The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 188 | How Should Christians FIGHT BACK Against the Rainbow Mafia? | Spencer Klavan | The Glenn Beck Podcast
Episode Date: June 3, 2023Sometimes, the only way forward is backward. For instance, the modern obsession with “my personal truth.” The solution to this destructive force, according to author and podcast host Spencer Klava...n, lies in ancient wisdom and the timeless question, “How is that working out for you?” Spencer joins Glenn to apply his expertise in classic literature and philosophy to the enigmas and culture wars of today, from the hubris of atheism to the rot of academia. And with a Ph.D. from Oxford, he knows a thing or two about academics. He walks Glenn through how the innovations of science have led to the religion of science, which in turn has bred horrors. He explains why he says, “Transgenderism is transhumanism.” And as a gay man, he responds to the destruction of truth in the name of people like him, including the possibility that Pride Month could be used to paint any dissenters as “Christian nationalists.” Spencer also walks Glenn through the big ideas in his latest book, “How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises.” But, despite it all, there’s room for hope, he says. The decay of society may just be a great opportunity to make civilization better. SPONSORS: If you're one of the millions of Americans who suffer every day from pain, there is hope, and it comes in the form of Relief Factor. If you want a drug-free and natural way to get your life back, go to https://relieffactor.com or call 1-800-4-RELIEF to get the $19.95 three-week quick start. Go to https://BetterSpectacles.com/BECK now to schedule a Tele-Optical appointment. You don’t even have to leave the comfort of your home. They’re offering an introductory 61% off of their progressive eyewear plus free handcrafted Rodenstock frames. When you buy socks from https://grip6.com/BECK, you’re supporting American ranchers and American manufacturers and getting a pair of socks that keep your feet warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Home title fraud is growing 2.5x faster than credit card fraud. You could be a victim and not even know it. Visit https://HomeTitleLock.com and use the promo code BECK to get 30 days of free protection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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A healthy society is one that allows its citizens to guide themselves, to pursue a life of virtue and wisdom.
And that always begins with the question that our kids ask us all the time when they're very young and it drives us nuts.
Why? Why? It drives me nuts when my kids say it because it's about everything. Why is the sky blue? Why is that couch red? I don't know.
but that drives me crazy now that those same kids growing up don't ever ask that question and think it's bad.
I've based my career on asking questions because I want to know the truth and I can learn from people that I even disagree with.
We can't know the truth unless we ask our way to it.
Today's podcast, the guest is an Ivy League educated PhD from Oxford in ancient Greek literature.
He has an incredible knowledge of the classics, timeless stories from names like Dante and Plato and Aristotle, names like George Washington.
And the important name of all time, most important, is Jesus.
He is an editor for the American Mind.
He shook cages with his podcast, The Young Heretics,
a legacy he continues as an associate editor for the Claremont review of books.
Oh, and he was raised by a friend of mine, Andrew Claven.
I started reading his books just recently.
I didn't put the two together, you know.
Okay, so two guys I know named Claven until about halfway through the book.
This is an incredible book.
it is how to save the West, which breaks down all of the struggling, the struggles that we are
facing right now into five parts. You'll learn all about it. Fascinating guy. His name is Spencer
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I'm glad you're here.
Such a pleasure.
I was reading your book before I ever put together that Claven is also your dad,
Clavin, who I know quite well.
We've met before.
Right.
I just saw this title and started reading about it.
And I'm like, oh, wow, that sounds really good.
It is a lot of times somebody who is perhaps a little overeducated has a little
difficult time getting it to the dummies like me.
And there are times I'm like, don't know that word, never heard that word.
But the concepts and the way you take us through what's happening to the West and the way you tie it to all of the lessons of history through our philosophers is really brilliant and easy to consume.
I don't know how you did it.
Well, thank you for saying that.
It's really wonderful when a book makes exactly the kind of impact you want it to make.
And that's very much my dream for this book.
you know oftentimes somebody like me will hear from you know people who read my work or who listen to my podcast and a lot of the folks that reach out to me will preface what they say by saying I'm not that smart they'll say hey I'm not that smart but you know I'm interested in what you're saying or whatever and I've started to learn that the minute somebody says that I'm about to have the most interesting conversation of my week because what they really mean by that they actually they're selling themselves wildly short what they really mean by that is
is I didn't go to the fancy schools. I didn't have, you know, the kind of prestigious education or
upbringing or what have you. And I've been told that that means I don't get an opinion because
I'm not an expert in anything. I'm not credentialed. And, you know, I am here to tell you,
I have been among the credentialed people and nobody can believe dumb nonsense like an academic.
Oh, I know. Right. You know this well. And so to me, these great books, the works of the
they're not there for eggheads like me to write PhD thesis about.
That's actually not why they exist on the shelf.
They're there for us.
They're there to teach us how to be excellent at being human.
They're there to make sense out of the catastrophes we face,
since the world is constantly full of them.
And if somebody like me who's spent a little time
kind of with his head buried in Greek can bring that to life for people,
then I think I'll have...
I mean, I remember, and I think I told you this, when I first read Plato, I was just, I was probably 30.
I mean, I read it earlier, but then, you know, just read it for class.
Sure.
And 30, I was interested because I knew I was a dummy and I needed to actually learn things.
That's the Socrates says that's the first step to wisdom.
That might be the only thing we can have.
Yeah, right.
And I was blown away how all of the questions I were asking were already asked.
at that time. And that's what the whole thing was about. The search for truth, the search for meaning.
And we've lost all of that. Yeah. All of that. We are told now, don't ask any questions.
You just follow this. We'll tell you what to do. That not only is, you know, bad for the civilization, but it also diminishes the individual and their spirit.
You can't be fully you if you're not allowed to go, well, wait a minute.
That doesn't make sense and I don't agree with that.
Exactly.
The minute they can tell you not to describe the world the way you see it, they have erased you.
You no longer effectively exist if you can't say, you know, I think a man is a man, a woman is a woman, the most basic observations.
