The Eric Metaxas Show - #83 - John West

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, Eric talks with John West about America’s founding, God given rights, the Declaration of Independence, and why forgetting those truths puts freedom at risk. Later, Eric speaks with Paul Brown about Tucker Carlson, Joe Kent, anti Israel rhetoric, and why he believes a deeper political and spiritual fracture is opening up on the right. Subscribe for clips from The Eric Metaxas Show to hear politics and culture from a Christian perspective.

Hey there, folks. In case you didn't know, this is America's supercentennial, our 250th year. We're going to be spending a lot of time in the weeks and months ahead talking about America, talking about our founding. And today, for example, we talked to our friend John West. He's been on this program many times. He has a new book out called Endowed by Our Creator. It explores the founding father's true beliefs on religion, all of that stuff. that I love to talk about. So let me talk to my friend. Here he is. John West, welcome back.

Eric, thanks for having me back. This is so important. In my book on The Revolution, I didn't write it with a subject in mind or an angle or anything. I just want to tell the story. But in just telling the story, everything you write about in your book comes out.

It is so shockingly inescapable. The faith of the founders was so central to everything. and we have kind of swept that away over the decades. It's vital, just for the sake of truth, that we understand us, that Americans understand who we are, who we have been. And so tell us about your book, and I don't know if you want to start. I know there was a new poll recently. Maybe you want to start there.

Yeah, we actually, in conjunction with the book, we did a poll of 2,500 Americans about how they viewed the American founding. And there were some positives, but also some things for concern. So the positives were, despite all of the wokeness, despite all the trashing of the American founders, the vast majority of Americans of all races, both male and female, actually think pretty highly still of the principles of the American founding, the Declaration of Independence. They actually even think highly of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. There's some drop-off going to younger people, but most of the drop-off is not because they hate the founders.

it's because they don't know anything about them, because they haven't learned about them. And so they just said they don't know. Now, there are some concerning things. One most concerning thing is when you ask people, where do our rights come from, ultimately? Well, the founders are very clear, as I'm sure you're putting in your book and in my book,

that our rights come from God. And that's pretty key, because if our rights come from God, then that means no government or other people can rightfully take them away. So that's been a key of our American founding, and it's really distinguished America, yet only four in 10 Americans, including self-identified Christians, now say that our rights come from God. Most say they come from government. Some say they come from evolution, social tradition.

Evolution. That's concerning. That's the dumbest thing I've heard in a while, whatever the heck that means. Yeah. Well, this is interesting because this gets to the issue of, like, it doesn't matter that something's true. if nobody knows it's true. And this is something that every single American, I would say everybody in the world should know,

there is a God, he gives us freedom, he gives us rights, and the reason we have government is to secure those rights. This is as basic as it gets. And I would say a few decades ago, every single American got that in grammar school. Every single American, it was inescapable,

but we have drifted away from that. It's one of the reasons that I wanted to write my book on the subject, and obviously your book deals with it very directly. But we used to all know this. And if we don't know this, we really cease to be free. Well, see, that's the key point. You know, we have some people today who says,

well, the thing that make us American is our ethnicity. No, it's not. Actually, it's because of our fundamental beliefs. And none other than the great G.K. Chesterton, the great English writer that C.S. Lewis loved and others. When he came to America in the 1920s, he then went away and wrote a book. what he saw in America. And he said something really perceptive, especially for someone who wasn't

American. He said, America is the only nation in the world that he knew about that is based on a creed. Now, and what does he mean by that? Yes, we do have ties of faith and family, and certainly we were founded by people from Europe and the United Kingdom. But America of all the places in the world, we have a creed. And he actually identified that with the Declaration of Independence, we believe that all men are creative equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, which aren't fake rights. They're not the rights that the left says, but life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments are secured, you know, try to secure those rights.

And he says that Americans, those are the ideals that make them, you know, an American. And we have a lot of people not just on the left today, but on the right who are trashing that idea and say, oh, the idea that American has a creed, as long as you're from, say Europe or England, that makes you American. You're a heritage American. I want to say to those people, ladies and gentlemen, there's nothing more important than what we're talking about right now. There's nothing more important. For somebody to say that your ethnicity makes you American, that is not just incredibly stupid, it is evil. It is evil. It is anti-American to say that. What makes someone American is they buy into a set of beliefs.

And if you don't buy into those beliefs, it doesn't matter what your nationality is. And so this tribalism, that's what we wanted to get away from in America, right? So if you're in France, you say, well, I'm French because I have a French name and my parents are French and that makes me French. That is not relevant in America. In America, from our founding, we didn't just have people from England here. We had Germans here. We have all kinds of people here. And being an American has nothing to do with your blood background.

