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The architecture of Liberty · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

• 0:00
  In a world full of lies and deception, it takes courage to speak the truth.
• 0:05
  In a nation hell bent on its own destruction, it takes honor to seek a return to glory.
• 0:12
  Join us in cutting through the lies.
• 0:14
  Join us in cutting through the propaganda.
• 0:18
  Join us as we seek the truth on cutting through the fog from the America Out Loud Network.
• 0:24
  And here's your host, Wallace Garno.
• 0:28
  There's certain questions in history that can guide us by looking not at what did happen, but at what did not.
• 0:38
  Consider, for example, what would the Middle East look like today had Jimmy Carter helped the Shah prevent Iran's Islamic revolution?
• 0:47
  Iran, of course, is the biggest supporter of terrorism today.
• 0:52
  Cutter pays for a lot, but Iran is the primary sponsor of most of the uh terrorism, the Islamic terrorism in the Middle East at least, and much of the Islamic terrorism now in the world today.
• 1:04
  So what might the Middle East look like Jimmy Carter prevented the Islamic Revolution or allowed the Shah to prevent it?
• 1:12
  Another question we might ask is what would American exceptionalism look like had America won the Vietnam War.
• 1:21
  That one's interesting because we did kind of win the Vietnam War.
• 1:25
  The Tet Offensive was an absolute bloodbath for the Viet Cong.
• 1:29
  About 50 years after the war, about every 50 years, but about 30 years after the war, one of the top Viet Cong or Vietnam generals was in the United States talking with some of the veterans of the United States that had fought in the war, including some top ranking veterans that were still alive.
• 1:48
  And uh that question came up, and he said, Well, you know, the bombing of North Vietnam was so very, very destructive and so very, very effective.
• 1:56
  Had Nixon asked politely, we would have surrendered.
• 1:59
  Unfortunately, of course, we came home with our tail between our legs, and uh we did not win the Vietnam War.
• 2:06
  Another question we might ask is what would the world look like if Karl Marx preferred Adam Smith to Thomas Malthus?
• 2:13
  Thomas Malthus was the guy who said that populations always grow faster than food supplies, and as a consequence, 90% of any population will always be one bad harvest from starvation.
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  Essentially 90% of any population will always be living in a perpetual state of slow starvation.
• 2:32
  And it was Karl Marx listening to Thomas Malthus that really drove him into the direction he went with the communist manifesto.
• 2:41
  But what would have happened if he'd read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and had instead looked at how the United States and England were breaking the Malthusian model, that all of a sudden food supplies were growing much faster than populations.
• 2:56
  And most critically, this is a question that everybody seems to miss.
• 3:02
  What would the world look like had the French Revolution followed Thomas Jefferson and James Madison instead of Thomas Pain?
• 3:11
  Ladies and gentlemen gentlemen, you are on cutting through the chaos on the America Out Loud Network, where we cut through the lies and the propaganda to bring you the out loud truth.
• 3:21
  I'm your host Wallace Garnot, and today I want to talk about what I call the architecture of liberty.
• 3:28
  Now, those are all very good questions.
• 3:31
  And uh what I'm asking people to understand is that the fracture inside the Enlightenment was not just about monarchy.
• 3:39
  It was also very, very much about human nature.
• 3:42
  Those who tried to separate God from the Enlightenment values also tried to separate man from his fallen nature.
• 3:50
  Pain was the proto-marks of his era.
• 3:52
  He was an ideologue, determined to carry theory all the way to its logical conclusion, even human nature cannot reach that far.
• 4:02
  Man, simply put is incapable of utopia, and so every utopian dream fails.
• 4:09
  And it's not just communism.
• 4:11
  We always think of utopia, we think of communism, and uh it's not just communism.
• 4:15
  The truth is that any ideology will fail if taken to its logical extreme.
• 4:21
  And this is why when I call myself a libertarian, it's always with a lowercase L.
• 4:27
  This is also why Thomas Sowell's perspective on the constrained versus unconstrained visions is not only profound, but also so very, very important.
• 4:37
  You see, only those who understand mankind's flawed nature can truly understand the dangers behind utopian views.
• 4:46
  Those who believe in the unconstrained vision believe that mankind is perfectible, and thus utopia is achievable.