This is why, you know, Orwell famously said that the regime will tell you two plus two equals four tomorrow and five today.
right. And this situation, I have to take a little bit of comfort in thinking that, you know, the world has kind of always been that way. I mean, you, you and I have lived through some good times in America that maybe made us feel like this wasn't kind of the state of, the normal state of things. But, you know, the book starts out with Socrates. And Socrates, the great, you know, original figure in Athenian philosophy and sort of the birth of the, the, you know, the book starts out with Socrates. And Socrates, the great, you know, the great, you know, the great original figure in. And the birth of,
that part of Western civilization was executed by the state,
went through forced suicide for inviting people to believe in gods other than the city's gods,
which when we're raising statues to abortion in New York over our courthouses,
that kind of charge can feel very familiar, heresy against civic gods.
And for corrupting the youth, right, for inviting the powerful young men of the day to think about
more than just gain or politics to actually ask what it all means.
And when you realize that the guy who did that got killed by the state,
you suddenly understand what kind of world you're living in.
And we really are living in that world.
In that book, The Republic that you mentioned of Plato's,
he talks about the cave, right?
This kind of shadowy world where we're all just staring at the manipulated kind of images
of our media and our elites and our...
sort of pseudo philosophers.
And he says, what would happen if somebody got out of that cave?
What would happen if he learned to really see the light, to really see the sun?
Well, he'd come back down into the cave.
He'd try to convince people that they were being fed a bunch of lies and they'd rip him to shreds.
In fact, they might even crucify him.
It's an amazing passage because, of course, the other figure that does this is Christ.
Right.
And get killed for it as well.
But that's generally what happens every time.
We seem to go through cycles where, uh, air,
Everybody just agrees that this is what it is.
And if you don't, you're a heretic and they stone you.
And then later they're like, oh, wow, we shouldn't have done that.
Right.
But let me start with the premise of the book, How to Save the West.
Let's first define the West.
What does that mean?
Sure.
Well, when I started writing this book, I told my friend that I was writing a book of
the West and she said, oh, I love John Wayne movies.
That's awesome.
I said, not that kind of West.
Although I too loved in Waymoot.
But this is actually a really important question.
Because when you say, I love Western civilization, you will immediately be told that's a white racist dog whistle.
Right.
That's a code word for all the sorts of backwards.
Colonialism and slavery.
Like, yeah, systemic whatever, systemic transphobia.
And, you know, the irony of this is that when I use the word West with that capital W, I'm actually describing one
the only ways out of tribalism. And that is to understand yourself as the inheritor of a tradition.
It's a two-part tradition that comes from Athens and Jerusalem. And when I say Athens, I'm talking
about those guys like Socrates and Plato, the great philosophers of Greco-Roman antiquity.
And then crucially, when I'm talking about Jerusalem, I'm talking about the scripture that comes out
of the monotheists of the Near East, the Jews and the Christians. And those two traditions,
those wisdom traditions, which meet in the preaching of St. Paul and the conversion of the Roman
Empire to Christianity, spread throughout Europe, create the world that we are living in today,
whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not. And if we decide that we're just going to
kind of get rid of all of that and go with whatever, you know, the world economic forum comes up
with tomorrow, we cut ourselves off from this vast store of ancestral wisdom that you were talking about
before. It's not a place. It's not a time.
It's not a race. It's the communion
of great minds. So it's
perhaps more than that
because it's, or simpler
than that, because
Socrates, Plato, and
the Jews are
exactly the same
in one thing. You talk to a
rabbi or any
really thoughtful
Jewish person.
It's all questions.
To find an answer, you ask them for an answer, and they're going to give you eight questions.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
But that's So that's Socrates, too.
So it's really the West, if you say it's these two groups, it's boiled down just to asking questions, searching for deeper truth.
Yeah, that's what makes them so annoying.
No, it's, I know.
I know.
You're like, can I just have an answer?
I'm back at you.
I know, I know.
Straight answer to any of one of these guys.
Right.
But yes, I mean, that's.
beautifully put and it speaks to what you were saying about. I knew that I didn't know things and so I went
away and I read a great book. I mean, you think that that's like, you know, not rare. You're kidding yourself. That's,
that's the whole game. So I went through because I, I'm an alcoholic and I just spiraled out of control.
Yeah. And when I got sober, I knew everything I believed was not working. Well, you know what I mean? Yeah. And so I had to figure out what
the meaning was of everything.
And there was so much I read that I didn't understand at the time because I was the typical
American.
When I read Emmanuel Kant when he said, there are many things that I believe that I shall never say,
but I shall never say the things that I do not believe.
I couldn't understand that world.
I understand it now, but I couldn't understand that world.
And I've done a lot of pondering on why more people don't.
because I just took everything out and went to the library and got the people who disagreed.
I put councils together.
And I'm like, okay, here's the topic.
And I'll read everything.
And then I'll start whittling it down until I find what I feel is truth.
And I think people, because I know I did, I think people don't do it because, A, it's a lot of work.
B, you're afraid it you're not smart enough.
you're afraid
there's maybe there's nothing in me
you know maybe I am just this
and I know how to deal with that
because it will change everything
everything I mean
you could tell me if I'm wrong
but it sounds like you're describing an experience
of hitting rock bottom right I mean that
that moment when you understood
that there actually
you know is truth
something is real
and it's not what I've been told
and I better reach out for it because it's life.
Right.
It's lifeblood.
I mean, I suspect when you gathered that, you know, communion of minds around you
to help you out of that pit, I mean, you were standing in a tradition with, you know, Machiavelli in exile
when he writes to his friend, Francesco Vittori, that I summon the ancient men to speak with me.
I enter the ancient courts of ancient men.
I mean, this is part of the tradition.
It's, in fact, the whole tradition is that sense that we're not alone, right?
But it has to begin with humility.
And I think there's nothing that human heart hates more than humility.
It's true of all of us.
And sometimes it does take, I think, just smacking up against that wall before you get there.
You said, you know, that the West is constantly on the, I don't remember how you said it,
but constantly on the edge of failure.
On the verge of collapse.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
So when you say how to save the West, it doesn't necessarily mean how to save our country as currently understood.
I think that's right.
I will say we're always living out the eternal principle, seeing the great truths in and through the here and now.
So I don't believe in indifference.
I don't think it's a matter of no consequence what happens to our country.
