dumb. It's like a classic example of this, of course, is Alistair Crowley and his made up Satanism, which is very bad.

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I don't approve of it, but it was also very clownish. And don't get me wrong. I'm sure you can get into some very bad stuff and summon up some very bad things going down that path.

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But it's not real in any kind of meaningful sense. Well, yeah, it has this ancient feel. I live actually in an area.

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I'm close to a college campus and there's a lot of, I don't know, witchcraft associated with it. The town has like two or three witch shops that you drive through.

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Yeah, they have as many witch shops as bars. I mean, it's just like it's weird. But, you know, the students there,

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I think, think that they are finding some kind of an ancient wisdom that has been long forgotten by the modern world.

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And they've got the key and they've got the secret. And of course, is attracting people on both sides. But but anyway,

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I know we're getting out of it's interesting to me, though, getting out of the topic at hand. So all right.

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So no enemies to the right. This is a practical for this time period that we're in right now.

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The situation that's that's what that's about. This isn't about for all time as an ideology that we should apply universally.

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This is just about a particular moment. I think people need to understand that. Yeah. Yeah, that's what you're saying.

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But people, it's easy to understand that. But the various people who spend their time attacking the philosophy or attacking me don't want to understand that they're not interested in understanding it.

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And you can tell that, among other ways, but they're never linked to any of the underlying written pieces on the topic. They offer tendentious lying summaries and straw men.

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And when these things are pointed out to them, they never course correct. So these people are by these people.

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I mean, these various evangelical influences. I'm not evangelical. I'm Eastern Orthodox. So I don't actually know who these people keep cropping up who are apparently famous, who

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I have literally never heard of. But they're clearly not interested in intellectual discussion.

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They're clearly interested in some combination of virtue signaling or signaling to the left that they're not a threat or ensuring that their monetary gravy train keeps going.

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I don't really know what drives these people because I don't understand the underlying dynamics, but they're not interested in in learning or in thinking of, you know, maybe when you come to some conclusion, while this is partially correct or partially incorrect, because I think this and I don't think

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Haywood's right about this or whatever. That's not the discussion that they're having. They set up these these fake arguments and rant about them all the time in a kind of low

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IQ fashion. Well, in the Christian circles, the concern seems to be that we are going to corrupt ourselves, that we're going to allow too many people into our circles, our neat, clean

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Christian circles on the right, that now we're going to have a bunch of the thing,

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I guess my cynical side, you know, being a little bit involved in politics here and there and knowing people very involved is that you guys are already corrupted, like, you know.

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Sure. It's already happened. But but that seems to be the concern you're going to.

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Well, that concern is not expressed precisely in those terms. So that could be an underlying concern.

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But most of the time it's not it's in the the expressions of concern are more tendentious.

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And I mean, you brought this up, too, like, yeah, who's this guy? Vice. He's like a ranting that Haywood likes Lennon, for example.

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And this is somehow weirdly. He stole that from James Lindsay, who's an atheist who somehow weirdly associated with these with these evangelical types in a in a general attack on effectiveness of the right.

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I mean, they all are betas who want to be ineffective. And like the

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Lennon thing was started by by Lindsay, because I've done several. I've reviewed a biography of Lennon.

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I've talked about Lennon and Lennon is a very positive figure in some senses.

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I mean, obviously, and I've made this clear. I mean, Lennon is a very evil figure in many ways. But the fact is, he was an extremely disciplined and effective political organizer who also flipped a coin 20 times in a row and it came up heads every time, which is why he ended up where we remember

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Lennon. But this idea that somehow it's because I make clearly delineated statements about certain sub aspects of Lennon's abilities that are positive, that that somehow that delegitimates the concept of no enemies to the right, because the same person, namely me, is saying these things.

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It just doesn't make any logical sense. No, it's just an attempt to to avoid substantive discussion because these people can't hack it.

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Yeah. I mean, if you go back in history, most things are gray and you'd study people even that are historical villains from our perspective.

