Everything has something to share, and either wisdom, story, or logic, and it's clearly
amazing to hear all the different missing links discovered by people unique to their
own journeys.
And in how they have come to discover them, together we can help to build a bigger picture
for a better future for a brighter tomorrow.
Let's stand united, let's remove the veils, and let's create a new world together,
argue that missing link.
Join Jesse Hale on the missing link talk show, as he helps to unveil the mystery through the
unique wisdom and store of others.
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
Welcome everybody here back to the missing link.
Today we're excited to talk with someone who's an associate editor of the Claremont Review
of Books.
He's also done recent books of light mind, light of world, illuminating science through
faith, and he's here to share his story and his wisdom with our audience here today.
Welcome to the missing link live, Spencer Clavin.
How are you doing today, brother?
Thanks, Jesse.
I'm doing very well.
Thanks so much yourself.
Doing really good, really busy.
We had an interview already today, so this is our second one today.
So let's start off with you telling us about yourself and your journey, a little bit about
your background, your education, what part of the world you grew up in,
what part of the world you're in now.
If you like disclosing that information, what got you into books and the spirituality
or anything else that you wanted to share with our audience here today,
especially if they may be hearing you here for the first time.
Sure.
Well, I'm what's called a classicist.
I prefer the term book bro myself, but traditionally the discipline that I study is
ancient history and literature, especially for me, ancient Greek and Latin history and literature.
And I came by that profession pretty naturally.
I kind of never stood a chance.
I was very, very lucky to grow up in a house surrounded by books.
My family is full of literary people and we kids had kind of the free range of this
wonderful home library and we could kind of pull down whatever we liked off the shelves,
you know, just at random as long as it wasn't too challenging or risque.
Like there was nothing like smutty on the shelves.
But like, you know, whatever, whatever you could get your hands on, you could read.
And what was really, I think, lucky about that is I grew up just with the assumption that
being surrounded by books means being surrounded by friends.
I just, you know, had as part of my childhood, in addition to my family and kids I knew at school,
I was surrounded by the voices of the past.
And this was just an enormous gift.
And I don't think I realized how weird it was, how unusual until I got a little older
and started going out into the world, going to college, you know,
figuring out the state of things.
I suddenly discovered that not only is being a book guy considered nerdy or weird,
it was also, especially at the time that I was growing up,
considered it somehow politically backwards, right?
There was this whole movement.
And now it's almost feels like it's kind of this movement is a little bit over or it's passing
away.
But there was this whole movement to like destroy the canon, western canon is evil.
And there's all sorts of prejudice built into it.
So to read guys like Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, you know, this isn't just boring,
it's actually bad and wrong.
And you should feel bad about it.
And I've just it's always been obvious to me that that wasn't the case, you know,
there was just never that argument never landed with me because I had I owe so much
to the great minds of the past and so much of my consolation has come from them.
And so as I went up through first college and then grad school, you know,
I started to focus in on ancient language and ancient literature.
I think especially because it's a way of breaking out of the kind of traditional
modern paradigm, we live in this very sort of modernity centric world where we think
that the only things that we can think about and talk about are, you know,
the ideas that just came up yesterday.
And so to break out of that and to study the ancient world has been so refreshing to me.
And, you know, I just basically step by step as I went along discovered that there was a world,
a whole universe out there for people who were hungry to rediscover the classics,
people who maybe hadn't learned about them in school or hadn't had them at home
and just wanted to know what the best that has been thought and said could offer them.
And so that's how I began my podcast is how I started writing and publishing.
It's really been the guiding light of my career is my belief that besides all the politics,
besides all the current affairs, all the stuff that we tend to fight about day to day,
wisdom, which you just mentioned at the outset here, wisdom is something that's for everybody
and something that genuinely instructs you in what it means to be excellent at being human.
And so my two books, How to Save the West and Light of the Mind, Light of the World,
are both attempts to kind of open the door to that wisdom for people and hopefully make it
kind of accessible and relatable. So that's me. It's where I come from.
So does that show you that, you know, just this intellect, even from this past
intellect is like the dumbing down of society where, you know, they don't want people to know,
they want people more in a box and not free thinkers, they want people more
programmed to what they want them to believe opposed to having an open mind to things.
Well, you know, I certainly think that our education system is profoundly broken. And
a lot of that brokenness is by design. A lot of that destruction was purposefully undertaken.
Mostly, I would say, by kind of the second wave of cultural Marxism that passed, swept through
this country. When the Marxist, the economic revolutions of Europe sort of failed to take
root in America, Marxists basically pivoted and took up a different strategy, which was to
seek revolution through social class, through these category groups that we're all now so
familiar with, like we have women's interests and racial interests and LGBTQIA sexuality
interests, right? And all of these organizing blocks were formed, yeah, as a way of undermining
the unity that comes from, first of all, American culture and civilization. But then
that is founded on this deeper base of what we call Western civilization, the inheritance,
the wisdom of Athens and Jerusalem that comes down to us through the Greco-Roman philosophers,
and then also through the scripture and the wisdom traditions of the Jews and Christians.