• 4:53
  If we can simply perfect people, if we can simply create people in the in the not the image of God because these people are primarily atheists, but if we can recreate man in the image that the society wants.
• 5:04
  And in the case of the Soviet Union, that would have been the communist model.
• 5:08
  Uh, in our in our version, well, depending on which side of the fence you're on, it might be communism, it might be fascism, it might be a free market, you know, with uh the ideals America was based on.
• 5:20
  But the concept is if you can perfect people, you can make them follow that ideology perfectly, and then the ideology can work and utopia becomes possible.
• 5:31
  But it just doesn't work.
• 5:33
  There we do have a fallen nature, and as a consequence, if you try to set up utopia, some people who try to cheat the system.
• 5:41
  Not just that, but if you have a leadership, and of course, the communist utopia is impossible to create, which is why it always stalls in the dictatorship of the proletariat.
• 5:51
  The dictatorship of the proletariat has to have leaders.
• 5:54
  And guess what kind of people are drawn to become those leaders?
• 5:59
  They are not always the best and the brightest, but they are those who most want power.
• 6:05
  Now, getting back to France, France was right to have its revolution.
• 6:10
  What failed was not the revolt, but the decision to attempt a mob form of democracy.
• 6:17
  The better path would have been to understand man's fallen nature and then to use the only governing model ever designed to restrain government power.
• 6:28
  See, pure democracy, which is what they were trying to do in the French Revolution.
• 6:33
  Pure democracy always fails.
• 6:36
  Democratic republics work not because they give the people the right to vote, but more importantly, because they limit the powers the people can collectively exercise.
• 6:46
  And though the French revolutionaries called the revolution a republic, it was a republic in name only.
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  In truth, it was a mob democracy.
• 6:55
  It was a it was an attempt to have a pure democracy.
• 6:58
  Because of that, the French Revolution lacked restraint.
• 7:02
  And once the mob ran out of royals to guillotine, well, it began to guillotine indiscriminately.
• 7:08
  It is a sad fact of history that all Napoleon really had to do to become emperor was to promise to tell the people to stop.
• 7:16
  And it really is basically that simple.
• 7:18
  This is a slight oversimplification, but it really is basically that simple.
• 7:22
  He came into Paris as the most powerful general that France had, that the revolution had, and uh, of course, they were guillotineing people left and right in a completely the mob had completely broken down and in function, and uh it was just indiscriminately killing at this point.
• 7:36
  And uh Napoleon basically said, I'll tell you what, make me emperor and I will tell you to stop.
• 7:41
  Well, he had an army behind him, so he had the ability to make them to stop.
• 7:45
  They made him emperor, he told them to stop, and it really is kind of that simple.
• 7:50
  You see, liberty does not survive by unleashing the will of the people.
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  The mob can be brutal.
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  Liberty survives by binding the people to a structure that forbids excess before excess begins.
• 8:05
  And that framework at the time of the French Revolution had already been built on the other side of the Atlantic with the United States Constitution and its federalist structure.
• 8:14
  After its revolution, Lafayette wanted to copy the American Constitution.
• 8:19
  He wanted to create basically the exact same framework within France and make France a republic, not a part of the United States, but its own republic, modeled after our constitution.
• 8:29
  Uh, you know, France really, when you think about it, probably should have listened to Lafayette and adopted our exact constitutional framework.
• 8:36
  Uh, looking back in retrospect today, you know, with with 200 years of hindsight, I might push one step further.
• 8:45
  Imagine the world of France become the 14th state.
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  Now let's start out talking about institutional rot.
• 8:52
  France's failure was not just political, it was also philosophical.
• 8:57
  By rejecting the American model of ordered liberty, France rejected the only enlightenment framework built to restrain human pride before it metastasized into institutional power.
• 9:09
  France also rejected its own tradition during the revolutionary period, including the Judeo-Christian moral inheritance that grounded public life.
• 9:17
  Morality was forced to stand on reason alone, and reason is never enough to hold a people together once they no longer agree on first principles.
• 9:28
  When morality is detached from anything higher than the individual or the state, it quickly becomes contested and ultimately it must be imposed.
• 9:38
  See, what happens is you have your morality, I have my morality, we disagree on certain things, somebody else's their morality, they disagree on certain things.
• 9:48
  Uh, somebody else says, you know, you guys are infidels and the worldly perfect if we got rid of the infidels.
