WEBVTT 00:39.660 --> 00:45.980 Everything has something to share, and either wisdom, story, or logic, and it's clearly 00:45.980 --> 00:51.740 amazing to hear all the different missing links discovered by people unique to their 00:51.740 --> 00:52.440 own journeys. 00:52.940 --> 00:58.080 And in how they have come to discover them, together we can help to build a bigger picture 00:58.080 --> 01:01.360 for a better future for a brighter tomorrow. 01:01.980 --> 01:07.980 Let's stand united, let's remove the veils, and let's create a new world together, 01:07.980 --> 01:09.960 argue that missing link. 01:10.320 --> 01:16.420 Join Jesse Hale on the missing link talk show, as he helps to unveil the mystery through the 01:16.420 --> 01:18.880 unique wisdom and store of others. 01:25.960 --> 01:27.540 Welcome, welcome, welcome. 01:27.760 --> 01:30.080 Welcome everybody here back to the missing link. 01:30.220 --> 01:35.960 Today we're excited to talk with someone who's an associate editor of the Claremont Review 01:35.960 --> 01:36.680 of Books. 01:37.240 --> 01:44.280 He's also done recent books of light mind, light of world, illuminating science through 01:44.280 --> 01:49.020 faith, and he's here to share his story and his wisdom with our audience here today. 01:49.300 --> 01:51.940 Welcome to the missing link live, Spencer Clavin. 01:52.100 --> 01:52.980 How are you doing today, brother? 01:53.860 --> 01:54.120 Thanks, Jesse. 01:54.280 --> 01:54.980 I'm doing very well. 01:55.100 --> 01:55.780 Thanks so much yourself. 01:56.620 --> 01:58.220 Doing really good, really busy. 01:58.400 --> 02:01.720 We had an interview already today, so this is our second one today. 02:01.720 --> 02:07.360 So let's start off with you telling us about yourself and your journey, a little bit about 02:07.360 --> 02:10.180 your background, your education, what part of the world you grew up in, 02:10.460 --> 02:11.600 what part of the world you're in now. 02:11.680 --> 02:18.120 If you like disclosing that information, what got you into books and the spirituality 02:18.120 --> 02:20.880 or anything else that you wanted to share with our audience here today, 02:21.180 --> 02:23.260 especially if they may be hearing you here for the first time. 02:23.880 --> 02:24.260 Sure. 02:24.600 --> 02:27.820 Well, I'm what's called a classicist. 02:27.820 --> 02:33.880 I prefer the term book bro myself, but traditionally the discipline that I study is 02:34.480 --> 02:41.460 ancient history and literature, especially for me, ancient Greek and Latin history and literature. 02:41.860 --> 02:46.420 And I came by that profession pretty naturally. 02:46.600 --> 02:47.620 I kind of never stood a chance. 02:47.860 --> 02:52.720 I was very, very lucky to grow up in a house surrounded by books. 02:52.720 --> 02:58.800 My family is full of literary people and we kids had kind of the free range of this 02:58.800 --> 03:04.900 wonderful home library and we could kind of pull down whatever we liked off the shelves, 03:05.260 --> 03:12.180 you know, just at random as long as it wasn't too challenging or risque. 03:12.640 --> 03:15.680 Like there was nothing like smutty on the shelves. 03:15.960 --> 03:19.180 But like, you know, whatever, whatever you could get your hands on, you could read. 03:19.180 --> 03:27.540 And what was really, I think, lucky about that is I grew up just with the assumption that 03:27.540 --> 03:31.440 being surrounded by books means being surrounded by friends. 03:31.700 --> 03:38.780 I just, you know, had as part of my childhood, in addition to my family and kids I knew at school, 03:39.100 --> 03:41.600 I was surrounded by the voices of the past. 03:41.800 --> 03:44.140 And this was just an enormous gift. 03:44.140 --> 03:50.140 And I don't think I realized how weird it was, how unusual until I got a little older 03:50.140 --> 03:53.240 and started going out into the world, going to college, you know, 03:53.820 --> 03:56.040 figuring out the state of things. 03:56.960 --> 04:06.080 I suddenly discovered that not only is being a book guy considered nerdy or weird, 04:06.560 --> 04:09.180 it was also, especially at the time that I was growing up, 04:09.180 --> 04:12.480 considered it somehow politically backwards, right? 04:12.560 --> 04:13.740 There was this whole movement. 04:14.560 --> 04:19.420 And now it's almost feels like it's kind of this movement is a little bit over or it's passing 04:19.420 --> 04:19.640 away. 04:19.660 --> 04:24.360 But there was this whole movement to like destroy the canon, western canon is evil. 04:24.700 --> 04:28.660 And there's all sorts of prejudice built into it. 04:28.820 --> 04:33.820 So to read guys like Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, you know, this isn't just boring, 04:33.920 --> 04:35.480 it's actually bad and wrong. 04:35.620 --> 04:37.640 And you should feel bad about it. 04:38.360 --> 04:43.400 And I've just it's always been obvious to me that that wasn't the case, you know, 04:43.440 --> 04:49.920 there was just never that argument never landed with me because I had I owe so much 04:49.920 --> 04:54.800 to the great minds of the past and so much of my consolation has come from them. 04:55.200 --> 05:00.220 And so as I went up through first college and then grad school, you know, 05:00.240 --> 05:04.640 I started to focus in on ancient language and ancient literature. 05:04.640 --> 05:14.180 I think especially because it's a way of breaking out of the kind of traditional 05:14.720 --> 05:21.860 modern paradigm, we live in this very sort of modernity centric world where we think 05:21.860 --> 05:25.360 that the only things that we can think about and talk about are, you know, 05:25.380 --> 05:27.760 the ideas that just came up yesterday. 05:28.160 --> 05:33.980 And so to break out of that and to study the ancient world has been so refreshing to me. 05:34.640 --> 05:43.060 And, you know, I just basically step by step as I went along discovered that there was a world, 05:43.200 --> 05:47.400 a whole universe out there for people who were hungry to rediscover the classics, 05:47.620 --> 05:50.940 people who maybe hadn't learned about them in school or hadn't had them at home 05:50.940 --> 05:56.920 and just wanted to know what the best that has been thought and said could offer them. 05:57.340 --> 06:02.200 And so that's how I began my podcast is how I started writing and publishing. 06:03.380 --> 06:10.040 It's really been the guiding light of my career is my belief that besides all the politics, 06:10.200 --> 06:14.140 besides all the current affairs, all the stuff that we tend to fight about day to day, 06:15.040 --> 06:22.420 wisdom, which you just mentioned at the outset here, wisdom is something that's for everybody 06:22.420 --> 06:27.740 and something that genuinely instructs you in what it means to be excellent at being human. 06:27.740 --> 06:33.280 And so my two books, How to Save the West and Light of the Mind, Light of the World, 06:33.700 --> 06:39.780 are both attempts to kind of open the door to that wisdom for people and hopefully make it 06:39.780 --> 06:43.780 kind of accessible and relatable. So that's me. It's where I come from. 06:44.540 --> 06:51.440 So does that show you that, you know, just this intellect, even from this past 06:51.440 --> 06:58.340 intellect is like the dumbing down of society where, you know, they don't want people to know, 06:58.500 --> 07:02.620 they want people more in a box and not free thinkers, they want people more 07:02.620 --> 07:08.640 programmed to what they want them to believe opposed to having an open mind to things. 07:09.200 --> 07:15.080 Well, you know, I certainly think that our education system is profoundly broken. And 07:15.080 --> 07:21.900 a lot of that brokenness is by design. A lot of that destruction was purposefully undertaken. 07:22.960 --> 07:31.600 Mostly, I would say, by kind of the second wave of cultural Marxism that passed, swept through 07:31.980 --> 07:39.340 this country. When the Marxist, the economic revolutions of Europe sort of failed to take 07:39.340 --> 07:47.080 root in America, Marxists basically pivoted and took up a different strategy, which was to 07:47.080 --> 07:52.900 seek revolution through social class, through these category groups that we're all now so 07:52.900 --> 07:59.220 familiar with, like we have women's interests and racial interests and LGBTQIA sexuality 07:59.820 --> 08:06.840 interests, right? And all of these organizing blocks were formed, yeah, as a way of undermining 08:06.840 --> 08:11.900 the unity that comes from, first of all, American culture and civilization. But then 08:12.820 --> 08:19.440 that is founded on this deeper base of what we call Western civilization, the inheritance, 08:20.000 --> 08:24.260 the wisdom of Athens and Jerusalem that comes down to us through the Greco-Roman philosophers, 08:24.260 --> 08:30.940 and then also through the scripture and the wisdom traditions of the Jews and Christians. 