Shaun Newman Podcast - #1017 - Fr. Emmanuel Lemelson

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

Father Emmanuel Lemelson is an American-born Greek Orthodox priest, hedge fund manager, investor, and social commentator. Ordained in 2011 in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, he has served i...n various parishes while leading Lemelson Capital Management as Chief Investment Officer, where he applies a value-based, Christian-informed approach to investing. He hosts The Fr. Emmanuel Lemelson Podcast, critiquing corruption in Wall Street, Washington, the pharmaceutical industry, Christian Zionism, technocracy, and geopolitical issues through an Orthodox lens. You can find Fr. Emmanuel here:https://youtube.com/@Lemelson https://twitter.com/Lemelson https://instagram.com/lemelson/ Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: SNP@silvergoldbull.comText Grahame: (587) 441-9100Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: welcome@BowValleycu.com Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

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Starting point is 00:03:40 Make sure to leave a review. And make sure to share with a friend. Now, let's get on to that tale of the tape. Today's guests in American-born Greek Orthodox Priest, hedge fund manager, and social commentator. I'm talking about Father Emmanuel Lemelson. So buckle up. Here we go.
Starting point is 00:04:13 Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Father Emmanuel Lemelson. Sir, thanks for hopping on. Absolutely, Sean. Thank you so much for the invite. Really happy to join you today. Now, I, you've been on Trish Wood before. So I'm going to assume some of my audience knows who you are, father.
Starting point is 00:04:31 But overall, I'm going to say a lot of people don't. So let's just start. Give me your background. You have a fascinating, fascinating background, but maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So you're right.
Starting point is 00:04:47 I was on Trishwood. It must have been maybe seven or eight months ago, I think, maybe longer. Great podcast, great host, much like your show, probably the two best shows in Canada, as far as I can tell. And so I am a Greek Orthodox priest. I spent about half my time in Vermont, the state of Vermont, in the state of Vermont, in the Northern Kingdom and about half my time in Central Europe between different faith communities. I was ordained about 16 years ago, a priest, although my entire life, adult life, since I was a young man, was spent serving the Church, the Orthodox Church. I'm a married clergyman. Most of our
Starting point is 00:05:25 Orthodox clergy are married, unlike the Catholic clergy. I have four children. And about two years ago, we started a podcast of our own. It was actually my wife's idea. And we just saw it as a way to sort of speak to the world. I also have a lay vocation and finance, so working on Wall Street, which I guess some people think is a little unusual. So yes, that, that's sort of, I would, I would say it's a touch unusual. But I, I get that a lot. What fathers do you know that work on Wall Street too and have children and married? And I'm like, it's all a bit unusual from this side in not a bad way. Well, you know, many Western Christians, Latin, Catholics, they think that the clergy were always celibate, but actually that was an innovation
Starting point is 00:06:11 in the Western Church. The early church, most of the apostles were almost certainly married. Paul's an exception. And almost all their presbyters, their clergy were married, and even bishops were married in the early church. It wasn't really until after the eighth century that the church in Rome began to sort of clamp down and say all of the clergy had to be celibate, which is a monastic practice or monastic discipline. Most people don't really have to be. the categories to delineate between what a presbyter is that just means an elder in the community and a monastic who's someone who lives outside the world once the roman church insisted on all their clergy being celibate and single i think that was the just open a bag of worms it's such a mistake
Starting point is 00:06:51 but most christians who aren't protestant in north america when they think of priest as apart from pastor they think of a celibate like the catholic church because it's much more accessible in the west in eastern europe um you know, when they think of priests, they always think of a married priest. There's nothing unusual about it at all. In fact, the celibate priest in the world is the anomaly. That's the unusual thing. And I'll just add, Sean, that really the rule is marriage, full stop, whether you're a layman or a clergyman.
Starting point is 00:07:22 The call to celibacy is really a call to monasticism. Having an unmarried man in the world without family is the source of a lot of heartache in the world. and more importantly, in my opinion, it was a seminal or a turning point in the Latin or Catholic Church that just led to so many errors theologically, dogmatically, ecclesiologically, and you see the Catholic Church today,
Starting point is 00:07:45 and of course they're still sort of paying the price of these innovations, of insisting that men should be without the benefit of family. Forgive me for taking us this way just for a few minutes, but if you go back to the 8th century, then, what was the thought process on making clergy celibate?
Starting point is 00:08:05 Well, if you were to ask them, they would say ostensibly it's because you have to live a life like St. Peter and give your whole life to Christ, as if a married man can't do that, which is ridiculous. But the practical reality is the more honest ones would tell you that it really was about bequeathing church properties to the presbyter's children. So when there's no children in place, the wealth goes back to the church. that was sort of a practical aspect of it. And to this day, the Catholic Church
Starting point is 00:08:33 wanted a large landowners in the world. And then a second reason, and even more important reason, which is less material, is that they really wanted their clergy married to the power structures of Rome. Because a married man will, every time he will prioritize
Starting point is 00:08:50 the holiness of the family and the little church at home over an institutional power structure. And that's where the sort of devil in the institution comes about where you see these, I'm going to speak freely now, Sean, but there's just tremendous abuse in the Catholic Church. It's just it, it's become an institution where abuse is normalized. I'm not just talking about the really obvious forms of abuse, you know, sexual abuse scandals and so forth, but emotional abuse and so forth. So anytime you see
Starting point is 00:09:18 an unmarried man in society, let's put religion aside for a moment, and he's separated from a wife and children, that's going to be the source of a lot of problems in the world. An unmarried man in the context of faith or Christian faith should be in a monastery, in a community where he has his brothers and he has a sense of intimacy and communal worship. The idea that we take a man, we separate him from the holiness of the family, and we leave him out in the world with all the temptations, what you get is an unmitigated disaster, which is what the Catholic Church has on its hands. So those are really the two reasons. Again, bequeathing properties to the children.
Starting point is 00:09:56 That ended with the turning celibacy into a matter of canon law and a prerequisite for a presbyterate. And then the second issue is marrying men to the power structures of Rome. And if you need any evidence of what that means, just look at the scandals of the last couple of decades in the Catholic Church. And you'll notice so many clergy in hierarchs were aware of the evil, aware of the, that's called the Catholic Church version of Epstein. and yet did nothing. A married man, you know what a married man will say? You say, you raped a child? Say, if that would my child get a gun and kill you? But a celibate man says, I'm afraid of my bishop. That's what a celibate man says. Very few celibate men stood up, almost none. And so the problem festered for decades.
Starting point is 00:10:41 The Eastern Church is quite wise, the Eastern Orthodox Church, because it maintained the original tradition of a married clergy and a celibate clergy associated with monasteries. So the hierarchy in the east, they are taken from the monastics. There's a place for celibates. It's a legitimate religious vocation, but it is the exception, not the rule. So we have this beautiful balance in the Eastern Church between married clergy and celibate clergy. And we can almost sort of think of it like, let's say, the celibate clergy reflect the divinity of Christ and the married clergy reflect the humanity.
