 All right, hopefully I'm not gonna sit on Newt Gingrich's head, but this is a Newt Gingrich. I think everybody knows Newt Gingrich, I speak of the House during the 1990s, during a period when I did my history of America, I think during kind of peak geopolitical influence for America, peak economy in many ways for America, and I think Republicans under Newt in opposition maybe Republicans at their best as an opposition party, once they get into power they lose it, but at their best kind of reigning in Clinton, advocating for an agenda that's kind of okay, not too destructive, but Newt is more than that, what makes him interesting is he's quite intellectual, he's written a lot of books, he has his own kind of think tank foundation, communication strategy, whatever, a firm, and he's a, you know, within the conservative movement he's one of the thinkers, relatively speaking. So let's see, and you'll notice the question and answer that comes, the media question answer, it's a good, he gives a really good answer, he gives the answer that conservatives would have given in the 1990s, no more, but this is a 1990s conservative answer to Jordan Peterson's question, all right, let's see if this works. Mr. Ron, so what do you think that would be most appropriate for conservatives on the visionary side, let's say, to be offering to young people as we move forward with the new House and the new Senate, freedom. Now do you think any conservative today would say freedom? Now we'll get to what he means by freedom and how they conceptualize freedom or at least how they don't conceptualize freedom, but it is interesting, this says freedom, and I don't think you'll see Trump would not say freedom, Josh Hawley's not going to say freedom, any one of these guys, you know, I don't know which of the Republicans today would actually say freedom. Now again, they don't maybe understand it, but he's at least has that maybe Reagan, maybe a Goldwater kind of spirit of what conservatism used to be about at its best and has betrayed it consistently and therefore failed consistently. You talked about work, freedom, I think, because see, freedom leads to responsibility and work. I just did a seminar with a bunch of people, including Dennis Prager on the first half of Exodus in Miami, we're going to release that November 26th, and you mentioned freedom and that's what made it spring to mind. So when God tells Moses to address the Pharaoh, he tells him to let my people go, and that's a famous line, let my people go, but that's not the line actually, interestingly enough, and it's repeated, I believe it's repeated nine times, might be ten times, just to make sure that the listener gets it. The line is let my people go so that they may serve me in the wilderness. So it's interesting that, you know, the Judeo-Christian tradition is basically goes back to the biblical story of Exodus. Of course, he was talking to Dennis Prager, and they talked about this quite a bit. And freedom means freedom from slavery, but wait a minute, wait a minute. Is there anything in the Old Testament against slavery? I mean, when Moses says let my people go, it's his people, and by extension it's God's people. It's not all people. It's let the Jews go. He's not, you know, asking the Egyptians to let all slaves go, and he later on, in a further book in the Bible, in the Old Testament, God actually tells the Jews how to treat their slaves. So there's nothing in the story that suggests that God is anti-slavery, or for any sense of freedom. And now, note the freedom to do what? Because you see, John Peterson realizes that freedom is a tricky word. Because once you let people be free, they might do things you don't like. They might do things that are harmful to themselves, even. You know, this is a foundational story that everybody takes as a foundation to the West of civilization. So if we're going to refer to these stories, and we're going to refer to them as the foundation of this civilization, we're going to know what they actually say, what they actually mean. Not what we want them to believe to mean from a 21st century perspective, but what they actually say and what they actually mean. Then there is no freedom in the sense that we understand it in the Old Testament. And Jordan Peterson goes on to say freedom to do what? Because God forbid it would be freedom to, I don't know, change your sex. God forbid it would be freedom to be gay. God forbid it would be freedom to get a divorce. One of the deadly sins, I think, in Jordan Peterson's will. No, it's the freedom to serve God. The freedom to serve God. That's what freedom means. It's the opportunity, the choice to serve God. And what does God do to people who choose not to serve Him? What does God do to people who choose not to serve Him? Once they are free. So let's go back to the Old Testament. I love the Old Testament. You know, I know a little bit of it, enough to be dangerous, I guess, enough to argue with these guys. But what does God do to people who disagree with Him? So the Jews ultimately leave Egypt. After, by the way, God who values human life so much and views it so sacred. I mean, He really views this as sacred. And, you know, all men are created in His image. So in order to free the Jews, the best magic that God can come up with is basically to kill the first male child of every Egyptian. Literally every Egyptian first male child is murdered, killed. They're not responsible for the enslavement of the Jews. These are children. And He kills them all, even though they were made in His image. In order to let His people go. I mean, you think that there are other like magical tricks that God can do that doesn't involve the slaughter of every male child in Egypt. So the Jews escape. They get out. They leave and they're wandering on the Sinai. And, you