JAMES LINDSAY - America's Hidden Enemy: The Battle for the Soul of Western Civilization - The Will Spencer Podcast

Episode Transcript
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(00:26):
Foreign.

(00:47):
Hello and welcome to the WillSpencer Podcast.
This is a weekly interviewshow where we sit down and talk with
authors, thought leaders andinfluencers who help us understand
our changing world.
New episodes release every Friday.
My guest this week is James Lindsay.
James is an American bornauthor, mathematician and professional
troublemaker.
He has written six booksspanning a range of subjects including

(01:08):
religion, the philosophy ofscience, and postmodern theory.
He is a leading expert oncritical race theory, which leads
him to reject it completely.
And he's the founder of NewDiscourses and is the co author of
the new book the Queering ofthe American How a New School Religious
Cult Poisons the Minds andBodies of Normal Kids.
James Lindsley, welcome to theWill Spencer Podcast.

(01:28):
Hey, thank you very much.
So a couple Years ago in 2023,you delivered a series of lectures
called the Secret Religions ofthe West.
And I found that series oflectures to be profound and inspiring
and sort of eye opening to alot of things that are going on.
And in fact, they're morerelevant today.
So I've been looking forwardto this conversation to get into
that series of lectures.

(01:48):
Well, thank you.
It's kind of exciting.
We talked about this brieflybefore we hit record, but you said
that it could constitutesomething of a book.
I've actually a long timebefore those lectures, I wanted to
write a book and I wanted totitle it the Three Religions of the
west or the Secret Religionsof the West.
And I wanted to talk about howwe have the Judeo Christian tradition

(02:10):
and we have the kind ofsecular reason based tradition that's
two, that's like the handshakebetween Jerusalem and Athens, so
to speak, as Ben Shapiro hasput it in the past.
And then you have this otherthing, this mysticism that's been
running a current all the waythrough, usually disguising itself
sometimes as theology, othertimes as philosophy.

(02:32):
So it can play in both ofthose two domains, reason and faith,
and do what mysticism alwaysdoes, which is create cults and cause
mayhem.
And it's just one of thosethings, you know.
Of course we know that Satanis the enemy, but time is also the
enemy.
And so having the time to sitdown and write this very deep, honestly

(02:52):
difficult to do right bookjust has never really occurred.
And so these lectures youbrought up were sort of my and that
we're going to talk abouttoday are sort of my like, you know,
well, you know, we're notgoing to get, we're not going to
get the first down, so let'sthrow the punt and let's at least
get some of the informationout there.
Yes.
And I think that just rightthere, you already presented the

(03:15):
framework that the entireseries of lectures are based upon.
You have faith and reason asthe guiding traditions of the west,
but then you have this thirdthing that's sort of been running
in the undercurrent of both ofthose, and that's Gnosticism, and
that has.
And I think the premise of thelectures is Gnosticism is having
a greater impact on our worldtoday than I think people recognize.

(03:37):
That's right.
That's right.
So let's back up for just asecond because I think this conversation's
really interesting for another reason.
And I want to talk a littlebit about your background, because
you just put out the podcast,the Woke, Right, New Atheists, or
the Maga as the Woke.
Right, Something like that.
I'm butchering the title.
Absolutely.
The Woke, right, is the NewAtheist of Maga.

(03:59):
Bingo.
And so what I think isinteresting about that is that you
talk about your background,having grown up Catholic, having
explored a lot of Easternmystical traditions, you know, Daoism,
Buddhism when you were incollege, and then rejecting that
for new atheism, which youthen repented of.
And what's interesting is thatI went through something very similar
at the same time in the late 90s.
Eastern mysticism, religionsof the world, things like that.

(04:20):
But then I went the otherdirection, into the pretty hard.
Into the new age.
And so now here we arecrossing paths many years later.
So maybe you could talk alittle bit about your background
that you established in the.
In the.
In that particular podcast.
Yeah, well, like.
Like I said, I grew upCatholic, and this is.
I always joked that I made adeal with the devil.
I don't know if that's a funnyjoke anymore, but.

(04:42):
No, it's definitely not.
But my deal when I was 8 yearsold, so my dad came to me once.
I don't know if you've been toCatholic Church or not, but nothing.
I went to a Catholic high school.
Okay.
Nothing about mass except thatit's not fun for kids.
Mass is not organized for children.
Okay.
And so I went to, ratherbegrudgingly with my parents as a

(05:03):
child, and I hated it.
And I put up a huge fightabout it every Sunday morning, as
many kids do.
I mean, there's even a sayingthat's very.
Also not appropriate anymore,which was, I got beat once a day
and twice on Sunday.
And everybody knows why yougot the extra one on Sunday.
It's because you misbehaved at church.
And so I put up the fightevery Sunday.
And when I was 8 or 9 yearsold, right around when I got my first

(05:26):
communion, my dad came to meone day and said, if you go to Sunday
school and you go to massevery Sunday without fighting until
you're confirmed, when you'reconfirmed, you're an adult in the
church and you can choosewhether you go or not.
And I, at like 8 or 9 yearsold, long gamed my dad.
I was like, deal.
And so I did.

(05:46):
I kept my end of the bargainfor four years or whatever it was.
I got confirmed right beforemy 13th birthday.
Being very creative, I chosemy confirmation name as James, which,
you know, put a lot of workand thought into that.
And then I immediately.
The next week, my dad knockson the door and he says, are you

(06:08):
ready to go to church?
And I haven't missed church infour years for no reason, cheerfully
go every week.
And I'm like, I'm not going.
And he says, well, why not?
I'm like, well, you said I'man adult in the church when I get
confirmed and I'm never goingto go again.
And my dad knew he had been bested.
My brother started throwing afit because he had to go and I didn't.
And it was like the mostexciting day ever.

(06:30):
But I played that game.
I did not enjoy being Catholicas a child.
I don't know how I would havelooked at it as an adult, because
I never got there.
And so I kind of justgenerically was Christian through
my teenage years in the kindof detached American way that a lot
of people are.
Culturally, Christian isn'treally a thing, but it's really what

(06:50):
it is.
And so then I went off to college.
My roommate, dad was aPresbyterian minister, and so he
and I did a lot of, you know,I had no opposition to the Bible.
We did a lot of Bible readingtogether, and individually we talked
about it.
We organized.
I became chaplain.
I joined a fraternity andbecame chaplain of my fraternity

(07:12):
in my second year.
So I was chaplain for three years.
I got reelected every year Iwas there.
I led Bible studies.
I led two, actually.
There was the one that me andmy roommate did that was our own
kind of, you know what Iguess, small group or whatever, where
we were trying to do it on our own.
And then for one year, webrought in a professor, a chemistry

(07:32):
professor who is a evangelicalof some type.
I don't know what hisdenomination was for sure, looking
back at it.
And we had him lead a secondBible study.
So we did two A week.
And the one with the professorturned out to be very unpopular because
he had a very kind of, to ourrecollection, strange and strict
theology that either didn'tmesh with our fraternity boy ways

(07:53):
or was actually weird.
I don't know.
I don't know.
In reflection, but as, as youpointed out, at the same time I had
been studying martial arts andI was, you know, as a lot of people
who study martial arts do, youstart getting interested in Eastern
traditions.
So I started looking into Buddhism.
A friend of mine in thefraternity gave me a copy of the
Analects of Buddha.
So I read that and I found itinteresting, but not what I was interested

(08:16):
in.
And I had always been kind ofinterested in Daoism.
So I picked up a copy of theTao Te Ching and read that, you know,
in my spare time on thefraternity house lawn.
And I don't know what I didand didn't get out of it.
I just figured out that thisguy is majorly a libertarian.
And there is.
I liked this concept of theway, you know, being the kind of

(08:39):
the issuing of the extremes ofopposites and trying to live your
life.
The, the Taoist principle,which I still kind of uphold, honestly,
if you had to name what it is,is go according to the situation.
Now a Christian is going torecoil to that because.
And I don't think necessarilythat they need to, but because I
think being righteous in thesituation is going according to the

(09:01):
situation as well.
But you do have to accordyourself with the situation and do
the best that you can with it.
And that's what the dao is.
It's actually being righteous.
The de in dao, de qing is virtue.
So it's the virtue of the way.
So you've got to be virtuousas you follow the path that Christians
would call providence.
So they're not commensurate.

(09:21):
I'm not trying to mix them together.
I used to read this Christianguy who did try to mix them together
and try to say that Christ wasthe dao.
And I thought that was just crackpot.
But eventually, honestly, Igot pissed off over.
It's sad, but it's actually the.
The church channel.
Cbn.
Is that what it's called?
It used to be called TBN orsomething like that.

(09:41):
Anyway, I think it was TBN atthe time.
I don't know what that stoodfor anymore, but my brother and I
derisively called it theBaptist Network, but I think it was
not that.
I think it was TrinityBroadcasting Network.
I think that's yeah.
And so those people who.
I'm not gonna lie, I kind ofthink that was a psyops against genuine

(10:02):
Christianity to makeChristians look crazy in the American
public, but that it worked on me.
I was pissed off.
I had grown up, of course,Catholic, which meant that I got
kind of religious abuse fromthe Protestants that I grew up around
in East Tennessee, which therewas almost no Catholics or very few
of us.
So I was, you know, not verywarm to these things anyway.

(10:24):
But there was a strongSouthern tradition that if you don't
go to church, you're notreally a person.
And I rebelled against that.
And these crackpots on the TVwere just making me angry as I kind
of grew into an adult view of,you know, the world.
And I was like, you know what?
I don't actually believe anyof this.
Now, here's a part of thestory I don't know if I told.
A lot of people don't knowthis, and I don't usually drag my

(10:45):
kids into it, but my kids wereactually like.
We tried to make them believein God, and they just wouldn't.
They just absolutely would not.
Where they got it, we have no idea.
We don't know what media.
We don't think it was.
It certainly wasn't theschools here in East Tennessee.
We have no idea where they gotthis, but they were adamant about
this.
And so, in a sense, theybecame the permission structure by
which I was just like, youknow what?

(11:07):
I don't actually believe this either.
And then I kind of went headover heels with it.
As I said at the time, even alot of people, when they're involved
in something that they don't,they feel like is kind of repressing
or oppressing them.
And I felt repressed, notoppressed, because I couldn't speak
just plainly.
If I wanted to bring upevolution, it was going to be a belly

(11:28):
ache for half an hour before Icould talk about anything or whatever.
A lot of people, when theyfeel that way and they get out, turn
around, as I phrased it, andthrow rocks at the cathedral.
So I got caught up in thiscurrent of the new atheism.
I finally.
A friend of mine had given mea copy of the God Delusion, and when
he brought it over to myhouse, I wouldn't touch it.
My wife actually had to put iton the bookshelf because I wouldn't

(11:50):
even touch the evil book.
And I wasn't exactly aprofessing Christian at the time.
But this is kind of, you know,I was like, that's wrong, you know.
And then I finally picked itup and I read it and I thought Dawkins
was glib and derisive incertain places, but I also thought
he made some really goodpoints in other places.
Then I basically consumed the canon.
Christopher Hitchens, SamHarris, the whole thing.

(12:11):
And I was like, these guys aremaking a lot of sense.
I can finally find people Ican talk to.
You get the whole social andemotional aspect.
And I got involved in writingabout New Atheism and trying.
I never actually went to a NewAtheist conference, but I started
working with a lot of thepeople who did.
I never quite got big enoughin it.
It's just this stupid little dilettante.
And I thought I'd just startmy life out in that regard by writing

(12:34):
a book which I called GodDoesn't We do it got described by
a Marxist leftist atheist as the.
I got described as the KarlMarx of New Atheism for writing that
book.
I had no idea why, but thetitle actually tells you the answer.
We don't need to rely on Godto solve our problems.
We can come together andbasically form a socialist program

(12:56):
that can solve all of ourproblems for us, you know, But I
wasn't an outright socialistand I was certainly an anti Marxist
though, so I didn't believe that.
I believed that we should havebigger and more government, but not.
Which is stupid on reflection,but not a socialist government that
does everything for us.
I didn't even go as far as theNordic countries, as a lot of people

(13:18):
kind of have as a way station.
I was like, that's a littletoo much taxes.
At 60% effective tax rate,it's too high.
But I did believe in a, youknow, solid tax base, a progressive
tax structure and a biggergovernment that could incorporate
to solve problems.
And that's basically what thebook is about.
So it got me into branded theKarl Marx of New Atheism by a lunatic,

(13:39):
which nobody took seriously anyway.
And so eventually that allstarted to fall apart.
Basically, it got attacked bya splinter group that was social
justice oriented within thebroader New Atheist movement.
In the podcast I discuss animportant fact that there were always
two movements, one morerationalist and one that was more
just angry about Christianoppression or repression, depending

(14:03):
on how they saw it.
A lot of women, a lot of gays,and a lot of people who grew up in
unpleasant fundamentalisthomes who are turning around and
throwing every rock they canpick up doing a critical theory of
religion or critical religion theory.
And these two were.
These two branches were not distinct.
Enough.
They were very symbiotic offof each other.

(14:24):
And eventually the socialjustice branch branded itself Atheism
plus and killed the host andkilled, turned, took over the whole
movement, killed all theconference structure, made everything
poisonous and it gave alaunching pad to a few people, but
not a lot of people.
And this kind of broadersocial justice warrior movement,
I think it set a lot of themotif for like the blog networks

(14:46):
and all of the ways that theywould abuse people online.
But they never real.
None of these people everactually became prominent as, you
know, woke leftists that I caneven think of.
I mean we knew they were woke,but they were niche woke up.
They weren't like the bignames like Ibram Kendi or Robin d'
Angelo or any of that kind of thing.
So anyway, looking back in2013 or 14, it dies by 15.

(15:09):
By 13 or 14 I got involved in12, so 11 or 12.
So I wasn't that long involvedin this.
I threw my rocks at thecathedral for a while.
By 13, midway about two yearsabout how long it takes say the D
transitioners to say it takesthem to deprogram from there issues.
I decided that, you know, thiswhole argument about the existence

(15:29):
of God, the philosophy ofreligion, the theology is actually
kind of just a circle thatnever ends.
You can't resolve these issuesby arguments and nobody ever will.
So what's more interesting isthe psychology behind it.
So I started to study thepsychology of religion using rigorous
textbooks that would be taughtin, you know, graduate level programs

(15:51):
in psychology.
And I wrote a book.
Eventually it published, Iwrote in 14, but it published in
15 called Everybody is wrongabout God where I just lay out that
God is a mythologicalstructure that indicates these psychological
and social features thatpeople need in order to, you know,
ground themselves in meaning,making a sense of control and other

(16:13):
stuff.
I forgot all I've writtenwithout going back to look at it.
And that was honestly two ofthe chapters in that are like the
complete break from Atheismand that atheism is corrupted by
this social justice crap.
And like I'm very clear thatlike atheism is cringe.
By 2014 when I wrote the bookagain, it came out and I think I
submitted it 10 months beforeit came out.

(16:36):
So you know, by 14, 2014, I'mlike, atheism is cringe.
And I just kind of, I mean Ikept a foot in the canoe for a while,
you know, as you do, as youget out of the boat, one foot's in
the boat, one foot's on thedock for a while.
And granted, when you'regetting out of a boat, it's not very
long, but you get the metaphor.
And so eventually I startedworking a lot with Christians.

(17:00):
I realized that a lot of whatI had been told about Christians
through the atheist stuff wastotal bullcrap.
And same thing happenedworking with conservatives.
The first time I went to cpac,I expected it to be this kind of,
like, clan rally.
I don't know why I thought that.
And it was totally was the opposite.
It's just nerdy politicalpeople, but across the, you know,

(17:21):
gam, whether it's race or sexor whatever.
And a lot of politicalvariation, too.
A lot of conspiracy theoriesas well.
And so anyway, I was reallyshocked and surprised.
I realized I'd been lied to.
And so I began kind ofpurposefully working with a lot of
evangelicals, in particularfewer Catholics.

(17:42):
But I wasn't closed off to it.
It's just who was inviting me.
Sat down for a long conversation.
It turns out that themicrophones fritzed, so it never
came out with Bishop RobertBarron at 1.
I did have some Catholicinterface, and as far as I know,
I'm still on friendly termswith them.
But at any rate, I came tothink, well, if I'm going to spend

(18:04):
a lot of time with Christians,I want to hear them.
I want to hear what they're saying.
I want to understand how theythink about things on their terms.
I want to understand a scripture.
Let's read some of thescripture again more frequently.
Then I started getting a lotmore serious about it.
But I refused at any point tobe dishonest about what I believe.
I did publicly repent.

(18:26):
I said, throwing rocks at the cathedral.
I had issues based on the waythat I grew up and the stuff I saw
on tv.
And I threw a fit.
And it seemed cool at the timeand wasn't cool.
It was cringe.
And so I've repented of that Idon't know how many times publicly.
I have to kind of go throughthis little ritual every time a Christian
invites me anywhere to gospeak now we have to go through this

(18:48):
little ritual where I admit,no, I think it's stupid now, and
we can't just move on to the subject.
But, yeah, so that's kind ofthis, like, journey.
And I've become extremely warmto the point where I did an interview
in February with JustinBrierly, who does an apologetics
kind of debate podcast.
I did.

(19:08):
I did a conversation with himwhere I even am saying I think that
the Bible is Anthropologically true.
I don't know if it'sontologically true, but I think that
at least is the most valuableguide to how to organize an individual
life and a society if you wantto have a successful society.
Of course, like anything, itcan go wrong.

(19:28):
That's why I have thisargument that, you know, we need
the handshake of faith andreason in order to overcome where
faith can get excessive, whereyou start to have basically cults
where people say, oh no, Godtold me this, so we have to go do
some crazy thing.
Well, reason says maybe not right?
Maybe that's not what that was.

(19:48):
Maybe, maybe you thought thatup yourself and decided that God
told you so that everybody hasto listen to you or something.
Or maybe you had an episode orwho knows?
There are lots of cases ofpeople who have verifiable forms
of epilepsy, for example, thatcause them to have visions and they
think that they're veridical,but probably they're not veridical.

(20:11):
They're probably weird brain activity.
And these people havefrequently been the basis for cults.
We also know that there arecharlatans who come up with entire,
you know, self serving cultreligious splinters using the Bible
as a basis and go off andcreate the entire thing.
So reason says, hold on buddy,you know, we need, what would reason

(20:32):
say about faith?
We need rigorous, thorough,originalist exegesis of the scriptural
texts to understand what wasintended about the belief when it
was written by the people whoare articulating what it is that
you're supposed to believe.
And all of these kind ofeisegetical or hermeneutical lenses
that you start applying to itneed to be regarded at least with,

(20:55):
you know, sincere skepticismand caution, lest we trip into, into
mysticism.
And the same thing's true onthe reason side of things.
Like the atheist movementwould totally, it was, it was always
a critical religion theory,but it also just went bonkers into
a, actually what the criticaltheorists call a what, what he calls

(21:18):
what they called the dialecticof enlightenment, where reason becomes
unreasoned by becoming dogmatic.
You know, they becamescientistic is the right word, but
not even scientistic.
They left the scientisticplantation and went all the way social
justice.
They went straight commie.
And so that, I mean scientismthat went to whatever the hell, Lysenkoism,

(21:38):
I guess.
And so anyway, I look back atall that and I'm like, the atheist
people are missing the core ofwhat it is to have faith, which is
something I literally thinkabout all the time now.
And the religious people needto ground themselves not just on
their faith, but also onreason or on truth.

(22:00):
Like, in my opinion, John 1indicates that Christ is a Logos.
And Logos means anintelligible, ordered world, if it
means anything in the originalGreek, aside from what's in John.
Therefore, there has to bereason involved, because that's.
I mean, logos is the root wordfor logic.
I mean, it's got to be there.

(22:22):
So I.
There's so much great stuff inthere, and I'm so glad that you laid
all that out, because I thinkwhat's important to highlight is
that the positions that you'retaking, the things that you're saying
today, as in today in 2025,are not just a bunch of academic
ideas that you come up with.
They're derived from a.
Of journeying through theworlds of reason and the worlds of

(22:43):
faith, and then also, in asense, through the world of Gnosticism,
through your study of Marx andHegel and all that, which we'll get
into.
So I think it's reallyimportant in the moment that what
we're seeing, what people areseeing when they're listening to
you today is not just someideas that you're kicking around.
It's 20 plus more 30 years ofexperience that you've put into a
perspective that now seemsmore urgent than ever.

(23:03):
Which includes a brief stint.
And even while we were doingthe Bible studies in the college,
I mentioned reading Buddhismand Taoism, but I read some New Age
stuff too, and I thought itwas really compelling.
It's actually very inspiring.
Not to draw an inappropriatecomparison, but in kind of the same
way that the spirit inspirescharismatics, it's like this weird,

(23:24):
twisted theosophical spiritlights you on fire when you get pulled
into that.
And luckily I realized, notvery far down the New Age road, that
it was kind of crackpot, thatI've always had this really strong
aversion, frankly, to hippies,and I've just coded it as too hippie.
I couldn't stand hippies forsome reason, basically, ever.

(23:45):
So I coded it that way.
And it kept me from going toofar into the.
Into the nonsense.
But what the nonsense is, isnot nonsense.
It's awakening to what theycall a Christ consciousness, which
is.
I mean, we can go real deep onwhat a Christ consciousness is, but
it's.
Yeah, absolutely not Christianis what it is the first place.

(24:06):
And it's this esoteric,mystic, mystical stuff.
So I had a point where Idabbled in that as well.
And you know, it's.
Again, when you get out of theboat, your foot stays in it for a
little while, even while theother one gets on the dock.
So for a little while, there'sjust this.
Through my 20s, there's justthis mishmash of theological and

(24:26):
theosophical and scientific ideas.
In other words, those threeworlds just kind of swimming around.
So I have direct contact, forgood or for ill, with all three of
these worlds.
I didn't take the theologicalworld seriously properly as an adult
until much more recently.
The scientific world wasalways my anchor, but the theosophical

(24:49):
really had a draw on me, and Ithink I'm fortunate that I didn't
get pulled in too deeply.
I have friends who actuallydid get pulled in very deeply into
that, and they're effectivelycrazy now.
Like, I know people who, youknow, they went down this road they
thought they were going,whether it's.
I mean, honestly, I read KenWilbur a long time ago, which is
the spiral dynamics thing.