08:31.480 --> 08:38.560 And that culture, which was something shared among a lot of Americans, it was not like everybody 08:39.140 --> 08:44.780 was a PhD in history back in the day. It's not like there was some golden age when everybody 08:45.580 --> 08:51.440 knew all this stuff perfectly. But there was a broad shared culture and community. People 08:51.440 --> 08:55.200 read Shakespeare in high school, maybe they learned a little bit of Latin, a little bit 08:55.200 --> 09:00.940 of Greek, and this gave us kind of a common footing to stand upon. And I do think that yeah, 09:01.020 --> 09:06.640 that was undermined, that was attacked for all sorts of ideological reasons. And one of the things 09:06.640 --> 09:16.100 that many ancient philosophers talk about is the fact that those, when you undermine the 09:16.100 --> 09:22.740 education of a civilization, you do make it much, much easier to control them. Education is 09:22.740 --> 09:29.420 one way of shaping molding citizens. And if you take control of education and you 09:29.420 --> 09:35.820 distort it for your own ends, then yeah, you can get people growing up to take to the streets 09:35.820 --> 09:42.400 or protest in favor of Hamas or whatever new current event you happen to decide needs to be 09:42.400 --> 09:47.400 the object of protest. You can do that much, much more easily when you have control over 09:47.400 --> 09:52.580 the narrative and over the sources of education. So I do think yeah, there's a kind of 09:52.580 --> 10:01.680 purposeful dumbing down that always happens whenever people are attempting to take control. 10:03.000 --> 10:09.500 Now, since you've delved a lot into history and a lot of writings from the past, 10:10.260 --> 10:19.840 when did fiction start? When did they start creating fictional stories? And did this day and age maybe 10:19.840 --> 10:26.020 look at some of those works that were maybe created at that time as fiction thinking now that 10:26.020 --> 10:32.080 maybe this actually happened in history because it was written about 500 years ago or 1,000 years 10:32.080 --> 10:39.760 ago, but it was actually maybe created just to entertain. But now the people look at it that 10:39.760 --> 10:44.980 oh, this must have happened because they wrote about it 500,000 or 2,000 years ago. 10:45.600 --> 10:52.020 Oh, fiction is as old as the hills. They're as long as we have records of human activity, 10:52.200 --> 10:58.200 we have records of storytelling, myths, legends. This is deeply, deeply built into 10:58.200 --> 11:05.780 something about who we are. And I would say it's because we have a need to express our inner lives, 11:05.880 --> 11:12.060 not just the sort of scientific or material facts about what's going on around us, but also what 11:12.060 --> 11:17.500 it's like to experience the world as a human being. And to do that, we have to tell stories. 11:17.620 --> 11:22.040 We have to say it was, you know, it's like an adventure of the prince who saves the princess 11:22.040 --> 11:27.700 or it's like a monster that we're face facing at the outskirts of the universe. And so 11:27.700 --> 11:33.600 as far back as we can go, we find people telling these sorts of stories, especially hero stories and 11:33.600 --> 11:40.280 stories of gods and legends and monsters. Of course, Homer's Iliad is our earliest work of 11:40.280 --> 11:46.720 Greek literature. And that is, if it's not totally fictional, it's fictional lies, it's 11:46.720 --> 11:56.180 drama with all sorts of gods and heroes in it. Go back even further, you find, you know, 11:56.180 --> 12:02.200 the Mesopotamian legends that also share a lot of similar elements there. This is something very, 12:02.280 --> 12:09.680 very primal in our experience. To the second part of your question, whether people tend to confuse 12:10.340 --> 12:15.680 fiction with fact, I would actually almost say that we have the opposite problem in the modern 12:15.680 --> 12:21.520 world. We tend to have the opposite problem, which is that we look at the stories of our 12:21.520 --> 12:27.440 ancestors, we look at the stories of the ancient world, and we say, they must have made all of that 12:27.440 --> 12:32.920 up because some of it is fiction. And so we assume they were just deceived, or they were 12:33.560 --> 12:38.780 simpletons. And therefore, we in our enlightened scientific age, we know better than to tell 12:38.780 --> 12:44.480 these stories of gods and heroes. The truth is, we're still telling stories of gods and heroes. 12:44.620 --> 12:48.500 We've changed their names. We like to talk about the science as if it were some sort of like 12:49.180 --> 12:54.700 disembodied entity that has supernatural power over us. So we still tell myths and legends. We 12:54.700 --> 12:58.860 don't always recognize them as such. And a lot of the myths and legends of the past contain 12:59.380 --> 13:04.340 truths in them. They contain spiritual truths about our place in the universe, or sometimes 13:04.340 --> 13:10.180 they even contain actual facts that we didn't realize were facts. Like, for a long time, 13:10.180 --> 13:14.540 people thought that Homer was entirely made of, that there was no Troy, there was no Trojan 13:14.540 --> 13:21.060 War, until in the 19th century, archaeologists actually discovered the site of Troy. Heinrich 13:21.060 --> 13:27.620 Schliemann and others basically excavated the real life Troy. And even though Homer is still 13:27.620 --> 13:32.380 fictional in the sense of having told a lot of stories that can't possibly ever have happened, 13:32.720 --> 13:36.520 he was also basing what he said on real life events. And there's a lot of that in 13:36.520 --> 13:42.420 modernity. We have a lot of kind of pride about our modern attitudes that often is kind 13:42.420 --> 13:48.700 of poorly founded. So stories are forever. Stories are human constant. And they do convey 13:48.700 --> 13:53.660 truth. It's just that it's not always the kind of truth that we are looking for in the modern age. 13:54.600 --> 14:01.220 What about the Bible? Didn't a lot of other stories that basically had similar 14:02.720 --> 14:08.660 plots as the Bible predate the Bible, and maybe from different cultures and different 14:08.660 --> 14:14.260 places, and maybe it was an amalgamation of all those stories which was created as the Holy Scriptures? 14:15.180 --> 14:21.320 Well, it's interesting. So there are, in some parts of the Bible, there are a lot of similarities to, 14:21.400 --> 14:26.020 for example, those Mesopotamian stories that I mentioned. So to take just one example, 14:26.120 --> 14:31.060 you take the book of Genesis, which is the Bible's story, among other things of how the world 14:31.060 --> 14:39.360 was created. And you can hold it up against Hesiod's Theogony or the Enuma Elish, 14:39.600 --> 14:46.420 which is a Mesopotamian creation legend, Sumerian and Babylonian, and then ultimately a Syrian 14:46.420 --> 14:53.300 story. And there are a lot of parallels. You can say, well, okay, a lot of these things 14:54.000 --> 14:58.460 kind of, they seem to kind of share a lot of similarities. For instance, 14:59.040 --> 15:06.100 they all kind of begin with a chaos or an ocean or a sort of confusion, and then there's usually one 15:06.100 --> 15:12.860 God who sort of asserts his control, his authority. What's interesting to me about this, though, 15:12.900 --> 15:19.880 actually, is not so much that there are similarities, as that once you survey the scope of those 15:19.880 --> 15:25.640 stories, you actually realize that the Bible's version is weirdly unique. In other words, 15:25.640 --> 15:30.620 there are all these sort of shared elements to all these creation stories. But the Bible is 15:30.620 --> 15:38.720 distinctive in that only the Bible makes the claim of one God before the chaos, before the void, 15:38.860 --> 15:45.480 before the tossing and coiling. Only the Bible asserts that that God is prime and in control, 15:45.620 --> 15:52.460 no matter whose political regime happens to be in charge. Only the Bible represents creation 15:52.460 --> 16:00.440 as a unitary order brought into being by the thought and words of a single mind. And so 16:00.440 --> 16:05.620 really, once you do this kind of digging, what happens is the Bible starts to stand out and 16:05.620 --> 16:11.040 look like a kind of revisionist history. It's like an intervention into what would have