Why Tyrants Want You to be Immoral

Tree of Liberty has Dr. Steve Bonta Executive Senior Editor of The New American magazine on to discuss how morality is essential to liberty.

TRANSCRIPT

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All right. Well, welcome back to the Tree of Liberty Society. I am Ben McClintock, and I have here a special guest, Dr. Steve Bonta, who is the executive senior editor at the New American Magazine. Dr. Bonta, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Ben. Good to be here. So I've been following your work for a long time. I know back in 2005, you wrote an article entitled "Why Morality Matters." You wrote that for the John Birch Society. And it talks about a really important subject on not only why does it, I mean, it's kind of, why does morality matter, but why does it matter to liberty? A lot of people nowadays, especially, they confuse liberty with libertinism and the idea that it's live and let live and that our actions, you know, kind of like going back to the Clinton administration of, you know, our private actions have no bearing on anything in public and our public liberty. And your article goes through and shows the history of morality, not just in Christian civilizations, but the importance of morality and how it was treated so seriously, even in ancient Rome. Oh, sure. Well, I mean, I mean, morality at its root, I mean, just the general meaning of the word has to do with self-restraint, right? Because we know certainly from scripture that there are these kind of two warring factions inside every one of us, right? There's the side of us that knows instinctively, inherently because of the light of Christ or whatever, what is right and what we ought to do.

And then of course, there's the, you know, what we sometimes call the natural man. There's the side of that, you know, that says, well, no, I have these instincts and these needs and wants and desires, and they should be fulfilled no matter what the cost to myself or to others. And so, you know, there's that old proverb that I think has been transformed into a Facebook mean that supposedly is something of some wise old Indian chief once said to the effect that there are two wolves inside us. And the one that gets the upper hand is the one that you feed. And so that's really, that's a really powerful metaphor, but, you know, Edmund Burke pointed out, and he, you know, he's had such a way with words, even by the standards, the enlightened standards of the late 18th century, you know, he said in effect that no society can exist unless there is some sort of control placed upon those appetites. And if that control is not within, then it must be placed without and the without part meaning government. Or I think he said the precise language was, you know, the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. And then it says, you know, it is decreed that, you know, immoral people can't be free, their passions forge their fetters. I probably use that quote in the article. It's been a while now since I wrote it. So, but, you know, but that's, that is so true. And this is something that one sees, obviously, that this is a lesson that's dinned into us in scripture. It's also testified over and over again in profane histories of pretty much every culture. And even outside of the Judeo-Christian heritage, I mean, you see that the most successful non-Western civilizations have been those in which there has been some, a significant degree of restraint, a significant degree of individual willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. I know that sounds like socialism a little bit, but what I mean is, you know, where people are willing to put their wants aside for their families, for their neighbors and yes, for their country. So obviously sometimes that need is extracted by a compulsion and that can work for a while. I mean, you know, that's kind of what's going on right now. And for example, in China is that, is that there's sort of this compulsory morality, moral program being imposed by the communist party. And right now in many places, not just China, but in Russia, in Turkey and other authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, there's this idea that, well, maybe this Western idea of democracy as they call it is not such a good idea because when we look at the West, all we see now is libertinism, right? All we see is because this is what's getting all the press, you know, the LGBTQ stuff and the trans stuff and all these other horrific things. And so, you know, to some extent, however, genuine or not the Xi Jinping's and the Putin's and the Erdogan's of the world are saying, well, you know, obviously this idea of a free and open society really doesn't work because under those conditions, people will voluntarily forsake morality.

And you end up with this kind of, you know, nihilism that you have in the West. So rather than do that, we're going to go back to our traditional authoritarian roots, whatever they happen to be and that sort of thing. So it's a rare thing that, you know, historically has been that a culture does what the American founding generation and for many years thereafter, Americans more or less chose to do, which was to restrain themselves and to be worthy of governing themselves. That's interesting. You brought up a point that I didn't expect about these other countries bringing in their own form of morality. And so I want to make sure we don't forget that. I want to remind me to come back to that. But as we, you know, for a long time, what I call the sodomite supremacy movement of them just shoving this stuff down your face and passing laws, putting a certain class of people above, you know, having more rights than others has been, you know, kind of limited to being promoted to one month as we come up to the month of June.

But now it's, you know, it's been leading up to that for the past six months. It's just non-stop shoving it in our faces and bringing it to the children. And we have with like the, with the tranny story time hour and the things even in a state that is thought of as being, you know, a red state or more of a religious, you know, dominated state. These things are happening in cities like St. George even. And so we're seeing it not just in your New York and your LA and your San Francisco, but we're seeing it in more of your more traditional areas. And so what, it's immorality. People can say, okay, well, yeah, it's wrong to hurt other people. It's wrong to steal. It's wrong to kill and to, you know, those types of things. But when it comes to sexual immorality, how does that affect liberty? Well, and that's a vexed question for some people because they will say, and they will say, well, as long as it's consenting adults, then it's nobody's business. Well, I mean, there's a very interesting book I was reading recently by a man named Michael Polanyi, and he was a brilliant scientist in the 20th century. He was a great chemist. Several of his students won Nobel prizes. And he himself was known as this great polymath. He came originally from Hungary and ended up in the UK and the United States. And in the late, after an illustrious career as a scientist, he got interested in morality and politics and all this sort of thing. And he wrote about this and he said, and in one of his essays, he made this really interesting observation. He said, well, now what is, and I'm paraphrasing now, but he said, you know, what is the difference between this view of popular government that we see arising in the French revolutionary tradition and then spreading pretty much on the European continent, as opposed to the Lockean tradition, the Lockean and so forth and Blackstone tradition that you see in the UK, which pretty much was the tradition that ended up in the United States and then formed the American founding. So why is it on the one hand that the European, the French European model so readily gives way to revolution, to anarchy, and ultimately to totalitarianism as we saw in France and elsewhere. But, you know, the, the Anglo-American model, you know, of limited government, you know, superficially seems to say the same thing. But what's the difference? And he, and he comes to the following conclusion. He said, the difference is that Locke and most of the people in that, you know, that tradition, including the founding fathers, for them, the right of freedom of expression and freedom of action stopped at a certain point. It wasn't an absolute, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't the ultimate principle because, so they would say, for example, well, you know, you're free to practice whatever religion you wish. You're free to believe, but you're not free necessarily to be an atheist and particularly an aggressive atheist, because they recognized that people who, and this is, this is the intractable problem that, in my opinion, the really strict libertarians don't never quite overcome. And that's, that's, this is an eternal fact about the human soul, which is if we choose to reject God and reject, you know, moral standards that emanate from God, in this case, you know, talking about sexuality, for example, if we choose to do that, we may say to ourselves, well, this is just between me and my, my conscience or whatever, or me and some other consenting adult. But experience shows that many, if not all people who get into that mindset, it changes them from within and they cannot help themselves in the long run, but what they want to impose their views on others. Okay. So we saw this with the homosexual movement, you know, way back in the stonewall days and all this, it was all about, you know, just our individual right to do what we want, consenting adults and so forth. And, you know, trust us, you know, it's our business, it's not your business. And so, but of course, ultimately they couldn't stop at that because homosexuality is an act of defiance against nature and nature's God. And deep down, those who practice it do know this, they may deny it and they may deny it very eloquently and persuasively, but they know deep down inside what, you know, what, what it is they're doing. And so to quell that inner voice, they need to raise theirs the louder and they need, they almost inevitably find themselves trying to suppress competing voices around them that are trying to tell them you shouldn't do this. And you end up with what we have today where it's become a very coercive movement. And not just here. I mean, there was a book that we used to talk about back in the eighties and nineties called the pink swastika, which by today's standard seems almost quaint, but it was a book that, that, that documented how sexual perversion was endemic in the Nazi regime. Now that's not what they, they, they exhibited to the public, the public, it was all about, you know, German nationalism and, you know, traditions of certain pre-Christian traditions, but they still, that was what they pose, but in the inner circle, in fact, these were men without morals. And so people who will deny their own nature, it's not a such a large step from doing that to denying the humanity of other people and saying, well, other people who oppose me, they need to get the wall. As people say now, they, they, you know, they, they, they should be exterminated. They're not really human beings. So these are the perils when, when, when, you know, immorality goes so far beyond just, I mean, let's say looking at a pornography, okay. Which is an ill that's been with us for a long time, but what does a person doing when they're, when they're, when they're using that sort of gateway drug into sexual morality? Well, they're objectifying other people. They're saying, well, you know, these people in these pictures that I'm looking at, they're not really human the way I am.