I think, like, there are good ways to vote and bad ways to vote and good ways to participate in policies and bad ways.
But where you're right is my book does not contain a political program because I don't think that the West can depend on the outcome of any particular vote.
I don't think none of this.
We don't have a, our politics are so screwed up because we don't know who we are.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
We have no idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so where do you start?
start? Well, you begin with reality in the book. You begin with this question that we're talking about of absolute truth, right? And I think that once you... Can we play that for a second? Yeah. Who's truth? I just... Let's play this game. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, there's two answers to that question. One is my truth, right? One is, as I perceive the world and you perceive it otherwise. And the question is, well, okay,
what happens when we feel differently.
And you immediately come to the realization
that the only answer is that we should come to blows,
that we should have a fist fight.
Why are we here? Why are we talking?
Right?
We are at this table right now
because implicitly, whether we acknowledge it or not,
we know that there's not just my truth and your truth,
there's the truth.
And it's somewhere in between us
that as human beings endowed by God
with the ability to see the world
and experience the world,
we actually have a claim
on that conversation that we can't we aren't unintelligible to one another and one of the things
I kind of argue in the book and try to drive home for people is that those are really the only
two options I think we've kidded ourselves for a long time that you could kind of speak
fancibly about well it's sort of morally who knows what's good or bad yeah right thinking makes
it so you know and this is all very well and good until they're at your
or trying to take you to the camps or until they're taking you.
So I will say, you know, the thing about Joseph Mengla, all of his horrid, horrid
experiments, they were all lawful.
And all of the medical society, they were for that.
I mean, they eliminated anybody who was against it.
But they all thought that was good.
So when you say, well, who's good?
Well, I mean, the hope for me is bad always just.
eats itself, rots from the inside.
You know what I mean?
Yes.
And it fails.
Eventually, it fails because you're breaking universal truths.
Yes.
Well, one of the great defenders of that idea, Iris Murdoch in the 20th century,
became the kind of objectivist about this stuff that she became because of the death camps,
because she saw the horrors of Nazi Germany and understood that there was no universal.
in which that was anything other than evil,
that there was a kind of bedrock of reality
that she was hitting up against in that evil,
which meant that there was something called good.
And the big secret is that we all act this way.
We all implicitly acknowledge this when we wake up in the morning.
Why do you pour your coffee?
Why do you get out of bed?
Well, you want something.
And if you chase that want far enough down the road,
you're eventually going to end up in some territory
where you just say, well, I just think it's good to whatever.
A lot of money, have a lot of sex, whatever, right?
And this is why, crucially, the Bible says
that the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.
It's not because atheists are especially stupid.
I mean, we're all about as stupid as one another.
But what that verse really means is if you tell yourself,
you don't have a God, if you tell yourself you're not
worshiping something, you've made yourself a fool.
You're kidding yourself, right?
And that good, which Plato identifies with truth, right?
That the sun which you see when you emerge from the cave is not crucially some sort of material fact about the world.
Although there's this much serotonin in your bloodstream right now, right?
No, it's an actual immaterial absolute.
It's this is good and that is bad.
And again, you know, some sort of bring in conversation with the scripture, right?
The woe to those who call evil good and good evil.
This is kind of the first stage of everything.
It is the sort of thing that you actually have to decide in advance that you're going to say that whether you make a million bucks or whether they come to...
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All right, back with Spencer in just a second.
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I took my kids to Auschwitz you know we went on a vacation my wife said you know honey
no vacation starts with Auschwitz so let's not call it but I took him over this is about
2010 because I felt these times were coming again. And I asked the kids and the whole family,
make a decision now who you are. If you don't, the line will keep moving, you know,
and it only gets harder. Right, right. But if you don't lock it down and say,
this is my line. Okay. This is where we go from truth to, you know, to, you know,
You're living in a fantasy world to danger.
And I think that once you have spent some time in introspection and prayer about that question,
you can then have a lot more liberty to kind of discuss and compromise and be free to...
Sure.
I mean, once we have agreed together that there is such a thing as truth, for instance,
then we can have all sorts of arguments, disagreements.
So how do you deal with?
with people who say there is only my truth and your truth.
Well, to me, the greatest philosophical question in the world is,
how's that working out for you?
I just adopted a new philosophy just recently.
Trying to raise my teenage kids.
I went to their therapist and I'm like, what do I do?
And he said, first thing you need to do, when they say something,
you just say, huh, it's going to be fun watching how that works out for you.
And I've used it on everything now and it's so freeing.
I mean, because it's really the irrefutable argument.
And it goes back to what you said, that good sort of produces fruit and evil eats itself alive.
Right.
And, you know, this was one of the great kind of benefits of the Socratic method that you were talking about before, just asking those questions.
Huh?
So, you know, Heraclitus says that everything is in flux, that nobody can know anything.
except for what they perceive in the given moment.
Well, where does that lead?
And eventually you get to the student of Heraclitus
who can only sit in the corner and move his finger
because he can't say anything out loud
because he can't affirm any truth.
And so to me, the answer to the question,
how's that working out for you is everywhere.
Weirdly, the kind of decay of our society
is a huge opportunity here.
Oh, I know.
Right?
I mean, like, yeah.
I just, if people would use the scientific method,
Right now, it's everywhere.
It's everywhere.
You might just trust the science.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
And for a civilization that makes such an idol out of a certain kind of scientism,
we are remarkably allergic to trusting the evidence of our senses.
To just like acknowledging and admitting.
This comes from the idea of experts, you know, at least in America.
starting in the progressive era that there is a scientific way to do everything.
And no, there's not necessarily a scientific way for everything.
Absolutely.
And even, I mean, and we know this.
Science is right until they're wrong.
Famously, yes, that's kind of the whole point of the thing.
And this is something so crucial.