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There's going to be admirable traits. Yeah. You find another example of this, too, like Napoleon killed millions of people.

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I mean, admittedly, not like in the modern sense where we nuke nuke cities, but he killed a lot of people basically for personal aggrandizement.

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And we can all agree that killing people for aggrandize self aggrandizement is bad morally.

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But the fact is that Napoleon had a lot of personal virtues and effectiveness at a time when those things were relevant in European history.

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And you have to be able to discuss those things without saying, well, we can't talk about the virtues of someone who also has vices.

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I mean, everybody has virtues and vices. So obviously just a attempt to avoid substantive discussion.

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What about someone like MLK? I'm just throwing this out there because he's lionized in even evangelical circles, even some of the people attacking you have made very positive statements about Martin Luther King, Jr.,

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even though he was a heretic, he was an adulterer. He was, you know, I don't know, all kinds of things that seems to be acceptable.

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And but you can't say anything about an authoritarian. You can't say a Protestant Franco without it's a good example.

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But I mean, it makes Martin Luther King was a scumbag, obviously. But the and for the moment, though, for that time, he actually had kind of probably turned more against MLK in terms of his historical relevance and effectiveness than would in the past.

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But the fact is, that was a troubled time in American history where there were actual injustices going on. And those were probably exaggerated.

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MLK probably had less a less savory role in it than unless he was focused on less savory goals than people say nowadays.

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But the fact is that you can make the argument that he accomplished certain necessary or as part of accomplishing certain necessary changes in American society.

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But that's not the argument that they make, as you say. And again, I don't like pointing out hypocrisy because pointing out hypocrisy is not a self -proving argument.

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And everybody, all the enemies of people on the right are hypocritical and pointing it out has never accomplished anything.

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But it is a good it is a good point in this in this context that that the same people praise someone who is a total scumbag like Martin Luther King.

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And and whereas someone who has a much higher percentage of virtues devices, say

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Francisco Franco, you know, that person is somehow anathema in every way, shape and form.

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And so what seems to have happened is the values of the left or I guess the framing of the left has been imported into the right.

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You had and I think it was in your article on no enemies to the right. The first one in the first paragraph, you talk about what leftism is to you, what you think needs to be defeated.

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You boiled it down to two principles. Could you just let us know the audience what those are? Yes, I did across the back of my mind about 10 minutes ago that that was probably a useful thing to do.

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So thank you for returning to this. Oh, good. Leftism in my definition is, though, to be fair,

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I partially stole most of this from Roger Scruton, is the the persistence of two principles derived from the essence of Enlightenment political thought.

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And the Enlightenment is only a political movement. People try to claim the so -called Enlightenment has like scientific progress.

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Those things have nothing to do with the Enlightenment and long predate the Enlightenment. So Enlightenment political thought focuses around revolves around two core principles.

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And these are the principles of the left, because there's a direct line from the Enlightenment through 1789 to to 2023.

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The first is total emancipation from all bonds not continuously chosen.

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So emancipation, no one is to be is to be hampered from total freedom in any way. And secondarily or second, the total forced egalitarianism, though you can argue these two things are intentional with each other, but that's a separate argument.

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Together, those things are are serve to create a utopia, a heaven on earth.

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And that is the the entirety of left thought. Anyone who says that the left is classical liberalism, which is just a sub branch of this, but it's a disguised sub branch, is just wrong.

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These are the core beliefs of the left. And they are relatively new beliefs, a couple hundred years old.

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And but they animate one hundred percent of left behavior, either directly or indirectly.

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You would you would distinguish that from classical liberalism? I would I would not distinguish. I think classical liberalism is a subset of this.

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Despite that's what I thought. OK, contrary. In fact, I got I had a nice, polite exchange with Yoram Hazony the other day on Twitter.

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And now I've agreed to to review his book, Conservatism. And I intend to use as a platform for discussing why classical liberal liberalism is merely a subset of left poison.

