[FULL] Dispensationalism and Reconstruction w/ George Bagby

there is so much support for the US. But I consider it sort of a continuation of an episode you and I did about evangelicalism kind of problems with that in the US, and then also an extension of the episode I did with Filo that will be the previous numbered episode, which is about kind of the history of Zionism and kind of the relation between Zionists and Israel,

the Jewish diaspora, and then Christians in America. So do you want to kind of just launch straight into this with a very broad kind of description of what dispensationalism is.

It's mostly confined to the English speaking world, and it's also mostly popular in the United States because the United States is far more religious than Great Britain Protestants these days. Dispensationalism involves a number of teachings, but two very important markers of dispensationalist theology are an ecclesiology that recognizes that God has a different relationship to Jews than he does to Christians, and that God has a different covenant with

Jews than he does with Christians. So it's a split ecclesiology, and dispensationalists believe that God has a special covenantal protective arrangement with the Jewish people, and dispensationalists see that manifested in the modern state of Israel in particular. So this is why we see so much political support that's tied with emphatic religious belief when it comes to the state

of Israel. Another great marker of dispensationalist belief is the doctrine of the Rapture or what critics might call the secret Coming of Christ. And the doctrine of the Rapture is the belief that Christ is not just going to come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, but Christ will come a third time or maybe a fourth or fifth time as well, all in the context of in Times teachings, and we aren't here to talk

about that. I'm not prepared to talk about that, but I am content to say that that is an innovative belief as well. It has not been something that Christians around the world have been at all acquainted with, haven't even heard of until nineteenth century innovators started preaching it.

in America. And so it's important to understand even if you have kind of no direct relationship with a church like this, because you know, even in my own church, which does not teach this, a lot of the older people just kind of through cultural osmosis have picked up these ideas. That's just a note before you launch into it.

actually the case or not, because it is so very popular. It, like the doctrine of the rapture, for instance, is probably the most popular dispensationalist doctrine, and that has filtered out far and wide. You find Christians all over the place that are familiar with the idea. Even if they don't they aren't sure if they believe in it or not. It's become Christian pop culture in some in some respect.

and all of the kids there. The like trading card game we played was a game called Redemption, which is literally like a knockoff like Magic the Gathering or Pokemon card game, but it's all themed around like dispensationalless eschatology, you know, like it has like little like cards that you trade back and forth, and it's like, oh this is that's that's a market a beast card, you know, it's very powerful, or this one is like the seven Countries or like the Third Like it's absurd, but it's

it's true. You can look it up if you want. And so even to someone who was never taught that from the pulpit, I kind of just thought, well, that's what Christians believe. That I remember very distinctly when I asked my mom about it, She's like, uh no, we don't think that it's like, oh, okay, I just kind of assumed that we did well.

of that is dogmatically dispensationalist. So dispensationalism exists among Protestants. However, it is taught by several Protestant seminaries, in particular Baptist seminaries.

could have divergent theological beliefs. So there are a couple of Baptist seminaries that I know of that are emphatically dispensationalists, and they're and they're pretty famous. You know, they're very well funded there. They've got a lot of illustrious people connected to them, specifically the Dallas Theological Seminary and the

Liberty Seminary Liberty Baptist Seminary in Virginia. So so, even though even though historically Baptists have not been dispensationalists, of most Baptists today would recognize dispensationalism and embrace it, much to the chagrin of my traditionalist Baptist friend who's really enthusiastic about the old school Baptist theology. Basically, the thing that holds Baptists together is the idea that everyone should look to their local institutions and not to a central

Baptist institution. Ironically, that's the thing that holds them together.

of the Jehovah's Witnesses. I think his name was Charles tays Russell, and another was the I think his name was William Campbell of the No No, No, No, I'm getting this guy mixed up the Millerites who became the Seventh Day Adventists. The Seventh Day Adventists also had a teaching about the return of Jews to the province of Palestine and some sort of national renewal for the state of Israel among the Jewish people of Palestine. So all of those, we would differentiate them in some way from

his Oracle Christian belief. They all stem out of the second grade Awakening or soon afterwards, as in the case of the Jehovah's Witnesses. But inside of of more mainstream Protestants, you have characters like a theologian named Darby, who popularized the doctrine of dispensationalism, and very famously an American Bible commentator named Schofield who managed to get his Bible commentary

published by Oxford University Press. Darby and Schofield are the major popularizers of dispensationalism in English speaking lands today.

with different groups. So for instance, the idea is that, okay, well pre sort of in the early parts of Genesis, that's one dispensation. You know, at Noah, that's the way covenant. That's another one in the Arab judges, and I can't remember them off the top of my head. They're fairly Byzantine. But part of this, and this will get a little

bit confusing, relates to kind of numerology and rationalism. So the weird thing about Darby in particular is that, on one hand, he was kind of firmly fundamentalist, in a biblical literalist. Right. He believed that, you know, what the

Bible says, the Bible says. So on one hand you could say, well, that's a very irrational quote unquote belief, But on the other hand, he's firmly steeped in this tradition of rationalism, and he believed that as many problems to do, essentially everything in the Bible you can figure out using nothing more than the text itself, like you can understand it all. And so what this leads to is this idea that you know, there's kind of like a mathematical schema in the Bible we can figure out

to find out exactly what these prophecies meet. And so he kind of jumps back and forth between the Book of Daniel, right, which is old testing the prophecy, the Book of Revelation, which is in the last book in the Bible, New Testament, and kind of combines those into this complicated mathematical scheme where they refer one to the other to support his argument. And there I don't want to get too into it because the numerology is somewhat tedious.

You're kind of going through on one level. When it was written at the time that numerology was fairly common. Like if you've ever people at home, I've ever read OVID when he references, you know, trust not in Babylonian numbers. It was quite common at the time, right, There were these kind of systems of numbers which had symbols. So, for instance, seven the idea of completeness six less than that, hence the number of the beast. It's so on and so forth. So he does attempts to ground this in

the text. I think from the outside looking in, it's a bit of a stretch. A lot of his justification for this, but the specific doctrine of the rapture is

almost unjustified. He allegedly got the idea from an ecstatic utterance, which means that he was having this sort of extremely charismatic worship service, and this woman went into a fit and started speaking in tongues and prophesying and mentioned, you know, the idea of this rapture, which I believe is a phrase used in a different context some point in the epistles. I can't remember exactly where, but he kind of from

that idea kind of built his whole system. Incidentally, one of the other things that is less common now but is very common with the early dispensationalists is he viewed that the Bible was not equally relevant to different groups

of people. So we've mentioned that, you know, dispensationalist view God is still having a special relationship to the Jews, and part of that is he believed that, well, there are section of the Bibles that are I think it's rightly ordained is the is the kind of doctrinal phrase for Jews and for Gentiles. And so essentially the idea was, well, we don't have to pay attention to anything that doesn't explicitly pertain to the Gentiles, you know, we only have

to effectively deal with the epistles. And so that's kind of fallen out of fashion, but if you read the kind of founding fathers of this school of thought, that was very much kind of baked in at the ground level. So sorry for that digression.

and punished accordingly. So this is a really extraordinary thing that our feelings about the modern state of Israel determine our relationship with God as Christians. This is a very novel, innovative idea, as is the idea of the rapture itself. Your mention about numerology and trying to figure out what these biblical prophecies mean. I mean, if you were to pick up the Book of Daniel, you would find that

it is rather inscrutable to the lay reader. It certainly mystifies me more often than not, and I don't I don't think that I have a special duty to figure out what it means either. But here's here's a major difference in approach between dispensationalism and a more traditional approach to Christianity. I'm not I'm not trying to be partisan in my interpretation of this doctrine. I am Eastern Orthodox, but I'm not trying to give a partisan position here.

I'm trying I'm trying to uh to be more ecumenical in my interpretation here. But here's a difference of approach. There is the Christian who will encounter the dispensationalist arguments like Darby and his obsession with numerology, and you can get very very deep into that subject. You can be like Sir Isaac Newton and right shelves of material analyzing biblical numerology. There is an awful lot there to analyze,

and there's some really compelling patterns there that invite interpretation. Okay, so that's one approach. And we know that Darby came up with some really weird ideas doing that and had some strange inspirations for doing that, some irrational inspirations perhaps, And we know that people like Sir Isaac Newton were obviously very heterodox. By the time he finished his analysis of scripture. Isaac Newton was denying the trinity and denying

the incarnation. You know, he's going very far afield from traditional religious beliefs of Christians. But here's another approach. The other approach is that there has been a lot of holy analysis, a lot of trustworthy analysis that's already been done.

And unless you yourself are going to devote yourself to biblical scholarship under the guidance of trusted authorities and become a scholastic or something, if you're just a lay person, you need to be more reliant on the traditional interpretation of these things unless you would like to become a Christian innovator or a heretic or an apostate. Obviously, if you're open to being those things, you want to become a religious entrepreneur, then go to town, you know, analyze

a way, go have fun, dabble in it. On the side, it is obviously isn't all that important to you to share community with people through time, right, But if you want to be a Christian, that means you want to believe what Christians believe. Therefore, the traditional interpretation is always going to have more weight with you than not. And this is this is not just the orthodox approach to these things. I'm giving you an orthodox perspective here that

the tradition is sacred, the tradition itself is sacred. That's an orthodox perspective here, but that's also just a practical approach, and they're all manner of Protestants that would agree with me on that point. You know, if you want to know what Christians believe, look at what Christians have had to say about the subject. And I'm here to tell you that your attitude towards the state of Israel is not the most important thing according to traditional Christian beliefs

and doctrines. Baptists historically will not emphasize that point. Presbyterians will not emphasize that point. Methodists will not emphasize that point that your attitude to the state of Israel determines your salvation, all right. Dispensationalists will. They will emphasize that point, and that is why we recognize dispensationalism is innovative.

of Israel, and that's an important distinction there. We'll say something like, you know, those who bless Israel would be blessed those who curse Israel, Okay, and the.