And that culture, which was something shared among a lot of Americans, it was not like everybody
was a PhD in history back in the day. It's not like there was some golden age when everybody
knew all this stuff perfectly. But there was a broad shared culture and community. People
read Shakespeare in high school, maybe they learned a little bit of Latin, a little bit
of Greek, and this gave us kind of a common footing to stand upon. And I do think that yeah,
that was undermined, that was attacked for all sorts of ideological reasons. And one of the things
that many ancient philosophers talk about is the fact that those, when you undermine the
education of a civilization, you do make it much, much easier to control them. Education is
one way of shaping molding citizens. And if you take control of education and you
distort it for your own ends, then yeah, you can get people growing up to take to the streets
or protest in favor of Hamas or whatever new current event you happen to decide needs to be
the object of protest. You can do that much, much more easily when you have control over
the narrative and over the sources of education. So I do think yeah, there's a kind of
purposeful dumbing down that always happens whenever people are attempting to take control.
Now, since you've delved a lot into history and a lot of writings from the past,
when did fiction start? When did they start creating fictional stories? And did this day and age maybe
look at some of those works that were maybe created at that time as fiction thinking now that
maybe this actually happened in history because it was written about 500 years ago or 1,000 years
ago, but it was actually maybe created just to entertain. But now the people look at it that
oh, this must have happened because they wrote about it 500,000 or 2,000 years ago.
Oh, fiction is as old as the hills. They're as long as we have records of human activity,
we have records of storytelling, myths, legends. This is deeply, deeply built into
something about who we are. And I would say it's because we have a need to express our inner lives,
not just the sort of scientific or material facts about what's going on around us, but also what
it's like to experience the world as a human being. And to do that, we have to tell stories.
We have to say it was, you know, it's like an adventure of the prince who saves the princess
or it's like a monster that we're face facing at the outskirts of the universe. And so
as far back as we can go, we find people telling these sorts of stories, especially hero stories and
stories of gods and legends and monsters. Of course, Homer's Iliad is our earliest work of
Greek literature. And that is, if it's not totally fictional, it's fictional lies, it's
drama with all sorts of gods and heroes in it. Go back even further, you find, you know,
the Mesopotamian legends that also share a lot of similar elements there. This is something very,
very primal in our experience. To the second part of your question, whether people tend to confuse
fiction with fact, I would actually almost say that we have the opposite problem in the modern
world. We tend to have the opposite problem, which is that we look at the stories of our
ancestors, we look at the stories of the ancient world, and we say, they must have made all of that
up because some of it is fiction. And so we assume they were just deceived, or they were
simpletons. And therefore, we in our enlightened scientific age, we know better than to tell
these stories of gods and heroes. The truth is, we're still telling stories of gods and heroes.
We've changed their names. We like to talk about the science as if it were some sort of like
disembodied entity that has supernatural power over us. So we still tell myths and legends. We
don't always recognize them as such. And a lot of the myths and legends of the past contain
truths in them. They contain spiritual truths about our place in the universe, or sometimes
they even contain actual facts that we didn't realize were facts. Like, for a long time,
people thought that Homer was entirely made of, that there was no Troy, there was no Trojan
War, until in the 19th century, archaeologists actually discovered the site of Troy. Heinrich
Schliemann and others basically excavated the real life Troy. And even though Homer is still
fictional in the sense of having told a lot of stories that can't possibly ever have happened,
he was also basing what he said on real life events. And there's a lot of that in
modernity. We have a lot of kind of pride about our modern attitudes that often is kind
of poorly founded. So stories are forever. Stories are human constant. And they do convey
truth. It's just that it's not always the kind of truth that we are looking for in the modern age.
What about the Bible? Didn't a lot of other stories that basically had similar
plots as the Bible predate the Bible, and maybe from different cultures and different
places, and maybe it was an amalgamation of all those stories which was created as the Holy Scriptures?