know, without going into too much detail, during one of the episodes in Sinai, you know, Moses goes up to Mount Sinai and he gets the Ten Commandments and he comes down and when he comes down, there are people worshiping in golden calf, which is a violation of the first commandment. And, you know, they are no longer free. They are no longer free. Why are they no longer free? Because they are no longer serving God. And given that they are no longer free, it is okay for Moses and his brother and the men affiliated with them to slaughter. I can't remember how many. Is it 30,000 people that day? Something like that. They kill. Everybody was worshiping the golden calf. Now, let's not confuse freedom with freedom of speech. There is no freedom of speech. If freedom is for the purpose, sole purpose of serving God. If your speech does not serve God, it is inappropriate. All right. So, that's freedom. Biblical freedom. This is what they're talking about. And it's interesting. They never interviewed somebody who would actually challenge them on this and it never goes in that direction. You know, if you challenge Jordan, then he'll start you on a road, an epistemological road and try to catch you at some contradiction. You know, he'll get very abstract, very complex in epistemology. But he's not going to actually deal with the foundation that he finds in morality. And the same with Newt. So, let's listen to a little bit more of this. And what's fascinating about that is that the vision of freedom that's put forward, which is the spirit, let's say, that's calling to the Israelites to emerge from their slavery and to the tyrannical pharaoh to release his tyrannical grip on them isn't the freedom of whim. It's the freedom to pursue the proper goals. It's not freedom of whim. It's the freedom to pursue the proper goals. Indeed, that is right. I agree with Jordan on that. Freedom is not about the ability to pursue your whims, although under freedom some people will. Freedom is about the pursuit of the proper goals. And a big question now is, what are those proper goals and where do they come from? And that's the whole issue. Where do those goals come from? Well, God, right, to serve God. So, you give up whims and you replace them with God. Whereas the way we formulate it, freedom is that state in which you get to use your judgment, your rational judgment, in pursuit of rational values. That's freedom. Free of coercion, of force, of authority. But you have to have reason, rational values as the basis for proper goals. Otherwise, where do proper goals come from? It's true that the freedom to follow your whims just for the sake of, if that was the purpose of freedom, then we wouldn't be for freedom. If the alternative was freedom to follow your whims or something else, then something else is almost always going to be better. Following your whims is a total disaster for everybody involved. Total chaos, total anarchy. No accident, anarchy. To pursue the highest goals. And so it's the freedom that comes with the voluntary adoption of responsibility and not the freedom that leads to a nihilistic hedonism. Right, but there's a difference between liberty and liberty. And I think that the challenge is, and this is, I think, very difficult to have a serious public conversation about it, although Dennis Prager does his good job as anybody. I mean, I think this is really important. This is where it boils down to in the end in terms of where they have to go and where Newt Gingrich has to go. So this is the vision of one of the more, I don't know, you would consider one of the more reasonable conservatives of the past 40 years. This is where he has to take it. Ultimately, the health of the West requires a profound revival. I mean, ultimately, God has to be at the center of our freedom when we say in our Declaration of Independence that you are endowed by your creator with certain unalienable rights. If you don't think there's a creator, then the whole rest of it makes no sense. You see, they can't make any sense of the whole Enlightenment project. They can't make any sense of rights. They can't make any sense of America. They can't make any sense of freedom. They can't make any sense of any of it without God. As soon as you take out God, it's gone. And the worst thing, Len, you say, I am my creator, you are. But the worst thing to them is this idea that you are your creator. They think that's the most absurd, ridiculous thing. And they associate with that, well, that means you can just decide on what gender you are. You can just decide on you're not a human, you're a rock or whatever, you're a zebra or whatever. And what's missing from your creator is reason and rationality and your own nature. God, what's happening today? And it's striking that they can't think themselves out of a paper bag in a sense. They get stuck on that terminology in the founding, and that determines the key. And I think of all the words the founders could have used, creator is the least committal religious wise, and I think that's why they used it. They didn't use God. They didn't use Christian God. They didn't use creator, which is as neutral as it can get. And yes, they were religious, more religious than I would have liked. Okay, but they can't even conceive of anything, any alternative. And it's probably, and it might be, I mean, I think the founders could. Being men of reason, I think they could. I think if you pushed them and said, well, what if there's no God? What if there is no God? What if I could prove that to you? Are they rights? I think the founders would have said yes. I think somebody like Jefferson would have been able to articulate something about rights. I think even if you pushed Locke, I think if you pushed a lot of these people, if you pushed these guys, there's