I can sort of look at them and, and, and use them as objects, right? Well, so how much of a step is it from objectifying people for sexual needs to objectifying people for other needs, for even more sinister needs for saying, well, you know, this is a whole class of people who really don't qualify as human beings. So let's just kill them, get them out of the way. That's what's happened with Nazism and obviously many other totalitarian isms of the modern era and in, in other ages too. That's, that's perfect. I think that's a really good segue to going back to these totalitarian regimes that now are imposing, like you said, morality on the people. You look at Russia with a long, you know, lifelong KGB, Putin being at the head of it, feigning Christianity, I believe feigning because he was a lifelong atheist in the KGB. But in China, them promoting atheism, what, what, what are they basing their morality on that they're trying to enforce?

Well, in the case of China, I mean, from, from, you know, what I saw when I was there, you know, increasingly, particularly under the current regime, I mean, Xi Jinping, his, his two predecessors were kind of the idea, were not so opposed to the idea of letting in outside influences to learn from the outside world and this kind of thing. And, and there was this brief period of about 20, 25 years when it looked like China was going to, you know, liberalize in a significant way. But now, particularly during and post COVID, you know, Xi Jinping has made his hostility to all outside values, including Christianity, which he views as a competing moral system to be just verboten. I was talking with a friend of mine in China just last night, and he was telling me that the people are now terrified to speak English because the government is now prohibiting the use of foreign languages. They're cracking down all a whole range of things, very, very rapid descent back into tyranny. And the moral basis is the age old rationale for the total state, you know, much as, you know, what the fascist said, you know, everything for the state, nothing outside the state, in effect. And, and, and it's a plea for order, because people who crave these sorts of totalitarian ideologies, you know, at base, they will say something like, well, you know, if you don't have these things, you have complete disorder and unpredictability.

And that's true. You know, that's, that's the, that's the tempestuous sea of liberty that Thomas Jefferson talked about, right? I mean, that's the nature of liberty. But it's also, you know, another, I think, ineluctable fact about people who are immoral, or perhaps what's worse, amoral, in terms of their personal conduct is they know, again, deep down inside that as a result of their repudiation of morality, of moral standards of eternal law, of God, all these things, that they can't really control themselves, they need some superintending authority to to set them straight. Otherwise, they have, you know, no compass, right. And so this is another reason that renunciation of morality is fraught with danger, because those who choose that path, inevitably conclude, well, you know, because they themselves don't know self restraint, they assume that everyone else is the same. Right. And we and we've seen this repeatedly in scandals in Washington, DC, like sex scandals, a lot of times those who plead on behalf of the Bill Clintons and their ilk will always say, well, everybody does it, right? Everybody acts that way. You know, there are two men in all Capitol Hill, I remember somebody, one of Clinton's epigones made that statement during the Lewinsky scandal, you know, because, because he and the world that he inhabits, everybody acts this way, right, you know, their orgies are kept decently secret from the rest of us, but they, but they just assume, well, you know, I have all these dirty secrets and all these things. So everybody else must be the same way. Right. And, and there's got to be controls, because, you know, if there aren't controls, you know, you know, so that's how they think they can't conceive, I think, or they've lost the ability to conceive of a world where people voluntarily, because of convictions from the heart, a desire, you know, love for God and love for their fellow men, you know, Jenny say, well, you know, I will, you know, try to improve myself, I will try to control, you know, put fetters on my appetites, and all this sort of thing.

That seems to be going in the inverse as well, though, with with your average person, not being able to recognize the conspiracy we face, because they're not evil. So therefore, they have a hard time understanding how others could be as evil as they are. Absolutely. And this is the problem. I mean, you know, I sometimes think this is this is maybe part of what, you know, the Savior meant when he said he counseled his, his disciples, or at least his inner circle to say, you know, be therefore wise as serpents, but harmless as doves. He seems to be saying, at least in part, you know, you need to know the ways of the serpent of the enemy. But, you know, you need to be you need to be mine. And we need to be both we can't be, we can't be naive, or even innocent in the same in the sense of, you know, I mean, at some point, we all have things that happen in our lives that cause us to see, perhaps more clearly the way the world really works this world at any rate. So we can't be blind, we can't be willfully blind, or Pollyannaish about these kinds of things. But it's understandable. Because, you know, I mean, decent people are attracted to decent things, and are repulsed by wickedness. And so very often, you know, people say, Oh, you know, you birchers are, you're just so negative all the time you talk about this when we try, I think we're doing a better job now of trying to catch that catch that balance. On the one hand, we need to give people the vision, a positive vision of what what liberty is, and and morality and that were the relationship between the two, and what a wonderful ennobling force they have been and always will be. But on the other hand, we need to also, you know, we, you know, tell the cautionary tales, you know, make people aware that, you know, that there are, you know, there are these pitfalls, and there are evil and designing men, who, who are very real, this isn't some fairy tale, that's made up by, you know, wild eyed conspiracy theorists. I mean, you know, maybe some of it is a little bit, I mean, about what we do some big stuff out there, that's pretty wild eyed, but the conspiracy fact is, is very much just it's, it's, it's very much academic. Well, and the problem is that they operate in secrecy, and are so effective in maintaining some of their, you know, their, their closest kept secrets that can be very hard to know. And so one has to be careful to say, well, I know that it's, it's this group, and they were, you know, you know, a lot of it, we really don't know. But we do know that they exist, we know that there, that there, that there is a great conspiracy, and then there are many other aspects of it, religious and political and social organizations that that do its beck and call, and that there's a clear agenda being carried out. It's not just happening by accident. It's not just the fulfillment of laws of human behavior, and all this sort of thing, although that, you know, that that plays into it. Right. But, but I can, I can certainly understand. I mean, the day the scales fell off my eyes was the day I first cracked open tragedy and hope by Carol Quigley. I was a short little read. Yeah, well, I did. It's really, you know, I confess, but I remember, I was a grad student at BYU many, many years ago, back in the 90s. And Jack McManus came to campus, he was promoting a new book that he just published. And he gave a talk. Well, he wasn't on campus, he was in Provo. It would have been allowed on campus even then that was let alone today. But in any event, he was he was in Provo, I went to see him. And in the course of his talk, he said, Well, you know, we make all these claims about conspiracy. And then people say, where's the proof? Well, I'll tell you. And that was the first time I heard the name Carol Quigley. And I remember going home and telling my wife, I said, boy, I've heard this. I'm going to go to the, you know, the BYU library and see if I went to the library, found the book, checked it out, and then turned to the relevant pages. And my jaw just dropped, because here's a person actually saying, you know, that this kind of thing. And of course, since then, you know, there are a lot of such evidences out there. But again, people, you know, and it is certainly easy to get caught up in the negative aspect of it, and get depressed and discouraged and assume that, that these malefactors are always going to be five steps ahead, and we're never going to defeat them. And, you know, what's the use and all this type of thing. And that, of course, is not the way you want to go. Right? It's not Yeah, it's not effective. So with with this morality, that is like you mentioned in China, there's more I'm going to put it in quotes morality. Is it just the state, like whatever the state says is what's moral? What are these state leaders trying to help the help? Maybe it might be the wrong word? What principles are they kind of putting out there? So people know when they're violating this morality? Yeah, well, so I mean, initially, it was it was a it was a, excuse me, when the communist first took over. Mao's period was primarily a period of, of nihilism, okay, in which not but the pure principles of Marx were implemented, or they tried to the great leap forward, the Da Yue Jin in, in the 1950s, followed by the Wen Hua Da Gemin, which is the cultural revolution, it literally means great revolution in Chinese, great cultural revolution. And that that period, that that period was so extreme, it convinced the Chinese communists that they had to look for maybe something a little more stable. And so whereas in the Cultural Revolution, the traditional morality of Confucius, which informed Chinese culture for a couple of millennia had been not just discarded, but, but prohibited, people who practice Confucianism, as well as Taoism, Buddhism were were aggressively persecuted, and many cases killed.