(25:09):
And I know people who gotpulled into Ken Wilbur so far that
they ended up attemptingsuicide several times in a row because
they just can't clear the nextlevel or whatever in his program.
So they turn around and thinksomething must be spiritually defective
about themselves.
And it's just.
Just really dark stuff.
But, I mean, I read all thatstuff 20 years ago and found it at

(25:30):
least intriguing, if not, youknow, inspiring in certain ways.
So I have a taste of that aswell, unfortunately.
Or fortunately, maybe.
Yeah.
Well, what's interesting about the.
The difference in our lifepaths is, is the scientific path
was your anchor.
I went hard into thetheological and sort of theosophical

(25:51):
path.
That was the road that Iwalked and that God ultimately led
me out of.
In fact, you write a lot aboutthe snake swallowing its tail.
I have this tattooed on my arm.
You can't really see it justbecause of the angle, but I have
a tattoo of a snake swallowinghis tail in the shape of a figure
eight on my arm.
And I have an ayahuasca vineon this arm.
Like, that was my life for avery long time.
And so as you talk about theseGnostic concepts, like, that was

(26:12):
what I lived.
You know, I got delivered fromit, praise God.
But as you talk about theseconcepts in your lectures, like,
okay, he's really got it.
And I think what's interestingabout this moment is these concepts
are now surfacing in the livesof everyday Americans, people in
the west, just the powerfulinfluence that they have over our
institutions, that they haveover people's minds, the Gnostic

(26:33):
parasite as having latched onto both faith and reason at different
touch points.
And this is why the path thatyou walk to discover these things
matters so much.
And it's why I wanted to start there.
That again, these aren'tacademic concepts.
These are things that you'veseen and read and experienced with
your own eyes, like they arewith me.
Yeah, they're everywhere.
I mean, my broad.

(26:55):
I'm trying to figure out whichof two things to say.
I'll say the less importantone or that maybe has more impact.
But like, for example, a lotof people just don't realize that
not only is a ton of ourentertainment media based off of
these gnostic principles and concepts.
Yeah.
But like the Oprah Winfreyshow, which was easy, enormously

(27:15):
influential for 30 years overhuge numbers of moms in this country,
is a vehicle for deliveringsomething called New Thought to the
public.
Most of the kind of bigreligious sounding.
They're not religious.
They're theosophical voicesthat Oprah had on her show over and

(27:39):
over and over and over againare actually what are are called
New Thought leaders.
They're the leaders of a newage cult religion called New Thought,
which I'm absolutely certainthat Oprah Winfrey subscribes to.
I'm pretty certain that theyhad the mechanisms and means to build
her show to the point whereshe became a billionaire because
she was the vehicle forbringing New Thought into our society.

(28:01):
So we are utterly saturatedwith this mysticism at this point.
The other thing that I wantedto say is that my thesis ultimately
comes down to this idea, thesecret religions of the west, that
at the dawn of the modern era,which is a fuzzy thing itself, I
don't mean modernism as a formof art or politics or philosophy.
I mean the modern era, whichstretches back to the end of the

(28:24):
medieval era.
It kind of is marked by theReformation, it's marked by the Enlightenments.
And I say that very distinctly.
Enlightenment, plural.
There are more than one Enlightenment.
The French Enlightenment, theGerman Enlightenment, and the English
Enlightenment, for example,with a side shot of Scottish Enlightenment,
are not the same things.

(28:46):
They had fundamentallydifferent commitments and they sprawled
in some sense from the late1300s all the way into the early
1800s.
So this is a very complicated.
And when people, you know, youhear a lot of people come out and
say, well, the Enlightenmentis ruined.
Everything.
Enlightenment thought, whatit's like, what are you talking about?
This is like a ton ofmovements sprawling over a continent

(29:10):
over 500 years.
Like, which things are youspecifically Talking about, because
a lot of it was shot throughand inspired by mysticism.
You might even count theRenaissance as part of this.
This was all heavily inspiredby mysticism that had been brought
in through Marsilio Ficino in Italy.
I always mess up his name, buthe ended up somehow getting a copy

(29:34):
of the Corpus Hermeticum,which is the bible for the hermetic
cult.
And he.
Well, most of it, it's in 17books and there are only 14 that
survive.
And we know that there are 17because the last one that does survive
is numbered 17 and it saysit's the last one.
So he ends up translating thisinto Latin and spreading it all over

(29:57):
Europe, or his benefactorspreads it all over Europe.
So there was a huge infusionof mysticism that inspired all this
kind of return to all this artand this return to different kinds
of thinking and lots ofphilosophical exploration.
This gave rise to ideal andromanticism down the track.
But my essential thesis isthat we can kind of put a pin in

(30:17):
Rousseau and Jean JacquesRousseau as kind of this, you know,
epoch defining voice.
And this is French Enlightenment.
Right.
This is different than sayScottish Enlightenment.
In fact, Hume being part ofthe Scottish Enlightenment, whether
you agree with Hume or not,was in a huge fight with Rousseau.
They didn't agree about a tonof stuff.

(30:38):
In fact, I low key suspect itwas a lover's spat, but I won't get
into that.
I just kind of get the vibe.
Right.
And so Rousseau inauguratesbasically, in my opinion, a new form
of mysticism that has not beenpresent up to that point.

(30:58):
Which would be, we should callmodern mysticism because it's indicative
of the modern era.
Okay, so pre modern mysticismis very magical.
Spiritual alchemy, potions,ghosts, shards of the divine, and
all of this kind of the 1stcentury and 2nd century Gnostics,
it's all just very spiritual.

(31:20):
Well, the modern era isenormously less spiritual in a big
way.
And so it's much more material.
And so now what we end up withis that the gnostic motifs and the
mystic and the occult motifsno longer get interpreted through
actual spiritual forces, butget interpreted through socio spiritual

(31:40):
forces.
In other words, sociologybecomes a replacement for the spirit
world.
And I call this socionosticismbecause it's or social Gnosticism
or sociological Gnosticism.
Does all three mean the same thing?
I don't care which term we use.
This is kind of new terminology.
And these, this comes in andwhen people say the Enlightenment

(32:01):
thinking was the problem,they're mostly talking about this
they're mostly talking aboutthe infusion of a sociological gnosticism
or mysticism into continental philosophy.
And that's Rousseau, that'sthe German idealists, many of whom
followed Rousseau.
And something completelydifferent happened in Scotland, which
ended up inspiring America.

(32:22):
Of course, Rousseau inspiresthe French Revolution.
A lot of the American founderswitnessed the French Revolution just
after we had put our owncountry together.
And they're like, not that wayWestern man.
And so they, they codifiedkind of anti Rousseauian or anti,
if you want to be strict aboutit, continental Enlightenment themes

(32:44):
in the American experiment.
So this is why this is likethere needs to be the three religions
of the west, because theAmerican experiment was based off
of how do we mix faith and reason?
And the continent went offinto romanticism, idealism, and all
these forms of socialGnosticism as a form of transformational

(33:04):
mysticism to ultimately all ofthem have the same goal, whether
it's the new thought on OprahWinfrey or whether it's Karl Marx
or Jean Jacques Rousseau,which is that there's an ideal state
of man, an ideal state ofsociety waiting for us, and we have
to arrange circumstances todrag everybody to higher spiritual
levels so that we can achieve it.
We've got to break free of thecurrent level in which we are trapped

(33:27):
by illegitimate forces whichthe original Gnostics would have
called the Demiurge andidentified with Yahweh in the garden
in Genesis 3, that is 2 and 3.
It's 1 through 3 really,because it's the creator God, they
say.
Nope, the fake creator.
Demiurge means artisan whobuilds things.

(33:47):
So he built a fake world,denying our true spirituality.
And when we tried to discoverour true spirituality by eating of
the fruit, he was like, oh,hell no.
And kicked us out into an evenworse prison of being where we're
going to suffer, have to liveby the toil of our brow, etc.
And so this same motif, it'snow whether it's the bourgeoisie,
whether it's the whitesupremacists or whatever control

(34:09):
society, this is the motifthat I see having spread through
this social Gnostic.
But the real goal isn't totalk about the demiurge or to become
the demiurge as I actuallythink they want.
It's to complete man andcomplete society.
In other words, it's to.
To facilitate our return backto Eden on our own terms and open
defiance of God.
Rousseau called it savagesmade to live in cities.

(34:32):
This was handed on toSchiller, who called it Alfheben
in German, which means toabolish, to keep and to lift up to
a higher level of understanding.
And that's the basis forHegel's thought was this concept
of alfhabn and how everythingis to transform.
And that's where Marx got hisidea that communism is the positive

(34:52):
transcendence of privateproperty as human self estrangement
and thus a complete return ofman to himself as a social, which
is to say human being.
How are you returning toyourself through positive transcendence?
You are keeping what it meansto be man while abolishing the false
aspects of our experiencethrough private property, while raising

(35:13):
to a higher level of what itmeans to live with one another.
That is indicative of theprimitives who now get to live in
cities.
It's the same exact model.
And I thought holy crap, crap.
This is just this weird blendand it kind of veers one way or the
other, depending on who we'relooking at, of Gnostic thinking or
Hermetic thinking.
And that reflects very heavilyback to the first century cults of

(35:36):
the Manicheans being veryGnostic and the Sethians having incorporated
more of the Zoroastrian andHermetic traditions into their Gnosticism,
it's more transformational.
And so.
So Gnostic is escape theprison of being, Hermetic is transform
ourselves to escape the prisonof being or to realize that the prison

(35:58):
of being is not real.
And that's where Christconsciousness actually comes in.
It's the eighth level, whichis the level that its homath says
he's on in Ken Wilber'sstructure, but he can't break through
to the 9th.
Okay.
There is so much in there thatis, is so super important.
So I want to start pulling outpieces because what you've described

(36:21):
is, as far as I can tell, agrand narrative of history.
I don't mean in the Marxistsense, but a sense of you have this
underground religion that hasexisted throughout the west in various
forms for a couple thousandyears, going back to the Gnostics,
the Gnostic heresy.
And that had a mysticalcharacter up until around the Reformation,
the Enlightenment, maybe the Renaissance.
And then during theEnlightenments plural, this mystical

(36:45):
character took on socialcharacteristics, meaning they stopped
worrying about spirits andthey stopped worrying about punching
through to different levels of consciousness.
Instead they wanted totransform material reality or the
social conditions of the world.
So Gnosticism adapted itselfto the changing societal conditions.

(37:05):
And there's a thread ofthinkers that this weaves through.
So just real quick, quick,when I start talking about these
things, I just I find thatpeople have trouble believing that
it's real.
When you start trying toexplain to people the notions of
Gnosticism and just how thesesequel religions are real things,
people's eyes kind of glaze over.
And in your lectures, youknow, you mentioned this book, Hegel

(37:26):
and the Hermetic Tradition,which I ordered on Amazon.
And I just started reading thefirst few pages just last night,
just to kind of get a feel of it.
And just the first 10, 15, 20pages are shot through with just
how hermetic, just howgnostic, just how secret religions
Hegel is.
And we're used to hearingabout Hegel in this socio political
kind of vein, but he wasbringing down gnostic and hermetic

(37:49):
traditions into social theory,which again is the point that you're
making, that these bigspiritual ideas were adapted to social
concepts and now they'rehiding in plain sight among us.
That we think that they'resocial political theories, but really
they're informed by somethingmuch deeper.
Yeah, I gotta add one thingwith Hegel, which is that Hegel didn't

(38:09):
just make it into like withphilosophy of.
Right.
He was talking about a, youknow, political theory, maybe a sociopolitical
theory, and then likephilosophy of logic and encyclopedia
logic.
He's actually talking abouteffectively epistemology.
It's infusing it into epistemology.
But more importantly, whatHegel did that often gets missed
is that he, following peoplelike Swedenborg, hammered it into

(38:31):
Christianity.
So he hammered it into theidea of Christian motifs, which of
course Marx picked up, butrejected with Feuerbach being the
guy in between, Feuerbachbeing the grand materialist that
informed Marx.
A lot of Christians miss this,particularly because they think of
materialism as meaning thereis no God, everything's just a material

(38:53):
world.
But there's a second aspect ofmaterialism that's called sociological
materialism.
And that's actually what youjust described, is that that the
sociological materialconditions replace the spiritual
world.
Not rocks and dirt and trees,but the way that human beings interact
with one another is actuallythe real world version of spirit.

(39:14):
And so Hegel actually had thissame idea.
This is what he called the Geist.
And the Geist was actuallykind of the spirit of the society
that had been erected by thestate, which had been erected in
an image of the idea.
The best that man could thinkof, he called, you know, the idea,
the absolute idea was hisstand in for God.

(39:36):
And then it creates thistrinity, which is the theoretical
idea giving away to thepractical idea, which is how you
try to the theoretical idea isyour best guess about what the absolute
idea is at this stage in history.
And then the, the practicalidea is how you try to implement
that.
And he said the state is adivine idea as it exists on earth.
So that's the implementationof your best guess about what God

(39:59):
is becomes the state.
And then that gives rise to a society.
The organization of the stateproduces a society because of its,
as Jordan Peterson wouldphrase it, its ground rules or base
rules.
And that society has a spiritthat infuses throughout.
And for Hegel, thecontradictions between the theoretical
idea and the absolute idea,which show themselves in practice

(40:22):
and look like contradictionsbetween the theoretical idea, what
you aspire to, and thepractical idea, which is what you
actually do, what you get as aconsequence of doing it.
Two, those contradictionsarise in the Spirit, and so that
the Spirit then informs thegrand transformation of the entire
thing.
So now the Trinity is not astatic object of 3 CO = of God.

(40:46):
It is a process.
It is no longer a being, butit is a process of becoming, which
is that the, through theprocess of going around that wheel
of revolution or triangle ofrevolution which.
Hold up the book again.
Look on the COVID The triangleof revolution of.
Yeah, the triangle ofrevolution of society, that eventually

(41:08):
every time you go around andthe contradictions emerge in the
spirit, you have a radicalreconstitution of society and you
have this political idea.
But what's happening is thatthe new theoretical idea that emerges
from the resolution of thecontradictions through the Alfaben
process closer approximatesthe divine idea.
So you get closer and closerand closer to God.

(41:28):
So the society itself, andthus the men within it, are becoming
godlike.
And this is done intentionallyin this three piece Christian motif,
this trinitarian Christianmotif with a father in the idea,
a son in the state, and aspirit that flows forth from it in

(41:51):
very intentional Christian motif.
So what you have with Hegel isnot just a poisoning of sociology
and politics, you also have apoisoning of theology.
Marx famously rejected thetheology and replaced it with economics,
which is much more material.
He believed that people arematerially determined by their economic

(42:12):
and social conditions.
That's how he opens the 18thBrumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
He says that men make history,but they do not make it under conditions
of their own choosing.
So that's called material determinism.
The circumstances of theirbirth, of the society when they're
born, delimit what they canbe, what they can understand, who
they are.
And the point is to drive thewheel around and around and around

(42:36):
until you break free of itover and over and over again.
Then when you break freeenough times, you reach a high enough
level, you have Christconsciousness now guiding your whole
society.
Now you're at a differentlevel of existence.
And this was actually Hegel's project.
So you have this weirdinfusion also into theology as a
process of becoming ratherthan as a voluntary pursuit of righteousness

(43:01):
under the.
The absolutely perfect andunchanging law of God, where you
are becoming your own God, manin society becoming their own God
by actualizing the divine ideaon earth in accordance with, like,

(43:21):
the Lord's Prayer, thy will bedone on earth as it is in heaven.
And so they're like, yeah,okay, that's what we're going to
do.
We're going to force God'swill to come.
Come to pass here.
And so when you look atphilosophy of right, then, and he
look at his philosophy ofwhat, a righteous political order,
which he lists as aconstitutional monarchy as its form.

(43:42):
When you look at philosophy ofright, what you're actually seeing
is a theological politicalproject that's designed to transform
man and society into a godlikestate, which Christians recognize
what that is.
That's Lucifer.
That's Antichrist.
So I think that the key pointthat you've made throughout all of

(44:03):
them, there are many of them,but the key point that you've made
is that they're trying toactualize God on earth, but they
have rejected categoricallythe God of the Bible.
They have a completelydifferent vision of God.
What Dr.
Peter Jones might call oneism,sort of an all is one.
Ultimately, at the highestlevel of reality.
They're trying to actualizethat all is one, one God on earth
with themselves as.

(44:24):
As its sort of high material priests.
Yeah, that's right.
That's.
That's exactly right.
And again, we can talk aboutHegel here.
We can talk about Marx, wherenow it's going to be that the man
transcends private propertyand returns to himself as a truly
human being who lives for the species.
What Marx called a speciesbeing, where the individual and the

(44:44):
total collective are unifiedas a single object.
Where you have, as heexplains, achieved a perfect communist
state, but not in theprimitive squalor of tribes, but
in the sense of havingmaintained and recovered or kept
all of the material benefitsof the previous stages of history.

(45:04):
That's explicitly what he sayscommunism is supposed to be about,
distinguishing it from crude communism.
Or we could flash forward andtalk about these new thought, new
Age people or the theosophistswhich are not quite exactly the same
thing, but they even havethese stupid pun like the atonement,
which is a very importantreligious concept, is actually should
be pronounced at one mint.

(45:26):
Because we're all becoming atone when we atone.
And so it's like woof.
But their idea is actuallythat humanity is stuck.
By the way, Hitler has thesame idea.
If you read Mein Kampf, heexpresses the same idea.
Where did he get it from?
Helena Blavatsky, the theosophist.
That's right.
That human beings are stuck ata particular level of spiritual and

(45:48):
societal advancement and thatwe must undergo certain processes
to elevate to the next level.
This sometimes, like withBlavatsky, is spelled out explicitly
with her theory of five root races.
There's the bottom two thatare basically animals, which includes
the Jews, by the way.
And then there are the.
The third level are theworkers, and they are called Lemurians.

(46:10):
I don't know why she picksthese motifs.
The thinkers are calledAtlanteans on the fourth level.
And they can do a lot ofvaluable things in soc.
Society needs true, as shecalls them, you know, Aryans, fifth
root race people.
Or it needs what gets calledin other places by Hegel, men of

(46:32):
destiny or men of history.
It needs the Aryans in orderto have vision to take humanity further.
But then the goal is not tojust make things better on earth,
it's to break through from thefifth root race to a higher system
of organization.
That's the sixth root race.
And when we get to the sixthlevel, everything is going to be
even better.

(46:52):
Like I said, this is for mewhat Marx is talking about when he's
talking about making everybody socialists.
You're going to bring them toa higher level of both human individual
and sociological organizationwhere everybody just shares.
It turns out that the at onemen state is almost always socialist
in its organization.
So a lot of people believe, asdoes Ken Wilbert, sixth state in

(47:15):
green, which isenvironmentalist communism, there's
going to be this hugecollective endeavor, this huge collective
endeavor to share everythingand live in greater harmony as one
and to recognize our onenessfrom one to the other.
And so Hegel's doing this too.

(47:37):
So is Marx, and so are theseNew age theosophists who.
But the really scary part iswhen I said that the fifth root race
is called the Aryans.
And that's actually literallywhere Hitler got both the term Aryan
and the swastika and the crazyrace ideology he explains in chapter
11 of Mein Kampf, which iswhere the blood can't be mixed downward

(47:59):
or else you'll pollute therace and the whole point.
He calls his project theracialist world concept, which is
the idea that if the state canpurify the race to the sufficient
level, then you can advance tothe next stage of organization of
humanity.
That's in the second volume ofMein Kampf.
If you actually bother to readHitler, you find out that he was
an occultist weirdo with aracialist word world concept based

(48:21):
off of a theosophist.
And that the point in everysingle case, fascist, communist,
Hegelian, New age, newthought, doesn't matter.
The point in every single caseis to elevate humanity to its next
stage of organization, whichseems to be socialist or for the.
For the fascist, it's fascism,which is just a different way of

(48:43):
organizing socialism with atotal, total hierarchical society
based on exclusion versus thetotally un hierarchical society of
communism based on inclusion.
Same energy, oppositedirection there.

(52:41):
So I think what we're seeingplay out over the course of history
is a theological worldview, atheosophical worldview really, that's
seeking to evolve humanity tohigher states of consciousness and
as a result, higher states of order.
And this stands directly incontradiction to the biblical story.

(53:02):
Just there is no higher stateof evolution.
We are in this position asfallen creatures and we repent to
God and we live for hiskingdom, but we don't try to actualize
heaven here on earth in thiskind of utopian kind of mode.
We understand the limits ofour human capability and we act in
faith as opposed to saying,no, we're going to actualize this

(53:23):
here on earth and we are goingto be the Gnostic ones who have the
truth for how to do that.
And these, this is why, why I.
Place, why I think they hateChristians and Jews so much, because
Christians and Jews are like,no, that's right, that's right.
Because we don't.
We don't obey your Gnostic priesthood.
We obey Scripture and find that.
Find that in scripture.
Okay, you have that.

(53:43):
Let me.
Here's this other text.
How do you juxtapose these two together?
This is a book.
Everyone has access to it.
There's no hidden knowledge.
It's all just right here.
Find it for me in the book.
And Helena Blavatsky said,said that the chiefs of the Theosophical
society regard Christianity asmost pernicious to their aims.
And she identified correctlythat Christianity was the enemy of

(54:05):
the Theosophical projectbecause it can't digest the Christian
tradition, so it sets itselfup in opposition to the Christian
tradition.
But I think what people havetrouble understanding is what we
currently conceive of asphilosophy today.
The history of philosophyactually isn't.
Maybe at one point in time itwas what I hear you describing as

(54:25):
what was once philosophy hasbeen parasitized and has become a
very sophisticated form ofGnosticism that uses philosophical
sounding language, but tocommunicate Gnostic and hermetic
concepts.
That's exactly how I feelabout the vast majority of philosophy
over at least the last severalhundred years, maybe even, certainly
also even in antiquity tocertain degrees.

(54:46):
But philosophy, if youactually, I mean, we're going to
be pedantic here and do the thing.
What does the word mean?
Philo Sophia, Love, Wisdom.
There's a famous.
Plato wrote a famous tractwith Socrates where he's asked if
he has wisdom.
And Socrates, of course, neverclaims to have wisdom.

(55:08):
And he says, that's for thegods only.
That is beyond me as a man.
So this is an orientation of humility.
He says, I can only but love wisdom.
Wisdom.
And that's where we get theword philosophy.
So that's the love or the pursuit.
Love includes an earnest pursuit.
Right.
In a defense of wisdom.

