WHY GOD PERMITS EARTHQUAKES

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Wie and I are watching in horrified fascination the scenes
of suffering and devastation in Venezuela. This is a double earthquake,
one earthquake immediately following on another, and both wreaking tremendous
havoc on an already ruined and disorganized country. Fortunately, Debbie's relatives,
a few that she still has there, are okay. But

(00:36):
the capital city, Caracas, and its surrounding areas are not okay.
The country is not okay. The death toll is expected
to reach one hundred thousand. Obviously, these natural disasters can
strike anywhere, but because of Debbie's connection to Venezuela, were
vested in this one. Tabby showed me a poignant scene
of a construction worker digging through the rubble looking for

(00:59):
survivors and bars bodies, and finding a Bible, he stops
and praise. Another video shows a woman trapped under the
rubble in her last moments of life. Another man asks
her to hang on. She gives thanks to God. I repeat,
she gives thanks to God in her situation.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Remarkable.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
I'm thinking to myself, who can praise God while trapped
under a collapsed building? Who can give thanks while seeing
the life crushed out of you. The man tells her
not to be afraid, and she replies, I'm not afraid.
I know where I am going. Now, it's natural for
us to ask in such situations, where is God?

Speaker 2 (01:42):
Exactly? Why is there so.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
Much evil and suffering in the world? Did God do this?
And if not, did he at least allow it? Why
does he allow it when he's in a position to do.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Something about it.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
I've been thinking about this question for several years, and
I've written a book about it. It's part of my
trilogy on biblical apologetics. The three books in the series
What's So Great about Christianity, Life After Death, The Evidence,
and the third one is called What's So Great about God?
My original title, which I prefer was God Forsaken. The
book was published in hardback with that title, but in

(02:18):
paperback the publisher chose a different title, What's So Great
about God. The argument of this monologue is adapted from
that book. Now, customarily, the issue of theodicy, the issue
of why God allows evil and suffering, is dealt with
in two separate parts. The first issue is the existence
of moral evil, and the second is the issue of

(02:41):
natural suffering.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Now, more.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Evil can of course produce suffering, but it's suffering directly
caused by human action. Natural suffering refers to the calamities
of nature, including of course, earthquakes. Moral evil is typically
explained as the consequence of free will. God made us
free creatures with choices to make, and freedom can be
used well or used badly. One could choose good, but

(03:06):
one can also choose evil. This, of course does account
for evil and it's corresponding harm and suffering, but it
does beg the question of why we need free will
in the first place? Did God have to make us
the way he did? Did he do us any favors
by granting us free will? Why could he not have
made us unfree and happy? No free will but also

(03:28):
no moral evil? That might be a trade off worth making.
Did God, in making us consider all the alternatives? Now
the demonstrable answer, My answer is yes he did, And
this I believe is the core message of the story
at the beginning of the Bible, the story of the
Garden of Eden. Now, a lot of ink and breadth

(03:48):
has been expended over whether this biblical account is literal
or metaphorical. A fair amount of commentary is also wasted
on the suggestion that the story of Adam and Eve
eating the apple is really about set nonsense. The core
meaning of the story, whether you take it as literal
or metaphorical, is this God gives the first human beings

(04:08):
a choice. Do you want to do things my way
or your way? Do you want to live in my
kingdom or yours. The apple is the arbitrary symbol of
this fundamental binary choice, and Adam and Eve both chose
the Frank Sinatra solution.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
They chose my way over God's way.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
They do what God asked them not to do, even
though it's such an easy choice, even though there are
plenty of other choices before them. They choose to disobey
because they refuse to live under the full sovereignty of God.
He created them. They know better than He does about
what's good for them. We might think that Adam and
Eve went terribly wrong here, and they doom the rest

(04:50):
of us by choosing on our behalf. But this is
an illusion. We two, all of us, all of mankind,
want to live our own way, which is to say free.
We consider the alternative to be slavery, which is pretty
much the worst thing that can happen to a person.
In other words, we have all made the same choice
as Adam and Eve, and we consider any other choice

(05:12):
to be both unthinkable and reprehensible. We two are quote
fallen in the same sense Adam and Eve fell. This
is why we identify with what Milton Satan says in
Paradise Lost. Satan says, quote better to reign in hell
than serve in heaven. Many critics of the poem consider
Satan to be Milton's hero. He's not Milton's hero, but

(05:34):
he is their hero. And we all get what Satan
is doing here. He wants autonomy, self actualization, freedom to
inhabit his own domain. To some degree, we're all on
his side. And what is God's response to Adam and Eve?

Speaker 2 (05:51):
His response is.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Well, have it your way, but you can't do it here.
Eden or paradizes God's domain. God spelled Adam and Eve
and their progeny from the garden. They found themselves in
a world in which human beings can make their own
plans and live freely. In such a world, humans are
not entirely disconnected from God. We do know the difference

(06:14):
between good and evil. This is what it means to
eat of the Tree of Knowledge. We have conscience and
moral faculties, and so we can still follow God's way
even outside of Eden, even this side of Paradise. God's
way is open to us, but we must willingly choose it. Now,
there's a deeper issue here that goes beyond moral evil
and also involves my subject of today, which is natural suffering.

(06:37):
Let's remember that natural suffering cannot be blamed on human action.
Humans have no responsibility for hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, asteroids hitting
the earth. Humans have no responsibility for animals eating one
another or bacteria causing diseases that wipe out whole populations.
Most of the explanations that people and even pastors give

(06:58):
for natural suffering are, in my view, profoundly inadequate. Suffering
is good for us because we can learn from it.
If suffering doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. Suffering
is beneficial because it inspires acts of charity. Now, this
sort of problem might work for moderate types of suffering,
from which.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
We emerge better and stronger.

Speaker 1 (07:19):
But it doesn't apply to horrendous suffering, suffering that shatters you,
destroys your family, rex whole community. So why did God
dispatch man and woman into a world in which so
much suffering, including horrendous suffering, occurs. We can answer this
question by first posing a different one. If God wanted

(07:42):
man to have freedom of choice and action, to live
a life of his own, what kind of a world
must humans live in for that to happen? Put differently,
what are the necessary preconditions for this type of divine architecture?

Speaker 2 (07:56):
What must such a world look like?

Speaker 1 (07:58):
I want to argue that there are two necessary preconditions. First,
such a world must be designed to make possible life,
and specifically human life. To achieve as objective for man,
God must make a universe that is at least somewhere
within it habitable for life.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
And indeed for human life.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
Now we live in a vast universe, and most of it,
all of it, as far as we know, is uninhabited.
Virtually all of it is uninhabitable. But here, in this
tiny pocket of the universe, life exists, Consciousness exists, human
beings exist. God has made a world in which creatures
like us can exist and make plans and have choices.