Starting point is 00:11:15 If Christ is fully God and fully man, we have both these clergy reflecting the sort of dual nature of Christ. You know, my brain goes to like, you know, so you go back to the 8th century, okay? And you're, you're trying to figure out how to, uh, essentially, well, we don't like that married men are giving the property to kids. So you could have just put in a rule that said you can't give your property, the church's property of kids. That would have solved that. I mean, the power, the power structure of it wouldn't because I get what you're saying. But that's probably way too much common sense. And I just look at it. I'm like, man, how,
Starting point is 00:11:51 how brutal it is that politics weasels its way into all these structures, right? This is supposed to be about something way larger than human possessions. And what does it become about? Wasn't it Plato who said that we're political animals? So certainly the church can become political. Like I said, the devil's in the institution. But, you know, Rome is really a metaphor almost for a desire for worldly power. If you read Augustine's city of God, you sort of get these categories straight in your mind.
Starting point is 00:12:24 Once the Bishop of Rome decides that he unilaterally has this ecclesiological authority over his brother bishops in the East in Antioch and Constantinople and Alexandria and Jerusalem, he's really grabbing at worldly power, right? The East maintained a synodal system of authority, which was the original system, which prevented serious error. So all the early doctrinal statements and dogmatic proclamations of the church were the result of great and holy synods like the Council of Nicaea in 325, which established what the church really believes. Once the bishop in Rome goes rogue and he essentially disposes of any system of checks or balances from a synod, that in itself is clearly a power grab,
Starting point is 00:13:09 in my opinion. And so Rome is no longer a city of God. Rome is worldly power, is what it begins to stand for. Where are you originally from? Are you from the United States? I was born in Phoenix, Arizona. Okay. My mother is Greek. She, she was from the island of Crete. She came to America as a young woman. My father is American. He's some sort of German and Austrian roots as far as I know. But I grew up in Europe. So I would go back and forth to Greece quite often. It was really, the reason. Forgive me. The reason that I, I'm curious of that is I'm like, okay, so I, I, I I grew up in Western Canada all my life, right? And Orthodoxy, Greek Orthodoxy, right, the East, all these different things.
Starting point is 00:13:58 Until I started doing the podcast, I didn't really give it much thought, right? Just thought the West had the right way. Like a priest is supposed to be celibate. I don't know. Sure. I guess I'm never doing that because I want to have a family and on and on and on. I'm just curious. How did you get pulled towards Creek Orthodoxy?
Starting point is 00:14:17 Because you mentioned you've been a father, apologies, for 16 years. So what is it that eventually pulls you into that, or has it always been there? No, yeah. So, you know, really great question. My path was pretty, it was definitely not linear. You know, religion and the church was the last thing on my mind as a young man. I was a healthy, full-blooded young man. I had a lot of things in my mind.
Starting point is 00:14:39 It wasn't going to church. I was, you might even say a little wild. But I was baptized Orthodox as a child. and, you know, my mother, God bless her. She saw it to make sure all of her children were baptized. In fact, her uncle was the Archbishop of Crete, which is a very, very pious part of Greece, you know, St. Paul stepped foot in Crete.
Starting point is 00:15:02 But my father was not a Christian, and as a result, we had a rather eclectic upbringing. But around the age of 17 or 18, I met a Catholic priest, actually, who had quite an outsized influence on me, He got me to rethink the direction I was headed in. I had actually left home pretty early. I went to high school in Germany, and then I came back, and I finished high school early.
Starting point is 00:15:22 I went to this Jesuit university. And right off the bat, I meet this guy. His name's Robert Spitzer. He's still alive. Brilliant man. Truly a genius. And I just was really captivated by him. I couldn't believe his intelligence in that he was doing everything selflessly, which
Starting point is 00:15:39 I didn't understand it because I thought, well, a guy with that kind of intelligence could be a billionaire. He could have the world if he wanted. Why is he so generous and why is he giving so much of himself? And it got me to think and rethink, you know, my, what had become sort of a bit of a hard heart, if you will. And then, you know, once that happened, the door sort of opened to the Holy Spirit. You know, suddenly the memories of church, you know, the Orthodox Church came back to me from when I was just a young child, even though I'd only gone a handful of times. That really stuck in my mind, the images of the icons, the smell of the incense. And as much as I was,
Starting point is 00:16:12 drawn sort of to this intellectual powerhouse. This guy was moving mountains. But I just had, at the same time, my heart was really pulling me back to Orthodox. So I began going back to the Orthodox Church. And I had, frankly, a very powerful experience, what people refer to as a calling. It was a major turning point in my life that I knew almost immediately at that time when this experience happened that I would be a priest one day, which I didn't even know what that meant, frankly. Again, church was on my mind. I was not excited about this sort of foreknowledge, if we can call it that. I thought, well, that's a bummer. But I began going back to church and experiencing, really trying to experience a life in Christ, participating the mysteries of the church, learning to pray.