(55:28):
So that's what philosophy issupposed to be about.
But what the Gnostic thing isabout is a pursuit of power to do
what?
To transform the idea actuallywhether, if we look at Blavatsky,
she's deriving this from the.
What is it called?
The Mahayana, Is that right?
Right.
School of Buddhism, which isthe one that's rather than the Thera

(55:49):
Veda one.
Theravada is individual.
You're going to go meditate ina cave until you have enlightenment.
And it's all about you as anindividual deciding to achieve detachment.
Fine, whatever.
I mean, I honestly don't care.
And Christians can try toconvert them all they want for their
theological reasons.
I just don't care if that'swhat they want to do with their life

(56:09):
because they're not hurtinganybody and they generally turn out
to be pretty good people.
The other school, theMahayana, I think it's Mahayana school,
is actually that they have tobe the vehicle to bring humanity
all together to the next levelor in order to save all of humanity.
And so this is this weirdsavior complex that's buried in there
that they're going to.

(56:30):
This vehicle is going to move humanity.
And again, how pervasive is this?
Not just in philosophy, theUnited nations since the millennium,
at least the Millenniumassembly, which is in 2000.
But I think from its originsin the.
In the 1940s, but explicitlysince the Millennium assembly in
2000, has embraced this.
They say that they areintentionally trying to be the entity

(56:55):
that acts as a nervous systemfor a central nervous system for
a global organism.
They call it a meta organism.
So it's not just aboutorganizing treaties and, or, you
know, challenges between countries.
They see themselves as acentral nervous system for a global
meta organism that includesall life and all people and all nations

(57:18):
and all institutions.
And their explicit purpose indoing this is to direct the evolution
of humanity to its next stage.
Now, just as a little cookieto throw in, there are numbers to
these stages.
Blavatsky calls the Aryans thefifth root race.
I would say that, that Marx'sview would be that the Communists,

(57:40):
because he says this isn't theend or the fifth level.
They're the ones that have.
Maybe it's the sixth level.
I should say they're the sixth level.
The fifth level are the peoplewho are going to bring us to that
higher order of consciousness.
So the Aryans are going tolead us to the socialist state.
So that's your sixth level.
But then there's a seventhlevel and then there's breaking free

(58:01):
of the corpus hermeticum.
There's the seven levels ofbeing kind of trapped in existence.
And then you break free.
And when you break free, whatyou break free to is Christ consciousness.
Christ is said to have beenone of the people in history of many
who broke through.
It could be Buddhaconsciousness instead, if you want.

(58:21):
It doesn't have to be Christ.
These are a handful of peoplethroughout history have broken through,
not just from the fifth to thesixth, to the seventh, but to the
eighth level of consciousness,where they've broken free of the
seven material planes.
This is their esoteric view.
And on the eighth level, youhave the mind of Christ, which is
to say that you have the mind,mind of God.

(58:42):
And at that point you have thecapacity and their belief to merge
back with the totality, thewhole, the one which is the true
God, not the false God that'sin the Bible in their view.
And so you have this missionthat this, like the United nations
has adopted and that ispromoted through new thought.
That was attempted throughcommunism, that was attempted in

(59:05):
fascism, by a different meansto push humanity toward everybody,
finally achieving Christ consciousness.
And if you read what Hegelsaid about that, that the point is
at that point all of man andsociety, the theoretical idea, the
practical idea and theabsolute idea will be concurrent.
We'll have the perfect manliving in the perfect society.

(59:27):
And at that point there ismerging back into the one.
And all this stuff, I mean itis super real, you know, from, from
me personally having studiedit for years.
These are the things that theoccult mystery schools teach.
This is what I studied for anumber of years.
This is what's kind ofpreached around the world.
Maybe not always from the samesocial socialistic United nations

(59:49):
kind of posture, but there isthat component as well, Alice Bailey,
the Lucis Trust.
But I think what as there's a.
Tech bro version too, beforewe go to that.
Yeah, please, real quick.
The tech bro version is the singularity.
Right.
AI is going to actualize as akind of God for us, by us that's
going to be able to brainwashus to be completely compliant with

(01:00:10):
the right next step in humanity.
And this was the attempt toactualize what the Jesuit heretic
called Pierre Terrdin calledthe Omega point.
So the Omega point of humanityis when it finally breaks through
from the material plane andgoes into the rarefied levels of

(01:00:31):
Christ consciousness.
So the tech pro view of it isactually that we're going to build
the AI and the AI and thealgorithm are going to be able to
control our brains goodenough, maybe through brain trips,
maybe just through propagandaor whatever to drag us to a new higher
level of organization.
They don't say it explicitly,obviously, but when you read the
document that the Chinesegovernment published in 2014 justifying

(01:00:52):
their social credit system,they explain that the primary purpose
of the social credit system isto create a mechanism by which the
people can be trained to become.
Become socialists.
It is a training tool.
In other words, it's to raisepeople up to that sixth level of
organization, which is socialism.
And so there's a tech broexpression too, that's not necessarily

(01:01:15):
the Oprah Winfrey or the KarlMarx or whatever else.
Yes.
And this theme, the Gnosticparasite, what's so frightening,
and I think I can use thatword confidently, is to look at how
subtle it manipulates ideas,language, concepts to drag it step

(01:01:36):
by step in the direction ofsomething that is truly fallen and
dark and that takes people over.
Because I think we can talkabout a Christian posture of yes,
I would love to see anevangelized world.
Yes, I would love to see aChristian world.
Absolutely.
I would love to see the gospel spread.
But it's very easy to co optChristian language to become as you

(01:01:57):
described in one of yourlectures or the podcast recently,
recently Dominionist, where Ithink the dividing line is one of
absolute Certainty, like onceyou begin operating with that sort
of absolute certainty that Ihave the answer, that's when you
can become aware that you'veslid off the path, particularly in
Christianity.
Because I think the beauty ofChristianity is we can never truly

(01:02:19):
be certain of our own intentions.
The heart is deceitfully wicked.
No one can know it.
No, I know in my heart this isthe truth.
Well, do you, do you really truly.
You have to always beexamining yourself to see if you're
in the faith.
But the temptation, I think,is to grasp onto that certainty,
to bring about a project thatis conceived not in the mind of man,
but the mind of someplace else.
And I think it's that wantingfor certainty that so many people

(01:02:42):
have, so many men todayparticularly have, that leads them
to misuse Christianity.
Like we can long forsomething, we can desire something,
but it begins within our ownhearts to be questioning and uncertain
of our own motives and to lookto Scripture for guidance for how
to conduct ourselves, not tosimply give ourselves over to this
sort of project that seeks toactualize utopia.
And it's so subtle the waythat this parasite gets in there

(01:03:05):
and wraps itself around men's hearts.
And I think this is the rootof bitterness that we're warned against
because I think you talk aboutthe Gnostic parasite as latching
on through.
Is it fear, desperation andone other thing.
Talk about that for a momentbecause when you said that that's
the attachment site for theGnostic parasite in.
Was it faith?

(01:03:26):
I'm going to go through all mynotes here.
Infection vectors are theparasitic mechanism.
The gnosis attaches todifferent receptor sites in faith
and reason for faith, mysticalexperiences, charity, love, theological
mysteries for reason,curiosity, open mindedness, freedom
and fair debate.
Now there's nothing wrong withthese things, but it can.
But the Gnostic parasite canget in through those vectors and

(01:03:47):
become capitalized on fear,desperation and talk about that for
a moment.
Resentment.
Yeah, yeah, please.
Or hate.
Yeah, fine, yeah.
I mean that's, that's reallyhow the, this all works, is it?
When, when Elon Musk, who didnot coin that term, I think Gad Sad
was the first person to startcalling it a mind virus.
But I don't remember for surewho said it first, but Elon Musk
has certainly started callingwoke a mind virus.

(01:04:09):
Right?
Of course, woke actually meanswoke up to a Gnostic view of the
world.
I'm just going to make thatreal clear.
It doesn't mean something different.
We say, I mean, I keep sayingit means critical consciousness,
but that's in the context of,you know, this kind of, kind of late
modern period that we live in.
But it means having woke up toa gnostic view of the world, which
is this kind of splitdualistic, spiritual versus material.

(01:04:33):
Everything fallen is awful.
We are actually spiritual beings.
A lot of people don't know that.
The hermetic, the corpushermeticum explicitly in the first
book, which is called thePoimandres, explains that you are
already God and that you'regoing through that process of ascending
the levels to remember who youare, to recover or recollect who
you are.
It is not that.
So the, the hermetic beliefsystem has, as the third person of

(01:04:56):
the Godhead, man, and then thesecond person of the Godhead is mind,
meaning the mind of God or nose.
And then the God is theunknowable, perfect full union of
everything at the ninth level.
I guess.
But I digress.
So what happens for a lot ofpeople is that life isn't going perfectly.

(01:05:17):
There are the contradictions,as Mark's named it.
Things are kind of, you know, unfair.
And sometimes they're unfairfor bad reasons, right?
Sometimes they're unfairbecause of corruption, sometimes
they're unfair because ofreally bad luck, right?
Like you have everythinggoing, just imagine because we had
really rough weather last night.

(01:05:38):
I'll use this as an example.
Nothing bad happened here,but, or at least at my house, but
I don't know.
But you know, you haveeverything going.
You're about to start yourbusiness, everything's, you know,
set that and a tornado hitsand destroys, you know, a bunch of
your property, maybe the stuffyou needed for your business, your
amassed initial inventory or whatever.
And yeah, you got insurance.
But this is a huge setback andmaybe it's just enough to break the

(01:06:01):
whole project, you know, soyou can imagine just really bad luck
also being this impediment.
Well, it's hard for peoplesometimes to, to accept that, that
they, that sometimes it'stheir fault and sometimes it's bad
luck and it's just how thecookie crumbles and it becomes much

(01:06:21):
easier to be able to point thefinger and blame.
Well, if the, you know, FEMAor whatever actually did good storm
stuff or the insurance companydid what it was supposed to, this
wouldn't even be a problem.
Or if society was organizeddifferently, this is the general
socionostic perspective, thenI wouldn't be in this losing position.
So it's easy to get, get theresentment aspect rigged up.

(01:06:43):
Especially when you startthinking in class based thinking.
Like there are, you know,those people.
So racial minorities getaffirmative action.
So that sucks for me as awhite person.
So I would have a way betterjob if it wasn't for, for affirmative
action.
And there wouldn't beaffirmative action if there wasn't
black people.
So I would have a way betterjob if I, if there were no black
people.
And you can get into thisresentment based class oriented thinking

(01:07:05):
very easily based on thechallenges and struggles of your
life.
This is why Marx calledreligion the opium of the masses.
Because he said that your realchallenges and struggles, you go
numb to them by believing thatthere's providence and there's a,
there's a divine order forthis and that this is or even just
fate.
And so you won't do anythingabout it because you go numb to it.

(01:07:28):
So what the Marxist or theGnostic incentive is with resentment
is to come along and saythere's something you can do about
it.
And if you understand thatsociety's organized differently,
there's the gnosis part.
Then you know who your enemiesare and you can figure out who your
friends are from there.
And there's your Carl Schmidtfriend enemy distinction which is

(01:07:49):
also the same splitting yousee from the woke.
They just don't call it thefriend enemy distinction.
And you can mobilize, youknow, oppressor versus oppressed,
with the oppressed being theintrinsic, forensic, valorized side.
And that by teaching them whatis called critical or class or whatever
consciousness that they arevictims because, well, their bad

(01:08:12):
circumstances make them victims.
And they are victims becauseof an unjust system that if they
gathered together their powerthey could actually do something
about.
But what that requires ishaving this theory.
Then this is the Gnostic, Icalled this in another place, the
Gnostic Temptation.
The way the Gnostic temptationworks is everything you think you
know is partly true, butthere's more and you've been lied

(01:08:36):
to to keep you from knowing more.
So you might be at level threeor four of the understanding of what
you know things are reallysupposed to be, but there's a higher
level understanding.
Come with us.
And that's the, that's the temptation.
So when you feed into thatresentment and you start telling
them that there's thisdichotomous power struggle in society

(01:08:57):
and that you're the one who'slosing because of it, you can then
say the reason that youhaven't been able to understand this
or do anything about it isbecause you actually have to have
a better understanding of thecircumstances that you're in your
so called real conditions asthe Marxists called it to be able
to do something.
So we have to teach you theway that you're supposed to see the
world.

(01:09:17):
And that's where they canintroduce the Gnostic dualistic thinking
and the, and feed off of thatresentment another way that they
do.
And this is particularlypoignant, I think on the right more
than on the left as it skewsis they generate fear and despair.
They make you think that theworld is.
Although Herbert Marcuse didthis in repressive tolerance very

(01:09:38):
explicitly, he did it also inone dimensional man and S and liberation
and counter revolution revolt.
So it was a big theme on theleft as well.
We are at the cusp of calamity.
The apocalypse is around thecorner and it's mostly the fault
of the other side.
And if we don't do something,we have two choices, which is to
fall off the cliff or tocompletely change everything about

(01:10:01):
how we do and how we think.
And so they feed into thisfear and this despair because existential
crisis demands a kind of solution.
Well, Gnosticism is itself anexistential crisis, right?
They get you to believe thatthe spiritual tradition or spiritual
circumstance you find yourselfin is a lie.

(01:10:23):
And so now you're going to bedamned by falling.
For if you take Gnosticismliterally in the first century sense,
you have the demiurge who's ademonic false God who's tricked you
into thinking he's the real God.
Well, what's going to happento you if you worship a demon instead
of God?
You're damned.
And so they then can startusing that fear and despair or this

(01:10:43):
existential dread to feel feed in.
But actually the whole storyis different.
You're worshiping this demon,but you don't have to because there's
a higher God behind him thathe doesn't want you to know about.
But we have the secretscriptures that tell you what that
actually is and which secretpractices that you have to engage
in in order to be able toachieve the higher level spiritual
gnosis.
When you achieve the gnosis,that's the hidden knowledge of self

(01:11:04):
that allows you as self, asdivine actually, by the way, that
allows you to escape thisprison that this false demon has
put you in.
And you can therefore beliberated or emancipated from your
bondage and your sufferingunder the false God by coming along
with us.
So that fear and despair canbe existential in the spiritual sense,

(01:11:26):
it can also just be society'sdoomed, you've eaten a black pill,
as the kids say, and that theonly thing that you can do about
it is join this radicalmovement where we collectivize our
power to do something about it.
The Marxists did that underthe brand name of solidarity.
The fascists did that underthe brand name literally of fascism,
which means, means to bindtogether like a bundle of sticks

(01:11:50):
which they then set the headof an ax in.
That's what they call theFascus, an ax that's on too small
of a handle.
So they bundle sticks aroundthe handle and tie it with thongs
to make it stronger.
And so they literally call it fascism.
So, you know, they're.
The right tends to be a littlemore on the nose about what it does
than the left in a sense.

(01:12:11):
So they call it solidarity onthe left and on the right they it
call, call it fascism, butit's a binding together enacting
in solidarity or collectivismin order to now break free.
And we're back to the MahayanaBuddhist model that we escape our
collective punishment bybinding together as a collective

(01:12:32):
unit seeking collectiveliberation or elevation.
And so I think that thosereceptors are both present and fed
by the Gnostic parasite.
They come along and tell youyou have reasons for existential
dread and it's the enemy's fault.
They come along and tell youthat you have reasons to hate the

(01:12:53):
system you're in and it's theenemy's fault.
And so you end up getting thisagain, friend, enemy distinction
where you have the us versusthe world.
It's not us versus them, it'sus versus the world mentality which
lends itself to an elitism.
Because if it's us andeverybody else, then we must be elite
by virtue of knowing that weknow what we know, which is the Gnostic,

(01:13:15):
another part of the Gnostic temptation.
You're in the in crowd.
Who knows what every, youknow, what there is to be known where
all the other sheep are asleepand don't know it.
But who does Jesus say, youknow, what is the motif in the Bible
or that Jesus always uses isthat his followers are the sheep,
right?
That he is the shepherd ofpeople who've not decided to go off

(01:13:36):
on some, you know, wildtangent or whatever.
But, but the, the, the, the,the, the generally gentle follower,
it's a very different, it's avery different model.
And I don't want to like losethe lion, obviously, but the point
is that, you know, the Gnosticcome along and say everybody's sheep.

(01:13:56):
But Jesus is like, you're.
You're my sheep, right?
And so there's a metaphorthere that's I think, powerful to
understand in terms of how thegnostic people tempt people out of
the flock and to run with the wolf.
Absolutely.
And in one of the lectures youtalked about how there's a different
set of morality for people who transcend.

(01:14:19):
So talk a little bit aboutthat because I think that's the phenomenon
that is most easy to mark.
People who have taken the baitis that they begin operating being
able to sacrifice their moralcharacter to do things, but it's
not wrong if they do it.
So talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, there's a lot of phrasesthat people.
I just want to throw out ahandful of like kind of cliches or
phrases that people may haveheard that will latch onto this.

(01:14:42):
You've probably heard when wetalk about the left over the last
few years, it's not hypocrisy,it's hierarchy.
Right.
So the left operates.
You say, well, they'rehypocritical and whatever.
And the, but, but the, thereason there is they're not actually
hypocritical.
They're reminding you thatthey're better than you, that the
rules don't apply to them, butthey do apply to you.

(01:15:03):
Whether we call that, youknow, liberating tolerance or whether
we call that a two tieredjustice system, that's fine.
Another phrase, this one'sless well known as wisdom, is knowing
when to break the rules.
This is weird because it'ssimultaneously true and simultaneously
very misleading and dangerous,especially if you think you're wise
and you're actually a fool.

(01:15:24):
That kind of taps into this energy.
I had another one, but I'lljust go on without worrying about
it.
But yeah, so the idea is thatI'll give you Nietzsche actually
first.
So Nietzsche writes thus spakeZarathustra, which is like the hardest
thing in the universe to read.
And it's like this kind ofallegory for his overall philosophy.

(01:15:46):
Philosophy, which essentiallyis a critique of morals, right?
It's a critique of morality.
It's the idea that morals arethe things that actually hold human
beings back from being theuber munch, the superman.
And so if we are to break freeof morals, or in other words, if
wisdom is knowing when tobreak the rules, then you can step

(01:16:09):
into a situation where becauseof your elect or enlightened status,
this, you know, which rulesapply and to whom and to when.
And there are no universalrules anymore.
All of a sudden all the,everything's relative, right?
The, the moral relativitycomes into the picture and the relativity
is, is if you are a person ingood standing in the elite group

(01:16:30):
or the elect group, then youcan operate on a different level
because you have a higherlevel of understanding.
That's the Gnostic part.
And if you're not, well,you're not.
So the, there's one set ofrules for the rule for what is it?
One set of laws for the policeand one set of laws for the people.
Right.
And this is how they actually operate.

(01:16:51):
The Gnostics believe that theyhave this higher level understanding
so that most of the rules thathave to apply to the dumb sheep and
like Hitler called the folkstupid repeatedly throughout Mein
Kampf, for example.
And the Marxists believed thatthe proletariat was too ignorant
and working class and dumb tobe able to do, you know, socialist

(01:17:13):
theory.
So the vanguard would have tolead them.
That was Lenin's entire modelof elite theorists would have to
lead them.
And so you have the samementality, but the, the elites, therefore
in the Gnostic, the elect.
I should use the Gnostic wordfor it, which is the elect.
I just don't want to like pissoff Calvinists who happen to use
the same word for somethingelse like me.
Yeah, but I don't mean it inthe Calvinist sense.

(01:17:34):
I mean literally the Gnosticin the first, the Gnostic cults in
the first century called thepeople who had no gnosis the elect.
Right.
Okay, so you were elect if youhad gnosis.
So they believe that theyunderstand the world on different
and better superior terms.
So therefore the rules areultimately arbitrary to them.
But like I said, this breedsmoral relativism.

(01:17:54):
If you're one of us, theserules apply and these other ones
don't and they become actuallyincreasingly arbitrary.
I guess the higher yourconsciousness goes.
And then if you are not, thenyou have these very strict rules.
And so this is, like you said,a very indicative feature that you're
dealing with, dealing withGnostics, is that all of a sudden,
oh, the other phrase I wasgoing to say is ends justify the

(01:18:17):
means.
All of a sudden that the, theends of advancing whatever the Gnostic
agenda is justify whatevermeans, the rules go out the window.
So this is where you end upseeing Christian pastors.
I think they're pastors orChristians anyway, sitting down and
having a podcast discussionsaying that there needs to be a better
political strategy amongChristian conservatives.

(01:18:37):
That includes lying and Machiavellianism.
Right.
Machiavellianism means moralsdon't matter.
Anything to gain power is moral.
So the pursuit of power is moral.
This is a you Know, we hear itin Machiavelli in very philosophical
terms.
You can put it in much moreplain terms from Harry Potter, where
J.K.
rowling actually boiled downthe essence of the psychopath to

(01:19:01):
the perfect expression inVoldemort's motto, there is no good
or bad, only power in thosetoo weak to seek.
It might be good or evil, Idon't know.
But no, only power.
Power.
So the pursuit of powerbecomes intrinsically good.
And so you can see how thisbecomes what the Gnostic game actually
becomes about.

(01:19:21):
But it's a.
It's a place where, becausethey think that they are enlightened,
that they have the capacity toexempt themselves from the rules
and apply rules viciously toother people that they don't hold
for themselves.
So there's this kind ofinbuilt hierarchy as hypocrisy.
The tricky part with the otherexpression, and I just want to mention

(01:19:43):
it briefly, is when you know,okay, so wisdom is knowing when to
break the rules.
I said that's true anddangerous because I've already explained
how it's dangerous because youcan think you're wise when you're
not.
But I think the rightexpression of that is that you should
be able to be as free as youcan be responsible for.
But that all of a sudden loopsin all of the responsibility you're

(01:20:04):
called to through your faith.
It brings in materialresponsibility, like if you want
to go out and have a benderand go drinking one night really
heavy.
Is that a sin?
Well, maybe, but probably not.
If your intemperance doesn'tcause any harm because you've arranged
the circumstances, you've gota designated driver, your kids are
taken care of, nothing islikely to go wrong.

(01:20:26):
It's possible something couldgo wrong, but it's unlikely.
And you've assessed the situation.
And if something bad happens,you're more than willing to bite
the bullet and clean up afteryourself for your mask, and you can,
you know, so to speak, holdyour liquor.
Is it really wrong to havebeen intemperate here and there?
No.
Does that mean wisdom isknowing when you can break the rules
of temperance?
Yeah, but what does wisdommean here is that you're within your

(01:20:48):
capacity to takeresponsibility for the mess you're
making.
And so I think there's a truth there.
But the truth lies inunderstanding what real wisdom is.
And the gnosis passes itselfoff as superior wisdom when it's
actually just theMachiavellian coveting of power,
which expresses itself asnasty hypocrisy in Practice, I would.