There's a lot about this in the book, actually,
that, you know, when I talk about scientism, I'm not talking about, like, the iPhone.
iPhone's great. You know, I'm glad I have one. I'm glad I, you know, don't have some terrible, you know,
I'm glad I don't have dysentery right now. All this is, right, right, right. When I say scientism,
what I mean is the belief that science, material science, gives an exhaustive account of reality. And you can
find people saying this all the time now. I mean, Richard Dawkins and the beginning of his book,
The Selfish Gene quotes as paleontologist, all the good answers to all the,
the important questions were thought up after Darwin, right? This was everything, you know, Muhammad, Christ, Jesus, Aristotle, all these guys. Forget them. Scrapin. It's all about bodies in motion, matter in motion. And by the way, this is not something that the great architects of the scientific revolution believed. This is not what Johannes Kepler thought. It's not what Isaac Newton thought. It's not even what Galileo thought. I mean, none of these people would have said to you that the only thing that is real is what can be proven by scientific experiment. And if you really think about that for a second, it has to be the case that there's something.
above science, giving logic to science or else,
why would science work?
Why should this work?
But one of the things that this has done,
because it's actually impossible to live this way,
because you actually can't operate as if you're just a chemistry set
inside of the meat sack, right?
Is that it has turned science into a god.
We have no, we're not allowed any of God,
and so we have to worship the science, right?
And Dr. Fauci says, priest, I represent the science.
I mean, these are not scientific statements.
They're correct.
They're theological statements.
Correct. And that's basically where we're at.
And the last time this happened in the 1930s, where science became the God, which we taught the Germans, it didn't work out well.
And I don't understand on the other side how some people will dismiss science.
I mean, I have no idea how God creates. I have no idea. Nobody does. But I do know this.
You can look at the universe and understand enough the universal language is math.
Right.
And math is all of it, which would mean that God would be the ultimate scientist.
Sure.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
There's something.
There's what he has.
But then he also uses math to run all of this.
Well, Kepler described himself as thinking God's thoughts after him, that he was basically just catching up with God and discovering how planets, you know, right, right.
Move around the sun.
And this has to be the case if you think about even what math is, like the idea of two doesn't exist anywhere in the world.
There's no two in the world.
You can't touch two.
You can't see two.
Two is in your head.
Two is a concept.
And the idea that you can use that and add numbers together and a rocket ship will take off.
can only be the case of the human mind is tapped into something much more profound.
But to your point about, you know, Nazi science, right?
And science as a god or as a kind of religious activity,
it's important for us to understand and remember that that looked just as good to them.
Oh, I know.
As like transgender surgeries for teenagers, looks to the people, you know,
it looked just as good to them.
First transgender surgery was Viarmat.
Republic, 1925. Right. And this is something, I mean, the fact that that's true should give us,
first of all, pause about, you know, all of our moral, moral convictions when it comes to sort of,
oh, yeah, we're just going to. But you can also now find people saying things like,
oh, well, there's authoritarian eugenics, and that's bad. But there's, there's liberal eugenics,
too. You know, there, I was reading a book by a big transhumanist scholarly, et cetera,
said exactly this, that it's okay when the good guys do it, right?
That's the problem essentially with the...
Well, they were the good guys.
They were in Hugo Boss suits.
Yes, right.
They thought they were doing just fine for themselves.
Yeah, and so this is something that, you know,
I have this thing I call the, if I had been there fallacy.
And if I had been there, fallacy goes like this, you know,
those benighted slaveholders at the American Revolution,
those evil Germans, you know, if I had been there,
I had been there.
I would have been an abolitionist.
I would have been.
How arrogant of you?
Well, right.
Would you, like, what was your reaction when you were forced to sign the diversity oath?
What was your reaction when, like, COVID?
What's your reaction when you buy an iPhone?
Yeah.
I carry Apple products.
Yeah.
I wrestle with this all the time.
Sure.
I know they're made by slaves.
What makes me any different than the people in the 1800s?
Sure.
They knew that product was made by.
slaves who's just far away I don't see it they had a bunch of arguments for right I mean and and this is
sort of the tragic vision of human life that I think Jerusalem contributes to the West you know you talk
about what are the things that we get from these two strands of Western civilization the the sense of
man's brokenness and the humility that comes with that and the introspection that comes with that
is a very Judeo-Christian thing I would say it's just this idea that like all have sinned and
fallen short of the glory of God
It's the only way you stand a chance in hell of making any moral progress of the real kind is to know that, as Soltchenitsyn says, the line between good and evil runs through every heart.
I mean, and it's a sobering thought, surely.
I think that's why we're in so much trouble.
Because we are even, you know, devout Christians who, you know,
do all the things are not necessarily the most humble.
And, you know, it's when we're not talking to someone
because they're just wrong, I don't want that, whatever it is,
we are showing our arrogance that we're saying that person,
even in their error, has nothing to teach me.
Absolutely.
And the sheer hubris, the sheer arrogance of saying, for instance, that, you know, this country was founded on white supremacy, right?
And which we've both now just acknowledged that there are, you know, terrible sins in the past of every human civilization, ours included.
Having said that, to look back on this enormous inheritance that does not actually begin in 1770.
that reaches back into Athens and Rome and Jerusalem as well, right, to produce this incredible
hot house plant, you know, and to say, well, those guys weren't as nice, as good as me.
And so I'm going to start a fresh.
Year zero begins with me.
It's like, who even taught you to condemn slavery?
Who even told you that all men are created equal?
The founders told you that.
Most people haven't thought that throughout most of history, most of time.
And so I absolutely agree with you that moral certainty, arrogance, self-regard, it's got to be our kind of central.
We don't fix ourselves unless we fix that.
Right, right.
You don't ever open the Republic after you've, you know, hit rock bottom unless you really understand that there's, like, it's not going to come from you.
Like, you're not going to fix things.
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More with Spencer Claven in just a second.
First, let me tell you about a small little company that I found out of Arizona.
This is where they started.
They just, one guy was making a belt as a gift to his friend.
And he loved the belt so much.
He was telling everybody else.
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Blah, blah, blah.
So he started.
And then he thought, I should start a company.
And so he went from belts and he now makes wallets.
And then they got into clothing, but they wanted to start small.
So they started with socks.
But everything they do is done.
here in America. It's a true American experience. The idea was not starting a company unless we can do it here in America. So the socks, when you buy their socks, you're supporting the American ranchers who raise the specially bred sheep that will produce the modern wool that the American manufacturers will wash and process it. And then another American group will weave that into a sock. That's what you're doing business with. American business owner.
who have accepted the risk that comes along with only using American made products and American labor,
but they do it right.