Well, it's interesting. So there are, in some parts of the Bible, there are a lot of similarities to,
for example, those Mesopotamian stories that I mentioned. So to take just one example,
you take the book of Genesis, which is the Bible's story, among other things of how the world
was created. And you can hold it up against Hesiod's Theogony or the Enuma Elish,
which is a Mesopotamian creation legend, Sumerian and Babylonian, and then ultimately a Syrian
story. And there are a lot of parallels. You can say, well, okay, a lot of these things
kind of, they seem to kind of share a lot of similarities. For instance,
they all kind of begin with a chaos or an ocean or a sort of confusion, and then there's usually one
God who sort of asserts his control, his authority. What's interesting to me about this, though,
actually, is not so much that there are similarities, as that once you survey the scope of those
stories, you actually realize that the Bible's version is weirdly unique. In other words,
there are all these sort of shared elements to all these creation stories. But the Bible is
distinctive in that only the Bible makes the claim of one God before the chaos, before the void,
before the tossing and coiling. Only the Bible asserts that that God is prime and in control,
no matter whose political regime happens to be in charge. Only the Bible represents creation
as a unitary order brought into being by the thought and words of a single mind. And so
really, once you do this kind of digging, what happens is the Bible starts to stand out and
look like a kind of revisionist history. It's like an intervention into what would have otherwise
been common wisdom that there are many gods, and they are expressed in nature, and we should,
you know, worship the trees and stuff like that. The Bible's distinctiveness, I find,
actually makes itself more and more plain the more you know about ancient mythology and ancient
history. To your second question, which is what a classicist would call the question of
transmission or compilation, this is obviously a huge, huge subject that I find endlessly
fascinating. To make a very long story kind of shorter, I would suggest that what you have,
especially in the first five books of the Bible, is a unitary literary composition. Now that doesn't
mean that it's not drawing from other sources, doesn't mean that there weren't editors and
different people who came along and shaped it into the book that we have today. But we also
know that there is a really tight chain of transmission for every period that we have
good records of. The Jewish people are meticulous about passing down this oral tradition that
then became a written tradition. And again, as a classicist, if I look at the manuscripts that we
have of these different texts, manuscripts of Homer, manuscripts of the Enuma Elish,
manuscripts of the Bible, and so on and so forth, it's astonishing the degree of exactitude with
which the Bible is preserved compared to Euripides and compared to Homer and compared to
some of these Greek texts. The Bible is in like way, way better shape than books we read without
thinking all the time in school, like the Greek tragedies. This is actually like a, this was
a very, very carefully preserved text. That doesn't mean that it dropped from the sky out of nowhere.
I mean, Christians believe that this is an inspired book, not that this is a God written
book. In other words, God's hand doesn't reach down and write it. God inspires different authors
and different speakers and thinkers at different periods into what eventually becomes the Bible.
So this stuff is like way, way more complicated than we sometimes let on for it to be.
I also find though that some people think of that as like a challenge to their faith. For me,
it's actually kind of a remarkable revelation of God acting in history, the way that the
Bible has come into being over time. When they teach history in their Freemason
indoctrination camps, they call schools that the victors of whatever era
all the books and rewrite history in their favor. And then the next era comes,
they burn all the books and they rewrite history to make it look in their favor. And this has happened
on many occasions what they teach in these indoctrination camps. But how do we know what
potentially could be real history if potentially what's being taught is history's been rewritten
many, many different times over the centuries? You know, it's funny. I was just reading
Suetonius's account of the life of Augustus. Augustus, the first Roman emperor. He wins a civil
war. There have been 100 years of civil war in Rome, starting with the Gragi brothers leading
up through Marius and Sulla on to Julius Caesar famously crossing the Rubicon. And then his
adopted son Octavius becomes Emperor Augustus by defeating Mark Antony. And at that point,
he gets to do what you're saying. He gets to establish the new world order and basically say,
it's my way or the highway. We're going to rewrite the rules of operation in Rome. And this
is sometimes called the Augustan era or the Augustan revival, the Pax Augustana, the
piece of Augustus. And one of the things Augustus did was clean up in his view the
annals of Roman prophecy. He came went into the storehouses of Roman prophecy,
which were obviously very culturally important. And he basically burned all but the most
kind of authentic authenticated ones in his view. And so there was this massive, massive
book burning to go along with this massive restoration. And so you're right, this the
control over information is very much a project that imperial rulers like to take on.
The Anuma Elish that I mentioned earlier is another great example. We have versions of the
Anuma Elish in which Marduk, the god of Babylon is king of the gods. Then we have later versions
in which Ashur, god of Assyria is king of the gods. And this reflects the fact that
in the intervening period, Assyria has become dominant in the region between the
Tigris and the Euphrates. And so we have basically like a rewriting of this mythological history
as well. This does happen. And so this leads to the idea that history is written by the
victors. That's kind of the cliche that you hear a lot. I think this is a little bit of
a hot take, I guess. I think that this has been overstated and oversold. And especially in
the postmodern period when people were really pushing this idea that there's no way of knowing
the truth. There's no kind of stable fixed point. We came up with this notion that, yeah, it's
all just propaganda. All history is really just interested parties for motivated reasons
trying to spin the spin the thing their way. And there you do get a lot of that.
But it's also true that historians for as long as there have been historians have been aware of
this problem and have been developing techniques for trying to get at the truth using these various
competing narratives. And this goes right back to the beginning of history. If you read
Herodotus, who's the father of the Western discipline of history, he's comparing different
sources against each other. And he's saying, well, the official Persian narrative is this.
But here's what the Greeks and here's how we can maybe hold these ideas up against each other.
Then Thucydides comes into play and he's doing the same in a more sophisticated way.
And there are certain texts and books that have been passed down century to century without
interruption. I mean, obviously the Bible is one. But we do have good historical records for a
lot of periods in history. The high classical Athenian period would be a good example.
Moments when our textual record seems relatively secure. Can we be certain at any point ever?