Starting point is 00:16:53 And I was very fortunate because the priests at the Greek Orthodox Church at that time was a very good man. And he gave me very good advice. And as I had dropped out of school for like a year and a half as an undergraduate. You know, I came back, changed my major to theology. My grades went to straight A's. I was a terrible student until then. And I just loved it. Every part of it, I was just doing what I was meant to be doing. And then I, after that, after my five years on undergraduate, I went to the Orthodox seminary. And that was just another major turning point in my life. Yeah, it's just bad. Forgive me. I just find it fascinating on this side because I'm like, up until the Russia, Ukraine war started, I would say I knew jack squat about anything to do
Starting point is 00:17:33 with Orthodoxy. And then you start watching two different civilizations kind of run into each other. And now it isn't Ukraine and Russia. Everybody knows, I think at this point, it's the West proxy in Ukraine against Russia. And you see how the two operate against each other. And you're like, something is very off here. I wouldn't even say it's the West versus Russia because Russia is part of Europe. I mean, at least part of Russia is. People always say Europe versus Russia, but people forget, you know, most of Russia,
Starting point is 00:18:01 well, not most, a big part of Russia is in Europe. And I would say, I would say more accurately we could characterize it as truly Christian versus anti-Christian. You could look at Europe and you could just. divide down the middle, and you see the Catholic western part of Europe, like France, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, the UK, which turned its back on its faith a long time ago. I mean, there's, like, I've been back and forth to Europe my whole life. The Catholics in Europe do not care about their church at all, full stop. And then you have Eastern Europe, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Greece, remnant in Turkey, obviously Russia and Ukraine. And these people love their church. They're
Starting point is 00:18:38 building cathedrals, the churches are full, and when they migrate west, like in central Europe and Switzerland, for example, where I spend a lot of my time, there's this confluence of dark and light. There's like the secular, liberal, globalist mindset, which is like evil. And then there's like these Serbian and Russian and Ukrainian immigrants who are filling up the formerly Catholic churches. And the Swiss are kind of, they're kind of smart in a way because they don't allow the Islamic immigrants to build mosques like they've done all over the UK or Spain or France. or Canada. So they have these beautiful, yeah, or Canada, and they have these beautiful churches, and they quietly allow the Orthodox to occupy them. It's not a state sanction religion,
Starting point is 00:19:16 only Catholics and Protesters are, but they're smart enough to realize, but for the Orthodox, they'd be in big trouble. So I often point out to you've got to look at it like this division down the middle of Europe. The Catholic Church, really, and we can go right back to these sort of major errors ecclesiologically, and the Pope of Rome is infallible, the Pope of Rome is a unilateral authority over his brother bishops. All the privilege he has. have to be celibate and it goes on just go down the list of all the mistakes then you got a mess then you got angry catholics like they're all angry and disenfranchised i'm gonna i'm gonna be really harsher forgive me to the catholic listeners if i offend them i don't mean to their every catholic
Starting point is 00:19:49 person was actually a very nice person and they mean well and some of my closest friends are catholics my mentor was catholic but i'm also going to be honest they're disenfranchised and they're angry about the abuses of their church they do not go to church i don't care what western european country you're in or in america they conflate their numbers they talk about i have 1.7 billion faithful. They do not. Tops, they probably have three or four hundred million that regularly attend mass. And then you look at the east and look at the National Cathedral in Romania, they're building. Look at what they're doing in Serbia with their cathedral. Look at the cathedral in Tehran, Albania. I mean, if you see on one hand, you see, if we can use this metaphor of the left and the right
Starting point is 00:20:24 lung, the right lung is fully functioning and taking oxygen in, and it's full of blood. And the other lung is, it's, you know, serotic. It's died. And, you know, that's, you know, should be a wake-up call for the Catholics, a huge, huge wake-up call. Something's terribly wrong. It's really orthodoxy, which is saving Christianity in Europe, and in my opinion, in America. And you just have to take a close look at it. Most Americans don't have these categories, because America has been largely a Protestant country. And they feel like a boundary between orthodoxy and themselves because they think it's behind an ethnic or linguistic boundary, which historically, I suppose it has been, but so has Catholicism. You have the Irish Catholic,
Starting point is 00:21:00 you have the Italian Catholics and so forth, the Spaniards, the French, the older sister of the Catholic Church. For those who enter into orthodoxy, they never come back out. We have a ton of Catholic converts. I have never, almost 50, I have never heard of an Orthodox leaving the church, much less to become Catholic. I have two questions. And I'm sitting here. I go. I hate to be harsh, by the way.
Starting point is 00:21:22 I hope I'm not offending anyone. I'm not Catholic. So I'm sure I'm going to get some Catholic people that are, that are upset. Okay. Full stop. I say it with love. At the end of the day. we try and bring people on here who are going to push people out of their comfort zones.
Starting point is 00:21:44 So it's not that you're calling them idiots and dumb and all these different things. You're just pointing out some things that they're going to have some thoughts on. That's okay. Orthodoxy. I mean, just want to start with that. Something really simple. Sure. What is orthodoxy compared to Catholicism?
Starting point is 00:22:03 Sure. So the word orthodoxy, orthodoxia means correct teaching. Ortho, like orthodonics, orthopedics, just means correct. Doxa means glory, so correct glorification or correct teaching. The word Catholic is also a Greek word. So we talk about the Latin Church, but most of the theology of Rome is actually Latinized Greek words. So you have to understand the early church is in a Greek world. In fact, the gospel was written and authored in Greek.
Starting point is 00:22:30 So everything the Catholic Church has ostensibly is really. really taken from the Greek mind, the Greek language. Even the word Catholic Catholic in Greek means universal. So the Orthodox Church is the true original unadulterated church. If you wanted to know what the church looked like without a gazillion changes, you would have orthodoxy. So every time, in 1054, that was what was called the Great Schism. And this is when the East and the West officially excommunicated each other. It was a tragic thing. But even prior to that time, in the centuries leading up to 1054, the fact is that the churches had diverged quite a bit.
Starting point is 00:23:13 The bishop in Rome increasingly saw himself, again, as having unilateral power to make decisions, including on issues of dogma. The straw that broke the camel's back was something called the filial quay, which was a fundamental change in the Nicene Creed and an understanding of the Trinity. So two of the major components to being Christian is that. the belief that Christ is fully God and fully human, and the other is that we believe in a triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So when the bishop in Rome changed the balance, the equilibrium between the Father and the Son
Starting point is 00:23:47 and the Holy Spirit by adding the word and the son, it's called Filio Que, which is frankincise, Latin. That, of course, was a major problem because the Nicene Creed, which had been there since 325, was a proclamation made by many bishops in Harrow. in a holy synod. So they said, wait, what are you doing? You cannot change the theology of the church unilaterally. At any rate, he says, yes, I can.
Starting point is 00:24:12 They excommunicate each other and becomes the great schism. By the 16th century, we have the rise of Mark Luther in Germany, and he, of course, creates the Protestant Reformation. The UK undergoes its own reformation with the Anglicans, which in America is known as the Episcopal Church. Again, a Greek word, episcopos. So you have these three branches of Christianity, but you have to remember this.
Starting point is 00:24:33 the further east you go, the more original you get. The further west you go, you're losing something every time. You're not gaining. You're always losing. To the point where Catholics now are indistinguishable from Protestants, in my opinion. They themselves, if you look at what they call trad Catholics or traditional Catholic, they are desperate to recover the authority of tradition. They say, we've got to go back to the Latin Mass.
Starting point is 00:24:57 We've got to go back to pre-Vatican 1. And I said, well, why don't you just go back to the Orthodox Church? How about that? You'll get it all. It's nothing but caviar and champagne. You've been living on a diet of saltines. So then the question that I wrote down was the poll. Why?
Starting point is 00:25:16 Is this why I sense a pull to go east? Because the further you get east, you see more and more traditional values. I remember sitting on this show and in the middle of talking about something, I'm like, oh my God, am I becoming traditional? I'm like, when did that happen? You know, like, it was this like stark realization. You got to go back like 500 episodes, folks. And I just like run into it in the middle of a conversation.
Starting point is 00:25:40 I'm sitting here talking to you. And I'm like, one of the things I keep hearing is the further you go east, similar what you just said. I'm talking about Russia, but I'm also talking about Poland, Hungary. I'm sure I'm missing five other countries. You can, you can rattle off. It's like there's something going on there. And there's people talking about it.
Starting point is 00:26:00 There's this pull to go see what it is. Is that orthodoxy then? Absolutely. So this idea of authority of tradition is really important. You know, we have this word in English, this colloquial expression, old school, right? And that's actually taken from the words, what's old is cool.