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  You have conflict.
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  When you have different moral visions, when you have different moral codes, when you have different first parties.
• 10:00
  Principles upon which to base these things.
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  Conflict invariably emerges.
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  And if you don't have anything above the state in order to draw that morality from, in the Christian world, we would say it comes from God, then you start having people arguing about what that morality should be.
• 10:19
  And at that point, it becomes the morality of the lowest common denominator, which by definition is basically the same as not having any morality at all.
• 10:28
  The French Revolution, they tried to impose morality by mob.
• 10:32
  Whatever the mob wanted, pure democracy, that became the morality of the time.
• 10:37
  This is something many in America are looking at trying to do today.
• 10:41
  But without a shared moral framework, the mob started sending more and more people to the guillotine for violating what was an ever shifting morality.
• 10:51
  It was basically if you didn't do what the mob wanted you to do today, or maybe yesterday you did what they wanted you to do yesterday, but today they think, yeah, maybe you shouldn't have done that.
• 11:00
  Well, Mr.
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  Guillotine's waiting for you.
• 11:03
  And that was true until Napoleon became emperor, and then as emperor, he was able to impose his moral order from above.
• 11:13
  Now his moral order, of course, had him at the top of the pecking order.
• 11:16
  He was going to be emperor for life.
• 11:18
  He would have eventually named his son emperor.
• 11:20
  See, France was completely lost without virtue.
• 11:24
  And the same lesson we are seeing now repeated across the entire Western world.
• 11:30
  Today what we are seeing are large numbers of people not only rejecting belief in God, but rejecting all that comes with belief in God.
• 11:38
  And that, of course, includes the shared moral order that has always held Western nations together.
• 11:45
  If we do not regain that shared moral footing, we'll either have mob morality, and unfortunately, the bloodshed that comes with it.
• 11:53
  If you look at England, they're on the verge of a civil war.
• 11:56
  They are bordering that kind of bloodshed right now, or more likely we'll end up with a state-defined morality, somebody running the country.
• 12:05
  You know, um Dami just won, and you've got people like AOC and Bernie Sanders, they would like to be in charge to create a socialist states of America and then to impose that socialist moral order down on the rest of us.
• 12:18
  And what I want people to understand is that state-defined moral systems always bend into tyranny, and tyranny knows no restraint.
• 12:29
  That's why Stalin was so bad.
• 12:31
  That's why Hitler was so bad.
• 12:32
  When you start leading into tyranny, there is no restraint and tyranny.
• 12:37
  In tyranny, the government can do whatever it wants, and if you get in the way, well, the modern version of Mr.
• 12:44
  Guillotine is waiting for you.
• 12:46
  You see, once a straight is severed, then the intellectual class within our universities gradually ceases to be a steward of truth and becomes an architect of ideology.
• 12:56
  We're seeing that today, aren't we?
• 12:58
  It is in fact the university system that is teaching our children to reject our shared moral values.
• 13:07
  Understand our university system was not founded by the government, but by private actors working out of the Enlightenment, trying to illuminate the world through science and reason such that this illumination could be taught to the rest of us.
• 13:21
  These institutions were built outside of government, precisely so that the government could never control the source of truth or the formation of conscience.
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  Harvard was founded in 1636 by Puritan ministers.
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  Yale was founded later in 1701 by clergy who were frustrated that Harvard seemed to be drifting away from his theological seriousness.
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  Princeton was created in 1746 by Presbyterian revivalists seeking to preserve both the liberty of conscience and classical reason.
• 13:53
  These were not bureaucratic organs of the state, but private academies rooted in civilizational mission and a strong civilizational mission to form people who were then capable of self-government.
• 14:05
  That is what our country was founded on, and that is what our institutions were initially designed to do to form people who are capable of self-government.
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  That means to govern themselves.
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  That means that you are sovereign within your own life.
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  Your family is sovereign within your own home.
• 14:23
  The government has its you know it does its thing, but it leaves you alone as much as possible to live your life however you see fit, provided you allow others to do the same.
• 14:35
  So that's what they're trying to do is teach people virtue, to teach people how to survive in a free country and how to be good to one another such that they were capable of self-government.
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  The university was once understood as the guardian of our worldview.
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  Now, that worldview may of course change and adapt over time.
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  Time does change.