No, there's always going to be room for doubt, always room for questioning,
investigation of individual of individual issues. But we're not in a completely hopeless situation
here. And unless we believe that everyone throughout all of history has always been a
self interested liar, which I don't believe I'm not that much of a cynic. And then it's
actually possible with care and attention to detail for us to sift through the truth.
Some people think that the Roman Empire never fell. They just became the Catholic Church
and are still ruling today through the Jesuit order. What's your thoughts on that? And have you
found any proof that that may be the case? Well, if the Jesuits are in charge, they're
I don't find this particular version of the story very plausible. I will say that
the idea that the Roman Empire never fell is a powerful. It remains with us still in so many
ways. I don't know if you saw that meme a while back that men think about the Roman Empire
like once a day or something. If you quiz your husband or your boyfriend or your brother
or whatever you will find that he thinks about the Roman Empire all the time.
I'm not sure if that's true for all men. It's certainly true for me. And more broadly,
it's certainly true that we encounter the footprint, the shadow of Rome wherever we go.
And one place that that power and authority and political organization went after the sacking of
of Rome in the 5th century AD was into the Roman Catholic Church. A lot of the
authority and Imperium did travel to the Catholics. It was also, however, inherited by the
barbarian tribes, especially by Charlemagne and his Franks, but also by any number of
Germanic tribes. There's always been a peripheral locus of power in England
that has never sat quite comfortably in that larger sphere of influence.
And of course, there's one way in which the Roman Empire very much endures and we almost
never talk about this. But that's in the East. In the East, what we now call the Byzantine Empire
continues to call itself the Roman Empire for centuries and centuries after the Western
Empire has fallen. And so that's a whole separate locus of control in what we now
think of as the Eastern Orthodox Church. And obviously, there's a lot of knock-on effects to
that right now in politics and in current affairs because Russia is waging this very unsettling
war with Ukraine. And they are one of the countries where that Eastern influence is most
keenly felt, the Eastern influence of the Roman Empire, that is. So I would be more inclined
to say that this massive kind of world state, which is what the Roman Empire was,
dissolved as world states tend to do, but it didn't disappear. It fragmented and splintered
into all sorts of different competing power centers, many of which we still live with today.
Something very similar happened, by the way, in the wake of Alexander the Great's death when
his empire fell apart, became the Hellenistic kingdoms. But it also became the Alexandrian
library and had this major, major cultural influence. The Jesuits, I have to say,
would not even be in my top 10 list of inheritors of Roman power today, but maybe you feel different.
Now, what do you know about the Merovingians and where they play a role in all kind of history?
I mean, it enlightened me. Very little, I think.
Well, apparently some of the Franks that you were talking about were Merovingians and their
bloodline was decimated. They have a true lineage to the King of David, and a lot of the
certain powers that be are trying to eliminate that bloodline so there's no true air to the throne.
And the ones that we see in monarchy right now, they're not really true bloodlines,
and they're just kind of, they've actually hijacked things and things aren't the way they're
supposed to be. And this was purposely done so that way no true air would be brought to light.
And, you know, I think they're, I'm still researching that topic myself.
Yeah, I mean, it's a deep cut, that's for sure. As I recall, and I'm speaking a little bit off
the top of my head here, the Merovingians were sort of a rival dynasty that were replaced
by the Carolingians. I think that's true. Carolingians, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So that's Charlemagne, right, in the Holy Roman Empire, and so forth.
And so I guess the idea here would be that like the Merovingians have been usurped
from their rightful place on what the throne of David?
Yeah, apparently it goes back to the throne of David, so.
But they weren't Jews.
That I don't know, again, I'm still hearing this from somebody-
That would be my first question, is the throne of David which belongs to Jesus,
right? Jesus being Jewish in the line of David, ostensibly this belongs to Jesus.
But Jesus didn't have a father, so he actually wasn't in the line of David.
He didn't, he was not from, you know, he was immaculate conception.
So there was actually no lineage to David through Jesus.
Well, right, this is one of the major sort of claims about the, of the New Testament,
is that this lineage is spiritual and of course the throne of David belonging to God
via immaculate conception.
I also have heard some people claim that Mary was from the line of David,
as well as Joseph, I'm not so sure about that.
But anyway, none of this changes the fact that the Merovingians weren't Jews.
So it doesn't really help the case.
What are your thoughts on modern-day Zionism and how they're kind of running things
in the standage?
Well, yeah, I mean, this is a huge sore spot right now, as I'm sure you know.
I find the right wings, I mean, I'm a conservative myself.
I consider myself a right winger.
I think the right has really, some parts of the right have made a really,
really ugly turn to just rank anti-Semitism.
I mean, there's really no other word for it when you start,
you know, asking whether the Holocaust is made up or invoking the blood libel,
which is one of the oldest canards in the anti-Semite playbook.
You know, the modern Zionist movement, which created the state of Israel,
is obviously like, it is possible in principle to discuss that in isolation,
distinct from the throne of Zion that is represented in the Bible, right?