Well, they decided, here's what we're going to do, we're going to create this, you know, Zhong Guo Te Si She Hui Ju Yi, which means socialism with Chinese characteristics. And, and, and that's going means we're going to continue being socialist, communist Marxist, but we're going to bring back key values of Confucianism, which are sort of traditional people would still remember that even though it's been stamped out for several decades, we'll bring that back. And we use that as the framework to continue our perpetuate our, our authoritarian rule. So that's what they've done. And so today, they they openly embrace Confucianism and other totalitarian models of the past. I mean, for example, the Spartans, this is true of many Marxist people, a lot of people aren't aware of this, but, but Sparta, you know, the like Kyrgyz, and Sparta are considered to be this great model, these proto communists as they were, in fact, classical era. So there's a lot of emphasis on that as well.

That's interesting, because that that really gets into a lot of the new age movement and, which is this amoral morality that is, you know, trying that is really sucking a lot of people in the spiritualism that that we see happening as a counterfeit to, you know, to what we read in the scriptures, you look at throughout time you have in the Old Testament and with ancient Israel, of how you didn't even want immoral people, you didn't want sodomites even living amongst your community. And then that, you know, that wasn't acceptable. And then in your in your article, it gets into ancient Rome and how the and how it was when it was a monarchy moving into republic, you have that aspect of it, where it was blossoming into kind of a free society, and then it degrades into a, into the tyranny and the empire that Rome became. And so as a non biblical society, how did what did, you know, China doesn't seem to be learning from, from what, you know, benefited Rome, even though it was non Christian? How did they did they? How did they understand that morality and how important it was to their civilization that it was their morality was even above their life you have, you know, was it Virginia? Or if I remember how to pronounce the, those some of those Roman names or was it Virginia, Sir Virginia, and how she when she was violated? She she took her own life because it was it was that important. You mean Lucretia?

Yeah. Who was who was? Yeah. Yes. Thank you. Yes. By the son of the trustee ruler. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, the thing is that the Rome is and some of this is sort of semi legendary, but but but the the moral system of Rome, which by the way, discouraged extravagant forms of polytheism, because the Numa Pompilius, who was the second king of Rome, the second of I think, seven kings before the Republic was created, something like that. Anyway, Numa Pompilius was the second. And he is regarded as being this incredibly virtuous figure. Now, he where did he get his ideas from? Well, he didn't think them up. He knew Pompilius kind of had this idea that it wasn't appropriate to worship idols that in particular, you shouldn't worship gods that were fashioned after animals, the way the Egyptians did. He was sort of a monotheist and and his code of morality and that idea came from a man named Pythagoras, he of the Pythagorean theorem, who is this also the sort of almost mythical figure who came out of the first center of Greek civilization. See, Athens was the second. But prior to Athens, prior to the rise of Persia and the conquest of Ionia, which was the portion of Greece that was on Asia Minor, what's now the Turkey, right, the Asian portion of Turkey. So there was a city there called Miletus, which was like Athens later on, was this great center of learning and produce great scientists like Pallas, who was the first guy who I think calculated the circumference of the earth. And this is like 700 BC, and also Pythagoras, who in addition to being a great geometer and mathematician, was also a philosopher of the age for the ages. And no one knows where he got his ideas. So one could speculate, but he seems he seems to have this have had almost this, this monotheistic approach and and he developed the these, these moral, the moral codes ideas, which apparently, according to tradition were transmitted then to Noah Pompilius, who was himself a student of the Pythagorean school. Okay. And so that means in effect, that Roman culture from the get go, though it was not, we would say, Judeo Christian, right, in many places was quite alien from Judeo Christian. So for example, in the Roman code of law, it was not permitted, it was required that deformed babies be put to death. Okay, for instance, so that's something that would not be countenanced. One with well, of course, we do that now too, anyway. But in theory, anyway, is not countenanced in Christian morality. But anyway, even though that was the case, there are still many recognizable strands of Roman culture, pre Christian Roman culture.

And they include a very strong emphasis on individuality. All right. And a, a diminution of many of the more extravagant impulses that are typically associated with pagan or pre Christian polytheism from the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean world all the way over to India, you know, I mean, it's essentially modern day Hinduism is really quite similar to the polytheism practiced in much of the ancient world. And the Romans, you know, kind of were a bit exceptional. And so for example, there was a period in the Roman Republic when the cult of Bacchus, or Dionysius was was imported as a secret society into Rome, and the so called back and back analysis that they had were basically orgies. And this kind of thing, you know, sexual license in the name of worshipping God, this is very much a feature of pre Christian polytheism, we see it referenced numerous times in the Old Testament, things like, you know, temple prostitutes, and so forth. Even to this day, I mean, they're not technically legal, but you can still find them in India, there are some temples remote areas that have, you know, that have, you know, prostitutes associated with them, and this kind of thing, you know, the fertility cult and all that stuff.