You can be black or white. You can be brown. You can be anything. What you believe, that is what makes us Americans. So the fact that there are folks on the right doing this, John, I have to say that's despicable. I mean, it's just amazing to me. And I guess I want to say this before I give you a chance to get back in here. But the concept of inalienable rights, ladies and gentlemen,

The word inalienable means you cannot be alienated from it. If you are born a human being, you are created in God's image, and he has given you, he has endowed you with certain rights that are not alienable. You cannot be separated from those rights. They belong to you because God gave them to you. The only thing is that some people can try to take them away from you. So the title of your book is endowed by our creator. And I have to say that it is amazing to me, John, that people, they say they're on the right.

I don't know. They're just dumb, basically. I don't know how they are conservative on any level. That they believe this kind of tribalist stuff. This is basically what Hitler believed, right? It's blood and soil. You know, you're a German because, you know, you were born in Germany and you're not Jewish, and that makes you German.

That's really the whole point of America is to get away from that kind of thinking. Yeah. And so part of my book is on the founding, but actually it goes on to say, well, how did we lose that? And you're right, the rise of social Darwinism and things like that that led to the blood and soil beliefs in Germany is part of how actually we had controversy here in America. And so one part of my book is on the founding, but the rest is, well, what was the attack on the founding, the name of science so-called? It wasn't really science. And then how can we get back to that and how are things pointing back to that? But let me just say one justification, I think, of some legitimate people on the right who are concerned about this is that they have bought into the left wing misinterpretation and misrepresentation of things like all men are created equal.

And that's why in my chapter I go through seven concrete ways that the founders thought we were equal. Now, it's not that we're equal because we have the same talents or that we have to equalize income or that, no, that's not or that all cultures are equal. They were not moral relativists, but they did think there were seven concrete ways that we are equal from being created by God, from having souls that are immortal that last afterlife, to a negative thing which most people don't talk about. It's we're sinners. We're corruptible. This is one of the key things that made us so different from the French Revolution. The French Revolution thought human beings were perfectable.

And the founders of America, for the most part, did not believe that. They thought we were equally fallible. That's why no human being can have, be like in the place of God and rule over people without any constraints. And so I do go a deep dive into the seven ways we are all equal in the founders' views and the ways that we're not and what that means, what in inalienable rights means, the attacks on that. But then I go on to talk about how in the 19th century and in the progressive era in the early 1900s, this was trashed by Darwinus in the name of science. And that led us to the rise of the expert state, the deep state. if you will. And so there's, and then I talk in the end about actually how reality is pointing back to the truths of the founders and the biblical principles on which they drew. Hey there, folks. I've been

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how we've drifted away from these ideas or how some of these concepts have been perverted, twisted away from their original meaning. But when you talk about the French Revolution, I just have to laugh that even in the founding era, people were confused by this, right? People like Thomas Payne and Thomas Jefferson, they thought it's possible to have all this wonderful stuff,

liberty and equality and whatever without God. And the fact is, it is not possible. It is simply not possible. The bloodbath of the French Revolution revealed that, but those bad ideas have carried on for over two centuries, and it's vital at this moment that we relearn what it is that we used to know as a nation about what we believe and what we don't believe. So what made you decide to write this book, John, endowed by our creator,

because these are the most central ideas. Yeah, you know, it was last year, so I knocked it off in six months, which I didn't think could be possible. It's a short book. It's only about 150, 200 pages. But I was actually praying and thinking about things of what God was going to have me do next. And I thought, you know, I remember from my time as a college professor, where I taught hundreds of students about the Declaration of Independence, and they were sympathetic, but they really didn't understand it going in.

And I thought, you know, I might have some things. because my graduate training, my PhD, actually focused a lot on the American founding. And I thought I might have some things to say. And then the key part of my book that actually, you know, it's not just about the founding, is how the founding was betrayed. Why was it, say, on the issue of slavery, that most of the founders knew slavery was wrong, even those who held slaves, they were embarrassed by it. And many, you know, founders then emancipated their slaves in many northern states after the revolution

because they knew this conflicted with All Men are created equal. They actually abolished slavery. But then we got stuck in that. Well, part of the story is the rise of science, the rise of false claims of the name of science. Scientific racism, which ultimately was pushed most forthrightly by Darwinian biology. And then Darwinian biology pushed, well, we're not really equal. None of us, even if you're white, you're not equal. that's why we need to be governed by scientific experts in the name of science.

This was championed by like Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century and the expert state we have. What we saw during COVID is a direct result of this assault on the American founding in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I've said this a lot publicly about how if you believe in Darwinian evolution, you should have no moral problem with racism. because Darwinian evolution says, hey, we all evolved, you know, without any purpose, whatever, we just evolved as we evolved. And according to that, some species, some colors, some races are more evolved than others. I don't believe that because I'm a Christian. I believe what the Bible says.