(08:37):
Our universe is sometimes called by scientists the fine tuned universe,
because it is fine tuned for life. Scientists have shown
that there can be other universes operating according to perhaps
other laws, but they would not produce creatures like us.
It's worth noting that we also live in a fine
tuned planet, which is Planet Earth. The Earth is precise,

(09:00):
I'm tender to say, uniquely calibrated for life, and specifically
human life. Here's one example of that. Our planet is
eight light minutes away from the sun. That's a measure
of distance, the ideal distance. As it turns out, if
we were closer to the Sun, we'd fry, If we
were further away, we'd freeze. For human life to exist,
the Earth has to be right where it is, and

(09:21):
the Sun has to be right where it is. There's
no room for fooling around with this. The second precondition
for God to make a world containing humans who are
free and shape our own lives, our universe must be
designed according to invariable natural laws. What sorts of laws, well,
the law of gravity, Newton's inverse square law e equals

(09:42):
mc square and so on. My point is, we cannot
be free in a random or even in a miraculous universe.
Imagine living in a world in which the sun rises
one day but not the next, in which things drop
down but they also fly upward, in which light travels
at one speed over here but another over there. We
cannot count on anything to be the same today as
it was yesterday, or for the same laws to apply

(10:05):
over here as over there. Our lives would be fundamentally disordered.
Random chaotic freedom is meaningless in a random, unpredictable, lawless world. Now,
let's talk about earthquakes, which occur within the context of
a fine tuned universe, a habitable planet, and the world
that operates according to natural laws. Could God have designed

(10:28):
a different sort of universe, Sure, but if he did,
he would not get life as we know it. He
would not have made creatures like us not only alive,
but also free to shape our lives within a framework
of predictable and detectable, discoverable natural laws. Why are there
earthquakes now? In one respect, we know the answer. Earthquakes
are the result of the movement of tectonic plates. But

(10:51):
this is Aristotle might put it, is merely the efficient cause.
The efficient cause doesn't explain a whole lot because it
doesn't answer the question.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Why do we need tector plates?

Speaker 1 (11:00):
What role does the movement of tectonic plates play in
the ecosystem that sustains life, our type of life on
this planet. In an important book, Rare Earth, published in
two thousand and three, Peter Ward and Donald Brownly, one
is a paleontologist, the other an astronomer, make the striking
observation that quote ours is still the only planet we

(11:21):
know that has plate tectonics, and of course Earth is
the only planet known to have life. So what's the connection? Well,
in fact, there are several. First, plate tectonics is largely
responsible for differences in land elevation and the separation of
the land on the Earth from the water. Without plate tectonics,

(11:41):
the author's rite quote the oceans contain enough water to
cover the spherical Earth to a depth of about.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
Four thousand meters end quote.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
Keep in mind that while two thirds of the Earth
is covered by water, over two thirds of animal species
live on land. Fish might survive in such an environment,
and maybe birds, but not armadillos or antelopes or us.
Plate tectonics also helps explain the biodiversity we find on
land because it causes the breaking up of land into continents,

(12:15):
each with its own distinctive topography in climate and thus
enabling different forms of life. So plate tectonics is responsible
for the earth stunning variety of flora and fauna. Without it,
our world would be thinner, less varied, less richly diverse.
Geologists go further than this to argue that without plate tectonics,

(12:35):
they might not be life on Earth at all. Life,
after all, is highly dependent on having carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
We need carbon dioxide.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Without it, plants could not breathe and the Earth would
most likely resemble Antarctica. It is the tectonic system that
recirculates carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, keeping the level of
greenhouse gases and thus the Earth's temperature stable. The whole
tectonic system serves as a kind of planetary thermostatu, regulating

(13:04):
Earth's climate and preventing the onset of scorching of freezing
temperatures that would make mammalian life and possibly all life impossible.
So play tectonics, the process that gives us earthquakes, is
also a process that is vital to enable and sustain
life on Earth. We owe our existence to plate tectonics.

(13:25):
Without plate tectonics, there might not be a Venezuelan earthquake,
but without play tectonics, there would also be no Venezuela
and no Venezuelans.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
Let me sum up.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
We see evil and suffering in the world, and we
think we are God forsake. And the problem is we
see the world through a glass darkly. We have the
human perspective, which is short sighted, partial angular. We lack
the God's eye view. We are like the ant in
the cathedral of Notre Dame. We go around saying why

(13:56):
are there such high ceilings, Why all these long corridors
which are so tough on an ant's little legs, while
all this unnecessary stained glass and gargoyles. Really, it never
occurs to the ant that there might be some larger
purpose considered by the architect that is unknown to the ant.
Could there be a larger purpose to what just happened

(14:16):
in Venezuela. I don't know, but here's one hopeful possibility.
The socialist regime, which has repressed and stolen from the
population from a quarter century, which has destroyed that country,
will be ousted in its time of complete disarray. Remember
the slogan never let a crisis go to waste. Perhaps
the Venezuelan people will seize on this opportunity to bury

(14:38):
Chavismo itself under the rubble. In any case, we can
be sure that God knows what he is doing. Earthquakes,
for all their pain and devastation, are necessary for our
planet to function and for us to be here and
live the free and purposeful lives we live. It's hard
to be thankful for earthquakes because of the suffering they caused,

(14:58):
but incredibly enough we should. Earthquakes, and as it turns out,
other natural calamities, all play an important role in God's mysterious, creative,
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(18:15):
Sexton is a graduate of Amherst College, a former CIA
officer as well as a research specialist in the NYPD
Intelligence Division. He is now a co host of the
Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. He also hosts his
own show, and he is not just a commentator but

(18:37):
also an author. We're going to talk about his latest
book called Manufacturing Delusion.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
Buck Welcome, Thank you for joining me.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
You know, I really enjoyed your book, and as I
was reading it, I thought to myself, you know, wow,
you and I are in the persuasion business. We do
films in my case, and we do commentary, and we
treat the mind as a rational object that is susceptible

(19:11):
to persuasion, to weighing evidence, to listening to facts and analysis.
But the impression I got reading your book is that
there is a whole sort of other dimension to the
human mind, and some very bad people in the world
have figured that out.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
Some very smart scholars have studied it.

Speaker 1 (19:34):
And so we get into this topic that you have
focused on, manufacturing delusion. Do you agree with this way
of thinking about it, that the mind has sort of
the rational side, but it appears to have some other
dimensions that are vulnerable or susceptible to manipulation.

