The Eric Metaxas Show - John Zmirak (Encore)

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

John Zmirak joins Eric to discuss his book "No Second Amendment, No First" in a special Socrates in the Studio conversation.  go to socratesinthecityplus.com for more. ...

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas 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. It's a nutritious smoothie of creamy, fresh yogurt, vanilla, vanilla, and a mushy banana. For your mind? Drink it all down. It's nummy.
Starting point is 00:00:36 I wubb, vanilla. I wubb, I wop, vanilla. Here comes Eric Metaxus. Hey, folks, welcome to the program. It is Friday, and today we've got a very special treat. As you know, we've launched a new program at Socrates in the city. It's called Socrates in the studio. So it's urbane, sophisticated conversations.
Starting point is 00:00:59 And somehow I had one of those with John Zmirach. Yes. Try to picture John Zmirak at Socrates in the studio. It was so delightful. He has a new book coming out. And so today we're airing that on this program. Can't see the video. For that, you have to go to Socrates in the city plus Socrates Plus.
Starting point is 00:01:19 Sign up for that. You want to see it. Lots of other great stuff. But today, John Zmirak at Socrates in the studio. Here it is. Folks, welcome to Socrates in the studio. This is the studio. Today we have kind of an interesting Socrates in the studio.
Starting point is 00:01:37 session because it's with someone with whom I've had many conversations, but never in a Socrates format. That person is this man, John Smirak. John Smirak, welcome to Socrates in the studio. Thank you, Eric. I really appreciate it. And I like the fact that it's being videotaped. It's not live. It's not alive. You can edit things out. I don't need to wear that shock. Like Red Fox. I don't have to wear that shock collar. Right. Yeah. We know, so we've known each other since college, and I've interviewed you many, many times, but this is different. This is Socrates in the city.
Starting point is 00:02:23 It's a different brand. It's a different thing. And you have come out. You do a lot of writing, but today you come here as the author of, of, you come here as the author of, What I know to be an important book on a very important subject, in the interest of full disclosure, I wrote the forward to the book because it seems to me such an important subject. So first of all, congratulations on this important book. Thank you, Eric.
Starting point is 00:02:59 It is titled No Second Amendment, No First. So let's start with the, you know, the nutshell version of the subject of the book before I start saying what it is. Tell me, in your own words, what is the thesis of the book? The thesis of the book is that religious liberty and gun rights in America are not just two accidental byproducts of our history. They're not quirks of the founding or stuff that happens to be in the Constitution. They both flow out of the same worldview, the same view of the human person
Starting point is 00:03:43 as the image and likeness of God with an inalienable dignity, inalienable rights, an eternal destiny, and profound responsibilities before God and to our neighbor. How did you come to write this? this book. And again, I mentioned the title, no Second Amendment, no first. That's not necessarily something that's clear to people, which is why I am so happy you wrote the book and you give
Starting point is 00:04:11 the intellectual background. But how did you come, or let's put another way, you've written and thought about these things a lot over a long time, but to write a significant, to some extent scholarly treatment of the subject, because people talk about these things a lot. But what led you to say this needed to be done? Watching what happened during the COVID panic, watching people throw away their constitutional rights and their human dignity with both hands in a desperate quest to feel safe, watching pastors shut down their churches, bishops shut down their churches, bishops shut down their cathedrals. The Pope turned his moral theology over to the World Health Organization,
Starting point is 00:05:02 watching even President Trump be at first beguiled by Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, watching YouTube say that it would censor doctors and researchers from speaking what they believed about the experimental gene therapy they called a vaccine, watching pro-lifers of many years, just willingly throw over their scruples about an abortion-tainted vaccine. I want to be clear, the vaccines
Starting point is 00:05:35 that were offered in the United States and around the world, there was no pro-life alternative. All the vaccines were developed using a kidney taken from an aborted girl named Johanna who was aborted in the Netherlands
Starting point is 00:05:51 I believe in 1967. Her kidney was taken out while she was still alive, because that's the only way you can get usable organs, is to vivisect a living fetus. They took out her kidney and they cloned it. H-E-K, some number, but I call her Johanna, because she deserves a name. And the researcher, the Dutch researcher who developed this cell line, testified under oaths. before the FDA, before Congress, that it was an abortion. And we know medically there's no way to get an organ unless the child is still living when it's extracted.
