The Eric Metaxas Show - Dr. James Lindsay (Encore continued)

Episode Date: September 17, 2023

Eric is joined by author, mathematician, and professional troublemaker, Dr. James Lindsay

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mataxis show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Do you like your gravy thick and rich and loaded with creamy mushrooms? If no one was looking, would you chug the whole gravy boat? Chug, chug, chug, chug. Stay tuned. Here comes Mr. Chugel himself, Eric Mattaxas. Welcome back. We continue our conversation with James Lindsay. I didn't say earlier, but

you, James, are the founder of new discourses, which is a journal, like an actual journal where you maybe people would want to read what you write or what is written in new discourses. And you've written a number of books. So how did this, so this kind of blows up. And you and your colleagues become famous for having pulled off this brilliant hoax on the insane academic world, woke, super woke academic world. So the Wall Street Journal got involved. We cooperated with the journalist there pretty much from the beginning, and she ends up breaking the story in early October of 2018.

The New York Times put it on the front page, believe it or not, on October 5th. They actually gave us, I have a copy still to this day, they gave us fair treatment. They didn't exactly give us a glowing review for a recommendation for what we had done, but they gave us quite fair treatment, even in the New York Times. And it ended up blowing up all over the place. I think it made the print edition of newspapers around the world in over 400 or 500 places. Even the South China Daily had us with a photograph of us in their newspaper, which, you know, that's from Shanghai, mainland China, and they had talked about this.

So it really made worldwide headlines for, you know, about a month or so. And we ended up, we were on just about every show in the world, maybe except yours, just teasing you. But for a while, I mean, Joe Rogan had Peter and I on, and that got a ton of attention. And, you know, we ended up doing media, media, media for like six, eight months. And that turned out to be interesting and fun, but as it is, a bit of a distraction. But one of the, Peter had another project he was working on. So he kind of diverted, but Helen and I sat down and decided we needed to tell the world what we learned doing this, but without pointing back to the thing itself. So we wrote a book that's got a lot of attention since that's called cynical theories, which outlines that there are deep postmodern theory roots to, like, how did we do this?

What did we understand? In the book, we never talk about this grievance studies, fake articles, hoax thing at all, but we talk about what we learned about what are the roots of gender studies, of critical race theory, of post-colon. theory. And we traced back, not the entire historical register, but back through the postmodern philosophers of Foucault and Derrida and Budraard and Leotard and so on. Well, so, I mean, I think we're in agreement, obviously, that this stuff is nonsense, but you are trying to dissect it to determine how does this nonsense work? What occurs to me, you know, as you've been talking, is that the humorlessness that you see whenever you're dealing with these strident ideological movements, you saw it in the French Revolution, you saw it in the Soviet Union,

you saw it with the Nazis, you see it in China, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, that you are not permitted to joke, you're not permitted. I mean, but that is interesting to me because I think most people would know that there's something fundamentally human about joking, about laughter, because it's allied with truth-telling. We know that that's what the court gesture was.

He was a truth-teller, and that oftentimes humor is simply truth-telling in an environment that's maybe a little bit uncomfortable, so people laugh because you said what they're all thinking. That seems to be at the core of what we're talking about. What you're talking about really is what is the nature of truth and how does that function and how does that go wrong? So where do you come out on all this stuff? Where are we now?

Did anybody on the dark side, so to speak, wake up as a result of what you wrote? Or did they just say, oh, that's not fair. We hate those people. Well, there are kind of two or three broad camps. There are the academics that we hoax themselves, the members of, these particular dark side journals by and large just said that we were awful people and pretended it didn't happen. A fairly large body of mostly still underground academics, however, kind of breathed a sigh of relief that somebody finally said it. And we hear from those

people fairly regularly. And that process, I think, was for a while rumbling up. I don't know if there's still a counter movement rising up within academia or not. And then a third group just got upset that we put egg on the face of the university system and academia itself, which is not at all true. All we did was pointed out that there is already egg there. But there are people who are a very large body of academics who are very invested in the pride and prestige associated with academia that it no longer lives up to, and we're very upset that we kind of pointed out that the emperor has no clothes. Well, I mean, what's interesting to me is it's the trickle-down effect.