And the Romans rejected it. I mean, they rejected the cult of Bacchus, because it was it was too much for them. It was, you know, it worked with Greeks, and, and with, you know, the adherence of Sibylla and Asia Minor and all these others, but, but not so much for Rome. So there's, there's already in Rome is on this trajectory of saying, well, we're not so sure that, that these ancient ways are what we want to be. So they're kind of in this middle between, you know, a recognizable Western Christian culture, and what we would now call an Eastern pre Christian polytheistic culture. There were features of both, but the former certainly predominated in the earlier years. And then what happened, you know, and this is not by coincidence, again, you know, bringing the more getting back to morality theme, as the Roman Republic evolved into a more of an imperial style Republic, and the Romans began to conquer foreign peoples with foreign ways, okay, in Asia Minor, North Africa, and so forth, they also began importing many of those foreign ways into Rome. And that included, for example, the infamous cult of Mithras, the Mithraic cult, which seems to have been brought from pre Christian Armenia in the time of Nero, and then eventually became the great cult of empire that, you know, a lot of the imagery in, in the book of Revelation regarding, you know, the mark of the beast and the, and so forth. A lot of that was, seems to have been borrowed from the Mithraic cult, which at its height was not just the cult of all of the emperors, all of the top generals, all of the top bankers and merchants in Rome, but also quite a number of soldiers and ordinary people. And one of the things they did was they tattooed a mark on their wrists or on their forehead. And so, so a lot of that, see, you know, we don't know a lot about the Mithraic mysteries even now, but what we do know suggests that, that John the Revelator may have had them in mind, at least metaphorically, when he was talking about, you know, all that, that mysterious stuff about the, you know, the mark of the beast and the number of the, all the rest of this stuff.

So you see in Rome, this contamination, and that's not too strong word, contamination by foreign and inferior cultures. And that then made its way, you know, insinuated its way into the highest corridors of power in the empire. And, and it's not coincidence that from Nero onwards, all of the worst Roman emperors were, seemed to have been adherents of the cult of Mithras, or which was the same thing of the cult of Helios, the sun, like Eleagabalus, who was, who was a sun cultist. So Mithras and the sun God became essentially the same cult. And of course, it was that same cult that was embraced by the emperor Julian, the apostate, the sole non-Christian Roman emperor after Constantine the Great, who tried to bring back the old ways. And part and parcel of that was an attempt to, to rekindle the aggressive persecution of Christian, of Christians that had been carried out at the behest, I think, of Mithras in the early, earlier age.

Right. So that's a little bit of the, of, of, of the story of what happened to Rome. And, and, you know, alongside that, of course, you know, if you could read plenty of other chronologies of Roman history that talk about the decline in, in public morality. So during the, during the Republic period, you know, the Romans were very much monogamous, you know, you didn't commit adultery on your wife, you know, they, they at least, I mean, this is maybe a little bit sanitized people have always been people, but, but by and large, that, that, that was very taboo. That wasn't a societal norm. It wasn't, you know, yeah, it was something. Yeah. Well, and I dare say, you know, the Roman, the Romans probably also, you know, look down on what they would have regarded as the relatively dissolute Greek mores. I think it's probably maybe been exaggerated the role of homosexuality and pederasty in classical Greece, but it was certainly there and nowhere incidentally, was it more pronounced than in that Paragon of virtue and civic order Sparta, where it was actually institutionalized, right? Pedophilia was, was, was part of that whole system, right?

Of when they, when the, when the soldiers, when the, when the boys of eight or nine started their military training, part of that training meant taking a partner in the full sense of the word of an older man, you know, a trained soldier and all of this, these are the sorts of things that the Romans would have looked upon at least during the, the height of the apogee of the Republic would have looked upon, I think with, with horror, with something that they did not want to emulate in much the same way that early Americans regarded their, you know, the depravities of the old world of Europe, right? The Somali, the Persian, all the rest of it. That aspect of, of the sodomites and the pedophilia is something that they are desperately afraid of coming out. Like they try to say that there's no connection between the two, but there's a tight connection between the two, even in the modern era with like Harvey Milk, who was famous for having underage boys as his, you know, long-term lovers. And so this idea that they're separate, I think is, you know, is obviously what they're, is a cover to be able to continue to promote the agenda until it becomes normalized. Well, and again, we can see, you know, again, back in the eighties and nineties, it was all about tolerance. You need to accept us in the name of tolerance. And again, going back to what Polanyi said, you know, he said, what this is turned into is this idea, you know, this continental European approach to so-called democracy, popular government is universal tolerance. But that was not the case with the British model, with the Lockean model, that they would say, well, there are certain ideas that really aren't to be tolerated because they engender the ultimate form of intolerance, which is what we're seeing now. Right. So we've gone from, oh, you know, we just, all we want, you know, is the freedom to enjoy the same privileges as the rest of you. You know, we promise we won't try to impose our, we recognize not everybody.

And now we have, you know, as the San Francisco gay men's choir producing this video, I'm sure you've seen it. We'll convert your children. Right. Absolutely sickening stuff. And they're very open about this now that, that it's not just about passive tolerance and well, if you happen to be born the way we are, then we want you to have the freedom to join our community. No, they're aggressively seeking to recruit everyone. And they focus on the young, the impressionable and the innocent. Right. And they, again, this isn't too strong word, they lust to destroy the innocence of the most innocent among us. This has been in the news with Target and the company that they use to produce some of their material produces an image of a guillotine and they call it a transphobe headrest. And so, yeah, going along with what you're saying that they're not about live and let live. You will accept them and celebrate them and put them on the forefront, their supremacy movement. Otherwise the force of government will be used against you. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, the United States has, unlike many Islamic societies, we've never gone out and, you know, killed homosexuals as a matter of policy and this kind of thing, but neither did we give it countenance. There was a reason. Again, I think in this regard, our ancestors were wiser than we, because they understood, you know, that old dictum that, you know, in my church, I don't know if it's your church, but you know, the LDS churches, they're so fond of uttering from the pulpit, you know, the old verses by Alexander Pope to the effect that vice is a monster so fearful mean that to be feared needs, but to be seen, get seen to all familiar with her face. We first pity, then endure. What are we first endure, then pity, then embrace. I think that's the sequence. And because there's a natural, I mean, one of the things, one of the godly endowments that we have as children of God is a natural tendency to sympathize with others. And this is the reason that again, going back to the pithy wisdom of our grandparents and ancestors, you know, you're known by the company you keep. Right. That's not to say we don't love all people, but you will assume the characteristics of those that you associate with, and you will tend to sympathize with ideas that you become too familiar with, too comfortable with, whether they're good or bad.

And so it's a false sense of love that we're being brainwashed with, because the Savior says, if you love me, keep my commandments. And he says that I chasten whom I love. And so this idea of broad acceptance, Christian libertinism is a false teaching that's not found in the scriptures at all. No, I don't see any evidence for it. I mean, I, some people refer to it dismissively as the teddy bear Jesus model. Right. You know, and again, there is no doubt that the love that the Savior has for every one of us, fallible, fallen, moral, not so moral is certainly beyond human comprehension. But I think so too, is the nature of that love. And we assume that love automatically equates to yes, there, there, there, I understand whatever you do, it's okay. And, you know, the way one might love a very, very, very pliant pet or something like that. Pets know that most pets, you have to discipline them. Right. Not all. I mean, there are some pets that are just naturally really, really laid back and chill, and you can just feel good about yourself. But, and the same is true with children. There are some children who are pretty easy to raise and probably the majority of them, there's, they're going to be challenges. There's a natural tendency to, to rebelliousness that needs to be corrected, or if not corrected, they need to at least be made plainly aware of the error of their ways. So that, you know, that, no, so, so I, you know, I don't think we can really fathom the depth or the full extent of God's love for us. That's true.