Starting point is 00:26:17 When you say it, okay, it's old school. We can all recognize, like when we sit in the presence of our grandfather, like, oh, he went to World War II. He's an old time. We've got to listen to him when he talks. We all have a sense in our mind that something that's time-testing, it is valid. That innovation is, there's an element of hubris in innovation, whether it's Martin Luther or if it's Thomas Aquinas innovating and moving the faith from the heart into the intellect and
Starting point is 00:26:40 making essentially an academic pursuit or if it's, you know, the bishop in Rome saying he can act without unilaterally without a holy synod. Innovations are arrogant. There's nothing you can see in the Catholic Church. Let's just start with 1054 on. That's an improvement on what the early church Father's taught at the Saints of the Church, the Patristic era, the apostles, Holy Scripture. You look at the saints they make today, and they'll be read, I don't want to, I'm not going to be reading anybody's saints, but you're not improving anything. You're losing something every time. Go back and read St. Gregory Palomas and St. John Chrysostom, the Eastern Fathers, because that was what formed Christian identity. Now, we are Western Christian society. The culture
Starting point is 00:27:28 and the religion are mutually informed. This milieu that Western Europe that gave rise to the greatest civilization on earth, in my opinion, was a Christian one. That has been under attack for a very long time. We have to recover that. That's what you feel in your heart, brother. You're feeling the sound of the truth.
Starting point is 00:27:47 You're like, wait, there's something to this that appeals to me. This is the romance of faith. The beauty of orthodoxy, the incense, the Byzantine icons, the hymns that are ancient from the the monastics, the richness of a clergy that understands family because they have a family, and you see them leading their family to the cross and the faithful are with them, the body of Christ.
Starting point is 00:28:09 And they're participating in the mystical body and blood of Christ and the holy sacraments and the mysteries of the church. You say, of course I want that. I don't want a wafer for Holy Communion that I put in my hand and I take a glass with grape juice. What is that? What is that? The mystery is gone. The beauty is gone. The solemnity is gone.
Starting point is 00:28:26 until you get to a point where you see insanity in the churches. Absolute insanity in the German Catholic Church and the French Catholic. I mean, look at the Olympics and, grants, what a disgrace. What a disgrace. So of course you feel that desire because the truth rings in your heart. That should be no surprise. No, it is. I don't mean it to be a surprise.
Starting point is 00:28:51 But as I told you before we started, you know, I wasn't always a faithful man. right i didn't always have jesus in my heart and certainly wasn't looking for it or at least i was wandering all over the place you know and so now that you have it like there is something different going on in the east because you watch the west and you're like okay well i mean i'm curious your thoughts we're bombing the heck well i shouldn't say we as as uh i'm not a fan of uh my current leader in Canada. But regardless, one of the things I can't agree with them on is nobody went, hey, Canada, do you want to go bomb Iran? It wasn't like, you know, we got that phone call because we got our own problems going on here. But the West, certainly, you know, the superpower that is the
Starting point is 00:29:40 United States is now in full out attack on Iran alongside Israel. And it has caused a schism between people, right? There's the people that the U.S. can do no wrong. There is the people that are like, no, no, I'm going to put it on the same side, that Israel can do no wrong, and they put those two together. Iran has been the worst nation under the sun for 47 plus years.
Starting point is 00:30:10 They've been killing people on and on and on it goes, and they were getting nuclear weapons. Boom, we're attacking and away we go. Then there's the other side of the equation that is like, I mean, Donald Trump ran on, I'm going to be the man of peace and hasn't been that. Full stop. And then they're watching as Israel pulls the United States into this, or at least that's the way that, I don't know, the Tucker Carlson, the, et cetera, et cetera, frame it. Your thoughts on this?
Starting point is 00:30:44 Well, we were framing it that way two years ago when Tucker Carlson was just getting his boost from Elon Musk on X. after getting fired from Fox. We did some podcast episodes called the criminalization of Christianity, talking about where this was going. Eight months ago, we produced a podcast episode, I think it was episode 41 or 42, on the heresy of Christian Zionism. In fact, it's interesting because we produced eight months ago,
Starting point is 00:31:08 like almost nobody watched it. It had a couple hundred views. And it was just rediscovered our next, like 48 hours ago, and it has like half a million views now. So to the extent you like watching podcasts, you could watch our podcast, watch the most episodes. We actually did a four-part series of a deal. with Christian Zionism, Zionism, syncretism, and then Christian nationalism.
Starting point is 00:31:25 And we basically said two years ago that first episode in the criminalization Christian, that the United States really is a vassal state of Israel. And I'm not sure how much listeners are willing to, you know, go down the rabbit hole to figure out what's really going on, but it's a pretty dark place where we're at. It's not just, in my opinion, it's not just a cavalier president. It's not just even a president with a bloodlust. It's darker than that. there's bigger issues at play. And we should pray fervently for that our country will repent,
Starting point is 00:31:57 that we will feel great sadness for the loss of innocent life, especially women and children in the region, in Palestine, in Israel, in Iran, like this terrible bombing of this girl's school. We should all just feel tremendous sadness for this. We all have blood on our hands in the United States. It's just horrible. This is our tax to your dollars going to this. And the people who are influencing our president, our leader, are a complete lunatics, in my opinion. And the problem is, if you have a leader who is surrounded by advisors, that becomes like an echo chamber, right? If they don't have good advisors around the, the advisors will form their worldview, the people they trust. The four or five years, Steve Whitkoff, and Jared Kushner and Paula White and Doug Wilson,
Starting point is 00:32:42 and this small coterie, we can say, around the president, he sees the world. world through that lens now. He hasn't allowed too many, you know, down-to-earth reasonable voices to be around him. And so he probably believes very much so like the emperor's new clothes. He probably thinks he looks great in his own mind. And he is very dismissive. And it's taking us to a terrible place. And there's terrible ideological underpinnings to that. You said two things there that I'd just like you to maybe expand on. One, it's darker than that and the underpinnings. But you, yeah.
Starting point is 00:33:28 Well, you may have heard this, but you know, for this ultra-Orthodox group in Israel, the Zionists, they use the Christian Zionists in the United States as a political conduit. There's no such thing as a Christian Zionist, by the way. It's an oxymoron. But the Zionists in Israel that control the Knesset, And particularly these ultra-Orthodox groups like Chabad Labovich, which Kushner is a lifelong member, they have a plan. I mean, their plan is the rebuilding of the Third Temple. They're doing away with the Temple Mound and the Alaska Mosque and to usher in their messianic era.
Starting point is 00:34:05 And they have managed to control the political elites in America for quite a long time, let's call it, at least 60, 70 years with increasing influence. And very often that is done through the befriending, we can say, of the children of political elites, in this case, we can say Ivanka Trump, who she goes from a Christian upbringing because of her mom, almost certainly, although her father was also a Christian, even if maybe a elapsed one, to becoming an apostate, denying Christ and joining this ultra-Orthodox group, which emerged in 18th century Belarusia. And so you see the step by step that now they're bringing sort of the financial means to the Trump administration. We see a confluence of some very disturbing things, the rise of not just digital currencies. You know, we have world liberty financial Trump's new platform with the USD-1. But, you know, these so-called these Abraham Accords, which he, you know, boasts as being a peace accord, were really brokered by Kushner. They're not really a peace accord.