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Yeah, because what the the arguments seem to be between the left and now, I guess the classical liberal right, if you want to call it that is like, well, equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome or something like that.

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But they're still after the same goal. Yes, absolutely. I mean, those things are basically nomenclature designed to hide.

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Now, don't get me wrong. I don't think everyone's being dishonest. I think there are people who think that, well, I can have my cake and eat it, too.

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I can have a subset of left doctrine without ultimately being swallowed whole by the parade of horrors that we see unfolding before us in the present day.

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But they're wrong. So, I mean, without giving a drawn out history lesson, I think people are probably curious how we got here, especially in the most religious right kind of conservative circles, importing these these standards from the left that we don't find these in our

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Bibles. Right. We don't find these in our historic Christian doctrines or traditions. But somehow we've all we defend them now.

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I don't say mean we as in me, myself or you or anyone, but we in Christendom, these things are defended as if they are cardinal doctrines and those who deviate our heretics.

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I just find that weird and interesting. Well, I'm not an expert on the history, particularly of religion in in America, but I do know a fair bit of history.

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And I think the the sad thing about America and I mean, this is slightly different in the West, more broadly, like England and Europe.

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But we'll leave those aside. It goes back to what you talked about, the American founding with virtue politics,

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Hamiltonian, Jeffersonianism, the sad irony is that the American founding was functionally informed by the

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Enlightenment, but it didn't appear to be in its extreme forms or didn't appear to have suffered the same defects because of the unique virtue of the society of the time.

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So basically, America has spent much of its history eating the seed corn of that virtue, much of which is based upon its religious underpinning and thereby sequentially revealing the underlying poison of the

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Enlightenment. And this accelerated, of course, at the beginning of the 20th century with Woodrow Wilson and the progressives bringing in things that were explicitly anti -religious, that is, sometimes were clothed in religious doctrine, like Unitarians who believe in one

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God at most, which was very, very common in New England and things like that. And then, of course, getting into the post -war era where America seemed like it was riding high.

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But again, the underlying poisons were working their way through the system. And you can argue why they've emerged now or what the

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Frankfurt School has to do with it or what have you. But these things were baked into the cake from the beginning because they're baked into the cake, because they're based upon these pillars of the

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Enlightenment. And every so often I get these insane responses like the Enlightenment isn't that Immanuel Kant said

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X, Y, Z. I'm like, I don't really or Hegel. People keep accusing me online of being engaging in the

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Hegelian dialectic. I mean, the only thing I know about Hegel is that he referred to Napoleon as a world soul.

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There's literally I don't know what the Hegelian dialectic is. Don't care. Not interested. Same thing with Kant.

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I mean, there are other people who are political philosophers in this in this time period, but they're not relevant to the underlying philosophy of the

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Enlightenment, which is what has created the horrors that we see around us today. Well, I think this is very important because what you're saying is that there's some almost like inevitable things that were going to take place.

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If you look back and you know what, I don't I don't know if you're tracing this to the Constitution because I see that as less

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Enlightenment, but maybe the Declaration of Independence more so. And some of the same thing. I mean, it panders to I've made this point repeatedly, but function of the left offers what the serpent in the garden offered.

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That is, you you you shall be as gods. Everybody is emancipated. Everybody is equal.

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You will have a utopia. It just took a long time, relatively late in human history for this to become a real political movement as opposed to a kind of heretical sect thing that's sub

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Rosa in a few places. Right. Well, the importance of this, in my mind, is that there are people on the right on our side,

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I guess you could say in a way who want to attribute all of the changes we saw in twenty twenty two.

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Well, it's a World Economic Forum. It's it's a it's Hegel. It's just Hegel. It's just the Frankfurt school. It's just there's a boogeyman somewhere paying everyone off, giving them like bags of cash or something so that they do something that is contrary to the

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American spirit. When when what you're saying is actually now this was this was present in the American spirit in a way.

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And it's and it's it wasn't rooted out and it's just grown and that's our problem.