Starting point is 00:06:34 So this was a really gruesome and horrible thing. It's as if the vaccine were made from Anne Frank's body when she was murdered in the death camp. And I said, I'm not taking this vaccine. Maybe I'll die from it because I'm overweight. I'm in the risk factor. I'd rather die than live from the fruits of an abortion. Watching the Pope and prominent pastors,
Starting point is 00:07:00 including some conservative pastors whom you've spoken before, watching them all say, oh, no, no, no, there's no moral problem here. You've got to get the vaccine. It's your duty. If you love your neighbor, you'll get the vaccine. Watching that, I thought, wow, they sold out cheap. They didn't even get 30 pieces of silver. They got three.
Starting point is 00:07:18 And you know what? It turned out to be little chocolate candies, in foil. I didn't think we'd leap into a discussion of the vaccine, but I'm glad we did, because what amazes me, John, about you, one of the reasons I admire you is that you discover things and write about them that no one else has discovered or written about. So we're going to be talking about the Second Amendment and gun rights, but I was myself, and this is not the first time, astonished, when you presented this information to me on my radio program, I thought, this is what always happens to me. I hear something like this, and then I think, why haven't I
Starting point is 00:08:01 heard this before? This is very important information. This is not your opinion. Is John just a nut? And believe me, I wish I were. Well, you are a nut. But even though you're a nut, you're 100% right on all of these things. And when this information is presented, I think it's hard for people, generally, myself included, to process it because you say, surely I would have heard of this.
Starting point is 00:08:32 This is too important for it not to have been covered. So your statement, which I just want to be clear before we move on, is that every one of the vaccines that were being pushed, was tainted as being derived from an aborted human being. Right. Okay.
Starting point is 00:08:54 So that's one level of horror. And the fact that the churches fell all over themselves the moment Big Brother snapped his fingers. Oh, we'll close our churches. We'll get checks from the government. What could be better? We don't even have to show up on Sunday. We don't have to do anything. Like, oh, wow, the churches just want to be part of the government.
Starting point is 00:09:16 the way they are in Germany. They just want to have salaries from the government. They don't really want to be independent civic institutions that could potentially push back against tyranny, which, by the way, is what's happening. Gretchen Whitmer shut down her state and locked all the citizens in their homes in violation of the state constitution,
Starting point is 00:09:36 as the state Supreme Court later said. She suffered no consequences. You know who did? People who the FBI lured into a fake plot to kidnap her. whom they entraped, the way they routinely entrapped Muslim Americans after 9-11. That Patriot Act, which I condemned at the time, when George W. Bush promoted it, I said, don't give George W. Bush any powers. You don't want Hillary Clinton to have in four years. Nobody listened to me. And the Patriot Act was weaponized by Barack Obama to turn the FBI into a secret police
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Starting point is 00:12:10 Legacy pm.investments.com. Check it out. I just want to go back to the beginning. Ultimately, your book, the principal thesis of the book, is that our Second Amendment rights flow from the same vision of the human person as our First Amendment rights. And people who are willing to surrender our Second Amendment rights don't care about our First Amendment rights. The same churches who, when there's a mass shooting, they come out and they talk about, the epidemic of gun violence, as if it were tuberculosis or something.
Starting point is 00:12:55 They don't talk about this person committed a terrible sin and murdered these people. His soul is accountable before God. Their souls have gone to God. Let's pray for the dead. Let's pray for the survivors. Let's pray for the conversion of this disgusting murderer. No. No, they talk about the bacillus of gun violence is spreading to every community.
Starting point is 00:13:18 and we must vaccinate ourselves against it. They talk as if we are not human beings with immortal souls, as if we were termites in a colony, and they work for the queen. And we are all meant to follow, to like sniff around to get the pheromone or watch the other termites bees dancing around in order that we can just operate like little robots. And nothing made them happier than to do this. The glee with which people said, oh, I got vaccinated.
