Ep 188 | How Should Christians FIGHT BACK Against the Rainbow Mafia? | Spencer Klavan | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

A healthy society is one that allows its citizens to guide themselves, to pursue a life of virtue and wisdom.

And that always begins with the question that our kids ask us all the time when they're very young, and it drives us nuts.

Why?

Why?

Drives me nuts when my kids say it because it's about everything.

Why is the sky blue?

Why is that couch red?

I don't know.

But that drives me crazy now that those same same kids growing up don't ever ask that question and think it's bad.

I've based my career on asking questions because I want to know the truth and I can learn from people that I even disagree with.

We can't know the truth unless we ask our way to it.

Today's podcast, the guest, is an Ivy League educated PhD from Oxford in ancient Greek literature.

He has an incredible knowledge of the classics, timeless stories from names like Dante and Plato and Aristotle, names like George Washington, and the important name of all time, most important, is Jesus.

He is an editor for the American mind.

He shook cages with his podcast, The Young Heretics, a legacy he continues as an associate editor for Claremont, the Claremont Review of Books.

Oh, and he was raised by a friend of mine, Andrew Clavin.

I started reading his books books

just recently.

I didn't put the two together, you know.

Okay, so two guys I know named Clavin until about halfway through the book.

This is an incredible book.

It is How to Save the West, which breaks down all of the

struggles that we are facing right now into five parts.

You'll learn all about it.

Fascinating guy.

His name is Spencer Clavin.

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Welcome.

Thank you, sir.

I'm glad you're here.

Such a pleasure.

I was reading your book before I ever put together that Clavin is also your dad, Clavin, who I know quite well and we'd met before.

Right.

I just saw this title and started reading about it, and I'm like, oh, wow, that sounds really good.

It is

a lot of times somebody who is perhaps a little overeducated

has a

difficult time getting it to the dummies like me.

And there are times I'm like, don't know that word, never heard that word.

But the concepts and

the way you take us through what's happening to the West and the way you tie it to all of the lessons of history

through our philosophers is really brilliant and easy to consume.

I don't know how you did it.

Well, thank you for saying that.

That's, you know, it's really wonderful when a book makes exactly the kind of impact you want it to make.

And that's

very much my dream for this book.

You know, oftentimes somebody like me will hear from you know, people who read my work or who listen to my podcast.

And a lot of the folks that reach out to me will preface what they say by saying, I'm not that smart.

They'll say, hey, I'm not that smart, but you know, I'm interested in what you're saying or whatever.

And I've started to learn that the minute somebody says that, I'm about to have the most interesting conversation of my week, because what they really mean by that, they actually are selling themselves wildly short.

What they really mean by that is, I didn't go to the fancy schools.

I didn't have, you know, the kind of prestigious education or upbringing or what have you.

And I've been told that that means I don't get an opinion because I'm not an expert in anything I'm not credentialed

and you know I am here to tell you I have been among the credentialed people and nobody can believe dumb nonsense like an academic oh I know right you know this well and and so to me These great books, The Works of the West,

they're not there for agheads like me to write PhD theses about.

That's actually not why they exist on the shelf.

They're there for us.

They're there to teach us how to be excellent at being human.

They're there to make sense out of the catastrophes we face since the world is constantly full of them.

And if somebody like me who's, you know, spent a little time kind of with his head buried in Greek can bring that to life for people, then I think I'll have believed.

I mean,

I remember, and I think I told you this, when I first read Plato.

Yeah.

I was just, I was probably 30.

I mean, I read it earlier, but then, you know, I just read it for class.

Sure.

And 30, I was interested because I knew I was a dummy and I needed to actually learn things.

Socrates says that's the first step to wisdom.

That might be the only thing we can do.

Yeah, right.

And I was blown away how all of the questions I were asking

were already asked at that time.

And that's what the whole thing was about, the search for truth, the search for meaning.

And we've lost all of that.

All of that.

We are told now, don't ask any questions.

You just follow this.

We'll tell you what to do.

That

not only is

bad for the civilization, but it also diminishes the individual and their spirit.

You can't be fully you if you're not allowed to go.

Well, I don't, wait a minute.

Yeah.

That doesn't make sense and I don't agree with that.

Exactly.

The minute they can tell you not to describe the world the way you see it, they have erased you.

You no longer effectively exist.

If you can't say, you know, I think a man is a man, a woman is a woman.

The most basic observations, this is why, you know, Orwell famously said that the regime will tell you two plus two equals four tomorrow and five today, right?

And

this situation, I take a little bit of comfort in thinking that, you know,

The world has kind of always been that way.

I mean, you and I have lived through some good times in America that maybe made us feel like this wasn't kind of the state of the normal state of things.

But the book starts out with Socrates.

And Socrates, the great original figure in Athenian philosophy and sort of the birth of that part of Western civilization, was executed by the state, went through forced suicide for

inviting people to believe in gods other than the city's gods, which when we're raising statues to abortion in New York over our courthouses, that kind of charge can feel very familiar, heresy against civic gods.

And for corrupting the youth, for inviting the powerful young men of the day to think about more than just gain or politics, to actually ask what it all means.

And when you realize that the guy who did that got killed by the state, you suddenly understand what kind of world you're living in.

And we really are living in that world.

In that book, The Republic, that you mentioned of Plato's he talks about the cave right this kind of shadowy world where we're all just staring at the manipulated kind of images of our media and our elites and our sort of pseudo-philosophers and he says what would happen if somebody got out of that cave what would happen if he learned to really see the light to really see the sun well he'd come back down into the cave he'd try to convince people that they were being fed a bunch of lies and right they'd rip him to shreds in fact correct they might even crucify him it's an amazing passage because, of course, the other figure that's

right and get killed for it as well.

But that's generally what happens every time.

We seem to go through cycles

where

everybody just agrees that this is what it is.

And if you don't, you're a heretic and they stone you.