29:06

It's homegrown. And I think I've come around to that opinion myself, just reading history and seeing that, hey, some of these ideas, they haven't they've been here for a long time.

29:17

Even the puritanical kind of spirit of we're going to make this great city on a hill that the whole world's going to see.

29:24

And it's almost like a new Jerusalem like that. That kind of stuff is it's kind of weird when I read it. But that was here at the foundation of the country.

29:31

So you can you can get away with that. Like you can you can pay lip service to emancipation if the entire society is has the kind of classic definition or classical definition of liberty, which is ordered liberty.

29:45

If everyone lives his life and social stigma and forces that in a way that you're not emancipated, you can talk about emancipation all day long, but eventually it's going to catch up with you.

29:57

And that's that's kind of what we see here. And don't get me wrong, people like George Soros or evil and the World Economic Forum is full of bad people.

30:04

And there is lots of payoffs to advance the evil cause of the left. But those things just accelerating the slide rather than causing the slide.

30:14

So I have to ask you in our few moments together, since we've we've been talking now for half an hour about foundationalism, because that it seems to be that is something that some of the viewers here, because I share an audience with people who are in the

30:29

G3 circles and some of them are on Twitter. They've seen Josh Bice, the president of G3 Ministries, accuse you.

30:36

I think you referenced this earlier about liking Lenin and so forth. But one of the sticking points seems to be that you your philosophy of foundationalism is being promoted by some kind of a secret society that's almost masonic and that it is at the root, this totalitarian society that wants to it's like Franco, right?

30:58

It wants to come in and crush with an iron fist and that you're fine being the dictator of that. So you have,

31:04

I guess, yourself, which I thought that was just humorous, some things you've said about yourself. But I just want to give you a chance to address that.

31:10

I know you have online, but there's a lot of people listening. You probably haven't seen what you've said online. Sure. Absolutely. By the way, just as a sidebar,

31:17

Franco was not totalitarian. And there is other than the National Socialists, there has never been a totalitarian right government in modern history.

31:26

Franco is the very farthest thing from a totalitarian. But so this all got started when a

31:34

Antifa asset, some it was a literal Antifa asset, some Guardian, the Guardian, as I believe, a far left wing

31:40

UK paper, wrote an article on me about my political philosophy of foundationalism, which is

31:46

I have 12 pillars. It's a designed to be a practical reality based set of rules for people to set up a future society, not an ideology.

31:56

That is, it's not designed to create your utopia or give you all the answers. These just signposts along the way.

32:02

And I call this foundationalism. And I think it's pretty cool. So everyone should read it on my website, The Foundationalist Manifesto, if you're bored.

32:09

So he connected this to something to other things. First of all, that I have a bunch of money, which is true because I used to make shampoo and I sold a shampoo making business.

32:17

So I'm rich. Yeah, I like being rich. I've been rich. I've been poor. Rich is better, though spiritually corrosive.

32:24

But as everybody knows, I also have some interesting pieces on that topic on my website, including

32:30

St. John Chrysostom's excellent book on wealth and poverty. But in any case, he connected that as well as I'm involved along with numerous other people in a nascent

32:41

Christian men's group called the Society for American Civic Sacker, which has a couple of chapters scattered across the country.

32:50

And I've also written on my on my site about how in some future societal collapse, the reorganizing principle of society is likely to be local people providing for defense and patronage and that would rebuild society.

33:05

So he put all these things together into this bizarre construct where Rich Hayward wants to be a warlord through the imposition of the

33:16

Society for American Civic Renewal everywhere, implementing foundationalism. None of these things are actually connected to each other except through me, though.

33:27

Sorry, it's just kind of. No, I know, I know, I know. It's true that all these things are, except for the warlord thing, which you basically just made up out of full cloth, are true in some kind of sense.

33:37

Like they're not like, you know, the Queen of England is a lizard alien or I guess the King of England now, but but they're not actually connected to each other.