Starting point is 00:13:48 Oh, I'm wearing a mask. Oh, I'm staying home. Well, okay. So there's some, I want to go back again to another thing. So how was it that this abrogation of rights and freedoms led you to write this book? In other words, as we experienced these things unprecedented in America. We had never seen these kinds of things. And I think this is why so many people to get.
Starting point is 00:14:18 give them a little grace, the reason they went along is because of the unprecedented nature. We had not been trained to be wary of these kinds of things. So tons of people whom we might otherwise respect and expect to do the right thing, were caught unawares and went along with it, and we now see what happened. We now see just how dangerous it is to trust the people in authority. if you hear someone is associated with an international organization, you should meet and you talk to such a person, you should count the fillings in your teeth afterwards
Starting point is 00:14:56 and see if your credit cards are still in your wallet. Right. Some people learn that in the last few years. Many didn't, but some did, because freedom is something that I always say. We pretty much take for granted because we've had it. It's been challenged so little. in America.
Starting point is 00:15:18 All right, but look what happened in 2020. Political riots stirred up by the Democratic Party using the pretext of George Floyd. Remember, the cops who killed George Floyd were immediately suspended, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. The system worked. But the people wanted to destroy the system,
Starting point is 00:15:40 the anti-American Marxists, like Barack Obama and his ghostwriter Bill Ayers, who was a Weather Underground terrorist. Like Kamala Harris, who was trained by Willie Brown, Willie Brown, the good friend of Jim Jones, the cult leader, the radical left that is anti-American, that says that the American founding itself was a conspiracy of slave owners in 1619.
Starting point is 00:16:07 I call the 1619 project the protocols of the elders of Jamestown, because it is every bit as unhinged a conspiracy theory, as the protocols of the elders of Zion. Both of them were political conspiracy theories cooked up by journalists and promoted in newspapers in order to demonize and target members of a different ethnic group
Starting point is 00:16:32 so that the government could persecute them. Well, you remember the George Floyd riots, people hiding in their homes, leftist mobs taking control of entire neighborhoods in places like Seattle and Portland, beating up their political enemies, store owners like Jake Gardner, a bar owner in Omaha, Nebraska,
Starting point is 00:16:49 tried to defend his elderly father from a looter. He was prosecuted for allegedly committing a racial hate crime by shooting the looter who was choking him. He was driven to suicide. And he was a U.S. combat hero, and after his suicide, a Democratic member of the Omaha legislature went on Twitter to gloat about his death. You dedicate this book.
Starting point is 00:17:14 To Jake Gardner. I'm in touch with his family. and when the book is printed, I'm going to take the first copy, and I'm going to go to Arlington National Cemetery to Jake Gardner's grave, and I'm going to lay it on Jake Gardner's grave. And I want everyone watching this to remember Jake Gardner to pray for him and his family. He was a victim of the American Deep State, a victim of the tyranny that the left and the compliant,
Starting point is 00:17:41 wussy, cowardly churches are imposing upon us one step at a time. in 2020 you had people locked in their homes with their jobs canceled, their churches closed because of this virus, but you could have George Floyd riots. And those were fine. Those did not spread the virus because racism is a public health threat. And so by being anti-racist, they're actually healthy. But if you go to a Trump rally, that's a super spreader event. Do you remember Herman Kane, that wonderful businessman who had run for president? He went to a Trump rally. He caught COVID. He died. they mocked him on television. They laughed about it.
Starting point is 00:18:17 Oh, that's what happens when you go to these super spreader events. At the same time, rioters were looting stores all across the country and they were being described as mostly peaceful. Can we go back to John Locke? For those who are unaware of John Locke, tell those watching who was John Locke?
Starting point is 00:18:36 John Locke was a devout Protestant in England under the stewards. And the stewards, were sort of high Anglicans sympathetic to Catholics, and there was a civil war in England between basically the Puritans on the one side and the Anglicans and Catholics on the other. And each side persecuted the other. Nobody comes out of this with clean hands.