(01:21:10):
Say, if I may, that aChristian perspective would say,
yes, the intemperance is stilla sin, regardless of whether you
can potentially control forall potential negative external consequences.
That still the intemperance,still the drunkenness, we're called
to be sober minded.
The Scripture explicitlyconcerns that.
So even if you're gettingwasted alone in a padded room, that

(01:21:30):
would still be sin in the eyesof God.
And I think a Christianperspective, and I don't mean this
as like chastisement, but Iwould say no, no, no.
I would actually agree withyou in the sense that if you're a
Christian and you're holdingto that Christian, that Christian
principle, that yourunderstanding of sin, and I shouldn't
have used that word, Isuppose, but your understanding of
sin therefore constrains yourlevel of your understanding of responsibility.

(01:21:53):
So you have to be responsiblespiritually as well.
Which means that you must takeyour efforts not to say sin.
I mean, this is what James4:17 says.
He who knows the right thingto do and does not do it is the sin.
So you have to be aware of,you know what the right thing to
do is, and when you know whatthe right thing to do is, you, you
have to stay out of, out of that.
So being spirituallyresponsible, you're right, would

(01:22:15):
be remaining within boundariesof temperance for sure.
Yes.
And I think to tie it back tothe Gnostic view, the Gnostic view
would say, well, we have thishigher knowledge, so we have the
ability to break the rules.
We have enough wisdom to breakthe rules.
And I don't see anywhere inScripture where it's like, you know

(01:22:35):
what, like this commandmentright there that has an asterisk.
If you have secret knowledge,like, you get to break that one.
And I.
It's not there.
It's not there at all.
And so, so Scripture calls usto a higher standard of faith.
Please go ahead.
No, the fact is that most ofthem are not responsible for the,
for the mayhem they're causing either.
So even if you were to take asecular perspective based in responsibility,
a lot of it is, I mean, thegeneration of externalities around

(01:23:00):
a lot of this misbehavior andcreating excuses for doing more misbehavior,
it's just generally not there.
Because these people are.
The right word, whether welike elect or not is elitist.
They're elitist, which meansthey believe they are themselves
elite and that they havedifferent rules that apply to themselves
as elites, whereas all theplebs have to follow stricter rules.

(01:23:21):
And the Grossest expressionsof this, by the way, which you can
actually read and say maybeSymposium from Plato, certainly the
Phaedrus, if I'm not mistaken,on which.
No, maybe it's Timaeus, Iforget which one other piece of Plato.
So I apologize for the lack ofcitation being accurate here.
That's all right.
Good luck.
They're both huge.
Go figure it out.

(01:23:42):
But you actually see that the.
I know in Symposium theexpression is that the road to higher
cultures through the rightlove of boys.
And so what you actually hadhappening in the ancient the cults
in antiquities equity was veryfrequently that the elites gave permission
to themselves for bothhomosexual behavior and pederasty,

(01:24:04):
that they strictly withheldfrom the degenerate masses that didn't
have the wisdom.
So the point I'm making isthat there are even historical precedents
for.
And by the way, Marcuse quotesSymposium on that in Eros and Civilization,
which I take as an explicit,explicit indicative, because that's

(01:24:25):
a sexual liberation book.
And so I take it as anexplicit endorsement that the elites
should have access topederasty and in fact that it should
set up a blackmail ring.
Because the road to higherculture, the gateway through which
you pass, is having done thisand then everybody in the elite circles
knows you've done it.
And then you're trapped andyou're controlled, you're compromised.

(01:24:46):
But I actually think that thepoint I wanted to make is that when
it comes to these ruleexcusing things, there's no limit.
And we of course see that withqueer theory.
We see it with the prideparades, the drag queens in classrooms,
that the enlightened peoplewho know who is actually a trans
and not a trans, are at such alevel that they can get away with

(01:25:08):
literal acts of sexualperversion and pederasty even in
public.
And everybody's supposed toturn a blind eye because it's for
liberation, because theyunderstand something called queer
theory that we all don't.
And so there are in principle.
No, my only point is that inprinciple there are no limits to
this level of rule breaking.
For the self enlightened foolthat considers.

(01:25:32):
Himself wise, that's theGnostic that sets himself up in opposition
to faith and reason.
Just to tie a bunch of threadsfrom the conversation together before
we move on, this Gnosticknowledge has set itself up in opposition
to faith and reason, whichshook hands and built Western civilization.
Now you have this intrusion ofGnosticism which has been hiding
in the shadow shadows, now hasoccupied so many socio political

(01:25:55):
terms, beginning with TheEnlightenment and on the Enlightenments
onwards.
Now Gnosticism is kind of theway that we do things without recognizing
it for what it is, but we seeit paraded around us on the streets
every single day.
This I have higher knowledgeand I'm the priest of higher knowledge.
So therefore I get to dothings that you don't get to do because
I know better than you.

(01:26:15):
And how often do we see thatin the world today?
Constantly, literally constantly.
We also got to see thehandshake of people, faith and reason
just a moment ago with thediscussion about responsibility and
spiritual responsibility orspiritual obligation.
Because you know, it's veryeasy to fall off into a Gnostic self

(01:26:36):
decadent self justifying trackand say, well, I can be really responsible
for things that I actuallycan't be.
And faith is saying actuallyyou can't.
So the intemperance itself,you know, is not an arbitrary limit,
you actually need to keep some limits.
And then on the other side,you know, we can see it as a form
of spiritual responsibility.

(01:26:58):
And so you actually see thehandshake of faith and reason is
the thing that we are talkingabout as the principle that excludes
the Gnostic temptation.
That's right.
That's right.
I have notes here about thequestion of political authority,
like Faith's answer for whoshould have political authority.
This is from your.
I believe this.

(01:27:19):
I'm not sure which lecturethis is.
I'll just read it.
Faith's answer for who weshould, who should, who deserves
political authority.
Faith says nobody really.
God alone has authority.
Humans can only serve.
Reason's answer is nobody.
Authority must be provisional,limited and earned.
And we can see that in theAmerican experiment.
But Gnosis's answer says wedeserve political authority.
Those who know deserveauthority over those who don't.

(01:27:41):
And there you have the expertclass and then you have people who
can violate who the, from theUN or whatever or the World Economic
Forum who are telling us allto decarbonize.
But don't mind me and myprivate jet, I don't have to decarbonize
because I'm the one who knows.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
And I think that that's one ofthe key foundations of the handshake,

(01:28:02):
right?
Whether you believe in God orwhether you do not believe in God.
What we have is that politicalauthority is, I mean you could just
say power corrupts andabsolute power corrupts absolutely.
But the fact of the matter isthat God alone, the comprehensive
statement is God alone, if heexists, has authority over men.

(01:28:24):
And this is the essence of allmen are created equal.
It doesn't mean that you and Ican run as fast, lift as much weight,
do as many calculus problemsin five minutes or whatever else.
It doesn't mean we're equal inevery possible conceivable material
way.
It doesn't mean that men andwomen are the same.
It doesn't mean anything like that.
It means that in terms ofpolitical authority that is intrinsically

(01:28:45):
granted upon us, we all havethe same amount, which is zero.
So the faith answer to this iswhoever is the most faithful servant
is probably going to be themost apt to rule or to lead under
the provision of his service.
Not even rule.
If you read through the.
The Old Testament, you know,the Israelites demanded kings, and

(01:29:06):
God was like, you don't reallywant those.
And then they were like, yeah,we do.
And then it's like book afterbook of tragedy.
Because, no, you didn't reallywant those because God is sovereign.
God is the king.
The king is not the king.
Right.
Or we could say Christ is kingand be edgy here.
Right.
And so within reason, it's.
The idea is whoever candemonstrate their competence through,

(01:29:29):
you know, whatever set ofparameters we think matter, they
should get to lead.
But in both cases, places, youknow, power can go to your head.
Having an absolute power orauthority, a king.
We just talked about the, youknow, the Old Testament part of that.
And of course, Jesus beingking, Christ as king indicates that
people are not king.

(01:29:50):
When you have those twothings, you have this idea that none
of us really deserve politicalauthority, but we can serve from
the faith perspective infaithful service, and we can not
borrow, but be grantedtemporarily right to authority through
demonstrated competence.
And when you put those twothings together now you get some

(01:30:11):
serious magic sauce.
Right.
So you have people who arefaithful servants who are bound by
their faith, but also have theunbinding through their faith of
knowing that they're pursuinga higher authority, not their own
authority.
Which means, like, when theattacks come, they don't necessarily
fold up under politicalpressure because their eyes are on

(01:30:31):
what God wants.
So they're not just servingother people.
They're serving somethingbigger and higher that's transcendent
to everybody.
Then when you mix in, yeah, wehope they're competent too.
Right.
It's not just that we want avery faithful, religious, godly man
in a position like, you know,I don't know, Secretary of Defense.
I'm not saying anything about Hegseth.

(01:30:52):
I just needed an office.
I was trying not to say the president.
It's not just that we wantsomebody who's righteous, we kind
of hope they can do the job too.
So when you put those twothings together, boom, you have magic
sauce.
Now what happens when you havea situation where there's a secret
formula that if you subscribeto the formula, then you get to be
in charge because you know andnobody else knows the Gnostic path?

(01:31:15):
Well, what happens is, numberone, as Peterson would put it, you
just enable people who are notcompetent or servants.
They want to be rulers becausethey're elitist and they are not
competent in actually doingsomething necessarily.
What they are competent in isthe power games set up by the Gnostic
program so they can risethrough the power games through Machiavellian

(01:31:37):
tactics rather than good andfaithful service in both senses of
the world, both to word, bothto the people in the world and to
the higher authority of God.
And you also end up withGrifter Palooza because it turns
out it's not hard to pretendyou understand the secret knowledge,
especially when 90% of whathaving the secret knowledge is, is

(01:31:59):
liking the right things,liking the right people, hating the
certain things and hating thecertain people.
And all you have to so you canrise through the ranks literally
in a Gnostic program just bytaking whoever the cult has decided
are bad people people andbullying the crap out of them all
the time.
And so you can become animportant and prominent person just
through the harassment andharangment of designated enemies

(01:32:23):
to the cult who are going tobe the people who are calling the
cult out, by the way, most ofthe time, or the people who refuse
to join the cult, say forexample, per our earlier discussion,
Christians and Jews.
And so you have this, you havethis, this really poisonous way to
certify illegitimate authority.
And we can be very biblicalabout this because there's godly

(01:32:44):
authority, whether that's inthe special revelation of God himself
in the faith sense, whetherthat's in the general revelation
of competence in the world.
You can either have that oryou can have.
Well, in some sense I thinkI'm God already.
So you have to listen to meand you can.
It's that which is satanic authority.
It is what the Bible callsworldly authority.

(01:33:04):
And this is why it's soimportant to realize that within
at least the Judeo Christianand then within the broadly reason
based paradigms that what wehave is this idea that nobody's intrinsically
deserving of any authority whatsoever.
In Christianity, everybody'sfallen, every single person, so nobody

(01:33:26):
deserves to be in charge.
But the gnostic idea is wehave the secret knowledge that makes
us not fallen in anymore, right?
And so we deserve to rule.
And of course it's based on a lie.
That lie can come in a lot of forms.
God hath not said is kind ofthe most famous of the forms in Genesis,
but it can come in the formlike you see in the.

(01:33:46):
I don't know if you've everseen this really crazy book.
You probably have a course inmiracles where, where the general
idea, the lie that it tells isthat in fact, fact, no fall ever
occurred at all, that Adam ateof the fruit and went into like some
kind of a drug induced comaand everything in the world is inside

(01:34:07):
his drug induced fever dreamor something like this.
And so there was no fall.
And so since there was nofall, there is no diminishment of
human beings to fallen status.
Therefore we are all as gods.
And that's why we can at willlearn to perform miracles.
That's the idea of the book,of course, in miracles.
And so it can take different,the temptation can take different

(01:34:27):
forms.
It can also be, you know, asit's said these days, that you know
what time it is.
You know, will, you don't knowwhat time it is, but I know what
time it is.
So I have to direct you.
And you know, I know what timeit is because I ate a bunch of black
pills and decided that ourlegal system and the Civil Rights
act can't stop DEI orsomething really stupid.
So therefore what we need todo is, you know, white power.

(01:34:50):
Let's go on a crusade.
And that's literally why Icall them woke up.
Right.
And obviously people don'tlike that, but it can come in a lot
of forms is the point.
Yeah, and I definitely want toget to the subject of the woke.
Right.
But real quickly, two things.
So another way to rise throughthe Gnostic power structure is through
mastery of language.
It doesn't matter whether youactually believe it.
If you can communicate all theright words in the right orders,

(01:35:10):
then you can appear todemonstrate competence versus trust,
which is earned over time inactual developing a skill like, no,
you've mastered the languageso that we know you're one of us.
And so it's super fake andit's really easy to game actually,
and it's almost begging to be game.
Go ahead.
Which is why let's say, let'sjust pretend, because I am pretending

(01:35:32):
this is not true, but let'sjust pretend that every queer theorist
and activist on the left istotally on the up and up and zero
of them are pedophiles.
It's not true.
Lots of them.
Are you sure?
By what they.
Right, but it's all just theory.
It's about being attracted andnot about, you know, acting on it

(01:35:52):
or whatever lie they tell.
Let's just pretend thatthey're actually telling the truth.
And zero of them are pedophiles.
The program that theyinstantiate, like you said, is so
easy to game that all thepedophile has to say is, oh, I'm
attracted, but I don't act on it.
That's not a hard sentence tofigure out.
Right.
And they have literally zerofilters now to keep that person.

(01:36:15):
They could go to a school, aninterview, and they say, well, you
know, you know, where are youon the P axis?
Right, the pedophile axis.
Well, I'm attracted, but I'llnever act on it.
You're hired.
They have no filter to be ableto exclude.
So it's extremely easy togame, is extremely important.
This is why it's grifter palooza.
It turns out that it's alsofed a palooza because it's not hard

(01:36:36):
for assets and plants and, youknow, that kind of thing.
Feds to basically.
I mean, everybody's seeingthis thing.
Glenn Beck just interviewedhim, the guy that was on the insider
documentary about the outlaws,the FBI guy who infiltrated the biker
gang and, you know, whatever,and he's telling his story everywhere.

(01:36:57):
Now, that guy pretended to besomething he wasn't in order to get
inside, to rise through theranks, to be able to bust it.
It is.
That's that he was doing itfor law enforcement.
But that's the grifter activity.
Right.
And so.
And that's.
And he is literally a fake Fed.
So the feds and grifters willinfiltrate and rise high up in these

(01:37:19):
gnostic paradigms, because atthe end of the day, like you said,
it's all a matter of masteringcertain linguistic, behavioral, aesthetic
motifs.
Right.
You know, what kind of joke totell and when to tell it, and, you
know, this and how to play itoff and everything else.
But at no point do youactually have to build something
that works.
Right?
That's right.
And so the test against theworld or the test against reality,

(01:37:41):
reality never actually arrives.
And of course, there are tonsof Bible prophet stories about that,
like Elijah coming and belike, yeah, if your God is here,
send down, you know, here's.
Here's the.
The offering.
Take it.
Nothing happens.
And then, you know, we knowthe rest of the story.
Yeah, no, it's it's, it's areally great point that they're never
forced to build anything thatworks like, okay, write a book.

(01:38:04):
Like, don't just do a podcast.
Don't just, don't just, youknow, don't just show up and create,
you know, 20 minutes ofdigital content.
Actually sit down and gothrough the process of writing a
250, 300 page book.
Demonstrate your competence atthe highest level, at the standard
that we've held in the westfor hundreds of years, thousands
of years.
But they're never forced tothat standard.

(01:38:25):
They can hide behind a mask ofanonymity, parrot the right phrases
at the right time, andcompetence, it appears, a mask of
competence.
Please go ahead.
Yeah, no, I mean,unfortunately some of them do write
books and then what they writethough is what boils down to a spell
mail book, correct?
Take you through thosenarratives of grievance or those
narratives of resentment orthose narratives of fear, those narratives

(01:38:47):
of.
On the other hand, the weirdcritical hope is what it gets called
in critical theory, which isthat you can envision the better
possibility outside of thisdemonic, awful, fallen world that
they've painted a picture ofif only you follow them and if only
you get on board with their program.
So, you know, you can tell thedifference, difference subtly by

(01:39:09):
a.
Seeing if there's a clearagenda, but also by seeing if.
And this is the hard work ofchecking something like that or their
20, 20 minute, you know,YouTube video is go check their sources
and does the source that theyquoted actually say the thing that
they say that it says?
And eventually the Gnosticsalmost always lie because they're,

(01:39:29):
they have a very instrumentaluse of information and other people
and everything else Hegelphrased it.
History uses people, thendiscards them.
So a great sign thatsomebody's not doing that is that
they're presenting theoriginal sources themselves and asking
people to investigate thoseand not take it on their word.

(01:39:51):
But I wish they didn't writebooks because I have to read them
all day.
But at least.
Yes, correct, but at least thebook provides something concrete
as opposed to I'm just bloveating off the top of my head on
a podcast like write a Writeit please go ahead.
Well, I mean, think about whenthey're in an organization, right?
What happens when they buildan organization.
There's always corruption,there's always grifting, there's

(01:40:12):
always infighting, it alwaysfalls all the pieces.
If they come into, say anorganization like a church or, or
even a company, it turns intoa huge fight over you know, power
dynamics and all this.
So they're not building a cohesive.
That's right.
Structure that can actuallyaccomplish something in the world
because they're not actuallyinterested in building something
in the world.

(01:40:32):
They're interested in, ingrabbing power from existing things.
Which is why I called it theGnostic parasite, in part.
Not just because itparasitizes these systems and looks
like one and grafts onto themand gets in, but also because as
parasites, what they do islatch onto a host and drain it of
its resources.
And so you can, I mean theBible covers this, is judge them

(01:40:55):
by their fruits.
Their fruits are columny anddivision and fighting and squabbling
every single place they go.
Which of course is also itselfcomplicated because they can outsource
that onto the people that aresaying something about it.
And this is, you know, Jesustalks about that a lot through the
Gospels, by the way.
You know, they hated me beforethey hated you.

(01:41:18):
And you know, I, I didn't cometo bring peace, but a sword and all
of this kind of verbiage.
It turns out the truth is divisive.
But the fruit is what you'resupposed to be looking, looking at.
It's.
Is the fruit this awful chaosor is the fruit something that's,
that's pointing toward thingsthat actually work?

(01:41:38):
The best way to tell if theyactually work is if they are based
in truth, if they're based ingoodness, if they're based in justice
or pursuing fairness oftreatment in the honest senses.
And also if you implement theminto a project, does the project,
project do somethingproductive or is it just, just power

(01:42:00):
games where people arejockeying for position?
This makes me think of whatyou talked about, the, the confidence
game analogy and then thewizard circle, I think, I think those
two are very apt to this discussion.
So you talked about thingslike trust building and exploitation
and asymmetric risk especially.
Maybe let's talk about theconfidence game first because that's

(01:42:21):
maybe, is that a sense ofpraxis, of what's going on for a
lot of this.
Is this where I called themcon artists?
Yes, I think so, yeah.
Okay, so the con, a lot ofpeople don't know that the con and
con artist is shorthand for confidence.
So it's a confidence artist orconfidence man is what con man actually
means.
So it's somebody who comesalong and builds, builds your trust

(01:42:43):
through projecting confidencein their view.
Now with the Gnostics theyactually, this is, this gives them
a weird advantage.
Advantage.
It's a short term advantage.
There are different ways tobuild confidence with the Gnostics.
They come along and they justtell you that they're right.
Why?
Because they're absolutelypossessed that they know the secret
truth and that it's good for everybody.
So they have tons.
They're brimming withconfidence, right.

(01:43:05):
And then on the other hand,people that are operating more legitimately
in the world have todemonstrate competence, which is
often a slow and challenging process.
The circumstance we findourselves in the world right now
is really bad, bad and favorsthis Gnostic stuff because our credentialing
apparatuses, institutions havelargely been corrupted by the leftist

(01:43:28):
Gnostics.
So now we don't know how to tell.
Like having a degree, does itreally matter?
You know, having a job of aparticular kind, like a judge, does
it really matter?
Are they corrupted or are they not?
It used to be that you couldto a degree expect that when somebody
had a credential or a, youknow, prestigious title or position

(01:43:52):
that they probably knew whatthey were talking about.
They might be wrong, but theywere coming from a place of due diligence.
And now that's all up in the air.
I think it's not as bad, bythe way, as people think it is.
I try not to eat black pills.
I would guess that ourcredentialing system is actually
not more than 10% corrupted,but it feels like it's totally corrupt,
corrupted.
Like you're probably not thatworried about your average engineer

(01:44:15):
building something that you'regoing to drive on in reality.
So you're.
It's not as bad as peopleactually think.
If you actually go to anengineering school, yeah, they have
to take some DEI crap, butmost of their stuff is still calculus
and mechanics.
It's like pretty legitimatestill, but we have this perception
that it's very illegitimate.
And this gives the not thegnostic con artist artist a ton of

(01:44:39):
opportunity because he comesalong very boldly and very brashly.
One of the things that I getaccused of all the time with my fight
against woke, I think it'spretty clear I'm competent on talking
about woke.
And I can like quote theirstuff from memory and I've taken
a very serious study of it fora very long time.
But what they say is James hasno solutions, right?
So they're very confident theygot it good enough and they have

(01:45:00):
solutions.
James has no solutions.
So I hear this all the time.
So they project this confidence.
It's not just that theyunderstand it, which they kind of
don't actually, but it's thatthey know what to do.
About it, where in reality, ifyou want to demonstrate competence
to know what to do about it,you can't just go on these like wild
quests tilting at windmills.
You actually have to be ableto figure out things that put results

(01:45:21):
on the board, right?
And these legal fights are complicated.
They're challenginglegislation is, I think, and honestly
mostly useless except to setup better legal fights.
And it's complicated.
It's very easy to get all that backwards.
You take the example of theStop WOKE act in Florida, right?
That was the first big legalstrike against woke.
It actually encoded socialemotional learning into Florida schools

(01:45:44):
while it was supposed to bestopping the thing that it encodes.
And so it's like, it's reallyeasy to mess that up.
Very easy to mess it up.
But the confidence artistcomes in or the con artist comes
in and just says, you know,this is the way, this is the only
way we understand it.
And it's time to go right now.
It's an emergency agency, wehave to do something.
This is something, let's go.