And then later they're like, oh,

wow, we shouldn't have done that.

But

let me start with the premise of the book, How to Save Save the West.

Let's first define the West.

What does that mean?

Sure.

Well, when I started writing this book, I told my friend that I was writing a book called How to Through the West, and she said, Oh, I love John Wayne movies.

That's awesome.

I said, Not that kind of West.

Although I too love John Wayne movies.

But this is actually a really important question, because when you say, I love Western civilization, you will immediately be told that's a white racist dog whistle, right?

That's a code word for

all the sorts of backwards.

Colonialism, slavery.

Colonialism, like, yeah, systemic, whatever, systemic transphobia.

And, you know,

the irony of this is that when I use the word West with a capital W, I'm actually describing one of the only ways out of tribalism.

And that is to understand yourself as the inheritor of a tradition.

It's a two-part tradition.

It comes from Athens and Jerusalem.

And when I say Athens, I'm talking about those guys like Socrates and Plato, the great philosophers of Greco-Roman antiquity.

And then crucially, when I'm I'm talking about Jerusalem, I'm talking about the scripture that comes out of the monotheists of the Near East, the Jews and the Christians.

And those two traditions, those wisdom traditions, which meet in the preaching of St.

Paul and in the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, spread throughout Europe, create the world that we are living in today, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not.

And if we decide that we're just going to kind of get rid of all of that and go with whatever, you know, the World Economic Forum comes up tomorrow.

We cut ourselves off from this vast store of ancestral wisdom that you were talking about before.

It's not a place, it's not a time, it's not a race, it's the communion of great minds.

So, it's but it's

perhaps more than that, because it's uh or simpler than that,

because

Socrates, Plato,

and the Jews are

exactly the same in one thing.

You talk to a rabbi or any really

thoughtful Jewish person, it's all questions.

To find an answer,

you ask them for an answer and they're going to give you eight questions.

You know what I mean?

But that's Socrates too.

So it's really the West.

If you say it's these two groups, it's boiled down just to

asking questions, searching for deeper truth.

Yeah, that's what makes them so annoying.

No, it's, I know, I know.

You're like, can I just have an answer?

No, I know.

I need a straight answer to any one of these guys.

But yes, I mean, that's beautifully put, and it speaks to what you were saying about I knew that I didn't know things, and so I went away and I read a great book.

I mean, you think that that's like, you know, not rare.

You're kidding yourself.

That's the whole game.

So I went through because

I'm an alcoholic and I just spiraled out of control.

And when I got sober, I knew everything I believed was not working.

You know what I mean?

And so I had to figure out what the meaning was of everything.

And

there was so much I read that I didn't understand at the time because I was the typical American.

When I read Immanuel Kant, when he said, there are many things that I believe that I shall never say, but I shall never say the things that I do not believe.

I couldn't understand that world.

I understand it now, but I couldn't understand that world.

And I've done a lot of pondering on why more people don't,

because I just took everything out

and went to the library and got the people who disagreed.

I put councils together and I'm like, okay, here's the topic, and I'll read everything.

Right.

And then I'll start whittling it down until I find what I feel is the truth.

And I think people,

because I know I did, I think people don't do it because A, it's a lot of work.

B,

you're afraid that you're not smart enough.

You're afraid

there's, maybe there's nothing in me.

You know, maybe I am just this and I know how to deal with that because it will change everything.

Everything.

I mean, for tell me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're describing an experience of hitting rock bottom, right?

I mean, that, that.

moment when you understood that there actually, you know, is truth.

Yeah.

Something is real and it's not what I've been told.

And I better reach out for it because it's life.

It's lifeblood.

I mean,

I

suspect when you gathered that, you know, communion of minds around you to help you out of that pit, I mean, you were standing in a tradition with, you know, Machiavelli in exile when he writes to his friend Francesco Vittori, that I summon the ancient men to speak with me.

I enter the ancient courts of ancient men.

I mean, this is part of the tradition.

In fact, the whole tradition is that sense that we're not alone, right?

But it has to begin with humility.

And I think there's nothing the human heart hates more than humility.

It's true of all of us.

And sometimes it does take, I think, just smacking up against that wall before you get there.

You said, you know, that

the West is constantly on the, I don't remember how you said it, but it's constantly on the edge of failure.

The verge of collapse.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

So

when you say how to save the West, it doesn't necessarily mean how to save our country as currently understood.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I will say we're always

living out the eternal principle, seeking the great truths in and through the here and now.

So I don't believe in indifference.

I don't think it's a matter of no consequence what happens to our country.

I think there are good ways to vote and bad ways to vote and good ways to participate in politics and bad ways.

But where you're right is my book does not contain a political program

because I don't think that the West can depend on the outcome of any particular vote.

None of this.

We don't have a...

Our...

Politics are so screwed up because we don't know who we are.

That's exactly right.

We have no idea.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so where do you start?

Well, you begin with reality in the book.

You begin with this question that we're talking about of absolute truth, right?

And I think that once you...

So can we play that for a second?

Yeah.

Whose truth?

I'm just a little bit more.

Let's play this game.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Well, there's two answers to that question.

One is my truth, right?

One is as I perceive.

the world and you perceive it otherwise.

And the question is, well, okay, what happens when we feel differently?

And you immediately come to the realization that the only answer is that we should come to blows, that we should have a fist fight.

Why are we here?

Why are we talking?

We are at this table right now because implicitly, whether we acknowledge it or not, we know that there's not just my truth and your truth, there's the truth.

And it's somewhere in between us.

That as human beings endowed by God with the ability to see the world and experience the world,

we actually have a claim on that conversation.

that

we aren't unintelligible to one another.

And one of the things I kind of argue in the book and try to drive home for people is that those are really the only two options.

I think we've kidded ourselves for a long time that you could kind of speak fancibly about, well, it's sort of

morally who knows what's good or bad, right?