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  I tell people that every generation is walking across a bridge.
• 15:01
  We take from our parents on one side of the bridge, we carry across to the other side of the bridge, and we give to our children.
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  What are we taking?
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  We're taking our values, our culture, our knowledge, all of the parts, everything that comes from our civilization.
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  We are carrying our civilization forward.
• 15:18
  Now, as we do, we may find some things that worked on the one side of the bridge, but don't work while we're on the bridge and probably won't work on the other side of the bridge.
• 15:27
  Well, we discard those.
• 15:28
  We may also find that we have to add things to what we're carrying in order to get us across the bridge because times do change and we do need to make those changes.
• 15:37
  But what we don't do is just take it all and chuck it all over the bridge and say, you know what, we don't need what our parents gave us.
• 15:44
  We're smarter than them.
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  We'll do it all from scratch ourselves.
• 15:47
  That you don't do.
• 15:50
  No, the universities are supposed to be guardians of the world view.
• 15:54
  And while they change it over time, it adapts over time.
• 15:58
  It only changes or adapts carefully and only with good reason.
• 16:03
  That's the way it's supposed to work.
• 16:05
  Unfortunately, that's not how it works.
• 16:07
  Today our universities have been reduced to nothing but licensed bureaus, and they have reduced themselves to that by rejecting the world view of our civilization entirely.
• 16:18
  Legitimity once legitimacy once flowed outward from the institution to the society enlightened.
• 16:24
  The state depended on the university as constitutional order requires a morally literate citizenry.
• 16:31
  Today the institutions flow inward, teaching students to question our nation's legitimacy, and you know, basically to reject the world view that the universities were initially created to protect.
• 16:42
  So we created the universities to protect our worldview, our civilization, and now they're telling people to question it and tear it down.
• 16:50
  Well, universities have changed things around entirely.
• 16:54
  They were built to protect us from government, to create people that were capable of self-governance, but now they seek legitimacy from the state, and they repay that dependence by producing subjects rather than statesmen.
• 17:06
  Professional bureaucrats lean left, even republicans are in office, and of course the universities follow.
• 17:13
  Professionalized obedience, generally to the left has replaced our cultivated independence.
• 17:19
  This was in retrospect unavoidable.
• 17:22
  The very nature of educating leaker of individuals or intellectuals necessarily separates them from the people that they are expected to lead.
• 17:31
  Well, over time, those in our institutions began to see themselves not only as above the masses, but above objective truth.
• 17:40
  Such people began to think they could shape rather than describe reality.
• 17:44
  And at that point, postmodernism was born.
• 17:48
  Postmodernism did not corrupt the universities by accident.
• 17:52
  No, it was invited in as justification.
• 17:55
  Once the academy abandoned the possibility of objective truth, it could never again be held accountable to anything outside of itself.
• 18:04
  My son tells me, by the way, that postmodernism is not really a thing outside of the art world, and certainly in the art world, it does serve a purpose.
• 18:12
  When you look at postmodern art, okay, cool, I get it.
• 18:16
  But it should have stayed in the art world.
• 18:18
  It should never have metastasized into English, and then from there throughout the university, it should never have left the art world.
• 18:24
  It should have lived in the art world and it should have eventually died in the art world.
• 18:29
  Whatever its insights about language and power, postmodernism has become, is a license to treat truth as an act of will rather than as correspondence with reality.
• 18:42
  And once imported in gatekeeping institutions, well, it took accountability and turned it away from truth.
• 18:48
  It turned it toward what looks like an intellectual version, frankly, of the French revolution's mob.
• 18:54
  This fake truth has no basis in objective reality.
• 18:58
  And as with all things based on the mob, it shifts constantly, usually in the wrong direction.
• 19:06
  The thing is is that if no truth exists, well, then no betrayal is possible.
• 19:11
  And if no meaning is fixed, well, then no obligation is binding.
• 19:16
  If all narratives are equal, then the only thing left to arbitrate between them is force, and what has the university become?
• 19:23
  It's become the place where force is declared moral in whatever circumstances the universities see fit such that just such that uh social justice warriors can go out on the street and deploy that force.
• 19:36
  We are seeing our children turned into what do you call them?
• 19:40
  A militia?
• 19:41
  I don't know what you call them.