You know, we talked about the rapture, the idea that the Church will the Church will be kind of removed from the earth and Christ will reign on earth for a thousand years.

you know, entropy taking over. And so a lot of these dispensationalists, who are I would consider sort of good people, you know, view society as coming apart at the scenes, something that you know, you and I might have some sympathy and say, like, all right, what's all coming to an end? What are these signs of, you know, the end times? You know, things being renewed and remade. And

part of that is the construction of the Third Temple. So, for instance, right, you see this big push from people like Pompeo and Trump, who, let's be honest, I think Trump did this as a play to his base, not out of any to sort of support Jerusalem as the capital of the nation. It is. So that's one way in which this theology matters in kind of like the

here and now. One of the other things is that part of that, in this prophecy, they're viewed as being seven nations against Israel which need to fall again, you'll notice this repetition of the number seven that goes back to the digression about numerology. But those seven nations among them, it's and I don't remember all them off the top of my head, but it's Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Syria, Iraq

and some others, right. And you may notice that a lot of these were invaded by and so essentially, in addition to just being an innovation, you know, something wrong to believe, which has its own consequences, especially if you're dealing in matters of theology, it also comes into effect and kind of the foreign policy arena. And I know a lot of people and George you know Doubt as well, who essentially signed up for the Global War on Terror because of this belief, and they viewed it as a

holy war. Yes. And one of the things that I really hate about this is that it takes what I consider the kind of like the best instincts of Americans, right, which is an instrict towards patriotism, and distorts it for things that are not in their interest, you know, distorts it so that they believe that they are fighting a Holy War, you know, fighting on behalf of Christ. And essentially they are without mincing words, you know, bombing civilians in the Middle East.

remember your name forever. Not that I was at all important to him. I had no influence. He didn't know who I was really, But I was there during the war on Terror, and I saw how everyone there, everyone in authority there, justified the invasion of Iraq. And they were all talking about in times prophecy, they were all

talking about dispensationalist talking points. They were talking about how Saddam Hussein had launched scud missiles at Israel during the Gulf Storm or was that the name of the operation in nineteen ninety two. I heard, yeah, Desert Storm, he just he just lobbed missiles at Israel randomly, as as an action of revenge. And I heard people talking about that when the United States invaded in two thousand and three.

But we need to remember the record of that, like the justification for those those military adventures, was built on allegations that were unfounded. The CIA was cooking up information on order for the Bush administration, and they people like Colin Powell, made a fool of himself presenting evidence for weapons of mass destruction at the United Nations that that

could not withstand scrutiny. Even just a few years later, Colin Powell was apologizing for that, calling that the lowest point in his whole career, saying that he was surrounded by people telling him to do this, and he gave in when his judgment should have held his hand.

secure their support for these things. And not only does this tax them, not only does it send their young men to fight and die in distant lands with no positive outcome for the United States. No good is done for Americans in this Iraqi intervention, but Christians in that place itself bear a disproportionate amount of cost and suffering, to the point that Christian belief isn't in Iraq anymore. It used to be ten percent of the population there and now there are no Christians left. We see another

example of this manifested in our politics. A number of years ago, Senator Ted Cruz from Texas had an invitation to an event hosted by Arab Christians. And so these are mostly Orthodox and Catholic Arabs, and there are a number of organizations of those groups of Christians here in the United States. There are people like the Antiochian Orthodox Church, which is an Eastern Orthodox group in the United States, and also Roman Catholic groups like the Merronites and the

Melkite Catholics. They're all Arab Catholics with Eastern write liturgies. They all sat down and listened to Ted Kruz, and ted Kruz decided to use his time with them by talking about the important relationship between the United States and Israel, and in the midst of his talk about how much he loved Israel, these Arabic Christians, who are not dispensationalists, started cat calling and hooting at him because Israel is

extremely unpopular among them. The Zionist movement in the Holy Land has ostracized Christians and exiled Christians from this place where they have been settled since the time of Christ.

These people have been there believing in Jesus for two thousand years, and if you go to the Holy Land you can still see their churches, though most of them are empty now right they've been displaced by Jewish Zionism in the Holy Land, and Christians also in that area have happened to have more resources to leave than the

Muslim population in that area. So if you go to Palestine today, if you go to a Palestinian town like Nazareth or Bethlehem, you'll see that there are Palestinian churches there that were built by Palestinian Christians hundreds of years ago, and now those churches are virtually empty because everyone that has left, everyone that can leave those communities has left those communities because the situation in that part of the world is so miserable for people who are not Jews.

So we we think of the Palestinians as overwhelmingly Muslim, and and when we when we look at at the territory of Palestine today, we see that is the case. They're overwhelmingly Muslim. But we forget that there was a large group of Christians in that in that place, and now now they're mostly in diaspora communities around the world. They've left. So, going back to your point, support American support for these adventures done in the name of the State of Israel or done for the benefit of the

State of Israel, it does not help Americans. It does not help American Christian communities. I would argue strongly that it undermines the future of both. It's not sustainable to ship ship all all this money and resources abroad indefinitely and with with no limit to any of it. But it also undermines Christian belief in America because it discredits it. This is an innovative belief, and it discredits it. It gives it gives Native American Christians, people who grew up

in this country believing in Christian doctrines. It gives them a bad experience, bad political experience, with an innovative Christian belief, a new Christian belief that does not correspond to historical Christian beliefs, and they see it as counterproductive and personally, just personally, I'm thinking back to all of the classmates I had at places like Liberty University who strongly identified all the Christianity that they had been brought up in

and taught to believe with disastrous adventures like the invasion of Iraq, and they thought that Christianity meant George W. Bush and dead children and I. And if you were to talk to them today and ask them, well, why why don't you identify yourself as a Christian anymore? They

would identify the War on Terror I had. I had friends that joined the Marine Corps and went to Fallujah and leveled city of blocks in Falluja and came back talking about how there were civilians in those city blocks and they were not allowed to do searches before they leveled the place, and these these people came back with major feelings of guilt, and they believed that they were serving their country. For one they weren't serving their country.

This had nothing to do with American national interests. This was a money pit. Trump was absolutely right when he identified this as a complete waste of American resources. That we have nothing good to show from this adventure and just just a ruined country and millions of dead people who now hate us for what we did to their homes. Right, this is counterproductive, this is blowback. And my friends came

back from tours over there. I have family that was there on military service, and they look back at that period of their lives with regret that this was misplaced, that this was a waste of resources, a waste of their lives. It took them away from their families for years, and there's nothing good to show for it. And many people walked away from their faith because of this, because it was so closely tied to their religious beliefs. And I see that as incredibly tragic and wrong, and this

should not be this should not happen. But aside from all of that, it has resulted in the suffering of Christians in the Holy Land. It's resulted in the suffering of Christians and the eradication of Christian communities in the Middle East, and Christians are Christians in this country seem completely unaware of that. They don't know that it resulted in the the extinguish, the extinguished light of Christianity in places like Iraq.

hates you. You know, there's no bones about that. The Democratic Party has made it clear that there is no patronage available for these type of people, or a party devoted to a completely other country, which is the r NC right. And through this combination of church and state, you know, these flyover Americans have been sold a bill of goods where they're sort of given a proxy nationalism.

So they don't get anything they want within the contiguous US, but they get to, you know, support Israel, feel good about it, have their tax dollars go somewhere else. And that is essentially what they get. That is their patronage from the Republican Party and no material benefit to them. And so what they get is basically no, they have no advocate at all for their own interest within the country, and their only reward is essentially, will you get to

sign up and die for someone else? And again it I am struggling for polite words on this, but there's something just ghastly about the fact that, you know, these people are having their kind of good and natural instincts towards patriots. You know, they're they're kind of natural American idealism towards you know, becoming a you know, good and righteous country abroad, used to essentially propagate violence against other

Christians in other countries. And when you go into it, you know, you recently recorded a reading of an article the Untold Story of Christian Zionism's Rise to Power in the United States by Whitney Web. So you can find a full hour plus lung reading of that on your YouTube channel. I'll link it where essentially it is clear that the Foreign Service of Israel has been directly promoting

this belief. So prominent, prominent dispensationalist preachers like Jerry Folwell essentially received large monetary gifts from the State of Israel. And I'll put it this, given the hatred that our government has towards Russia, for instance, right, even the fact that Orthodox Christians are vaguely connected in some ways to Russia has put them under suspicion. Right, there's a hit

piece that came out a few months about this. But the fact that through all of that, you know, there's been no concerned you know, looking into the fact that you know, Jerry Folwell's private jet, what was purchased by a Lakud party member, you know, or that his entire organization was was bailed out at least twice. Yes, exactly what the.

driving them away from the faith. And John Slaughter, who's been on here multiple times, he used the phrase I like we basically said, like these churches are atheist factories, and we've talked about before that this is contributing to the brain drain in the American right and American conservatism, where essentially anyone who is smart enough to see this is a false bill of goods, you know, because it

obviously is, you know, there's nothing to it. Anyone who's smart enough to see that basically is presented a dichotomy where it's like, well, you can either be dumb in conservative or smart and get out and become an apostate, you know, become a rabbit progressive. And it's really part of the reason that I have nothing but disdain for the kind of leaders of the American conservative movement. So I want to.

the flagship school of their variety of Baptists. And yet these these kids, my classmates, who were the recipients of all of that investment, walked away from the faith their parents most wanted them to preserve. So you're you're quote from our friend mister Slaughter that these churches are atheist factories. I certainly am witnessed to that, and I think it's incredibly sad. But I'd like to I'd like to go back to the point. What is dispensationalism exactly?

the leaders and inflated into a Christian teaching. Now we we all, we all experience private religious opinions or enthusiasms. Some of us have had major spiritual events in our lives where we feel like we've we've been inspired in some way, or we've received something from God.