Speaker 3 (19:55):
Oh. Absolutely, And that really goes right to the thesis
of the book. We are not machines, but we are animals,
and as a result, there is an underlying architecture of
the mind biochemistry that with pressure applied externally can have

(20:16):
very profound effects and if done at scale, which which
is where we'll go in a second, but how mass
media has made that possible. You can, as the title suggests,
manufacture delusion or really manufacture a mass hysteria, which brings
me to the idea for the book. You know, for
years to nsh, I've had and I know you've written
a ton of books and a ton of bestsellers. For years,

(20:38):
I've had publishers come to me and say, you know,
just write something, and I would just say, well, if
I first of all like you, I actually write my book,
so I insist on actually doing the work of writing
the book. So I said, well, it has to be
something that I'm really interested in and passionate about. And
passion is actually well maybe that's the right word. I
could also be angry. It might be the right world

(21:00):
because it comes out of COVID. After COVID, when everything
was and I mean afterwards, whenever realized like the lockdowns
were crazy, We're getting you know, the six shots was insane.
Being forced to get the first shot was insane. All
these different things that finally became I looked around and said, hey,
I don't want to just move past this. I want
to think about how this was possible, because it felt

(21:22):
a little bit like a dry run for the society
that we would be living in if the Democrat left
got their way, and I mean that beyond just health stuff,
really with everything. And then I said, well, who has
done this the best in the past, meaning who has
engaged in this mass mind control process? And the totalitarian

(21:42):
societies of the twentieth century were able to bring together
a basic understanding of brain science, if you will, with
mass propaganda, mass media, the ability to reach and coerce
people even at scale millions, hundreds of millions. And we've
seen how those experiments played out, and there are some

(22:02):
thread some commonalities between those in terms of the approaches,
the tactics, the pathways if you will, that they abuse,
and even what you'll see in pockets in America today.
I'm not saying that we have gulags, but the forced
confession that the Chinese Communists used as a critical tool

(22:25):
in their thought reform very similar to what you'll see
in a lot of college campus contexts or the forced
struggle sessions in corporate America, where you have to use
the preferred pronouns. So there are these neural pathways, if
you will, that are abused, and that are ways of
getting people to believe crazy things. And that is what

(22:45):
we saw with COVID. People people believed or were forced
to believe things that were manifestly absurd or even insane.
And so I think it's critical to get an understanding
of how this happens. And that's what manufacturing collusions about.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
These days, when I travel, I'm always fascinated to see
and this usually happens in airports, but it also happens
sometimes on the street. I kind of take a little
inventory of the type of people who continue to wear masks,
because here we are, you know, six years away from
COVID and even extending some grace to the early years

(23:21):
of COVID, when things perhaps were not known and there
were people who wondered about what the facts were and
we were still kind of figuring out if you took
the vaccine, could you get COVID and could you give
COVID to someone else? But here we are in you know,
twenty twenty six, and I noticed that there are still
some people who wear masks. Not a majority, but they
they're there, and if you look at them a little

(23:43):
more closely, you notice that they tend to be sort
of on the left. There are people with the blue hair.
There are people who sort of convey that signature that
you know, I'm a diehard Obama Biden guy, and here
I am with my mask, and I think to myself, like,
why are you wearing that mask? Is it the case
that you have some different information than I do about

(24:07):
the underlying epidemiology or about the chance of getting COVID today,
or has got nothing to do with information at all.
It's rather that emotionally you feel differently about all this
than I do. In other words, the difference is not
in the facts, but it is in the fear. It
is in the way that you approach this as compared

(24:30):
to me. Can you do a little bit of an
analysis if if you see a guy or a young
woman today wearing a mask, what's going on with them?

Speaker 3 (24:38):
So to just to lay this out, and by the way,
that is really fundamental the question that you raise and
that observation to how I even came up with It's
not a COVID book, As you well understand, I know
you read it, but it does look at what is
going on with people. I mean, to wear a mask
today because you think it's giving you some form of protection,

(24:59):
is to engage in a public display of irrationality. It
is absurd. In fact, it is particularly absurd to do
it in the context of an airplane, because, as the
airplane or airline CEOs and others showed us, believe it
or not, the air on a plane is cleaner than
and essentially any other public setting you can possibly be in,

(25:19):
which makes sense because if they didn't have these hepa
filters in these things, if one person had a cold
on a plane, you were on a flight for ten hours,
everyone's going to right. So they actually have a filtration
system that makes it quite But I looked at when
I put together the chapters, I sort of looked at
the different approaches. You know, well, first it starts with

(25:40):
Pavlov and conditioning, and people use the term conditioning very broadly.
And Pavelov is a fascinating guy, but he really as
a scientist, as a Nobel laureate, he was the most
famous scientist of his time, really of all time from
the Soviet Union. I mean, there's some others who were close.
But Pavlov is someone who has kind of built it
or a larger than life scientific persona based on what

(26:02):
people thought that he was able to do or thought
that he was experimenting on. And there's a lot of
misinformation about really you know, he wasn't training dogs. He
was attempting to use dogs as a proxy for understanding
how external influences can create a reflex on the human mind,
can create a reflexive physiological response. So this is this

(26:25):
is actually the heart of what Pavlov was interested in
because he wanted to He even wrote about creating the
perfected human type. He wanted to find ways to eliminate
you know, what do you call a genetic disease and
things that could be passed on. I mean, he really
had this vision of understanding the brain body connection in

(26:48):
a way that could be very useful for humanity. What
it came out of that is the whole you know,
hit people say hit the bell and the dog salved.
It's actually a buzzer or a metronome. It wasn't a bell.
And he called it conditional reflex and that would be
the direct Russian Russian translation, not conditioning. That's the sort
of westernized, americanized version of the research that he did.

(27:08):
And what was so interesting was he and this takes
me sort of at the beginning. There's a reason I'm
telling this story, and I'll get to the mask thing
in a second. But there was a seminal event where
he was doing all this experimentation and obviously to find
out that a dog that had become conditioned to having
food presented with a sound. It's not just the dog

(27:30):
hadn't you know, you can't tell if a dog in
its mind when it's thinking, but the salivary response shows,
oh the dog thinks, now this is going to happen.
But by the way, involuntarily, right, So this is external
stimuli creates a physiological response in the body. But how
deep does this go into the mind. Well, there was
a flood in Saint Petersburg in nineteen twenties and the

(27:55):
flood almost killed all the dogs that were in the lab,
that were in Pavlov's lab, and Pavlov's assistants were able
to get into this lab Denesh and free these dogs
right before. I mean, remember the water's rising slowly. But
they're animals, they understand, they're in these cages, and so
they have this slow process of we're all gonna die

(28:15):
and we can't get out of these cages. Extremely traumatic,
and the happy ending of this is that they saved
actually all the dogs, none of the dogs crown. The
part of it that was fascinating scientifically, and you can
start to see now how it informed our understanding of
what would come to be known as brainwashing, thought reform, menticide,

(28:36):
all these different processes, is that the dogs were not
the same afterwards. Their behaviors had changed dramatically. Afterwards, some
of them had a total wipeout, if you will, of
all of the conditioning. So all of a sudden, dogs
that for years the bells salvate, sorry, the buzzer salvation,
the buzzer salivation gone beyond that. They even had dogs

(28:57):
that had become very that were very docile and friendly,
etre really aggressive, extremely aggressive dogs became in some cases
quite docile and frightened based on this one traumatic experience.
So the point here was that not only external stimuli
can have a reflexive response in the body, but in
external stimuli, and this of course we know about PTSD.
In these things, external stimuli of fear can actually change