otherwise 16:11.040 --> 16:16.360 been common wisdom that there are many gods, and they are expressed in nature, and we should, 16:16.360 --> 16:22.000 you know, worship the trees and stuff like that. The Bible's distinctiveness, I find, 16:22.200 --> 16:28.680 actually makes itself more and more plain the more you know about ancient mythology and ancient 16:28.680 --> 16:32.900 history. To your second question, which is what a classicist would call the question of 16:32.900 --> 16:40.520 transmission or compilation, this is obviously a huge, huge subject that I find endlessly 16:40.520 --> 16:49.100 fascinating. To make a very long story kind of shorter, I would suggest that what you have, 16:49.220 --> 16:56.060 especially in the first five books of the Bible, is a unitary literary composition. Now that doesn't 16:56.060 --> 17:00.140 mean that it's not drawing from other sources, doesn't mean that there weren't editors and 17:00.140 --> 17:05.600 different people who came along and shaped it into the book that we have today. But we also 17:05.600 --> 17:11.000 know that there is a really tight chain of transmission for every period that we have 17:11.000 --> 17:16.880 good records of. The Jewish people are meticulous about passing down this oral tradition that 17:16.880 --> 17:23.100 then became a written tradition. And again, as a classicist, if I look at the manuscripts that we 17:23.100 --> 17:28.180 have of these different texts, manuscripts of Homer, manuscripts of the Enuma Elish, 17:28.180 --> 17:35.900 manuscripts of the Bible, and so on and so forth, it's astonishing the degree of exactitude with 17:35.900 --> 17:42.680 which the Bible is preserved compared to Euripides and compared to Homer and compared to 17:42.680 --> 17:48.820 some of these Greek texts. The Bible is in like way, way better shape than books we read without 17:48.820 --> 17:53.720 thinking all the time in school, like the Greek tragedies. This is actually like a, this was 17:53.720 --> 17:59.960 a very, very carefully preserved text. That doesn't mean that it dropped from the sky out of nowhere. 18:00.140 --> 18:04.920 I mean, Christians believe that this is an inspired book, not that this is a God written 18:04.920 --> 18:09.820 book. In other words, God's hand doesn't reach down and write it. God inspires different authors 18:09.820 --> 18:16.220 and different speakers and thinkers at different periods into what eventually becomes the Bible. 18:16.420 --> 18:21.500 So this stuff is like way, way more complicated than we sometimes let on for it to be. 18:22.060 --> 18:26.600 I also find though that some people think of that as like a challenge to their faith. For me, 18:26.620 --> 18:31.840 it's actually kind of a remarkable revelation of God acting in history, the way that the 18:31.840 --> 18:37.780 Bible has come into being over time. When they teach history in their Freemason 18:37.780 --> 18:44.700 indoctrination camps, they call schools that the victors of whatever era 18:45.420 --> 18:51.160 all the books and rewrite history in their favor. And then the next era comes, 18:51.400 --> 18:57.340 they burn all the books and they rewrite history to make it look in their favor. And this has happened 18:58.000 --> 19:04.340 on many occasions what they teach in these indoctrination camps. But how do we know what 19:04.340 --> 19:12.200 potentially could be real history if potentially what's being taught is history's been rewritten 19:12.200 --> 19:17.900 many, many different times over the centuries? You know, it's funny. I was just reading 19:18.940 --> 19:27.020 Suetonius's account of the life of Augustus. Augustus, the first Roman emperor. He wins a civil 19:27.020 --> 19:31.900 war. There have been 100 years of civil war in Rome, starting with the Gragi brothers leading 19:31.900 --> 19:37.620 up through Marius and Sulla on to Julius Caesar famously crossing the Rubicon. And then his 19:37.620 --> 19:43.540 adopted son Octavius becomes Emperor Augustus by defeating Mark Antony. And at that point, 19:43.640 --> 19:49.800 he gets to do what you're saying. He gets to establish the new world order and basically say, 19:49.800 --> 19:55.300 it's my way or the highway. We're going to rewrite the rules of operation in Rome. And this 19:55.300 --> 20:00.980 is sometimes called the Augustan era or the Augustan revival, the Pax Augustana, the 20:00.980 --> 20:08.520 piece of Augustus. And one of the things Augustus did was clean up in his view the 20:09.140 --> 20:15.720 annals of Roman prophecy. He came went into the storehouses of Roman prophecy, 20:16.080 --> 20:20.440 which were obviously very culturally important. And he basically burned all but the most 20:20.440 --> 20:26.200 kind of authentic authenticated ones in his view. And so there was this massive, massive 20:26.200 --> 20:31.220 book burning to go along with this massive restoration. And so you're right, this the 20:31.220 --> 20:38.120 control over information is very much a project that imperial rulers like to take on. 20:39.240 --> 20:43.300 The Anuma Elish that I mentioned earlier is another great example. We have versions of the 20:43.300 --> 20:49.880 Anuma Elish in which Marduk, the god of Babylon is king of the gods. Then we have later versions 20:49.880 --> 20:54.220 in which Ashur, god of Assyria is king of the gods. And this reflects the fact that 20:54.220 --> 20:59.440 in the intervening period, Assyria has become dominant in the region between the 20:59.440 --> 21:03.720 Tigris and the Euphrates. And so we have basically like a rewriting of this mythological history 21:03.720 --> 21:10.280 as well. This does happen. And so this leads to the idea that history is written by the 21:10.280 --> 21:16.180 victors. That's kind of the cliche that you hear a lot. I think this is a little bit of 21:16.180 --> 21:21.880 a hot take, I guess. I think that this has been overstated and oversold. And especially in 21:21.880 --> 21:27.640 the postmodern period when people were really pushing this idea that there's no way of knowing 21:27.640 --> 21:32.820 the truth. There's no kind of stable fixed point. We came up with this notion that, yeah, it's 21:32.820 --> 21:39.600 all just propaganda. All history is really just interested parties for motivated reasons 21:39.600 --> 21:46.980 trying to spin the spin the thing their way. And there you do get a lot of that. 21:46.980 --> 21:52.460 But it's also true that historians for as long as there have been historians have been aware of 21:52.460 --> 21:58.980 this problem and have been developing techniques for trying to get at the truth using these various 21:58.980 --> 22:03.340 competing narratives. And this goes right back to the beginning of history. If you read 22:03.340 --> 22:08.100 Herodotus, who's the father of the Western discipline of history, he's comparing different 22:08.100 --> 22:11.860 sources against each other. And he's saying, well, the official Persian narrative is this. 22:11.860 --> 22:17.400 But here's what the Greeks and here's how we can maybe hold these ideas up against each other. 22:17.680 --> 22:23.120 Then Thucydides comes into play and he's doing the same in a more sophisticated way. 22:23.580 --> 22:30.020 And there are certain texts and books that have been passed down century to century without 22:30.020 --> 22:35.920 interruption. I mean, obviously the Bible is one. But we do have good historical records for a 22:35.920 --> 22:40.960 lot of periods in history. The high classical Athenian period would be a good example. 22:40.960 --> 22:47.920 Moments when our textual record seems relatively secure. Can we be certain at any point ever? 22:48.220 --> 22:50.720 No, there's always going to be room for doubt, always room for questioning, 22:50.780 --> 22:57.800 investigation of individual of individual issues. But we're not in a completely hopeless situation 22:57.800 --> 23:02.880 here. And unless we believe that everyone throughout all of history has always been a 23:02.880 --> 23:07.240 self interested liar, which I don't believe I'm not that much of a cynic. And then it's 23:07.240 --> 23:12.460 actually possible with care and attention to detail for us to sift through the truth. 