33:47

So but this is something that has gotten traction and it's kind of I would say it's an easy thing for my enemies to use, but it's not really useful to my enemies because it makes me look kind of cool and based and awesome.

33:59

He's rich. He has all this cool stuff. So but people like James Lindsay like seem to think this is like a like a like the

34:05

Lenin thing, like a self -executing attack on me. So all these things are unconnected.

34:11

I think they're actually all pretty cool. But if you're interested in any one of them, they're they're all they're they're not.

34:17

You don't pull the string and find out that there's some some one ring behind them that unites them all. So you just I have to just point this out.

34:24

You just named the society, the supposedly secret society. And with the website, well, it doesn't sound that secret to me,

34:31

I guess it's just maybe it's exclusive. It's not secret. Well, it's exclusive in the sense of Christian Christian men.

34:37

And there's a couple others. I actually don't have I don't actually belong to to the any kind of local group is there is

34:43

I live in Indiana and there's not a group here. There's a couple in Idaho and and it's a couple in Texas.

34:50

And there's some others. I mean, this is a very small group of people who sit around and talk about Christian men's things.

34:57

There's nothing secret. There's no underlying. OK, that's what I thought. I mean, people can go look at its principles, its principles, anodyne.

35:05

And they're not like concealing something that just is what it is. Well, I had there was someone who if I if I name this person, people would recognize who this person is.

35:15

But, you know, they reached out to me a while ago and we're very concerned about this, too. And this and that's the first time it was before Josh Bice that there was a secret group and then there was a website.

35:26

And then I laughed myself because I'm like, wait, you're going to give me the website. So the secret group that's and yeah.

35:32

So this is I don't know who came up with this line of attack. But the attempt seems to be, in my opinion, to tie you to Christian nationalism somehow, that you're funding it, that you're behind it, you're benefiting.

35:44

And and so the whole movement must be cast aside because they can put it around the neck of the movement. I am vaguely aware of a

35:50

Christian nationalism as I have a copy of Stephen Wolfe's book, and I've kind of read it and I decide not to review it because it relied on a lot of Protestant reform theology.

35:58

That's beyond my can, though I did go to a Dutch reformed elementary school, as I like to say.

36:03

And I'm I'm friendly on Twitter with some of these Christian nationalist types. And so I want to hear about Christian nationalism sounds fine to me as I put in a piece talking about the the

36:12

Eastern Roman Empire. Christianity and nationalism are like Reese's peanut butter cups, like peanut butter and chocolate, two great tastes that seem like they go well together.

36:21

Beyond that, I have nothing to do with the the Protestant movement of Christian nationalism. I haven't given any money to Christian nationalists.

36:28

I mean, maybe they should ask me. I might, I suppose. But, you know, it's weird, like I was at church yesterday,

36:35

Eastern Orthodox, and some people came up to me and said, well, I have I know people who who go to a

36:40

Protestant church locally here in Indianapolis area. And who's

36:46

Owen Strachan? Is he Owen Strand? Owen Strand. Yeah. And so he's like some big evangelical type in this general.

36:54

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Well, whatever. Apparently he was came to a local church and spent hours.

37:01

I haven't looked at the videos yet. Attacking me. Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Hold on to your church.

37:07

No, no. To a local product. A local Protestant church. OK, go to my church. No people who go there.

37:12

Apparently he never named me. But the whole thing was about me, I guess, about like the evils of of Christian nationalists.

37:19

I haven't listened to the stuff. Well, you're in Indiana, right? But this was then in Indiana, like this was in India because he's in Arkansas.

37:25

I thought that he traveled to your. Well, I mean, he was probably paid to travel. And I think that's an underlying subtext of a lot of this stuff is that a lot of these people make money off of doing this.

37:34

I mean, that may not be true in this case. I don't know. I just thought it was bizarre. Like, here I am minding my own business on a

37:40

Sunday morning in an Eastern Orthodox church. And people are telling me that I can live a few miles down the road.