But if you don't believe what the Bible says, then it's perfectly logical. And you are talking about this in the latter part of the 19th century, early part of the 20th there were people, they became eugenicists. They said, some races are better than others. Science proves it. And according to this, racism is nothing bad. But those of us who believe what the Bible says, who believe what God says about human beings, we know that racism is wrong, but it's so fascinating to me that they don't deal, they're not honest about this. They kind of pretend like, why I believe in science? I believe in evolution and I'm against racism. And I think, well, why are you against racism?

I know why I'm against racism because of what the Bible says, and in our founding documents, it says all men are created equal. That's a biblical idea. But why would a scientist who believes in Darwinian evolution be against us? They're pretending, basically, that they have anything to say on this worth listening to. And you know where it really gets sad is, and this was true in the 19th century, and it's true right now, is that there were so many Christians who gloned on to these scientific racist arguments, despite the fact that it was clearly against biblical teaching.

And we had that in the 19th century, who basically embraced this sort of anti-Christian science. And then today on, well, the Groyper right, you have people who are claiming to speak for Christians who are elevating Hitler and saying that, you know, some races are biologically inferior to others. These are sort of the direct sort of result of what happened in the 19th, early 20th century. And you could even see it today. I mind people who claim to be Christians, but are really anything but. Well, the idea that all men are created equal, I have to say, you know, people act like Jefferson came up with that or something.

And honestly, folks, all of our founders understood this. Jefferson came up with the phrase, but all of this is fundamental to our founding. The whole idea that, you know, you can trace it backwards through John Locke, to the Puritans, to the Reformation, to the Bible. These are biblical ideas, but they had never been expressed in a government before. They had never been expressed in a national creed ever before in the history of the world. And suddenly they come into being thanks to the document that your title, John West,

endowed by our creator in the Declaration. Suddenly it becomes a national creed. And so what you're saying, which of course is true, is that there's always a war for the truth, even though this is established in 1776, the war for what we believe and what we're going to stand for carries on. And so that there was a war on these ideas. There were plenty of people who didn't believe it in the 19th century. And they used science in the 19th and 20th centuries to go to war with this idea. It's fascinating.

And what's really interesting is you go, and I do this in my book, is the founders wrote a lot in their private letters and in their speeches about what they meant by human equality. like Reverend John Willisman talked about how we're moral creatures, how we're spiritual creatures, how we have access to reason whereas like fleas don't. James Wilson, who signed both the Declaration and the Constitution, was one of the most gifted legal theorists and philosophers of the founders. And he gave a whole series of law lectures that talked about man's uniqueness in nature and the natural moral law. And so I go back and plumb the depths of writings that a lot of people have not read, the founders were they explicated. So you're right, it wasn't just Jefferson. It was the whole philosophy of the founding, and they wrote a lot about it. They also, by the way, today, many people

who are pro-life, they talk about the right to life. The founders actually agreed with that. James Wilson, in his law lectures, talked about abortion being the unjust taking of life against the right to life. This is what, again, he was one of the early justice of the Supreme Court, appointed by George Washington. He saw it. He saw it. He, he, wrote, helped write the Constitution, and he, you know, signed the declaration. He's talking about how abortion is against the right to life. He's talking about how suicide is against the right to life because ultimately our lives come from God. So even we don't have the right to take our own lives. So it's not those of you who are pro-life and arguing that that's a right to life,

that actually, you're not straying from what the founders believe. The founders actually talked about this. Well, I've talked a little bit about. what you talk about in your book about science and evolution, but talk more about that because these are really bad ideas. And as you were saying, there are people on the tribalist right. These are the kind of people, folks, that they agree more with Adolf Hitler than with George Washington and Adams and Jefferson and Franklin. They really are tribalists.

These are fundamentally anti-American views. But there are people now in our public discourse who are, are leaning in this direction again. And we need to clarify that what they believe is not true. It's anti-American. But I know you go into this in the book. Yeah. So just, you know, the founders believe we have a creator.

He gave rights. We're fundamentally equal in our rights and in ways the creator created us. And that there are laws of nature and nature's God, by which they meant there was an absolute moral law that's non-relative. All those things were basically trussed by Darwinism. Darwinism really claimed we don't need a. creator because they're a product of an unguided process. Darwin is basically claimed we're not created equal. We're fundamentally unequal, not just in different races and ethnicities, but even

any human being is so, you know, as a glorified animal, that's why we need experts to guide us because ordinary people aren't enough. And then the Darwinism helped lead to moral relativism, because just like if humans are an accident of history, Darwin wrote a whole book, the Descent of Man, where he has chapters talking about morality. In his view, morality simply was what you needed to do to survive in a certain given time and place. And so it was radically relative across time and situation. And so how you get things like Alfred Kinsey and the sexual revolution, actually many people don't know, Kinsey was actually trained as an evolutionary biologist.