I mean, it's not clear to me as a Christian that the Old Testament is a promissory note
for today's Jews to hold the nation state of Israel,
but that's also actually separate from my political opinion,
which is that it is a good thing for the today's Jews to hold that nation state of Israel.
In fact, this is one of our chief and key allies in the area.
They are effectively the only Western-style state
in what is otherwise an enormously hostile region,
and it will be bad news bears for us if they suffer any sort of catastrophe.
The attack on October 7th was a horror,
was just a rank and contemptible act of aggression by terrorist cowards,
and I think that that has been a really ugly and terrible war ever since,
but effectively I'm in support of Israel.
And that is separate from my feelings about the Tree of Jesse
and these larger theological questions.
I mean, in America, there's been historically this really interesting
phylocemitism in which evangelical Christians tend to actually place
almost a scatological or apocalyptic significance upon the modern nation state of Israel,
but once the 12 tribes return to this location,
then the second coming will happen, and etc., etc.
I don't really believe that.
I think that's probably a mistake in the same way as Jesus' connection to the throne of David
is primarily, is first and foremost spiritual,
and he says, whoever does my will is my father, mother, sister, brother.
Similarly, I don't actually think that holiness is passed on through bloodlines
or anything like that, and so I don't think that the modern nation state of Israel
has that a scatological significance that some people
attribute to it, but at the same time, God doesn't go back on his promises.
The Jews are the chosen people.
I'm personally ethnically from them for what it's worth.
My father's side, we are Jewish ethnically,
so maybe I'm being a little bit biased here,
but you look at the vast disproportion of Jews among our greatest scientists,
our greatest intellectuals, our greatest writers in Europe and America especially.
I do think there's kind of something marvelous about this people,
and especially about this culture, which is a lodestone of the West.
When you talk about Western civilization, you talk about Athens and Jerusalem,
and this to me is like the indispensable pillar of our civilization,
which we will give up or squander at our peril.
We have Lorna Lee O'Brien from our Facebooks.
As I heard, the Israel leader funded Hamas to attack his own country,
like there were no people there to protect the gates or anything,
so that story is pretty crazy in itself,
but Israel actually created Hamas to go against the PLO,
so that was actually Hamas was a creation of Israel,
because the PLO was causing problems there.
What evidence would Lorna cite in defense of this claim?
I'm not sure, but we had an actual Israeli here that created the perimeter defense system
in 2001 in Israel, and he's a computer guy that he created,
and he was actually working, after that he ended up working with the US
on defense systems and things, a computer programmer,
and we had some other people come on and say,
it's not possible that that attack could have happened unless it was let happen,
and we've had others talk about that festival that they came and attacked
was never in the area that it was actually in at the time of the attack,
it was always somewhere else, and for some reason,
they moved it right beside the wall there when it was never had been held before,
so there's a lot of things that are very peculiar.
I'm sorry, I find this point extremely dubious.
I mean, it just strikes me as an extraordinarily roundabout way
to go about prosecuting your national interests,
to engineer the execution and kidnapping of your people,
and frankly, it's quite an audacious
and it's a major accusation against the Jewish leadership
that they would abuse their people in that cynical kind of way.
I would want extremely conclusive evidence to that effect
before I went around making claims like that.
Well, there's lots of false flags that are happening in America and other places.
We have a lot of people talk about some of these false flags that do happen.
At that time, Netanyahu, which is he's done a lot of criminal things
and his own people wanted him out,
so his own popularity at the time was in question,
and there was actually criminal prosecutions against him for some of the corruption.
Netanyahu, in order to counterbalance his failing popularity,
would have engineered an assault on his own people.
I mean, that's a really astonishing and very serious allegation
for which, as yet, I've seen absolutely no viable evidence.
Well, like I said, these are just questions as a journalist.
I'm looking at their assertions there, feature make.
I mean, this is the whole just asking questions thing
that we get from this camp of people is actually an op, right?
I mean, because the answers are never forthcoming,
except in one direction, right?
I mean, this is like an insinuation campaign,
and the allegations are so severe and ugly that I just, you know,
I find this like quite, I find it quite indefensible.
Yeah, I wouldn't put it past any of these scumbags.
I think most of the people that are in leadership,
whether it's in America, whether it's in Canada, whether it's in Israel,
they're all a bunch of parasitic scumbags,
and they're all targeting their own people.
We're in the state of the world that we're in
is because of the governments that are running this country,
and it doesn't matter if it's Israel or the UK or United States,
they're all been doing things against our own people.
Look at what this COVID just did with them,
bioengineering a weapon to target their own people
in order for the pharmaceuticals to inject these mRNA into people.
Like, we're not living in a good state of time
where we can trust the people of any of the country's leadership,
and that includes every country in the world,
not just specifically picking one or the other.
Well, I was no great fan of the COVID regime,
and my record on that is pretty clear.
I mean, the insinuations, though, that you are making
about now, every leader in the world, including, I guess, Donald Trump, right?