23:13.700 --> 23:20.460 Some people think that the Roman Empire never fell. They just became the Catholic Church 23:21.080 --> 23:26.320 and are still ruling today through the Jesuit order. What's your thoughts on that? And have you 23:26.320 --> 23:37.220 found any proof that that may be the case? Well, if the Jesuits are in charge, they're 23:37.220 --> 23:41.660 I don't find this particular version of the story very plausible. I will say that 23:42.240 --> 23:50.780 the idea that the Roman Empire never fell is a powerful. It remains with us still in so many 23:50.780 --> 23:58.380 ways. I don't know if you saw that meme a while back that men think about the Roman Empire 23:58.380 --> 24:04.680 like once a day or something. If you quiz your husband or your boyfriend or your brother 24:04.680 --> 24:07.480 or whatever you will find that he thinks about the Roman Empire all the time. 24:08.300 --> 24:12.800 I'm not sure if that's true for all men. It's certainly true for me. And more broadly, 24:13.000 --> 24:18.680 it's certainly true that we encounter the footprint, the shadow of Rome wherever we go. 24:19.060 --> 24:27.400 And one place that that power and authority and political organization went after the sacking of 24:27.400 --> 24:33.980 of Rome in the 5th century AD was into the Roman Catholic Church. A lot of the 24:33.980 --> 24:41.740 authority and Imperium did travel to the Catholics. It was also, however, inherited by the 24:41.740 --> 24:46.780 barbarian tribes, especially by Charlemagne and his Franks, but also by any number of 24:46.780 --> 24:53.000 Germanic tribes. There's always been a peripheral locus of power in England 24:53.000 --> 24:57.240 that has never sat quite comfortably in that larger sphere of influence. 24:57.860 --> 25:03.000 And of course, there's one way in which the Roman Empire very much endures and we almost 25:03.000 --> 25:09.100 never talk about this. But that's in the East. In the East, what we now call the Byzantine Empire 25:09.100 --> 25:14.800 continues to call itself the Roman Empire for centuries and centuries after the Western 25:14.800 --> 25:19.960 Empire has fallen. And so that's a whole separate locus of control in what we now 25:19.960 --> 25:25.060 think of as the Eastern Orthodox Church. And obviously, there's a lot of knock-on effects to 25:25.060 --> 25:32.320 that right now in politics and in current affairs because Russia is waging this very unsettling 25:32.320 --> 25:38.260 war with Ukraine. And they are one of the countries where that Eastern influence is most 25:38.260 --> 25:43.180 keenly felt, the Eastern influence of the Roman Empire, that is. So I would be more inclined 25:43.180 --> 25:48.600 to say that this massive kind of world state, which is what the Roman Empire was, 25:49.820 --> 25:56.520 dissolved as world states tend to do, but it didn't disappear. It fragmented and splintered 25:56.520 --> 26:02.400 into all sorts of different competing power centers, many of which we still live with today. 26:02.460 --> 26:06.140 Something very similar happened, by the way, in the wake of Alexander the Great's death when 26:06.140 --> 26:11.540 his empire fell apart, became the Hellenistic kingdoms. But it also became the Alexandrian 26:11.540 --> 26:16.980 library and had this major, major cultural influence. The Jesuits, I have to say, 26:16.980 --> 26:23.560 would not even be in my top 10 list of inheritors of Roman power today, but maybe you feel different. 26:25.040 --> 26:31.940 Now, what do you know about the Merovingians and where they play a role in all kind of history? 26:32.920 --> 26:36.280 I mean, it enlightened me. Very little, I think. 26:37.560 --> 26:41.440 Well, apparently some of the Franks that you were talking about were Merovingians and their 26:41.440 --> 26:47.420 bloodline was decimated. They have a true lineage to the King of David, and a lot of the 26:47.420 --> 26:55.520 certain powers that be are trying to eliminate that bloodline so there's no true air to the throne. 26:55.780 --> 27:01.340 And the ones that we see in monarchy right now, they're not really true bloodlines, 27:01.580 --> 27:08.240 and they're just kind of, they've actually hijacked things and things aren't the way they're 27:08.240 --> 27:14.040 supposed to be. And this was purposely done so that way no true air would be brought to light. 27:14.420 --> 27:18.540 And, you know, I think they're, I'm still researching that topic myself. 27:19.100 --> 27:24.760 Yeah, I mean, it's a deep cut, that's for sure. As I recall, and I'm speaking a little bit off 27:24.760 --> 27:28.440 the top of my head here, the Merovingians were sort of a rival dynasty that were replaced 27:28.440 --> 27:32.440 by the Carolingians. I think that's true. Carolingians, yeah. 27:32.440 --> 27:37.840 Yeah, yeah. So that's Charlemagne, right, in the Holy Roman Empire, and so forth. 27:38.260 --> 27:42.420 And so I guess the idea here would be that like the Merovingians have been usurped 27:43.080 --> 27:45.320 from their rightful place on what the throne of David? 27:46.100 --> 27:49.320 Yeah, apparently it goes back to the throne of David, so. 27:49.400 --> 27:50.420 But they weren't Jews. 27:53.520 --> 27:56.820 That I don't know, again, I'm still hearing this from somebody- 27:56.820 --> 28:01.120 That would be my first question, is the throne of David which belongs to Jesus, 28:01.120 --> 28:05.560 right? Jesus being Jewish in the line of David, ostensibly this belongs to Jesus. 28:05.560 --> 28:09.580 But Jesus didn't have a father, so he actually wasn't in the line of David. 28:10.020 --> 28:15.900 He didn't, he was not from, you know, he was immaculate conception. 28:16.040 --> 28:21.240 So there was actually no lineage to David through Jesus. 28:21.820 --> 28:27.160 Well, right, this is one of the major sort of claims about the, of the New Testament, 28:27.160 --> 28:33.040 is that this lineage is spiritual and of course the throne of David belonging to God 28:33.040 --> 28:34.320 via immaculate conception. 28:34.580 --> 28:37.500 I also have heard some people claim that Mary was from the line of David, 28:37.660 --> 28:39.280 as well as Joseph, I'm not so sure about that. 28:39.460 --> 28:42.520 But anyway, none of this changes the fact that the Merovingians weren't Jews. 28:43.240 --> 28:46.120 So it doesn't really help the case. 28:48.200 --> 28:54.320 What are your thoughts on modern-day Zionism and how they're kind of running things 28:54.320 --> 28:55.160 in the standage? 28:56.220 --> 29:03.800 Well, yeah, I mean, this is a huge sore spot right now, as I'm sure you know. 29:04.220 --> 29:08.480 I find the right wings, I mean, I'm a conservative myself. 29:08.640 --> 29:09.640 I consider myself a right winger. 29:09.880 --> 29:14.540 I think the right has really, some parts of the right have made a really, 29:14.560 --> 29:18.500 really ugly turn to just rank anti-Semitism. 29:18.920 --> 29:21.360 I mean, there's really no other word for it when you start, 29:21.360 --> 29:26.820 you know, asking whether the Holocaust is made up or invoking the blood libel, 29:26.980 --> 29:30.700 which is one of the oldest canards in the anti-Semite playbook. 29:31.520 --> 29:36.380 You know, the modern Zionist movement, which created the state of Israel, 29:37.900 --> 29:44.280 is obviously like, it is possible in principle to discuss that in isolation, 29:44.660 --> 29:50.300 distinct from the throne of Zion that is represented in the Bible, right? 29:50.300 --> 29:57.580 I mean, it's not clear to me as a Christian that the Old Testament is a promissory note 29:57.580 --> 30:02.640 for today's Jews to hold the nation state of Israel, 30:02.900 --> 30:06.220 but that's also actually separate from my political opinion, 30:06.220 --> 30:12.060 which is that it is a good thing for the today's Jews to hold that nation state of Israel. 30:12.220 --> 30:16.280 In fact, this is one of our chief and key allies in the area. 30:16.280 --> 30:20.680 They are effectively the only Western-style state 30:20.680 --> 30:24.020 in what is otherwise an enormously hostile region, 30:24.180 --> 30:31.320 and it will be bad news bears for us if they suffer any sort of catastrophe. 30:32.400 --> 30:40.180 The attack on October 7th was a horror, 30:40.960 --> 30:46.420 was just a rank and contemptible act of aggression by terrorist cowards, 30:47.240 --> 30:52.600 and I think that that has been a really ugly and terrible war ever since, 30:52.700 --> 30:55.520 but effectively I'm in support of Israel. 30:56.260 --> 31:00.860 And that is separate from my feelings about the Tree of Jesse 31:00.860 --> 31:02.600 and these larger theological questions. 31:03.020 --> 31:06.520 I mean, in America, there's been historically this really interesting 31:07.600 --> 31:16.040 phylocemitism in which evangelical Christians tend to actually place 31:16.040 --> 31:21.660 almost a scatological or apocalyptic significance upon the modern nation state of Israel, 31:21.740 --> 31:25.240 but once the 12 tribes return to this location, 31:25.460 --> 31:28.140 then the second coming will happen, and etc., etc. 31:28.720 --> 31:30.780 I don't really believe that. 31:31.460 --> 31:37.720 I think that's probably a mistake in the same way as Jesus' connection to the throne of David 31:39.140 --> 31:42.100 is primarily, is first and foremost spiritual, 31:42.540 --> 31:47.280 and he says, whoever does my will is my father, mother, sister, brother. 