Grip6.com slash Beck.
Grip6.com slash Beck.
Let me talk to you about Christian nationalism a bit.
Okay.
I think, do you know Big Tea traditionalist, opposed to small tea traditional?
Fill me in.
So, Big Tea traditional.
Traditionalist movement from Europe, really Russia.
Yeah.
Comes from Putin's advisors.
And it is the idea that we have flushed all tradition down.
Okay.
And so we're going to wipe everything out because we're the ones that can put it right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's so slippery because when you first start looking at it and you don't understand small tea and
capital T traditionalism, you can fall into the wrong side quickly because all they're saying is
we have to restore the things that are true. We have to restore the things that are good about
our society. Yep. Yep. But then it's always coupled with and that's why we need to get rid of
him and him and her. Yeah. And by the way, like I should probably run things. Correct. Correct. So
the next charge, especially in this, you know, pride,
month. What concerns me is the Christians, because the government is trying to make everybody into a Christian nationalist.
Absolutely. What is it? How do you know the difference? And how do we maneuver?
Yeah. Well, certainly the extremists of the kind of alphabet people.
are
behaving in doing everything that they can
to radicalize
us basically you and me right to make us
feel embattled
to make us feel like you know
the slippery slope was there from the beginning
we should never even have departed from like you know
just we probably never have departed from England
you know for that matter you know and
and and it's very very easy
It makes a lot of sense, I think, to look at that and say, well, let's just get rid of all of it.
And my problem with this is get rid of all of what?
Like, how far back are you going to go?
What exactly do you want?
And I think a lot of the, for me, the ambiguity, the sort of uncertainty and unclarity about the term Christian nationalism is that there's this sort of charge.
We've got to get rid of all of this stuff.
and we've got to reestablish tradition,
which I largely agree with.
And we've got to use the force of the law
to do what?
To do what?
Right?
That's my question.
And whenever somebody starts talking about Christian nationalism,
and to me, you know,
what I want us to be as Americans.
And I think that that does not mean
we have to simply let a thousand flowers bloom.
Everything goes.
Like there are no rules about anything.
It's just liberalism unfettered.
You know, that's not what the American founding is.
But it does mean that among our inalienable rights is liberty and that these choices that people are making, even the ones that are wrong, they're going to have to be free to make if we want to stay the country than we are.
They just, the government should be so small that those ideas, the wrong ones, die off small instead of being propped up, propped up until they're gigantic and we all fall.
Well, I think there's another dimension to this.
you tell me what you think about this, because I've been towing thinking about this a lot,
especially as this like carnival of grotesquery that is Pride Month begins to unfold before us,
and this is going to be in the news all the time.
If we're not just going to say, okay, like it's time for a Protestant Franco, we're going to, like, you know,
if we're not going to do that, what are we going to do?
What's our counter program?
And I think a big sort of category that's missing here, you know, we say, oh, we're going to,
to outlaw this and we're going to make this legal. But what about the things that we're going to
honor? Maybe there's like a range of things that are that are possible, right? Maybe, you know,
like I believe quite firmly, like one man and one woman raising a like their kids is the ideal.
I just want to throw in in case people don't know. You're gay. Yes. Sorry. Yeah, I should probably
have put that out there. I'm gay. And so I'm obviously not doing the thing that I just said is the ideal.
I obviously also believe it should be legal for people to do a ring of other things, right?
No place.
And so that leaves us with this question, right, which is how, is it possible for us to have room for kind of the quirks and weirdness and eccentricity of humanity, which by the way, we all participate in sharing to some degree.
None of us lives in the ideal.
is it possible for us to acknowledge that, to let people be people while honoring what is the center of civilization, which is a male and female procreative love in a family?
And I think the answer is it has to be yes, but we have to elevate some things over others.
My marriage is not the same thing as a heterosexual marriage, even though I am very happy in it, even though I believe.
it should be legal, I don't think that it should be identical with or honored at the same level with a straight marriage.
So I, so yeah, this is a tricky part.
Yeah.
But I think, I mean, I'm just down to, I've whittled so much away.
It's like, what are you trying to save?
If you're a conservative, what are you conserving?
Yeah.
What brought us together, what made us successful and what made it work is we all agreed on the Bill of Rights.
and if you just do those, you're not going to be happy.
Sometimes it'll cut against your way.
Sometimes it'll cut the other way.
It's not going to fix everything.
But if we have just that roadmap, that's made for the government,
but it's really a roadmap for all of us.
I shouldn't spy on you.
I shouldn't be able to have power over you.
I shouldn't curb your speech.
Yes.
So I agree with this.
I think the Constitution is what it is because it is the operating system of the country.
Right.
And as you say, if we do that, we will have made a big stride forward.
To me, there's another part of this, which is that the Constitution sits in a cradle of culture.
And the founders knew this.
John Adams famously said this Constitution is not written for anything other than a moral religious people.
And so if we're going to be able to do the Constitution, we have to give serious attention to our culture.
that's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about honor and values. What do we encourage in people?
What do we invite people into? And we've developed this terrible mania that treats ideals as insults.
That if you say to somebody, the best thing you can do is, you know, raise a family and start, you know, then somebody said, how dare you?
Because I can't do that for whatever reason. I'm, you know, I'm infertile or I'm gay or I'm whatever.
And these things, like, it's actually possible, I know, because I'm living this life.
It's possible to say, I endorse and affirm that as the ideal, even though I have to be true to and honest about the ways in which that's not my life.
So I know and work with a lot of gay people.
Sure.
And I've always, I'm much more libertarian than anything else.
I've never been against gay rights.
but I will tell you
the people I know
are as shocked and horrified by what's going on
in the name, in their name
why aren't we seeing more people stand up?
This is a very important question
and of course we've already now talked about
the sheer force of social conformity
and intimidation.
So there's a big part of
that. But there's also, I think, a fear that there's no place to go. There's nowhere to go.
Right. That you can't say these people are not my people. You know, basically the Americans are
my people. And I, like you, speak every day to people that are just horrified by what's being done
in their name. And the thing that I constantly say to them is, okay, so say that.