Operation Warp Speed, Operation Warp Speed,
he's obviously, he's bragged about this,
where at any time in history,
if any pharmaceutical product had a death of more than 50 people,
it was pulled off the shelf.
There's actually hundreds of thousands of people
that have now been injured and or killed,
so people say millions,
and they're still promoting this type of thing
for people to inject it.
I know personal people that have been affected by it.
I've interviewed tons of people that have had kids that have had it
and, you know, killed and other things by this bio weapon
that's bragged about,
and no longer, he's not bragging about it now,
but again, you know, I don't see any of these leaders
working for the best interest of the people from,
you'll know them by their fruits,
and so far, their fruits have been very rotten.
Go with you up to a certain point here, right?
And I think that this is one of the things
that was so devastating and pernicious about the COVID regime
is that the people who were in charge,
whom we trusted to be neutral arbiters of information,
especially the WHO and the CDC
and all of these supposedly neutral boards and bodies
that had been basically like bureaucratically installed
to override our constitutional system,
they lied and lied and lied,
and they did it without our best interest at heart,
and they absolutely squandered every bit of public trust
that they then did lose.
And so I'm completely on board with you about that.
I think that's absolutely true.
It doesn't follow, though, that whatever conspiracy theory
we make up is there for the truth, right?
And just because we're not getting accurate information
from official sources,
doesn't mean that we are getting accurate information
from the insinuations of a few half-baked conspiracy theorists.
So I would just say I would caution, I guess,
against like getting hoodwinked in the other direction.
So of course, yes, leaders do lie.
I mean, it's similar to our conversation
that we were having about ancient history, right?
There are people who burn books, people do lie,
and they do so shamefully.
But it's also true that we are not without the ability
to like pursue evidence
and to attempt to understand what we can and can't know.
And I'm very concerned that in our reaction,
our justified rage and reaction against the guys
like Anthony Fauci who misled us,
we have now just decided that whatever we might say
about world leaders, no matter how wild, far-fetched,
and evil is necessarily true because they're all out to get us.
I just don't think that that follows.
But is there any evidence that any of the world leaders
have been in favor of any of the people ever throughout history?
There was actually JFK.
Does any world leader ever
had the best interest of his people at heart?
Yeah, JFK actually tried to expose some of this stuff
that was going on with these secret societies
and different things that they murdered him, right?
Well, I don't believe that either.
But like if you think that JFK tried to do that,
then you think that JFK had the interest of people, right?
So you at least believe that one person once
had the interest of his people at heart.
And again, there's other people that are on both sides of the fence on that,
why he did that or who he was aligned with.
Some people think that JFK staged his own death, right?
There's lots of questions about all of this being such a big show
that we don't actually even know what is actually happening
because there's so much lies that are mixed in with the truth
that it's hard to discern what is actually truth when
even the news media, Operation Mockingbird Media,
has been put into place in order to indoctrinate the people
of their way of thinking and not actual truth comes out of the media very often.
You're advancing a theory though in these various cases
of what is the truth, right?
So there's this weird double bind going on here
that this is what I'm worried about.
It's like on the one hand your claim is we can't know anything,
everyone is potentially against us,
no leader has ever been in the people's good graces,
or at least we don't know.
On the other hand, your claim is that in fact, yes, JFK,
what, engineered his own death,
or BB Netanyahu engineered October 7th.
And so you are engaging in discourse and discussion
about what the truth is,
which necessarily implies that you therefore think
it's possible to move closer to it versus further away from it.
And if that's the case, then your claims need subjection to evidence,
just like anybody else's.
And that's all I'm saying is that these like larger
backroom smoking deal theories that you're advancing
don't seem to me to have any evidence for them
any more than the claims of the WHO and the CDC
seem to have evidence during COVID.
What do you think about Russia invading Ukraine
because of the NATO encroachment on their country?
Well, I mean, I think that a war of aggression,
which is what this is, is a threat to geopolitical security.
I think that in the wake of that invasion,
which is again what it was by a thug, which is what Putin is,
the left and the kind of, I'm not even sure how to put it,
the laptop class basically adopted a Star Wars morality tale
about how this is now World War II all over again.
And unless you support sending American boots on the ground,
you're literally Hitler.
And I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not by much.
And so this created a kind of maddening media environment
in which it was impossible for people to acknowledge
that, yeah, of course, there's this like long
and tangled history between Russia and Ukraine.
You can read Solzhenitsyn about it.
I mean, this stuff has been going on.
They've been fighting over this forever.
And so this latest incursion is not without precedent.
Of course, from Putin's perspective,
it's not without justification.
I reject that justification.
I don't think it validates an invasive war.
But I think the interdiction, the prohibition
against acknowledging and talking about these things
has counterintuitively actually made Putin's case
much more plausible to a lot of people.
I think we've got to get over that.
We can say that this war is wrong, which I believe it is,
while also talking seriously like adults
about the various nuances of it
and acknowledging that that doesn't mean America
is necessarily obligated to get involved.