(29:21):
dramatically change repeated behavior and thought processes afterwards, and from
this you get the totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century
in effectively mass conditioning and with Stalin and the show
trials and Maoism and the Culture Revolution and all these
things that follow very systematic and very similar playbooks that

(29:45):
played along some of these vulnerabilities in the human mind,
and that you can take it all the way to
the present. You asked about masking. On the one hand,
you can do what's called a when there's a chap
in the book forst phobia. You can just scare the
beg is out of people if you will, and they'll
just do whatever you want because they're so terrified. Right,
the water rising in the cage is or if you

(30:07):
take it to the next level of processes, it could
be that your affiliation, you have become attached to the
notion that this is that this is saving you, that
this is something that is part of your identity now,
which I think is the far more common reality here
in America. You don't wear a mask now because you
think if I don't, I'm going to die. You wear

(30:29):
a mask because it has been so conditioned into you
the good, smart, sciencey loving people who don't vote for
Orange Man bad Trump, they wear masks, right, So it's
a signific It's almost like people who join a cult
and wear certain clothing, they wear a mask. So all
of this is, you know, comes from that course of

(30:49):
what they call course of persuasion.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
Gamut Buck, you're adding a dimension here that I want
to focus on because it goes beyond on the conventional
explanation for wearing a mask in twenty twenty six. Right,
if you were to ask most conservatives, hey.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
Look at that.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
Look at that weirdo wearing a mask, most conservatives would say, well,
that's a kind of virtue signaling the person is trying
to convey to society. I'm a superior human being. I
went to an Ivy League college. I know more about
science than you do. And so there is this kind
of moral display or moral preening. But I think what

(31:31):
you're saying is that it's not merely a kind of
moral pretense going on here.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
This person actually.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
Is a product of a kind of social conditioning that
is so powerful that even when the you know, even
when the original threat has abated or even gone away,
they're still captive to the fear that caused them to
wear that mask in like twenty twenty one.

Speaker 3 (32:00):
That's yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean that that is
what if you apply the different processes in the book
and I go through menta side, thought reform slash brainwashing.
And the reason that's a slash or why put those
together is that the Chinese called it thought reform. That
was there. The Chinese communists called it thought reform, which

(32:21):
I think is very interesting, right because in the Soviet
model and with the Gulags, they yes, there was a
ton of propaganda and they wanted people, but they they
really focused on crushing people like that was the on
breaking their minds. The Chinese took that and borrowed very
heavily from that stalin'st approach. But then also, and as

(32:42):
we know, and it should be taught more in schools,
both China and North Korea are essentially you know, mute,
you know, as regimes like mutant offshoots of the Soviet
disaster would not be possible without not only that ideology,
but without the direct support of the Soviet Union intervening
in the Chinese. So thought reform though, was to build

(33:03):
people up to the ideology on the other side, and
they really it was intricate, and they really went through
this extensively, and to what you were saying about, well,
look at back, and I do think masking for everyone
just becomes There's other things too, I mean, and I
talk about in the book Manufacturing Delusion, which I hope
all of your listeners will go get by the way,

(33:23):
got to keep selliment tonsh. But there's something as preposterous
as the demand that you use the preferred pronouns for example.
I mean, that's sort of a form ideologically of masking, right,
it's a form of obedience training. But with the Chinese
communists and the thought reform process, they were so effective

(33:46):
at this that after they had broken people down and
put them through this extreme trauma again like the dogs
with the water rising, the physiological trauma that is then
being molded to a purpose to afterwards to make them
adhere to the ideology. Even after some of these people
Danesh were and this comes up in Robert Lifton's work,

(34:06):
who did the really the seminal study or the most
cited study on people from Thought reform and communist China.
In the early days, they would continue to defend the
Chinese communist regime when they were free, and they would,
you know, they if they weren't in love with it,
they weren't all of a sudden it was amazing. But
they would say, well, they were doing some good things,

(34:26):
Like they broke you, they made you lie about yourself,
they beat you at sticks, they kept you in a prison,
they denied you all human rights and human decency and
huge human agency. And now you're going to say, well,
life is complicated, and maybe they're doing some good things.
You know, when you're free. That was and you're able
to say whatever you want. That was, I think something
that really shocked people and comes to a pinnacle in

(34:49):
some ways with the so called turncoats from the Korean War,
who were actually Americans who were captured, put through a
thought reform process, and then when it was time to
go home to America, they didn't want to go, and
they said terrible things about America. They lied about America
doing biological chemical warfare stuff. They lied about America spreading
plague and all this nonsense, because that was how effective

(35:13):
the process was with them. So this of course has
spawned like the Menorian Candidate novel and the series and
everything afterwards. But there is a historical truth to it,
and anyone who's actually read The Manchurian Candidate, the Condon novel,
the original, you'll see that there are many references to
Pavlov and Pavlovian science in it, because these things were
all thought of and talked about in the same breath.

Speaker 1 (35:36):
So Janetson and the Gulag Archipelago, which is an account
of the Stalin witch trials, the so called forced confessions
of the accused defendants, but it's also an account of
life in the Gulag. But in the early sections when
he's talking about various types of Marxists and Communists were

(36:00):
rounded up by the Bolsheviks and then they were asked
to confess to things that they manifestly knew to be false.
And initially they would refuse and they would say, well,
isn't Marxism based on truth? Are you going to make
us lie? I mean, we're intellectuals. We came to believe
in Marxism because we thought it was all true. And

(36:23):
in a sense they were told, well, listen, who decides
what truth is? Is it you or is it the
Communist party? In other words, are you saying that you
are right and the entire Soviet system, the entire Communist
party is wrong. Who are you gonna go within the
end you and your individual, isolated subjective judgment or the

(36:47):
collective wisdom of the party, and under that alternative forcing
people to go with one box or the other. The
vast majority of them said, all right, well, I'll confess,
because at the end of it, I kind of have
to admit that, based on my own ideological presuppositions, I
believe in collectivism. I believe that the party is right.

(37:10):
I believe that Marxism is on the right side of history.
I believe that the Soviet Revolution is the embodiment of
that Marxist wisdom. And so I guess I am wrong
even about something that I sort.

Speaker 2 (37:23):
Of knew to be true. I mean, what an amazing phenomenon, right.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
Terrifying and amazing. Yeah. I thought a lot about the
gulag a Repelago, which I think there are so many
great books I don't want to diverse too much, so
many great books to nesh that people need to read
that were not a signed in school, and that goes
into that category for me. I never never was assigned
the glog A Repelago, which is in retrospect shocking. So
I had to read it on my own in college.