In other words, that the stuff that you get from Foucault and company that trickles into the university so that already when I was at Yale in the 80s, critical race theory, deconstruction, all this stuff is there. But it's at a very high level, and it's in the humanities, but it's trickling down into the undergraduate world. and over the decades, it trickles down into culture. And so that we are now dealing with it now. The madness has been unleashed.

And so what are the roots of this? Because to me, as a Christian, as someone who loves the ideas of the American founding, I believe in truth. I believe in science, in the discovery of truth, the nobility of that project. and when things get ideological as they did under the Nazis, under the Soviets, whatever, certainly in China today, the limits put on truth become increasingly stringent to the point that it seems to inevitably blow up. In other words, because there is this thing called reality, you can only play the game so long and then it cannibalizes itself. And so it seems that your articles were doing that, and it seems that we're kind of there now,

that the looniness becomes more obvious, that you can only pull it off for so long. Yeah, I think, and I think that to sound a little biblical, that's part of what's meant by fearing God and fearing the truth, because the truth is going to win out in the end. So you better be respectful of it and treat it heavily. But so where does it come from? I'm trying to figure out which name to blame. But I think the real point, I don't know how philosophically deep we want to get, but the real progenitor of this line of thought is where you said the French Revolution,

it is, in fact, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And the idea that effectively, you know, man could be free, but we're in the chains and fetters of a socially constructed universe. It makes us follow certain rules and makes us follow, you know, certain modes of behavior and decorum and ethics and so on. which then gets translated through the German ideal. So that's the French romantic reaction is what that is. And then that gets picked up by certain people who are arguably mystics in Germany,

Emmanuel Kant and Georg Hegel particularly, who codified and systematized their formulation of this same line of thought in what's called German idealism. And whether it's the Nazis or the communists, what you're dealing with is idealism. There's this ideal society that we can progress toward if we all get on board with it. So the lineaments of this going back always seem to be that, seemed to be utopianist.

Another which the idea, and this is fundamentally antithetical to what the Bible says, the idea that we're not fallen, but that we are, we're fine until society corrupts us, and that we can in effect, we can in effect be as gods ourselves. We can achieve some kind of utopia that there's this process by which we can ascend into heaven on earth apart from God, apart from the moral strictures of the Bible or of any religion. It's naive. It has this kind of overtly innocent quality to it. and it always seems to turn into a nightmare bloodbath.

I mean, all through history, these are the kinds of things. So you're talking about Rousseau. We're dealing with, actually, we're going to go to a break, but I think it's important for us to talk about this because we are seeing a horrific iteration of it in America, in the West. We'll be right back talking to James Lindsay. For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only creativity, conservative wireless provider. And when I say only, trust me, they're the only one. Glenn and the

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Metaxus. Join me. Make the switch today again. Go to Patriot mobile.com slash metaxus or call 878 Patriot. Do it now. There's a battle for our nation going on right now. The question is, who will lead it? Get answers as the Real Life Network televises the Pre-Vote Stand Summit, September 15th and 16th, with former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ronda Santis discussing what it'll take for America to get back to greatness, along with a host of conservative leaders like All-American Swimmer Riley Gaines, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, Dr. Ben Carson, Pastor Jack Hibbs, and more. Go to real lifenetwork.com now to sign up for free.

That's real life network.com. On the real life network, the gospel is never censored by big tech or the government with faith-based content, family entertainment, and new shows released weekly. Watch on any device, anywhere, anytime. Don't miss pray, vote stand, a free online event with Donald Trump, Rhonda Santis, and other conservative leaders. September 15th and 16th, available at reallifenetwork.com or download the app and sign up for free. That's reallifenetwork.com. Check it out. Welcome back, folks, talking to James Lindsay. You can follow him on Twitter at Conceptual James. He's written many books on the subjects we're discussing right now. He is the founder of New Discourses, which is an actual journal that actually writes real things about real things. I was just talking about the kind of shape of the madness, that what we're dealing with, you know, we can go back to the French Revolution, but it's always, It seems always to be the same.

It's utopianist. It's ultimately, I guess, devolves into a madness, into a kind of a febrile madness of violence, and then it spins itself. Yeah. And has been promoted in academic circles for, you know, way over, roughly 200 years. I guess. I mean, but how did it even, how did it even find its way? Where did Rousseau get it from?