Our national interests are our own.
And I think it's shameful the way we are conscripted
into playing world police or what have you
out of sort of this emotional or moral blackmail.
But I do think that America has an interest
in bringing an end to this war.
And ideally, it has an interest in Putin
coming out the worst for it.
I think at this point in the wake of the Biden
presidency, given where things are with Trump,
it's unlikely that we're going to get the ideal possible scenario.
But this is one thing that Trump says that I really agree with
is the ideal is for this never to happen.
And if he had been in office, it never would have happened.
But we are where we are.
And I think we're going to have to find some way
of drawing a ceasefire.
And I don't think that's going to look like Ukraine
getting all its territory back, unfortunately.
Do you know how many regimes or governments
have been overthrown by the CIA and the American, I guess, military?
I have a feeling you're about to tell me.
Well, we've had an Army colonel, Colonel Towner Watkins,
who worked in the Pentagon for 20 years.
She comes and talks about the CIA being
the biggest terrorist organization on Earth.
And they've overthrown 90 different regimes.
They've been instrumental in sending money through USAID
and other things to make sure governments have been overthrown.
One of those governments that was overthrown was an elected government,
was in Ukraine.
And then Zelensky was installed.
And then the nightmares kind of happened through Zelensky
and them targeting the Russian people and all these other things.
So a lot of people think that they know what's going on in the world.
But unless you're actually trying to ask questions
and research every single side of things,
most people have one way or the other.
They tend to side with one side or the other side,
whichever fits their narrative the best.
And so it's interesting that people have opinions
on what's happening in Ukraine when they don't actually even know
that it was actually overthrown by the CIA.
And then they think Putin is bad for what he did
when all NATO has been done.
And she also talks about NATO.
And this is your talk about an Army colonel from the U.S. Air Force
talking about NATO being one of the biggest terrorist organizations on Earth.
So it isn't just coming on someone's opinion.
We're talking about someone who's a brilliant woman
who has been deeply studying all of this stuff coming.
She's come on our show numerous times
and I think she'll be on in a couple of weeks again.
And she talks about all these things,
how the CIA goes and overthrows government.
So what's the difference between an overthrowing a government
or the military coming in and taking over that country?
It's basically the same thing, just done in two different methods.
Well, I am moderately familiar
with the whole Victoria Nuland story about Ukraine.
I can't claim to be an expert in this particular domain.
I think it is absolutely...
Again, here's somewhere I'll go with you to a certain extent.
It is valid to ask questions about CIA.
There's actually a scholar, Angelo Codavilla,
the late Angelo Codavilla, who's really forthright
and advocating for the abolition of CIA and FISA
and the reform of the FBI.
And these are organizations
that have clearly slipped the leash in some way
and have in many cases ceased to operate
in America's best interests.
All of that having been said, I think,
if we're gonna be realists about world politics,
the question is, do we believe that America's interests
ultimately should or should not be advanced?
Is it better for the world, for America to thrive
and be secure or is it worse?
And once you have answered that question,
then I think you can ask the very difficult
Machiavellian questions about geopolitics that ensue and follow on.
I think our problem for a long time has been
that we don't really know whether we think America is a good country
and we don't know whether we think America should be able
to advance its interests, to be equipped to do so,
or how and what ways are moral.
I will put my cards on the table and say
that despite our many, many flaws,
despite the problems that we've been through
in the last decade or so,
despite, of course, the attacks that we've levied upon ourselves internally,
America is still the last best hope of the West.
America is a great country, constitutional government,
hanging by a thread is still one of the great
political theory innovations in world history,
and it would be a tragedy if we were to be,
God forbid, wiped off the world stage,
or even if we were to become diminished on the world stage.
So whereas I agree with you, again,
that this is one of those areas where that is liable
to provoke a certain degree of skepticism
because the people in charge have abused their power,
I certainly would not go anywhere near,
as far as calling the CIA, a terrorist organization.
And I resent the charge that people are not entitled to
an opinion unless they are preoccupied with particularly
the sort of theories and questions that you are raising.
I don't think that's quite right, that's going too far.
You mentioned in your book, Illuminating Science Through Faith.
It's interesting because isn't science almost counter to faith?
It seems like science has created this evolution theory,
which wants to make people to believe that they came from monkeys
and things evolved through that,
and it kind of goes away from spirituality or faith.
Maybe you could elaborate on that.
Sure. Well, I don't mention in the book
so much as on the cover of the book, yes,
but that is the subtitle of the book, Illuminating Science Through Faith.
And the argument that I make within the pages
is that in fact, these two things are not at odds with one another.
And that, I know, has been a story,
a narrative that we grew up with for a long time.
And here's where I actually will take your bait
and say that we have been lied to about this,
that this is a false narrative that needs overturning.
I at least grew up with this basically casual morality tale
about the battle between the church and the mighty, mighty scientists
that reason and truth had to break the chains of religion in order to be free.
And that's simply not so.