(37:48):
But I would say this I remember from the early
stages of the bringing you into I think the Social
Needs refers it as like the human disposal of the
human waste system of the gulag. Right, it's just meant
to you're just part of this trash that they are processing,
that they're putting through the system. And how the jailers

(38:09):
if you will, you know, the people running this process,
it would beat you and interrogating everything else. The notion
of you professing your innocence was an insult to them
because all you were doing was slowing down the process.
And if you were there, you had to be guilty. Right,
This is they don't make the party. This goes exactly
what you're saying. The party doesn't make mistakes. So what

(38:31):
do you mean You're here but you're not supposed to
be here. Are you really saying that you are above
the party in this issue, and that you are are
saying that they're wrong? I mean, how could how could
you know? It's like saying the pope is wrong and
still being a Catholic or something. I mean, you know
much more than that, but you get what I mean.
It was it was meant to be entirely soul crushing.

(38:51):
And so I would say a few things. One is
the force confession part of this, because this is again
along the pathways and the tactics of a manufactured delusion.
Why is is a confession so important? You mentioned this
in the show trials because I really looked into this
as well. And you know, as part of the research
of the book, Stalin was having liquidating millions of people,

(39:12):
and people were just being executed everywhere middle of the night,
taken out against a wall and some dungeon shot. Why
go through this thing? And Raschkowsky, who's one of the
figures in the book, he was someone who Stalin not
only had a show trial of, he was like the premiere,

(39:32):
you know, Marxist communist zealot. I mean, this was a
guy who had been in the struggle all along, his
father had been in the struggle. I mean he was,
and they made him confess to what you said, absurd things,
I mean, things that it was impossible for him to
have done. And it was interesting to see why would
they do this? And my and I'm not alone in this,

(39:55):
but I think the analysis of it comes out with
or comes up with Don wanted to show people that
he could break anyone, that he would break them so
thoroughly that they would profess to have abandoned everything that
they had devoted their life to and demand their own
execution publicly as well, which is what Rashkovski ended up doing.

(40:17):
That's how effective they were at beating force confession, beating
force confession the Chinese with forced confession the Chinese Communists.
This was this was a fascinating you know, addition to
what I had known. I mean, I knew that they
would do the struggle sessions and people would say stuff,
but they would have people in the jail, you know,

(40:39):
sort of take yourself. It's you know, nineteen fifties. You know,
you're in Beijing or whatever, some province, you know, Hunan somewhere,
and they bring you to a prison and they start
beating you, and they go okay, and at first you
say you're innocent, which of course just takes them off
even more, just like in the Gulag. Right, of course,
you're not an innocent you're here. If you're here, you're
not innocent. That's the way the system works. But after
the first few days, you'd finally you'd had no sleep,

(41:01):
you'd had no food, you'd been beaten. You know, your
body is broken down, and that of course affects very
much your psychological processes. You say, fine, I'll confess, and
your expectation is that whatever they had said to you,
you just say, fine, I did it, and then everything
will start to get a little bit better, or at
least it'll end. But no, it doesn't end, because your

(41:22):
confession is never sincere enough, so they would make you
go through these iterations of confessing and confessing more and
putting more names in there, and betraying more people. By
the way, and the whole point of it is to
completely destroy eradicate unmore, pull away from everything that had
meaning to you before, everything you stood for before, everything

(41:44):
you believed in that you thought was true. And only
when they thought you had achieved that, only when you
would say, you know, actually, my own mother was the
one that was taking the the you know, the spy
sack full of the microfilm to the British at this place,
and I was under my fin the party leader. And
that only when you would give up anyone and say anything,

(42:05):
would they then start to treat you a little bit better.
Would they then start to bring you to the meetings
where you would go through the struggle session stuff and
talk to the other So uh, there was It was
really systematized in a in a in a way that
tried to treat people like robots or like a mechanistic being.

Speaker 1 (42:21):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
And they were able to have tremendous at least short
term success with breaking people and making them mouth the
preferred slogans. So this stuff when you start to get
into about and by the way, why do I care
about this so much? I mean, I remember being at Amherst.
I know you were a dartmouth, a dartmouth guy. I
remember being at Amherst. And one of the first things
in our sort of you know, uh freshman indoctrination training,

(42:44):
which they didn't call it that, that's what it was,
was to confess your privilege in front of all of
your you know, they invited the white, cis male whatever
else they want to say me to stand up and
basically say I'm so sorry for being who I am.
What is the what is the point of that if
not to undermine someone and make them begin to be
more susceptible to whatever other influences you then want to

(43:07):
impose upon them. So this or the or the land
acknowledgments to that, I mean, do we really think that
the uh you know, the city, the City Council of
uh on of Oneanta is gonna all of a sudden say,
you know what we or you know, Buffalo, New York
think saying we're going to give us back to the Huron.
We're going to give this whole thing back. So what's
the point of your land acknowledgement? Why make everyone sit

(43:28):
there and go through this. Well, of course, part of
it is just a show of virtue, that's true, but
also part of it is to degrade your sense of
what is true, what is meaningful, and what is necessary.

Speaker 1 (43:38):
Yeah, Debian and I went to Australia actually we want
to lecture tour with Tucker a couple of years ago,
and everywhere we went, even as the Quantas airline descended
on a city, the they would do a land acknowledgment
on the plane, and so Debian and I were like,

(43:59):
so dowunded at this, And of course our first thought was, well, gee,
come on already, if I mean, if this land really
belongs to the Aborigines, Well, return it to them. It
seems kind of weird to keep the land and do
the acknowledgment. And I think what you're saying is that,
guess what the land acknowledgement is actually not about the
Aborigines at all. It is about battering down the ordinary

(44:26):
Westerner and undermining your cultural self confidence, undermining the idea
that you even have a right to live where you do.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
Your own home.

Speaker 1 (44:36):
Is sort of called in the title, deeds of it
are being called into question. You're now a usurper, an impostor,
a colonialist, an occupier, and so all of this is
intended to create a moral inversion in which you now
become pliant. You're now like, okay, I give up, I
don't really have a right to any of my stuff,

(44:59):
And may maybe this then becomes a pretext for the
state to say, well, in that case, if we take
it from you, you don't really have any just grounds
for complaint because it wasn't yours in the first place.