(01:46:04):
And everybody else, they thendecry as, as being waffling or half
measures.
That was Hitler's favoriteword for it, half measures, weak,
whatever.
Whereas in reality,demonstrating real competence and
thus generating genuineconfidence in what you have to offer

(01:46:24):
is a slow, painfullydifficult, difficult, very fragile
process.
You have to be, if you're in abusiness, you have to deliver for
your clientele for decades toget a strong, strong reputation.
And all you have to do, sayyou're a dentist, is really hurt

(01:46:44):
somebody one time, once.
And all that 30 years ofcompetence and confidence you've
built up is shattered.
It's a very difficult andfragile thing.
Thing.
And so this gives the Gnosticsa advantage when they're willing
to attack any failure, nomatter how unfair or unjust, and
project total confidence for themselves.

(01:47:06):
And I think that that's bornout of their maniacal belief that
they alone possess the truthand everybody else is operating under
a false consciousness thatlooks weak and slow by comparison.
And meanwhile they don't haveto demonstrate that same level of
competence.
They can sit back and merelycritique, you know, someone who are

(01:47:27):
people who are actuallyproducing and they themselves aren't
being held to the samestandard of okay, produce something.
Yeah, that's the, I waswondering what you, what you meant
out the asymmetric risk.
And that's, that's what it is.
This is why they participatein a critical theory.
Their objective is actually togain power.
And their hypothesis is whenwe're in power, we know how to make
it work so we'll make it workso they don't have to build anything.

(01:47:50):
In the meantime, all they haveto do is crap on the thing that's
not working.
Working to perfection so far.
So that's sort of what I wasactually talking about with, you
know, you have no solutionsand all this.
So they get to project this,not just this confidence, but they
get to remove themselves fromhaving to demonstrate competence
in the world because theirtheory is a critical theory.
Their critical theory doesnot, by definition, does not have

(01:48:13):
to paint a picture of a better world.
It only has to demonstrate howthe existing system isn't adequate.
And so they get to sit aside,my friend, and this is a colorful
phrase, sorry for yourpodcast, he calls it sitting aside
from the thing and shitting on it.
And so they get to sit aside,distance themselves from it, have

(01:48:33):
no skin in the game, and justpeck at things.
It turns out, psychologically,being a cynic, actually, for whatever
reason, people perceive you assmarter than you are by a lot if
you're just being cynical.
So if you.
Their.
Their method, by definition,is cynical.
What they do is that theypoint at something that's not working
perfectly in the.

(01:48:53):
The thing.
They want to critique theorganization that they're targeting.
Let's say, maybe it's acompany, so something's not going
perfectly right.
So they point at the thingthat's not going perfectly right,
and then they just blurt outthat if they had the woke understanding
of the world or the gnosticunderstanding of the world, they

(01:49:14):
wouldn't have made that mistake.
They wouldn't have got this wrong.
This is because they fell forthe tricks of the demiurge.
This is because, you know,they have a materially determined
limitation on their thought,as Marx would have it.
This is because they havefalse consciousness, and obviously
we don't.
And so they don't have todemonstrate anything because, well,
all they have to do iscritique and say, we don't make those

(01:49:36):
same mistakes because we know better.
And at no point do theydemonstrate what they can actually
do, because the promise isgive us power and then we'll show
you.
It's exactly the same, by theway, the way it doesn't matter if
it's right or left.
It's exactly the same as whenthe Democrats say, pass the bill
and we'll tell you what's in it.
Yep.
Yeah.
And another facet of that isthe scam that says, well, it'll only

(01:49:58):
work if we all do it.
It'll only work if one Pleasego ahead.
No, that's totally right.
You know, we got to geteverybody on board.
It'll only work if everybody'son board.
So with, with communism, thebelief is that communism can actually
only work when every singleperson has transformed themselves
to have transcended private property.
So when it doesn't work, thecommunists just has to go out and

(01:50:20):
say, well, this guy over here,Joseph over here, still believes
in private property too much.
Look, you can tell because hehas an apple.
And so his capitalisttendencies, his bourgeois values
are actually the problem.
So we're going to take Josephoff to prison and we're going to
re educate him.

(01:50:41):
Or if we can't, we'll just getrid of Joseph because his values
are what's stopping it.
Because it'll only work whenwe're all on board.
So there's this collectivistelement, right, that's the fascist
is a little bit different thanthe communist.
Communists want transformed consciousness.
The fascists want total obedience.
It's a completely differentapproach to doing the exact same

(01:51:03):
thing.
There's a right way to do thisand a wrong way to do this.
And if everybody is obedient,then we're going to be able to succeed.
But if everybody doesn't dothe same thing at the same time time,
then it's not going to work.
Whereas that's not just.
How did I want to phrase this?
It's not just that that'scollectivist and in fact totalitarian
in the end.

(01:51:24):
It's that they get to havethat scapegoating mechanism for anything
that's not working.
So it's like they can pointand say, well, these guys the reason
and this will happen, by theway, with both woke, left woke, right
woke anything.
When it doesn't work, it'salways going to get blamed on the
people who didn't do it enough.
Right?
And so they can say, well, wehave this great plan.

(01:51:47):
Let's say it's these guysright now on the woke, right, for
example, and Trump's in power.
And Trump is not succeeding ateverything he wants to do.
He's accomplishing somethings, but he's not succeeding at
everything he wants to do, iscertainly not succeeding in, with,
with, with his Congress, right.
It's passing virtually nothingand people are noticing.
So what are they to going to say?
Are they going to say it'sbecause we're a bunch of wackadoodos

(01:52:09):
who are pushing this crazyextremist stuff and the American
people aren't really having itand the Congress isn't going to pass
wax wackadoodle stuff.
And there's this conflict there.
Or is it that the Congress isthis or that.
No, they're going to say thatthe people who oppose our agenda
are stopping us from doingthis thing.
This is what the Democrat.
We can take it out of the right.
We can put it back in theDemocrats that there was the House

(01:52:30):
Republicans in the, in theBiden administration who stopped
everything.
It's a dirty House Republicansand their basket of deplorables.
And it.
If we didn't have this, wewould be marching off to the glorious
future.
And so it gives them theability it will only work when everybody
comes with us.
Gives them the ability to saythat when it doesn't work for any
other reason, that it wasactually because not enough people

(01:52:52):
came with.
And so they can do a redoubledcommitment on their cult members
and get them to start blaming,scapegoating and attacking people
who are not adequatelycommitted even before the failure
comes.
And now we can take thisconfidence game, total obedience.
And now we can put it togetherwith the sort of spiritual gnostic

(01:53:13):
aspects because we've gotteninto the social and the political,
we might say the materialaspects of it, but there is also
a theological and spiritualaspect to it, as demonstrated by
Hegel and plenty of others.
And this is where I think weget the idea of the Wizard Circle,
the idea that a hyperrealityhas been drawn around people.
So maybe we can startunpacking that to show there's more
going on going on than justthe material aspect.

(01:53:35):
Sure.
What we were just talkingabout actually manifests explicitly
spiritually in the Mahayanasect of Buddhism.
Right?
Right.
We're all going to getsalvation or else we're going to
fail and nobody is.
And so we all have to go together.
This is the same as Blavatskysaying that the Aryans are going
to lead us to the birth of thesixth root race and into the New
Age, which is the Age of Aquarius.
If anybody doesn't know whatthe New Age and New Age refers to,

(01:53:58):
it is the Age of Aquariuswhere everybody's in harmony because
Aquarius symbolizes some kindsocialist of bullcrap.
And so we're all going to bein harmony together.
So we're going to have to beled together into this.
So we all have to movetogether in.
In that way.
Now the way that they do this is.
Is the term.
I did not coin this term theWizard Circle.
I'm trying to remember where Igot this term.

(01:54:20):
I think I Got it from Eric Fogland.
Yeah, yeah, Fogan.
And so Fogan refers to the setof kind of mystifications, the, the,
the misinterpretations ofreality that the Gnostics give to
try to confuse people.
They point to various factsabout reality and then use them to

(01:54:41):
mislead people about the stateof affairs.
The communists would give youa structural power interpretation.
So with the fascists, astructural power interpretation of
how these facts come together.
To point out that there's asystem of power keeping people like
you out.
Right.
The Gnostics might blameliterally the tricks of the demiurge

(01:55:02):
or bad spirits or whatever,the archons keeping people from the
true knowledge.
In fact, the hermetic beliefon some expressions is that as you
rise through the planes, youhave to meet the archons on different
levels and answer their question.
Basically like the Sphinx, Iguess, to defeat them, to show that
you have the high enough levelof spiritual development to progress

(01:55:25):
to the next plane.
But, um, so there it's whetherit's bad spirits or whether it's
the demiurge himself as theimposter God, whether it's socio
and political entities.
The idea is that they put youin a state where you perceive reality
only through the terms of the cult.
What I termed in other timesas a.

(01:55:48):
This is fancy terminology,parology and paramorality.
Paralogy means para logi, parameans parallel logi means logic,
a parallel set of logic.
So you have the real logic ofthe world and then they make a fake
one next to it.
And so they get you to play inthe fake sandbox of how reality works.
And that's what we call beingwoke, by the way, is being in that

(01:56:10):
sandbox, or being Gnostic isbeing in that sandbox.
And they set up a logicalstructure that trains you.
If you're thinking along thoselines, which by the way, is rooted
in consensus, that's whateverybody around, around you affirms
is true.
Then it's very difficult tothink in other ways.
That's being in the wizardcircle that way.
The other way they do it is bysetting up a paramorality.

(01:56:32):
Same thing, parallel morals.
This is where we were talkingabout the hypocrisy aspect earlier.
They have different morals forwithin the cult.
And if you play along with their.
More the.
The ethics of every one ofthese Gnostic cults, by the way,
is that which advances thecult is good and that which hinders
the culture is bad, period.
That's the entire ethical framework.

(01:56:52):
So you talk about it beingsimple and Gamable, that's their
whole morals, their wholesystem of morals is that which advances
the cult is good and thatwhich hinders the cult is bad.
And so the Marxists say thatexplicitly about Marxism, by the
way, that that is literallythe Marxist ethic.
That which advances Marxism isgood and that which hinders it is
bad.

(01:57:12):
So they get you trapped in amoral confusion and a logical confusion
so that you can't see theworld accurately.
And this is what we call being woke.
Actually you have a distortedlens that you see the world through.
This is what the, the wokiescall it, theoretical lenses.
I literally for once have them.
It's like putting on a pair ofglasses and you see the world differently

(01:57:34):
when you have your glasses on.
Imagine they're colored or something.
Okay, so Fogelin characterizedit differently.
He characterized the con menat the heart of the Gnostic religion
as wizards, literally calledthem wizards and says it's like he
cast a spell or a distortionfield, that's a circle, that he describes

(01:57:56):
it as a circle and that itmakes you misapprehend reality.
And I think it's both in thelogical and the moral domains by
their abuses of language, bytheir false constructions of what's
happening, by their secrethidden knowledge, interpret interpretation
of everything.
And that when you're in thatwizard circle, he says you're lost.

(01:58:16):
So rather than thinking whereit is lenses, imagine it being like
in, you know, some magic videogame where they put a spell on you
and you're in a bubble, right?
So inside the bubble, when youlook through the surface of the bubble,
the world looks all funny.
And that's basically the same idea.
But you could also, I meanother words that that means is hermeneutics

(01:58:36):
or lens is or eisegesis.
These all refer roughly to thesame thing, though not perfectly.
So the idea then is that theycast a spell on you.
That's why he uses the wordwizard, to get you to misapprehend
reality both logically and morally.
And when you're stuck in thatcircumstance, he says you're lost,

(01:59:00):
you're in the wizard circleand you're lost because everything
within the circle is self reference.
So when say I'm in the circleand you're not and you come to have
an intervention with me andsay, James brother, I need you to
look at this differently, Iprobably will attack you because,
or I'll be completely confusedor something like this because all

(01:59:21):
of the self referential logicof the Gnostic cult environment rejects
that.
And eventually at some pointI've learned that people who try
to get me out of it are enemies.
And so the argument that Igave is that what we have to do to
help people who are capturedby this Gnostic wizard circle is
that we have to create kind ofgaps in the distortion field, like

(01:59:43):
a crack or a hole where theycan see reality clearly.
You do that by pointing outplaces that they're being lied to
or contradictions in the cultexplanation of the world versus the
real world.
A big one for me historicallywas the Very Fine People hoax with
Donald Trump.
Same.
I finally watched the entirevideo at the request of a trusted

(02:00:04):
friend who said, would youwatch more than the 17 seconds or
14 seconds or whatever, wouldyou watch the two and a half minute
clip?
And it had that the sentencebefore Donald Trump made the infamous
Very Fine People remark hadhim repudiate the white supremacists
and all of this explicitly.
But the argument was that thewizards were casting from CNN and

(02:00:26):
MSNBC and everywhere else, andthe Democrats and every liberal that
I knew knew the the and meincluded was that Trump never actually
denounces white supremacy.
And there he said, they'revery fine people on both sides.
And as it turns out, the nextvideo the guy sent me was a super
cut of Trump denouncing whitesupremacy publicly on video something

(02:00:48):
like 50 times over the courseof like, you know, a couple of years
or whatever.
He does it all the time.
And I'm like, all of a suddenthey had a crack in the distortion
darshyn field and like Trump,Derangement fell apart for me in
probably a matter of days as aresult of that.
So I was in the wizard circlecalled Trump Derangement Syndrome
based on the Gnostics who haddecided that Trump is the avatar

(02:01:11):
of all evil for theirprogressive left cult.
And I was caught in thedistortion field.
And I would have argued withyou until I was blue that, you know,
Trump's a bad guy, he might bea closet fascist, who knows?
I don't think he's a Nazi, buthe's terrible.
And all of sudden a this stuff.
And he said, there's very Finepeople on both sides.
And I would have just totallyrun with it.

(02:01:31):
And then all of a sudden I sawreality for what reality was.
There was a hole in the WizardCircle, and it's almost like the
guy reached his arm throughthe hole and pulled me out.
Yeah.
And that's what we actuallyhave to do.
It's not actually waking upand it's not going back to sleep.
It's coming out of the dream.
Yes, it's, it's a, it's, it'shard because the language has been

(02:01:53):
so co opt.
Co opted wokeness or awakeningor whatever.
There is a component of likeeyes open.
All this language has been coopted to explain a very real phenomenon
where you recognize thatwhatever false paradigm the wizard
circle you've been operatingin, that's based on con men, that's
based on manipulations oflanguage, that's based on the distortion
of truth.
Two layers of morality.

(02:02:15):
There's morality for you andmorality for me.
All these things you kind ofsnap out of it and recognize the
inherent contradiction at thecenter of it.
And that's the key point isyou have to identify where that contradiction
is and then just push on itreally hard.
Not like I'm going to show youthe true truth.
I'm going to show you thecontradiction that lies at the heart
of your worldview.
And I think that's, that's thevery difficult thing to do for people

(02:02:37):
that are trapped in thisbecause they have to be willing to
accept information thatcontradicts their worldview.
And that's true for everybody.
Like I don't just mean to saythere's one particular set of people
that needs this more thananybody else.
We all go forward withcontradictions in our worldview and
we all have to learn to remedy them.
And you know, I would say thatwe need to remedy them with scripture,
with God's truth.
And that's where we can find awhole worldview that locks together

(02:03:00):
in a way that actuallysupports prosperity and peace and
all these things throughredemption in Christ.
But guiding people out oftheir own self contradictions is
the essential part.
And I think you also talkedabout in one of the lectures the
iron law of woke overreaction.
Maybe put that together andthen we'll take a step beyond.

(02:03:20):
Okay, so yeah, I have fouriron laws of woke behavior that are
pretty diagnostic.
I mean I'm sure other peopledo them sometimes and I call them
the iron law of wokeprojection that they're always blaming
on others what they'reactually doing or telling you ahead
of time what they're going to do.
So they're projecting in oneof a couple of different ways the
iron law of woke corruption,which I think explains itself.

(02:03:43):
If you see woke people in aposition of power with money involved,
something bad's going on,somebody's embezzling or something,
it's almost always true.
You always find these selfserving deals because they have a
higher morality where they getto do self serving.
Deals.
Okay.
Okay.
Then there's the iron law.
This one's cute.
It's the iron law of Wokecosplay, which is that everything's

(02:04:03):
formative.
Okay.
They're all performing an act.
Right.
That's the con man thing,actually, in a sense.
But like the statement forthat, for on the left is the issue
is never the issue.
The issue is always the revolution.
But it, it's a lot of it isexaggerated forms that don't have
any real content.
Right.
They pretend to be these kindsof, you know, they put on these performances

(02:04:25):
to kind of make, make a, makea statement or whatever.
But it's virtue signaling, Ithink, is the way to really explain
that.
And then there's what youasked about, the iron law of awoke
overreaction, which Ioriginally called the Woke flip out
test.
If you say something and theyflip out, you've probably hit something
important.
But what it is is, it's thatthe gnostic has a very heightened

(02:04:47):
sense of his own importanceand his own absolute correctness,
both morally and legally, logically.
And when you poke at that, youreveal something, you show the man
behind the curtain, as thewizard of Oz thing goes, or you pull
the mask off a little bit.
They have to absolutely usethe only tools at their disposal,

(02:05:08):
which are to absolutely freak out.
They will kind of explode withweird rationalizations and excuses.
They will frequently doubledown like crazy, and they will almost
always go viciously on theattack that there's something either
intellectually, morally orpsychologically wrong with you for
having dared to expose them orpoint out a contradiction or something

(02:05:29):
like this.
So, you know, otherexpressions for this is you take
the most flak when you're overthe target.
That's roughly the same idea.
So when you expose them, theywill flip out.
The biggest hallmark that youhave hit a point where you're experiencing
the flip out or theoverreaction is, as my friend, I

(02:05:50):
think he's still my friend.
Brett Weinstein said yearsago, um, you know, that you've said
something important.
When you get rapid criticismthat's from one person to the next,
self contradictory.
So one guy says, for example,you're absolutely irrelevant, nobody
pays attention to you.
And somebody else says you'repaid millions of dollars by the Jews

(02:06:13):
to put this out or whatever.
Those are contradictory claims.
Right.
You cannot be irrelevant andhighly paid at the same time.
Right?
Right.
Or you're absolutelyirrelevant, you're cooked.
Nobody listens to you.
And you know, you'remisleading everybody.
You're not misleading anybody.
If you're Irrelevant.
These are contradictory claims.

(02:06:33):
And when they.
When all of a sudden, youknow, you say something and it's
like you hit the hornet's nestand the hornets are flying all around
and everybody's mad and someof the hornets are saying one thing
and some of the hornets aresaying the something that is wholly
contradict.
Victory.
You've hit a overreaction point.
You know that they're justtrying to.
It's like they got napalm off them.
They're just trying to get itoff of them in any way that they

(02:06:53):
possibly can as fast as possible.
And it doesn't matter whatthey do, but because again, they
have their own set of rules.
It doesn't matter if they'retelling the truth.
So when they reply to you,some of them can say this one thing
like that you're paid byforeign adversaries or whatever.
And the others can say someother thing that's completely contradictory
to that.
Like you're absolutely washedup and broke and nobody would give

(02:07:16):
you money for anything.
And it doesn't matter becauseit turns out in most cases neither
one of those things is true.
And they're just saying thingsto make the bad thing go away.
Yes.
And that you can feel thatwhen it happens.
I was listening to you talk toJordan Peterson about that, about
just that, that, that wave ofimpact when it hits, like the insults

(02:07:36):
and the shaming and the, themockery, like being prepared for
it.
That's how you know.
Which I know you've beensubject to quite a little.
Just a little bit lately.
Just a little bit.
A few through these many years.
Yeah.
But I think everything thatwe've talked about today, this is
great, by the way, becausewhat I wanted to do was I wanted
to surface all these differentgnostic hermetic aspects of kind

(02:07:59):
of wokeness and land it in adiscussion of the woke.
Right.
So I have a lot of people thatare really down with a lot of things
that you say and I thinklistening to this, they'll be even
more down with it.
But I think they want to carvethemselves off from a phenomenon
that you're describing.
Describing that I think we'reboth talking about.
That is a very real thing thatwe are not that, but that sometimes

(02:08:20):
the term can conflate both of them.
So I just a specific questionthat I have right here that I want
to read just to clarify it.
So in your lectures youdescribe reactionaries as, quote,
gnostics with a hardlineconservative looking mindset.
How do you distinguish betweentraditional conservatives and what
you would call the woke.
Right.
The woke right being, I think,a lot of things that we've now been

(02:08:43):
describing with this kind ofgnostic world worldview that used
to be on the left, but now inshort order.
Well, maybe in the past year,but it's been seated in the underground
for a long time, has nowreared up its ugly head within the
right wing pretty much sincethe election.
So how do we draw distinctionsbetween these phenomena that we've
been talking about and peoplewho are just traditional conservatives?

(02:09:04):
And I don't mean this in, likethe NeoCon, you know, GOP kind of
sense.
I mean, people that havetraditional conservative.
Yeah, I don't know that Icould say enough about his philosophy
to say yes to that.
But, you know, I think therewould probably be middle Americans,
you know, who want to workhard and be rewarded and have.

(02:09:24):
And have their measure ofprosperity and not see the government
sell away pieces of theirchildren's inheritance to whoever
it may be, whether it beimmigrants or inflation or whatever.
People like that, I think, iswhat I'd be saying.
More traditional conservativesmaybe rooted in Christianity values.
How do we separate people whoare like that from the phenomenon
that we've been describingthat seems to have attached onto

(02:09:46):
it?
Yeah, that's an important question.
And the vast majority ofconservative people are not woke
in any regard whatsoever.
And a lot of people think that.
Well, I mean, there's a mythout there in alignment with what
we were just talking about,with the flip out or the, the overreaction
that I'm naming allconservatives and all Christians
or anybody to my right as woke.