Stand up and say, not in my name. And I do think that it's very, very difficult for us to see this
because the loudest and the craziest voices are so visible. It's very, very difficult for us
to grasp that this is going on. But I really do believe that just as civil rights was weaponized by
the radical left, just as
women's economic equality
was turned into, led us
basically into this insane
bacchanalia of transgenderism.
So too, the kind of legitimate
requests for recognition and
full citizenship that were made by
gay people
have now been
very effectively wielded
as a Marxist political project.
And that's like a hell of a drug.
So yeah, it's
it's a really, to me, it grieves my heart a great deal.
But I also think that, as you say, there are more of us with us than you might think.
So my fear is on all fronts, because they're cowards.
I don't care what you believe.
Cowers all everywhere that just want to be left alone.
Yes.
And now is not the time for that timid spirit.
Right.
But it's what usually happens.
people are like that.
Yeah.
So out of all of history and all of the things you've seen over and over, what's the answer
that we should be looking at right now?
What should we be doing to exercise that muscle to say that's not true?
And I can't sit by.
The only thing I can think of is God.
Yeah.
Well, amen.
I mean, absolutely.
There is, to me, this is unfortunately indispensable.
and this is like very, also very delicate because it's like it creates this,
sort of coalition of people that might, you know, think that I'm sort of the representative
of all that's gone wrong and that I'm, you know, we all are.
Yeah, well, tell me about it.
Right.
But it is certainly true that even before you get into questions of denomination,
before you get even really into questions of, you know, which Abrahamic faith,
the belief that there is something beyond the material world is indispensable.
Solsternetson, the great Soviet dissident, observed this in the Gulag, in the camps,
that it was the people who thought there was something above Stalin who could stand up for him.
Of course this is true.
I mean, G.K. Chesterden says, you know, the Marxists get us exactly backwards.
Religion is not the opiate of the masses.
It's the only thing that soberers you up.
more powerful than politics. Yeah. And so that is certainly a necessary first step. I also think
something else Sultaninson said is, you know, in those days of the camps, we wished that we had
just said something when it was easier, when we still, and so the question is, you know, what,
what can we do? If we're too afraid to speak up, he says, at least live not by lies, right?
at least don't say the lie.
And I think that's not too much to ask
if you believe there's something beyond
politics in the material world.
But if you don't think that, if you don't think that
the leftists are basically right, if you don't
think that we should all just bend the knee to whatever power
or, you know, dominion is
kind of most
powerful in this world.
And that's kind of the option.
Those are the options on the table. So yeah, I absolutely agree with you.
If you were, I mean,
if this were being done
in the name of Christ, I would have just as much problem with it.
Of course.
And I don't think, you know, I wonder how many people on the left actually believe the stuff
they're preaching.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I think the leadership does.
Right.
But how many of the people, because what new evidence do you have that pedophilia might
be a okay lifestyle?
Right, right, right.
What evidence did you receive that has opened your mind to that?
Yes.
And what sort of links this together for you with, like, sort of gay rights?
You know, like what he was?
I mean, this is where the slippery slope people start to look as if they were always correct, you know,
because now suddenly people are making these appalling, appalling arguments.
But the interesting thing is, you know, in the 80s, when gay people were sort of starting to make noise about this,
it was the conservatives who would say, well, gay people are just,
pedophiles, right? Gay people just want to groom your kids, essentially. Now, if you say,
don't groom my kids, don't come into my school and try to, the left will say, you're just
against gay rights. You're attacking, well, really? Are those the same thing? Right. And is,
right? Is, like, are you suddenly saying that, like, LGBTIQIA rights include the right to take children
away from their parents? Because if you say that to people long enough, they'll say, call me a homophope.
Call me a bigot. Like, you come for that. If the only other
options you come from my kids, call me any name you want, you know. And so this is the,
this is a catastrophe for actual freedom loving normal people, including gay people. And the
only way out of it is, yeah, courage and, and just constant disavowal. Like, this is really not
in any way. This is the worst caricature of everything that was said about us. And it's,
yeah. It parody is impossible. Exactly. Exactly.
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Let me take you to one because we're going to run out of time. I can spend days with,
oh my gosh. You lay out, just lay out the five crisis real quick. Yeah. So the first one we've
talked about already, reality. Is there a truth and a falsehood? Doesn't matter who says otherwise,
but can we progress by half measures toward truth?
Second one is the crisis of the body, which we've been talking about.
And in that section, I kind of offer my theory of the case for why this transgender extremism
is actually a totally different beast than the American project of civil rights.
What is it?
Actually, what it is is transhumanism, that what we're really dealing with is an ancient
offer, an ancient split between body and soul.
That what you are being told is you are a divine spark.
You are not your body.
Your body is nothing to say about you.
Actually, it's probably a burden.
It might be a mistake.
And so what you need to do is reconfigure your body
until the divine spark within you can float free.
And guess what?
It doesn't stop at transgenderism, right?
It's actually much, much more than that.
It's about using the tools of the state and technology
to totally unmake the human person.
That's a very, very old problem, and it never works out.
And again, with Ray Currack.
as well, who is trying, I believe, to recreate his father, bring him back to life.
They don't see it.
Many do and think it's inevitable that mankind is over.
But they also, I mean, when I asked Ray, what if I don't want to upgrade?
Yeah.
Because he was talking about, you know, things like Neurilink that is just around the corner.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What if I don't want to uplink?
Right.
And he said to me,
why would anyone not want to?
Right.
I said, because maybe I like who I am.
You know what I mean?
I like, I don't, I want to be who I am.
Yeah.
He said those people will be a danger to themselves and to society.
Right.
That's a little frightening.
Sure enough.
Sure is.
And I do think that one reason why it's,
important not to get bogged down in the kind of carnival of the politics of it all is,
you know, and not to fall into this trap, essentially, of saying, like, the problem is sort of,
you know, every gay person ever or whatever, you know, is that we have bigger fish to fry.
What you just described, that's what's coming down.
Correct.
And so the meaning of life.
Yes.
What is alive?
What does that mean?
But the line is going to get slippery.
Yes.
Because AI and technology, we will be able to do things to our body to correct and fix.