Starting point is 00:19:05 But out of that struggle, they finally established a constitutional monarchy. when they brought in William and Mary, and this is the origin of our Second Amendment and its connection to religious freedom. The text of our Second Amendment is lifted almost word for word from the English Bill of Rights of 1690. But here's the interesting difference. In the English Bill of Rights, it says,
Starting point is 00:19:36 no Protestant may be deprived of the right to have firearms. And I said, my first instinct, as a Catholic was to be offended by that. And then being half Irish, I could sort of see the sense of it. But just thinking of my family. But I used to joke that everyone in America should be allowed to have a gun except Smirax. But since then I've moved to Texas and I'm now very good with an AR-15.
Starting point is 00:20:02 I still won't drive a car, though. I live in Dallas, but I will not drive. I have an AR-15, but I will not drive. There are certain principles I will not compromise. I'm going to Uber it for the rest of life. But anyway. Protestants can't be deprived of weapons. Why would it be so weirdly specific?
Starting point is 00:20:20 So then you read the history. Charles I, Charles the second, James the second had been disarming Puritans, had been searching their churches and taking away their weapons in order to render them helpless for a civil war or a persecution. So as a condition of accepting the throne, King William and Queen Mary had to assign
Starting point is 00:20:43 this Bill of Rights, which guaranteed Protestants the right to have guns. So why were the Protestants so keen on having guns? It wasn't to defend their store of goods from Amway. It wasn't to hunt ducks. It was to protect their religious freedom. The same kind of people created the colonies in North America, most of them. And their churches were where they had militias. You would go to church.
Starting point is 00:21:12 you would hear a sermon on the importance of defending your community, and then you would go out and do target practice, and you would drill in order to defend your church and your town from the Indians or the Spanish or the French. Those were the people who then defended their cities and towns from the English, and overthrew that government and established the United States of America. And that's why they wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution.
Starting point is 00:21:40 Stephen Halbrook, a wonderful constitutional scholars, got a number of books. One is called the Founders Second Amendment. And he shows you the debates about the Second Amendment among the founders. Nobody debated whether Americans had the right to have guns. The whole point of America was militias that would defend their freedom against tyranny. And the whole Constitution was written. It's like a Rube Goldberg designed to make government as frustrating and difficult as possible, to make it impossible for a tyrant to take power.
Starting point is 00:22:13 It's this huge elaborate Rube Goldberg. Foreigners looked at it, especially the French, and they said, this is not efficient. How can the king do anything? That's the whole point. We don't want a Napoleon. We don't want a rope spear. Gridlock was the point.
Starting point is 00:22:26 Gridlock was the point. Matt Gates was the point that someone like Matt Gates could come along and speak truth to power and try to defund the FBI from kicking down the doors of pro-lifers and infiltrating Latin mass Catholic churches and persecuting PTA moms who don't want child porn dumped on their kids.
Starting point is 00:22:47 The whole point of the Constitution was so that Matt Gates could bring Kevin McCarthy down and could defund Jack Smith and defund the deep state. That's why we have a United States of America. That's why we're not just a bunch of provinces like Canada. Hey, this is Eric Metaxus. For years, I've told you about nutrometics,
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Starting point is 00:25:05 That's promo code Eric. 800-9783057. Promo code Eric. Or go to MyPillow.com and use promo code. Promo code Eric. Dark a shame, darling, dark a shame. All the founders agreed that gun rights were crucial. James Madison said, if all these checks and balances I have written into this Constitution fail,
Starting point is 00:25:34 you will still have a militia of millions that would overthrow any tyrant. So the Second Amendment was the... Wait, Madison said that. Yeah, he said that. That we'd still have a militia of millions to overthrow any tyrant. And so that the Second Amendment is the... break blast in case of tyranny, hanging on the wall in the founding of the United States. So isn't it interesting that the connection was between religious freedom and gun rights?