But at the same time, the witness of the scriptures is very clear. For those who, who, who, who are, are clear-eyed rebels against God, particularly with these, these more serious things that, that are, that are corrupting and not just soul destroying, but civilization destroying vices, like homosexuality, you know, will not be found without blame when their time of reckoning comes, you know, so that's, these are very serious matters. I've been trying to put together in my head, a list of free societies throughout the history of the world. And maybe you can help me out with this. So I'm going through, you go back to Enoch, right. And then you have ancient Israel and you have... At certain times. Of course, under Moses, you know, under the, what Moses set up originally. And then of course you have the problems afterwards, but, and then you have

basically the, there might've been, well, you, so we talked about Rome when it was a Republic. You have the pilgrims and what they established and as the, as America or the Americas were being populated by Europeans. And then we have the, the beginning stages of the United States as the, in the first couple of generations of the constitution were a free society. And all of those that I listed all had the basis of morality. Are there other, what other societies throughout history would you know, would you consider to be a very, a liberty of a free society like those? And were they all Christian except for Rome? Were there other societies that weren't Christian or ancient Israel?

I mean, that's a really good question, Ben. I mean, there are probably many that have been lost to history that we don't know about. I mean, the only reason, well, I mean, so, I mean, the only reason we know about the ancient Israelites is because we have this record that's been handed down to us. I think that certain Europe, there've been a number of Republics that have arisen in Europe during the middle ages, probably the most preeminent, the most successful was certainly Venice. Now in the last two or 300 years of its existence, it had become, it was a Republic only in name. It was a very, very noxious police state, but at its apogee in the high middle ages and before, it was this island of tolerance. I mean, you've heard of the Shakespeare play, "The Merchant of Venice," right? He said, "The Merchant of Venice is Shylock the Jew," right? And he's the villain in the story. But the truth that underscores that play, and that has nothing to do with the Jews themselves, is that Venice was the one place that Jews could live in Europe, in medieval Europe, without fear of persecution.

And so Venice was known as being a magnet for Jews. That's why Shakespeare used it as his setting because Venice, although it was officially Catholic, I mean, patron saint was St. Mark, and so it was officially Catholic, yet it was sort of an aristocratic Republic. It was governed over by a council of aristocrats. There was also a popular element. And the proof of the pie is in the eating for hundreds of years, Venice, this tiny little mostly man-made city erected literally out of the waters of the Rialto lagoon, became the sole superpower of Europe. It was able to hold at variance, the armies of Turkey and the armies of the various European monarchies and so forth and so on. It was Europe's power broker. It had an unparalleled Navy. And this is because Venice, by virtue of being this sole light of freedom in medieval Europe, maybe not sold, but one of the only ones, it attracted talent from foreign wide. Now, some other lesser known examples would be Frisia or the Frisian Republic. My own ancestors are Frisian, but Frisia is a strip of land along

the, well, mostly the North sea, the coast of Holland, Harlingen is a major city and then on up into Germany and even a little bit into Jutland, a portion of Denmark. And the Frisian are descendants of the Angles and Saxons, of the Anglo-Saxons who moved back and resettled on the European mainland along the coast several hundred years, apparently after the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England. And they also set up a remarkably free state, which remarkably prosperous. It was like the only place in Northern Europe that was pretty much free of feudalism through the whole of it. The history is not well-known because it was small and it was obscure. Another example that comes to mind, of course, is the Swiss Republic, which is a, I think a wonderful example of a pluralistic state. There are four different languages spoken in Switzerland and numerous minority dialects, but four official languages. And Switzerland is divided into cantons. The major cantons, I think there are 27 in all, and they're not all equal. Some of them are pretty small, but all of the larger cantons are essentially equal in power. So Swiss, Switzerland is more of a confederacy than a true federated state. And yet, despite these apparent weaknesses in its society and constitution, the fact that it's divided along ethnic and even religious lines. I mean, the French, Moetian Switzerland is typically Catholic, whereas the Germans, of course, are Protestant. The Italians are Catholic as well. So you would think that it would have been riven by the same religious conflicts that engendered the 30-year war and all the other religious wars of that period, but it wasn't. Probably because they were separated.

They weren't intermingled. If they were probably intermingled, it might've caused more problems. Might've been more problems. Yeah. But in effect, for some reason, I mean, the Swiss, despite their diversity, relative diversity, have been able to hold together this state very successfully for hundreds and hundreds of years. And let's see some other examples. San Marino is a tiny Republic in Italy. And contrary to what people, when the Italian peninsula, it was the only Italian state that refused to participate in the Risorgimento of Garibaldi and that crowd back in the 1800s. They apparently came into being about the same, well, probably even earlier than Venice. Venice dates to the sixth century. They seem to have dated from maybe the fifth or fourth century AD. And from the get-go, they appear to have had some form of written constitution. Now, San Marino only has like 30,000 inhabitants or fewer, but it has always been a Republic, interestingly enough. So that's another example. Moving eastward, I mean, there's something to say perhaps about the Novgorod Republic in Russia, which was in the Christian era also. I mean, your question was whether there's a correlation between these types of governments and Christianity. And I have to say the answer is probably that there is, because I don't really see outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition, any independent invention of Republics as we understand them. So when you get into Asia, you find some very sophisticated States, large and small, some very ancient, but they're almost universally based on top-down compulsion. And in particular, when you get beyond the Muslim domain, you start getting into the Indian subcontinent and into Southeast Asia, and also into China and East Asia, where Hinduism and then further to the East and North and South, Buddhism are prominent.

You find that collectivism is the ideal form of government. And why is this? Well, because governments at some very profound and subtle level are really just a reflex of how we conceive of how a culture of which government is like a very prominent aspect is just an earthly representation of how we conceive things eternal to be. And so with Hinduism, with Buddhism, and also with Jainism and even Sikhism, lesser known, but still, these all have, and the same is true of, I guess, Taoism in China as well. So these all have an interesting feature in common, and that is that for those religions, there's no such thing as individual salvation. And properly speaking, there's no heaven in the sense. There's only eternal oneness with the great universal collective. So you've probably heard the term Nirvana, which the Buddha would have pronounced Nibbana. That was the language he used. And that literally means without breathing or without breath. The idea being that the ultimate desideratum of a Buddha, of a Buddhist is to achieve Nirvana through Moksha, Moksha being release from the eternal cycle of death and rebirth, reincarnation or transmigration of the soul. And then after that, you don't go to a place to worship God, let's say, or in some sense, be an individual anymore. You become reabsorbed into the great universal collective. So this is the shared cosmology of all of the peoples of the East. So small wonder that their governments and indeed their social structures are a reflex of that, where individuality is viewed as something to be minimized, if possible, stamped out. And the collective is, I mean, that's part of the reason that communism has been, I hate to use the term, but has been so successful in places like China, Southeast Asia, the Korean peninsula, and so forth, where it wasn't quite so much in Europe.

Culturally, they were already kind of like accepting of that kind of idea.

It was already there.

In the West, we weren't so much.

Yeah, it was already there in their cultural bloodstream, right?

Well, that's interesting that you kind of see those types of ideologies, really, that's the spiritualism that you see in California, in the West, that are trying to be more socialized.