37:46

Random Protestants are attacking me, though not by name, apparently. So I don't know. The whole thing is just very strange to me,

37:51

I guess, is my point. Yeah, that's a common thing I've also seen. I don't know if that's unique to Christians where you attack, but you never mentioned the name.

37:59

We saw this during the social justice fights a lot that I don't know if it's viewed as like bad manners to say the name or I don't know.

38:07

But well, but I think it's my assumption is, as I said earlier, none of these people ever link to the underlying written pieces.

38:14

They try mightily to make sure that nobody can look up to say what the people they're attacking actually say themselves.

38:22

It's probably just an attempt to frame the discussion to their own benefit. So I know in our few minutes left together, there's a few there's two things

38:31

I wanted to ask you about briefly. One is your religious views. One is your political view. So I'll start with the religious view since we're already on the topic.

38:38

You said you grew up Dutch Reformed, is that right? No, I grew up Roman Catholic, but I went to a Dutch Reformed elementary school.

38:44

Interesting. OK, whatever. And then but did you convert to Eastern Orthodoxy or how did that process?

38:50

Six years ago, I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy for a while. We had my family had been actually attending another

38:56

Reformed church, a Presbyterian Presbyterian church. So but it was kind of inevitable from from my perspective because of my

39:04

Roman Catholic background that I would when I was returning, as it were, or more fully embracing my

39:13

Christian belief that Eastern Orthodoxy is a logical, logical ending place for me. My wife was not raised

39:20

Roman Catholic. So it was a bit of a a less obvious landing place for her. But it has it has been a great joy.

39:27

Was it the doctrine? Was it the liturgy? Was what was the thing for you? Well, the doctrine of the liturgy are important, though.

39:33

I'm not I'm like unlike like some people are really into like online orthodoxy and stuff. I am not have nothing to do with that.

39:40

But the I like to say and people I'm sure that some people take offense to this, but there's more

39:47

Christ in the Orthodox Church. Christ is is very much an evidence in a way. It certainly wasn't an evidence in the

39:53

Presbyterian Church we were attending. But the the the focus is Christ there.

39:59

I mean, Orthodox converts are probably largely politically conservative nowadays. But there's it is not a political thing.

40:07

The the the the church is strictly my church, at least is strictly nonpolitical.

40:13

There's just there's just plenty of Christ. OK. All right. Yeah, no, I've seen that this trend.

40:19

That's one of the reasons I wanted to ask is young men, especially who grew up evangelical, are converting to Eastern Orthodoxy here and there.

40:26

I've had some friends and I've I went to an Orthodox church for a service once just to kind of see it was all in Greek.

40:32

And I right. That's a lot of the American Orthodox churches are ethnic chauvinist.

40:39

And one element of that is that they they don't use English, which they really should be like my church uses is

40:44

Greek Orthodox, but uses primarily English. The I think that and this is a longer topic,

40:50

I don't necessarily get distracted. But the the attraction of young men to Orthodoxy, I think, is largely because the

40:56

Orthodox are the only non -feminized Christian religious denomination.

41:02

I mean, there are probably subsets of Protestants and evangelicals that are not feminized, but there is there is no feminization of the of the

41:10

Orthodox church, which does not mean that there is not a large female presence for Orthodox and very big iconography.

41:17

And so you have female saints, you have male saints. But there is no feminization.

41:23

The the and you don't have some of the you don't have the problems that the Catholics do with homosexual priests.

41:29

Well, you probably have some occasionally. But the Orthodox have different problems. Every church has problems.

41:34

But I think to young men who are tired of being told that becoming more like a woman is the path to Christ, Orthodox will not offer you that as the path to Christ.

41:45

Yeah, no, that's that's fascinating to me. I think a lot of there are evangelicals and Protestants, particularly those,

41:51

I would say, more on the very reformed side who would they you you're already kind of a black sheep in a way just because of that, because, you know,

42:00

Protestant doctrine would have the same problem with Eastern Orthodoxy that they have with Roman Catholicism. That is, the theosis doesn't make a distinction between sanctification and justification.