Yeah.
And where is the line on that?
Right.
Well, this is where it actually becomes.
urgent to think about ancient philosophy, right?
The ancient idea about a human being that I talk about in the book in this section is called
hyalomorphism.
And it's from the Greek word, hulae meaning stuff matter and morphae meaning form, shape.
In the works of Aristotle, this beautiful idea emerges that what we actually are is a union
of those two things.
That's what everything is.
You've never seen a circle without any, that wasn't made of anything.
You can't even picture one.
You can picture drawing one an ink in your head, whatever.
And just as a circle can't float free of any matter, we can't float free of any matter.
There is no kind of abstracted gender identity, divine spark, like kind of code, perfect code, whatever.
There's actually what you are, which is an embodied soul with a telos, a purpose, and that is to exercise your reason in choosing the good, right?
I mean, this is one reason why, by the way, human liberty is really actually important,
because without that choice, unless you're making the right choice,
then you're not actually, there's no you there in the equation at all.
It is possible to restore and even enhance the thing called a human being.
And we're going to be faced with choices.
I can't even predict exactly which choices we're going to be faced with them.
But they're going to be big, right?
And it's not going to be enough to simply say, just shut all the AI down, shut all the everything.
Like, it's not going to happen.
You know, AI, the country, individuals, is it good or is it bad?
When it comes to that, the answer is yes.
Yes, right.
And so the question becomes, what is your North Star?
What are you, the rubric you are using to shoot?
And unless it is, I am actually, as I am, already a complete entity.
I am a fusion of body and soul.
I'm a rational animal.
And the tools that I use and the enhancements that I take on are all with that purpose in mind.
Unless we're saying that, then we're nothing.
Then we're just primitive machines, essentially.
And we will be, you know, kind of expunge as a danger to society.
So I think that is the real dividing line on this sort of question.
If you can say that a human being is an irreducible gift of God.
It doesn't get to be wished out of existence.
Then you'll at least have a rubric to go on when you're making these sorts of decisions.
That's a hard climb from where we are right now in a quick amount of time.
Okay.
So those first two, give me the other crisis.
The crisis of the body, the crisis of meaning, which is about whether the things that we say and do
refer to anything outside of the physical world, everything we've just been talking about, is there
something beyond just kind of evolution and means all the way down, or are we actually referring
to something? And then finally, the crisis of religion, if we're referring to something outside of
ourselves, outside the world, what? What are we talking about? Can we go back to the crisis?
Yes. Of meaning, that was the last one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you start to say,
okay, it's all great that there is such a thing as truth.
It's great that there's a human being in a human body and these things are real and matter.
You have to begin to ask what's the point of it all?
What's the purpose here?
And there is an answer on the table that is kind of everywhere in the atmosphere.
And it's the answer of Richard Dawkins, whom I sort of mentioned earlier, that actually all that's happening all the time is
we're just sort of reproducing and imitating one another.
This is where we get our word meme.
It now describes this thing that we spread around on the internet.
But it begins with this idea that all human life, all human culture,
is actually just a kind of game of imitation and replication
because evolution explains everything.
And what an empty, empty, meaningless world.
Indeed.
And the problem with this is that all of the things that we know to exist,
like virtue, love, goodness, they are nowhere to be found in that description of the world.
And they'll always play a kind of double game or sleight of hand where they'll sort of sneak this in
and say, well, you know, isn't it great? Dawkins says, isn't it great that we can make good choices,
even though our biological programming is just turning along like a kind of script?
And you think, well, what's a good choice? What does that mean? You've all just said that
everything is this kind of endless game of imitation and replication.
The ancients also believe that human beings were constantly imitating, mimetic animals.
It's called that we're always sort of bouncing off of each other.
We learn by imitating one another.
But of course, the obvious implication of this is if we're imitating something,
there must be an original.
There must be something that we are copying or referring back to in all of our efforts.
And then you can say this is a better thing than,
that, right? This is a more effective
tool than, right?
Well, if it wasn't that way,
we would have died off a long time
ago because we would just spiral down.
Right, we would be another kind
of blip on the evolutionary. We're not.
We're actually evaluating things
according to a higher plane. And when
you can start talking about
that original that you're copying,
then the copy has meaning. Just like
when I say words, right, if those words refer
to something outside of me, they have meaning.
If not, they don't. And those
That's the crisis of meaning, is this kind of elimination of that original copy that we are all supposed to be referring to.
How many times in history do you see these five things in crisis mode and the civilization survives?
Well, the civilization goes on in some form.
Right. Okay. But country or...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I would say it is the
rarity. It's the exception, not the rule.
But I would say that there are some.
I actually think that our revolution is one.
I would say that the Protestant Reformation
represents a crisis of many of these things
and that your mileage may vary.
You have some countries that do very well
in some countries that don't out of that.
But, you know, I won't lie to you or sugarcoat it.
These things come with turmoil.
They come with very serious, you know.
But it's not impossible to pass through those periods of turmoil and emerge in revival.
And I hate to keep going back to this, but the difference is God, right?
The difference is if you believe that you're actually going through something for a purpose.
As the founders did, right?
They felt that God was essentially not.
doing a new thing that they were being called to live out the fundamental truths of nature and nature's God.
If you believe that, I think you stand a chance in hell of coming through something new.
I will tell you that about five or six years ago, I just came to the conclusion, they are so far ahead of us.
You know, catch up is going to be miraculous.
And I'm thinking for solutions and comes to my head.
Well, Jesus knows about it.
So maybe Jesus is coming back.
And it was weird because I actually looked at that as, you know, everybody says they're living in the end days.
But, you know, maybe this time.
And it gave me a way to jump over the darkness and say, it's all going to be used for his purpose one way or another.
No matter what happens in the end, this will be used for good.
Yeah.
I have to tell you, this moment of kind of artificial intelligence and transhumanism is the first time that I've ever thought, yeah, I can see a plausible scenario in which that is what the book of Revelation describes.
Me too.
And I'm so wary of that because of what you.
you said that everybody.
I know.
Yeah.
I mean, but I know everybody thought it.
The apostles thought it.
Yes.
And, you know, his time's not our time.
Whatever, I get it.