Did he get it from someplace? Or does it just, you know, come from his brow fully formed? I don't think it came from his brow fully formed. I don't think he's that smart. But ultimately, there was a current. And so what we're not naming is, we're not naming the name of this thing. This thing isn't just back to Rousseau. And to get biblical with you, it's back to the serpent in Genesis. what we're not naming is Gnosticism. The reason it ends up in a feebrile madness is this is, like you said, the belief, in fact, that we can be as gods, or in fact that we actually are already as gods who have had imposed upon us that we've forgotten that. And so we're...

Right. So it's the ancient... So, yeah, for my audience who are Christians, they'll recognize that, you know, in the garden, Satan says, you can be as gods. So the idea is that the one who calls himself God, he's bad. And I'm Satan, and I'm here to deliver you from that bad God who is oppressive. And you want to be really free. Well, then just transgress against that God.

So it's kind of a Promethean idea and that we're going to rebel against this evil God. and you're saying that it's Gnostic. So talk a little bit about that. What is Gnosticism? So what I think, now I mentioned you can do Rousseau, we can do Kant or Hegel, but also another name that got left out that must come into the articulation, of course, is Marx, Karl Marx being a student of Hegel's philosophy, particularly. What these kind of four particular philosophers, among others,

they were caught up in a current that today we would call it, if we lived then, we would call it the New Age movement. These kinds of mystical or esoteric thoughts like Gnostic religion were kind of the elite stratum of society was toying around with them, kind of like how Madonna is toying around with these things and have turned herself into a demon or something. And so the same kind of phenomenon was happening then. And so I think that the impulse that we are actually as gods just got translated into a modern context in their reaction. So rather than that there's the being described in Genesis that's God that's actually, actually evil that's keeping us imprisoned in the world. It is, in fact, that the bourgeois classes

of society, the upper classes of society expect us to behave certain ways, or they expect us to work in certain ways and exploit our labor. They expect us to think in certain ways. And so they exploit us and keep us trapped within a prison of the world. And that's, of course, Rousseau's perhaps most famous line. Man is born free, but everywhere he's in chains. The chains he described are the social contract that are that are arrayed by the elite members of society who tell everybody how they have to live in order to kind of count as a full citizen and what it means to be a noble person and all of these different strictures of society. So what they did was they relocated this character from the Gnostic heresy, the so-called

Demiurge, the evil demon that creates and builds the world. They relocated it in the upper crust of society into the elites of society. And they said, well, these people, whether it's the Bergen, whether it's the capitalist class or whatever, they're holding us down. They're holding all the people down. Or it's the church and the aristocracy and the monarchy, but the point is that we rebel against, you know, the man, that's what we call it today. We're rebel against the man, the system, the patriarchy, whatever it is, rebel against that and we'll be free. We've neglected to mention Nietzsche. We've liberated. We've neglected to mention Nietzsche. I mean, his idea of beyond good and

evil that there is no such thing as good or evil. These are social constructs imposed upon us. And to be truly free, we have to throw off the shackles of morality, bourgeois morality, Christian morality. Yeah, that's the whole idea with Nietzsche is that you become the Superman by transcending morality completely. So a Superman, which is, of course, an ideal that was held up in the Nazi regime, is somebody who has renounced the...

the kind of low level false morality imposed on people by other people and is living freely in and of himself. He's now able to do things that other people can't do because he's not bound by a conscience. He's not bound by morals. He's not bound by the rules of society. And while there can be truths to these things, this is a fundamental nature of this line of thought, whether we call it Gnostic or communist or fascist or whatever, is that it marries truth and lie. It mixes truth and lie together so that what it dissolves, speaking from both a

Christian and just a sane perspective, is the capacity for discernment. You can't tell true and false. You can't tell right and wrong. You can't tell good and evil. And in our day, you can't tell male and female. You can't even tell the basic. I was going to say that's, you have to go there eventually. In other words, to my mind, it's a war on reality and on nature. And so the idea that I'm a man or I'm a woman, is offensive to someone who says, no, I reject nature and reality. I can be whatever I want to be. It is pure subjectivity. And anyone who disagrees with me is my enemy and is trying to keep me in chains.