Starting point is 00:35:15 It really shortchanged to put it nicely, the Palestinians and their cause and their tremendous suffering. But what it really did is it opened up Bahrain and the Emirates and others, Morocco and so forth, but especially the UAE and Bahrain to fund this digital currencies, which the ambitions of the current political leadership in Israel is very clear. They want to become a global superpower. So you put these things together. you say, wait, they want to build a third temple.
Starting point is 00:35:42 They want to usher in the messianic era. They want to be a global superpower. And one way to do that, of course, is through a control grid, you know, digital currencies, which now Trump has got. And what's it funded by? It's funded by emasculated Arab states that would have traditionally cared about their Muslim brothers and sisters, but don't. They sold out.
Starting point is 00:36:03 They then fund Trump and a large part of our capital markets outside of that. And then Trump's saying, you know, just this last December, I think it was a lot of December 19th, you know, he has this White House memo on the 7G networks, the 7 gighertz networks for 6G, but 7 gigahertz wavelength for implantable specifically. So it's not that hard to see that, you know, he's talking about the importance of implantables for national security and economic prosperity, plus the USD one stable coin, plus Israel's desire to be a global superpower. You say, wait a minute here, like the best way to control the population is to control their participation in the economy. So I believe completely that that's the ambitions of Netanyahu's
Starting point is 00:36:43 government and of the sort of, we can say, peristate religious movement that's been around Trump and around D.C. for quite a while. I think they've got their man in Trump. They've convinced him he's the new Cyrus. So they're going to, you know, their ambition, they're moving along a timeline. It's very clear. I'm not making this up to establish a third temple where the Alaska mosque is and therefore to reestablish a messianic era. And that, of course, would be in conflict with the Muslim and Christian populations, which have been the custodians of that area for some time. And you see this collapse in Christian population in that region,
Starting point is 00:37:17 going from roughly 20% in the Levant to under 4% now. And nobody's shedding any tears in Israel over that. Go back to Christian Zionists. You said it is not a paradox. It is something else. And I forget the word you used. Oxymoron. Oxymor.
Starting point is 00:37:34 see moron. Thank you. Can you explain that to me? Well, I would just call morons, actually. No, just kidding. No, maybe we should. You know, they're really a political group. I don't want to offend anybody. There's a lot of good evangelicals that mean well. They're really their heart is drawn to Christ. And unfortunately, they're living in a country where they have no real tradition, no cultural identity. Americans are highly separated from their family, their community. So they wind up with like a Paula White, who's a charlatan. Or they wind up with a Doug Wilson and other charlatan. And they wind up with a Doug Wilson and other charlatan. Or John Hagee. And these people are businessmen. They make a lot of money. They're selling religion. It's snake oil. And they're really a political movement. The evangelicals have had outsized influence in American politics for a long time.
Starting point is 00:38:19 They're not Christians. You really, you can't call them that. There's nothing new under the son, Sean. It's really the old heresy of the Judaizers that St. John Chrysostom had declaimed against in the fourth century. You could just look up St. John Christosome. He's one of the early fathers of the church. and he cautioned his flock, the faithful at that time, to be very careful not to return to becoming
Starting point is 00:38:42 essentially Jews. They're really just Jews. You can't say Christian Zionists. They're really a Zionist. They always quote from the Old Testament. They might as well act as if the New Testament doesn't exist. And they have this, of course, this idea from the Schofield Bible and this innovation that you have to restore the geography of Israel to the chosen people of God to bring about the rapture and the second coming of Christ, which has no scriptural foundation. Certainly just not many foundation, the teachings of the church. So they've created a parallel theology, and it conveniently works towards the ambitions of the real Zionists in Israel and their political ilk. And so you see these people, and you say, well, yeah, they've got the G6, right? They're doing very well. They've
Starting point is 00:39:19 got the sprawling mansions. They've got the prosperity gospel. It's not the gospel of Jesus Christ. They're laughing all the way to the bank, and they've got well-meaning Americans who say, well, I really have the desire for a life in Christ, and they don't know where else to turn. They don't have the benefit of generations of culture and history and tradition being handed down to them, as they would have normally had, say, in Europe, for example. And so they're attaching to charismatic speakers like Apollo White. And that, once they get their tentacles in them, all of a sudden they're buying into, yes, I have to give 10% of my paycheck to fund the Israeli cause, to establish Israel for the second coming of Christ. And they just have no real categories. And you have to
Starting point is 00:39:56 remember, Sean, that very few people have categories in theology. Like, nobody really goes to the university and gets a degree in theology anymore, right? That's that, that department in every university is declining for decades. And when I went to undergraduate, my undergraduate degree, I entered the school of theology. It was five people out of five thousand studied that program. Everyone's like, I got to study accounting or engineering or something to get a real paycheck. In fact, having a degree in theology meant you had the lowest pay scale. In fact, I've never received a paycheck as a priest or a theologian. But now we're living in a world where people have these really important and timely question theologically and where are the teachers. Well,
Starting point is 00:40:30 we've all but destroyed them in the university system. You know, when you go to a lot of these private schools, even elementary schools or high schools that were formerly religious, they're almost embarrassed the fact that a church is at the center of their institution. Like, I used to live in a town called South Borough, Massachusetts, and there was this elite, whatever that means, school called St. Marks. I'll never forget. I went to go visit one time when my kids were growing up. And that has a beautiful church in the middle. We're taking a tour.
Starting point is 00:40:55 And as we go through the church, the person gave his tour, remember the mission, you know, don't worry about this because we don't do anything. religious here. We just use it for gatherings and conferences, so don't get to be bothered by this church. So that's not a credit to you. That's a shame on you. That you've sliced yourself off from your heritage, your Christian heritage and identity. And of course, their STEM department is this big, beautiful glass and metal structure, you know, I don't know, $20 million they spent on it. Then the church has been used essentially like a, you know, like a gymnasium, you know, for gatherings where they, I don't need to do all sorts of things other than worship or prayer. So, you know, that's really where we've come. And if you look at all the institutes of higher learning,
Starting point is 00:41:33 like they've gone to great lengths to blot out their Christian identity. So now we have a people who know we're living in darkness. They know something's terribly wrong. They're really afraid and they don't know where to begin. And what do they see? They see, again, these Paula White types who are very loud. They're like clanging symbols. They should really just sit down and be quiet, as St. Paul would say. And where are the real theologians? Well, they were extinguished, you know, a long time ago. It's funny. All the, you know, I'm sure you have offended a bunch of people right now, but you just
Starting point is 00:42:02 rattle off a bunch of names and I go, it's funny. I don't know any of those names. I might know Doug Wilson. That might be, I'm also thinking of an NHL hockey coach, which I know you're not talking about him. You don't have to go long before you see Paula Wright around Trump. And she's on his religious, uh, Liberty's commission and so forth. And she's an interesting character.