(02:10:06):
Right.
And this, none of this is true.
Woke means something very specific.
Specific, It's a little technical.
It means having a.
Having woke up to a critical consciousness.
Right.
So that's the ultimate test.
But that doesn't help a lotbecause people don't really know
what it means.
And it's abstract in its own presentation.
So the first thing I would sayis the traditional conservatives

(02:10:27):
are not radicals.
Right.
They have very little interestin tearing up the existing system
by the roots.
In fact, if we look at versus,there's a little bit of a conflict
because this is, of course, aEuropean tradition of conservatism.
And America is a fundamentallydifferent thing.
But there is a thing calledthe American tradition.
It is rooted in the AmericanConstitution and its other founding

(02:10:51):
documents and its foundingspirit and ethos.
And the American conservativeprobably doesn't want to pull up
the American tradition becausethe Burkean view is that the tradition
itself itself is the guidingfactor for a people.
And so that any modificationsthat you make, especially as technology

(02:11:14):
comes along and requires you,should be gradual, should be carefully
thought out, should be minimal.
So radicalism doesn't fit intothat picture.
So you can be radicallyconservative and want to rip the
constitutional, classicallyliberal system out of America.
America, that's one thing.
But if you are not radical, ifyou believe in the Constitution,

(02:11:38):
want to maintain and enforcethe Constitution, you're probably
not woke.
Although of course the wokepeople are going to be able to clothe
themselves in the Constitutionand make it sound like they are talking
about that.
So it's actually very, verydifficult to pull apart.
Another factor is that whiletraditional conservatives may be
a bit clannish, they have havewhat J.D.

(02:11:59):
vance, you know,controversially talked about as the
ordo amoris, to some degree,they will tend to favor their family
and kin and then theircommunity and all of these things
over other people.
So there's a closeness of kinthat matters.
They will also, you know, putGod first and then, you know, have
the ordo Amoris, as J.D.

(02:12:20):
vance talked about.
Most conservatives are notcollectivist identities.
People, they're not going tohole up in a collective identity,
especially one based onsomething like race or genetics or
even political.
It's the.
So a big dividing line here isgoing to be tribe versus truth.

(02:12:40):
If you care more about tribethan you care about truth, you're
in a dangerous place.
Right?
Because a hallmark of thiscollective or of this woke thing
or the gnostic thing is collectivist.
It is that it's not just thatyou have a critical view of what's
going on or that you perceivethat there is a power structure that's
acting illegitimately and isin many ways corrupt.

(02:13:03):
Those things can be perfectly true.
It's not just that you are using.
It is actually just thatyou're using a critical theory.
But part of using a criticaltheory is that collectivism, it is
intrinsically collectivism.
Traditional conservatives tendnot to be.
They tend to favortraditional, favor that which is
closer to them, be that, youknow, family, nation or sorry, family,

(02:13:26):
community or nation or even faith.
But at the same time theythink for themselves still.
Right?
They don't just inherit theirideas from other people and run around
and think the people on ourside are automatically good and the
people on the other side areautomatically bad.
So that's a diagnostic.

(02:13:46):
I'm not.
It's very tricky because thediagnostic is do you have a critical
consciousness?
Have you split the world intous versus everybody and that the
whole system is Corrupt andtherefore we have to band together
to seize power and impose aradically new order on it.
If you have that, you're woke.
If you don't have that, you'reprobably not woke.
But these other things thatI'm talking about are diagnostics,

(02:14:08):
right?
If you, in psychology, if youlook at like schizophrenia as a list
of symptoms and if you have,have like maybe it has nine listed
and if you have five of them,they diagnose you as schizophrenic.
So these are things that wouldbe kind of diagnostic.
I think the identity politics,which is collectivist politics, is
highly indicative, however, ofhaving adopted this kind of cult

(02:14:33):
mindset that is at least beingtaken over by the woke.
A victimhood mentality, Ithink, is actually a big diagnosis.
Agnostic criterion here too.
That's what it plays off of.
If, if your view remains thatif you work hard in a fair system,
you have every right to expectthat you'll probably do well, barring

(02:14:57):
bad luck, then you're not woke.
You can say that the currentsystem is not fair and that we need
to challenge that.
But if you believe that thesystem itself is holding you down
and people like you, becausethere's the identity policy politics
and so we need to bandtogether to fight against it, you
are probably woke.
That is pretty close to whatwoke means.

(02:15:19):
So this victimhood mentality,the despair, the black pill is the
invitation.
I think if you're justdespairing that there is no solution
except a complete radicalbreak from everything that's diagnostic
woke.
This is a little harderbecause it doesn't fit the.
It does fit the Gnostic thing,but I don't want to spend all the

(02:15:40):
time unpacking how woke peoplefavor outsider knowledge.
They believe that the inner.
Well, it's easy to do theGnostic thing.
The inner knowledge is likethe demiurge.
It's the.
It's set up by the false powerstructure of society or by the false
demon that's posing as God.
And you're supposed to staywithin on the plantation of how you're

(02:16:00):
supposed to think according tothat captured view of reality.
And so anything that fallsoutside of it that challenges it
is probably, probably true.
So there's two components towhat I just said, that which falls
outside and which challenges it.
So what you'll usually see isstuff like this.
We're just asking questionsbecause they want to have the asymmetry

(02:16:23):
of risk.
They don't want to takeresponsibility for the thing that
they're actually saying withtheir question.
Or you're not allowed to talkabout this.
You're not allowed to ask thisquestion now it's fine.
We all just went through censorship.
We all understand that thereis censorship and that there were
things you were not allowed totalk about.
You were at least not incertain ways.
You were not allowed to talkabout the vaccine in particular ways

(02:16:46):
on YouTube.
YouTube would cancel youraccount for it.
Okay, so you were effectivelyin so other social media platforms
you are not allowed.
I'm still permanently bannedfrom Facebook for making a joke about
the Canadian medicalassistance and dying suicide program.
So there are certain thingsthat you were not allowed to talk
about that were actually,actually true.

(02:17:06):
But if you believe that, theydon't want you to think this, therefore
it's probably true.
That's woke.
Thinking that is actuallycalled in the woke literature, and
I quote a preference forsubjugated knowledges.
And so or the less fancy termthat we've all heard is other ways
of knowing.
So if you believe other waysof knowing are superior to established

(02:17:27):
ways of knowing, you areprobably tilting toward woke.
And that's a very, very, veryimportant one because it's ultimately
the whole Gnostic constructionis right there.
We're being lied to completelyabout the world by an alienating
power.
By an alien power that isalienating us from who we really
are.
And if we discover the secrettruth that they that the alien power

(02:17:49):
doesn't want us to know, thenwe can liberate ourselves from its
tyranny.
That's the Gnostic motif right there.
So this preference formarginalized or subjugated or other
ways of knowing, otherGnostics knowledge is which by the
way is a form of relativismand is is highly indicative of being
woke.
So traditional conservativesdon't buy any of that.

(02:18:11):
From everything I knowtraditional conservatives are realists.
They strongly value individualliberties and their fundamental rights,
like property rights, liketheir rights to life and liberty.
They do not necessarily allthink the same.
They believe in something Ithink we would agree is called common
sense.
Now that doesn't mean meanthat you know, it's just stuff everybody

(02:18:33):
knows.
That means that we can, we canascertain a lot of truths about the
world.
That's the sense part.
And that the ability to do sois common to everybody.
That's the common part.
We have a common sense.
In other words, Christianscall this general revelation.
Everybody has access togeneral revelation.

(02:18:53):
You can just go out and lookat the world and experience the world
and experience general revelation.
The Gnostic on the other hand,has special secret knowledge.
They have to tell you how tointerpret the things that you see.
You cannot go figure it outfor yourself.
Common to everybody.
So that's the secret marker.
Like you held up the Bibleearlier and said, here's the scripture,

(02:19:15):
show me where it is in the book.
Right.
So with legitimate exegesis ofthe actual text, you can determine
what the author's intents wereto pretty good degrees of certainty.
You can know what's there.
We can go out in the world anddo a physical experiment and it doesn't
matter if, like, let's saywe're going to find out how fast
the ball drops if we let it go.

(02:19:36):
Right?
Basic physics experiment.
It doesn't matter if you do it.
It doesn't matter if I do it.
Let's say that we mix, youknow, sodium this and acetate that
and we get some chemical,chemical reaction.
And it doesn't matter if yougo by the chemicals and pour them
together.
If I go by the chemicals andpour them together, the same thing
happens.
So there's this universal tothe aspects of general revelation,

(02:19:56):
which is to say there is acommonness, everybody has access
to it, to a sense perceptionof the world that requires no special
insight, knowledge or interpretation.
But the Gnostic view is whenyou read that verse in the Bible,
it says this word, but thatword actually can secretly mean this
instead.

(02:20:17):
Then when you compare thatagainst this other verse, it secretly,
secretly means this.
Well, where does it ever saythat it secretly means that?
Oh, you just have tounderstand that it's written in code.
Okay, so that's where you'restarting to apply an eisegetical
lens to your reading ofscripture now that you're reading
scripture to extract certainfacts from it.

(02:20:38):
And this is where you end upwith something like the Social Gospel,
where Walter Rauschenbuschread the gospel and with a bent toward
Jesus being a social reformerand extracted the story of a social
reformer from it through hisisegetical lens.
That's Gnosticism.
It is not a fair and accuratereading of the text.
It is a purposed reading ofthe text.

(02:20:59):
And the same thing withinphysical reality.
Although maybe not a basicphysics or chemistry experiment,
maybe more of a sociologicalor political thing, is that there's
a correct way.
You know, here's a greatsymptom of that.
James said X, but what hereally means is Y.
And if you look at it thisway, here's a perfect example of
that, that our friend willcall him our friend.

(02:21:20):
R and McIntyre at the Blazeback in January put out a video Claiming
that I called for theassassination of J.D.
vance, who is the vice president.
That's pretty extreme.
How did he arrive at this conclusion?
Show me the tweet, show me thepost, show me the video.
Where have I ever done this?
Well, he said you have to dothe math.

(02:21:41):
And he pulled up a tweet whereI said that JD Vance is advancing
the same definition of fascismor same definition of nationalism,
but the fascism fascists used,therefore some math.
This is the secret knowledgeof James, is always wrong.
So he said, if you do themath, that means I call JD Vance
a fascist.
Did not call JD Vance a fascist.

(02:22:01):
Never did call JD Vance a fascist.
Then in another tweet,completely unrelated, there's a lot
more math.
It's a lot of two plus twoequals five.
Over here, over here.
In another tweet, I said, thisis a Bonhoeffer moment.
And I was actually referringto the need for the church to rise
up to protect itself against arising radicalism that's coming within
its ranks and threateningAmerica, which is what the Bonhoeffer

(02:22:24):
story is about.
What happened with DietrichBonhoeffer was he was obviously standing
up against the Nazis.
And Dietrich Bonhoeffer wasaccused, probably falsely, I think
legitimately falsely, by theNazis of calling for the assassinations
of high level Nazi officials,which he eventually got imprisoned.
And I believe that's what hewas executed for, even though I don't

(02:22:46):
think it was legitimate.
And so somehow our friendAaron McIntyre at the Blaze put together
the math that I said that JDVance was a fascist, even though
I never did.
And then in a completelyunrelated tweet weeks later, I said
this is a Bonhoeffer moment,which he misinterpreted to mean totally
against my intentions,although my intentions were not written
in the tweet, obviously,obviously to mean that I am secretly

(02:23:10):
calling for the assassinationof high level fascists.
Therefore, when you do themath, the Gnostic math you come out
with, or the propagandist mathin this case you come out with, James
said that he wants toassassinate J.D.
vance, which I never said.
So this is a really greatsymptom, right?
This is a really good telltale.

(02:23:30):
The secret knowledge of what Iactually mean, meant has been divined.
So I used Arin McIntyredivining my secret hidden intentions,
even though I never said them.
But we're all familiar withthat, with the left.
You know, you said whateveryou said and somehow it was racist,
right?
You said, I'm going to go getice cream today.
Well, white people prefer ice cream.

(02:23:50):
So obviously you're racist, right?
Or you just don't want blackpeople to have ice cream.
They were able to read yourmind and come up with these awful
explanations for what youdidn't ever mean, right?
And they called it all dogwhistling and all this, other things.
So we're all very familiarwith this not mind reading from the
left.
They did it and I mean theexact same thing.
So traditionalists don't dothat, Right?

(02:24:11):
Traditional conservativesdon't do that.
Traditional conservatives askyou what you mean because they're
people who are curious to findout what you actually meant when
you said something.
And then to the degree thatthey feel like they can trust you,
will take your word on it orwill measure other evidences like
the fact that I've nevercalled for the assassination of anybody.

(02:24:32):
To try, try to, to, to try tounderstand, you know, what was actually
being said, which in this caseI just explained.
And obviously most people arenot racist either.
And so, you know, most of thetime when people say they want to
go get ice cream, there wasnot some secret, hidden, coded racism
buried within it.
And the leftist mind readingis also suspect.
But that's the Gnostic thing.

(02:24:53):
Not only do they have theirown rules, but because they know
everything that's really goingon in society, they can read the
intention, intentions of other people.
Here's another example.
I love this example.
So if a 7 year old kid goes toschool in California and tells their
teacher, I think, say it's alittle boy, I think I'm a girl, right?
So now the kid is transaccording to the rules of the Gnostic

(02:25:16):
transit transgenderism, okay,the teacher is going to believe them.
The parents are now requiredby law to affirm this right, to pretend
and go along with it and ondown the line to medical establishments.
It doesn't matter where you,you take them.
The child is presumed by theGnostic cult of queer theory to be

(02:25:36):
telling the truth, right?
So they can tell when thechild, when somebody says that they're
trans, this child is tellingthe truth.
Now take another example ofsomebody who might say that they're
trans.
We can use a funny examplethat I prefer and I'll give you a
real one afterwards.
Donald Trump could walk out onthe, on, on the balcony of the White
House this afternoon,afternoon and say, I've been thinking

(02:25:58):
it over.
I've always wanted to be thefirst woman president.
I didn't want Hillary Clinton,I didn't want Kamala Harris.
It'll never be a woman.
I'm a woman today.
Today for this Day only.
I'm a woman.
The most tremendous woman toever be in the White House.
First woman president.
It's a tremendous accomplishment.
He could come out and whatwould they say?
Would they say Donald Trump is transgender?
No, he would say.
They would say he's mockingtransgender people.

(02:26:20):
Why?
Because they get to know hissecret intention.
Intentions.
They know the child'sintentions are totally legitimate,
and they know that DonaldTrump's attention, not that he's
confused or he's seven or hesaw something on TV or he's got brainwashed.
Nope.
Child telling absolutely the truth.
Donald Trump absolutely lying.
And this actually happened.
Zubi, a lot of people know whoZuby is.
I don't know Zuby's last name,so I just have to call him Zubi.

(02:26:43):
Zubi's a cool guy.
Zubi at one point did identifyas a woman for five minutes on video
and.
And went and lifted a deadlift.
That would have been thewoman's world record at his weight
class or whatever.
I don't know who these womenare, but he lifted a one rep Max
world record deadlift, youknow, as a woman.
And then he, when he finisheddoing it, he says, I've set the world

(02:27:04):
record as a woman, and I'm nota woman anymore.
And nobody believed him.
Nobody believed his selfidentification counted.
So that's indicative of the Gnostic.
The Gnostic knows your realintentions, no matter what you say,
say, and those real intentionsalways come from the Gnostic or woke
worldview.
Traditional conservatives donot do this now.

(02:27:25):
They know that Zubi's playinga joke.
But if President Trumpwandered out and said he wanted to
be the first woman president,maybe that's what he wanted to do
today.
I don't know.
There's a component of plainspeaking that happens here.
And I think as I go back tosort of scriptural interpretations,
I think that the real struggle is.
Is pulling into light theinterpretive lens that someone is

(02:27:48):
using.
So looking at this moment,like, okay, what grid are you viewing
this through?
Are they willing to confess itin the open?
Are they willing to say, theseare the lenses that I'm wearing to
interpret reality?
And when someone won'tactually tell you what their secret
knowledge is that gives themthis interpretation of reality?
That's the clue that you'redealing with someone who's.
That's a clue that you have a problem.

(02:28:09):
That's a clue that you'redealing with a nauseous mindset versus
someone who says, yeah, theseare my interpretive grids.
This is how I see the world.
They're not willing to owntheir perceptions, let's say.
Yeah, another actually big onethen that ties to that is everybody
does this bad thing, so wehave to do this bad thing too.
Right?
So the woke generally believethat all forms of raising a child,

(02:28:32):
whether it's church, whetherit's family, whatever, whether it's
school, is all brainwashing ofone sort or another, another.
Therefore they need to dobrainwashing the right way in schools.
Right.
And they argue, you know,well, there's no value neutral territory.
That view in his philosophy iscalled constructivism.
There's no value neutral territory.
So everything is value laden,nothing is objective, and therefore

(02:28:55):
we are perfectly justified inbeing subjective, in proposing our
values as I guess, the only values.
And you see this on the woke,right, picked up, you don't see this
in traditional conservatives.
They've picked up the ideathat nothing is value neutral, that
there is no objective positionand that, well, you know, the left
is doing all these bad thingsso we have to be able to do these
bad things back or else we'regoing to lose.

(02:29:18):
Right?
So those are, those are allbad signs.
But the Gnostic worldview isthat in fact everything in our reality
is the same kind of corruption.
So we can either do it rightor wrong.
And the idea is if we do itright, we get to break free of the
whole corrupt worldview.
So entrust us to lead you indoing that.
I hear this all the time with,we're going to pick up Marxist tactics.

(02:29:40):
We're going to pick up, evenif it's cancel cults etc or other
vicious bullying things thatwe're gonna use the Gramscian infiltration
model into the institutions.
Somehow they think they'regoing to pick up all this Marxism
without picking up the Marxistworldview, which is the oppressor,
oppressed dichotomy and theconflict theory and all this underneath
it.
And they're fools for thinkingthat they can do that.

(02:30:00):
I mean, this is the wholeallegory of the one Ring in Lord
of the Rings.
You can't use the Ring withoutdoing the evil the Ring was made
made to do.
And so you see this, thisargument a lot and where it attaches
what we just.
What you just said is thatthere's this trick.
The fact is I can't beobjective so I can put my lenses

(02:30:23):
on the table, right?
You can't be objective becauseyou are a subject.
So you can't be objective, Ican't be objective.
We all bring our biases, soobviously everybody's biased.
Right.
That completely leaves leavesoff the concept that we can develop
that we can do better andworse at describing the thing that
we're looking at and that wecan develop rigorous methodologies

(02:30:43):
that help us understand better.
It's not that everymethodology is actually equal.
If you go do an experiment andI go do an experiment completely
independently and we get thesame result, that's called replication.
There's a very strong reasonto believe that the result is more
likely to be true than if justone of us had done it.
And if you do it and I do itand somebody else doesn't, somebody

(02:31:05):
else doesn't.
Somebody else doesn't.
Somebody else, else's.
And it does the same thingevery time, we have a really good
reason to believe that that'sobjectively what's happening.
Right.
It doesn't matter if I'mBuddhist and you're Catholic and
this doesn't matter.
And if you write yourinterpretation, what happened still
happened.
The same thing can be true forexegesis of the Scripture.
It doesn't matter whetheryou're a Baptist or a dispensationalist

(02:31:27):
or whatever you are.
There is that this book waswritten in particular languages at
particular times by particularpeople who we can know something
about.
About.
We can understand thoselanguages accurately.
We can know what the word, youknow, angel, as we translate it actually
means in whichever.
Whether it was in Hebrew,whether it was in, you know, coining

(02:31:48):
Greek or whatever it happenedto be.
And we can derive a prettygood set of guesses about what that
means.
Now, The Bible has 860,000words in it, and it's 66 books with
tons and tons and tons andtons and tons of stories.
So there are a lot of waysthat you can try to figure out what
the total message of all thesestories are.

(02:32:10):
And there's a lot of room fordebate in that.
But you can lay on the table,this is where I'm coming from.
This is why I think that.
And like you said, the Gnosticwon't do that.
The Gnostic has.
No, no, no.
Here's the secret meaning thatyou didn't understand.
This is the secret code.
We have the interpretation andit really helps.
By the way, if you've readthis other book called the Gospel

(02:32:31):
of Thomas or whatever thatreally sheds a lot of light on all
these things that you justaren't getting in the, in the canon.
They, they.
It's very different becausewith rigorous methodologies, especially
where things aren't as cut anddry as a physics or chemistry experiment,
Putting your methodology outon the table very clearly is extremely

(02:32:53):
powerful in leading us to beable to get closer and closer and
closer or guesses andapproximations to a correct reading
of what's objectively writtenas it was intended to have been written.
Yes, that's right.
And the power of scripture inthe same way checking reality against
itself is you can checkscripture against itself to see if

(02:33:15):
your interpretation agreeswith other statements in scripture.
You can use the more clearpassages to interpret the more obscure
passages, for example.
That's right.
So it provides a very powerful lens.
But the piece people who won'tdo that, who won't actually say what
their interpretive lens ofscripture is, who's like, oh, you
know, I'm being based, I don'tneed to worry about the fruits of
the spirit.
Like, okay, what's yourinterpretive standard?

(02:33:35):
You know, based quote unquote.
What's your interpretivestandard so that you get to discard
those words from Paul.
I have to hear.
Go ahead.
Yeah, my favorite meme of thisso far is, you know, it shows a soul
burning in hell and it says,but I was anonymous.
That's right.
Yeah.
Or but I was based.
Right, yeah, right.
And yeah, guess what?
That's not an excuse.
Having occupied a worldly superior.

(02:34:02):
No, self superior.
Having occupied a selfaggrandizing worldly position does
not justify you acting like a jerk.
It just simply can't do it.
But then we're back to the,you know, hierarchy, not hypocrisy,
where there's one set of rulesfor me and one set of rules for thee

(02:34:23):
mentality that the Gnostic carries.
And we're back in the wizard circle.
We're in the confidence game,we're in the hyper reality, we're
in the two tier society whereall of these different things come
into play as people gettingsucked into these online communities.
And you watch a shift in theircharacter as they start adapting
the secret knowledge and theystart parroting the right language

(02:34:47):
to move up the Gnostichierarchy and we can see it happening
in real time.
And I think the thing thatmakes this discussion so challenging
for so many people is thatit's happened so quickly.
Like it's just, it'sessentially just been since the election
that all of this has explodedinto the public in the way that it
has.
It was always there.
I've seen it percolating inthe underground of the Internet for
many years, many others haveas well.