If you look at the history of what was once called natural philosophy
and is now called science, for the vast majority of its history,
science was undertaken in a religious spirit.
The architects of the scientific revolution,
guys like Galileo, Newton, Johannes Kepler,
I mean, name any major figure from that era almost,
and you will find that they were believers of some stripe or another.
And they had to be because they had to believe
that the universe was structured in such a way
that it could be understood by the mind of man.
And that structure was thought to come from God.
And the reason that we could understand it
is because we are made in the image of God.
Another great gift of the nation of Israel, of the Jews to people
is this idea that we have an imprint or a blueprint of God's mind in our mind.
And that's what enabled people to deuce the first place.
That's what inspired guys like Galileo and Newton
to go out and ask questions like how do planets move
and why do they move in the way they do across the sky.
It is true, as you alluded to, that in the wake of those discoveries,
there was a decision or there was a transformation of science
or a wielding of science in the name of a kind of atheism.
And usually evolutionary theories is sort of cited in support of this claim.
Or else you get, for instance, cosmological observations
are supposed to show that there is no God.
This is a major part of the Soviet Union's idea about this stuff.
But in point of fact, none of those discoveries,
not evolution, not the Big Bang,
which itself implies all sorts of questions about metaphysics and divine origin,
not Newtonian mechanics, none of these discoveries
is incompatible with the idea that there is an organizing mind
which guides the creation of the universe.
In fact, I would say it's actually necessary to believe in such a mind
in order to retain the tradition of Western scientific inquiry.
Do you think the world is around spinning ball going 66,666 miles around the sun?
Are you more at flat and stationary
and things are maybe spinning up around us?
I believe that the Earth is round.
At least I think that that is the most accurate description of it
from our human perspective in much the same way
that I think it's accurate to describe the Earth as moving around the sun,
even though we know from Einstein that motion is ultimately
a relative category based on the relationships between matter and space time.
All of these things are more fascinating and complicated
than they're typically made out to be.
But the way that we're taught to think about them in our science textbooks
I think is a basically good model for answering the material questions
we have about the physical universe because that's what science does.
Last question because I know we've got a hard stop in about four minutes
and I'll let you talk a little bit about your books and stuff before we end would be
what's your thoughts on that?
They don't care if you align with left or right.
They don't care if you align with blue or red.
They don't care if you think it's a contrail or chem trail.
They don't care if you think it's the Jesuits or the Zionists
or Freemasons.
They only care that you pick a position and take a stance and fight about it.
Well I would say there's actually a lot of truth to that.
I mean I'm not quite sure who they is in that scenario
but it's certainly true that it is to the benefit of the worst people in the world
that we spend our time as Americans grouping one another into groups
and then going to war as if we were enemies.
And that is another reason why I would encourage and caution your listeners
against the sort of paranoia that is liable to emerge from an experience like COVID.
Yeah I get it like we were lied to and people do lie.
And as a student of history I can tell you it's happened before it's going to keep happening.
All of that having been said it's very very easy
from my Christian perspective I would say for the devil, for Satan to use that
as a way of enticing you into all sorts of resentments and fabrications
and tribal allegiances that ultimately won't serve you.
Won't make you happy, won't bring you to the truth
and won't illuminate your path or the nation's path.
So I would say like by and large be wary of anybody who's selling you on the idea that
this or that group is to blame or to be scapegoated for all of our ills.
Obviously the Jews are often placed in that role I believe deeply unjustly
but it could be anybody that's offered up to you as a scapegoat.
We know from world history that that mechanism is always a means of control
to offer up some collective enemy as a scapegoat
is to distract you from your actual business which is to love God and seek justice.
You have your links here rejoysevermore.substack.com and then a.co maybe tell us
where people can find you, where people can find your books
and you know just a little bit about yourself before we wrap up here.
Thank you I appreciate the opportunity so you can find me on Amazon light of the mind
light of the world illuminating science through faith.
It's a history of science from a religious perspective which we just touched on today
and I'm on Substack at rejoysevermore.substack.com where I write weekly essays
and I would just love to see you there or on X I guess at Spencer Clayton.
Right on well thank you so much for your time sharing your thoughts on things.
We just try to bring in every perspective that we can
just so that way people can make up their own minds we don't tell people what to think here we just
this is our thousand and twenty third interview that we've done in four years so
we're just trying to bring as many different you know opinions on
you know our show just so people can figure out what's going on in this crazy wild
twilight zone of a reality that we are in. Tomorrow we've got Mark Baccar from the PPC
political party in Canada at noon eastern standard time and then we've got Johnny Sirucci coming back
on Sunday at one p.m. eastern standard time so may the source be with you and you know during
this pivotal time in history knowledge is power the more knowledge we all have collectively the
less power they have over us so let's all face infinity without flinching for one love
one heart one life namaste everybody and if they ever ask you to put on a breathing
inhibitor against Spencer you know what to tell them what do I tell them no masque
okay bye everyone we'll see you next time we see you back here on the missing link