Of course. Of course, it has to be a war on reality because that's ultimately what it seeks liberation from. And if we go back to the fundamental idea that this is Gnosticism retooled for the modern and postmodern era, where we no longer believe necessarily in spirits. That's, of course, where it has to go. The idea with Gnosticism is pure dualism. There is the spirit and there is the material. The spirit is all good.

The material is all bad. And your spiritual quest is to shed the material and return to spirit. And only through the secret knowledge of this is how it's really organized and how you're held in the material, can you possibly have a chance of doing that? That's the spiritual quest. So if this is the same thing, we have to wage war on nature. We have to wage war on reality because reality and nature are a prison. from which we must free ourselves. And that is the logic.

And, of course, reality doesn't particularly care about your fantasies. And so at the end, this turns into, you know, totalitarian control and bloodbaths and destruction everywhere it goes. And of course, that's where we are today. In other words, the radical left seems increasingly obviously crazy. In other words, we might have had discussions some years ago, but the point is now they seem to be advocating for things that pretty much everyone knows is insane. But the question is whether enough people have the courage to say,

no, that's crazy. Women shouldn't need to compete against men in sporting events. That doesn't seem right. Like we've achieved, you know, I guess I kind of saw some of this coming, and I thought this is healthy. In other words, it's healthy for the Olympics to be blown up because of this stuff. It's like let's deal with the logical, you know, outcome of these ideas. What's going to happen?

We can no longer have the Olympics. We can no longer have sports. We can no longer have, you know, and that's just dealing with the trans madness. But it's interesting how these ideas, they're rarely, you know, seen through to the end because when you do see them through to the end, suddenly everybody sees, oh, sorry, that can't work. Yeah, well, I mean, the madness is certainly breaking through to the surface, and I think people can see what is being advocated for. And the question becomes courage, like you said, will people have the courage to stand up and say this is nonsense?

And the reason is, like, if we go, again, I just want to come back to the same Gnostic concept. They believe that God or reality itself or the upper classes or whatever are an evil demon. that's keeping everybody locked down. What they're actually doing is they always confess by projection. They tell you what they think and how they want to be in the world. So what they are actually doing is erecting themselves as an evil demon that holds everybody in fear, basically, and imprisons them in their system of the world. So it does take courage to speak up and say, you tyrants, no, it is not merely that they've gone mad.

It's that they understood that they could arrange social conditions where you would pay a half, heavy social and maybe professional and personal price for trying to stand up, where even to notice what's going on makes you feel like you're the one who has lost your mind because everybody seems to be going along with the madness. And they understand this not just on a profound or almost instinctual level, but they understand this on a religious level. Their religious obligation is to create a social structure that elevates them and makes everybody else too afraid and too uncertain to be able to speak against it. And they're very effective at it.

But at the end, there has to be a rupture. And it has to start to destroy the things that it colonizes and takes over as people start to see that this just cannot possibly be. Okay, we've got more talking to James Lindsay. I'm so glad to get to introduce him to my audience. You can see him on Twitter at Conceptual James. And of course, new discourses is the journal. that he found.

We'll be right back. Go Dutch treat. You were sweet. Dark ashamed of. Save those lies. Tell me why Relief Factor is so successful at lowering or eliminating pain. I'm often asked that question just the other night. I was asked that question.

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man or a woman or whether we can know whether someone is a man or a woman. We can't talk about the possibility that elections are stolen. We don't talk about that. We don't talk about whether the vaccines could be harmful. We don't talk about that stuff. Don't talk about it. If you talk about those things, you're going to be in trouble. And because my mother escaped East Germany and my father left Greece. That was, you know, where the communists were trying to take over. I was raised to be hostile to the mindset that says, you can't talk about this, you can't talk about that. I was raised to believe in America that we talk about everything because we're not afraid of truth. We're not afraid of exploring truth, having conversations. Right now, we're really,

we are seeing this come to a head in various ways in our culture. Yeah, well, where I see us right now is that these movements grow kind of in a subterranean fashion. They grow underground. They infiltrate. They slowly subvert, quietly subvert. In other words, as Solzhenitian phrased it, they wear disguises up until the moment when they can no longer wear disguises.