And he looked at things in evolutionary terms. And so you can't have non-relative morality. in that. And so basically, the Darwinian revolt against, I think, the real world against truth, attacked all the central tenets of the founding. And you were right with regard to the racism part, because, again, in a Christian view, a creator created us lovingly, and we reflect that. In Darwin's view, we're an accident of whatever our ancestors needed for survival in their particular time and place. And so Darwin thought, you should expect radical differences between different races, different human populations. And, I mean,

there are differences, but in the idea of the Christian idea, which I think is borne out by reality, you know, human beings, actually James Wilson talked about this. Every human beings, every different culture has a language. And as he says, in language, they talk about things that are admirable or not admirable. Or they actually have a way of speaking about morality. And they understand, like C.S. Lewis has said that, you know, there's a fundamental moral law written on our hearts. And so, even language itself, if you compare across cultures, there are actually so many similarities. That points to the reality of just how, like each other, all human beings are. Yes, there are differences, but they're not the most fundamental things about us. That was the,

the point of the founders were, again, they were not left-wingers. And that's why I think some modern conservatives misunderstand this. They weren't saying that everyone has to have the same income, everyone has to have the same talents, and you pretend otherwise, no, but in our fundamental rights, in our makeup, comparing a human being to a flea or a rock, we are fundamentally equal, and that has repercussions. Why our government should be based consent of the governed, not on unelected elites. And basically, and I do talk about this a little bit in my own book, that if you are a very serious Christian in the founding era, like James Otis Jr.,

and John Adams and others, they knew that slavery was wrong. They were pushing against it. So this lie that all the founders were okay with slavery, no, no, no, no, no. This was a battle, folks. This was a battle. And many of them despised slavery and fought against it. They didn't have all the votes.

So in order to ratify, in order to have independence, they had to kind of go along with South Carolina and Georgia. They had to go along, but didn't mean that they agreed with it. And it came from their biblical worldview. They knew that if the Bible is true, then we are all children of God. We are all sinners. This is absolutely vital that people understand this, that that lie, that all the founders were somehow fine with slavery or with, it's simply not true. I like the idea that you talk about the expert stuff here

because we have all been brainwashed into thinking that there's this expert class and they can tell us what to do and what to think. And for me, the best reminder of why that's wrong is what William F. Buckley once famously said. He said that he'd rather be governed by the first 300 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard College.

In other words, your average person has the ability to have common sense and to weigh right and wrong and what's good and what's going to help better than the intellectuals in this case at Harvard College. But all of these intellectuals, the educated class, we see this today with the cultural elites, the secular elites, they are completely out of touch with reality. Most of them don't have families or they don't have kids or they don't have normal jobs. so they can afford to have these preposterous ideas. It's like, you know, if you're a community organizer and then you become a U.S. Senator, you've never actually had a real job.

You've never had to think about this stuff. But this is one of the big lies, John, that we're dealing with right now. And I know you talk about it in the book, in your new book endowed by our creator. Talk about that because to me this is so central. When Westcham first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different.

People thought denim on denim was peak fashion. Inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to Westjetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Well, in the latter part of the 19th century, this was not happenstance. These were people who explicitly rejected the founding because they thought Darwinism pointed to the fact that we were fundamentally unequal. And I actually go through the leading founders of American political science in the late

19th, early 20th century who are saying the founders were wrong. They were wrong about natural rights. They were wrong about consent of the governed. And that's why we need to replace things with unelected experts who are neutral and objective. Now, the founders were not against expert knowledge. Their point is everyone is fallible. So no one should have unchecked power. And the last thing you should do is give unelected experts carte blanche to do anything. That's why you have consent of the government. So it's not that all of us are equally experts, is that all of us do have a stake in this and that people can't just lord it over you and just say, well, you have to do this. We don't even have to justify it. But the point is, this came out of an ideology, actually

largely a Darwinian ideology. And as I've proven my book, this is what they were actually trashing the founding in places like Harvard and other places at the end of the 19th century because they thought the founders were bad and had an outdated view of reality. I also taught at the time of the founding, they understood that nature, that science pointed toward an objective creator and an objective morality. And so by the end of the 19th century, they said, oh, now Darwinian science overthrows all that. So it makes it outdated. Wrong.

