 Hey everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and today we're going to talk about the God of Safety. So I actually did look this up to see if there's an ancient Roman or Greek God of Safety. It turns out there is. It's a female goddess that goes by sortia, I think. However, that goddess really wasn't capturing the ethos that I was trying to capture here. So the analogy doesn't work. However, we have reached this time in American history where we have gone all in for the worship, and I mean worship, and I'll explain that, of the God of Safety. This really took off after 9-11, but I think it came into prominence probably in the 80s. I was born in 85. So I think around kind of when I was a kid and I was growing up, this was a growing monster that then has gone all the way over the deep end here. So this idea that you need to be safe all the time, and specifically that we need to use the government as a tool to keep us safe. Now look, what I want to say here is that safety is a good thing. If you come to a firearms class with me, we're going to talk about safety. We need to do things in order to be safe, and we need to take reasonable adult precautions in order to do things as safely as we can reasonably do them. That's safety. I believe in safety. When my kids don't look both ways before they cross the street, we have a talk about that. We're going to take reasonable precautions, and we're going to be safe where applicable, when applicable, in order to get through our life and not take heedless risks that don't make any sense. So we believe in that. However, our culture currently has gone way beyond that and way beyond reason into this ardent worship of the God of safety. Especially this has been coming out with coronavirus. It started with two weeks to slow the spread. Do you remember that? That feels like forever ago. And then after that, we extended those, and we've had further lockdowns and restrictions and mask mandates, and governments coming after businesses that don't comply with the mask mandate or won't shut down or will offer dine-in service versus carry out only, and businesses have paid the price in the meantime, and people are stuck at home alone having apparently lots of mental health issues, suicides are up. There's all kinds of other things, but we're willing to sacrifice all of that, the economy of this country, on the altar of the God of safety because people are afraid and they want to feel safe. We're talking about disease with a 99% survival rate. But again, reason doesn't matter because we need to worship and offer more sacrifices to the God of safety. And that's what I mean when I say worship. It is this ardent inherent need that we need to worship safety and do everything to be as safe as humanly, well, not even as humanly possible, to be as safe as divinely possible, because the kind of safety that is being pursued here is no longer reasonable. Life is full of inherent risks, and unfortunately, we're all mortal and we are all going to die. There is going to come a day when you close your eyes in this world and you open them in the next. That's going to happen to you. It's unavoidable. And the idea that we can prevent all death through the power of government is truly frightening. Because this is a religious type worship, it also has a heretics, right? Anybody who speaks against it or says, like, I saw that Elon Musk tweeted the other day that he took four tests in one day and two came back positive and two came back negative. And he's like, hey, there's something weird about that. And people are like, I saw one tweet that was my favorite that was like, this is an irresponsible tweet. Meaning like, you shouldn't talk about this. This isn't to be discussed here. This is information that is counter to, you know, typically would say the narrative. But in this case, I'm going to say the worship of the doctrine. And so we can't discuss this. This isn't okay to talk about. And it's this ardent religious zealousness, again, that terrifies me the most, because religious zealots tend to run over any counter facts or minorities that disagree with them, often burning them at the stake in order, quite literally in history, in order to continue to build their narrative. And so I would invite you to think of it in those terms as a worship of the God of safety and where that is sending our culture that this pagan worship is not putting us in a good place. It's going to hurt us more in the long run than it will help us in the short run. You can really see the history of this. It really took off after 9-11, right? Everybody's freaked out. Nobody's getting on planes. Congress handed over all their power to George Bush in order to go do whatever he needed to do. They passed the Patriot Act. A tons of bad things happened in order to pursue this God of safety, or in that case, probably dabbled in a little bit of revenge, right? Our civil liberties keep us safe. And I will say that until I am blue in the face. The idea that we can trade away rights or freedoms, you know, they're just starting to call freedom selfish now. Well, you just don't want to wear a mask because you're selfish. You just won't stay alone in your house for three weeks because you're selfish. You just want to go to a restaurant and eat out because you're selfish. What we're being conditioned to think that anything that I would like to do to live like a normal American is selfish. And it means that I hate people and I want to kill people and I just, I don't care about anybody. That's what we're being told. And again, this is all coming from a place of the worship of the God of safety. I am afraid we might die. We need to do everything possible in order to prevent death and prevent me from dying. And I must feel safe. I must be safe. And that must be which the whole world marches to is this idea of safety. Obviously, I believe in safety. I regularly carry a firearm to keep my family safe in the event that there's a problem that that particular rescue tool can solve. People called me paranoid before, but now we're making sure life doesn't happen so that people can be safe. If our culture is going to continue to worship this God of safety, you will see both progressive liberals who we usually accuse of just wanting governmental control and conservatives or midline conservatives also vote this way for further restrictions and lockdowns because it's all rooted in worshiping this God of safety. We have to do something. How many times have you heard a politician be it a city council member or a mayor or governor or whoever say that we need to do something? One of the problems that we have fallen into America is that if ever any one bad thing happens somewhere one time, we will make six laws and pass 18 different resolutions and ordinances in order to make sure that never happens again. We have to come to grips with the fact that people die. Bad things happen. Accidents happen. Mistakes are made. And yes, we can learn from that, but we need to move on with life. It is not okay to put all life on hold and particularly all freedoms and liberties on hold or just get rid of them in order to keep people safe. Not only will that not keep you safe, but it will put you in greater danger in the long run because long after this virus passes and leaves us and we get herd immunity and we just move on, there's going to be another virus or another problem and all those freedoms and restrictions that we gave up will not come back so easily. Freedom hard won through blood is easily lost and extremely difficult to regain. I would urge you now to not worship the God of safety and to not comply with the God of safety as he tries to rule your life, lest you wake up and that be all there is left to worship. Do brave deeds and endure.