Speaker 3 (45:12):
Yes, that is all absolutely spot on. That is exactly
what I try to lay out in the book, and
one of the sort of central premises of it. So
there's Pavlov and there's understanding the brain and pressure and
how that can be used, and then there's the different
ways that this played out in places. And there's a

(45:35):
really fascinating guy who's kind of fallen out of the
common discourse. His name is Yost Mirlu, and he was
a He fled Nazism in the Netherlands. He was a Jewish,
a Dutch Jewish psychiatrist, and he managed to get out
of the Netherlands under Nazi occupation and go to the

(45:58):
UK and was part of the Dutch army and exile.
And as people often do when they have a particular
skill set, he got into psychological warfare psychological operations of
the Allies against the Nazis because he had a background
as a psychiatrist and understood some of these processes, and
also that led him then to understand better how to

(46:20):
do these things. He interviewed high level Nazis in prison
as well to understand how was it that they did
what they did, you know, how was it that they
were able to Essentially, I mean you want to talk
about a manufactured delusion, right, I mean, Nazism is a
manufactured delusion that ended up killing tens of millions of people,
and there he goes through. I mean, he wrote a

(46:41):
book Rape of the Mind, which I think is a
fascinating book that people should go you written in the fifties,
really about brainwashing, but understanding what it really is and
how it has really used. And it's not you know,
some wou wu thing of someone with like a you know,
with a watch going back and forth, and you were
getting very sleepy. I mean, these are things that were
that were the biggest, most powerful governments in the world

(47:03):
other than America, were trying at scale on their own
people in the twentieth century and still to this day
in some ways. So you know, this isn't a this
isn't an out there thing. We're not doing astrology here.
I mean, this is real, This is real, This is science.
This is regime foundational regime conduct. And so he said

(47:25):
again back to Merlu that the twin pillars of menticide,
which is a term that he coined, killing of the brain.
And there's a chapter in the book it's just on
menta side on Merlu it was dnaesha was confusion and degradation,
and this is what he said. So you have to
you have to imagine whether you're in Nazi Germany, you're
in the Soviet Union under the Marxists, you're in any

(47:46):
any of these places. What is something that all of
the propaganda, all of the government pressure on the individual
mind is meant to do. You're always supposed to be confused,
changing terms, changing who's in favor, changing who the good
person is, changing whether you're ok you're not okay. So
there's no consistency, and this is critical. By the way,
you'll see this in individual interrogations as well. There's something

(48:09):
that they call the Alice in one. I don't get
into this in the book, but this is part of
the research Alice in Wonderland effect, where they're just, you know,
they want you to think night is day, you don't
know what time it is, you know, up is down,
and everything else. They want to keep you as confused
as possible because that's a step in breaking down the
psychological processes of being able to fight back and really
just to keep you attached to the truth. And the

(48:30):
other is degradation. So it's confusion and degradation, or the
twin pillars of menta sod are really breaking your mind.
And the degradation piece of this and this takes me
right into what we see with a lot of the
gender identity stuff, because again in each one of the chapters,
for everybody at home, if you get manufacturing collusion, I
take this to where we're seeing this today. This isn't
a history book thorough there's a lot of history in it.

(48:52):
And with the gender madness, the whole point is to
get you to say things that are just just objectively
obviously untrue, but force you to say them, press you
to say them over and over again, because eventually you
not only are complicit in it just by saying it,
but also the mere repetition itself. The degradation of reason,

(49:14):
the degradation of your ability to discern fact from fiction,
has an effect on the way that you approach everything.
And so that's why they're so insistent on it's not
about being polite. They are so insistent on using the
preferred pronoun. They're so insistent on saying that a two
hundred pound you know, man does not have a biological

(49:35):
advantage in the shot put over one hundred and thirty
pound woman. I mean this, if you're willing to say
that the point is next red or that a woman
could have a penis. If you're willing to say that,
you're willing to say anything, and your brain makes note
of that. So it's it's a submission, but it's also
a rewriting of your fundamental psychological architecture. And that that's

(49:57):
really the heart of menticide. And that's why any process
that's meant to keep you confused but also degrade you
your sense of reason and what your beliefs are are
so powerful as psychological tools of manipulation.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
Your approach in the book is.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
Really to look at the techniques of re education, brainwashing,
conditioning that we associate with foreign totalitarian regimes. Right, you
discuss the Nazis, you discuss the Soviets, the North Koreans,
the Chinese. We haven't talked about this, but you also

(50:37):
discuss the Jihadis how you saw as a CIA officer,
the ways in which they would take an ordinary kid,
you know, seventeen years old and turn that guy into
a suicide bomber or into an aspiring suicide bomber. And
so the techniques here are ones that we associate with

(50:58):
these authoritarian and utalitarian regimes.

Speaker 2 (51:01):
But then you go on.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
To say all of these techniques perhaps in a modified
form we see in our own society, and we see
being deployed by the left. And you just gave the
example of this sort of gender bending. Now the way
I look at it, if I think about the trans phenomenon,
First of all, when you and I grew up, nobody
even talked about this right. In fact, the kind of

(51:26):
governing push of the left was essentially to say, and
this was in the context of homosexuality and the push
for gay marriage, that gender identity is fixed. In other words,
they said, these poor gays, you shouldn't be intolerant of them,
because they don't have a choice in the matter. They
can't help being gay, and that's the way they're born,

(51:47):
and that's the way they're made, and so you have
to extend some compassion, some consideration, give them the same
rights you have. And as the society is slowly molded
to accepting that, we get a major seu, which is
we're suddenly told no, it's not that at all. People
can actually completely undo their biology through psychology. In other words,

(52:09):
if I'm a biological male and I decide that I'm
a woman, first of all, that establishes me as a woman.
I can then go ahead and do some you know,
medical treatments and so on to cosmetically alter my body
in line with But the point is that the psychology
is primary, which I guess means the gender can be chosen.

(52:30):
So here's a classic example of a complete u turn
by the same people who twenty five years ago tried
to tell us the gender was fixed, now telling us
the gender is fluid. And not only is it fluid,
but there are many many genders.

Speaker 2 (52:49):
So how is this.

Speaker 1 (52:52):
Kind of I'm trying to get to the bottom of,
you know, they don't get you and me to believe it.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
We pushed back, We laugh at it.

Speaker 1 (52:59):
We say it's we apparently have shown some immunity to
this kind of brainwashing. But a lot of people, including
a lot of smart people on a lot of good campuses,
are suckered into this. And what I'm trying to get
at is how are they suckered into it? Are they
suckered into it? Because you know, some clever professor of
you know, let's just say anatomy says, hey, guess what

(53:21):
you know. In nineteen seventy seven, a man was born
with what looks like a vagina or is penis was
only like half an inch long, and therefore he's intermediate between.

Speaker 2 (53:33):
Is that how it goes where the ordinary kid goes?

Speaker 3 (53:36):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (53:36):
Wow, I never heard of that. I guess there really
are many genders after all. Or is it something more
sinister that goes way beyond the pointing out of a
kind of anomalous and bizarre biological fact.