Well, sure, that's what the New Age ideology ultimately is that same mentality. And so is what's called now, it's sort of a broad term, but shamanism in general. And so this is the reason that you have this phenomenon that I call the ABC phenomenon, which means anything but Christianity. And that's really what it comes down to.

You could probably add Judaism to that, it means really anything but Judeo-Christianity, because that is the sole...

Anything Bible-based, anything but the Bible.

Yeah, well, that's the sole tradition where you have this vigorous idea of individuality, right? And why? Why is it important? Well, because, I mean, there are several things that go into it. Number one, we were created by an individual God, you see. This tradition says that there's one God, not a plurality of gods, at least that we worship, right? There's one God. So monotheism gives birth to this idea that individuality is an eternal principle, right? So obviously, if we're children of God, we must too be individuals first and foremost. And of course, individuality is something we pretty much in the West take for granted, unless we are actively and aggressively counter indoctrinated to think otherwise, as is happening now in our public schools, right?

Our default assumption is the reality of the individual. And then the corollary to that is the importance of individual growth and progress. And then we would say, well, you know, and that's good for the collective too, because if people are given individual freedom to develop their talents as they see fit, their God-given talents, mind you, then they will, I mean, not everyone's going to choose the right path, but the majority of people will develop those talents to the infinite betterment of the greater good, which cannot happen if individuality and the individual choice and right of individual progress is denied, right? But all of this flows in the first instance from these long held premises of Western religion, that God is an individual, that he is our father, and therefore he's imparted certain traits to us that he loves us.

And so therefore he wants us to progress. He wants us to be happy, right? And again, this idea, well, of course, God is love. Well, that's not necessarily the case in many pagan religions. God is power, right? You worship God so that he will do things for you, that he will, he or she will exercise power on your behalf. So many of the more, you know, the more aggressive Hindu deities, like the goddess Kali, for example, that's, I mean, I don't think any Hindu would say, well, I believe that Kali loves me. But if I do what Kali wants, then maybe she will come out and do powerful stuff on my behalf.

Right? So it's a different mindset, right? Sucking up as opposed to a relationship. Sure, sure. So it's a different, yeah, a whole different relationship. So the relationship of man to God and the idea of what God is like, right? And other things, what heaven is like and so forth, these things inform the types of societies and governments that we have in the first instance. And I think at a visceral level, the enemies of freedom do understand this. You know, they may not have thought it out, how much, but they understand it instinctively, which is why they instinctively hate and oppose anything that smacks of Judeo-Christian morality.

Because they know that that conduces naturally to the state of affairs that they're opposed to, which is individual liberty. Well, kind of going through all those civilizations, and we go to the United States, how our republic was founded upon the idea that it's only meant for a religious and a moral people and that it can't, you know, we can't work under any other circumstance. And so this satanic conspiracy that seeks to enslave everyone, and we see, especially in the 19, you know, starting kind of maybe earlier than this, but really start to see it established in the 1920s, and then really push itself in the 1960s, where you see what's interesting, I think, you know, the free love movement also got together where you have like the Beatles pushing the Eastern religions at the same time of the free love movement. And then moving us to today, where they've been able to go throughout the years of destroying that, and then you go to, I think it was, what was it, 2000, when you have Lawrence v. Texas, and where they said that you could no longer outlaw sodomy and sodomite relationships. And then you go to, was it 2014, I think it was, when they said that states no longer had the right to regulate marriage within their boundaries. And so you have these movements where they were not just about just kind of promoting immorality, but saying that you weren't even allowed to, as a people discuss what morals were available, were, were acceptable within your culture and your society. And so they were able to break down those barriers and bring in the bigger government that we've been seeing for the last couple of years.

Yeah. And I mean, I think that we maybe misunderstand the nature of the conspiracy when we simply say it's about, you know, they want to take our freedom. They do. But that's not the end, actually. It's the means to the end. The end is they would want to take our Christianity. They want to eradicate Christianity from the face of the earth. That has always been their primary agenda and primary motive force. And so, I mean, you know, before... But it's that step of destroying the morality, you just, you have a totalitarian government, and then they can just completely stamp out the religious aspect of it. Oh, sure. And I mean, we used to have somewhere here at JBS headquarters, I was shown to many years ago. I don't know if it's still here or not. But at one time, we had a letter that was a piece of correspondence that was sent to us by no less an eminence than Anton LaVey. You'll know that name. He was the man who founded the Church of Satan, one of many modern day, you know, Satanist types, you know, he's not the only one, but you know, he was pretty influential in his days, passed on now. And I read the letter, and it was signed by him. It was, you know, very cordial.

You know, Mr. LaVey was nothing if not open about what he stood for. And he said, well, you know, we do believe, among other things, he said, you know, part of our program is we think, you know, we should do away with the American Constitution and replace it with a strong police state. Now, I don't know how his organization or he himself fit into this greater scheme of things, but this is just one of the many examples of how these people think in private, you know, what they talk about amongst themselves, as opposed to what they say in public. So in public, many of them are highly, most of them, I would say are highly intelligent. You know, many of them are people with remarkable worldly accomplishments in, you know, in education, and this, you know, they have their, you know, multiple PhDs, and they've served in high positions in business and government and so forth and so on. But in public, you know, since they have such a large microphone, they will say they will always couch their agenda in terms of things that sound familiar to the partisans of freedom. So they talk about tolerance, who can oppose tolerance, for example, that's such a nice word. It's such a good thing to be tolerant. Obviously, intolerance is a bad thing. They talk about freedom and liberty, and the right to choose, and all these other things, what could be more American these things, right? But in reality, you know, their real agenda, which is starting to come into the open now, we're seeing how truly coercive they are with the cancel culture and all the rest of this, it's, you know, comparatively new, you know, it's, you know, it's borne out what we've been saying for decades, you know, if you give them power, this is how they're going to behave. Now they're doing it, because they're in a position where they feel that, that none dare oppose anymore. And so they're openly squelching points of view and beginning to espouse more extreme measures. Like I said, I mean, if you look at the interviews, a lot of these Antifa types, they'll talk about how they're going to give this person the wall and give that person the wall, which is their slang for we're going to kill them, the first chance we get, right, you know, so that and obviously, they've already shown how violent they are, how willing they are to do things that ordinary decent people would not be willing to do, you know, so the mask is coming off. A major reporter and sodomite activist, Masha Gieson, I think that was her name in the Washington Post. She talked about how, of course, we lie about, you know, what we're wanting marriage equality, of course, we're lying, we don't want marriage. And so they admit, like you said, amongst themselves, and in these private circles, that they're not telling the truth about what they want, and that it's a lie to be able to move them towards a certain direction. And you talked about, you know, how the end result, right, is destroying Christianity. And so, but at the same time, they recognize, I think of an effective way that they do this is they recognize that if you were to come out straight to their face and to our faces and say that, we would fight them tooth and nail to the death, you know, we would be like, you know, the martyrs of old and in some more totalitarian countries today. And so they make it, what they're doing in the West, what it appears to me is to get you to reject Christianity in the name of Christianity, like changing what it means to be a Christian and that it's like with the Unitarian churches and some of these churches, it was in the news in just north of Sacramento, about this pastor that was, you know, basically being a groomer for teenage kids to be able to engage in the transgender and sodomite movement.