Thinking makes it so, you know.

And this is all very well and good until they're at your door trying to take you to the camps or until they're taking taking you to the camp.

So, I will say, you know, the thing about Joseph Mengela, all of his horrid, horrid experiments, they were all lawful.

And all of the medical society, they were for that.

I mean, they eliminated anybody who was against it, but they all thought that was good.

So, when you say, well, who's good?

Well, I mean, the hope for me is

bad

always

just eats itself, rots from the inside.

You know what I mean?

And it fails.

Eventually,

it fails because you're breaking universal truths.

Yes.

Well, one of the great defenders of that idea, Iris Murdoch, in the 20th century, became the kind of objectivist about the stuff that she became because of the death camps, because she saw the...

horrors of Nazi Germany and understood that there was no universe in which that was anything other than evil, that there was a kind of a bedrock of reality that she was hitting up against in that evil, which meant that there was something called good.

And the big secret is that we all act this way.

We all implicitly acknowledge this when we wake up in the morning.

Why do you pour your coffee?

Why do you get out of bed?

Well, you want something.

And if you chase that want far enough down the road, you're eventually going to end up in some territory where you just say, well, I just think it's good to

whatever the money, have a lot of sex, whatever, right?

And this is why, crucially, the Bible says that the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.

It's not because atheists are especially stupid.

I mean, we're all about as stupid as one another.

But what that verse really means is if you tell yourself you don't have a God, if you tell yourself you're not worshiping something, you've made yourself a fool.

You're kidding yourself, right?

And that good, which Plato identifies with truth, right?

That the sun which you see when you emerge from the cave is not crucially some sort of material fact about the world.

There's this much serotonin in your bloodstream right now, right?

No, it's an actual immaterial absolute.

It's this is good and that is bad.

And again, you know, some sort of bring in conversation with the scripture, right?

The woe to those who call evil good and good evil.

This is kind of the first stage of everything.

And it is the sort of thing that you actually have to decide in advance that you're going to say that, whether you make a million bucks or whether they come to take you away.

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You know, I took my kids to Auschwitz.

You know, we went on a vacation.

My wife said, you know, honey, no vacation starts with Auschwitz.

So let's not call it vacation.

But I took them over.

This is about 2010 because I felt these times were coming again.

And I asked the kids and the whole family, make a decision now

who you are.

If you don't, the line will keep moving, you know?

And it only gets harder.

Right, right.

But if you don't lock it down and say, this is my line.

Okay.

This is where we go from truth

to

you're living in a fantasy world to danger.

And I think that once you have spent some time in introspection and prayer about that question,

you can then have a lot more liberty to kind of discuss and compromise and be free to

debate.

I mean, once we have agreed together that there is such a thing as truth, for instance, then we can have all sorts of arguments, disagreements.

So how do you deal with people who say there is only my truth and your truth?

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, to me, the greatest philosophical question in the world is how's that working out for you?

I just adopted a new philosophy just recently, trying to raise my teenage kids.

I went to their therapist and I'm like, what do I do?

And he said, first thing you need to do, when they say something, you just say, huh, it's going to be fun watching how that works out for you.

And I've used it on everything now and it's so freeing.

I mean,

because it's really the irrefutable argument.

And it goes back to what you said, that good sort sort of produces fruit, right?

Evil eats itself alive.

Right.

And

this was one of the great kind of benefits of the Socratic method that you were talking about before, just asking those questions.

So Heraclitus says that everything is in flux, that nobody can know anything except for what they perceive in the given moment.

Well, where does that lead?

And eventually you get to the student of Heraclitus who can only sit in a corner and move his finger because he can't say anything out loud because he can't affirm any truth.

And so to me, the answer to the question, how's that working out for you, is everywhere.

Weirdly, the kind of decay of our society is a huge opportunity here.

Oh, I know.

Right?

I mean, like,

just

if

people would use the scientific method right now,

it's everywhere.

It's everywhere.

You might just trust the science.

Right, exactly.

Right.

And

for a civilization that makes such an idol out of a a certain kind of scientism, we are remarkably allergic to trusting the evidence of our senses, to just like acknowledging and admitting it.

This comes from

the idea of experts, you know, at least in America, starting in the progressive era, that there is a scientific way to do everything.

And no,

there's not necessarily a scientific way for everything.

Absolutely.

And even, I mean, and we know this.

Science

is right until they're wrong.

Famously.

Yes, that's kind of the whole point of the thing.

And this is something so crucial.

There's a lot about this in the book, actually.

When I talk about scientism, I'm not talking about like the iPhone.

iPhones are great.

I'm glad I have one.

I'm glad I don't have

some terrible, you know, I'm glad I don't have dysentery right now.

When I say scientism, what I mean is the belief that science, material science, gives an exhaustive account of reality.

And you can find people saying this all the time now.

I mean, Richard Dawkins at the beginning of his book, The Selfish Gene, quotes this paleontologist, all the good answers to all the important questions were thought up after Darwin, right?

This is everything, you know, Muhammad, Christ, Jesus, Aristotle,

forget them.

Scrap them.

It's all about bodies in motion, matter in motion.

And by the way, this is not something that the great architects of the scientific revolution believed.

This is not what Johannes Kepler thought.

It's not what Isaac Newton thought.

It's not even what Galileo thought.

I mean, none of these people would have said to you that the only thing that is real is what can be proven by scientific experiment.

And if you really think about that for a second, it has to be the case that there's something above science giving logic to science, or else why would science work?

Why should we experience this work?

But one of the things that this has done, because it's actually impossible to live this way, because you actually can't operate as if you're just a chemistry set inside of a meat sack, right?

Is that it has turned science into a God.

We've not allowed any other God, and so we have to worship the science, right?

And Dr.

Fauci says, Priest, I represent the science.

I mean, these are not scientific statements, they're correct theological statements, you know, and that's basically where we're at.