I was receiving a tremendous amount of spiritual inspiration. But spiritual inspiration is one thing. Bringing it into church and proclaiming it as a teaching that Christians ought to believe, that is something else. That is something else. And if I could make a metaphor for this, church is a place where we are supposed to put on our best clothes. Church is a place where we're supposed to go with

a proper frame of mind, a sober frame of mind. Obviously, some people think that church is a place to go in order to get very emotional and enthusiastic. I will take exception to that. All right, I'm gonna say no, that's not proper, and make of me what you will. But church is a place where we are supposed to put on a certain frame of mind. We're supposed to be sober, we're supposed to be dressed up properly, we're

supposed to behave ourselves right. We have phrases that we used to describe that put on your Sunday best right, and that really does change the way that we behave when we dress up well. If we dress up better for work, or dress up better for the supermarket, then we dress up for church. Then there's a disparity there that there's something there's something amiss. Church is not supposed to be vulgar. Church is not a place for commonplace things. It's not a place for pajamas and slippers.

not belong in the teaching of the church. If we can identify that teachings like dispensationalism originated from a historical period and do not correspond to the traditional teachings of Christian groups. Then it does not belong being taught in seminaries. It does not belong being taught in church. Now to

your point, you mentioned something really important. You said that Americans are allowed to have an affection for the nation state of Israel, and they are not allowed to have an affection for their own country, for their own national group. We're allowed to fund and otherwise support the sacred boundaries of the nation of Ukraine, but we are not allowed to support or fund boundaries for our own country. This is ridiculous and it's a kind of a proxy nationalism.

As you said, Similarly, I would say that in this problem of ecclesiology, that is the theology of the Christian Church, what what is the church in the beliefs of Christians, there is a proxy ecclesiology going on here in dispensationalism. So many Protestants, so many low church Protestants in particular, don't believe in a holy calendar. They don't they don't celebrate religious holidays, or perhaps some of them still do in in the form of holidays like Christmas, but they don't.

They don't see that as something particularly connected to worship in the church. They don't don't have a holy calendar that they keep in their minds, and so they they praise the holy calendar that they see in the ceremonial law of the Jews in the Old Testament. They don't see themselves as a chosen group by God. They don't have uls to perform in their own churches. They don't see that as a group set apart by God, and so instead they see the Jews as a group set

apart by God. They see the Jews as having rituals to perform that have religious significance, and they themselves do not see that they have any corresponding rituals as Christians. And this is a moment to make a controversial aside. I have sympathy for Protestants that embrace things like freemasonry, because it is an exclusive group with rituals and practices and has a temple and things like that. I think

that it's natural to want those things. And if you're a Baptist out in Mississippi or something, and you don't have any of those things, and you're taught by your church leadership that Christians are not supposed to have those things, that those things are like Roman Catholic apostasy or something. I think that it's there's something humane and understandable about wanting to go and become a Freemason so that you

can have some of those things. I think it's natural for people to want those things, so at least it goes some way explaining that phenomenon among Protestants in particular, but in dispensationalism, we see a lot of Protestants that are praising the Jewish practices and saying, no, God, God

blesses these things. These are good things. We want to see these things flourish, and moreover, we want to see another temple constructed in Jerusalem so that the Jews can can better practice their religion, which they say God has blessed. This is extremely perverse, this is wrong. Dispensationalists will say that the belief that the Church was established by God for his people and that the Church manifests the chosen people of God in the body of Christ. Dispensationalists call

that quote replacement theology. That is, the idea that the church, the Christian Church, replaced the Jews in religious rituals, in calendar, in the church calendar, in the true and proper worship of God. Dispensationalists dismiss that doctrine of ecclesiology, but that is the doctrine of the Church for all of historic Christianity, and in that I'm including the Protestant denominations. That's what Presbyterians believe, that's what Methodists believe, that's what the Church

of England believes. That the Church is the promise given to Abraham. And I don't want to get us bogged down in scripture today, but I will quote one piece of scripture to this effect. What we need to do if we're wanting to understand these points better as Christians, we need to go back to the Bible and see what the New Testament has to say about this. The New Testament has an awful lot to say about people who continue in the beliefs and practices of the Jews

versus Christians. They see them as opposed to one another. And the Apostles are emphatic on this that the Church is the covenanted group with God, and that Jews are supposed to believe in Jesus, that this is the culmination of the Old Testament, that Christ full fills all the promises of the Messiah in the Old Testament, and that Jews are not supposed to continue on in Judaism without professing their faith in Christ as their Messiah and as

God incarnate. The New Testament is very clear on these points, and I'll quote just one verse to this effect. I'm going to quote Galatians three six and following, the apostle says, consider Abraham, he believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Understand then, that those who believe are children of Abraham. The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the gentiles by faith and announce the Gospel in advance

to Abraham. All nations will be blessed through you. So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. Okay, So here the Apostle is telling us the gentiles who believe in Jesus manifest the promise given to Abraham. It is not Jews who may literally be descended from Abraham. That is not what God wants. God wants belief in our hearts. God does not want physical descendants of the patriarch. And that's the major difference here.

If we want to identify it with scripture and with dogma between dispensationalists, these innovators, and traditional Christian belief. The traditional Christian belief is that the faith in Jesus is the thing that marks the people of God, and we call the members of that group the Church. The dispensationalists say that there are two groups of God, that it's the modern state of Israel and the Jews that belong to that group, and the Christian Church, which some how

exists alongside. And as you said previously, the dispensationalists want to bring about the end of the world by helping the Jews in Israel reconstruct the Temple in Jerusalem, which is also a very perverse thing to want. This is

this is perverse to want the world to burn. That's bad, Okay, to want to see people die all around the world in a fiery cataclysm, that's bad to want that, And that is that is equivalent to washing one's hands of one's one's inheritance and all the beauty and value everywhere.

And it's funny because I was preparing for this stream. I've been doing a lot of reading on the side, getting ready to have this interview with you. And one night I was I was driving these folks around and I picked them up in this in this rather rough corner, and they were tourists. They weren't They weren't used to New Orleans. And they said they had had some street people harassing them and they saw drug addicts lying in

the gutter. And they asked me about that because they weren't used to presumably they weren't used to American cities, much less New Orleans. And I said, well, the police just don't enforce laws relating to those things like, even if, even if you were to call the police because these people conned you or threatened you, or you saw people shooting up in the gutter, the police wouldn't do anything about it. And a woman turned to her husband in the back seat and she said, you see, you see,

it's the end times. We're about to be raptured out of here. And I couldn't help but smile. And my mental response to that moment was I'm afraid it's a lot worse than that. This is what we're dealing with, and no one's going to snap their fingers and get out of this without paying a price. Right, this is our society, These are our political circumstance. We shouldn't bet on getting raptured out of here. We shouldn't bet on the end of the world taking place so that we

don't have to deal with any of them. We are going to have to deal with this stuff. It's going to involve a lot of suffering. It's going to involve a big cost because we've just let all this stuff go for so long. So I think that's another explanation for why dispensationalism has become popular. We've been able to externalize a lot of our a lot of our political problems. We've been able to export them to some rapidly approaching judgment day that will resolve everything with no cost to anyone.

God will intervene and fix everything in the blink of an eye. But that's just fantasy thinking. And we we believe as Christians that the world will end. We believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ. This is doctrinal teaching of ours. This is dogmatic. All Christians believe that, and I'm not I'm not taking any exception to that. I believe that too. But we we also think that this world is our home for the time being, and

we have a responsibility to take care of it. We shouldn't we shouldn't absent ourselves from that saying, oh, well, it's all it's all ending right now any second now, it's all going to end. Uh, and take no provision for the future of our communities. We're supposed to take provision for the future of our communities. And perhaps it's because we've had a couple generations that have externalized all all of these things, not made the proper investments in

the future of Americans. And see these chickens coming home to roost. Perhaps perhaps that's why they've embraced this doctrine that oh, well, none of that matters now, because we're we're in the end time now and it's all about to be ended well.