And at the very end of my book, I get into things like my friend, Stephen Meyer. and others who are showing, and, you know, in your book actually on God and Against Atheism, how science today actually is pointing back to the very truths that our founders based America on. So we have to come full circle. So I'm actually somewhat positive. Yes, we're in a very challenging time, but reality has reasserted itself. And as in the last chapter, I go through, whether it be from human equality, the evidence for human equality is never greater than it's ever been before.

evidence that we have a creator, the evidence that morality can't just be reduced to survival the fittest or what's in your particular culture. And on the negative side, the evidence that expert opinion without checks and balances, that somehow that works, well, we've just looked through COVID. And we know that that doesn't work. I was just going to say, ladies and gentlemen, if you want the greatest example of how that's not true, I'm just going to throw a couple of names past you. Francis Collins. Anthony Fauci. And you know, John West, my guest today,

you and I have talked about this, the wickedness of Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, what they did working with the communist Chinese, the WHO, to foist horrible, horrible ideas, harmful ideas on the global population. By the grace of God, they failed. But you wrote about it, in your most recent book,

I'm trying to remember this Stockholm Syndrome. Stockholm Syndrome Christianity, yeah. Folks, if you haven't read that book, highest recommendation, Stockholm Syndrome Christianity, you deal with this because people don't believe the evil until they read it with their own eyes and they go, oh my goodness,

I had no idea. Shepherds for sale by Megan Basham. She goes into this. Our friend Seth Gruber has written about this. Really wicked stuff done by scientists in the name of, science, really, really wicked stuff. These are the so-called experts that many of us foolishly turned our lives over to. They made these decisions. And it's only by God's grace

that we survived what we did in the last few years. Yeah. And I want to say, for people like Francis Collins, I still regard him as a brother in Christ, and I don't try to assume what he did in his heart. But he was a public official, and you can judge what he did publicly. And I would say that if you're a Christian, I know there is still out there, even among evangelicals, who don't realize how much we were bamboozled during COVID, read endowed by the creator, because I have a section on that, that there have now been government reports through Congress. There have been peer-reviewed journal articles that really expose what has happened. And so if your knowledge base of COVID is stuck back in 2021, read my book to at least get the references that might open your mind. Because I know, I I've interacted recently with a really sincere Christian who was very much. It's like nothing it happened since 2021. It was just basically giving talking points from 2021.

That's not reality. And you need to know that. And if you don't, there are many books you can read. But my latest book, you'll find some references there that might challenge your preconceptions on that. And what is the release date on endowed by our creator? Well, it's just out. So people can get it now. It's just out this month.

So brand new. Brand new. endowed by our creator. I want to talk to you more, John. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for the new book endowed by our creator. This is very, very important. God bless you, my friend.

Thank you, Eric. I always is a delight to talk with you. I don't like alarmism. I don't like fear-mongering. I especially don't like people who profit from panic. But I do believe in telling the truth, especially when the markets are reminding us how fragile things are. Over the last few weeks, we've all watched the volatility, stock swinging, confidence-shaking, longestanding assumptions, suddenly looking less solid.

Many economists are calling this moment the everything bubble, where nearly every asset class has been inflated at the same time by years of cheap money and reckless global policy. This isn't political, it's not partisan, it's math. And when confidence erodes, history shows us what tends to have. happen next. That's why I've taken time to educate myself on one of the oldest ways people have protected wealth during uncertainty, physical gold and silver. I've partnered with Genesis Gold Group, a faith-based, values-driven company offering clear information, no hype, no pressure. They've put together a free financial survival report explaining what's happening why multiple markets can fall together and what prudent steps families can consider now.

I encourage you to read it and decide for yourself. Please go to metaxis gold IRA.com. That's metaxis gold IRA.com. You don't need to panic, but you do need to be informed. In times like these, wisdom matters more than optimism. Hey there, folks. Welcome. Right now it's my privilege to have a new guest. His name is Paul Brown.

That's his real name. At least he tells me it's his real name. It's not made up. He's a Marine Combat Veteran and Intelligence, analyst and entrepreneur who is a man of faith. He also is the founder of Wasson Watch Company. You know, Paul Brown, welcome to the program. You remind me on some level of myself in that I don't know where to start.

You're an eclectic figure. Can we start with your biography? What's your story? Where did you grow up and how did you get to be who you are today? Yeah, thanks for having me, Eric. No, my background is very eclectic. I was born in Arkansas and rural Arkansas in the mid-80s and grew up there. My parents worked in ministry.

My dad had been an active duty Marine infantry officer, and then he was in the reserves by the time I came along. But grew up being homeschooled, lived the first seven years of my life in Conway, then Hope. then we moved to Dallas when I was 10, the Dallas area, so that my dad could go to Dallas Theological Seminary. So I grew. Whoa. Go ahead. I know, I just said, whoa. So, you know, you've got a lot, you've got a lot going on, a lot of theology already as a young man if your dad's at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Yes. And that was a big decision for him. It's a midlife kind of decision, right? You know, he didn't go in his 20s. He was about to turn 40 when we moved to Dallas, right? So that was a big transition, not just the Arkansas to Dallas part, but of course, just, you know, going to school at that point again as well. So I grew up learning a lot about the Bible from my parents and seeing them work their faith out, right? It wasn't just a statement of like, hey, this is what we believe.