And the last time this

happened in the 1930s, where science became the god, which we taught the Germans,

It didn't work out well.

And I don't understand on the other side how some people will dismiss science.

I mean, I have no idea how God creates.

I have no idea.

And nobody does.

But I do know this.

You can look at the universe and understand enough the

universal language is math.

And

math is all of it,

which would mean that God would be the ultimate scientist.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

There's something, there's what he has,

but then he also uses math to

run all of this.

Well, Kepler described himself as thinking God's thoughts after him, that he was basically just catching up with God and discovering how planets

move around the sun.

And

has to be the case if you think about even what math is, like the idea of two.

It doesn't exist anywhere in the world.

There's no two in the world.

You can't touch two.

You can't see two.

Two is in your head.

Two is a concept.

And the idea that you can use that and add numbers together and a rocket ship will take off can only be the case if the human mind is tapped into something much more profound.

But to your point about

Nazi science, right, and science as a god or as a kind of

religious activity.

It's important for us to understand and remember that that looked just as good to

as transgender surgeries for teenagers looks to the people.

It looked just as good for people.

The first transgender surgery was Weimar Republic, 1925.

And this is something, I mean,

the

fact that that's true should give us, first of all, pause about all of our

moral convictions when it comes to sort of, oh, yeah, we're just going to.

But you can also now find people saying things like, oh, well, there's authoritarian eugenics, and that's bad.

But there's liberal eugenics, too.

I was reading a book by a big transhumanist scholar recently that said exactly this,

that it's okay when the good guys do it, right?

That the problem essentially with the good.

Well, they were the good guys.

They were in Hugo Boss suits.

Yes, right.

They thought they were doing just fine for themselves.

Yeah.

And so this is something that, you know,

I have this thing I call the If I Had Been There fallacy.

And the If I Had Been There fallacy goes like this, you know, those benighted slaveholders at the American Revolution, those evil Germans, you know, if I had been there, I would have been an abolitionist.

I would have been...

How arrogant of you.

Well, right.

Would you, like, what was your reaction when you were forced to sign the diversity oath?

What was your reaction when

you buy an iPhone?

Yeah.

I carry Apple products.

I wrestle with this all the time, sir.

I know they're made by slaves.

What makes me any different than the people in the 1800s?

They knew that product was made by slaves.

It was just far away.

I don't see it.

They had a bunch of arguments for right.

I mean, and this is sort of the tragic vision of human life that I think Jerusalem contributes to the West.

You know, you talk about what are the things that we get from these two strands of Western civilization.

The sense of man's brokenness and the humility that comes with that and the introspection that comes with that is a very Judeo-Christian thing, I would say.

It's just this idea that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

The only way you stand a chance in hell of making any moral progress of the real kind is to know that, as Solchenitsyn says, the line between good and evil runs

through every human heart.

And

it's a sobering thought, surely.

I think that's why we're in so much trouble.

Because we are

even

devout Christians who

do all the things

are not necessarily the most humble.

And

you know, it's when we are not talking to someone

because they're just wrong, I don't want that, whatever it is.

We are showing our arrogance that we're saying that person,

even in their error, has nothing to teach me.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

And the sheer

hubris, the sheer arrogance of saying, for instance, that,

this country was founded on white supremacy, right?

Which

we've both now just acknowledged that there are terrible sins in the past of every human civilization, ours included.

Having said that, to look back on this enormous inheritance that does not actually begin in 1776, that reaches back into Athens and Rome and Jerusalem as well, right?

To produce this incredible hot house plant, you know, and to say, well, those guys weren't as nice, as good as me.

And so I'm going to start afresh.

Year zero begins with me.

It's like, who even taught you to condemn slavery?

Who even told you that all men are created equal?

The founders told you that.

Most people haven't thought that.

throughout most of history and most of time.

And so I absolutely agree with you that

moral certainty, arrogance, self-regard, it's got to be our kind of central.

We don't fix ourselves unless we fix that.

Right, right.

You don't ever open the Republic after you've, you know,

hit rock bottom unless you really understand that there's like, it's not going to come from you.

Like, you're not going to fix things.

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More with Spencer Clavin in just a second.

First, let me tell you about a small little company that I found out of Arizona.

This is where they started.

They just, one guy was making a belt as a gift to his friend, and he loved the belt so much, he was telling everybody else.

And everybody was like, Could you make me one?

Blah, blah, blah.

So he started.

And then he thought, I should start a company.

And so he went from belts and he now makes wallets.

And then they got into clothing, but they wanted to start small.

So they started with socks.

But everything they do is done here in America.

It's a true American experience.

The idea was not starting a company unless we can do it here in America.

So the socks,

when you buy their socks, you're supporting the American ranchers who raise the specially bred sheep that will produce the modern wool that the American manufacturers will wash and process it.

And then another American group will weave that into a sock.

That's what you're doing business with.

American business owners who have accepted the risk that comes along with only using American-made products and American labor, but they do it right.

Gripsix.com/slash Beck.

Gripsics.com slash Beck.

Let me talk to you about Christian nationalism a bit.

Okay.

I think.

Do you know big T traditionalist opposed to small T traditional?

Fill me in.

I mean, so big T traditionalist movement from Europe,

really Russia,

comes from Putin's advisors.

And it is the idea that we have flushed all tradition down.

And so we're going to wipe everything out because we're the ones that can put it right.

And it's so slippery because

when you first start looking at it and you don't understand small T and capital T traditionalism,

You can fall into the wrong side quickly because all they're saying is we have have to restore the things that are true.

We have to restore the things that are good about our society.

Yep.

But then it's always coupled with, and that's why we need to get rid of him and him and her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And by the way, like, I should probably run things.

Correct.

So the next charge, especially in this, you know,

Pride Month,

what concerns me is

the

Christians, because the government is trying to make everybody into a Christian nationalist.