Which is one what's called the modernist crisis, which is this situation where a lot of this is where the main line evangelical or mainline conservative split happened in Protestantism, where essentially all of these denominations had two camps in them. There was an elite liberal camp that kind of around the nineteen twenties sort of dropped all pretenses of being genuinely Christian. This aside, here this sinks up well with what Muldbug writes about kind of the progressive Christian elites

becoming what we consider the woke religion. Now, if you want to look at the kind of early forerunners of this, the you can look at the Quakers, but essentially started doing things like denying a virgin birth, denying Christ. And in evangelical circles they call this the Great Betrayal because all of these legacy American institutions, these legacy American seminaries like Harvard, like Yale, like Princeton, which were elite organizations,

essentially stopped being Christian Christian in name only. So you have these congregations that are in many cases still very conservative, they're still very devout, and they're essentially left leaderless. And so the Schofield reference Bible, which we've mentioned multiple times is, you know, dispensationalless and the reason and it sold so well is because it's sort of coincided with that. So you have a large number of people and their elite

structure has been cut off. They've been cut off from their access to new leaders and so they're sort of left rudderless. They're sort of forced to come up with a new leadership organization from the groundhop and the Schofield Bible has an addition to commentary, it also has sermon notes. So it was sort of a ready made solution for someone who is not a classically trained teacher to preach to a group of people. And it was used not only to train kind of that generation, but also to

start new seminaries. So one of the and this is something that you really only see in the South, you know, kind of the Bible Belt is the Bible school and Bible schools are sort of they're not even quite seminaries. They're sort of in that mold, but they're much less formalized, they're much less institutionalized, and the vast majority of those draw their teaching from the Schofield Bible, and so of

have this. And honestly, I think in a world in which the leadership class of the American Protestant movement kind of kept its senses, dispensationalism would have been a side note in history, you know, one of like any number of you know, spinoff heresies. But because the leadership, the leadership completely gave up, you know, turned around and betrayed

their base, sort of had a massively outsized impact. And you know, you and I have said before that we have a lot of disdain for conservative leadership, and this is a part of it, that they're sort of like second tier leaders. And I guess that's another thing in this, that this is sort of something of, you know, sheep looking for a shepherd. And at the same time as this, right you have the Zionist movement picking up steam in Europe.

You know, more Jews are moving to Israel, and so sort of you can forgive people for thinking, well, it looks like it's happening, you know, the prophecy is coming. And I don't know, I have kind of two feelings about this, because I think that what these people believe is harmful and bad and stupid, to put it bluntly, but also I feel a lot of sympathy for these people, you know, the people that they should be able to

count on, hate them and despise them. And yeah, other relevant things kind of happening is this is also relevant to the Scopes monkey trial, things like that, And this is really the moment in which the kind of split between conservative Christians and broader culture began, you know, where these people were vilified, they were mocked, and it became more and more difficult kind of up to the current day to be a respectable devout Christian. Anyway, it's probably not said.

There was this big division that resulted in a civil war over Protestant institutions all across the United States. And this is the Great War between the modernists and the fundamentalists. And what happened was the leaders of various American denominations came out against traditional teachings that Christians have always believed. They we're embracing things like the higher criticism out of Germany and saying, oh, well, the Bible is not what

it purports to be. The Old Testament prophecies were written after the events that they described, which means that they aren't really prophecies. And the miracles of the New Testament which undergird Christian teaching, things like the virgin birth and the resurrection, those are miraculous things, and modern people know that such things never really happen, and so they're denying basic Christian teachings, and they face a revolt from the lower ranks, and the people in the pews say.

and even for the control of various denominations. And I don't have a taally. I don't know which fundamentalist sects were able to retain the control of their institutions around the country. I do know that here In the South, the fundamentalists one in the Baptist Church, and you can count that to their credit. They retained control of most of their educational institutions. And up north, where the Baptist Modernists won out, the Baptist Church has just withered.

And we see that the falling away from from leftist and liberal denominations that continues on into the present day. But you're quite right what you're describing about the elites embracing leftist causes in this period. A very good book on that subject, by the way, is Richard Gamble's book The War for Righteousness, which was published by is I Press.

I believe in that he's he's documenting the support of leftist Christians, and that would be those modernist Christians for Woodrow Wilson's war to save the world for democracy, to make the world safe for democracy, and to fight the war to end all wars. You know, these very utopian goals. It's a really interesting study. But that's left the fundamentalists without without that elite leadership, and they've been left with people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Folwell and John Hagey

as their leaders. They've been left with tele evangelists for their leaders, and those people have been particularly interested in

trying to grab the reins of the political process. We see that at least the one that stands out most to me, and it's because of my personal experience, the one that stands out most to me is Jerry Folwell, who always wanted his school to be a training ground for future congressman and he wanted his law school to produce future Supreme Court justices, and his school has attracted

any Republican aspirant to the presidency, including Donald Trump. I remember when Donald Trump came to speak at Liberty and revealed that he did not know how to talk to low church Baptists, and he didn't know how to talk about the Bible. He tried to talk about the Bible in his speech and messed it up. He tried to quote Second Corinthians and said, you know, in two Corinthians whatever reference, and everyone laughed at him for that because he didn't know how to quote scripture. He was obviously

out of his depth. But it only it only goes to show that that liberty was always about getting involved with politics. But in in my judgment here, given the metaphor that I drew a little while ago, bringing up current political events in church to make an argument about where Christian should stand on these things. If it's if it's something that's in conversation right now and is controvertible, that's something that intelligent people, informed people can disagree about.

Politics has no place there. Politics is very vulgar. Now I want I want to explain myself to say, Christians believe that marriage is between a man and a woman is not a controversial thing. But that is a political thing. Now, when I say not a controversial thing, I'm saying that's

obviously what Christians have always believed, okay. Or when Christians say Christians have always argued against abortion, We have records that date back to the first and second century on that point that that's not controversial to say that that's what Christians have always believed, but it's become political now. I'm not saying that Christians should not say those things in a teaching position in their churches today. I'm saying

the exact opposite. Actually, Christians teach what Christians traditionally believe in church. What Christians should not do is opine about the controversies in the local race for congressmen or county commissioner from the pulpit, because that's vulgar. That's the point

that I'm making. And so at at places like Liberty, where the beliefs, the Christian beliefs of Baptists was so closely wedded with national political concerns and even the concerns of wars abroad, it had the effect of vulgarizing what is sacred. And that is an only negative effect, that only discredited what is holy. And this is why we have such a profound duty to make sure that holy things are not sullied, that holy things should never should

never be sullied by combining them with vulgar things. We should not give our enemies any reason to mock us on those grounds. We should not give our enemies any reason to point out, Oh, look at them, they were advocating for this political policy, and the whole thing was foolish. The whole thing was a failure. You see, you can't trust those people. If you can't trust those people on what's going on right now, what makes you think you

can trust them to teach you about the hereafter? What makes you think that you can trust them to teach you about God and about how to relate to God. Those arguments are reinforced, those arguments are strengthened every time a pastor weighs into the mud of politics to make an opinion from the pulpit. Church is not a place for opinions, is what I'm saying. We should only get what is real there. We should only get what is

tested there. We should only get what Christians have been believing for the history of the Church.

they invest an astonishing amount in their children. You know, they pay to send them to private school, which is very expensive. You know, they send them to private universities, which are also very expensive, and with the expectation that they will kind of continue in their you know, broad let's just say pro nomion. But the problem is, you know, when you build all of that on something as incorrect

as this, you need captures. And so as far as is what I believe are kind of the the core kind of growths that need to be excized from this movement there, and they're kind of linked. It's Christian Zionist dispensationalism. I'll just kind of lump that into one and then maybe you know something for another day, which is the

kind of like milk toast civic nationalism. And in each case, right, we're sort of we have a community of people who has good instincts, but they are playing with to borrow a term from the the anti colonialist right, they're playing with the master's tools, and because of that, they will never be able to kind of keep that premise and

break out. Now you've mentioned before, you know that there's sort of this dissonance between what these people think and what they believe, you know, with regards to your own employment, with what they you know, these people will say, oh, we want to be dissident, you know, Oh we want to be you know, kind of insulated from the world, and yet they're kind of not committed to it. And I see doctrines like this as being a part of that.

And so I realized that, you know that you and I didn't get into kind of the theological nitty gritty. I don't see it as that important really, But the reason that this matters is I view this as being one of the things standing between our people and they are our people. You know, you know where I live, you know, the kind of circles that I run in and essentially getting out of this. You mentioned again this idea of like, oh, we'll just stand back, it'll all

sort itself out. And that's another major stumbling block, you know, the idea that you don't need to work, you don't need to prepare, you know, essentially God will will come back and you know, make everything better. And again that's why this matters, you know, because in addition to motivating people to do the wrong thing, it keeps them from doing anything positive. So again, George, I appreciate your time. We're sort of, you know, wrapping this up. Is there anything you want to say?

to serve their community and defend their community. They want to preserve the freedoms they've inherited from their ancestors, specifically their freedom of religion. They said, all of those things. What they're unaware of is that their own government is acting against their interests. Their own government is ignoring the Constitution.

Their own government is not protecting their freedom of religion, or their freedom of speech, or their freedom of assembly, or their property rights, or their protection against warrantless search and seizure. All of this, all of those things have been swept away, and they are unaware. They thought that their government was still worth the blood of their children, that this government is worth the blood of their children, And that just floored me. I don't know how they

can cope so hard as to believe that. But also what really disturbed me about about that service that I witnessed was that the only children there that would continue to believe that were children who had deliberately close their eyes to what their government is doing and refuse to believe what is obvious about what their government is doing. It reminds me of another loved one that I have, someone I'm closely connected to who believes in the Q conspiracies.