(02:35:09):
But suddenly post November 5thor whatever day it was, it seems
to have just erupted intoelon's version of X.
And it's kind of a little bit.
At times it feels like the fogof war trying to identify, okay,
who's where and who's what and must.
You must see this firsthand now.
I feel like it's a blitzkrieg, actually.
Like, I feel like, like yousaid, it's the left stewed for years

(02:35:30):
and they kind of broke intothe public in these like kind of
moments, these stages.
One of the big ones being, youknow, the BLM after, After.
What's his name?
Michael.
Michael Brown.
Michael Brown, yeah.
Was shot in Ferguson, Missouri.
And then the.
Another one B.
Obviously the huge eruptionduring Trump's first tenure in office

(02:35:53):
and the very fine people thing.
But then primarily, of course,George Floyd and you know, it erupted.
Oh, Covid too.
Yeah, yeah.
And so it erupted into thepublic eye, but had been stewing
for 50 years.
This thing has been stewing.
The woke right has beenstewing for a long time.
They used to call themselvesthe alt right.
Then the left picked up the term.
People say, James, why don'tyou just call me alt right?

(02:36:14):
Well, it's because the leftruined that term by calling grandma
alt right.
They called everybody, allright, so now you don't know what
it means.
So we, we needed to a new term.
And it turns out that alt justsays that they're alternative to
the other right.
It doesn't say what they believe.
Woke tells you how they arealternative to the other right.
It's that they have woke up toa gnostic understanding of their
set of circumstances.
But yeah, my interpretation isthat they began in earnest to lay

(02:36:40):
tracks to, to, to make a bidfor power probably four years ago.
They've been stewing aroundfor about 10 before the that.
But they started laying realtracks for a bid for power.
Like started to organize in 20and probably 21.
Really.
They really started to beginto try to put infrastructure, get
money behind them and so on,and to start collecting influencers

(02:37:02):
and promoting and growinginfluencers and so on.
And this kind of slowly built.
And I think that it wasn't the election.
I think that they came out ofthe gate roughly at the beginning
of October, right before the election.
And I think that they had atwo pronged purpose.
If the election had gone toKamala, I think they would have pushed
for a civil war.
War and agitated in that direction.
And if as Trump won, the otherplan was to, you know, basically

(02:37:26):
try to take over MAGA as fastas possible and ideally to control
Trump or get rid of him.
And I Don't know if it's anop, that's a containment OP to make
it so that Trump is not goingto be as effective because he's got
all these radicals.
I don't know if it's adiscrediting op, I don't know if
it's a actual bid to try to,to claim tyrannical power for themselves.

(02:37:48):
But I perceive that you'reright, that it basically exploded
in the lead up to the electionand around the election.
I also pulled a mask off ofhim with my hoax of American reformer
in early December that forcedthem to just kind of double down.
There was a lot of iron law ofwoke overreaction happening then.

(02:38:10):
It's so not like Marx thatnobody could possibly tell on the
one hand and other peoplescreaming, Karl Marx was great.
He was a great writer.
He had an important analysisof liberalism.
And it's like, okay, we see that.
Today, we're seeing that todaywith people saying maybe Karl Marx
got a few things right.
Like to this day, lots ofthem, lots of them, this is their
two plus two equals five moment.

(02:38:31):
Actually these so called rightwing guys defending Karl Marx and
socialism is their two plustwo equals, equals five argument
moment.
The left did that in 21 withtwo plus two equals five.
And now we're just here weare, you know, Karl Marx was great,
I guess.
And so no.
1 the conservative case forKarl Marx.
And so this is, I think beenvery, very fast for people, but I

(02:38:55):
think it's a blitzkrieg.
My current analysis is thatover the last four years they have
engaged in what is calledelitist capture of the influencer
tier of the movers and shakertier of maga.
And they feel like that wasmostly complete.
And now that they have shiftedand we all see it much more visibly,

(02:39:15):
they're actually trying totake over MAGA at large.
They're using roughly the sametechniques that the left used in
2015, then 16 to take over theentire Democratic Party.
But I believe that that iswhat we're actually seeing and that
their model is a blitzkrieg togo as hard and fast and take as much
ground as, as they can, eitherbefore they're stopped or until they

(02:39:35):
win.
But I think that that's theshift you're perceiving.
It didn't come out of the ground.
It had built its, it had builtits phalanx in the influencer tier,
what I call elite mega overthe course of the last four years.
And then they decided now isthe time for the offensive and they
launched their phalanx intoMaga at large and are either cutting

(02:39:58):
everything down or trying totransform everything into their alignment,
which is a carrot stick,incentive structure, rewards and
punishments.
And so we're now going throughwhat amounts to a coup within Maga
and they use all theseexcuses, well, we don't have any
power, so we have to be ableto do this.

(02:40:19):
And it's like, first of all,you have tons of power in Maga even
if you don't have poweroutside of a Maga.
And second of all, you'restill answering evil with evil, so
it's not okay.
And third of all, you're justbeing evil.
Some of these people like thatyou're, that they go after, haven't
done any evil, they justdisagree with them.
Like I see conservativeChristians all over the place that
have stood up to this.

(02:40:39):
Joel Barry at the BabylonBees, very prominent, but there's
others.
Carrie Smith.
There's a woman who has tostay anonymous because the attacks
on her have gotten so bad.
But a lot of people know whoshe is, so I won't even mention who
she is, but there is one.
And a lot of people know whoI'm taught will know who I'm talking
about.
They have basically just beenabsolutely wrecked.
And these aren't people thatare somehow, you know, some weird

(02:41:05):
enemy or whatever.
They just opposed this wokecrap on the right, including outright
racism and outright antiSemitism which the second, if you
say any of that, they say, oh,James called people racist, he the
shitlib.
And it's like, no, actuallyyou can still be racist.
Like that's still bad.
Right?
Like did we.
You didn't.
Nobody forgot that exceptthese guys who have a different set

(02:41:25):
of rules because they're basedor whatever.
Yeah.
And I think, I think thismakes me think of the fear, hate
and desperation as those beingsignature characteristics that you
can kind of say, you know,because there's, I think what we're
talking about is there's a,there's a Christian or conservative
or a traditional way to talkabout these things.
And then there's a gnostic wayto talk about them as well that often

(02:41:48):
uses some of the same language.
And the way to kind of beginto discern the difference is by saying,
well, what's the emotionaltenor of this?
Is it fear, hate and desperation?
How am I feeling in responseto it?
It doesn't mean feelings are facts.
It doesn't mean they'reobjective realities.
But I think our intuitivesense can give us more information
than I think we often let on.

(02:42:09):
And the trick is to sort ofsay, you know what?
I don't exactly know what thatis, and I know it's using language
that I'm supposed to agreewith, but I don't like what's happening
there for some reason, so I'mjust going to back away.
In fact, I think you talkedabout that in your lecture about
using Christians, picking upon missing people who use their language,
but being able to pick up onthe language that others are using.

(02:42:31):
Talk a little bit about that.
Yeah.
I mean, so a lot of people,like, if.
If these parasites come in andattack, say, Christianity using Christian
language or Christianscriptures partly in context or completely
out of context or whatever, alot of Christians see Christian stuff

(02:42:53):
and they're like, yeah, Iagree with that.
Right.
That's a Christian thing.
Christ is King is a great example.
So do you mean Christ is king,Praise the Lord, or do you mean Christ
is King, you dirty Jew?
Right, right.
Which one do you mean?
And it can mean both.
And they tried to deny that itcan mean both and then the evidence
came out.
Nope, it meant both.
And a lot of people were usingit like pretty hostilely.

(02:43:14):
And so, you know, there was ahuge controversy because a lot of
Christians latched on toChrist as king.
Yeah, of course it is.
And James hates Christians forsaying that this isn't what we should
be doing.
But I was seeing that bothuses were happening at the same time.
And it's.
That's hard to discern for people.
So if it had come in insteadunder the guise of secular liberalism.
Right, so.

(02:43:35):
So we need to have radicalequality in society or equity.
And Christianity creates alack of equity, so that's bad.
And so we're going to do allthis stuff, dei, in order to achieve
equity, because it's outsideof that and it's pushing for a different
value structure, which in thiscase is DEI or equity.
It's a lot more visible.

(02:43:55):
I think I gave the examplethat I was talking about about that.
When mysticism appears in aJewish context, a lot of people can't
determine the differencebetween it being.
It's a further step from whatI just said, sort of.
But they can't discern thedifference between Judaism and Jewish

(02:44:17):
mysticism, which are not thesame thing.
Correct.
And Jewish mysticism can bejust as gnostic and nasty as any
other gnostic thing.
And so they see Jewishmysticism sticks doing gnostic manipulations,
and they say, that's the Jews,but that's a lack of discernment
because religiously observantJews don't act like that.
In fact, every conversationI've had with a religiously observant

(02:44:38):
Jew about what I'm seeing saysat some point in the conversation
that's the exact opposite of Judaism.
They say that it's the exact.
Well, of course, maybe they'rejust lying.
Of course that's what we haveto believe, that every time they
say something they're lying.
That's the woke view becauseyou know their secret one motivations.
But the same thing's happeningwith the other example I gave with
Equity, Radical equality.

(02:44:59):
You'll see a lot of the guyswill say that secular liberal values,
in other words, that the stateis not interfering if we get strict
about it, that the state isnot interfering with your religious
beliefs, including the abilitynot to believe if you choose, that
actually is the same thing as communism.
And you're seeing thatargument everywhere.
That's not the same thing as communism.
Individual rights versuscollectivism are not the same thing.

(02:45:20):
So when it's not your set ofvalues, you lose the ability to discern.
You might pick up thatsomething bad is happening, but you'll
probably blame the wrong thing.
Jews or liberalism being thetwo examples I gave.
But when it is your set ofvalues where you should be the most
attuned, there's too much.

(02:45:41):
I don't know if it'ssentimentality, if it's tribe over
truth, if it's just theblindness that comes with your own
good intentions, right?
So if you're a good healthyChristian and you've said Christ
is king, you probably neveronce thought it could be used to
hurt Jewish people.
So you don't even know thatany Christian would possibly do that.
Not realizing that youliterally have these guys out arguing

(02:46:02):
to be more Machiavellian intheir approach to pushing their values.
So as it turns out, it'sharder to see when it's your own
thing.
But that's how parasites work.
That's why I was calledcalling them Gnostic parasites.
The idea like when you get bitby a mosquito every now and then,
you feel it because whatever.
But it's supposed to have itslike saliva, which is makes you itch,

(02:46:24):
is like anesthetic, so youdon't feel it when it bites you,
you don't know you got bitthat way it can bite you again and
again and again, same thing.
If you've ever had thedistinct pleasure of getting in a
pond and picking up a leech,you never felt it happen.
Or if you've ever had a tick,it's buried its Head in your skin,
you never felt it happen.
And Right.
That's how parasites work.

(02:46:45):
If they're detected, they getremoved, they get stopped.
So they try to be undetectable.
So you can do this within thatChristian context this way just as
easily by manipulating whatthe verses mean, by manipulating
Christian values or impulses.
Like, you know, we want moreChristians in society.
That's obviously part of theGreat Commission.

(02:47:05):
We all know that having morebelieving moral Christians in society
would be a net benefit for,for society.
Or at least every Christianagrees with that.
I also agree with it, butevery Christian certainly agrees
with that.
And so you come along and say,we need a Christian nation.
And all of a sudden they'relike, yeah, but they don't know that
it might actually meansomething else too.

(02:47:27):
Right.
So there's this difficulty ofdiscernment when it's in your own
house, in a sense is I thinkwhat I'm saying.
And then when it's outsideyour house, you're more apt to blame
the wrong discernment youactually have.
So it's easier.
So you can't spot it in yourown house, but you can easily spot
it in someone else's house andscapegoat or make that person the

(02:47:49):
enemy while being blind to thefact that you have just as much of
a parasite in your own house.
And then I can see thatworking both ways.
Like everyone's pointing ateach other.
It's like, well, maybe weshould look at our own house and
actually try to get theseparasites out that have latched onto
some.
Something good.
Yeah, it's, I mean, that'ssuch a radical idea, especially when
you know they're, they're dangerous.

(02:48:10):
It's like that if you have a,if you have a parasite, you probably
don't need it and probablydon't want it and it's probably not
benefiting you.
And these aren't actually likeleeches or mosquitoes, by the way.
These are like face suckers.
Like these are.
Yeah.
Or cordyceps is actually theright parasite, the fungal cordyceps,
which takes over the brains ofinsects and causes them to go basically
like plant themselves or that,that other one that gets birds, they

(02:48:34):
crawl up to the top of thegrass to get birds to eat them.
It's like mind control parasites.
Now how can someone begin todiscern if some of these ideas have
taken root in them, in their heart?
Because it does ultimatelybegin with the individual to be discerning
about the ideas that they'reabsorbing the individuals that they're
following and Their ownemotional tenor and character.

(02:48:55):
If someone's like, oh, wow.
If they're listening to this,like, I think I might have gotten
myself into a bit of mud.
How can they start to know ifthat's kind of, like, within them
as well?
I think that the emotionaltenor is the most.
The easiest one in manyrespects, or maybe the most important
one.
Another one is, of course, tosee, like, if you can take a step

(02:49:16):
back from your favoriteinfluencer and see more of what they're
saying.
And they said something reallybad, and you're like, I have to defend
him.
Like, that's a sign thatsomething is off.
Like, if you have aninfluencer and he does a show and
he literally starts talkingabout how National Socialism might
be the right answer, andyou're like, yeah, but he's on the
right.
He's on our side.
Like, you probably got to step back.
The emotional tenor is if youare really being motivated by, like

(02:49:38):
we said, fear, desperation,resentment, grievance, victimhood,
like, you're in.
You're at least in danger.
Right.
Speaking of stepping in the mud.
And you really have to try totry to fix that now, Christian, this
is the handshake of faith andreason again, because what is it
that actually drives out is agood word, but it's not.
Not even.
It's not even correct.

(02:49:59):
The more I think and feelabout this, where there is faith,
there is not fear.
It's not even that it drivesit out.
It's like the.
It's like turning on the lightdoesn't drive out darkness.
It's like it fills the space.
Instead, it's something different.
And so if you're coming atthis from a place of fear, then you

(02:50:20):
have come from a place of lostfaith, right?
And so that's bad.
And then same thing.
Are you being reasonable or unreasonable?
The example I just gave.
Are you being unreasonable todefend somebody on your tribe when
they've said somethingobjectionable or indefensible?
Well, probably you're beingvery unreasonable.
So if you're losing the pathof that handshake of faith and reason,

(02:50:44):
if you're acting from fear ortribalism or anger or wrath or the
desire just to feel better,which is called Catholic catharsis,
you're probably at least in danger.
And it's a good time to justtake a step back and say, man, am
I messing up?
And the Christian ideal, whichin this case I definitely hold to

(02:51:04):
and have articulated manytimes, is that if you repent, you
deserve, not deserve.
In the.
In the cosmic theologicalSense, but from brother to brother,
forgiveness.
That's right.
And so, I mean, the idea isthat nobody deserves forgiveness,
but God in his mercy willstill grant it to those who repent
as well, to the best of their ability.
And in earnesty, so it's likethat becomes this idea deal, model.

(02:51:25):
And so it's fine if you'remessing up, right?
This is the most frustratingpart is everybody's like, James hates
all these.
And it's like, no, it'sreally, it's okay, you're messing
up.
It's a huge psyops.
There are probably billions ofdollars behind it, tons of actors.
We're seeing all the Qataristuff getting tied into it right
now, actually coming out live.

(02:51:45):
The whole point of thesethings is to trick people in getting
to get them to act the wrong way.
That's the point of political warfare.
Just take a step back, say youmessed up, and move forward if, if
you're unwilling.
So this is a great diagnosticto step back and say, man, I messed
up.
But you have to analyzebecause you might be right and you

(02:52:06):
might be wrong.
But if you messed up and youfeel like you just can't say it,
you're acting in pride, you'rein a bad place and you're susceptible
to that gnostic circumstance.
Or maybe you're already partof it because that's what it really
is.
If you think you're overalready, God, in a sense that you
have different rules thatapply to you because you're elitist
and superior to everybody.
That's pride.

(02:52:27):
That's, that's toxicpathological pride.
So those are good diagnostics.
For what it's worth.
People say, James, thatapplies to you too.
You messed up with this wokeright thing.
And it's like I have poredover this again and again and again
and again and again.
I am not coming from a placeof fear.
I am not mad at it.

(02:52:47):
Anybody?
Well, a few people, actually.
It's a little hard.
But, you know, I'm seeing whatI'm seeing and I think I can articulate
it very clearly.
And so if, in the event that Irealize that I'm wrong, I will eagerly
repent of it is the best I cangive you right now and that I honestly

(02:53:10):
assess this all the time, butI believe that I have the correct
diagnosis for what's going on.
So I understand that that'swhere people are also going to be.
But again, what are your motivations?
My motivations are not fear.
Anger, despair, resentment, envy.
I don't want what these People have.

(02:53:31):
I don't care.
I just want to get back to usfixing the country and getting leftist
exploitation out of it.
Like, I don't want to be theguy on tv.
I don't want to be the guy going.
Going to all the DC parties orwhatever the hell they think I want.
That's not it.
My motivations are I'm tellingthe truth to the best of my ability
to understand it and know itas earnestly as I can, including

(02:53:53):
if it costs me.
So I have a hard time knowingwhat it is.
I mean, if I'm wrong, I'll sayso and I'll repent of it.
But other than that, once it.
Once it's proven to me, butother than that, I don't have those
motivations.
So check your emotional tenor.
Check your tribo truth.
Would you say you're operatingwith a measure of faith?
Yeah, actually, all the time.

(02:54:14):
I don't know what the faith is in.
That's the agnostic part.
But like, the idea that, Imean, I've been given all my public
talks for the last few weekshave been.
That I've given, over the lastcouple months have been preaching
this exact idea is thatbelieving that if you do the right
thing that better things thanworse will happen is I think, really

(02:54:36):
a pretty operationaldefinition of faith.
And that means being able totry to ascertain what the right thing
is to do and to take the riskof doing it, not knowing if it'll
work out, not knowing if it'llbring consequences or even knowing
it'll bring consequencesbecause it's the right thing to do
anyway.
This Daniel Penny example, hedid the right thing down that train

(02:55:00):
knowing that there could beconsequences, knowing that he could
get hurt, knowing thatsomebody else could get hurt, and
then faced tremendous legalconsequences for it and public opinion
consequences.
And to me, it's like whatfaith boils down to is acting to
do the right thing anyway,pursuing the truth anyway and trusting.

(02:55:23):
That's the trust part.
That's your Hebrews alone.
11 Trusting that when you dothat, not that it'll be rewarded,
that's like too selfish, that things.
Better things than worsethings will happen if you do that.
Are you surprised to find thatthe faith that you grew up with and

(02:55:45):
that you explored in collegehas come around to a new degree of
relevance in your life in this moment?
I don't know.
I don't know that surprised is right.
I don't know if I have time tobe thinking about it in those terms.
I certainly have a more matureview of these things than I did at
the time.
And so what I would actuallysay is I don't think it was relevant

(02:56:07):
then either.
So there was not like thisreturn to relevance.
There was more of thisdiscovery of relevance.
I think same more about that.
So a while back I startedspeaking of projects I never finished,
I started writing a book aboutpolitical warfare and propaganda.
And I don't know, it's notvery long.

(02:56:29):
I think I wrote 14 or 15,000words on it.
And I came up with this wholelist of principles that I had intended
to fill in and write out, someof which I've done podcasts about,
some of which are just sittingon this file as a bullet point list,
some of which I've written out.
And I just kept noticing thatlike a whole bunch of them I'm like,
I was kind of like, frankly, Iwas like, damn it, this is in the

(02:56:51):
Bible.
Damn it, this is in the Bible too.
Damn it, this is in the Bible.
Three, you know, and it's likeI was having this kind of like Jordan
Peterson moment where, youknow, he's like, well, you know,
his whole argument right nowis if you were to figure out a society
and how it's going to work andwrite the book, it would end up being
the Bible, you know, and it'slike, yeah, it's kind of right.

(02:57:12):
And it's like, okay, so thisis sort of how I ended up coming
to the belief that at leastwhatever is written there is anthropologically
true.
And what I mean byanthropologically true is at the
very least stripping alltheology out of the Bible.
Because of the agnosticperspective that I have, I don't
want to use that.
I'm willing to entertain it.

(02:57:32):
But just for this argument, Iwant to step away from, from it.
That the Bible records a threeor four or five thousand year history.
I'm not exactly sure of thetimeline of we'll say 5,000 year
history of a people.
Yeah.
And that people is broughtinto a covenant, it believes with

(02:57:54):
God that gives it a set of laws.
It says if you behave this wayyou will be blessed.
And if you don't behave thisway, it's not going to go so good
for you.
So that could be a result of,you know, divine punishment and reward,
or it could be a result as theBible actually depicts.
Or it could merely be if youlive according to these things, then

(02:58:16):
things are going to work outokay through natural consequences.
And what I, you know, the, themost, the least I can say about the
Bible is the, the least I cansay about the Bible is that these
people that wrote this bookdown were writing a chronicle of
basically, hey, look, here'show we screwed up and here's what

(02:58:37):
we did to fix it.
And here's how we screwed upagain and here's what we did to fix
it.
And it always came back towhen we followed these principles
that were these kind of corefounding principles, the law as given
in the Torah, things got better.
And when we deviated or forgotthem or whatever, things, things
got worse.
When there was calamities, ifwe kept our faith, then we got through

(02:58:58):
it.
And if we didn't, then wedidn't, you know, then bad.
Well, they never actuallyfully lose the faith.
That's the whole point of theBible and so on and so forth.
So you get this documenttracking a peculiar set of values
that shows up very rarelyanywhere in the world.
The voluntary pursuit ofrighteousness on an individual level,
the wrestling with God thatmeans Israel real, the voluntary,

(02:59:22):
by the time you get to the NewTestament of acceptance of Christ's
sacrifice and grace orrejection of it, and you have this
whole set of principles thatfor whatever reason, divinely inspired
or because it happened to workfor a people that survived a lot
of trouble, tells you a greatway to live.
And so that's what I mean byanthropologically true.

(02:59:44):
I don't know why it is true.
It could be theological, itcould be divine inspiration.
It could merely be that youhave a really tough people who had
the right set of principlesthat guided them through a lot of
good and bad and theyarticulated what it was that made
it work and didn't.
But either way it's stunninglyrelevant to living in ordering a

(03:00:06):
good life and a good society,and intriguing on at a minimum that
level.
So that's, I think what I meanby discovering more and more its
of relevance.
But the other part is when Iwas a kid, it wasn't relevant.
It was boring.
It was stupid mass.
It was boring.
And when I was in college, youknow, I was in college, I had other

(03:00:27):
priorities.
We were doing Bible studies,but it was just kind of like, you
know, interesting.
And I was in this mishmash ofspirituality stuff.
But mostly I was a college guyin a fraternity trying to major in
physics, which is kind of thisweird mix of things.
But you still have this longexperience with the book.
It's not like you're justopening it for the first time right
now.
It's something that you grewup in.