31:48.060 --> 31:52.600 Similarly, I don't actually think that holiness is passed on through bloodlines 31:52.600 --> 31:56.900 or anything like that, and so I don't think that the modern nation state of Israel 31:56.900 --> 31:59.520 has that a scatological significance that some people 32:00.780 --> 32:07.340 attribute to it, but at the same time, God doesn't go back on his promises. 32:07.520 --> 32:09.420 The Jews are the chosen people. 32:09.720 --> 32:13.100 I'm personally ethnically from them for what it's worth. 32:13.440 --> 32:16.520 My father's side, we are Jewish ethnically, 32:16.980 --> 32:21.200 so maybe I'm being a little bit biased here, 32:21.300 --> 32:28.540 but you look at the vast disproportion of Jews among our greatest scientists, 32:28.540 --> 32:33.860 our greatest intellectuals, our greatest writers in Europe and America especially. 32:34.680 --> 32:43.260 I do think there's kind of something marvelous about this people, 32:43.520 --> 32:46.860 and especially about this culture, which is a lodestone of the West. 32:46.960 --> 32:50.940 When you talk about Western civilization, you talk about Athens and Jerusalem, 32:51.660 --> 32:57.720 and this to me is like the indispensable pillar of our civilization, 32:58.360 --> 33:01.380 which we will give up or squander at our peril. 33:02.760 --> 33:05.440 We have Lorna Lee O'Brien from our Facebooks. 33:05.440 --> 33:09.720 As I heard, the Israel leader funded Hamas to attack his own country, 33:09.800 --> 33:12.640 like there were no people there to protect the gates or anything, 33:12.740 --> 33:15.460 so that story is pretty crazy in itself, 33:15.480 --> 33:19.960 but Israel actually created Hamas to go against the PLO, 33:19.960 --> 33:24.080 so that was actually Hamas was a creation of Israel, 33:24.740 --> 33:27.760 because the PLO was causing problems there. 33:30.080 --> 33:34.240 What evidence would Lorna cite in defense of this claim? 33:34.940 --> 33:43.580 I'm not sure, but we had an actual Israeli here that created the perimeter defense system 33:43.580 --> 33:50.620 in 2001 in Israel, and he's a computer guy that he created, 33:51.020 --> 33:54.700 and he was actually working, after that he ended up working with the US 33:55.380 --> 33:58.960 on defense systems and things, a computer programmer, 33:59.580 --> 34:01.680 and we had some other people come on and say, 34:01.740 --> 34:06.980 it's not possible that that attack could have happened unless it was let happen, 34:07.100 --> 34:11.200 and we've had others talk about that festival that they came and attacked 34:11.840 --> 34:15.780 was never in the area that it was actually in at the time of the attack, 34:15.780 --> 34:18.080 it was always somewhere else, and for some reason, 34:18.160 --> 34:23.580 they moved it right beside the wall there when it was never had been held before, 34:23.700 --> 34:26.960 so there's a lot of things that are very peculiar. 34:26.960 --> 34:29.460 I'm sorry, I find this point extremely dubious. 34:29.740 --> 34:34.220 I mean, it just strikes me as an extraordinarily roundabout way 34:34.220 --> 34:36.400 to go about prosecuting your national interests, 34:36.400 --> 34:41.740 to engineer the execution and kidnapping of your people, 34:41.960 --> 34:46.280 and frankly, it's quite an audacious 34:46.960 --> 34:54.300 and it's a major accusation against the Jewish leadership 34:54.300 --> 34:57.640 that they would abuse their people in that cynical kind of way. 34:57.740 --> 35:00.940 I would want extremely conclusive evidence to that effect 35:00.940 --> 35:03.280 before I went around making claims like that. 35:04.000 --> 35:08.960 Well, there's lots of false flags that are happening in America and other places. 35:09.140 --> 35:12.500 We have a lot of people talk about some of these false flags that do happen. 35:12.680 --> 35:17.920 At that time, Netanyahu, which is he's done a lot of criminal things 35:17.920 --> 35:19.760 and his own people wanted him out, 35:19.860 --> 35:24.400 so his own popularity at the time was in question, 35:24.960 --> 35:29.380 and there was actually criminal prosecutions against him for some of the corruption. 35:30.220 --> 35:35.760 Netanyahu, in order to counterbalance his failing popularity, 35:36.680 --> 35:40.540 would have engineered an assault on his own people. 35:40.680 --> 35:47.800 I mean, that's a really astonishing and very serious allegation 35:47.800 --> 35:52.560 for which, as yet, I've seen absolutely no viable evidence. 35:53.400 --> 35:57.040 Well, like I said, these are just questions as a journalist. 35:57.040 --> 35:59.900 I'm looking at their assertions there, feature make. 36:00.020 --> 36:02.120 I mean, this is the whole just asking questions thing 36:02.120 --> 36:07.720 that we get from this camp of people is actually an op, right? 36:07.860 --> 36:11.640 I mean, because the answers are never forthcoming, 36:11.680 --> 36:13.240 except in one direction, right? 36:13.340 --> 36:15.240 I mean, this is like an insinuation campaign, 36:15.540 --> 36:21.440 and the allegations are so severe and ugly that I just, you know, 36:21.440 --> 36:29.280 I find this like quite, I find it quite indefensible. 36:30.140 --> 36:32.740 Yeah, I wouldn't put it past any of these scumbags. 36:32.900 --> 36:35.000 I think most of the people that are in leadership, 36:35.080 --> 36:38.720 whether it's in America, whether it's in Canada, whether it's in Israel, 36:39.000 --> 36:41.040 they're all a bunch of parasitic scumbags, 36:41.220 --> 36:44.340 and they're all targeting their own people. 36:44.480 --> 36:46.500 We're in the state of the world that we're in 36:46.500 --> 36:49.120 is because of the governments that are running this country, 36:49.120 --> 36:53.100 and it doesn't matter if it's Israel or the UK or United States, 36:53.360 --> 36:55.700 they're all been doing things against our own people. 36:55.840 --> 36:58.240 Look at what this COVID just did with them, 36:58.960 --> 37:02.220 bioengineering a weapon to target their own people 37:02.220 --> 37:06.180 in order for the pharmaceuticals to inject these mRNA into people. 37:06.600 --> 37:09.140 Like, we're not living in a good state of time 37:09.140 --> 37:12.580 where we can trust the people of any of the country's leadership, 37:12.820 --> 37:15.240 and that includes every country in the world, 37:15.240 --> 37:18.400 not just specifically picking one or the other. 37:18.400 --> 37:22.220 Well, I was no great fan of the COVID regime, 37:22.260 --> 37:24.760 and my record on that is pretty clear. 37:26.040 --> 37:31.320 I mean, the insinuations, though, that you are making 37:31.840 --> 37:37.260 about now, every leader in the world, including, I guess, Donald Trump, right? 37:39.120 --> 37:41.700 Operation Warp Speed, Operation Warp Speed, 37:41.840 --> 37:45.080 he's obviously, he's bragged about this, 37:45.260 --> 37:47.180 where at any time in history, 37:47.180 --> 37:51.920 if any pharmaceutical product had a death of more than 50 people, 37:51.980 --> 37:53.000 it was pulled off the shelf. 37:53.220 --> 37:55.920 There's actually hundreds of thousands of people 37:55.920 --> 37:57.680 that have now been injured and or killed, 37:57.760 --> 37:58.680 so people say millions, 37:58.980 --> 38:01.940 and they're still promoting this type of thing 38:01.940 --> 38:03.480 for people to inject it. 38:03.480 --> 38:05.780 I know personal people that have been affected by it. 38:05.780 --> 38:09.240 I've interviewed tons of people that have had kids that have had it 38:09.240 --> 38:13.420 and, you know, killed and other things by this bio weapon 38:13.420 --> 38:14.600 that's bragged about, 38:14.600 --> 38:17.480 and no longer, he's not bragging about it now, 38:17.580 --> 38:20.540 but again, you know, I don't see any of these leaders 38:20.540 --> 38:22.820 working for the best interest of the people from, 38:23.140 --> 38:24.400 you'll know them by their fruits, 38:24.580 --> 38:28.300 and so far, their fruits have been very rotten. 38:28.620 --> 38:31.400 Go with you up to a certain point here, right? 