And I was talking to this man and getting along with him. I don't seek out to have fights with people about things like this or even to contradict them, especially when it's a loved one of mine. And he was telling me how Trump was still president, that Hillary Clinton was dead and we aren't seeing actually Joseph Biden, we're seeing a clone of Joseph Biden or something like that, and that John F. Kennedy Junior is vice president. He believes all of these things, and he says, yeah, and

everything is going to be fine. And he also he said something very interesting to me. He said, none of the churches are ready for what's going to happen. And I said, well, what do you mean and he said, well, when it's all revealed that Trump is still in charge, and that John F. Kennedy Junior is still alive, and that the United States government has been overthrown in this secret revolution behind the scenes, he said, millions of Americans are going to return to faith in Jesus. And it

just blew me away. I was like, how would that follow? What does the one have to do with the other? I don't understand. And it is people. It seems to me, I have no other way of describing what's going on. It seems that these people are deliberately closing their eyes to what's going on, and they have a sunk cost

in these things. To go to a less radical example, the homeschool moms who were telling that their children, telling their children that the flag had symbolism of the Trinity associated with it, and the sanctity of womanhood was associated with the colors of the flag and things like that. They could continue to believe in this ersatz civic religion and continue to sacrifice to these people and institutions that want them to be destroyed, or they will wake up

to the fact that this is all counterproductive. But where does that leave them if they if they see, oh wait a second, my government really does want me dead. I've been sacrificing to them and telling my children to have confidence in these institutions when in fact this is all against my interests. Does that cause them to lose their faith?

So maybe they maybe we're looking at massive disillusionment. Can you imagine where these people will be left if the state of Israel is discredited, repudiated as genocidal by the United Nations, say, by a consensus of world powers. And if the United States has a new administration that repudiates its support of Israel or announces hard limits to that support, it could shake the faith of many of those people.

And I don't want to I don't want to misrepresent these things, but this is what the dispensationalist writers and leaders have to say about it. How Lindsay, who wrote a very important book called The Late Great Planet Earth a dispensationalist interpretation all right, an important dispensationalist thinker, how Lindsay. How Lindsay said, the United States has been protected by God because it has been a haven for Israelites and an ally of their survival. That's what makes America exceptional.

This is very close to what people at Liberty were saying. The whole time I was there, that America is special, America is exceptional because we support Israel. That it's not at all unusual to hear a dispensationalists say that what happens when these illusions are dissolved. If support of Israel is what makes them crit in their view, and not their confession that Christ is God, where does that leave them? Well, it's a very disturbing question. I feel very sorry for

the suffering that they must go through. That suffering is inevitable. It's going to happen. They will be disillusioned because these beliefs are false. It's not going to trouble me. I mean it'll trouble me because people I love are suffering, because people I love are having their faith tested. But that faith must be refined, it must have their impurities burned out of it.

The baby Boomers and gen Z buy into this much more. And maybe it's just the fact that millennials in gen Z are less Christian or less churched, and so they get less of it. But it does sort of seem that this is an idea that is dying, you know, whether you want to say it or not. And on one hand, you know, I would prefer to live in a more Christian country than not, even if it's kind of a suboptimal form of Christianity. But at the same time,

I think you're right, this needs to die. It is dying, and I don't think we should bemoan it.

involve our crazy, are insane modern political problems. The Christian gospel is that Jesus is God and he saves us from our sins, and our sins cause us to suffer and die. All right, So this is good news that Jesus saves us and that we're supposed to believe in it. That's the Christian gospel, and dispensationalism is contrary to this. Dispensationalists say, no, it's more important for us to support Israel, and that's ridiculous. That is vulgarity as opposed to what

is holy and true and golden. And so this does not deserve to survive, and it's going to cause a lot of suffering to those that have so heavily invested in it. And we see, we have all these major institutions all over the place, and they have been perpetuating this belief, and they've been popularizing this belief. This is something that's even out in pop culture. Nicholas Cage was in a movie about this. It was one of those lesser known Nicholas Cage movies, but they actually got Nicholas

Cage for that. The movie was called Left Behind, which is a very popular series of novels about this theology. And that is not what Christians have historically believed. And you don't have to look far outside of the United States to find that no one's heard about this stuff. This stuff is really weird. As ask Christians from the Middle East if they've heard about this stuff and they think it's crazy, they think that it is. It's parochial, right in the sense that it's isolated to a certain area.

It's isolated to like the like anglophone Americans, and those are all all signs this is not the Catholic teaching. This is not what Christians have always believed in all times, in all places. So it does not deserve to survive. And it's done a lot of harm and it I think it will cause a lot of people to lose their faith in Christ such such as they profess it, because it has marred that teaching so badly. So I want to and I don't want to see that happen.

You know. I'd prefer more people confessing than not, and I'd prefer a level of cultural Christianity. But like I said, it will refine people's teachings, and that is necessary and inevitable. It has to happen at some point.

approved for publication today. It might go online today. So we'll figure that out and I will certainly publicize its release once it's actually for sale. I expected we'll go for sale on Amazon very soon.

last forever. Good night, all right, George Bagbe, Welcome back to the show. How are you doing.

we'll get into it. So you have recently republished a book, and that book is about our topic today, So do you want to first introduce our topic and then maybe the book that you've republished as well.

the reconstruction period. And these students, the most famous of them, went to the Southern States and did their work there, but there were northern state histories that came out of this school of historians as well. These were mostly published around the turn of the century, and they are rather inaccessible. They're extremely good quality because they are compendums of the sources of the times. They draw very heavily on these primary sources, and that's one of the reasons why they

are very durable and valuable. But it's also a very controversial, very controversial period in American history, and the Dunning School has been purposefully marginalized because they take an older view. It used to be the establishment view of this period of American history, but it's been marginalized and deliberately excluded

from the conversation about this period. What's really interesting about this at the moment as a contemporary concern is suddenly these reconstruction policies and laws are front page news all around the country, mostly because of controversy about the upcoming twenty twenty four presidential election. And these these laws, in particular the fourteenth Amendment, are being used to justify very

radical policies in our own time. So it's a curious thing that this old conversation about what happened in American history and what justifies or or makes makes these things unjustifiable, that is now a topic of popular interest once again.

that the blueprint of that is found in reconstruction. So let's start kind of immediately when you know, the hostilities end as far as the War between the Straits is how long does it take between that moment and the start of I guess what we would know is reconstruction. Actually, you know, before I get into that, do you want

to maybe define what reconstruction is? Because I realize I have a more international audience than I I often say, and so there are perhaps some of us who don't necessarily know their America.

the Republican Party, which dominated the federal government after the war. This, of course, was Lincoln's party, and the Democrats were marginalized as the party of rum, Romanism and rebellion.

during this time. Lots of Democratic voters, these are white ex confederates in the South were disenfranchised during this time very importantly, and this is the probably the number one emphasis in most of the history you'd read on the period today. The slaves were all legally freed by the thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This is the first of the reconstruction Amendments. That was the legal end of slavery in the United States, not the emancipated proclamation by the

thirteenth Amendment in eighteen sixty five. In eighteen sixty six we see the fourteenth Amendment, which redefines citizenship and also excludes ex confederates from voting and holding office. And then finally you have the Fifteenth Amendment, the last of the Reconstruction Amendments, which guarantees voting rights to all American citizens, regardless of their former status of being slaves. So reconstruction is this time of the rebuilding of American American constitutional government.

It's a reforming of Republican institutions, particularly in the South, Republican meaning representative government institution. And it's a period that was done by force. These reforms were done by force, not through consensus. The constitutions of all the Southern states were rewritten during this time. And it was also a time very famous for corruption in high places. Mark Twain famously referred to this period as the Gilded Age. So it looks really glittery on the outside, but on the

inside it's worthless gilded. It's an age of corruption in high places. You have probably the most infamous American presidential regimes, like the US Grant regime, which sees the vice president arrested for corruption, the president's personal secretary and several cabinet members all indicted for corruption and the embezzlement of public funds.

Even the word lobbyist first comes into use during this period because the Republican Republican regime in Washington, d c. Is handing out huge sums of money to special interest groups during this time. So the way that the United States government operates fundamentally transforms during this period, and that makes it of particular interest the civil rights aspect, the end of slavery, the radical sudden enfranchisement with no previous plan of all black Americans in the South, not in

the North. We should specify these reforms that enfranchise black voters in the South do not initially affect northern states at all, not that that matters very much. There are very few black people living in the North at this time. The vast majority of them live.

up around the South and military governments are established. And Lincoln was always adamant that the Southern states had not left the Union. They remained in the Union, and they were commandeered by rebel factions that did not represent the states that they portended to represent. So Lincoln never recognized that the South had left the Union. He never recognized the legitimacy of the Confederate States or the Confederate Government, the Union of the Confederate States. He never recognized them

as legitimate bodies. And he said that they were all in conspiracy, in rebellion against the federal government. So when the federal armies went into Southern states, they would set up rival Union governments when when they didn't just run things like a military camp. So this happened in several states, and this is this is an important feature to talk about the Reconstruction Amendments because it makes sense of several

of them. In states where the federal government had a long standing occupation, states like Tennessee, which was invaded very early. In states like Louisiana, the Union army established rival state governments in those states, and those governments actually sent representatives to Congress, and these were all Republicans. The most famous instance of that is the future President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. He was a Democrat. He was a Southerner from the

highlands of Tennessee. He was a Unionist. He had the distinction of being the only Southern Congressman that did not leave the capital when his states seceded from the Union. He did not recognize the right of secession, and so he stayed in the capitol and became a favorite of Abraham Lincoln because he was a loyal Southerner, loyal to the Union. So Abraham Lincoln rewarded him by making him vice president on his Republican ticket in eighteen sixty four

when he ran for reelection. And this very ironically, after Lincoln is assassinated, makes Andrew Johnson President of the United States, which is the craziest thing. Following the Civil War. You have a Southern Democrat who is President of the United States immediately following the Civil War. It's the most unlikely accident. Not surprisingly, he does not get along with the radical Republicans and is impeached unsuccessfully. They do not remove him

from office. He's acquitted by a single vote. But he's a very important example of these Union governments that were set up in these occupied states in the South. Well immediately after Lincoln's assassination. Andrew Johnson is president because he's Lincoln's second vice president. The process of renovating the Union at this point, following the Great American Civil War, where half of the country destroys the other half of the country, the big question of the time is how is the

Union going to work at this point. Previously, the conservative position in Antebellum America, in pre war America was that the states had formed a consensus about what functions of government the federal government would have, what powers does the federal government have, and they wrote down and agreed upon this consensus, and that is what the Constitution is. So the Constitution is a long list of things the states

agree the federal government can and cannot do. And after they wrote down the Constitution, or their representatives wrote it down, it went to the state governments for ratificate. And that's the story of all the states of the Union up until the Civil War. After the Civil War, we have this big problem because it's obvious that there are many more powers in that federal government than people had imagined before.