Starting point is 00:42:26 say to put it nicely. When you talk about the third temple and these things, this idea that you can bring the second coming of Christ, right? Like the, I don't know. I'm like, I've been trying to put this around, wrap my brain around this. Because I'm like, okay, if you do these things and you usher back in, all the evil that you've done to bring him back in, you for sure are not going to where you think you're going.
Starting point is 00:43:03 Like I'm trying to jump through the middle. They don't know the evil we're doing, Sean, and they don't have a very well-developed sense of a life to come. The Jewish idea of a messianic era is one of peace and justice in the world. They have kind of a vague notion of after a life that's not well-developed. In fact, when you look at their theology, again, I'm going to just offend a bunch more people. It just looks relatively undeveloped, which is the Old Testament,
Starting point is 00:43:26 it's the old covenant. It's not the fulfillment of what God's revelation to his people was. it excludes annoyingly and deliberately the manifestation, his greatest manifestation of his self-sacrificial love and the person of his only begot and son. Cool stop. So once you cut that off, you keep turning away from that, not all of them, a lot of good Jewish people. Some of my closest friends are Jews, by the way. But once you consistently turn your back on that, as God's revelation, something something happens to your heart. And that's where you see far too much Jewish influence and immorality in the world, whether it's Hollywood or pornography or something, you know,
Starting point is 00:43:56 things like, you know, rabbi owns only fans. And there is a sense that we're just a sense that we're just living for this life, right? So let's live it up. It's almost like a quasi-nostic state of mind. And so it's not surprising at all that, you know, the evil, it's not unlike the Jews in the Sinai who ultimately make their golden calf to worship. And, you know, the problem was that God's creation, this sort of, this alienation of his creation from their creator, it kept going wrong from the time of the disobedience of Adam and Eve. And then you have this fractricide with their children, Canaan and Abel. And then by the time they're in the Sinai, you know, they're literally worshipping idols. They're just bad. It will stop me. Humanity is sinful.
Starting point is 00:44:40 Like Jews don't have a monopoly on sinfulness. We as humans are sinful. But God's grace began with the Mosaic law as a way to bring them back in. But when that wasn't enough, did the ultimate unexpected thing and became man himself and died for our sins. If you cannot get that into your heart, if that does not seem to ring true and you can turn your back on that, I'm afraid it has very dilatious effects on the soul. So you continue to sin. Whereas the Christian says, I have to repent. This notion of repentance doesn't exist. They want a military and political leader. Why would they care about repentance? Why would they care what they have to do to usher in the messianic age in the building of the third temple? By the way,
Starting point is 00:45:23 they're bringing the future into the present, which no man can do. Even Christ himself said, I don't know the time. What Christ said time and again was to do things in remembrance of him. The last service is, do this in remembrance of me. That's the antithesis. That's the inversion. You take something from the past and you bring it into the presence by remembrance. What these ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities are trying to do is the antithesis of that, and it synchronizes very nicely with our newly bred teckel. in America, who have also a very sort of inverted view of God's will and the development of technologies, including implantable technologies that could be used to seal the people into a control state.
Starting point is 00:46:05 So it really harmonized as well, sort of the religious, ultra-Orthodox Jewish ambition and the tech oligarchs ambition. They happen to work very well together. That's where you see pictures of Elon Musk and Danube together. And Elon Musk is very close to Trump. He's really sort of a shadow president. He plays a role. And so you've got the religious ideological indoctrination from Shabad. You've got the apostate daughter, who obviously he had very special feelings for. He thought very highly of his daughter. You've got Jared Kushner, this sort of shadow gullum in the background. And then you've got these outsized wealthy tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel, who essentially created J.D. Vance, the vice president. And you've got Elon Musk with his very, very dark
Starting point is 00:46:44 ideas about technology. And you say, well, none of this is Christian. So it shouldn't be a surprise that Christians are just being steamrolled in the Middle East and being done away with. When you look into the next year or years, what do you see? Well, I don't have a crystal ball. Sometimes in my life I've been fortunate to see some things before they happened, but rarely. I think I see a lot of darkness, tremendous amount. unless we repent as a country and return to a correct faith, not these heresies. America has become a kingdom of cults, whether it's the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Pentecostals, the Mormons, you know, the Christian Zionists, the Christian nationalists, and all these other cult-like leaders.
Starting point is 00:47:38 Even Elon Musk is running his own cult, quite frankly. You ever talk to a shareholder in Tesla? It's like a cult for them. It's like a religion. We're creating pseudo-religions everywhere. Even if you talk to these sort of stacking communities, people in gold and silver, they prep. It's like a religion. Look, there's only the religion God reveals to us. If we don't get back to that, if we don't get back to religion proper, the Christian religion,
Starting point is 00:47:59 which in my opinion hands down is the fullest manifestation of God's truth. It is the only way forward. And if we don't repent, there's going to be some really dark things happening. I think they're hell bent on destroying the Alaska mosque. And you just couldn't do anything else more to ask for World War III with the Muslims. you know, look, I'm not doing an apology X for Muslims here, but their eschaton, their eschatological end is a lot more in harmony with Christian teaching than that of the Jews. So while you have the three different major faith of the book, you know, radically different theologies, radically
Starting point is 00:48:33 different in their end times, they actually come to the same point. And I would just say that if we don't pray and we don't repent, if we don't learn a monicum of humility, we're going to suffer And we're going to suffer a great deal. And I think we as Americans have lived quite well for a long time. We believe that we will not ever have to suffer the consequences of what happened in Gaza or what's happening in Iran right now. And of course, we have to feel very badly for the innocent loss of life in Israel as well. Those people certainly didn't deserve to die, but it should never have been a catalyst for a wholesale genocide. Suffering will come to America.
Starting point is 00:49:06 It already is here, actually. Most Americans live in fear. We have senseless violence, people living under tremendous economic strain. this is not exactly heaven on earth what we're creating. When we go back to our Christian roots and we recapture where we came from, I think we've got a chance. If we do that with humility and with repentance, we could stave off a lot of unnecessary suffering. But right now, what I see, Sean, we're not slowing down. I don't think we're going to careen off the cliff.
Starting point is 00:49:36 Muslims, Jews, Christians. Maybe you can make something here click for me. Jews don't believe in Jesus. Correct? This doesn't have to be, you can go into a full-scale answer after, but just in general, Jews don't see Jesus as Messiah, as God. The religious leadership said crucify him. Correct.
Starting point is 00:50:03 Give us Brabass the murder. Let them speak for themselves. Then you have Christians that believe Jesus is a part of the, is God. And then you have Muslims who see him. as a prophet, correct? But at the end, with all the eschatolotrial, I can't even say the stinking word, father, apologies. Eschatological.