And they stop wearing disguises, A, if they take power. and B, if they're exposed, at which point they just kind of let the madness flow. The fact is that these folks know that there's a Rubicon that they've crossed and that they have crossed it. So there is no backwards for them. There is only progress in their vision. There is no retreat at this point. They have been exposed. So we're in this very peculiar position where we now very broadly, not everybody, but very broadly, we know that they're lying.

We know that this is absurd. we know that this is madness. We know that this is a rupture in our society that could end our society. And yet they are proceeding with the pedal to the metal. They absolutely are doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on every single possible madness that they put forward. They are, you know, whether it's whatever sector with politics just going all out forward more, more, more, more. In other words, they are careening toward a legitimation crisis that they cannot recover from, or they're going to grab the bag and run with it,

depending on if they can actually get enough done to break the foundation of our society or tear the fabric of American and Western life. And that's the crucial moment that we're actually at. And I think that it is truly an open question as to which thing will happen in the short term. And in the long term, they are destroyed. They have to be destroyed because they're at odds with reality, and reality will assert itself and always win. But in the short term, they may grab a lot of power.

and they are at the decisive moment, and I think they're going for the bag, knowing that everybody sees them. You can imagine a bank robber, and everybody's figured out that he's a bad guy, and he's running to grab the bag right now. And if he can get it and get out the door, maybe he can steal the society. And that's kind of the place where I think that they know that they are, which is why you see this rampant acceleration, even though people are crying out to stop, stop, stop everywhere they turn. Right. In other words, they've outed themselves and there's no way back. And this is what I find fascinating and in some ways delicious to watch

because the craziness was muted or hidden. You know, when I remember the first time I noticed it was when somebody talked about defunding the police. And I thought it was a joke. Like I thought, what do you mean? Like if there's no cop to come when somebody is mugging you or, trying to kill you, then what? And they didn't have an answer for that. It was just doubling down on, you know, the cops are racist, they're bad, we hate them.

And you thought, well, that's so childish. I can't believe. Are you really putting that forward? And that was, again, the first time I noticed it, but the idea that, oh, borders are bad. You know, you think, this is so crazy. How did we ever get there? the idea that we can't know whether someone is a man or a woman or the idea that a man could become a woman or become, you think, wow, they're daring me to, you know, to say something. But it does remind me, I guess ultimately what we're talking about when we talk about the nature of this is that this is sheer power.

This is the idea that I'm going to put a gun to your head and I'm going to tell you either say one plus one equals three or I'll kill you. It has nothing to do with reality or truth. It has everything to do with their ability to get you to shut up about what they don't want you to say and to say what they want you to say. And that's the nakedness of it. It is pure power. It is a will to power, which ultimately is evil. And we've just never seen it like we're seeing it right now. Yeah, I agree with that completely.

that's exactly the diagnosis. It's power for the sake of power, for the sake of power, because that's what they associate with true authority. They think that authority flows from illegitimate application of power, so they, of course, want to make themselves the people who have the illegitimate application of power. Now, again, speaking biblically, this is the difference between God and Satan at the most fundamental level. God has true authority. Satan has no authority, so he creates the simulation of authority and collects it in the world. where it's false. And so it's the, it's quite literally the battle between good and evil on a very profound level.

Going to a break. Final segment with James Lindsay, don't go away. Hey, folks, you've all helped support MyPillow and their employees in these tough economic times. Mike Lindell knows this and continues to give back to listeners with deals on his most popular products. You've heard me recently speak about the MySlippers, the Giza sheets, My Pillar 2.0 and more. For a limited time, the MyPillow six-pack bath towel set is back in. stock. Take it from me. These towels are highly recommended. They're luxuriously soft and super absorbent, meaning they actually function like a towel should. With a special deal, you'll get two

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Use promo code Eric or Mypillow.com. Folks, welcome back. Final segment with James Lindsay. James, what's a good website for you if people want to find you? It's new discourses.com. That's the one that you've been referencing. Lots of podcasts, lots of articles, lots of things to read and listen to to learn about this.