The federal government has waged a war against the states in the name of union, and this was how Lincoln justified his military actions that began the war. Now, Lincoln added further justifications as the war progressed. Most famously, he said the war was going to end slavery, and that the war was justified because it would end slavery. He very famously alludes to this in the Gettysburg Address and then states it much more plainly in the second Inaugural Address.

But if we read the first Inaugural Address, he is very careful to skirt the issue of slavery. He says that he isn't doing anything in regards to slavery and doesn't think that he has any right to do so. But by the time we get to April of eighteen sixty five, Lee surrenders at Appomatox Courthouse. The other Confederate armies are in a hopeless condition. They quickly surrender. The question is what sort of government does the United States

have at this point? Andrew Johnson President Andrew Johnson is marginalized. He has his ideas about how to bring the Union together post war. Andrew Johnson seems to illustrate Abraham Lincoln's conciliatory ideas about restoring the Union. Andrew Johnson stays up all night long signing pardons for ex Confederates who write to him asking for the restoration of their citizenship rights.

Andrew Johnson tells the ex Confederate states that all they need to do is send representatives back to Washington, d c. And they are restored to their status in the Union. But this runs into problems. Congress at this point is dominated by the Republican Party. The Southern States, the former Confederate States were the major Democratic stronghold in the South. They were the stronghold of the Democratic Party. When they

left the Union, they withdrew their Congressional representatives. All except Andrew Johnson left. So Congress from the moment of the secession of the Southern States has been overwhelmingly dominated by Lincoln's Republican Party, and through the course of the war, this party becomes very radicalized and very antagonistic against the South, not surprisingly because it's a war, right, they feel very bitter towards the South, and their people are encouraging them

in this. It is a reflection of popular sentiment. More or less Andrew Johnson's conciliatory attitude, just as Abraham Lincoln's conciliatory attitude towards the end of the war. Lincoln was famous for saying, with malice towards noun and charity for all, let us bind up the nation's wounds. He's known for saying these very nice and soothing things about the Union. Following the war. Andrew Johnson seems to be working that out, and that is very unpopular in Congress. So Congress does

a couple of things here. Well, Congress starts doing a great number of things, but most importantly, they decide they are going to run the restoration of the Union out of Congress, and they are going to get around the president's conciliatory policies towards the South. The Republican leadership in Congress is very close with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who is Lincoln's Secretary of War, not surprisingly Lincoln's last

and most effective secretary of war. He is a radical Republican, Edwin Stanton, and he starts disobeying the orders of President Johnson. President Johnson tells Edwin Stanton that Southerners are to hold elections, that these ex Confederates are allowed to reform their state governments to hold constitutional conventions. The idea is that these ex Confederate states need to repudiate their former Confederate Constitution and rejoin the Union. Ratify the Philadelphia Constitution once again,

and rejoin the Union. Edwin Stanton is commanding the army, and he's sending out the orders to all the Southern generals, and he is actively subverting the political process in the Southern States at this point. So Andrew Johnson attempts to remove Edwin Stanton from office, and Edwin Stanton refuses to leave and is backed up by his allies in Congress. Then the president's enemies in the Republican Congress, they pass articles to impeach the president for attempting to remove a

cabinet officer for attempting to remove Edwin Stanton from office. Now, that is a remarkable and crazy episode. Andrew Johnson was wanting to appoint ulysses As Grant as Secretary of War to replace Stanton. And Grant is the most popular man in America at this point, He's the victor of the army right. He couldn't have picked a more popular fellow to take this position. And yet Edwin Stanton barricaded himself in his office to resist removal and gets backed up

by these really wild anti Southern Republicans in Congress. Congress then decides that they're going to impeach the president. They very very narrowly fail on that point, but then they start imposing very strict terms on the South, very punitive terms on the Southern state. Firstly, the Republicans turn away

the representatives sent to Congress by the Southern States. Not surprisingly, these are people that were voted on by these ex Confederate Democrats in the South, and the Southerners vote Alexander Alexander Stevens to be the senator from Georgia for instance. Alexander Stevens was the former vice president of the Confederate States and a notable statesman from pre war Georgia. Well, he's the leader of these people. These people are voting for their wartime leaders to lead them after the war.

They vote ex Confederate generals into Congress, and these men show up in Washington, d c. And are barred from entry into the capital by the Republicans. The Republicans in Congress declare that there are no legal governments in the Southern States, and they declare martial law throughout the South. And this is getting around the president's authority with the Secretary of War. The Secretary of War isn't answering to the president with all of this, He's answering to radical

leaders in Congress. So this is not the way that the American government was designed to work, but this is how it is is working effectually during this time. Now, at the exact same time, taking the long way around to your original question, what about these reconstruction amendments. At the exact same time these things are going on in Washington, d C. We have these major constitutional questions, this big crisis is brewing. The Southern state governments are ratifying the

thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution at this time. Now, the thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution is the amendment that formally abolishes the institution of slavery. Every Southern state abolishes the institution of slavery. There's one weird exception when it comes to the thirteenth Amendment. The state of Mississippi does not ratify the thirteenth Amendment, but they do write a new state constitution which abolishes slavery. So it's not as if

they are trying desperately to hold on to slavery. At the end of the Civil War, it's just a different way of doing it, and they don't want to be strong armed into ratifying amendments to the Constitution down there in Mississippi, so they do it their own way. But every Southern state abolishes slavery, and this is through their

representative governments. At the exact same time, the radicals in the Republican led Congress in DC say there are no legal governments in the South and that justifies their treatment as conquered territory to be administered by martial law. And this is one of the very many reasons why reconstruction is a maddening period to study. It is a very frustrating period. It is a very confusing period because legally

this doesn't make sense. It's not a time that it's not a time where anyone can justify what's going on. No one can make sense of what's going on or how it's all, how it all makes sense constitutionally. Even even if you are trying to take the side of the radical Republicans, you have to admit that they are there going far beyond the law to do all.

War tours in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Occasionally I have some people and I give them this tour. And one of the stories that I tell is how the Union army arrived in New Orleans and declared Confederate currency void. This shut down the banks in New Orleans. Everyone was using Confederate currency and this was declared not legal tender. When the Union arrives, then the Union publicizes that Congress has declared the confiscation of all rebel property.

This is one of the things that the Republicans do when they take over Congress in eighteen sixty two. The Confiscation Act of eighteen sixty two declares anyone in arms against the United States Government has forfeited their property rights, and their property may be seized and auctioned and This is one of the original things that's used to justify the manumission of slaves. So people who own slaves who are in arms in the Confederate States have forfeited their

property rights to their slaves. Some Union generals take that act to meanness and declare the emancipation of slaves in military districts based on this law. Down in New Orleans. What this meant was General Butler, the Union general in New Orleans, warns the people of New Orleans that they have to take oaths to be loyal to President Lincoln and to the Union, or the military authorities could seize

everything that they own. And there are lines outside of the army headquarters in New Orleans for people to come in and take the oath with their hand on the Bible that they will be loyal to Lincoln and his government. Not surprisingly, the people with the most to lose, the wealthy, the merchant class, are the ones most tempted to go and take this oath to safeguard what they own. The women of the city, which are the majority of the

people in the city at this time. You know, most of the able bodied men are off at war at this time. The women of the city come and be rate. The men that stand in line to take this oath, they call them cowards, and there's this very emotional exchange. It's this very sad thing to imagine. But one of the things that follows is that General Butler goes around

New Orleans seizing the property of ex confederates. He sezes the property of Confederate generals, Confederate officers, people that he knows are in arms, and he can use newspapers as evidence for this that they are in command in posts outside of the city, and he starts seizing their property, and according to the military law, and according to the martial law, it is auctioned off. Now this presents a

big problem because Confederate currency has been outlawed. So unless you have assigned loyalty oath which safeguards your property rights, and you have a lot of gold and silver, coin or or some other some other source of wealth that's that's liquid and exchangeable, you have no ability to participate

in the auctions that follow from the seized property. So General Butler auctions off seized Confederate property around New Orleans, and he turns up to the auctions himself and wins a lot of these auctions and sends the movable property back to Boston, where he was from. And he leaves New Orleans after after a tenure of only nine months. General Butler leaves New Orleans a multimillionaire. And this is this is all arguably legal under martial law. After the

end of the war. This is happening throughout the South, not just in in the great city of New Orleans. It's it's something that's happening everywhere. After the war, twenty five percent of the able bodied men of the South have died. A whole quarter of the military age male population is dead. Another quarter is wounded or maimed, lots of them with missing limbs. A whole twenty percent of the farms in the South in eighteen sixty five have

been abandoned. And this is very surprising when we think of the death toll right and the proportion of men lost in battle. There simply aren't enough men around to save the farms, to do anything with them, to even make them liveable or habitable, and so they are abandoned.