It's like, this is what we believe. And so we're going to do it. And that was a great privilege for me. It really impacted the kinds of decisions that I made. So grew up kind of my teen years in Dallas, you know, ended up joining the Marine Corps in 2005 when I was 19 years old, which, you know, wasn't always a given that I was necessarily going to do that, but with my dad having been in the Marine Corps,

it was one of those things that was always a possibility. And I ended up working in intelligence. So I was a cryptological Spanish language. So I got to go to the different. Whoa, whoa. A cryptological Spanish linguist. We've had so many of those on the show that I can't believe we booked another one. Can you explain what is a cryptological Spanish linguist, please?

Yes, absolutely. So the linguist, the Spanish linguist part is pretty self-explanatory. You know, you learn Spanish and you leverage that in your work. The cryptology part basically means that it's a job where the focus is in signals intelligence. So after I left DLI and then we did some follow-on training at Goodfellow Air Force Base in central Texas, I ended up getting stationed at the Texas Cryptologic Center in San Antonio, which is an NSA site, right? So I was working there doing intelligence, translation, got to do some intelligence analysis, ended up getting deployed to Iraq in 2008-2009, where I was not leveraging the Spanish portion

of my training, obviously. But I was doing geospatial intelligence analysis where you figure out, based on the intelligence data, where the bad guys are, how to get them, you know, what they've done, where people should look for them,

where, you know, the guys on the ground should look for them, building target packages, writing reports, all that good stuff. And I'm now, that was a really, that was a really exhilarating experience. I got to pull together, there are a lot of different training elements

and leverage them and use them well and at least feel like I was making a difference on the ground. So that was fun. So you, I mean, so yeah, you bring a lot of perspective to current events because, you know, most people watching this podcast, most people hosting this podcast, we've not been in the world of intelligence

and understanding that kind of stuff. I mean, I also, I want to talk to you about your company. what led you to found the Wasson watch company? In other words, in your story, how does that come in? I don't get that. Yeah, so I was, you know, I've always been very entrepreneurial. I've always had this kind of, like, in high school, I had a lawn business that I ran with like 20 customers.

And then over the years, you know, after the Marine Corps, I was working in the Defense Intelligence Agency. I started a gun business that I ran. on the side for a little bit, but these were kind of like side projects. And in 2018, I was working at a large financial institution in anti-money laundering. And it was the kind of thing. It was a stable job. It was a secure job. But it was not scratching the itch of like, what am I doing here? What's the purpose here beyond bringing home a paycheck, which is, is fine. But it wasn't what I wanted to be doing. And so I started thinking about like,

what is a business I could start that would not just be a side project, would be something that could ultimately, you know, be the whole project, you know, they could bring a paycheck to support my family with. And I started learning more about watches. I'd always loved watches, but I didn't know much about automatic watches. You know, a lot of people out there are familiar with the term automatic watch, but like Rolexes, Omega's, a lot of the big brands you've heard of that are, you know, known for being very expensive watches,

use what's called an automatic movement, which means that it's powered by the movement of your wrist. There's no battery, right? And that's an old technology. It's not a new one, but it's less popular than it used to be because of battery powered watches. And I was fascinated with this. I was just like, this is really, really cool.

And it just hit me one day like, hey, this is something, I have a vision for a very specific watch product that I would like to see produce that I don't see on the market. market and I had a very specific idea of like what what a good watch company could look like. And I just decided, I'm going to do it. I'm going to make it. I'm going to start it. And I don't have a background in watchmaking. It's more the entrepreneurial and the critical thinking and the synthetic thinking kind of drawing the different components together. And so I worked

with different manufacturers in Switzerland and all over the world to have them build what I wanted, you know, build the product that I had in mind. And so from 2018 to 2021 was all product development. It was three years of one product, one watch going from concept to finish delivered product, you know, finished prototype at the end. That is extraordinary. It's Wasson W-W-A-S-S-O-N watch company. Wasson, Wosson, W-W-A-S-S-O-N. I want to talk to you about current events because there is stuff flying around right now, and I know you have a perspective on it. Who is Joe Kent? Yeah.

Why was he on Tucker Carlson? I mean, there is some dark stuff out there right now, undermining of the president that we elected to lead the nation and to trust, presumably. What do you suppose? Can you shed any light on that? Because it's just, it's disappointing to me when figures like Tucker Carlson used their huge influence. effectively to undermine the president of the United States, which the Democrats are doing all day long.