But, you know, they say no man will know the time.
Well, you did give us a lot of signs to look for.
So you are telling us something about the nature of this thing.
At the very least, you're telling us that this thing, which is going to reach its pinnacle in Armageddon.
Apocalypse is has this certain character.
And so like it looks to a certain way.
And so when you see these things,
this is kind of like that spirit is on the move.
And I would say that,
you know,
once you are telling people that there's no difference
between what they're doing and what chat GPT is doing,
that it's all just a kind of,
you know,
outward form of meaning and inside.
It's just numbers crunching or it's whatever.
That's what these guys think we are, though.
Often, yes, indeed.
And so then you say, well, okay, so I'm going to upload my consciousness into the cloud or whatever.
Whose consciousness?
Who, right?
Well, who is the person that actually is having the inner life experience that you're describing?
And once you realize that, you understand that actually transhumanism is the end of humanity, right?
It is.
It's the consummation of, and if you do think that people are going to be forced into a choice between, you know,
endless promised pleasure at the expense of their individual humanity and kind of limping on in our
fallen but but god ordained you know human forms um that does sort of look like apocalypse that looks
like a great split down the middle between the humanity and those that remain human will you know
will look so carry on and those that don't will sort of evaporate into nothing anyway this is all i mean
this is all.
But I, you know,
I've been saying that this, all this technology
I don't think is the mark of the beast,
but it's, it will,
this is the kind of technology
that the beast will use.
Absolutely.
You know what I mean?
Right, right.
And the thing that the technology being used,
the philosophical premises behind a lot of the technology
is satanic.
That's certainly true.
That's like we're just,
machines or whatever. So I know a lot of people who used to be atheists. I think atheism is just so
arrogant. I know there's not. Well, okay. I'd rather just, I understand I'm agnostic. I don't know.
I have no idea because I'm agnostic on a lot of stuff. Sure. You know what I mean?
Right. But they, a lot of, you know, they're my friends, so they're wired maybe a little bit differently.
but, you know, they didn't ever agree with me and many things.
But they are recognizing evil for the first time.
Yes, of a supernatural kind or not.
Yeah, I think so.
Okay.
I think so.
Because I mean, how do you describe evil?
You could say, historically in a petri dish, you could say what they did in the concentration camps, that was evil.
That was an act of evil.
Right.
But there is something else happening.
here because it's growing and hypnotizing and it's so cultish. I mean, it's crazy. I do agree with
you and I think you almost can't talk about it accurately without using spiritual categories. That's
sort of what's happening. It seems to me is that unless you talk about demonic forces,
you're going to be talking in circles. You're going to be kind of using language.
that's less accurate. It's like you can kind of develop all these sort of neologisms and terms to
talk about what's going on, but they'll be less accurate and less descriptive than simply saying
there are demons and there's a statue of one in New York. You know, it's a sort of, it's really weird
because it just, I don't know, 10 years ago maybe, I swore off using the word evil. Because I said,
you know, I described too many things as evil and right. You know, this action is evil. And I said,
evil is a different thing altogether.
And I find myself using it a lot now.
And I check myself every time.
But there's no other way to describe something that is so destructive to everything.
I mean, it's battery acid on everything good and decent.
Right.
And it's just multiplying like crazy.
and showing the results of misery, and yet it continues to grow.
And it uses everything good and decent to its purposes.
There's another characteristic of evil.
St. Augustine says of evil that it is only ever and can merely be a privation of the good.
That there's no like sort of absolute existence to evil because God makes things that exist and God makes good things.
And so all evil does is it twists and distorts and takes away and destroys.
And if you think about it, there is a character to an absence.
Like if you have a wall and then you have a hole in the wall, the hole is like a thing,
even though it's not a thing, right?
And that to me is a perfect description of a lot of this stuff, the kind of parody of, you know,
American equality that gets now twisted and transformed into equity, all of the ways that the,
you know, civil rights movements have been hollowed out and worn as a skin suit by people.
who hate this country, who hate one another,
who want us to hate one another,
just this constant grasping desire to tear other people down.
I mean, these are all hallmarks of evil.
And you don't actually, one of the great benefits
of talk of demonic possession or that sort of language
is that you don't actually have to say
this person is irredeemable, you don't have to say
this person is, you know, you can say there is a spirit at work,
and when you align yourself with that spirit,
you do evil.
I mean, these things are just, seem quite clear at this point.
Just, we've got two minutes left.
And so I just have to ask you this personal question.
Yeah.
I love your father so much.
I love your dad.
Me too.
And so bright.
And I love you just the same.
I mean, you're just tremendous.
So wonderful to be here.
And I never met your grandfather.
Did you meet your grandfather?
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
Puba.
What an amazing.
Claven.
You know what I mean?
There is something that
generation,
when, my goal,
because we've been,
we've had abuse in our family, we've had
really tough go in the Beck family.
And my goal was
to just stop
all of that and
try to put some
good into the family
hoping that the next generation,
because it takes generation,
to change.
Yeah.
Man, Glenn, when you say that in my heart, it's like, you know, the, I am,
I am the product of somebody doing exactly what you just described.
I wouldn't be here.
I wouldn't be who I am.
I wouldn't have the joy that I have in my life.
I wouldn't have the sanity that I have if both of my parents hadn't taken it upon
themselves to, by clinging to one another, and eventually, as they found faith, by clinging
to God, to provide.
plant their foot in that river and change its course. You know, I mean, this is something,
I loved my grandfather to death. I'm not here to knock him in any way, but my dad and his
memoir talks about the sort of struggles that he had in his family growing up and also just the kind
of, again, the demons that took hold of him in his sort of early youth. And no, I, you know,
my dad and I have this joke that were not related. We say Spencer Clayton, no relation because
but I would be nothing with that.
I mean, I'm very lucky that I'm not just, I don't just love my father.
I mean, everybody kind of loves their parents sort of by nature.
But I'm friends with my father.
And that's one of the greatest gifts of my life.
It's just a beautiful thing.
So I, you know, I'm honored to be here with you.
And I'm very touched that you have that aspiration because I'm sure you're going to do it great.
Thank you for coming.
Thank you for having me.
Just a reminder.
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