Speaker 3 (53:53):
Well, there's so much there. I just first thing I
wanted to jump in with is on your point about
gender denesh. I think it's also important for people to
note that even the current because this goes to confusion
and degradation, right, even the current orthodoxy is subject to
change and completely absurd. What they're saying now about how

(54:16):
many you know this is the joke about for example,
lgbt QIA plus. I believe that was how far it went,
and the letters were getting so long that now they've
just done this plus thing to be inclusive, because they're
leaving open the possibility they're going to have to change
this and add some other weird thing in there in
the future. Right, So it's eternal truth scientifically, they will say,

(54:39):
except that they're saying it's also subject to subject to
revision in six months or whatever the needs may be.
I wo'd also point out that gender transition is now
called gender affirmation because they have to to your point
about the this is like an immutable characteristic. Essentially, you're
actually a female, not a male, and anyone who doesn't

(55:03):
agree with that is blocking the affirmation of that truth.
They've changed the terminology to affirmation. But I would note
that if gender is therefore either on a spectrum or mutable,
they will not allow conversation about people who are called
d transitioners, who are like say, a man who because
usually a woman in the can taste of transitioner, but

(55:24):
a woman who becomes a man who then wants to
go back to being a woman again, They say, well,
that's not possible. Well, why is that not possible? The
first transition was based upon the feelings of the person.
Why can't the second transition be big ah, Because then
it brings you know, the whole logic of the thing
collapses under its own. And another example of this, I
might add is gender assigned at birth. Densh you have kids,

(55:49):
I'm a friend of your wonderful daughters. If you wanted
to know the gender of your son or daughter months
before birth, you can, because it is not assigned at birth.
They can look. So even the notion of gender assigned
at birth is a falsehood on its face because the
gender is known through ultrasound and other scientific processes months

(56:10):
and months before the birth even happens. Again, if somebody,
the doctors certainly know, they can tell you or not
tell you. So that the whole notion of gender assigned
at birth, which we're supposed to say, is absolutely completely absurd. Sorry,
so I just think that, But that just goes to
show you how it all actually degrading. This whole thing is.
It just runs in circles and makes no sense. But
you're supposed to mouth the preferred slogans and nod your

(56:31):
head and confess that you used to not use the
preferred pronouns and all these things. And then as to
the susceptibility question, because that's very, very important, I can
go back to Pavlov on that because one of the
and this is in some ways the most encouraging thing
out of all of this, because people say, how do
we fix and I know we're kind of getting to
that point in the conversation, right well, how do we
fix this or how do we fight it? And you

(56:53):
mentioned souls and eats, and I mentioned them in the
book Live Not by Lies. I mean, you just have
to be able to identify. Doesn't matter who's tell you,
doesn't matter what the belief is, doesn't matter how many
scientists quote unquote sign on to it or how many
experts or whatever. It is. A lie is a lie,
and a lie is bad. And that is the initial
antidote I think to all of this. And also Pavlov

(57:16):
found with the dogs that even a very almost mechanistic
process or a kind of industrial this is how we do.
This is how we do the following things to get
the dogs to behave a certain way Among canines, who
have obviously a vastly less complicated cerebral cortex than we do.
Among the dogs, there was a lot of variation, and

(57:37):
some of them it just didn't really work. So some
of them, you know, you can't get them to behave
the way that you would want based on these processes.
Some of the dogs, by the way, in the flood
who were saved stayed exactly the same afterwards. They were
able to process that trauma and not have the extreme,
you know, the extreme after effects of either massive behavioral

(57:57):
change or wiping away of the conditioning you know, brainwashing,
if you will. And so each individual is different and
it's up to each individual to find there are ways
to fight through this, uh and and to and I
think identifying it is the most the most critical aspect
of it. But in terms of in terms of susceptibility,
I mean, I do believe that in people that, for example,

(58:20):
lack I think lack a a tradition of relation or
a relationship with God, or have any sense of faith
and why they are here and what they do, it
is it is harder in many cases to break down
somebody who it's not impossible, but to break down somebody
who has a firm sense of of who they are

(58:42):
and uh, what is goodness and what is evil? And
and that sort of confidence in belief is instilled through
just just constantly learning about the immutable truths if you will,
that we all live with, or the universal truths. So
you know, there's no easy there's no easy answer to

(59:02):
getting around all this stuff. But I think it's critical
to understand how it is done and why it is
done and how effective it can be, because that's how
we had people, uh, you know, sitting in a park
in a circle being told that that makes you safer
from COVID than if you weren't in the park, in
the grass circle. The stuff. People were doing insane things.

(59:23):
Millions and millions of Americans were doing insane things that
are that are in retrospect. You I can't even believe.
Remember the people that were doing the band practice, they
would cut out the hole for the clarinet or you know,
the flute or the whatever, or you know the or
the people that were in the in the the bubbles.
Remember we had these plastic plexiglass things to protect those.

(59:43):
By the way, you know, they actually found out that
that makes it worse from a virology perspective because it
blocks airflows. You're actually gonna have more concentrations of viral
particle in the air in a room because of those
plexiglass dividers. Now, I think it's pretty not but the
point is it doesn't protect you at all. And everyone

(01:00:03):
was doing this to Nish. But you see, you know,
you go on to college campus, everybody how many women
and men if you asked, you know, if you ask
them at at Harvard, you know, can women? Can women
have a peanis? Can a man have a vagina? I
think an answer from a lot of them is going
to be yes, which is insane.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
Yeah, And you know, and to me, I begin to
wonder whether, in a way, the left, you could almost say,
was going too far with the gender stuff for the
simple reason that you and I and anybody is in
an easy position to verify the truth of the matter.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
I mean, let me put it this way.

Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
For a number of decades I kind of admired the
ingenuity of the left because they would make some claim
that the ordinary guy had no way to check out.
Let's say, for example, the remember the doomsday clock the
world is like three seconds away from nuclear holocaust. Well,
how the heck do you or I know if that's
even true. We don't know. We have to sort of

(01:01:00):
rely on somebody else. Or even take climate change, that
the the average temperature of the Earth, let's say, from
nineteen oh one to the present, has gone up one
and a half degree, Well we'd have to go out
somewhere in the middle of the ocean and compare temperatures,
which you and I can't do. And so we go, Okay, Well,
I guess if somebody else says that, I'm going to
take it on face value. But when they come to

(01:01:23):
something that's different or even systematic racism. I mean, you
and I have no way to measure the amount of
systematic racism in a society. So the left was ingenious
about making these let's call the meta claims about society
and that the ordinary guy was clueless about, and then
they would beat you into submission to agreeing with their

(01:01:43):
way of looking at it. Otherwise you are backward, you're reactionary,
et cetera. But when they say something like gender assigned
at birth, that's in a different category. Because you and
I and anybody else can go look at an ultrasound
and when you zoom in you begin to realize it's
not a sign of bird. This is just something that
you and I can check out and see to be

(01:02:05):
completely fallacious.

Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
And yet the left persists with it.

Speaker 1 (01:02:09):
In other words, they are willing to go against the
evidence of our eyes. They're basically saying, don't trust your
lying eyes, trust us.