Yeah. Yeah, right. That's right. We're facing kind of enemies from both sides, if you will. And Joe Kent was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, known as NCTC. All right. And I've actually worked with NCTC when I was at the DIA. It's an important element of our kind of, you know, weaving of all the different pieces of the government together to protect against terrorism. And Joe Kent has a background in the military. He was in special operations. He deployed 11 times. So when you look at his background on paper,

he seems to have this like, oh, like, hey, he's the guy. This sounds like a great guy. But what we've discovered, you know, what many more people are discovering, especially with his resignation letter, is that what many Americans value, especially conservative Christian people, patriotic Americans value don't seem to be what Joe Kent values.

Joe Kent not only resigned when the Trump administration is in the middle of doing what needs to be done with Iran in a way that drew a lot of attention away from that in a negative way, but he made all of these crazy accusations about Israel. It's like, oh, Israel is behind us doing this. He even said, you know, Joe Kent had lost his wife. his previous wife, she also served in the military and she was in Syria

she was killed by ISIS. He blamed that on Israel in his resignation letter. The murder of his wife. The ISIS murder of his wife he blamed on the Jews. That's right. Very interesting take.

I hadn't expected that. Which is absurd. But I mean, I think to get to the fundamental piece of what Joe has done here is you think about his title, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center And Iran is the number one state sponsor of terrorism globally, has been for decades, is responsible through terrorism for the death of up to thousands of Americans,

not to mention people in Iraq, people in Afghanistan, Israelis, you know, they were behind the October 7th attacks, at least in part. And you have the director of the National Counterterrorism Center resigning because the United States holds the number one state sponsor of terrorism accountable for its evil deeds. I mean, if that doesn't just scream not doing your job the right way, I don't know what does. So I think a lot of people were, I had not looked into Joe Kent very carefully prior to that resignation. A lot of people have woken up to who he really is. And I think it's an important turning point for those of us on the right who maybe previously felt like, you know,

We're all on the same team. We're all going the same direction. It's time to recognize that there is a group of folks who at least say they're on the right, who absolutely are not, who don't have the same vision for the future of America, who don't have the same values, and who are actively working to undermine what it is we're trying to accomplish here. Which, look, we should all be shocked by this. I mean, when Tucker Carlson talks about multipolarity and we need to share the global stage with China, I think, are you out of your bleeping mind?

That's like sharing the stage with Hitler. China, I just interviewed Jan Yeklech about his book, Killed to Order, about how China, the Marxist atheists in China, murder young people for their organs to make money. You know, that's worse than the global slave trade or it's equal to it. It's worse than the Nazis incinerating Jews and ovens.

That's what you do if you don't believe we're made in the image of God. And Tucker Carlson is saying, well, you know, we should share the stage with China. And I think to myself, no, we should use all the power we have to influence China against this satanic evil, if possible. So here you have Tucker Cross and we say, oh, he's a figure on the right. He's no longer a figure on the right. These terms become meaningless.

Yes. And so a guy like Joe Kent, I mean, there are a lot of folks like this, Paul, that I think they're kind of, they're playing possum over the years through the decades. They're sort of pretending, they're moving along in the system. and getting certain credentials, which would lull us into thinking they're on the same team that we are. But they're fundamental things that they don't believe in.

You know, people that I, I mean, I've seen this over and over. People I thought, well, they're pretty much on the same page as we are. And whether through ignorance or malevolence or a combination, whether it's Mike Pence or others, Bob, you know, I stand for conservatism.

Well, I really think that it's very challenging for people to try process this right now and to see these people as effectively turning against the man that we elected Donald Trump. I mean, we should be able to agree that we elected him and that we can trust him. We'll criticize him. But when you go crazy and say things like Tucker has said and Joe Kenda has said, basically blaming the Jews for, you know, you just think this is really dark, spiritually, very, very dark. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, we need a wake-up call about it, because it is progressed very far. I think some people who maybe

are just now being exposed to some of the off-the-wall statements by Tucker or Joe Kent or Candice Owens or whoever it may be, maybe under the impression that this is some small thing that's just beginning, this is part of a concerted effort to manipulate U.S. politics, especially on the right, that has been going on for years at this point. And it has made its way into many of the high-level influencers. And you have, you know, so the obvious folks are like Tucker Carlson, Candice Owens, you know, obviously we've talked about Joe Kent, but then you even have elements of this that are drifting into guys like Joe Rogan the other day,

who's not some paragon of the right per se, but he is a very notable individual who's now talking about conspiracy theories about Israel and about Erica Kirk his mocking his mocking of Erica Kirk was so despicable I was really shocked I was really really shocked me too I don't know how he could look at himself

in the mirror and have a guest on saying that's like this is the widow of a friend of mine who was murdered what do we even what do we make of this so something really bizarre is happening out there now when you said this is

a, have been a long-term effort to influence politics on the right. Who ultimately are we talking about is being behind that kind of an effort? Yeah. Ultimately, China and Russia are the two parties that stand to gain the most from this kind of, this kind of effort. But Paul, the point is we would assume that China, particularly, China and Russia, but the idea that they could get to Tucker Carlson, does he need the money? Does he have a source? soul, I really thought that he was a decent guy trying to figure stuff out. Are you suggesting? I mean, what are you suggesting?