• 19:42
  When you see the when you see the the violence on the streets, the mobbing on the streets, the rioting, the looting, when you see all of that, that's being taught in our universities.
• 19:52
  They're being taught to do this.
• 19:54
  The universities are teaching them to tear society down.
• 19:58
  How bad is it?
• 20:00
  Entire fields have been built on the premise that reality is simply a social construct that we can rearrange.
• 20:05
  Gender studies in its extreme forms, just as one example, is premised on the claim that biology is oppressive and that identity is more real than chromosomes.
• 20:15
  They're throwing science right out the window and telling people we can just make it up as we go along.
• 20:20
  Look at postcolonial studies.
• 20:22
  They insist that achievement is suspect unless it comes from a marginalized group, and that Western advancement must be viewed as theft.
• 20:30
  Critical race theory treats disparities as proof of invisible social systems that can only be corrected by tearing society down.
• 20:39
  Queer theory to find subversion is virtue and makes normlessness a moral imperative.
• 20:46
  These fields don't focus on knowledge.
• 20:48
  They focus on grievance.
• 20:49
  They can drench, they could credentialize and weaponize grievance.
• 20:54
  And they exist completely outside objective reality.
• 20:57
  They're designed not to build, but to destroy.
• 21:00
  Postmodernism, therefore, did not merely weaken the academy, it replaced scholarship with a liturgy of resentment.
• 21:08
  Knowledge no longer has to be true.
• 21:10
  It only has to be politically useful to those who hold institutional power.
• 21:15
  A person can now earn a doctorate without encountering a single testable claim, measurable standard, or falsifiable thesis.
• 21:24
  They are credentialed not because they have mastered reality, but because they have learned how to deny it under scholarly garb.
• 21:32
  The Enlightenment gave birth to institutions that eventually repudiated the Enlightenment's own premise.
• 21:38
  That's what actually happened.
• 21:39
  The premise of the Enlightenment is that the truth is objective, that the truth exists outside of power.
• 21:45
  That's what the universities were taught to teach.
• 21:47
  Well, now they teach the opposite.
• 21:49
  That truth is constructed by whomever controls the institutions.
• 21:54
  The Enlightenment produced schools to defend liberty, but postmodernism has converted them into factories that train the next set of social justice warriors with the intention of with the intention of tearing liberty down.
• 22:09
  And ladies and gentlemen, the consequences are visible everywhere.
• 22:14
  Schools of education produce teachers who cannot do math but can recite privileged taxonomies.
• 22:20
  Law schools graduate lawyers who know more about lived experience than due process.
• 22:25
  Medical schools now instruct future physicians to prioritize equity outcomes over medical outcomes.
• 22:32
  Even engineering programs are being written to incorporate decolonized design, pretending that stuff like gravity is just a cultural bias.
• 22:41
  What was once an engine of illumination has been reduced to a credentialed caste justifying its own existence.
• 22:48
  The academy no longer prepares citizens capable of self-government.
• 22:52
  No, it prepares dependents who cannot imagine life without being governed.
• 22:57
  Ladies and gentlemen, I want to announce here today that the institutions are officially dead.
• 23:04
  Let's talk about root causes.
• 23:06
  Nothing happens without root causes.
• 23:08
  The rot we see in our universities, it didn't begin with the Vietnam War like everybody thinks.
• 23:13
  It began the moment Europe decided that liberty could survive without the structure that makes liberty possible.
• 23:20
  In other words, the French revolution not listening to Lafayette and putting in a mob.
• 23:24
  Institutions do not collapse when they become wrong.
• 23:28
  No, they collapse when they become unaccountable.
• 23:30
  Some want to blame postmodernism, some want to blame foreign donations or cultural Marxism or some other such thing for the collapse of the institutions.
• 23:38
  But ladies and gentlemen, those things, maybe they're causes, maybe they're only symptoms.
• 23:44
  But what they're definitely not are root causes.
• 23:47
  And if we want to truly solve the problem, we must address the root causes.
• 23:53
  Causes return unless we address the root causes.
• 23:57
  Now, postmodernism can provide a pseudo-intellectual excuse to move from revealing reality to an attempt to rebuild it.
• 24:04
  But the root cause of collapse was built into the institutions from the start.
• 24:10
  The institutions created credentials.
• 24:12
  Well, credentials created prestige.
• 24:14
  What did prestige create?