Absolutely.

What is it?

How do you know the difference?

And

how do we maneuver?

Yeah.

Well, certainly

the

extremists of the kind of alphabet people

are

behaving in doing everything that they can to radicalize

us, basically you and me, right?

To make us feel embattled, to make us feel like, you know, the slippery slope was there from the beginning.

We should never even have departed from like, you know, just, we should probably never have departed from England, you know,

for that matter, you know.

And, and.

And it's very, very easy.

It makes a lot of sense, I think, to look at that and say, well, let's just get rid of all of it.

And my problem with this is get rid of all of what?

Like, how far back are you going to go?

What exactly do you want?

And I think a lot of the, for me, the ambiguity, the sort of uncertainty and unclarity about the term Christian nationalism is that there's this sort of charge, we've got to get rid of all of this stuff and we've got to re-establish tradition, which I largely agree with.

And we've got to use the force of the law to do what?

To do what?

To do what, right?

That's my question.

And whenever somebody starts talking about Christian nationalism, and to me,

you know,

what I want us to be is Americans.

And I think that that does not mean we have to simply let a thousand flowers bloom, everything goes, like

there are no rules about anything.

It's just liberalism unfettered.

You know, that's not what the American founding.

is.

But it does mean that among our inalienable rights is liberty and that these choices that people are making, even the ones that are wrong,

they're going to have to be free to make if we want to stay the country that we are.

The government should be so small that those ideas, the wrong ones, die off small instead of being propped up, propped up until they're gigantic and we all fall.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, I think there's another dimension to this.

You tell me what you think about this, because I've been toying, thinking about this a lot, especially as this carnival of grotesquery that is Pride Month begins to unfold before us, and this is going to be in the news all the time.

If we're not just going to say, okay, it's time for a Protestant Franco, we're going to,

if we're not going to do that,

what are we going to do?

What's our counter program?

And I think a big sort of category that's missing here, you know, we say, oh, we're going to outlaw this and we're going to make this legal.

But what about the things that we're going to honor?

Maybe there's like a range of things that are possible, right?

Maybe, you know,

like I believe quite firmly, like one man and one woman raising

their kids is the ideal.

I just want to throw in, in case people don't know, you're gay.

Yes.

Sorry.

Yeah.

I should probably have put that out there.

I'm gay.

And so I'm obviously not doing the thing that I just said is the ideal.

I obviously also believe it should be legal for people to do a range of government.

The government has

no place.

And And so that leaves us with this question, right, which is how,

is it possible for us to have room for kind of the quirks and weirdness and eccentricity of humanity, which by the way, we all participate and share in to some degree, none of us lives in the ideal.

Is it possible for us to acknowledge that, to let people be people, while honoring what is the center of civilization, which is

male and female procreative love in a family.

And I think the answer is it has to be yes, but we have to elevate some things over others.

My marriage is not the same thing as a heterosexual marriage, even though I am very happy in it, even though

I believe it should be legal.

I don't think that it should be identical with or honored at the same level with

a straight marriage.

And so,

yeah, this is a tricky part.

But I think,

I mean, I'm just down to, I've whittled so much away.

It's like, what are you trying to save?

If you're a conservative, what are you conserving?

What brought us together, what made us successful, and what made it work

is we all agreed on the Bill of Rights.

And if you just do those,

you're not going to be happy.

Sometimes it'll cut against your way.

Sometimes it'll cut the other way.

It's not going to fix everything.

But if we have just that roadmap that's made for the government, but it's really a roadmap for all of us.

I shouldn't spy on you.

I shouldn't be able to have power over you.

I shouldn't curb your speech.

Yes.

So

I agree with this.

I think

the Constitution is what it is because it is the operating system of the country.

And as you say, if we do that, we will have made a big stride forward.

To me, there's another part of this, which is that the Constitution sits in a cradle of culture.

And the founders knew this.

John Adams famously said this Constitution is not written for anything other than immoral and religious people.

And so if we're going to be able to do the Constitution,

we have to give serious attention to our culture.

And that's what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about honor and values.

What do we encourage in people?

What do we invite people into?

And we've developed this terrible mania that treats ideals as insults.

That if you say to somebody, the best thing you can do is raise a family and start, you know,

somebody said, how dare you?

Because I can't do that for whatever reason.

I'm, you know, I'm infertile or I'm gay or I'm whatever.

And these things, like, it's actually possible.

I know, because I'm living this life.

It's possible to say, I endorse and affirm that as the ideal, even though I have to be true to and honest about the ways in which

that's not my life.

so i know and work with a lot of gay people sure um and i've always i'm more much more libertarian than anything else i've never been against gay rights um

uh

but i i will tell you uh the the people i know

are as shocked and horrified by what's going on oh

in the name yes in their name yes um

why aren't we seeing more people stand up

this is a very important question.

And of course, we've already now talked about the sheer force of social conformity and intimidation.

So there's a big part of that.

But there's also, I think,

a fear

that

there's nowhere to go.

Right.

That you can't say,

These people are not my people.

You know, basically the Americans are my people.

And I, like you, speak every day to people that are just horrified by what's being done in their name.

And the thing that I constantly say to them is, okay, so say that.

Stand up and say, not in my name.

And I do think that it's very, very difficult for us to see this because the loudest and the craziest voices are so visible.

It's very, very difficult for us to grasp that this is going on.

But I really do believe that just as civil rights was weaponized by the radical left,

just as sort of women's economic equality was turned into, led us basically into this insane bachanalia of transgenderism,

so too, the kind of legitimate requests for recognition and full citizenship that were made by

gay people

have now been very effectively wielded as a Marxist political project.

And that's like a hell of a drug.

So yeah,

it's a really, to me, it grieves my heart a great deal.

But I also think that as you say,

there are more of us with us than you might think.

So my fear is on all fronts, because they're cowards.

