Welcome back to
the Liberty Insider.
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Before the break, my
non democratic friend here
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was railing against
democracy but your point is true
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that majoritarian just the
rule of the mass or the crowd.
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Plato considered...
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Has to be right there.
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Go back, Plato
considered what the worst form,
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oligarchy, democracy.
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And I forgot, the
tyranny, you know.
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Key one, I think of
plutocracy or what was it?
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What was where you
got the smartest and best?
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Well, you know, is
philosopher king, you know,
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if you can find one.
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There's no question
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that a lot of the
American system is designed,
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I think very appropriately
to protect minorities
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from the majority
who would otherwise
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vote them out.
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And maybe out
period or harm them.
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And on religious
liberty, you know,
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this is a classic
statement was it...
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Was it Jeff?
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No, couldn't
have been Jefferson,
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it would be Madison
probably that said, you know,
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who cannot see that
if you give one sect
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a primary position,
they would turn around
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and restrict the other sects.
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See, Madison
thought, it's great.
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You got all
these separate sects.
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Does he call them
fighting each other?
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Yeah.
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Because that way, none would
have the ultimate authority.
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Yeah.
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So there's a
balancing act there,
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but, you know...
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But it's coming unglued.
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Rhetorically, I agree with you.
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But we, you
know, we're not anti,
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the democracy
that exists in the US,
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but we see clear signs
that the system is fraying.
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And I think
ironically, it's going back
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to what it was
designed to protect against.
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Remember people objecting
to the electoral system,
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electing,
objecting that, you know,
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the power is designed
to divide it up in a way
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that favors they think
some of the smaller states.
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All of these things are
really unraveling a system
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that was designed to
sort of weight and balance
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against that
just the popular vote.
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As we talked in the break.
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I mean, this was such,
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you said I thought it was there
different countries all in one.
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I remember years ago,
I grew up the East Coast,
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was born in New York,
grew up in Miami Beach,
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lived in Maryland
for 30 some years,
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and I was at a...
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I'll never forget I
was at a camp meeting
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in Bozeman, Montana.
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And they were
going to have a rodeo.
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You know, I'm
coming from Miami Beach.
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I'd never seen a rodeo before.
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And they ended up,
I ended up is history.
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Well, they say in
Australia, I think rodeo.
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Yeah, I mean, I'm a
camp meeting speaker,
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but I didn't have rent a
car then and I hitchhiked.
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I hitchhiked
from the camp meeting
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and went to the rodeo.
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And I'll never forget.
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They had these
girls, roping calves.
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Okay, and I suddenly view them.
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I saw they have these girls
from college roping calves.
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And I don't think I
ever knew in my life a girl
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who could rope a calf.
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But what I do is...
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You don't know
what you missed out.
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Yeah, yeah.
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But I saw that I
never forgot that.
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Yeah.
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As a symbol of how,
because I probably didn't know
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anybody who knew
anybody who knew a girl
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who could rope a calf.
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And it struck me.
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Wow, how vastly different
parts of this country are.
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I'm an East Coast boy.
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I lived in Idaho
for eight and a half
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or so years coming
from, I'd been in the US,
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went back to Australia
and then came to Idaho.
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And that was exactly
what struck me that's like,
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another world
than the East Coast.
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It's not.
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I mean, of course, same country
in the citizenship sense,
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but the culture is
radically different.
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But you know even despite that,
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there was always something
that kept us all American.
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- A shared dream. - Yeah.
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And that now, I think
whether you're on the far left,
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you're on the far
right, you're in the middle,
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you've got to be
blind now not to see.
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Now, let's draw a parallel...
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How this
country is coming apart.
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We talk about religious liberty.
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But when you're talking
about religious liberty,
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there's the
church and the state.
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And I think we've
got a parallel problem
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within some of the churches.
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It's not just
Seventh-day Adventist Church,
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and law and order
and regular operations
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that used to be easy in the past
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are sort of falling apart.
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And I've thought,
why is it you know,
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some of our own members
decry the leaders on occasion
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calling them you know,
papal and inquisitorial.
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But in reality
that's nonsensical.
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We don't have it and I'm glad
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we don't have
control mechanisms, right?
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But we seem to need them.
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So what's missing?
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Just as the country I think,
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even in the church
and church governance,
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you had a critical
body of the members
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who bought into the assumptions
of the system they belonged.
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Yeah, good point.
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That self regulates.
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Yeah.
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But you don't have that anymore.
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Not so much.
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And the same thing is
happening in the country
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and neither system can
sustain without the buy in.
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Yeah, so it's a
scary, it's a scary time
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and what's going to, and
if things do come unglued.
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People want stability.
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They want and
they will simplify it.
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That's why Germany went to NATO.
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Yeah, they will
sacrifice for that stability.
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And I mean, again,
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you were talking a little
bit about the COVID thing,
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and I'm not as
apocalyptic about it.
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But your point was,
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look at how quickly
we stopped going out.
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We stopped going to
work, we stopped doing,
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and I'm not saying it was wrong.
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Again, I don't know.
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I don't know what to believe
anymore about any of this.
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But social change
happened like that,
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about how life is regulated.
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We, the government told
us to do this, and boom,
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we all as
lemmings were doing it.
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Now, again, I'm not
saying it was wrong.
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But like, wow, wow.
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And some people and again,
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I'm not in a
conspiratorial mind frame.