New Discourses.com. We were going to talk about something called degrowth, and this brings up the larger issue. I mean, it's the same issue, but anybody paying attention looking at what's happening in America right now, it looks to most people not like we're dealing with incompetence in the Biden administration and so on and so forth, but it looks like we're dealing with people who, actually want to destroy the American economy, who actually want to break the back of America, that's what it looks like, because it's in their best interest to break it. Am I getting that wrong?

Or how do you see that? No, you're right. No, that's absolutely right. And so their big new movement is degrowth. We're going to degrow. We've had all this growth. We have to degrow. We have to move beyond the idea of growth.

Sometimes the brand is beyond growth. We have to de-grow the American economy. We have to de-grow our way of life. We have to expect a lower standard of living. And this is the fruit of the past maybe 70 years of Marxist thought in the West, is that we're going to de-grow the West. Of course, that will not apply to the global South or to our primary adversary, China. They will be encouraged to grow.

Believe it or not, there is a logic to this that isn't pure malevolence in the destruction of the West and destruction of Christianity. There is a profound but perverse logic that they are actually following that we have to diminish the West in order to be sustainable or whatever for emissions and climate crisis. Yeah, they believe this. Many of these people believe this and they believe that. I mean, it has to do with the lie of the zero-sum game, right? That they believe that unless we diminish, unless we knock down the rich and the powerful and the high and mighty, we can't rise. They don't believe in the idea of creating wealth. They believe in the idea of redistributing wealth.

And so this is a fundamental piece of how they see things. But this is happening now. It is happening not just in the West. It's happening in America. And that's part of what, you know, it's the global elites working through the American left. But they actually want to bring us down. They're not pretending that they're, they want us to have a booming economy.

Right, that's right. And they have a, the perverse logic is a little bit tricky. I know that we're short on time and I don't know if I want to introduce something that's heavy, but there's this concept known as Thucydides trap. And I'm not going to get into the details of where that comes from or what it is. It refers to a philosopher Thucydides who is observing the Peloponnesian War. But the idea is when you have a dominant power for us that's the United States and the West and its allies. And then you have a rising power, which is China in this case, that eventually you are going to be.

trapped into war because the rising power will want to assert its hand and dominance over the existing dominant power. So you become trapped as the rising power rises. And so what they have done over the past 50 to 70 years is they've aided that rise of China. China, of course, is communist controlled. It is also deeply aggrieved and not willing to forgive that against the West. And so the threat of the war has loomed. And this is due city of these traps. So they've been saying that we have to avoid Ducydides' trap while they've been building the conditions of it. So how do you avoid the war? Well, if the dominant power loses its dominance for other reasons, you can think of it as a 40, 50-year-old guy with a torn hamstring, he won't get in the

ring and fight at all. So in the moment when China arrives on the stage ready to fight the war for global dominance, the West will say, we're in no condition to fight and we'll just hand it over to you. And thus, war is avoided. And so this is the major scam that they've been running, on the world is to allow the rise of China and to diminish the West so it won't fight for itself when the moment arises. And the elites don't care about any national or civilizational loyalty. They just care where they can park their yacht. And if they park it in the South China Sea or outside of Shanghai, that's not much different

from parking it outside of something in France. And they can rise, in other words, in another culture, because they're not bound. They're not economically and culturally bound to the land that they were born in. They're billionaires. They can afford to go wherever they want and start a new life however they want. They're global citizens. And so their incentives are all such that, well, China's on the rise. We've helped China rise.

We've arranged a situation where war is probably inevitable. The best way out is to cripple our own society so that it won't fight the war and then just to move on to the new society. But we always want to know who are these people. that are doing this. That's where it becomes so difficult to fathom, that there are people with enough power to be making such things happen. And obviously, we have to all go along with it enough to let it happen. Many of us are now fighting back, and that's the question, where will it go? But who are these elites that would plan something like degrowth, that would want to cripple the economy, that would be able to take over the left in America such that the Democratic Party

would be going along with these kinds of things? Well, I mean, we can name some pretty easy names, which I think that the United Nations, the WHO, and their partnership with the World Economic Forum and International Monetary Fund and work through the Council for Foreign Relations or Foreign Relations. I think that those entities are pretty close to an epicenter of where this is happening. I see the World Economic Forum. It gets held up a lot. I see it like a car. You have this power source somewhere, the engine that's putting out power. and the power has to get to the drive train to move the wheels, to move the car. And the piece that does that is the transmission. The transmission transmits the power from the engine to the drive train.