A huge proportion of the population is reduced to penury and even made into refugees dependent on friends and family elsewhere at the exact same time in eighteen sixty five, when federal authority is enforced throughout the South, the federal government imposes four years of back taxes on the South. So the Southerners said, well, we are at an independent country. We've seceded from the Union. You know, we aren't paying

taxes to the federal government. When the federal government came back, they imposed punitive taxes and back taxes on all of the Southerners and told them to pay up. And when they couldn't pay, they seized their property. So a huge amount of property around the Southern states went to the auction block for back taxes. This caused property values to plummet throughout the South. In some states, this was particularly bad. In places like Mississippi, one fifth of the state was

auctioned off for back taxes. A whole fifth of the state was put to auction because the people there could not pay the taxes. After the war, it's difficult to explain just how utterly destroyed the South was in the years after the war. I have a quote here to illustrate this. A Massachusetts journalist his name was Sidney Adams. He made a tour through Southern States in eighteen sixty five, and he said you can only get over the roads

walled by desolation. He described Charleston, South Carolina, as a city of ruins, of desolation, of vacant houses, of widowed women, of rotting wharves, deserted warehouses, of wild gardens, of miles of grass grown streets. A British traveler who visited Tennessee wrote that the area consists, for the most part of plantations in a state of semi ruin. The trail of war is visible throughout the valley, in burnt up ginhouses, ruined bridges, mills and factories, and of large tracts of

once cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing. One of the things that we should remember when we're talking about this period of reconstruction. It is a time that is cunningly labeled because we know that war is so destructive. But reconstruction is not the rebuilding of the United States. It is not the restoration of what was lost. It is not recompense or effort made to restore things that were destroyed. It was not the rebuilding of the country.

Reconstruction was the rebuilding of the way our country's institutions worked. It was a radical tinkering with the fundamental laws of the country, and it was done. It was done by force, it was done by military government. Well, I've been talking here for a long time. I hope I haven't overworn myself.

Morgenthele plan, you know, or the Marshall Plan. You know, what is kind of teased in you know, their wildest dreams about is this idea that essentially they know better they can reconstruct, you know, certain ideas, certain proclivities out of people and society can be remade in their image. And to a certain degree they were successful, I would argue in the case of reconstruction, they were very very unsuccessful, right,

It went poorly it was, it was ended early. But it is this this kind of like megomaniacal desire to remake other societies. Like say what you will. But there's something kind of honest about pre modern war. Right, it's either you know, kind of an internecine thing between you know, different factions, in which case it's a political struggle, or

if it's a war between different peoples it was. It might not be pretty, it might not be nice, but it's understandable and kind of an animal level, right, Different packs of wolves fight, so Roman Carthage fights. But something like this, whereas there's this layer of social engineering, I just I find it very.

taken into account. There were compromises made to accommodate concerns. There was a plan. People were thinking about how this was going to play out, and it was executed through a political process according to that country's traditions. Whatever it was. Okay, this is how Turkey did it, this is how Brazil did it, This is how Great Britain did it. The United States was the only country in the world to

abolish slavery. Perhaps I should say HATI abolished slavery by violence rather than by political process and consensus, and it was done without any consideration for the future. What was going to happen after that is a very important thing to remember about this process. So back to congressional reconstruction. I would I find myself talking about the state of the South after the war and kind of the practical

results of the war. The fact that every bank failed, the fact that no one had any money at precisely the moment that the country became a free labor economy. The irony of this is overwhelming. Right, Everyone's supposed to have wages now and no one has any money, and no one can get any money, and the country has been decimated, and you know, a quarter of the of the white men are dead. Right, This is really really bad.

And this, by the way, is one of the reasons why Northerners who came South with money at this time, the so called carpetbaggers, are an extremely important group of people. They had a political voice in a time when white Southerners were excluded from the political process. They had money when no one else had money. They were disproportionately important

in every way. And if it had not been for the carpetbaggers, the so called carpetbaggers that came from the northern States into the South immediately after the war, the reconstruction period would have been far worse. I mean that there would have been terrible famine. Many people would have

been dead from famine and suffering in other ways. The carpetbaggers served a very important economic role, even even if they're condemned for their political role, and we can understand why they were resented, but nevertheless, I think they're a very important group. I find myself talking about those things with more ease. But we do need to turn back

to congressional reconstruction. At the same time, the Congress is insisting that no legal governments exist in the South, and they use this to declare martial law throughout the South, and the occupation of the South by the Union armies who police the voters, intimidate the voters, encourage the newly freed slaves to participate in politics, while they are excluding all of the former white citizens from the political process.

This is very This is all a huge social experiment, and it has an effect of pitting the races against one another and breeding lots of resentments. We can understand how that would work. At the same time they're doing this, Congress insists that Southern legislatures, which they say have no authority, should rewrite their state constitutions with Republican committees in charge. The Democrats have practically been outlawed in the South. They

have been so marginalized through disenfranchisement. In particular, even though the Democrats in the South, the Democratic Party leaders take special pains to appoint as their official leader the men of those states who were always against secession and on the sidelines of the Civil war. Naturally enough, we can say those were not their natural leaders, that those were not the people they wanted in charge of their institutions.

They were just the only men around who stood any chance to make an argument to the Radical Republican Congress that the Democrat the Democratic Party of the Southern States was at all legitimate to be participating in politics at all. Even though they did those things, they were still being excluded. So the radical Republicans say that all the Southern states have to rewrite their constitution. This happens in places like

South Carolina and Alabama, for instance. This happens with committees of Republican politicians who come from the North, or are collaborator Southerners who declare for the Republican Party, or they are newly enfranchised blacks from that state, or blacks that come from elsewhere in the country, and they are put in charge of rewriting those state constitutions. The Democratic committees in those states file complaints to Congress saying this is

very lopsided, this is very unfair. You have taken a very small minority of our population. If you think back just a few years, in Lincoln's original election in eighteen sixty, there was no Republican Party in the Southern States. Abraham Lincoln did not receive a single vote in the states that joined the Confederate States. It wasn't as if Lincoln was an unpopular candidate by our standards in American history.

There was no organization for the Republican Party in those states, and he did not receive a single vote in those states. He was seen as such an alien candidate, so far removed from the concerns of those voters. But now that political party is reforming the basic political institutions of these states for their own benefit. The radical Republicans in Congress

then pass on to the Southern States. At the same time they say, is there are no legal institutions in these states, they hand them an amendment to the Constitution. They hand them the famous fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution with a threat Congress. The Republicans in Congress tell the Southern states in eighteen sixty six, ratify the fourteenth Amendment or you will have no representation in Congress. And a number of Southern states try to hold out on this.

Even with a lot of Republicans in charge in these Southern states, several of these states decide they are going to withhold consideration of the fourteenth Amendment because the way that it is forced on them with a Blackmaile threat, we will not give you, we will not permit you to have Republican institutions, representative government, not not even a

shadow of it. With all the disenfranchisement that's gone on in the enfranchisement that has gone on in these states in this short period of time, we won't let you have it unless you ratify a constitutional amendment. It makes no sense. Are they part of the Union or did they actually leave the Union? Lincoln said they never left the union. President Johnson said, they never left the Union. They just need to send representation back to Congress, and

they've been restored as states in the Union. The radical Republicans forwarded a theory to justify their behavior that when the states seceded from the Union, they committed political suicide and ceased to exist as bodies, as legal bodies, and this was their justification to treat the Southern States as conquered territory, which was basically what they were. They declared

them military districts during this time. Yet at the same time they're demanding that they ratify amendments to the Constitution. The only bodies that can ratify amendments to the Constitution are states of the Union. So they're trying to have it both ways. The government of Florida in eighteen sixty six, wrote Let's see a resolution of the Florida House of Representatives. They said, beyond the postal service, our people derive no benefit from our existence as a state of the Union.

We are denied representation even when we elect a man who never sympathized with the Confederacy's rebellion. We are at the same time subject to the most onerous taxation, and our civil law is enforced only when it meets the approval of the local military commanders. Now that was their reason to not consider the fourteenth Amendment. But Congress. Congress decided to drag this out as long as it took to ratify the fourteenth Amendment, and eventually the Southern States did.

And this is part of the process of reconstruction. It was a process of threats, of blackmail, of cynical looting, of the enfranchisement of certain populations, not the Indians, by the way, the fourteenth Amendment deliberately excludes the Indians from citizenship. That comes later, all right, But enfranchising the black population to make them a loyal block of the Republican Party of Lincoln's party, and to make the Republican Party the

dominant party of the United States in perpetuity. This was what the Republican leadership in Washington, d C. Openly avowed as their goals in this time. They also some of the more extreme members, people like Benjamin Butler, the former Union commander in New Orleans now United States Senator in Massachusetts or from Massachusetts. Benjamin Butler is one of Andrew Johnson's greatest enemies in the impeachment. UH. Benjamin Butler is is one of the leaders of the radical Republicans in

Congress during reconstruction. Other others like Thatteus Stevens of Massachusetts, who has a big war, a big role prior to the Civil War, very famously beaten over the head by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks for insulting family members in UH in speeches on on the floor of Congress.

wealth to be redistributed as plunder. This this happened on a certain scale, but it was not That was not actually how reconstruction took place. I should say Thadeus Stevens did not get everything that he wanted. But these these radicals in Congress, they force the Fourteenth Amendment on the Southern States. In the Southern legislatures, in desperation, eventually ratify the most controversial amendment to the Constitution, the fourteenth Amendment.