38:31.560 --> 38:33.320 And I think that this is one of the things 38:33.320 --> 38:37.780 that was so devastating and pernicious about the COVID regime 38:37.780 --> 38:41.220 is that the people who were in charge, 38:41.220 --> 38:45.820 whom we trusted to be neutral arbiters of information, 38:45.940 --> 38:48.980 especially the WHO and the CDC 38:48.980 --> 38:52.200 and all of these supposedly neutral boards and bodies 38:52.780 --> 38:55.720 that had been basically like bureaucratically installed 38:55.720 --> 38:59.180 to override our constitutional system, 38:59.420 --> 39:01.260 they lied and lied and lied, 39:01.420 --> 39:03.520 and they did it without our best interest at heart, 39:03.580 --> 39:06.720 and they absolutely squandered every bit of public trust 39:06.720 --> 39:09.240 that they then did lose. 39:09.240 --> 39:12.380 And so I'm completely on board with you about that. 39:12.500 --> 39:14.280 I think that's absolutely true. 39:15.220 --> 39:20.460 It doesn't follow, though, that whatever conspiracy theory 39:20.460 --> 39:23.340 we make up is there for the truth, right? 39:23.680 --> 39:26.580 And just because we're not getting accurate information 39:26.580 --> 39:27.840 from official sources, 39:27.840 --> 39:30.500 doesn't mean that we are getting accurate information 39:30.500 --> 39:36.420 from the insinuations of a few half-baked conspiracy theorists. 39:36.420 --> 39:39.500 So I would just say I would caution, I guess, 39:39.680 --> 39:43.740 against like getting hoodwinked in the other direction. 39:44.220 --> 39:46.660 So of course, yes, leaders do lie. 39:46.780 --> 39:48.100 I mean, it's similar to our conversation 39:48.100 --> 39:50.220 that we were having about ancient history, right? 39:50.500 --> 39:53.060 There are people who burn books, people do lie, 39:53.120 --> 39:54.760 and they do so shamefully. 39:55.220 --> 39:58.320 But it's also true that we are not without the ability 39:58.320 --> 40:00.880 to like pursue evidence 40:00.880 --> 40:03.620 and to attempt to understand what we can and can't know. 40:03.620 --> 40:07.860 And I'm very concerned that in our reaction, 40:08.220 --> 40:12.560 our justified rage and reaction against the guys 40:12.560 --> 40:14.280 like Anthony Fauci who misled us, 40:14.460 --> 40:17.560 we have now just decided that whatever we might say 40:17.560 --> 40:23.080 about world leaders, no matter how wild, far-fetched, 40:23.180 --> 40:26.220 and evil is necessarily true because they're all out to get us. 40:26.240 --> 40:27.360 I just don't think that that follows. 40:28.200 --> 40:31.260 But is there any evidence that any of the world leaders 40:31.260 --> 40:35.220 have been in favor of any of the people ever throughout history? 40:35.760 --> 40:37.160 There was actually JFK. 40:37.540 --> 40:39.460 Does any world leader ever 40:40.040 --> 40:41.960 had the best interest of his people at heart? 40:42.560 --> 40:47.140 Yeah, JFK actually tried to expose some of this stuff 40:47.140 --> 40:49.200 that was going on with these secret societies 40:49.200 --> 40:52.120 and different things that they murdered him, right? 40:52.800 --> 40:54.860 Well, I don't believe that either. 40:55.000 --> 40:57.860 But like if you think that JFK tried to do that, 40:57.860 --> 41:00.520 then you think that JFK had the interest of people, right? 41:00.520 --> 41:02.840 So you at least believe that one person once 41:02.840 --> 41:04.560 had the interest of his people at heart. 41:04.840 --> 41:08.680 And again, there's other people that are on both sides of the fence on that, 41:08.720 --> 41:11.020 why he did that or who he was aligned with. 41:11.300 --> 41:13.860 Some people think that JFK staged his own death, right? 41:13.980 --> 41:18.600 There's lots of questions about all of this being such a big show 41:18.600 --> 41:21.240 that we don't actually even know what is actually happening 41:21.240 --> 41:25.100 because there's so much lies that are mixed in with the truth 41:25.100 --> 41:28.000 that it's hard to discern what is actually truth when 41:28.000 --> 41:31.840 even the news media, Operation Mockingbird Media, 41:32.020 --> 41:36.300 has been put into place in order to indoctrinate the people 41:36.300 --> 41:41.760 of their way of thinking and not actual truth comes out of the media very often. 41:41.960 --> 41:44.660 You're advancing a theory though in these various cases 41:44.660 --> 41:46.220 of what is the truth, right? 41:46.940 --> 41:50.760 So there's this weird double bind going on here 41:50.760 --> 41:52.440 that this is what I'm worried about. 41:52.780 --> 41:56.100 It's like on the one hand your claim is we can't know anything, 41:56.100 --> 41:58.200 everyone is potentially against us, 41:58.300 --> 42:01.840 no leader has ever been in the people's good graces, 42:01.860 --> 42:03.120 or at least we don't know. 42:03.560 --> 42:07.240 On the other hand, your claim is that in fact, yes, JFK, 42:07.660 --> 42:08.640 what, engineered his own death, 42:08.900 --> 42:11.440 or BB Netanyahu engineered October 7th. 42:11.740 --> 42:15.700 And so you are engaging in discourse and discussion 42:15.700 --> 42:17.260 about what the truth is, 42:17.340 --> 42:19.640 which necessarily implies that you therefore think 42:19.640 --> 42:23.700 it's possible to move closer to it versus further away from it. 42:23.700 --> 42:28.460 And if that's the case, then your claims need subjection to evidence, 42:28.540 --> 42:30.020 just like anybody else's. 42:30.260 --> 42:33.760 And that's all I'm saying is that these like larger 42:35.100 --> 42:38.000 backroom smoking deal theories that you're advancing 42:38.000 --> 42:40.660 don't seem to me to have any evidence for them 42:40.660 --> 42:44.380 any more than the claims of the WHO and the CDC 42:44.380 --> 42:45.840 seem to have evidence during COVID. 42:47.020 --> 42:50.280 What do you think about Russia invading Ukraine 42:50.280 --> 42:52.600 because of the NATO encroachment on their country? 42:53.700 --> 42:57.020 Well, I mean, I think that a war of aggression, 42:57.280 --> 43:01.800 which is what this is, is a threat to geopolitical security. 43:02.000 --> 43:05.360 I think that in the wake of that invasion, 43:06.360 --> 43:10.780 which is again what it was by a thug, which is what Putin is, 43:12.940 --> 43:18.220 the left and the kind of, I'm not even sure how to put it, 43:18.220 --> 43:24.400 the laptop class basically adopted a Star Wars morality tale 43:24.400 --> 43:28.620 about how this is now World War II all over again. 43:29.000 --> 43:32.860 And unless you support sending American boots on the ground, 43:32.980 --> 43:33.860 you're literally Hitler. 43:34.040 --> 43:35.960 And I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not by much. 43:36.260 --> 43:40.320 And so this created a kind of maddening media environment 43:40.320 --> 43:42.560 in which it was impossible for people to acknowledge 43:42.560 --> 43:44.660 that, yeah, of course, there's this like long 43:44.660 --> 43:48.540 and tangled history between Russia and Ukraine. 43:48.780 --> 43:50.320 You can read Solzhenitsyn about it. 43:50.440 --> 43:52.940 I mean, this stuff has been going on. 43:52.980 --> 43:54.580 They've been fighting over this forever. 43:55.760 --> 43:59.840 And so this latest incursion is not without precedent. 44:00.180 --> 44:02.420 Of course, from Putin's perspective, 44:02.560 --> 44:03.580 it's not without justification. 44:04.160 --> 44:05.700 I reject that justification. 44:06.080 --> 44:10.320 I don't think it validates an invasive war. 44:10.840 --> 44:16.840 But I think the interdiction, the prohibition 44:16.840 --> 44:19.760 against acknowledging and talking about these things 44:19.760 --> 44:23.480 has counterintuitively actually made Putin's case 44:23.480 --> 44:25.380 much more plausible to a lot of people. 44:25.480 --> 44:26.660 I think we've got to get over that. 44:26.900 --> 44:29.780 We can say that this war is wrong, which I believe it is, 44:30.040 --> 44:34.180 while also talking seriously like adults 44:34.180 --> 44:36.000 about the various nuances of it 44:36.000 --> 44:38.920 and acknowledging that that doesn't mean America 44:38.920 --> 44:41.800 is necessarily obligated to get involved. 44:42.100 --> 44:44.480 Our national interests are our own. 44:44.580 --> 44:47.040 And I think it's shameful the way we are conscripted 44:47.040 --> 44:49.600 into playing world police or what have you 44:49.600 --> 44:54.300 out of sort of this emotional or moral blackmail. 44:55.060 --> 44:58.080 But I do think that America has an interest 44:58.080 --> 45:00.820 in bringing an end to this war. 45:01.120 --> 45:03.780 And ideally, it has an interest in Putin 45:03.780 --> 45:05.460 coming out the worst for it. 45:05.540 --> 45:08.280 I think at this point in the wake of the Biden 45:08.280 --> 45:11.240 presidency, given where things are with Trump, 45:11.380 --> 45:15.380 it's unlikely that we're going to get the ideal possible scenario. 