Starting point is 00:26:03 That seems to suggest it comes from something profound, right? That there's something basic about the human person that says he should be able to worship in the way his conscience directs him, without secret police from the government coming and saying, oh, no, no, in this county you have to be a Mennonite, or in this county you have to be a Catholic. If you want to be a Baptist, you're going to have to go down the road because that's a Baptist county. No, that's not how we're going to do things here,
Starting point is 00:26:36 because we saw what a disaster it was in Europe. We saw that having state-sponsored churches produced a lot of leaves, bureaucrats who didn't really care about the kingdom of God, but wanted to make sure that their check cleared. Well, isn't that what happened with the PPP loans? All our churches became government-supported churches that were dependent on checks from the government. And a lot of our churches, my own Catholic church, are heavily dependent on non-profit contracts from the federal government to resettle immigrants. I joke that the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops is an immigration pyramid scheme and gay employment agency with a Catholic problem because 40% of their money
Starting point is 00:27:24 comes from federal resettlement money where what they're doing is they're helping the human traffickers get people from Latin America and resettle them around America and get them on public assistance and they're creaming off part of the money. Okay, so we got a lot of things in the middle here. So number one is the idea that our founding, Reenders realize that churches need to be part of the free market. Right, they need to afford. They can't be like American automakers in the 70s that are protected by tariffs,
Starting point is 00:27:58 so they create rolling couches. They get five miles per gallon. I don't remember those, but the... Pontiac Bonneville. Yeah. Actually, I love the Pontiac Barrio. So do I. So do I.
Starting point is 00:28:11 That was an awesome car. It was a rolling couch. But that was one of the greatest cars ever. the tail fins were not that high. It was like just right. My uncle Joe had a punnyack Bonneville. But the principle is that we want the government to stay out of our business. We want people to be able to be utterly free to do whatever they want.
Starting point is 00:28:33 Within respecting the inalienable rights of their neighbors and the common good. Right. Right. Well, we're not libertarian. Well, exactly. God forbid. But the point is that, You're saying that what fascinates me really about this idea is that we've become,
Starting point is 00:28:53 even people who talk about the Second Amendment have become generally unmoored from these fundamental foundational ideas. You know, we mention the Second Amendment, militia, whatever, but we don't seem. We don't draw the connections. The same people who go to church on Sunday and go to the gun rage on Saturday, they might do both things, but they don't see the fundamental profound connection between those things.
Starting point is 00:29:27 That the same vision of the human person that says you should be able to defend yourself against home invaders, not just wait for the police to come and draw chalk line around your wife's body. You should be able to defend yourself. And by the way, if the police become tyrannical, You should be able to defend yourself against them too.
Starting point is 00:29:46 That is the same vision that created the churches that had the second great awakening, that that is the vision of America. So the same reason you go to church on Sunday is the reason you go to the gun range on Saturday, because you're the same person. You're not becoming a different person when you go to a different place. You are the same image of God who has the same fundamental rights and responsibilities. And I saw all these things being thrown aside during the COVID panic with our churches falling all over themselves to prostitute themselves to Caesar and Mammon and Sodom. So I'm a student of history. My PhD is in literature. It would have been in history, but I'm terrible of foreign languages.
Starting point is 00:30:33 And you need too many foreign languages to do history. So I did literature. Sorry. But I'm obsessed with history. I view everything that happens in terms of historical precedent. I'm always going, well, that's just like the Byzantine Empire in 700, and my girlfriend goes, oh, would you shut up? What is wrong with you?
Starting point is 00:30:52 But that is literally how I see. Oh, wait, this is like the late Roman Republic. This reminds me of the Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Normans. So what do we learn from history? Our founders said, if you disarm the populace, they will be subject to tyranny. to make it Sunday. I've got a great story to tell you about our friends at Americans for Prosperity.
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Starting point is 00:32:21 When you get the blues, get a rock and roll. Let's look at the history of the 20th century. I co-wrote a book with our friend Jason Jones, The Race to Save Our Century, which we issued in 2014 on the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, warning about the violence that was coming down the pike with the loss of respect for human rights and dignity.