And the World Economic Forum is the transmission of this vehicle that's moving the world. I don't know what that metaphor leads us to, except that I know that if you identify and take out the transmission on a vehicle, it's not going anywhere for a while. So the World Economic Forum becomes a useful target. and I think it's a key coordinating hub that's transmitting that power wherever it's coming from, whatever organizations. Some people in the past, John Coleman suggested the so-called Committee of 300. Nobody knows if that exists for real or not. The British and Danish royal families are allegedly part of that. You know, there are different suspicions as to who the they behind that they are.

But we know that power is flowing from WHO and UN, and we know that it's flowing through the world economic form. And ultimately, we the people in the United States of America, America, we're not governed by those people. We've allowed them to infiltrate us. We did not elect them. We, the people, are the government. And unless we recover our cultural confidence in the idea that self-government on the American model, according to the founders, is the way forward. And we need to reject all of these globalist folks. We can't recover. And so that's the key. I'm sorry we're out of time. James Lindsay, just a joy and a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much. Yeah, my pleasure. Hey, rain and snow, so many things I could have done.

Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Robert Netsley right now, who is with Inspire Investing. Robert, I can't help but get excited about what you've created, an opportunity for people to find out if their money is funding wicked things, if they have money in a 401k or retirement fund, whatever it is. that is invested in companies that are doing evil things, that is promoting pornography, promoting abortion, promoting any number of things or ideologies with your money, folks. So Robert Nestle has created something where you can get a free report

that tells you where your money is, and they will help you get your money into companies that are doing good things. So you have to go to InspireAdvisors.com slash air. Eric, inspireadvisors.com slash Eric, you get a free report. But this is something I, you know, Robert, I guess it just gives me hope that it's possible to turn things around in America. Because when I think of how much money people have invested out there, if they would understand what's going on and shift that money to good stuff, it's just huge.

It's just absolutely monstrous. Like what is- It's enormous. It's enormous. And we are seeing fruit from that labor. It's remarkable. It doesn't have to even be trillions of dollars to change things. I've been on the phone, you know, in recent weeks, you know, with investor relations and CFOs and whatnot.

We regularly engage with companies that we invest in or are like to invest in or kind of just speaking biblical truth, the corporate power. And, you know, one of the things we hear is often that, number one, these people have never heard, they tell us they've never heard from a faith-based investor before. they've been doing their job for 20, 30 years. You know, executive major organizations never heard from a faith-based investor. So number one, they need to hear our voice. Number two, they're thankful to hear it. Even in some of these sort of, you know,

woke businesses you think that this don't care, there are people in those businesses of influence that actually do care about what we have to say and oftentimes have enough influence to change things. So, for instance, Costco stopped giving money to gay pride parades. Chevron stopped giving money to Planned Parenthood. There's a laundry list of other organizations. that has changed things.

That is unbelievable. Robert Nelson. That is unbelievable. It is so wonderful. I want to tell people, folks, what you do and don't do, you can change the world if you take an interest in this. When I hear that a company like Costco would stop giving money to something like that or Chevron, these are huge, huge companies. And you shop there, your money may be invested there. when we get involved in these things, we can change the world.

So I want to say the action point is go to invest. I'm sorry, inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. Inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. You'll get a free report that will help you figure this out. And I know, Robert, that you guys will help people if they want to transition to invest in companies that believe in their values. but this is a gigantic thing that we have. I mean, it's to me scandalous when we have power and we don't use that power.

It's like when I say, I'm not going to vote, I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to do that. When you don't do those things, people who don't share your values, who share opposite, who have opposite values, they're going to prevail. So I just want to say to you, Robert, thank you for taking this on because it is game. changing. Like you said, it's a movement. The more people that do this, it's an amazing thing when we think of the money that is out there, that many people of faith with traditional values have invested in woke companies. Ladies and gentlemen, you've got to do something about it. You've just got to do something about it. This is like a mandate that we've got to live our faith out in every sphere

and where your money is. That's a big deal. So please go to inspire. advisors.com slash Eric. This is a free report, inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. Robert Natsley, thank you. Pleasure. Thank you, Eric.