And so using the churches to promote their agenda under the guise of Christianity. So making you think that you haven't given up your religion when you really have.

Well, you know, this is old term that was popularized by Aristotle in his treatise on politics. He called it revolution within the forms. And he said, you know, when you have a well-constituted state, a Republic or something like that, that is, you know, basically set up pretty well, has many, many bulwarks against its own destruction. Then if you desire to revolutionize the state of affairs, you have to do it within the forms that are given to you. You can't come normally and just say, you know, wholeheartedly, you know, assail the whole edifice and say, I want to destroy it all now, tear it all down. You know, particularly if you have a well-educated populace, people who are accustomed to living in a certain way. So for example, we see this happening in ancient Rome. This idea that the Roman Republic, you know, perished like that. There's one defined instant when we say, okay, now we went from Republic to Empire. It was actually a very gradual, you know, transitional period starting with, I mean, probably as early as the ascent of the Grockei brothers who were sort of like the new dealers of the Roman Republic. And then followed up a generation later by the twin tyrants, Marius and Sulla, who, you know, made war on each other and Julius Caesar and Pompey grew up in that circumstance. And then they themselves, along with the other, you know, triumvirate, the first triumvirate, then they, you know, dealt the Republic another mortal blow, bit by bit established a new set of precedents whereby the old established forms of the Republic could be done away or used in novel ways. And it is an interesting fact of history that Rome continued to regard itself as a Republic officially under the Empire Emperors, all the way up through the time of Diocletian. Okay, he was the first Emperor to officially don the purple, as they say, I mean, he put on the purple robe, which in the Eastern Desmond, for Eastern Desmond, that was the robe of the Emperor, of the King of Kings.

What year roughly was that? Roughly 300 AD. Oh, so like, so even during Christ's time, they consider themselves a Republic, they at least... Absolutely. Well, I mean, and if you've seen the movie, Gladiator, which is heavily fictionalized, but it's set in the time of Commodus, who was a real person who was it was a tyrant. He was the son of one of Rome's better Emperors Marcus Aurelius and the grandson of probably the best of the Roman Emperors who was Antoninus Pius. But in any case, he was a depraved monster, but the Roman Senate still existed. And so did many of the other offices of the old Republic, they still had senators and you can see that in the movie, right? There's this, there's this, if you've seen the movie, there's this, this power struggle going on between Commodus, you know, the imperial faction, on the one hand, and the senators and the other, and the eponymous Gladiator, who becomes sort of the hero of the everyman hero, ultimately sides with the Senate and says, you know, the Senate, this is the way back to the rule of law and the, to the good old days of the Republic, even though by that time, those good old days were centuries removed, but the institutional memory was still there. And it wasn't until Diocletian's time, Diocletian said, Oh, no, you know, we're not a republic anymore. The Senate was abolished, all the old offices were abolished. Diocletian himself partitioned the emperor empire into new, you know, it created this new polity that then became ultimately the basis for the splitting of the empire itself into an Eastern and Western. It's a good thing history never repeats or repeats itself. It doesn't sound familiar at all.

It doesn't rhyme, right? Does rhyme and it does echo. And so, you know, that's kind of what we're seeing now is that we have, you know, we're beginning to see just speaking about politics, we're seeing in the political realm, this revolution, within the forums taking place, such that the American president, we consider we call him he's a president, you know, he's not a king. And yet he now wields more de facto, maybe not de jure, but certainly more de facto power than bad old King George ever had. So I mean, the founding fathers were, took great pains, as you know, in the Federalist Papers to point out, I think it was actually Hamilton that pointed this out. And Hamilton, he was more of the big government guy. He was the one who pointed out here, you know, people who claim that the American president is going to turn into a tyrannical executive, like the British monarch, they don't understand, you know, he doesn't have the power, he doesn't, he can't declare war like the British monarch, he can't raise taxes or raise money the way the British monarch can do. Okay. And of course, we know how that went, right? So now the president, again, de facto, starts wars on his say so, and Congress has given him the tools to do it way back in the 1970s, you know, passed a law and effectively saying, you know, yeah, you can start a war if you need to. The rationale was well in the modern day, we can't wait for a declaration of war if they're incoming ICBMs, the president has to have the ability to act with dispatch. So for whatever reason that that circumstance was changed. And of course, that and in combination with our membership in the UN, and supposed subordination of our constitution to the UN Charter means the president doesn't need congressional authority to start war anymore, because guess what, folks, he gets that from the from the Security Council. So, in fact, we now have a president who pretty much starts wars at whim, just like all those old world monarchs that the founding fathers used to decry. And for raising money, well, the president has a remarkable range of options at his at his disposal now. And the most formidable, of course, is that he no longer needs to raise money via taxation, right, which means he doesn't have to go to Congress and ask for bills of appropriations in spite of what's going on the drama that's unfolding right now in Washington theater, that it's because the reality is that most of the money is raised by inflation now, right, and has been for over 100 years. Right? So, so and this is, you know, in theory, Congress had, but they've never audited the Fed, the Federal Reserve, so they really don't know what's going on in the Federal Reserve System. In recent years, particularly post 2008, the Fed has become more and more secretive about things that you like the exact figures were m one and m two and m three are concerned, other things are generally no longer published. Right. And so all of this is carried on. And it's primarily to the extent that the Fed is allied with the government at all, which I think it is, it's not strictly correct to say it's a totally private institution, it's kind of a hybrid, public private, well, the public part is the executive branch, specifically the Department of Treasury, because Department of Treasury is the place that issues all those bonds that the Fed then ends up buying and or selling on the secondary market with open market operations. So all of this takes place outside of the purview of Congress. So if not the President, then in the larger sense, the executive branch is now pretty much taking care of its own fiscal affairs without the say so of the people's house of the Congress, the House of Representatives, specifically, just like in good old England. The only difference is the President still can't say, well, you know what, you know, Kevin McCarthy, I don't care what you say, I'm going to raise taxes. We haven't quite got to that point yet. But then he doesn't need to. Yeah, because because of this wonderful thing, you know, that J. Edward Griffin called the Mandrake mechanism. He doesn't need taxes as much as was once the case. So all of these taxes through inflation, which is same thing. It's all this power de facto has been migrating to the executive branch. We now have a president who, you know, properly speaking, should be styled an elected monarch. And that may sound like an exaggeration, but there are abundant examples of elected monarchs in history. The Anglo-Saxons, for example, elected their kings, okay, and their kings sometimes actually retired. And there was a loose, you know, in Anglo-Saxon England, they had a king, but then they also had the Witanagamote, you know, this this sort of quasi popular council that could offset the power of the king to some degree. And it kind of went back and forth. So yeah, there are such things as elected monarchs.

The fact that we don't call ours such, it reveals how powerful this principle of revolution within the forums actually is, right? Because people say, well, you know, we have this, this government, the Senate is another good example. What is the Senate supposed to be? Well, in the in the original scheme of things in our republic properly constituted, those were the guys that represented the states, not the people. And as such, they were not appointed by the people through a direct plebiscite, they were appointed by the state legislature. So only indirectly by the voting public. And in that capacity, they behaved much differently than the Senate senators today, you know, post 17th amendment, right? Because senators today act like glorified representatives. They are, they are demagogues with with, I mean, I think Mike Lee is an exception to that, by the way, you know, there's a few of them that aren't, but the majority of them are basically glorified demagogues. And not only that, because they have that longer term in office, they can accrue a lot more demagogic power than representatives can, because they got six years to consolidate the power. So you can see where, in so many regards, our republic and I'm not saying by the way that the cause is hopeless, that's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying, looking soberly at the way things are now you can see the way. You have to look at the score to know what to do. You can't, it's not giving up saying, Oh, look at the score. It's saying, look at where we're at. So that way, we're not doing the wrong thing. Right. And but yeah, I mean, so you can see that this revolution within the forms has, has transformed the senators.