I don't care what you believe.

Cowards everywhere.

They just want to be left alone.

Yes.

And

now is not the time for that timid spirit.

But it's what usually happens.

People are like that.

So out of all of history and all of the things you've seen over and over,

what's the answer that we should be looking at right now?

What should we be doing to exercise that muscle to say that's not true?

And I can't sit by.

The only thing I can think of is God.

Yeah.

Well, amen.

I mean, absolutely.

To me, this is unfortunately indispensable.

And this is like very,

also very delicate because it's like it creates this

sort of coalition of people that might think that I'm sort of the representative of all that's gone wrong and that I'm

hellish.

Yeah, well, we all know about it.

Right.

But it is certainly true that even before you get into questions of denomination, before you get even really into questions of which Abrahamic faith

the

belief that there is something beyond the material world is indispensable Solchenitsyn the great Soviet dissident observed this in in the gulag in in the camps that it was the people who thought there was something above stalin who could stand up for him of course this is true I mean G.K.

Chesterton says you know the the Marxists get us exactly backwards religion is not the opiate of the masses it's the only thing that sobers you up It is more powerful than politics.

And so that is certainly a necessary first step.

I also think something else Solja Nitson said is, you know,

in those days of the camps, we wished that we had just said something when it was easier.

And so the question is,

what can we do if we're too afraid to speak up?

He says, at least live not by lies, right?

At least don't say the lie.

And I think that's not too much to ask if you believe there's something beyond politics in the material world.

But if you don't think that, if you don't think that the leftists are basically right, if you don't think that we should all just bend the knee to whatever power or

dominion is kind of most

powerful in this world, and that's kind of the option.

Those are the options on the table.

So yeah, I absolutely agree with you.

It's going to be God.

If you were, I mean,

if this were being done in the name of Christ,

I would have just as much problem with it.

Of course.

And I don't think,

you know, I wonder how many people on the left actually

believe the stuff they're preaching.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I think the leadership does.

Right.

But how many of the people...

Because what new evidence do you have that pedophilia might be a okay lifestyle?

Right, right, right.

What evidence did you receive that has opened your mind to that?

Yes.

And what sort of

links this together for you with like sort of gay rights?

You know, like what was, I mean, this is where the slippery slope people start to look as if they were always correct, you know, because now suddenly people are making these appalling, appalling arguments.

But the interesting thing is, you know, in the 80s, when gay people were sort of starting to make noise about this, it was the conservatives who would say, well, gay people are just pedophiles, right?

Gay people just want to groom your kids, essentially.

Now, if you say, don't groom my kids, don't come into my school and try to, the left will say, you're just against gay rights.

You're attacking.

Well, really?

Are those the same thing?

Right?

I mean,

are you suddenly saying that LGBTQIA rights include the right to take children away from their parents?

Because if you say that to people long enough, they'll say, call me a homophobe.

Call me a bigot.

If the only other option is you come for my kids, call me any name you want.

And so so

this is a catastrophe for actual freedom-loving normal people, including gay people.

And

the

only way out of it is

courage and

just constant disavowal.

Like, this is really not in any way.

This is the worst caricature of everything that was said about us.

And it's, yeah.

Parody is impossible.

Exactly.

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Let me take you to one because we're going to run out of time.

I could spend days with you.

Oh my gosh.

You lay out, just lay out the five

crisis real quick.

Yeah.

So the first one we've talked about already, reality.

Is there a truth and a falsehood?

Doesn't matter who says otherwise, but can we progress by half measures toward truth?

Second one is the crisis of the body, which we've been talking about.

And in that section, I kind of offer my theory of the case for why this transgender extremism is actually a totally different beast than the American project of civil rights.

What is it?

Actually, what it is is transhumanism, that what we're really dealing with is an ancient offer, an ancient split between body and soul.

That what you are being told is you are a divine spark.

You are not your body.

Your body has nothing to say about you.

Actually, it's probably a burden.

It might be a mistake.

And so what you need to do is reconfigure your body until the divine spark within you can float free.

And guess what?

It doesn't stop at transgenderism, right?

It's actually much, much more than that.

It's about using the tools of the state and technology to totally unmake the human person.

That's a very, very old

problem, and it never works out.

And again, with Ray Kurzweil, who is trying, I believe, to recreate his father, bring him back to life.

They don't see it.

Many do and think it's inevitable that mankind is over.

But

they also, I mean, when I asked Ray,

what if I don't want to upgrade?

Yeah.

Okay.

Because he was talking about, you know, things like Neuralink that is just around the corner.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What if I don't want to uplink?

Right.

And he said to me,

why would anyone not want to?

Right.

I said, because maybe I like who I am.

You know what I mean?

I like, I don't, I want to be who I am.

Yeah.

He said those people will be a danger to themselves and to society.

Right.

That's a little frightening.

Sure enough.

Sure is.

And I do think that one reason why it's important

not to get bogged down.

in the kind of carnival of the politics of it all is, you know,

and not to fall into this trap, essentially, of saying, like, the problem is, sort of, you know, every gay person ever or whatever, you know,

is that we have bigger fish to fry.

What you just described, that's what's coming down

the pike.

And so, the meaning of life, yes, absolutely.

What is alive?

What does that mean?

But the line is going to get slippery

because

AI and technology, we will be able to do things to our body to correct and fix.

And where is the line on that?

Right.

Well, this is where

it actually becomes urgent to think about ancient philosophy, right?

The ancient idea about a human being that I talk about in the book in this section is called hylomorphism.

And it's from the Greek word hule meaning stuff, matter, and morphae meaning form, shape.

In the works of Aristotle, this beautiful idea emerges that what we actually are is a union of those two things.

That's what everything is.

You've never seen a circle without any, that wasn't made of anything.

You can't even picture one.

You can picture drawing one in ink in your head, whatever.