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
Well, I agree with everything you said, I would just
I would take a perspective on it. Those that the
fact that they got as far and they have gotten
as far as we have seen with the obviously absurd
gender madness stuff, I actually find deeply distressed. I agree
with you that there's a tact that there is a

(01:02:39):
tactical mistake perhaps, and there's pushback now, but they have
not abandoned this, and to me, it should be at
all and it should be very concerning. I mean, when
you have Neil de grasse Tyson, who's a wildly overrated
scientist but a you know, an astrophysicist or whatever, he's
a scientist, when you have him on the Bill Maher show,
and Bill Maher looks at him. I don't know if

(01:03:00):
you know this clip, but you know you've seen and
where this is going. Yeah. Bill mart looks a him
and says, you're a man of science, yours you know this?
Men have an advantage over women in sports? And he goes, oh,
I don't. I don't know that we could say that,
I know. I mean think about the ramifications of this.
I mean, think about the implications essentially. Now you have

(01:03:21):
people who are supposed experts in the field. By the way,
I think we're all experts on whether a man is
a man or a woman as a woman. It's pretty straightforward, right,
but supposed you know, I remember there was a thing
for a while people were like I can't tell. I'm
not a biologist. That became a lifeline. One thing I
will say, and I didn't get into this in the book.
And there are a lot of things that I you know,
I mean, I might have to rune another one, right,

(01:03:41):
there's a lot of things that I wish I could.
The one people talk about an antidote to this stuff
or a defense against this denesh mockery. Totalitarians, cult leaders,
people who want to have real pernicious control over your
mind and whatever. The thing that they cannot abide is mockery.
Mockery is absolutely lethal to their tools of control. And

(01:04:08):
you know, in different ways over time, I mean, the
Soviet's actually, like the Soviet civilians, you know, started to
become a lot more you know, a lot more salty
about the realities of the world around them. Now they
were there's a massive state built upon a mountain of
force and threats around it. But they you know, there
was a greater awareness over time to I think what

(01:04:29):
was going on. But mockery is something that totalit that
is lethal to total I mean even Voltaire new this, right, Like,
mockery is lethal to totalitarian control. And so that's something
and the gender stuff really leaves open a lot, a
lot of space for that because you know, the twenty
seven pronouns or the thirty seven pronouns or whatever it
is we're supposed to believe in, those are all things

(01:04:50):
that a person I think rightly reacts to with mockery
because it is worthy. It is really demanding of ridicule.
It's not even just deserving of it ding a ridicule.
So that's that's another component to I think how this
can all, how this could and should be handled. But
there there has absolutely been a really profound effort by

(01:05:13):
the left to get people to bend the knee on
this because the you know, there's a scene that I
and I kind of alluded this before, but there's a
scene at the very it's the very end of nineteen
eighty four Orwell's masterpiece. You know, Orwell brilliant writer. Took
him a little too long to figure out the whole
socialism is bad thing. But anyway, but a brilliant writer,
and obviously nineteen eighty four is incredibly important. But the

(01:05:36):
end of nineteen eighty four, he you know, the main
character denounces his his lover, his love interest, I mean,
his sort of act of personal rebellion against the regime.
And when the when the cage of rats is going
to be put around his head, He's like, no, take her,
she's the one you want. Take her. And then they
take their round. Okay, now they've got him. Now they've

(01:05:57):
really broken him, right, And you see Neil de grasse
heysin on Bill mahershow the scientists saying, well, I don't
know if men have a physiological advantage over women in
athletic competition. They broke him to.

Speaker 2 (01:06:13):
Wow, I mean it.

Speaker 1 (01:06:14):
And they got him without putting rats. You know, they
didn't have to put rats around his space. They have
I think what you're saying is they've got a subtle
system that is no less effective than that. You know,
Buck years ago, when I wrote my first book in
liberal education, this was the nineties, the era of speech codes,
I noticed that one of the speech codes, they would
would penalize all these racist statements and defenses of columbus

(01:06:37):
and if you said this, and if you said that,
and if you made racially insensitive remarks. But one of
the things that the speech codes also penalized was quote
inappropriately directed laughter, in other words, the mockery that you're
talking about if you if you derided and marked the
regime they were, they wanted to punish you for doing that,

(01:06:59):
and they did so.

Speaker 2 (01:07:01):
Guys, this is a great book. It's called Manufacturing one Thing.

Speaker 3 (01:07:05):
And they're just this is so easy. Just you just
made me remember, mimind me something. The Nazis had a
crime that they would I mean like a statutory offense
of physiognomic insubordination, which meant not paying enough at not
you know, standing up straight enough, paying enough attention, being
as engaged as they wanted you to during a parade

(01:07:26):
or during some kind of a public event, or or
even just if senior officers walk by as a civilian
physiognomic insubordination slout shoulders, not standing at attention, we're gonna,
you know, beat you with truncheons and throw you in
a cell. Anyway, So yeah, yes, yes, very much, very much.

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
The case enjoyed it very much, Buck.

Speaker 1 (01:07:47):
The book is Manufacturing Delusion, Buck Sexton, thank you very much, the.

Speaker 3 (01:07:51):
Nice thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:07:55):
I'm now on substack.

Speaker 1 (01:07:57):
It's a platform for articles and video, and I've just
released a series of articles on the five key American Founders.
This is in honor of America's two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary and of course, in celebration of July fourth this week.

Speaker 2 (01:08:12):
So who are these founders?

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin.
My idea is not to try and tell the life
story these men, but rather to identify the one big
idea that each of them stood for their unique contribution
to the founding of America and to the America we
live in now. I think you'll find my account's memorable,

(01:08:36):
educational inspiring. To read them, go to Dinesh Desuza No apostrophe,
Denesh DEESUSA dot substack dot com. Become a monthly subscriber,
but I also have lots of free content on substack,
and you're welcome to check it all out and then
decide if you want to subscribe. Once again, go to
Denesh Desuza dot substack dot com. Big news coming out

(01:09:01):
on silver right now. The US just added silver to
the Critical Minerals List.

Speaker 2 (01:09:06):
What does this mean?

Speaker 1 (01:09:07):
This is an important list of minerals that are considered
crucial for US security and economic viability. So when you
buy silver to help protect your savings. You're also buying
a critical mineral that's needed for the US and its
economy to survive. That's why I want you to reach
out to my partners over at gold Co. They're the
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(01:09:28):
have over eight thousand and five star reviews and they
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Go to Dineshgold dot com. That's Dinesh goold dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:09:55):
Guys.

Speaker 1 (01:09:56):
I want to announce I have a new book coming
out in the fall. I'm very excited about. It's called
The Stones cry Out subtitle Biblical Archaeology, Prophecy and the
Last Days. The book outlines the greatest discoveries in Biblical
archaeology that affirm the Bible, confirm the presence of the
Jews and the Holy Land, and also support the twin

(01:10:17):
foundations of Western civilization, which are Athens and Jerusalem. The
Stones Cry Out has rave reviews from archaeologists, from leading
pastors and from prominent commentators of the book, published by
Charisma Books, is available now for pre orders on Amazon,
so I'm calling on new early birds to order your
copies now. You'll be the first to get it when

(01:10:40):
it's out

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