I mean, we still call them senators, but they're, they're more and more and more like the old aristocratic councils of the European republics at best, and at worst, perhaps, you know, subservient to monarchs. And the president is for all intents and purposes, an elected king, by any measure. I mean, the US president has so much more power than all, but the, the greatest despots of your could have dreamed of. I mean, he can just push a button and annihilate entire countries. Well, even using the, the, the, the, your example of the forms, you know, revolution in the forms is, um, with voting records, you have Dick Cheney voting a hundred percent, you know, constitutional as a congressman, but he was a globalist the entire time. And so these wolves in sheep's clothing pretend to be one thing to the people. And he, he talks to the council and formulations and brags about being, you know, at the head of the CFR, but it didn't tell everybody back home that and laughs about it. And so, you know, we see with, with these politicians where they, you know, they can look good with the, with the voting record or they can with their words, but what their long-term goals are, are much, much different.

Yeah. And I think, you know, kind of circling back to the subject of morality, the other, the other thing about morality is this, if your moral compass is properly oriented, I'm not saying if you're perfect, right? No, nobody's perfect, but if you're more or less trying to do the right thing and your moral compass is more or less pointing in the right direction, then you are also going to be able to see more clearly. It's been my experience that people that moral people, well, you know, this is, this is, this is a, a, a saying that's ascribed to Robert Welch, the founder of the JBS. He said that morality sees farther than intellect. And that's so crucial. America has never been a country of intellectuals the way, you know, the great European countries have been. It's primarily been a country of, you know, of moral people. I mean, that that's our, I mean, the founding fathers were brilliant men, but first and foremost, they had this unparalleled moral compass certainly in comparison with, you know, their counterparts in the old world. You know I'm not saying they're perfect. Obviously I know about Alexander Hamilton's peccadilloes and some of the others, you know, they, they, they had their issues. I think it's a false dichotomy or a false choice to say that it's either, you know, that your perfection or you allow everything, right. Oh, you're not perfect. So you can let everybody murder. You know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a false choice that to allow people to do bad things and to give the people excuses. It's, that's not what it means to be a moral people.

Well, and the other thing is to moral people, people who are not trying to constantly, who are constantly hardening themselves through this process of self-justification, right. Tend to also to be teachable. And I mean, you know, the thing about... Repentant for their flaws. Well, right. But, but, I mean, you know, the thing about, about a Republic is that a Republic, you know, a free Republic is, or ought to be about growth, about personal growth. Ideally, America should be better now than it was 50 years ago or a hundred years ago, right. Just as people, hopefully, you know, you're a wiser man now than you were 20 years ago or whatever this, this type of thing. And so, you know, but, but I've, I've, I've learned from, from decades of experience, you know, being in this, this freedom fight, trying to teach people about the principles of freedom is that, is that people who are moral,

generally are more amenable to being taught, more amenable to, to saying, oh, well, here's something I don't know about. Let, let me learn about this. You know, whereas people, I mean, one of the things, and I was, I was raised to be kind of in a leftist environment and the thing, you know, looking back on that, meaning no disparagement to my parents or anything like this, but, but I, I grew up around university people and academic people. And so I guess it was natural that I would go, you know, become sort of an academic myself and get a PhD and all this type of thing. Right. But the thing that has often struck me is how close-minded intellectuals can be, you know, and it has not so much to do with their, their innate, you know, intellectual power, you know, their IQ or whatever it has to do with, with, with their moral convictions or lack thereof. And, you know, there, there are many very bright people out there who understand perfectly what we mean when we talk about limited government and everything else, but they disagree with it viscerally, not because it's illogical or it violates some principle of reason, but because they're morally opposed to it. Right. So, so a lot of this comes down to morality rather than, rather than, rather than intellect. Again, to get back to what you're talking about, I mean, the morality, but what, you know, the center of the focus of this conversation is just the central role of morality.

Morality, I guess, you know, it prepares people to govern themselves. Right. And not only that, it prepares them to, to improve, right. To be, to get better. Right. So most of us, when we're 16, 18 years old, maybe aren't so good at governing ourselves, but, you know, as we get older, we learn usually by trial and error, mostly error, you know, how to, how to do that. You know, if, if, if our, if, if in our hearts, we recognize, you know, my goodness, I, you know, I don't want to be that 16 year old boy for the rest of my life. You know, I don't want to be, I want to, I want to somehow get, you know, gain ascendancy over, over my passions and my instincts and all this type of thing. And, and, you know, and so, but, but part of that process, you know, of learning moral behavior also involves, you know, saying, well, you know, I guess I'm not as smart as I thought I was at 16. That's the other thing about teenagers, right. Is that they think they know everything. And then as they get older and humbler, they realize if they're, if they seek to be moral and they don't want to stay in that state of arrested development of permanent adolescence, which is really what the left is all about. Okay. That's, that's another conversation, but that's really what the left is. It's about promoting a teenage, teenage eye view of humanity.

You know, you should be able to live at home with your parents and get everything provided for you all your life, except the government does that. Right. So, so, but, but if you're not so disposed, then you learn, you become more moral, but you also say, well, I want to learn more, you know, so the two work together, you know. Yep. Well, we've been talking a lot longer than I had planned. I just, I've loved this conversation. I've appreciate your time, Dr. Banta. Anything want to wrap it up, kind of just make that final connection between morality and, and liberty, and then tell us what you're doing at the new American. Well, at the new American as executive senior editor, I, I, I write articles, I do editing. I help with, with aspects of supervision. Right now. I mean, we're doing, we're doing a lot of great things here. One of the things we've been doing, we started, we call it television show.

That's primarily broadcast online, but it's, it's on a network. We do it every day. I'm frequently on that as like the, the counter part, Paul Dragoo, who's the host that we taught, we taught, you know, the news behind the news. So we're working on that. We're working on ideas of, of more, you know, moving more of our material into that kind of venue because it's, you know, the power of, you know, podcasts and people like this is very, very manifest. And so we, you know, we think that, you know, we need to be doing the same kind of thing. So we're in the process of developing that. Yep. Well, I appreciate your time again, Dr. Banta. I mean, this kind of reminds me of when, when the whole, you know, COVID stuff started in 2020 and everything was being shut down and we were the first ones, you know, just kind of, we're like, we're not going to put up with it. And so we're nullifying, right. You go back to Thomas Jefferson's idea of resistance to tyrants is obedience to God, but resistance for resistance sake, doesn't do you any good if you're not a moral people. And so we have to be able to stand up against illegal government actions through nullification, but also be that moral people if we, otherwise it's not going to.

Otherwise all you have is another, you know, another Jack Cade peasant rebellion type situation. And those things never work. Exactly. Well, thanks so much again, Dr. Banta. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Ben.