And just as a circle can't float free of any matter, we can't float free of any matter.

There is no kind of abstracted gender identity, divine spark, like kind of code, perfect code, whatever.

There's actually what you are, which is an embodied soul with a telos, a purpose, and that is to exercise your reason in choosing the good, right?

I mean, this is one reason why, by the way, human liberty is really actually important, because without that choice, unless you're making the right choice, then you're not actually, there's no you there in the equation at all.

It is possible to

restore and even enhance the thing called a human being.

And we're going to be faced with choices.

I can't even predict exactly which choices we're going to be faced with.

But they're big ones.

But they're going to be big, right?

And

it's not going to be enough to simply say, just shut all the AI down, shut all the everything.

It's not going to happen.

You know, AI, the country,

individuals, is it good or is it bad?

When it comes to that, the answer is yes.

Yes.

Right.

And so the question becomes, what is your North Star?

What are you, what is the rubric you are using to shoot?

And unless it is, I am actually, as I am, already a complete entity.

I am a fusion of body and soul.

I am a rational animal.

And the tools that I use and the enhancements that I take on are all with that purpose in mind.

Unless we're saying that, then we're nothing.

Then we're just primitive machines, essentially.

And we will be

expunged as a danger to society.

So I think that is the real dividing line on this sort of question.

If you can say that a human being is an irreducible gift of God, it doesn't get to be wished out of existence,

then you'll at least have a rubric to go on when you're making these sorts of decisions.

That's a hard

climb from where we are right now

in a quick amount of time.

Okay, so those first two.

Give me the other crisis.

The crisis of the body, the crisis of meaning, which is about whether the things that we say and do refer to anything outside of the physical world, everything we've just been talking about.

Is there something beyond just kind of evolution and means all the way down, or are we actually referring to something?

And then finally, the crisis of religion.

If we're referring to something outside of ourselves, outside the world, what?

What are we talking about?

Can we go back to the crisis

of meaning?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So

when

you

start to say, okay, it's all great that there is such a thing as truth.

It's great that there's a human being in a human body and these things are real and matter.

You have to begin to ask,

what's the point of it all?

What's the purpose here?

And there is an answer on the table that is kind of everywhere in the atmosphere.

And it's the answer of Richard Dawkins, whom I sort of mentioned earlier, that

actually all that's happening all the time is we're just sort of reproducing and imitating one another.

This is where we get our word meme.

You know, it now describes this thing that we spread around on the internet.

But it begins with this idea that all human life, all human culture, is actually just a kind of game of imitation and and replication because evolution explains everything.

And

what an empty,

empty, meaningless world.

Indeed.

And the problem with this is that all of the things that we know to exist, like virtue, love, goodness,

they are nowhere to be found in that description of the world.

And they'll always play a kind of double game or sleight of hand where they'll sort of sneak this in and say, well, you know, isn't it great?

Dawkins says, isn't it great that we can make good choices even though our biological programming is just churning along like a kind of script?

And you think, well, what's a good choice?

What does that mean?

You've all just said that everything is this kind of endless game of imitation and replication.

The ancients also believed that human beings were

constantly imitating, mimetic animals, it's called, that were always sort of, you know, bouncing off of each other.

We learn by imitating one another.

But of course, the obvious implication of this is if we're imitating something, there must be an original.

There must be something that we are copying or referring back to in all of our efforts.

And then you can say, this is a better thing than that, right?

This is a more effective tool than, right?

Well,

if it wasn't that way, we would have died off a long time ago because we would just spiral down.

Right.

We would be another kind of blip on the evolutionary.

We're not.

We're actually evaluating things according to a higher plane.

And when you can start talking about that original that you're copying, then the copy has meaning.

Just like when I say words, right?

If those words refer to something outside of me, they have meaning.

If not, they don't.

And that's the crisis of meaning: this kind of elimination of that original copy that we are all supposed to be referring to.

How many times in history do you see these five things in crisis mode and the civilization survives?

Huh.

Well,

the

civilization goes on in some way.

But country or

I would say it is the

rarity.

It's the exception, not the rule.

But I would say that there are some.

I actually think that our

revolution is one.

I would say that the Protestant Reformation represents a crisis of many of these things, and that

your mileage may vary.

You have some countries that do very well and some countries that don't out of that.

But

I won't lie to you or sugarcoat it.

These things come with turmoil.

They come with very serious, you know.

But it's not impossible to pass through those periods of turmoil and emerge in revival.

And I hate to keep going back to this, but the difference is God, right?

The difference is if you believe that you're actually going through something for a purpose, as the founders did, right?

They felt that God was essentially doing a new thing, that they were being called to

live out the fundamental truths of nature and nature's God.

If you believe that, I think you stand a chance in hell of coming through something new.

I will tell you that

about five or six years ago, I just came to the conclusion they are so far ahead of us, you know, that catch up is going to be miraculous.

And I'm thinking for solutions and it comes to my head,

well, Jesus knows about it, so maybe Jesus is coming back.

And it was weird

because

I actually looked at that as, you know, everybody says they're living in the end days, but, you know, maybe this time and it gave me a way to jump over the darkness and say it's all going to be used for his purpose one way or another no matter what happens yes in the end right this will be used for good yeah yeah um i have to tell you

this

moment of kind of artificial intelligence and

transhumanism

is the first time that I've ever thought, yeah, I can see a plausible scenario in which that is what the book of Revelation describes.

Me too.

And I'm so wary of that because of what you said, that everybody.

I know.

Yeah.

I mean, but I know everybody thought it.

The apostles thought it.

Yes.

And, you know, his time is not our time.

Whatever.

I get it.

But, you know,

they say no man will know the time.

Well,

you did give us a lot of signs to look for.

So you are telling us something about

the nature of this thing.

At the very least, you're telling us that this thing, which is going to reach its pinnacle in Armageddon and Apocalypse,

has this certain character.