45:15.840 --> 45:18.300 But this is one thing that Trump says that I really agree with 45:18.300 --> 45:21.340 is the ideal is for this never to happen. 45:21.640 --> 45:24.920 And if he had been in office, it never would have happened. 45:25.100 --> 45:26.800 But we are where we are. 45:26.960 --> 45:29.760 And I think we're going to have to find some way 45:29.760 --> 45:30.980 of drawing a ceasefire. 45:31.120 --> 45:32.940 And I don't think that's going to look like Ukraine 45:32.940 --> 45:34.700 getting all its territory back, unfortunately. 45:34.700 --> 45:40.140 Do you know how many regimes or governments 45:40.140 --> 45:46.840 have been overthrown by the CIA and the American, I guess, military? 45:47.240 --> 45:48.840 I have a feeling you're about to tell me. 45:49.560 --> 45:53.320 Well, we've had an Army colonel, Colonel Towner Watkins, 45:53.480 --> 45:55.740 who worked in the Pentagon for 20 years. 45:56.060 --> 45:58.800 She comes and talks about the CIA being 45:59.340 --> 46:02.020 the biggest terrorist organization on Earth. 46:02.020 --> 46:06.120 And they've overthrown 90 different regimes. 46:06.460 --> 46:10.660 They've been instrumental in sending money through USAID 46:10.660 --> 46:14.320 and other things to make sure governments have been overthrown. 46:14.440 --> 46:17.600 One of those governments that was overthrown was an elected government, 46:17.760 --> 46:18.920 was in Ukraine. 46:19.460 --> 46:20.980 And then Zelensky was installed. 46:21.200 --> 46:25.220 And then the nightmares kind of happened through Zelensky 46:25.220 --> 46:28.100 and them targeting the Russian people and all these other things. 46:28.300 --> 46:31.400 So a lot of people think that they know what's going on in the world. 46:31.400 --> 46:34.600 But unless you're actually trying to ask questions 46:34.600 --> 46:36.780 and research every single side of things, 46:36.860 --> 46:39.920 most people have one way or the other. 46:40.100 --> 46:43.240 They tend to side with one side or the other side, 46:43.360 --> 46:46.640 whichever fits their narrative the best. 46:46.960 --> 46:50.340 And so it's interesting that people have opinions 46:50.340 --> 46:53.380 on what's happening in Ukraine when they don't actually even know 46:53.380 --> 46:56.100 that it was actually overthrown by the CIA. 46:56.660 --> 47:00.400 And then they think Putin is bad for what he did 47:00.400 --> 47:02.100 when all NATO has been done. 47:02.220 --> 47:03.380 And she also talks about NATO. 47:03.700 --> 47:07.620 And this is your talk about an Army colonel from the U.S. Air Force 47:07.620 --> 47:11.640 talking about NATO being one of the biggest terrorist organizations on Earth. 47:11.760 --> 47:14.220 So it isn't just coming on someone's opinion. 47:14.380 --> 47:16.880 We're talking about someone who's a brilliant woman 47:16.880 --> 47:22.160 who has been deeply studying all of this stuff coming. 47:22.280 --> 47:23.960 She's come on our show numerous times 47:23.960 --> 47:25.820 and I think she'll be on in a couple of weeks again. 47:26.160 --> 47:27.860 And she talks about all these things, 47:27.860 --> 47:30.560 how the CIA goes and overthrows government. 47:30.900 --> 47:34.200 So what's the difference between an overthrowing a government 47:34.200 --> 47:38.620 or the military coming in and taking over that country? 47:38.820 --> 47:43.060 It's basically the same thing, just done in two different methods. 47:43.580 --> 47:45.160 Well, I am moderately familiar 47:45.160 --> 47:47.560 with the whole Victoria Nuland story about Ukraine. 47:47.800 --> 47:51.260 I can't claim to be an expert in this particular domain. 47:51.900 --> 47:54.340 I think it is absolutely... 47:54.340 --> 47:58.240 Again, here's somewhere I'll go with you to a certain extent. 47:58.500 --> 48:01.360 It is valid to ask questions about CIA. 48:01.900 --> 48:03.960 There's actually a scholar, Angelo Codavilla, 48:04.300 --> 48:07.200 the late Angelo Codavilla, who's really forthright 48:07.200 --> 48:11.440 and advocating for the abolition of CIA and FISA 48:11.440 --> 48:13.080 and the reform of the FBI. 48:13.600 --> 48:16.040 And these are organizations 48:16.040 --> 48:19.160 that have clearly slipped the leash in some way 48:19.160 --> 48:23.420 and have in many cases ceased to operate 48:23.420 --> 48:25.680 in America's best interests. 48:26.160 --> 48:29.760 All of that having been said, I think, 48:29.960 --> 48:32.540 if we're gonna be realists about world politics, 48:32.660 --> 48:35.740 the question is, do we believe that America's interests 48:35.740 --> 48:37.900 ultimately should or should not be advanced? 48:38.040 --> 48:41.400 Is it better for the world, for America to thrive 48:41.400 --> 48:43.680 and be secure or is it worse? 48:44.140 --> 48:46.020 And once you have answered that question, 48:46.100 --> 48:48.580 then I think you can ask the very difficult 48:49.320 --> 48:53.560 Machiavellian questions about geopolitics that ensue and follow on. 48:53.820 --> 48:56.620 I think our problem for a long time has been 48:57.360 --> 49:01.360 that we don't really know whether we think America is a good country 49:01.360 --> 49:05.420 and we don't know whether we think America should be able 49:05.420 --> 49:07.800 to advance its interests, to be equipped to do so, 49:07.960 --> 49:10.100 or how and what ways are moral. 49:10.460 --> 49:12.300 I will put my cards on the table and say 49:12.300 --> 49:14.120 that despite our many, many flaws, 49:14.740 --> 49:17.840 despite the problems that we've been through 49:17.840 --> 49:20.200 in the last decade or so, 49:20.620 --> 49:25.400 despite, of course, the attacks that we've levied upon ourselves internally, 49:26.120 --> 49:28.860 America is still the last best hope of the West. 49:28.920 --> 49:31.220 America is a great country, constitutional government, 49:31.960 --> 49:35.060 hanging by a thread is still one of the great 49:35.920 --> 49:39.320 political theory innovations in world history, 49:39.660 --> 49:44.640 and it would be a tragedy if we were to be, 49:44.640 --> 49:46.700 God forbid, wiped off the world stage, 49:46.920 --> 49:51.560 or even if we were to become diminished on the world stage. 49:52.020 --> 49:54.480 So whereas I agree with you, again, 49:54.640 --> 49:57.420 that this is one of those areas where that is liable 49:57.420 --> 50:00.060 to provoke a certain degree of skepticism 50:00.060 --> 50:03.600 because the people in charge have abused their power, 50:04.260 --> 50:06.360 I certainly would not go anywhere near, 50:06.620 --> 50:09.580 as far as calling the CIA, a terrorist organization. 50:10.040 --> 50:13.780 And I resent the charge that people are not entitled to 50:13.780 --> 50:17.620 an opinion unless they are preoccupied with particularly 50:17.620 --> 50:22.340 the sort of theories and questions that you are raising. 50:22.540 --> 50:25.040 I don't think that's quite right, that's going too far. 50:25.760 --> 50:28.760 You mentioned in your book, Illuminating Science Through Faith. 50:29.220 --> 50:35.380 It's interesting because isn't science almost counter to faith? 50:36.060 --> 50:40.780 It seems like science has created this evolution theory, 50:40.780 --> 50:45.800 which wants to make people to believe that they came from monkeys 50:45.800 --> 50:47.260 and things evolved through that, 50:47.360 --> 50:50.720 and it kind of goes away from spirituality or faith. 50:50.880 --> 50:52.400 Maybe you could elaborate on that. 50:52.760 --> 50:54.340 Sure. Well, I don't mention in the book 50:54.340 --> 50:56.280 so much as on the cover of the book, yes, 50:56.360 --> 50:59.440 but that is the subtitle of the book, Illuminating Science Through Faith. 50:59.880 --> 51:02.820 And the argument that I make within the pages 51:02.820 --> 51:07.580 is that in fact, these two things are not at odds with one another. 51:07.720 --> 51:09.760 And that, I know, has been a story, 51:09.760 --> 51:12.000 a narrative that we grew up with for a long time. 51:12.160 --> 51:15.900 And here's where I actually will take your bait 51:15.900 --> 51:18.980 and say that we have been lied to about this, 51:19.040 --> 51:21.740 that this is a false narrative that needs overturning. 51:22.320 --> 51:27.420 I at least grew up with this basically casual morality tale 51:27.420 --> 51:32.700 about the battle between the church and the mighty, mighty scientists 51:32.700 --> 51:38.220 that reason and truth had to break the chains of religion in order to be free. 51:38.220 --> 51:41.740 And that's simply not so. 51:41.920 --> 51:45.080 If you look at the history of what was once called natural philosophy 51:45.080 --> 51:48.940 and is now called science, for the vast majority of its history, 51:49.200 --> 51:52.640 science was undertaken in a religious spirit. 