no, there's mayhem, there's the two options. So this is Josh Hawley talks about this. Two options. Either rights are given to you by God or rights are given to you by government. That's it. And God, you know, it's obviously awful if rights are given to you, given to you by government. Then what are the options there is? Then if we're going to hold on to rights, then we have to adopt religion. So even if you took the perspective of some of these conservatives, value rights, value freedom, value the founders, you know, value human life in some sense. And they look and they, and the secular world, they reject completely because it leads to everything opposed to these things. Then they're stuck with their religion, even if they want to give it up. Now, I don't, again, I don't think that's most of them. I think most of them are committed religionists, but I think that's certainly some of them. It's interesting that I think Newt Gingrich, like most, most is an exaggeration, like many of modern conservatives, Newt Gingrich converted to Catholicism. I'm pretty sure that's true at some point. And Catholicism, almost all the conservative intellectuals today, particularly the ones that are most antagonistic to a secular view of the world, are Catholic because Catholicism is the most intellectual of the Christian religions. Is that the right way to say it? On the other hand, if you believe that your rights come from God and your right includes the right to pursue happiness, which in the sense of the 18th century enlightenment actually meant virtue and wisdom. Happiness did not mean hedonism. So know it again. Another dichotomy, right? And I've noticed this, I've noticed this among conservatives because they have a problem with the pursuit of happiness. It's problematic, right? So it's, they have to make it wisdom and virtue. And there's a sense of which that's true. But there's a sense in which the founders understood the purpose of virtue, the secular founders, the more secular, the more so, understood the purpose of virtue, the purpose of wisdom as attaining a state of being called happiness. A state of satisfaction with much life, a state of joy, a state of contentment. But the alternative to this, oh, they were just seeking wisdom and virtue, not happiness. You can only contrast with hedonism. It's either hedonism or wisdom and virtue. People who struggle with, you know, maybe Anata's intellectual, Anata's smart to achieve wisdom is virtue enough. And notice that the hedonism stuff is all going to be material stuff, so we can dismiss that. We're going to stick with wisdom and virtue, intellectual stuff. But that's all they can think about. Again, secular, subjective, hedonist, nihilist. So we have to go to religion, but then we have to dismiss happiness because it's about service. Then the pursuit, I always try to make two points to people. The pursuit of happiness, first of all, is an active phrase, which gets us back to the work ethic. It doesn't say you're going to, you know, it doesn't say we'll have happiness stamps or we need a federal department of happiness. It says you have been endowed by God with the right to pursue happiness. And second, by that grant, God has also imposed upon you the obligation that you should pursue happiness. Where does that obligation come from? He just made that up. Again, happiness in the sense of wisdom and virtue. And all of that only makes sense if you understand that you are subordinate to a supreme being. It's a little bit like Alcoholics Anonymous. I left because, you know, you have a right to your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Happiness is about your pursuit of wisdom and virtue, which I think is right because those do lead to happiness in its sense if you understand them correctly. But all of this is made possible because you understand that you are, well, not a slave, a subservient to a higher power, to a God, to someone up there. That you are nothing. And your wisdom is what? Subordinate. Sorry, subordinate, not subservient. Subordinate. You are subordinate. And you are subordinate because if all truth comes from God, then you're just there to gain the wisdom that He provides you. You're not creating anything. You're not discovering anything. You're just passively waiting for God to, or you're praying, or you're doing something that does not involve thinking, so that God could just, you know, provide you with the revelation of what you should be doing. I had a good friend who had been very high up in the Reagan administration. This is important. And who was an alcoholic. And ultimately went to Alcoholics Anonymous, found it to be enormously helpful. And ultimately you get to a key step and you have to start by recognizing you have a problem and recognizing that you can't solve the problem yourself. But then you get to the key step. You have to recognize that there is a supreme being, a higher power. And so he found himself talking one day to a federal official and he was explaining the impact of Alcoholics Anonymous. And this federal official said, you know, if we could skip that one step, we could fund it. And he said, I don't think you understand that's the step that makes the rest of it work. And I think in that sense, all of us are caught in an Alcoholics Anonymous moment. All of us are weakened by the fact that we don't live in a culture which makes it normal and obvious that your freedom is a freedom within God's belief and God's control. It's not a freedom against God or a freedom in an atheistic world. It's good to know I have no freedom. It's good to know you guys, most of you I think have no freedom. It's not a freedom in an atheistic world. It's not freedom for atheists. Yeah, you know, this is the conservatives. I'm just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.