And so, like, looks the certain way.

And so when you see these things, this is kind of like that spirit is on the move.

And

I would say that, you know, once you are telling people that there's no difference between what they're doing and what ChatGPT is doing, that it's all just a kind of

outward form of meaning, and inside it's just numbers crunching, or it's whatever.

That's what these

guys think we are, though.

Often, yes, indeed.

And so then you say, well, okay, so I'm going to upload my consciousness into the cloud or whatever.

Whose consciousness?

Who, right?

Well, who is the person that actually is having the inner life experience that you're describing?

And once you realize that, you understand that actually transhumanism is the end of humanity, right?

It's the consummation of...

And if you do think that people are going to be forced into a choice between

endless promised pleasure at the expense of their individual humanity and kind of limping on in our fallen but God-ordained human forms.

That does sort of look like apocalypse.

That looks like a great split down the middle between humanity and those that remain human will, you know, will carry on and those that don't will sort of evaporate into nothing.

Anyway, this is all.

I mean,

this is all.

But I, you know,

I've been saying that this, all this technology, I don't think is the mark of the beast,

but it's, it will,

this is the kind of technology that the beast will use.

Absolutely.

You know what I mean?

Right, right.

And the thing that that the technology being used,

the philosophical premises behind a lot of the technology is satanic.

That's certainly true, that we're just machines or whatever.

So I know a lot of

people who used to be atheists.

I think atheism is just so arrogant.

I know there's not.

Well,

I'd rather just,

I understand.

I'm agnostic.

I don't know.

I have no idea.

Because I'm agnostic on a lot of stuff.

Sure.

You know what I mean?

Sure, right.

But

a lot of, you know, they're my friends, so they're wired maybe a little bit differently.

But, you know, they didn't ever agree with me on many things.

But they are recognizing evil

for the first time.

Yes, of a supernatural kind.

Or not.

Yeah, I think so.

Okay.

I think so.

Because, I mean.

How do you describe evil?

You could say

historically in a Petri dish, you could say what they did in the concentration camps, that was evil.

That was an act of evil.

But there's something else happening here because it's growing

and

hypnotizing and it's so cultish.

I mean, it's

crazy.

I

do agree with you and I think

you almost can't talk about it accurately without using spiritual categories.

That's sort of what's happening.

It seems to me, is that unless you talk about demonic forces, you're going to be talking in circles.

You're going to be kind of using language that's less.

It's like you can kind of

develop all these sort of neologisms and terms to talk about what's going on, but they'll be less accurate and less descriptive than simply saying

there are demons and there's a statue of one in New York.

You know,

I mean, it's really weird because just, I don't know, 10 years ago maybe, I swore off using the word evil.

because I said, you know, I describe too many things as evil.

And, you know, this action is evil.

And I said, evil is a different

thing altogether.

And I find myself using it a lot now.

And I check myself every time, but there's no other way to describe something

that is so destructive to...

everything.

I mean, it's

battery acid on everything good and decent.

And

it's just multiplying like crazy and showing the results of misery, and yet it continues to grow.

And it uses everything good and decent to its purposes.

There's another characteristic of evil.

Saint Augustine says of evil that it is only ever and can merely be a privation of the good.

That it's there's no like sort of absolute existence to evil because God makes things that exist and God makes good things.

And so all evil does is it twists and distorts and takes away and destroys.

And if you think about it, there is

a character to an absence.

Like if you have a wall and then you have a hole in the wall, the hole is like a thing, even though it's not a thing, right?

And that to me is a perfect description of a lot of this stuff, the kind of parody of

American equality that gets now twisted and transformed into equity, all of the ways that the civil rights movements have been hollowed out and worn as a skin suit by people who hate this country, who hate one another, who want us to hate one another.

Just this constant grasping desire to tear other people down.

I mean, these are all hallmarks of evil.

And you don't actually, one of the great benefits of talk of demonic possession or that sort of language is that you don't actually have to say this person is irredeemable.

You don't have to say this person is, you know, you can say

there's a spirit at work.

And when you align yourself with that spirit, you do evil.

I mean, these things are just, yeah, seem quite clear at this point.

Just we've got two minutes left, and so I just have to ask you this personal question.

Yeah.

I love your father so much.

I love your dad.

Me too.

And so bright.

And

I love you just the same.

I mean, you're just tremendous.

It's a pleasure.

So wonderful to be here.

And I never met your grandfather.

Did you meet your grandfather?

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

Papa.

What an amazing

Clavin.

You know what I mean?

There is something that

generation, when

my goal, because

we've had abuse in our family.

We've had really tough go in the Beck family.

And my goal was to

just stop all of that and try to put some good into the family, hoping that the next generation, because it takes generations to change.

Yeah.

Man, Glenn, when you say that in my heart, it's like, you know, the,

I am the product of somebody doing exactly what you just described.

I wouldn't be here.

I wouldn't be who I am.

I wouldn't have the joy that I have in my life.

I wouldn't have the sanity that I have if both of my parents hadn't taken it upon themselves to,

by clinging to one another and eventually, as they found faith by clinging to God,

to plant their foot in that river and change its course.

You know, I mean, this is something.

I loved my grandfather to death.

I'm not here to knock him in any way, but my dad in his memoir talks about the sort of struggles that he had in his family growing up and also just the kind of, again, the demons that took hold of him in his sort of early youth.

And

no,

my dad and I have this joke that we're not related.

We say Spencer Clayton, no relation because he wanted to do it.

But I would be nothing without.

I mean, I'm very lucky that I'm not just, I don't just love my father.

I mean, everybody kind of loves their parents sort of by nature,

but I'm friends with my father.

And that's one of the greatest gifts of my life.

It's just a beautiful thing.

So

I'm honored to be here with you.

And I'm very touched that you have that aspiration because I'm sure you're going to do it great.

Thank you for coming.

Thank you for having me.

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