So let's get in. Let's get into the details of the fourteenth Amendment. The first, it's the longest amendment in the Constitution, I should say first, it is the most complicated. It has several sections to it, and it has been used to justify a great many of the most controversial things in constitutional law in the United States. It has been used to justify the elimination of laws regulating abortion

in the States. Row versus Wade used the Fourteenth Amendment to justify striking down all laws prohibiting abortion in the United States. It was used to justify Lawrence versus Texas, which struck down all laws prohibiting or criminalizing sodomy in the United States. It was used to justify Obergfel versus Hodges, which struck down all state laws regulating the definition of marriage, proclaiming marriage to be a institution between a man and

a woman. It's been used for all of these controversial Supreme Court cases, these major culture war cases, if you will, because the first part of the Fourteenth Amendment limits what state governments can do. It gives the federal government power to strike down things that state governments have done in law. And if you note, the Supreme Court cases that I mentioned all have to do with striking down state laws.

It is the Supreme Court striking down state laws. What we call the incorporation of the Bill of Rights, the application of constitutional limitations to state governments. The Fourteenth Amendment

applies federal power to state governments. Now, if you recall towards the beginning of our investigation, I said that in Annabellum America, the conservative view, if you will, was that the states came together to decide what powers their common federal government might have over them, what powers they would cede to a general government, and those powers were all

listed in the Constitution, the Philadelphia Constitution. The Constitution then went back to the state legislatures for ratification, and there was debate about that. The Constitution was then further defined by the Bill of Rights, which followed the ratification of the Constitution. And the Bill of Rights are another long list of things the federal government can and cannot do,

summarized with the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. The tenth Amendment, the last of the Bill of Rights, says that anything not explicitly listed in the Constitution is reserved to the states. The fourteenth Amendment turns this on its head, and this is one of the reasons why the fourteenth Amendment is such a consequential and important amendment. The fourteenth Amendment says the federal government regulates what state governments can do. The

tenth Amendment says the exact opposite. Now, the Tenth Amendment was never repealed, but the South's defeat in eighteen sixty five has sealed the fate and interpretation of the tenth Amendment. People still talk about the tenth Amendment these days, but I think they forget about eighteen sixty five when they talk about it. I think the question was settled back then. Doesn't mean that I'm happy about that or anything, Okay.

I'm just saying that that's the way it has worked out, okay, And that doesn't mean it's the end of the story. We still have these things in our law, and we still think about them and care about them, and maybe we'll do something with them. I'm not here to say that, but okay. So that's what the Fourteenth Amendment did it. It says no State shall make or enforce any law that shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of

the United States. Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny any person within his jurisdiction the equal protection of law.

Supreme Court case that federal law trump's state law. All right, it's a very important early Supreme Court case, McCulla versus Maryland.

McCulla versus Maryland. The State of Maryland had passed attacks against the federal corporation, the Bank of the United States. The idea back then was the federal government did not have the constitutional authority to set up corporations. Right, It shows a difference between our world and theirs. We kind of take corporations for granted. We can we can hardly imagine our lives without these huge federally chartered corporations everywhere,

all protected by the Bill of Rights. Remember Mitt Romney, corporations are people, my friend. We can hardly imagine our world without that. But back then, states actually tried to keep them out. They didn't want wealth and power concentrated in New York City or whatever. So Maryland attacked the Bank of the United States and that was declared void by the Supreme Court in McCullough versus Maryland. Well, later on, the state of Ohio decided they would tax the Bank of the United States.

The Supreme Court has made its ruling. Let's see them enforce it, all right. Just because the Supreme Court made a ruling and it is seen as constitutional law, did not mean that the states would obey it. After the Civil War, no one was under any illusions that the states could say no to the federal government anymore. And that's a very significant change. So that is one of the main things about the fourteenth Amendment. But let me

talk about the other ones. I'm not meaning to keep you here all day with all this talk about the legalities of reconstruction. But the other element in Section one of the fourteenth Amendment is extremely consequential. It redefines citizenship. Now, it is very important to note that the Southern States were strong armed, blackmailed, had to sit under a martial law through a very oppressive regime for years in order

to redefine what Americans understood to be citizenship. Previous to the Civil War, every state separately regulated who was eligible for the suffrage. This is a very important point. Every state had a different law about who could vote, and that was because every state was seen to have publican institutions of its own that it was responsible for. Ultimately, the Fourteenth Amendment gives us a federal definition of citizenship, and this is a very important one. This is a

this is a radical one. This has a lot to do with how American identity has developed over time. We see this this uh, this law influences American identity in major ways. We we are perhaps much more aware of that with our immigration questions today. The first part of the fourteenth Amendment says, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof our citizens, all you need to do to be a citizen is to be born here.

of Central and South Americans. You know it was it was written with regards to slaves. And I mean, I can dislike the original interpretation of the fourteenth Amendment, but it's very clearly was not designed for its current application. I guess indeed has this has huge ramifications, of course, and we can never get to the bottom of it. But Section two of the fourteenth Amendment, this, this is a very long amendment, has to do with changing the

way that representation in Congress is apportioned. You you may remember from Civics or if you've ever taken or if you've ever read the Constitution itself. The Constitution is very famous for the three fifths clause, which has to do with the apportionment of representation in Congress based on population. The three fifths clause refers to slaves counted for purposes of representation. Because they were not citizens, they were only counted as three fifths. This way, the South had a

measure of additional representation based on its slave population. The argument was, of course, that the well being of the slave population was represented in congressman, just as a father would represent the interests of his wife and children. All right, so it's we could call it a patriarchal or feudalistic

justification in a representative mode. This is of course, before women's suffrage, and men were seen as representing the interests of their womenfolk in representative institutions, and women were seen as non political members of society, that they did not have a public role in making law or executing law. And this is actually a very profound point. We know that this is mocked, dismissed. We are so used to the mockery and cynical takes about the exclusion of women.

For instance, we tend to mouth them ourselves, or even to fall into patterns of thought when we think about this, think about it a different way, if you will. The idea was that God has divided humanity into at least two groups, men and women, and women have a special role in society to foster and nurture, whereas men have a special duty and burden in society to deal out legitimate violence when necessary. All right, men go to war, women stay home. Women are not supposed to shed blood.

Women are not supposed to bear arms. All right.

slaves don't take part in politics. Politics involves the dealing out of legitimate violence, among other things. Slaves are just not a part of this. Slaves do not bear arms. Slaves are enthralled to their masters, and their masters look over them.

All right, So Section three. No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office civil or military under the United States or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as any member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the

United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may vote of two thirds of each House to remove such disability.

And this disenfranchise is a This disenfranchise is the leadership class of the South. Okay, the leadership class of the South participated in the war. This is this is a very consequential thing. And by the way, this is the justification for some of the Shenanigans who are seeing today, which I don't mean to get into right now, but

this is what the fourteenth Amendment was written for. It was written to disenfranchise an entire class of people, and it was forced into law through these extreme malevolent ways, all right, by by garrisoning black conscripts in Southern states to intimidate the population.

paper money that we had in the United States. By the way, it was all supposed to be redeemed by the by the Treasury with lawful money, and lawful money, according to the Constitution, is gold and silver coin.

that the federal government has to pay its debts. So when we have a budget crisis and the US government is deciding which bills it can afford to pay, it's definitely going to pay the interest on the national debt. It at least constitutionally, unless it violates the constitution, it

has to pay the interest on the debt. But the section goes on it says, neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave. But all such debts, obligations, and claims shall be held illegal and void. All right, So, finally, the United States government will not pay any compensation for the end of

slavery and the end. No one is going to be paid for their confederate bonds, no one will be compensated for Confederate currency. All of that is written off, no debate anymore. So it shuts down these big questions during reconstruction. But even though even though this is very constant quinchal in that it destroys an incredible amount of wealth in the South through the stroke of a pen, it's still brought up in conversation today when it comes to the

national debt. Lastly, in an conclusion section five the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress shall have the power to enforce or appropriate legislation the provisions of this article all right into the fourteenth Amendment.

yet because there's a lot in there. You know, it's incredibly dense, and I got it just a few days ago. But if people want to find more of you and more of your work, what's a good way for them to do that.

I'll make sure that you have that information. You can find more information about my work. I'm newly on Twitter. I've never been on Twitter before, but i am now kind of to promote my book. I'm at Tallman Books on Twitter, and I've got a YouTube channel as well. Look up George Bagbee on YouTube and you can find some of my recording there. I record essays things that interest me. I'm recording a couple of books there right now. I'm recording some C. S. Lewis and some GK. Chesterton right now.

as well. I'll be on Urn's show on Wednesday. That will be third I believe to discuss an article I've written, So if you want to get a look at it before I discuss it live or see some other stuff I posted, that's a good way to do that. If you want to support us directly, the best way to do it is Axios Remote Fitness and Coaching. A couple of guys in my community have launched the Fat Bastard Challenge,

which is free. It's not something I even came up with. Scratchy, who's been on here a couple of times, did which essentially a weight loss program for the first quarter of the year. I think it ends sometime in March. Heroic Whale and Arthur Dane, who both had been on the show before, are acting as judges. So I'll include a link to that. If you want to get in on the action and just do something. It's just accountability. There's no sales or anything to it, but you should do

that as well. And again, Bagbee, thank you so much for coming on.