Because I am so baffled to try to understand. I mean, let me put it this way. Candice Owens has said things and Tucker have, they both said things that are insane to me. I know enough to know they're wrong about that. Like, I know that. And I think if they're capable of saying that, I cannot listen to them on anything because they have said lunatic things. that I can say for sure I know they are either ignorant

or completely wrong. Right. But what is your guess with somebody like Tucker? Did he never have any values or beliefs and he's just kind of going with the flow? Because that's to me what's so puzzling about him. That's heavily debated. And, you know, my personal thought,

I never felt like Tucker was genuine, right? And that was just a gut sense. So I'm not going to put all my chips on that. being the case because I don't know. You know, that's speculative. I don't know his heart or where his heart was at that time. But Jesus did say, you will know that by their fruits. So whatever my gut suspicion was at that time, we can see now that there's a deep, deep rot. And whether that was, you know, something that was just under the surface for many years or something that just really popped up here recently, I can't say for sure. But people speculate about, you know, could

there could there be bribery or could there be compromising information about him out there? I don't know that the exact motivation for this seemingly massive shift and the kinds of things that he's been saying in the last year, not even seeing me. You know, we all see this massive shift. But I know this and it's that you might think that you know someone, but the question is do you? I've, you know, I knew a couple for years living in the DC area. We got to know this couple really well. They'd been married for a couple decades. And then one day, the husband just tells the wife that he's leaving her.

And he doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't want to talk to us about it. I try to reach out. He won't have a conversation with us. And I've had a number of things like that happened in my life over the years where someone I previously trusted and believed was a great person. Like someone I would really, you know, I even get advice from, turns out not to be that person. Yeah, yeah.

That's a big thing. And that's happened to me a lot because I'm basically an overtrusting person and a hugely loyal friend to a fault, I think, at some times. And I have seen that there were people that I was sure that they were good people, whatever. And I clearly got it wrong. Yeah. And Jesus says, why does he say, by your fruit, why does he bother to say that? Because some of us really need to hear it.

Amen. And I can say the same thing, marriages, people that I know, suddenly the wife just walks away from it. You're like, wait a minute. Yeah. You're like, you're in ministry. You're doing Bible studies, you know, with women. And you're telling people about Jesus.

And then suddenly you decide, oh, I'm going to leave my wonderful husband. There's no biblical grounds. I'm just going to. And, I mean, that's one example. but there's so many examples of men doing the same thing to their wives. And that's, that's kind of the clearest way, focus in a sense, a way to focus that you look at something like that, you go, that makes absolutely no sense. Yeah. So clearly, the person was living a lie, whether they were lying to themselves, probably to some extent. And when you extrapolate this

outward to somebody like Tucker or to lots of other people like Joe Kent, that they've been kind of under the radar, maybe saying what they need to say to move along, to move along, to move, along and then suddenly there's a you know they do something or say something that it doesn't it doesn't fit with anything they've said before there are many deep state actors like that who you know they're they're kind of work in the system yeah but when when it's a crisis point you don't want to be depending on that person and we're seeing a lot of that right now yeah well i think the takeaway with that particular thing about how how people can change even people you really don't expect to is even if we don't understand the mechanism of that change in those individuals, like once you see it happen

once, you should be on alert. And we get information from a lot of people. We're in sort of a decentralized communication world now, right? The old media is crumbling away and there's this new media. So we all have these people that we follow and listen to. You need to be quick to recognize when people are saying stuff that's insane and evil. And, hey, maybe you don't need to fully judge their entire character by one misstep. But once they start saying stuff, anti-Semitic stuff, blaming Jews and Israel for everything, at that point, you need to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt of like, oh, why are they saying these things just recognize they're lost?

They deserve no more market share of my time and my interest. Well, that's a good way putting it. And I still have friends that, you know, are listening to Tucker or listening to Candace. I just at this point, ladies and gentlemen, I would counsel you strongly to not do that. Yes. Well, Paul Brown, just great to get to know you a little bit. We'll have you back. Congratulations on Wausen Watch Company.

I'm fast. I want to talk to you more about that. Fascinated by what you did. But thanks for coming on today. God bless you. Thanks for having me, Eric. Good to see you. God bless you, too.

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