• 24:16
  Ego.
• 24:16
  An ego listens to the voice on the opposite shoulder from conscience.
• 24:21
  That's right, ego listens to pride.
• 24:23
  We should not be surprised that over hundreds of years, pride begets pride.
• 24:28
  I've heard it said the republics have about a 200-year shelf life.
• 24:31
  I've got an article out there about how rebirth is the rule and collapse the exception.
• 24:35
  But while it is true that civilizations often radically shift or collapse in that general time frame, that is the exception.
• 24:43
  The truth is that civilizations don't have to collapse.
• 24:49
  It's not our time has come and we're over.
• 24:51
  It doesn't work that way.
• 24:52
  We can have rebirth, we can't rebuild to become stronger than ever.
• 24:56
  It's like a romance.
• 24:58
  We've all had weekend romances.
• 24:59
  We've also all had two-week romances, six-month romances, eight-month romances, and even one-year romances.
• 25:07
  There are specific reasons why romance is often fall apart at those specific moments.
• 25:13
  What is a weekend romance?
• 25:15
  That's a relationship between people who don't really like each other but are physically attracted.
• 25:19
  They last a weekend.
• 25:21
  A two-week romance is between two people who do like each other, but where at least one of them is something about them that makes the pair simply incompatible, takes about two weeks and it burns out.
• 25:31
  Six to eight months, that's about how long it takes to become comfortable enough in a relationship for the real me to emerge, and both parties are doing that at about the same time frame.
• 25:40
  Up until that point, we tend to put our best foot forward.
• 25:44
  And a year, that's that's when engagement starts to become an expectation.
• 25:48
  So, you know, these romances they follow a universal psychological arc.
• 25:53
  Well, so too do institutions.
• 25:55
  It is not civilizations or republics then that have a 200-year shelf life, but intellectual structures.
• 26:01
  It takes about 200 years for the institutions to rot.
• 26:05
  Whether a civilization collapses at that point is determined by whether or not the rot continues.
• 26:11
  The institutions have lost their first principles, and thanks to a mixture of size, power, and pride, we're not getting them back without first replacing them.
• 26:22
  The institutions will fight that, of course, but if they lose that fight, they will do what all organisms do to survive.
• 26:29
  They will adapt, copying the new system in order to regain their former place.
• 26:35
  Now, if the institutions are dead, and if we're not going to be able to get them back without replacing them, where do we find a new intellectual class?
• 26:42
  That's a good question.
• 26:43
  Now that the institutions are dead, that's an obvious question.
• 26:47
  From where will a new intellectual class emerge?
• 26:49
  Luckily, I've got an answer for that.
• 26:52
  The natural impulse is, of course, to look for it from within the universities.
• 26:55
  But that's not going to work.
• 26:57
  As Sean Conry said of the Intouchables, when the barrel is rotten, you go to the tree.
• 27:02
  Obair's the tree, the intellectual class actually existed before the institutions.
• 27:07
  So if we go back to before the institutions and look at what built the institutions in the first place, that is where we find the tree.
• 27:15
  The institutions were originally built to carry forward the best of lay knowledge to future generations.
• 27:22
  Though the next intellectual class will emerge the same way.
• 27:25
  It'll emerge from medical doctors and engineers, and for people with degrees in mathematics, manufacturing, or other tangible skills.
• 27:33
  These be people advancing real disciplines rather than just managing abstractions.
• 27:38
  And perhaps more importantly, they'll be people who are still responsible when they are wrong.
• 27:43
  That's what the institutions have lost.
• 27:45
  They're no longer responsible when they're wrong.
• 27:47
  If the ideas blow up, they just blame somebody else.
• 27:50
  Now, some credential thinkers joined the lay scholars who built Harvard Yale and Princeton.
• 27:56
  But most of the original intellectual class came from practitioners who excelled in their fields and educated themselves in other areas outside, and they did outside of those formal structures.
• 28:07
  Whatever they learned, whether in economics, philosophy, history, or whatever.
• 28:13
  They were self-taught, and so they did not bring the institutional baggage with them.
• 28:17
  Their authority didn't rest on reputation.
• 28:20
  They had to master it.
• 28:21
  It rested on their mastery.
• 28:23
  And of course, they formed outside the rot.