Starting point is 00:50:28 Thank you. Ands, they all come back together. Is that what you just said? Well, you have to remember that the Jewish Messiah is the Christian Antichrist. So the building of the third temple is the period that ushers in the period of the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast. this idea that there'll be a mark that will not allow the faithful to transact to buy or sell. The convergence of these things happening right at this time, I don't know if there's a dress rehearsal and I don't know the end times.
Starting point is 00:51:01 I try not even to think about it. In fact, the book of Revelations, this deals with end times. It's the one book in the Orthodox Church we don't read from during the Holy Services. But this unveiling, in Greek we say Apocalypseis, the unveiling of end times, What they describe is their political and leader that's going to sit in the throne in the third temple is exactly what is prophesies the Antichrist by the Christians. So to the extent they're pushing for that, they're saying we're pushing for our Messiah. We're saying you're pushing for the Antichrist. Imagine that.
Starting point is 00:51:37 How different. They're diametrically opposed. And where do the Muslims, and where do the Muslims fit in those? So the Muslims also believe, they say Issa, Issa, the return of Issa. will be to combat the Antichrist as well. So that is much closer to the eschatology of Christianity, and they believe it will be to parse out people based on personal accountability, those who go to heaven and those who go to hell.
Starting point is 00:52:02 For the Christians, it's the resurrection, right? The resurrection of Christ, the resurrection of all those who have lived a pious Christian life in the second coming of Christ ushers in a new kingdom of heaven, a new kingdom on earth. for the Jews, it's merely a time of peace on earth where they're established as a sort of super race. They see themselves that way, by the way, the ultra-Orthodox. They see the non-Jews as Amalek, or basically animals, the Melakites from the Old Testament. And they need to reign supreme.
Starting point is 00:52:32 They see them as servants. So the world will serve them. I think it's totally germane for them to think of that being done and carried out through a control grid. like implantable technologies. You see Elon Musk working feverishly on neuralink to put chips in our brain, and then Trump's very swiftly moving along this 6G, 7 gigahertz wavelength and clearing the path of every other government used to make sure it's dedicated just to that. And then you see, of course, he sell out Arab states funding it. The only thing standing in its way is Iran in a way, right? If the greater Israel project is going to move forward and Israel's going to come this expanded geography
Starting point is 00:53:10 and it's going to become the new geopolitical superpower after Pax Americana, it becomes Pax, Judeica, right? Like, they've got to get rid of Iran because they've already sold out the other Arab states. Like, they've sold out completely. Like, they're not in their way anymore. So they've got to go. And then you've got John Hagey and these other prominent evangelicals talking about Iran being Gog and Magog, and we've got to go to war. And it becomes a bloodlust. Look, there's no concept of holy war in Christianity.
Starting point is 00:53:39 for their early church fathers and the teachings of the church is that war might be a necessary evil. Like, let's say you're invaded and you have to defend yourself, fine. But it's not the state of man. And it requires repentance when it happens. That's very different than, you know,
Starting point is 00:53:54 Jared Kushner told me they might get a nuclear weapon in a week. And so I had a feeling and we had to bomb them with 900 strikes in the first 12 hours driven by AI, the decisions. And oh, yeah, we did hit a girl school, by the way, too. that's never Christian. And shame on John Hagee and Doug Wilson
Starting point is 00:54:12 and all the other evangelical pastors beating the war drums with these false teachings. They're heresies, they're charlatans, and Americans need to know that. That is not the teachings of the church. 6G, 7 gigahertz.
Starting point is 00:54:33 You've mentioned that now several times. Walk me through this. Well, it's running parallel. The latency rates on the 7G, wavelength is much faster. So it's really that would should work Beth for implantables for a brain computer interface.
Starting point is 00:54:52 So this sort of desire that these tech oligarchs have is very dark. And we'll look at it as a sort of secular version of what the Jews want. We can say, I don't say a Jew, say that ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Zionists, let's say. I really want to separate them out because we as Christians need to be a light
Starting point is 00:55:08 to our Jewish brothers and sisters who may not know about Christ. Like, we cannot wholesale attack them. That is completely wrong. But for those who are pushing for this, these ultra-Orthodox Jewish, I don't call them fringe groups because they're actually calling the shots. You know, we need to declaim against that. But, you know, they, and within Christianity, Sean, we have this sort of traditional idea of three stages to the spiritual life. There's, in Greek, we call it Nipsis, Opsis, and Enosis, which is like a purification is Nipcis.
Starting point is 00:55:38 And then Opsis is like an illumination. That's really like optics in Northern English. and Enosis is like union with God. So this idea that you have to start by purifying yourself, and then you can receive the light of God in your heart with the idea that you have greater unity with him, becoming one. Another word for Enosius is Theosis and Orthodoxy. That means to become Godlike.
Starting point is 00:55:58 So St. Athanasius, and everyone one of the great fathers of the church said that God became man, i.e. Christ, so that man might become like God. Think about that, that we might become holy and illumined. The tech oligarchs, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, are very open about the fact they have, again, an inversion of these things. So they will talk about, well, first of all, they're doing anything but Nipseys. They're filling themselves with drugs, ketamines, and every other drug they get their hands on,
Starting point is 00:56:29 psychedelics and so forth. That's hardly purifying yourself, not clearing forifying your mind. They seek what they call a dark enlightenment. You might have heard Musk refer to this, a dark enlightenment. It talks about a dark maga, right? black hat. Think about the imagery. You don't have to be a faithful Christian to see the difference between dark and light. So that's the inversion of oopsies, right, the illumination of the soul. The heavy drug use is the inversion of purifying yourself through prayer and fasting. Right,
Starting point is 00:56:55 right now we're in great and holy lent. We fast to cleanse our body even more. The worst thing you could do would be to open a portal to the devil in your mind by keeping your mind intoxicated with powerful drugs, including hallucinogenics. So then they have this dark enlightenment. And what do they want in the end? They don't want a singularity with God. They don't want anosis or theoses. They want a technological singularity. And the sort of ideological godfather of a lot of these ideas is this guy named Nick Land, who was a heavy drug user.
Starting point is 00:57:25 And this idea that AI, you hear a lot about AI, general super intelligence and so forth. And it's not just that it's going to be this tool for humanity to use, like the next generation computer. For these guys, it's to replace humanity, that it's an evolutionary step. that they are going to give birth to God, right? That they are going to give rise to the next God. In fact, Elon Musk has said that the next God will come out of Memphis, Tennessee, where his hyper-scale server farm is at. So think about that.