42:10

And Protestants are very big on justification by faith. Sure. And so, you know, I'm wondering if that is also

42:16

I think that plays into it. I notice Josh Bice was trying to use say that you're an Eastern, Eastern Orthodox, as if that was relevant.

42:23

Yeah, political discussion. But I guess I don't know. I mean,

42:28

I I don't I write it. I write occasionally on Eastern Orthodox stuff, but mostly book reviews. I mean, most of my site is book reviews or my own thoughts masquerading as reviews.

42:38

But it tends not to overlap with politics. Well, let me ask you about politics, because we only have like three minutes here.

42:44

Are you would you consider yourself so you already ruled out Christian nationalists? You're not that at least you don't take the nationalism.

42:51

You're not opposed, but you're OK. So conservative. If I said Charles Hayward's a conservative, would you correct me?

42:57

Well, I would because conservatism is the word is tainted in American context. It's redolent of zombie

43:04

Reaganism and that Judas, as I like to call him, William F. Buckley and these kind of failed efforts over the past 60 or 70 years to take

43:13

America in the right direction. I mean, not just failed miserably and totally failed. So I don't like the term conservative.

43:18

It also calls up what I call scrutinism after Roger Scruton, whom I admire, but was fond of being a beautiful loser and thought that was adequate.

43:26

Well, he used to muse on how beautiful English churchyards are. I mean, like, well, they may be beautiful, but when they're overrun by raping invaders from countries that you've you've invited, you know, your churchhood isn't so damn beautiful anymore, is it?

43:40

Right, right. I'm opposed to conservatism in that sense.

43:46

So because you define the left in Roger Scruton's terms, it sounds like you have somewhat of a

43:52

I don't know if association is the term, but you like paleo conservatives. It sounds like you associate like Paul Godfrey.

43:59

You were on Chronicles podcast. Yeah. But but you want a more aggressive approach. I mean, foundationalism, which is my political philosophy, right, is fundamentally a radical political philosophy in the sense that it requires a remaking of society after society will inevitably fracture again.

44:16

Like just be like Josh Bice. Think like Hayward's going to run around with like a 20 pound sledge breaking up society on his own or something.

44:22

But, you know, society is going to come to an end because the because the left is fundamentally anti. Yeah. Well, hopefully you have like, you know, a

44:29

Mad Max warsuit or something. No, I do not have a couple of guns because it's Indiana. But, you know,

44:34

I don't have my my supply of military graded weaponry is sadly lacking. And and maybe

44:40

I should change that. But it's it's foundationalism isn't radical in the sense that it's the politics of reality that is that takes into account human nature, as well as the aspirations of mankind, both secular and spiritual.

44:56

So it's not meant to be radical in the sense of utopian. Like we're going to have some we're going to solve all our problems and everyone's going to be happy forever kind of thing, like a

45:03

Marxist kind of thing. So it's radical in the sense of the society has to be remade, but it's not radical in its aspirations or goals.

45:11

So I guess I don't be offended by this. But when I looked at your foundationalism, I thought to myself, well, this is basically conservative.

45:18

That's what I thought, because I thought, well, this is taking true and valuable insights from the past and saying this is how human nature functions.

45:26

And we should we should keep these. We should implement it. I just think the word the word is tainted.

45:32

But objectively, if you if people came from Mars and said, tell me about your politics and had a reasonable degree of reasonable definition of conservatism, they would they would probably think the same thing.

45:43

I think this is what's happening with Christian nationalism and all these approaches, is that there's this recognition that the right has failed and that we need a new rallying point.

45:52

And so you're providing that someone like Stephen Wolfe's providing that. And you're being attacked by establishment types who want to keep going with the old ways of,

46:01

I guess, conserving, conserving or lack thereof. Yeah. So anyway, well,

46:06

Charles Hayward, I appreciate it so much. You've been a great guest. You've been patient with me, which I appreciate. And I look forward to hearing more and talking more in the future.