(03:00:48):
And maybe it wasn't relevantto your life as A kid.
And maybe it wasn't strictlyhow you, you know, how you organized
your life in college, but youstill have this deep familiarity
with it where you're quotingverses throughout this entire interview,
which has been, I've beenpretty impressed by that.
You have it, you have thisintuitive knowledge of it.
And now here it is sitting infront of you, this moment where like,
you need this now more than ever.

(03:01:09):
I would say we all do.
But in a moment it's like thisis providing you the framework and
a way to understand a lot ofwhat's happening in the west right
now.
Yeah, it's been a realblessing actually to get to work
with so many Christians whothe woke.
Right.
Say that I hate speaking oftheir secret mind reading powers
because one of the things wasthat I figured if I was going to
be stepping into that domain,I definitely am not a haughty person.

(03:01:31):
I don't think.
I wasn't going to come in andbe like, listen here, you chuckleheads,
you primitive screwheads orwhatever it is from army of Darkness,
and I'm going to tell youabout the what and then leave me
alone and all this crap, orI'm going to argue atheism with you
or any of this junk.
I purposefully entered intothe Christian environments that I
was invited into.

(03:01:52):
Gracious or grateful, I shouldsay, for the invitation and happy
to listen.
I genuinely wanted tounderstand the perspective of the
people I was listening to.
Not just for the reason thatit helps me communicate to them,
although that's also relevant,but just to understand this perspective.
Perspective properly, which Ihad kind of never bothered to do.

(03:02:13):
And it's been a genuine andtrue blessing to have spent most
of the last five years workingwith so many Christians who have
been gracious, also with their time.
Sometimes they get a littleapologetic with me or like weird
about it, but most of the timethey don't.
And you know, they speak thislanguage and so I want to know what
they're talking about.

(03:02:33):
I talked to my pastor friendJohn and he's telling me, telling
me about, you know, the mercyand grace of, of mercy and justice.
I'm sorry, perfect mercy andperfect justice of God.
And I'm like, you know, I wantto know more about that because I
get the ideals and I don't.
It's.
I understand how it's challenging.
And he's like, well, it's thebook of Galatians.

(03:02:56):
So it's like, well, let's gostudy that and let's try to go, try
to figure out.
And then it's like, oh, wow,this is really profound and interesting.
And so, you know, I've takenthat opportunity, I guess, very seriously,
obviously, contrary to what alot of my critics, and I don't know
if they're opponents, I don'tknow how to describe them.
People who don't like me havecharacterized me as.

(03:03:16):
I've really taken theseopportunities seriously.
And it leads where it leads.
And it leads where it leads,how it leads.
I mean, you're Calvinists, youknow the deal.
It's not up to them.
Yes and no.
So anyway, I'm grateful forthe opportunity.
And so.
So I've taken it veryseriously and I haven't, I don't

(03:03:38):
think, wasted it.
I think that you were tellingthe story of the history of a people
group who have theseprinciples that when they adhere
to the principles, they have agood life, things go well for them.
And when they deviate from theprinciples, things don't go so well.
And that sort ofanthropological view.
And then in them you have theperson of Christ who embodies the

(03:04:01):
principal principlesperfectly, who comes down like I
am in this very real embodiedsense that sort of provides this
sort of theological,supernatural appearance of the law
amongst the people as aninvitation into living in this way
and being sanctified towardsbeing able to live that way throughout
your life.

(03:04:21):
And what a great turning pointthat is in the middle of that story,
in a sense, or towards the endof the story, depending how you look
at it, I suppose, or wherever.
But this idea headquarters.
Yeah, exactly.
But there's a sense where it'slike this story is about this people,
but it's also about somethingso much larger where the law becomes

(03:04:41):
embodied in reality,condescends to become embodied in
reality.
And sort of what happens as aresult of that for the people who
reject that law and then thepeople who follow it.
And I think the story of thewest is in many cases, in a very
real sense actually the peoplewho choose to.
To follow that law and makethat profession and say, yeah, no,
this is reality.

(03:05:02):
This actually happened.
This historical event actually happened.
And we follow in the thingsthat it teaches.
What a gift that's been to our civilization.
Yeah, I mean, both there inthe New Testament, but also with
the law in the Old Testament.
It is ultimately a voluntarychoice to righteousness.
And of course a voluntarychoice to righteousness is the moral
and religious people that JohnAdams was referring to that he said

(03:05:24):
the Constitution, Constitutionwas written for.
Because the entire project ofself governance relies upon that.
But again, I say that that'sthe handshake of reason and faith.
Because you have to have bothreason to operate within general
revelation.
You have to have faith totrust that what you're doing isn't
all in vain or that it'sactually worth it too in order to

(03:05:47):
do many of the things that you do.
So it's this individualvolunteerism that's tucked in.
There is also, I think,crucial whether it's in the Christian
context or whether it's in thebroader acceptance of these.
Well, the law as it's phrasedin the Torah, but of these principles
that defined how these peoplewere going to organize themselves

(03:06:08):
and hold themselves.
Plus the examples of course,of people who are doing it wrong,
whether that's the Phariseesor whether that's when they get degenerate
at different points.
You come down, Moses himselfis on the mountain talking to God
himself in bringing down thetablets of the core of the law itself.
Comes down and find Aaronbuilding a golden, or have.

(03:06:28):
Having built a golden calf.
No.
And then he lies about it.
Oh, he just took all the goldand threw it in the fire and the
calf came out and everybodyjust got real excited.
And it's like, what a stupid.
I get worked up about thatone, sure.
But yeah, but yeah, it's the,the this, you know, the, these are
people.
Also the Bible talks not justabout like how great everything is,

(03:06:50):
like they messed up a lot.
And that I think is reallyimportant too.
I mean, that's what a lot ofPaul's epistles are.
He's like, listen here, youprimitive screw heads, pretty much
almost all the epistles.
It's like, it's a story aboutthe challenge of taking up righteousness

(03:07:10):
so that you can operate inself governance and choose to have
voluntary association ratherthan enforced association, which
is a radical departure fromevery other system that the world
has ever kind of come up with.
It's very different and it'sabout a changed nature because Paul
himself was one of those quoteunquote primitive screwheads when

(03:07:32):
he was Saul.
You know, God comes and hechanges us.
He makes Sauls into Paul's andSimons into Peter's and he makes
us able to live in alignmentwith that law.
And so in that sense, reasonand faith again shake hands and say,
like, I can read thisrationally and I can understand what
it says.
Faith binds me to it and helpsme live in accordance with it.
And that produces a righteous society.

(03:07:54):
And not in any gnostic sense.
There's no secret knowledge.
It's all just written Right there.
But are you willing tosacrifice your pride, you know, your
self righteous pride to do itand to do it God's way instead of
your own?
Yeah.
The Gnostics are the, are thefalse teachers that get warned about
again and again and again and again.
They have the secret teachingof what it really means.

(03:08:14):
Come with me.
And you know, I mean, to adegree, I guess it's not quite the
same.
I was going to say the scribesand the Pharisees, I mean, but it's
like they've just, those arepeople that have just lost the track.
They're not really necessarily Gnostic.
They, they're just too wrappedup in, in the particulars and in
the surface.
But the, the false teachersare a real problem and this is why

(03:08:36):
the Bible warns about them somany times, whether it's in Jeremiah,
whether it's in Ezekiel, theGospels do it again and again and
again and again and again.
It's, it's an incredible,incredibly important theme to watch
out for.
False teachers.
Just if you don't mind me asking.
So you've taken a lot of theseideas into the public square and
you've gotten a ton of force,feedback, let's say about some of

(03:08:59):
these ideas are unwelcome andyet you persist, and I hear you persisting
for the right reasons.
As you articulated.
What do you hope for through this?
We'll call it campaign.
We've talked about theblitzkrieg and so maybe there's a
counter campaign.
What are you hoping for?
The result might be, if you can.
Articulate what, what that is,I mean, a very abstract sense is
that the truth and what isright will prevail and that the faithful,

(03:09:24):
even if they're only aremnant, will therefore be able to
inherit the fruits of thesociety we're trying to defend.
In a more prosaic sense, whatI actually hope for is I see a radical
coup attempt against Maga happening.
I think it is a splinter hunter.
My personal belief is that itis a losing campaign, a purposefully

(03:09:47):
losing campaign that will reempower the left and I am hoping
to stop that from taking place.
I would love to see Maga flourish.
I would love to see it becomean epoch defining movement for America.
I would love to see Trump'spresidency succeed and him to have
a strong successor who canhelp lead us back to being this kind

(03:10:09):
of shining city on the hill,beacon of freedom for the world that,
that I've grown up knowing andloving about my country.
So I want to try to stopeverything that I think Might foil
that.
Whether it comes from the leftoverall or from the right.
Honestly, I actually thinkthat both woke left and woke right

(03:10:31):
are the same.
Project is, you know, rope them.
It's not rope a dope.
It's the.
It's the old one, two, right?
You.
You get them with the left,and then when they're, like, reeling,
you whack them with the right.
Yeah.
And then the left comes backand finishes the job.
And so I think that that's.
I think that that's actuallywhat's happening.
And the way I've described itto a lot of people is I saw a train

(03:10:54):
coming.
I've seen the train, you know,hooking up cars and gathering steam
for a few years.
Years.
But I saw the train hit fullthrottle, come barreling down the
tracks end of summer lastyear, and I thought, well, I can't
stop a train.
I'm not Superman.
Maybe I can derail the train.
What do I have?
And at the end of the day,what I figured out that I have is

(03:11:15):
basically me.
And I was like, well, I'llthrow myself on the track, on the
tracks and see what happens.
If I can get the wheels off,then America survives.
Cool.
Praise God.
Do you think you're beingsuccessful in that effort?
Yeah, pretty much.
It's not pleasant, though, andI don't know how it works out for
me in the long term, but I'vedecided that I don't care.

(03:11:36):
You know, I mean, again,speaking biblically, Abraham was
asked to put his child on, youknow, Isaac on the table, and he
was faithful.
And then he was blessed with,you know, many children.
So maybe it works out andmaybe it doesn't.
Job had a.
Had a rough go.
Worked out for him.
Worked out for him, though.

(03:11:56):
It worked out for him, too.
Yeah, but it's, you know, it's.
It's.
It's tough.
So I don't know if it'll workout for me, but I think I am being
successful.
I think I have largely exposedthe coup attempt within.
I've kind of tiered out maga.
I see it in three levels.
Elite maga, which I alreadytold you, I think is captured, and

(03:12:17):
then Middle MAGA and thenNormie maga.
And I think that Norm ArmyMAGA or, sorry, Middle maga.
I think Middle Maga isstarting to wake up very quickly
to there being a serious problem.
And since they are theoverwhelming workhorse of the MAGA
phenomenon, not its celebritytier, I have a feeling that there
will be some kind of a rupture later.

(03:12:37):
But Rather than it tearingMAGA apart, as I previously feared,
I think what it will be isthat the kind of elite woke right
bubble will separate and gooff and pop.
I think that that's been kindof the best I can hope for.
And every time I mull it over,don't tell anybody or pray about

(03:12:59):
it, I just keep thinking, keepgoing, keep going, keep going.
Do you think that the Trumpadministration is aware of this threat?
I presume that they probably are.
But can they see it with thislevel of clarity and resolution?
They are, I think, awarenessaware of it to a degree.
I don't know if they know howserious it is.
I do not think they have ahigh level of clarity about it or

(03:13:21):
precision about it.
I have very strong reasons tobelieve that they are aware of it
and that they are at leastconcerned by it.
It's best that I not talkabout those reasons.
But it's certainly also thecase that I'm still completely blacklisted
from the White House, so it'snot like they're inviting me over
for meetings.
Well, if someone in theadministration should happen to listen

(03:13:41):
to this interview and youcould give a message to them about
this, because I, with youranalysis and I agree with your assessment,
what would you have to say to them?
I am very afraid that all thisradicalism is in a.
We're at a very dangerous point.
First of all, what I would sayis there's no easy way out.
We've waited too long to speakup about.

(03:14:05):
This will cause a bomb to gooff, basically, that will fragment
the movement, the MAGA movement.
At this point, there's no wayfor that not to happen.
It's been too big and too entrenched.
But hopefully with savvy act,you know, savvy action, and it has
to be done earlier rather thansooner or rather than later.

(03:14:26):
It has to be done as soon aspossible because the midterms put
a deadly stopwatch on thiswhole, whole thing.
The administration is going tohave to start setting very clear
tones and very clear, clearindicators that it is not with these
radicals without necessarily,you know, pushing down the plunger
on the dynamite and justblowing it all up.

(03:14:48):
So how that's to be done withsavvy, I'm less clear.
But it's going to have toactually be very clear to start distancing
itself from the radicalismthat's already done so with the anti
Semitism, obviously, but withthe, the racialism, the, the rampant
us versus them mentality, it'sgoing to have to start setting Some

(03:15:10):
lines.
It's going to have to do it ina savvy way.
Like I said, the longer youwait, the worse it's going to get.
And the closer to the midtermsyou get, the more likely you are
you're going to lose them completely.
We are rapidly approaching the date.
I don't know when that date iswhere one of two things.
There are two dates actually.
One of the dates is whereyou're not going to win the midterms.
The Republicans are going tolose and there will be no saving

(03:15:31):
after some point.
And so secondly, you'replaying a game of chicken against
the clock right there.
The secondly, there's thingshappen so as we saw with that Shiloh
woman who called the child bya racial slur and became a cause
celeb through the woke rightand other parts of the right in a

(03:15:52):
kind of very ugly way in orderto defy the left, allegedly.
But it was clearly not just todefy the left.
There were many people whowere making it about being racist
as well.
Sooner or later, I mean, that's.
That's like Breonna Taylordying with the left back in 19 or
20, whenever that happened.
And they were looking fortheir George Floyd.

(03:16:14):
And so Trad Floyd is coming.
So some event is going tohappen at some point that's going
to cause the woke right to goabsolutely ballistic the way that
the left went ballistic afterGeorge Floyd.
The energy is there.
The consolidation of power is.
Is there.
That's how you take therevolution in stages from stage two
to stage three and consolidatepower over the entire movement and

(03:16:35):
jettison everybody else.
And so that moment is coming.
They are looking for.
That moment, I think, is whatthe Shiloh story proves.
And when it comes, if we areunprepared for it, MAGA will be ripped
to pieces and everything willbe in disarray.
And it would be very, verywise for people, especially even
in the imaginationadministration, to have thought about

(03:16:56):
and prepared for thatcontingency, which they will not
likely be able to control thetiming of because it will happen
off of some event that's morethan likely organic.
So tough times are coming,tests are coming.
And the administration should,and also everybody around in MAGA
should be aware that thesethings are happening and that these

(03:17:16):
threats are looming and theyare real.
And if we sleep on this, thatwe're going to find ourselves in
trouble.
Yeah.
If the assessment and thediagnostics that you provided throughout
this whole conversation arereal, what you're describing is the
logical conclusion of that.
I think the Tricky part is,and maybe you can speak to this is
how to back away from theseelements without being like you're

(03:17:39):
tacking to the left.
Because that's what happens assoon as you try to back away from
the more radical elements onthe right.
You get accused of going left,which technically is true, but not
in an objective sense.
No, actually you can just bestanding still.
You can even actually moveright technically whilst still opposing
radicalism.
I don't.
I think that the way that youhave, we have to do this is by appealing

(03:18:00):
to the founding principles ofthe country.
I kind of see three paths thatyou could say there are four, but
there are really three.
But I'll say four paths.
And these paths are you canfirmly advocate for the founding
principles of the.
Of the country.
You can weakly advocate forthe principles of the country.
You can go left or you canwatch the right take over and the

(03:18:22):
radicals.
I mean, we can either goradically left or go radically right,
or we can weakly or stronglyarticulate for the.
And defend the principles ofthe country.
Weak is not really an option.
That's why I said there'sthree, but not four.
If you to just be weak aboutit is to pick whichever one of the
right or left is stronger.
In this case, I think it's the left.

(03:18:43):
So you can't weakly articulatethe principles of the country.
You can stand firm, or you canwatch everything bend left, or you
can watch everything bendradically right.
And I think that the necessityfor people who want to keep the country
on track is that we have tofirmly articulate the principles
of the country.
That means we have to learn them.
If we are not familiar withthem, we have to know them, we have

(03:19:03):
to feel them, we have to havefaith in them.
We have to believe that theywere founded on the right things,
right about humanity, and thatthey are the right thing to do and
to stand for.
If you're demoralized ordespairing of them, you can't do
that.
And those people turn radicalone way or the other, depending on
their dispositions.

(03:19:24):
Yeah, we have to recognizewhat it was that actually founded
us.
The synthesis of reason andfaith and the exclusion, perhaps
not intentionally, but theexclusion of gnosticism and protect
against that.
But you're also just going tohave to bear getting called names
that aren't true.
And you're going to have torearticulate and rearticulate and
rearticulate and rearticulateyour positions and why you're being

(03:19:46):
misrepresented, which isfrustrating, tedious, exhausting.
And every Other thing, youknow, we went through it with the
left.
We can go through it withthese guys too.
That's one final question.
If someone is listening, haslistened to all this and has been
skeptical of all, like, okay,you know what?
I like these guys, but I'm notsure I'm going to trust them as the
authorities.
Where would you point them forsources outside of, say, the two

(03:20:07):
of us, where they can begin toget a little, little piece of perception
of what might be going on?
Well, I mean, if they'reinterested in the gnostic stuff in
its relationship to modernist politics.
You held up the book.
It's not an easy book.
Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition.
You can make.
You can see that case.
Another very hard set of booksare written by Eric Fogland, who
make the case that Marx was a gnostic.

(03:20:29):
If you're interested in thatside of the debate, I encourage people
to do the following experiment.
If you want to find out aboutthe woke.
Right.
At least if you have enoughfollowing, just go on social media
on in particular and say,especially if you say it where I
get to see it and I canretweet you.
I think James Lindsay is rightabout some things that all you, you

(03:20:51):
don't have to commit to anything.
Or I think James Lindsay makessome good points and just see what
your experience will be fordefending or agreeing.
There's been a number ofpeople who've stood up and defended
me in the last week who gotabsolutely mobbed.
So you can go see for yourselfthat there is a campaign to make
people not want to listen towhat I have done to say coming from
the right right now.

(03:21:12):
So check it for yourself.
Go on.
If you don't want to engagethat way, go on my X.
Read my.
Read the replies to anything I say.
Just read through them for anhour, see how you feel.
See what you're seeing.
I'm not that fat.
I could lose a pound or two,maybe ten.
I'm not Jewish, I'm not gay.
I mean, we can go down thelist of all the things that you're

(03:21:34):
going to read that I'm not.
And of course I'm not cooked either.
So that's one thing.
I read primary sources.
So if you want to see whatMarx said, don't take my word for
it.
Go read Marx.
I'm sorry, it's hard.
You're more than welcome touse the resources that I've produced.
You're welcome to useresources other people produced.
But if you want to see whatMarx actually said, you need to read

(03:21:56):
Marx.
And it is challenging.
If you want to see what thecritical theorist said, I encourage
people to read RepressiveTolerance for themselves.
Just see what the they saidand see if, when you read Repressive
Tolerance, you're seeing thesame behaviors backwards from the
right, for example.
These are the kinds of thingsthat you can do to check me.

(03:22:17):
If you think I'm reading thesources that I cite incorrectly,
go read them and challenge me.
Go read Mein Kampf.
I'm reading Mein Kampf again.
Again.
Again.
It's horrifying me how many ofthe arguments I see from the woke.
Right.
I don't know if they've readthe book or not.
I don't think think they have.
But they're the sameargumentative structure, the same
exact points being raised.

(03:22:39):
See it for yourself.
Go read.
That's why most of mypodcasts, by the way, Will, is just
me reading sources to people.
Most of my episodes, not allof them, but most of them are me
reading primary sources to people.
So go read Primary sources andsee if it lines up.
Listen, maybe less toinfluencers who are.
Are basically the fake news.

(03:23:01):
Now this Qatar stuff should bealarming for people, for example,
and that's a tip of an iceberg.
So, you know, be healthy inyour skepticism, but be skeptical
of what you're seeing.
But check primary sources.
There's nothing better.
Yeah, read the corpus hermeticum.
Read Hegel.
You know, like the, the SecretReligions of the west lecture series

(03:23:24):
that we've been talking aboutis just, you just have, have quotes
through the entire thing.
You can read Freire, you canread all this.
And that's the thing is thisisn't about James Lindsay.
Right.
It's not about you.
It's about the picture thatyou can see that people can go look
and discover this.
It's not for themselves.
They can read these primarysources and see is James doing his

(03:23:45):
work.
Check James's work againstwhat you're seeing.
And then it doesn't have tojust be about a man.
And I think that's the reallyimportant thing.
Yep.
Thank you.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, this has been awonderful conversation.
I think we've been going forthree plus hours.
I appreciate your stamina.
I appreciate the thoroughnessthat you, that you communicate all
of these ideas and different teachers.

(03:24:06):
Teachers, but differentphilosophers and their ideas.
And I just really appreciatethe commitment that you've shown
to this information becauseyou delivered those lectures in 2023
at a church, of all places.
And so here in Faith Phoenixwhere I live.
And so like, how did I miss this?
So thank you so much for yourcommitment to all of this.
Well, thank you so much.
That's very kind of you to say.
And thanks again for theinvitation and the opportunity to

(03:24:28):
talk at this much depth.
You're very welcome.
Where would you like to sendpeople to find out more about you
and what you do?
Newdiscourses.com that's the website.
Newdiscourses.com Go check it out.
That's newdiscourses.com I'mon social media at Conceptual James,
my company where I publisheverything in the podcast and everything
is new Discourses.

(03:24:49):
It's called the New Discoursespodcast and its social media presence
is new Discourses.
It is more places than I ambecause I'm everywhere except Facebook
and it didn't get kicked offFacebook when I did.
And I'll be sure to link thoselectures in the show notes to this
interview.
Great.
Thank you.
Thank you, James.

(03:25:16):
Sam sat.

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