Starting point is 00:57:55 The theology of the church is the incarnation, the canoes we say in Greek, this kinetic theology that God emptied himself out and became fully man in an immaculate conception with the Virgin and was born a man, fully man and fully God. a really fundamental Christian teaching. You cannot be a Christian and not believe that. If you believe something other than that, you're really not a Christian. They're saying, we're going to give birth to a God. So what do they want to be? They want to be like gods themselves. It's a sort of hyper-maglomania that most people cannot relate to. And it's not going to end well. And I've
Starting point is 00:58:31 been saying for years, it will result in bloodshed. You can catch me on podcast years ago saying, this hyper-maglomania will result in bloodshed. And that's what you see now in the indiscriminate killing going on in the Middle East. And you cannot unlink it from the ambitions of the tech oligarchs, which are secular, which put themselves at the center of the universe, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community that believes they can usher in the era of the Messiah, they're getting ready for it, they're setting the groundwork, they're making the vessels for the third temple. They're bringing in these heifers, these red heifers from Texas,
Starting point is 00:59:05 which are now of age as of 2025 for a purification ceremony. You've got soldiers in the IDF wearing patches with images of the third temple. So they have a strange convergence, their desires. And in the end, it's profoundly sinful. It's the ugliness of every despot in history who saw himself as a god. Ultimately, it results in great bloodshed. Look at Mausé Dum. or any, you know, Joseph Stalin and the Bolsheviks, look at the bloodshed when a man begins to think
Starting point is 00:59:40 he's God, that he can displace God, he loses all sense of humility because he doesn't know the warmth of God, the movement of the Holy Spirit. He's not willing to submit his will. He's not willing to say, thy will be done. His proclamation is my will be done. And look at the disaster it leads to. So it's coming at us on all sides right now, this megalomania. And it's just not going to end well unless something changes big time. And you've got, again, snake oil salesmen and charlatans pounding the drums of war, convincing these political leaders that they have a, like almost a godly mission that Trump may very well see himself as the precursor to the building of the third temple. And in that sense, he says to himself, I'll be remembered in history like Cyrus. I will be
Starting point is 01:00:26 remembered and nothing beyond that. And whatever has to happen, you know, the, the, these Jewish groups like Chabad, they don't mind the death and destruction of the Muslims and the Christians in that region. That's just a necessary prerequisite to lay the groundwork for the building of a third temple. So when you start to really grasp what's going on here and what the motivations are, if that doesn't result in prayer and repentance and return to church, I don't know what else will. I can't convince you any other way. One final question before I let you out. You know, like I didn't used to play attention to politics.
Starting point is 01:01:04 Obviously for listeners of the podcast, it's been some time, father, since I started paying, you know, it's been five years, I guess, now of where I've been, you know, actively engaging in what's happening not only in Canada, but elsewhere. And so it brings me to Putin. And I am curious your thoughts on Putin. I've been wondering, you know, like when I look at all the world leaders, any of the world leaders, or any of the leaders here in Canada, I see politicians as willing to say whatever it is and then do whatever they need to do, right? So they say something and it's just to get past
Starting point is 01:01:42 whatever they're talking about or to move a certain block of people along with their, you know, where they need to go and then they go do whatever they need to do. There's very few politicians on this planet that have not done that. When I look at Putin, I've been trying to figure out. You talk about the further east you go, the more orthodox you get. And you look at Putin and you look at some of the, you know, the things said about him and on and on, but then you look at his actions through the course of the last five years since I've been paying attention to it. And I've been wondering, and I'm curious your thoughts.
Starting point is 01:02:19 Is he an active or a professed Orthodox Christian? Or is he just using Orthodox Christians to get what he needs? Well, that's between him and God. You know, there's a saying that all great men are bad men. You know, we were talking about Alexander the Great. How many millions of people did he kill? You know, people fondly remember Napoleon, what, 400,000 people died in his senseless wars. You know, what I'll say about Putin is this.
Starting point is 01:02:49 I don't want to judge any political leader because probably none of us really have all the information. We have what is disseminated to us, which is often propagandized. But he's often seen with patriarchural. The first place he goes when he visits a Orthodox country is to an Orthodox church. And he shows great reverence to the church. And in Russia, they're building three churches a day. While in Ireland, in the UK, in France, they can't turn the churches into. to pubs and cafeterias and, I don't know, brothels, whatever they want fast enough.
Starting point is 01:03:23 They think it's funny. They profane their own churches. So, you know, God knows his sins. If he's faking it and using the church, he should be very worried about the salvation of his soul. I don't think he is. If I had to bet, my bet would be he's a bad dude. No question about it, former KGB, who like anyone wants redemption. And at least, you know, let's be honest.
Starting point is 01:03:49 Russia is like the last stand, if you will, between the globalist attack on Christiandom and Christian society. Look at the harm that's been done. You know, look at how the continent of Europe's been flooded with people who have no interest in preserving European cultural history. That doesn't exist in China. What country is that existing? It's an attack on Christian society and culture and heritage, which he does seem to be standing up to in all fairness. They are building churches. God can judge patriarchural.
Starting point is 01:04:22 God can judge Putin. But at least the outward appearance, well, he's not at the O'Hell in New York, like Trump with a Yamika on, throwing papers in there to a guy that, you know, Rabbi Schneerson, who's thinking it's going to be the next Messiah coming. So he doesn't do that.
Starting point is 01:04:43 Trump has lost his way. He's in total darkness. So I can't judge their sins. God can judge their sins, Trump and Putin. But even if he doesn't believe those things in his heart, and again, only God knows that. We cannot judge Sean. No man can judge another man's heart in his relationship to God.
Starting point is 01:05:00 But just what we can judge is seeing their actions. You know, like if a man can go before the holy altar and bend his knee, if he can support the church, look at the magnificent churches they're building in Russia. Look at it. I'd like to think that would be taken to account at the end of his life. whatever his sins may be because at the end of the day i mean he probably sees himself not being a saint either but he's trying to do something so you know that's that's how i see it that's a lot better than what the globalist whack jobs at the world economic forum and davos are doing which is openly also
Starting point is 01:05:36 showing you something they're showing you satanism openly i was talking the other day on a podcast i said just go google the opening ceremonies for the latest tunnel in switzerland i don't want to criticize all of switzerland but it's the most satanic thing you're you've ever seen your life. Complete Satanism on full display. They're telling you something. They're saying we worship Satan, and you can do nothing about it. At least Putin, whatever is going on in his heart, he's not saying that.
Starting point is 01:06:03 He's saying, let me support the church, let me go light a candle, let me venerate the holy icons, let me bend in need, let me support the church. And we build churches all over our country in Moscow spotless. And it really makes America look like a third world country, from what I can tell. So, I don't know. I guess you know a tree by the fruit of bears, but ultimately, God will judge him. He's no saint, to be sure. I'm not saying he's a nice guy.
Starting point is 01:06:27 You took the line out of my brain. You judge a tree by the fruit of bears, and it takes seasons to bear fruit. And so you look at things over the course of a man's lifetime, and things become more and more apparent. But I agree with you 100%. It's not for me to judge or for you. Either way. Father Emmanuel, I appreciate you hopping on and doing this. Absolutely. It was a real pleasure to join you, Sean. Let's do it again sometime.

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