Starting point is 00:32:42 Well, in that research for that book, I came across a scholar named R.J. Rummel. He was a genocide scholar, and his most famous book is called Death by Government. And you can actually find it online for free. More than 200 million civilians were murdered by their governments on purpose between 1914 and 1990,
Starting point is 00:33:07 not including casualties of war. The estimates go between 170 and 250 million. Imagine, let's just say, pick the middle estimate, 200 million. It's like the population of France and England. Well, it makes the Holocaust look like a footnote. The Holocaust is part of that, and the Soviet genocides are part of that. Mao's famines are part of that. But again, this was only like 85 years or 75 years,
Starting point is 00:33:37 but 1914 to 1990, what did those 200 million victims of genocide have in common? Because we're talking Tutsis in Rwanda, Cambodians in the killing fields. What did all those people have in common? Wouldn't it be interesting to know what was the unifying characteristic of the victims of genocide? Well, you know, it's actually easy to find. They had one quality in common. They had all been disarmed by their guys. governments first. Well, part of what I find fascinating about your book, no Second Amendment,
Starting point is 00:34:19 no first, is that you remind us, and we've been doing it a little bit, but you remind us of this, on one level radical idea and another level, utterly foundational idea in America, that we are we are we the people are the government and we must beware of and protect ourselves against tyranny it's not something that we abolished one time 250 years ago but it's something that always will will come back it is a fundamental temptation in the fallen human heart
Starting point is 00:35:03 it's like saying oh we abolished prostitution back in the 1870s So, you know, we'd have to worry about that. That'll never happen again. Who would ever do such a thing? Right. What? Well, so, but the thing is, I mean, the reason I put it that way is because it seems to me, and I myself, I'm guilty of this, of drift, where you forget over time that we actually
Starting point is 00:35:29 need to take this seriously. You forget that our ancestors fought and died for these exact privileges, for these exact liberties. or they came across the ocean to find these liberties because they were being denied them in their home countries. And not just that, but that, I guess my point here is that I feel like most Americans, including gun-toting pro-second amendment Americans, are kind of like the Tories in our revolution. They forgot that it's possible that you might need,
Starting point is 00:36:08 to use your weapons against your own government. It's like a distant theory, but most of us don't think of that way. I mean, we're filming this in Texas, so maybe I'm thinking about people outside of Texas. But the point is that it is an extraordinary thing. And also, John, because in the years since the revolution, we no longer have, You know, it's one thing to own a musket when the red coats have muskets. But now we are facing something different. In other words, I can't have a bazooka and a tank in my garage.
Starting point is 00:36:51 I give you another potent example. A book I really recommend highly is Gun Control in the Third Reich by Stephen Howbrook. And he documents how when the Nazis came to power, they didn't even need to pass new gun control laws because the Weimar Republic, good liberals that they were, had put in gun registration. And, of course, the communists and the Nazis had just ignored it, but all the good people, the Jews and the socialists and the labor union members, they had all registered their guns.
Starting point is 00:37:21 So in the build-up to Crystal Noct, the Nazis just collected all the guns from the Jews, so they couldn't defend their synagogues when they decided to burn them. Give you another historical example. One of the nightmares of our age was the Jews, genocide of Christians in Iraq that George W. Bush enabled through his pointless
Starting point is 00:37:44 stupid war in Iraq. People like me warned him this will cause the genocide of Christians, they will blame the local Christians for America's policies and nobody will protect them. They will be the scapegoats. And W. said, which I did not think was an adequate response.
Starting point is 00:38:04 And his soldiers did nothing to protect the local Christians. And three quarters of them were driven out of the churches and villages where they've lived since the second century. Some of the oldest churches in the world were burned by Muslim militias. And our troops stood by and did nothing because that's what Bush ordered them to do. And later what Obama ordered them to do. The Christians of Iraq, and I know some personally who are now in exile, living in shipping containers. They can't even get into the refugee camps because those are controlled by Muslims.