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You don't have
to be a conspirator.
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You have to be an
independent enlightenment,
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for one of a
better word frame of mind
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and that is drifted away.
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People are ready to jump
when they're told to jump.
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But what I think is, after this,
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and what we've done, I think,
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something else coming
next is going to make it easy.
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Apres moi, le deluge.
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Yeah, well,
yeah, not necessarily,
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but there's a whole might...
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I have to explain if...
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Yeah, explain up.
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After me, the flood.
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It's a non French...
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Louis XVI.
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Yeah, the French
Revolution, you know,
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things were getting bad.
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And so he says,
after me, the flood.
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Well, you know, and
to a certain degree.
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And he was right.
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To certain degree.
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He saw things falling apart.
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Yeah.
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But again, when you
think about it in toto,
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and again, I'm not
defending the French Revolution,
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though there was an
awful lot of good...
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An awful lot of good came
out of the French Revolution.
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Of course, but what led to it?
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It was corrupt politics.
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It was taxes.
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Louis XIV drained the treasury
to the American Revolution,
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and its court at Versailles.
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And so by the time
this Louis XVI came around,
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they were flat out broke,
they wanted to raise taxes,
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but the aristocracy
didn't want to get taxed.
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The clergy didn't
want to get taxed.
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So they were
going to tax the people.
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So there was
social inequalities,
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corrupt government,
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and an unholy union
of church and state.
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Well, that was
always there all along.
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Yeah, but it got bad there.
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But what that
produced once the government,
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people rose up
against the government,
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the church was with them.
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So they turned
against religion too,
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which did not happen
in the United States,
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but it could have
because the church...
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They turned against
the Catholic Church.
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They turned against the church.
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The French Revolution instituted
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a lot of freedoms
for Protestants...
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Oh, the code of
Napoleon is still with us.
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France still has
the code Napoleon.
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Yeah.
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They were trying
to break the back
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of the Roman
Catholic stranglehold on them.
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Again, I'm not an apologist
for the French Revolution.
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But again, 30,000 dead people...
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I'll tell you three lessons.
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We are falling in some of that.
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Not all of them
some of the same prompt.
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Now, what will happen in the US?
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We're running out of time,
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but I read something
in Liberty about Rome.
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I said, you know, the
Romans, on the Roman roads,
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the legions marched
out to the four corners
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of the empire and
were and disappeared.
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Literally, a
couple of the legions
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were wiped out.
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And then the
barbarians followed the roads
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back to Rome.
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Wow, really?
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Is that what happened?
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Of course.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow.
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And they won't tell you also
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that the
barbarians were Christian.
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Yeah, oh, yeah.
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But they were a different type
of Christian on the Trinity.
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Yeah.
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But in some ways America
has modernized the world.
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There's no question
that since World War II,
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America has
democratized and modernized,
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and some of
those same forces now
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are leading to its stresses.
00:09:05.31\00:09:08.48
But it is a prophetic nation.
00:09:08.51\00:09:10.25
There's no question I think.
00:09:10.28\00:09:11.61
Well, good...
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The American experiment,
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even with all the
faults and all its problems,
00:09:16.65\00:09:20.96
I know and we
all know it too well.
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We all know it
too well, but it's,
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these things just
don't last forever.
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And as I said, we'd say it
for the first time in my life,
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I can see this common consensus,
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this common thing
that makes us American,
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its fraying
right before our eyes.
00:09:45.15\00:09:48.28
And it's very scary to
think what's gonna come out
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at the other end
and to a certain degree,
00:09:53.12\00:09:55.92
we know, and it's not good.
00:09:55.96\00:09:58.39
The great
playwright Ingmar Bergman
00:10:05.20\00:10:08.70
once put together a production
called the Seventh Seal,
00:10:08.74\00:10:12.17
very complicated story.
00:10:12.21\00:10:14.01
But it was all set in Europe
at the time of the plagues,
00:10:14.04\00:10:17.55
and feature to not
come back from the crusades
00:10:17.58\00:10:20.72
to encounter not
just devastation,
00:10:20.75\00:10:22.78
sickness and death,
00:10:22.82\00:10:24.29
but religious
fanaticism, persecution,
00:10:24.32\00:10:27.32
witchcraft trials of the rest.
00:10:27.36\00:10:29.66
It's worth
remembering that the Black Death
00:10:29.69\00:10:33.33
that descended on
Europe in several waves
00:10:33.36\00:10:36.13
and took out at least 30,
00:10:36.16\00:10:39.00
and arguably in a larger sense,
00:10:39.03\00:10:41.17
maybe 50% of the
population brought about
00:10:41.20\00:10:44.04
many incredible social
changes, not least of which,
00:10:44.07\00:10:47.81
the modernization
that we inherit today.
00:10:47.84\00:10:51.25
I think it just
is likely that COVID
00:10:51.28\00:10:54.62
small as it may
be as a forerunner
00:10:54.65\00:10:56.69
of radical shifts to
our world that clearly
00:10:56.72\00:11:00.59
will bring about a
shift in religious attitudes,
00:11:00.62\00:11:03.53
perhaps persecution,
00:11:03.56\00:11:05.13
but perhaps also
something like the reformation
00:11:05.16\00:11:08.30
and a revival of godliness.
00:11:08.33\00:11:09.80
For Liberty Insider,
this is Lincoln Steed.
00:11:11.63\00:11:14.17