51:52.900 --> 51:54.760 The architects of the scientific revolution, 51:55.000 --> 51:59.100 guys like Galileo, Newton, Johannes Kepler, 51:59.620 --> 52:04.700 I mean, name any major figure from that era almost, 52:04.700 --> 52:10.020 and you will find that they were believers of some stripe or another. 52:10.200 --> 52:12.040 And they had to be because they had to believe 52:12.040 --> 52:14.960 that the universe was structured in such a way 52:14.960 --> 52:17.960 that it could be understood by the mind of man. 52:18.400 --> 52:21.360 And that structure was thought to come from God. 52:21.860 --> 52:24.360 And the reason that we could understand it 52:24.360 --> 52:26.280 is because we are made in the image of God. 52:26.340 --> 52:32.120 Another great gift of the nation of Israel, of the Jews to people 52:32.120 --> 52:37.600 is this idea that we have an imprint or a blueprint of God's mind in our mind. 52:38.080 --> 52:41.620 And that's what enabled people to deuce the first place. 52:41.720 --> 52:44.240 That's what inspired guys like Galileo and Newton 52:44.240 --> 52:47.940 to go out and ask questions like how do planets move 52:47.940 --> 52:51.020 and why do they move in the way they do across the sky. 52:51.640 --> 52:56.220 It is true, as you alluded to, that in the wake of those discoveries, 52:57.960 --> 53:06.220 there was a decision or there was a transformation of science 53:06.220 --> 53:10.180 or a wielding of science in the name of a kind of atheism. 53:10.360 --> 53:16.180 And usually evolutionary theories is sort of cited in support of this claim. 53:16.740 --> 53:20.720 Or else you get, for instance, cosmological observations 53:20.720 --> 53:22.820 are supposed to show that there is no God. 53:22.940 --> 53:25.720 This is a major part of the Soviet Union's idea about this stuff. 53:26.220 --> 53:29.800 But in point of fact, none of those discoveries, 53:30.060 --> 53:32.940 not evolution, not the Big Bang, 53:33.060 --> 53:37.400 which itself implies all sorts of questions about metaphysics and divine origin, 53:38.400 --> 53:40.920 not Newtonian mechanics, none of these discoveries 53:41.480 --> 53:46.040 is incompatible with the idea that there is an organizing mind 53:46.040 --> 53:48.120 which guides the creation of the universe. 53:48.720 --> 53:52.820 In fact, I would say it's actually necessary to believe in such a mind 53:52.820 --> 53:57.880 in order to retain the tradition of Western scientific inquiry. 53:58.780 --> 54:06.620 Do you think the world is around spinning ball going 66,666 miles around the sun? 54:06.700 --> 54:09.520 Are you more at flat and stationary 54:09.520 --> 54:12.040 and things are maybe spinning up around us? 54:12.500 --> 54:14.100 I believe that the Earth is round. 54:14.700 --> 54:17.820 At least I think that that is the most accurate description of it 54:17.820 --> 54:21.320 from our human perspective in much the same way 54:21.320 --> 54:25.920 that I think it's accurate to describe the Earth as moving around the sun, 54:26.040 --> 54:28.900 even though we know from Einstein that motion is ultimately 54:28.900 --> 54:33.860 a relative category based on the relationships between matter and space time. 54:34.520 --> 54:38.680 All of these things are more fascinating and complicated 54:38.680 --> 54:40.460 than they're typically made out to be. 54:41.040 --> 54:44.860 But the way that we're taught to think about them in our science textbooks 54:44.860 --> 54:49.060 I think is a basically good model for answering the material questions 54:49.060 --> 54:51.900 we have about the physical universe because that's what science does. 54:52.640 --> 54:56.040 Last question because I know we've got a hard stop in about four minutes 54:56.780 --> 55:00.380 and I'll let you talk a little bit about your books and stuff before we end would be 55:00.380 --> 55:02.060 what's your thoughts on that? 55:02.160 --> 55:06.920 They don't care if you align with left or right. 55:07.060 --> 55:08.940 They don't care if you align with blue or red. 55:09.020 --> 55:11.600 They don't care if you think it's a contrail or chem trail. 55:11.780 --> 55:14.680 They don't care if you think it's the Jesuits or the Zionists 55:14.680 --> 55:16.200 or Freemasons. 55:16.200 --> 55:20.600 They only care that you pick a position and take a stance and fight about it. 55:21.200 --> 55:24.960 Well I would say there's actually a lot of truth to that. 55:25.100 --> 55:29.680 I mean I'm not quite sure who they is in that scenario 55:30.140 --> 55:34.720 but it's certainly true that it is to the benefit of the worst people in the world 55:35.340 --> 55:40.780 that we spend our time as Americans grouping one another into groups 55:40.780 --> 55:44.620 and then going to war as if we were enemies. 55:44.620 --> 55:48.880 And that is another reason why I would encourage and caution your listeners 55:48.880 --> 55:56.420 against the sort of paranoia that is liable to emerge from an experience like COVID. 55:56.680 --> 56:00.280 Yeah I get it like we were lied to and people do lie. 56:00.460 --> 56:04.240 And as a student of history I can tell you it's happened before it's going to keep happening. 56:04.760 --> 56:08.380 All of that having been said it's very very easy 56:09.220 --> 56:13.400 from my Christian perspective I would say for the devil, for Satan to use that 56:13.400 --> 56:19.300 as a way of enticing you into all sorts of resentments and fabrications 56:19.300 --> 56:23.860 and tribal allegiances that ultimately won't serve you. 56:23.960 --> 56:26.160 Won't make you happy, won't bring you to the truth 56:26.160 --> 56:30.340 and won't illuminate your path or the nation's path. 56:30.620 --> 56:36.900 So I would say like by and large be wary of anybody who's selling you on the idea that 56:36.900 --> 56:43.300 this or that group is to blame or to be scapegoated for all of our ills. 56:43.440 --> 56:48.480 Obviously the Jews are often placed in that role I believe deeply unjustly 56:48.480 --> 56:53.080 but it could be anybody that's offered up to you as a scapegoat. 56:53.200 --> 56:59.860 We know from world history that that mechanism is always a means of control 56:59.860 --> 57:03.940 to offer up some collective enemy as a scapegoat 57:03.940 --> 57:08.380 is to distract you from your actual business which is to love God and seek justice. 57:09.720 --> 57:17.280 You have your links here rejoysevermore.substack.com and then a.co maybe tell us 57:17.280 --> 57:20.180 where people can find you, where people can find your books 57:20.180 --> 57:23.640 and you know just a little bit about yourself before we wrap up here. 57:24.060 --> 57:29.120 Thank you I appreciate the opportunity so you can find me on Amazon light of the mind 57:29.120 --> 57:31.780 light of the world illuminating science through faith. 57:32.400 --> 57:37.500 It's a history of science from a religious perspective which we just touched on today 57:37.940 --> 57:43.500 and I'm on Substack at rejoysevermore.substack.com where I write weekly essays 57:43.500 --> 57:48.180 and I would just love to see you there or on X I guess at Spencer Clayton. 57:48.980 --> 57:53.220 Right on well thank you so much for your time sharing your thoughts on things. 57:53.320 --> 57:56.500 We just try to bring in every perspective that we can 57:56.980 --> 58:01.320 just so that way people can make up their own minds we don't tell people what to think here we just 58:01.320 --> 58:05.400 this is our thousand and twenty third interview that we've done in four years so 58:05.400 --> 58:08.820 we're just trying to bring as many different you know opinions on 58:09.480 --> 58:14.860 you know our show just so people can figure out what's going on in this crazy wild 58:14.860 --> 58:21.560 twilight zone of a reality that we are in. Tomorrow we've got Mark Baccar from the PPC 58:21.560 --> 58:27.740 political party in Canada at noon eastern standard time and then we've got Johnny Sirucci coming back 58:27.740 --> 58:35.660 on Sunday at one p.m. eastern standard time so may the source be with you and you know during 58:35.660 --> 58:40.420 this pivotal time in history knowledge is power the more knowledge we all have collectively the 58:40.420 --> 58:45.540 less power they have over us so let's all face infinity without flinching for one love 58:45.540 --> 58:50.220 one heart one life namaste everybody and if they ever ask you to put on a breathing 58:50.220 --> 58:55.440 inhibitor against Spencer you know what to tell them what do I tell them no masque 58:58.440 --> 59:01.760 okay bye everyone we'll see you next time we see you back here on the missing link