Starting point is 00:38:36 and you have to be a Muslim to get into them. They can't even go to the UN refugee camps. They're living in shipping containers in the winner. These Iraqi Christians were the victims of genocide. There's no other word for it. They were disarmed by the Iraqi government. We said, oh, you need gun control. And the Iraqi government put in gun control.
Starting point is 00:39:02 And the Christians didn't have any guns. This was after, during the war, after the war? During our occupation. During our occupation, we put in gun control laws. America, I want to be clear. Under George W. Bush, we told the Iraqi government of that time, okay, they weren't bathists, but they weren't exactly, you know. Washington and Jefferson and Franklin. They weren't exactly the founders. They instituted gun control.
Starting point is 00:39:35 And guess who obeyed the law, the Christians. Guess who didn't? The Islamists and the jihadis. So the disarmed Christians were subjected to genocide. It's as if there were a divine laboratory experiment here. Go one country over to Syria, where John McCain and the neocons wanted to overthrow the government and create chaos and genocide,
Starting point is 00:39:58 but they failed, thanks to people like Trump and Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, the only candidates who did not in 2016 want to risk a nuclear war with Russia shooting down Russian planes to help bring al-Qaeda to power in Syria. There is civil war in Syria. The Christians in Syria have guns. They allied with the Kurds.
Starting point is 00:40:40 They fought a war and they defeated ISIS. They liberated the caliphate of ISIS. They're the same people, Syriac-speaking Christians. neighboring countries 10 years apart the ones who let themselves be disarmed by the government subject to genocide the ones who formed Christian militias
Starting point is 00:41:03 their churches are spreading they're making converts their churches are growing you could not have a more perfect laboratory experiment on the effect of gun rights on religious freedom and resistance to genocide than what happened by contrast in Iraq and in Syria. And I have a chapter on this in the book.
Starting point is 00:41:25 I was just going to say, I don't remember. It's been so long since I read the book, but you write about this in the book. The title is no Second Amendment, no first. How extraordinary that under George W. Bush, we persuaded the Iraqi government that we had sort of shepherding into existence to institute policies antithetical to our own Constitution.
Starting point is 00:41:56 Well, George Bush was antithetical to our Constitution, so what's the big surprise there? I mean, no, seriously, establishment rhino Republicans are the worst people in the world. They are the controlled opposition. They are the people who pretend to fight for us and sell us out. It was John McCain who brought the fake. Russia collusion document, collusion document to the FBI. As a sitting senator said, this has to be investigated.
Starting point is 00:42:25 And that's what created the fake impeachment of Donald Trump, by which our deep state, controlled by Obama's appointees, nullified the results of a democratic election because the deep state didn't like it. Now, look, to be clear, this is not about politics. This is about foundational principles. And so I often have said, it really doesn't matter who you voted for,
Starting point is 00:42:51 but you understand the basic rules. We the people get to choose our leaders. And when anyone... And the CIA doesn't get a veto. And the FBI doesn't get a veto. Well, that's the point. And so when you realize that they're doing that, you have to say, excuse me,
Starting point is 00:43:11 that those aren't the rules of the game. John, the reason your book is so important is because we are... at a I never want to quote Malcolm Gladwell, so I won't say tipping point. Crossroad. We're at a crossroad.
Starting point is 00:43:28 I would say an inflection point. We are facing in America, as I see it, the third existential threat of our existence. The first was in the revolution, the second was in the Civil War. We are now facing a existential threat.
Starting point is 00:43:47 And so people need to understand, as they did during the revolution, as they did during the Civil War, this is it, folks. This is it. Let's clarify the threat. The regime is trying to imprison its political opponent and prosecute dissidents for speaking against the state. The security apparatus has become a politicized secret police. It just classified supporters of the, of dominance. Trump of the political opponent as potential terrorists. Our leader, Biden, gave a speech demonizing the half the country that voted against him, demonizing them as being like Nazis. Dehumanizing and demonizing rhetoric is being used against Christians, against white people, against conservatives. The term they're using now is, we must decolonize. We must decolonize America.
Starting point is 00:44:47 that means it is kill whitey

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