• 28:26
  If we go back earlier, even England's Oxford and Cambridge were founded by those passing on practical knowledge, but unlike the American model, they developed under caste assumptions to educate a ruling class.
• 28:38
  This is why America, rather than England, produced a system designed for liberty to widen as much as to expand.
• 28:45
  Now, Donald Trump, he doesn't really mark the beginning of a new era.
• 28:48
  He marks the end of an old one.
• 28:50
  He is not the figure who lifts us out.
• 28:52
  He is the figure who exposes the decay so that it can no longer hide behind legacy or prestige.
• 28:58
  Restoration will not come from him.
• 29:00
  No, it will come from those who follow him and who still wish to learn.
• 29:05
  When institutions depart from the purpose for which they were created, authority simply passes to those who remain faithful to that purpose to truth.
• 29:13
  Intellectual legitimacy does not come from age or from pedigree.
• 29:16
  It's not from inherited prestige.
• 29:18
  No, it comes from the continued custody of truth.
• 29:22
  Truth is not the property of institutions either.
• 29:25
  Liberty of mind precedes permission from gatekeepers and a free people do not need permission to speak.
• 29:33
  The Enlightenment did not make the university sacred.
• 29:36
  The pursuit of truth did.
• 29:38
  The university has abandoned that pursuit.
• 29:40
  It no longer enlightens, and by severing itself from reality, it has also severed itself from authority.
• 29:47
  The custodianship of truth has already passed to those outside the academic estate.
• 29:54
  The responsibility to illuminate therefore falls to those who still will.
• 29:58
  Discovery, debate,
• 30:00
  Debate, argument, and refinement must now be carried forward by independent thinkers who have not traded courage for credentials.
• 30:08
  A new intellectual class must rise to resume the work the institutions abandoned.
• 30:13
  If someday the old universities return to the pursuit of truth, they may stand alongside replaces them.
• 30:19
  But until then, their seal is no longer a mark of authority, and society must declare independence from them.
• 30:27
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• 34:50
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• 34:54
  I'm your host Wallace Garneau.
• 34:56
  We are talking about the architecture of liberty, and we were talking about how society must declare independence from the gatekeepers, from the intellectual class, from what everybody calls the institutions, such as our university, our broken university system.
• 35:10
  Now I said must declare univers with independence from the old institutions.
• 35:14
  What that means is that legitimacy now lives in a distributed commons.
• 35:19
  In other words, peer review in the open, standards bodies rebuilt outside the old guilds, independent journals and fellowships, cross-disciplinary salons and apprenticeship pipelines tied to actual production.
• 35:32
  These are not substitutes for universities, but they are the ordering principles that precede them.
• 35:38
  Authority eventually reattaches to verifiable work, to transparent critique, and to standards that can be replicated by anyone anywhere.
• 35:47
  That is, of course, the way the enlightenment works.
• 35:50
  That means that the light has not really gone out.
• 35:52
  It simply moved.
• 35:54
  Wherever truth is defended with honesty and moral courage, a new enlightenment begins.
• 35:59
  Now we will not reform without sacrifice.
• 36:02
  Professionals are going to have to risk status for speech.
• 36:05
  Politicians are going to have to be willing to surrender power and cancel culture.
• 36:10
  It's not going to give up without a fight.
• 36:12
  But understand, apologying to cancel culture does not work.
• 36:17
  So when you're sacrificing righteously, we can also do so with courage and conviction, knowing that the public at large will see through cancel culture into the virtue of sacrifice.
• 36:29
  More to the point, if the institutions no longer have legitimacy, then they can't really cancel anyone anyway.
• 36:36
  And by the way, none of this is hypothetical.
• 36:38
  It is all happened before.
• 36:40
  The rise of America's early universities followed the rot of those in England.
• 36:44
  The public university system arose in response to the rod of the Ivy League.
• 36:49
  Jordan Peterson's Peterson Academy is existing.
• 36:51
  It's being built and coming about because of the present rot in modern universities.
• 36:57
  And believe me, the Peterson Academy will not be the only one.
• 37:01
  Others will follow.
• 37:03
  And in time that will necessitate a new and independent accreditation a credition, I can't say accreditation, accreditation body that recognizes only those programs that return to education's first principles and that base themselves on truth.
• 37:18
  I don't know why I had trouble with that word, but there it goes.
• 37:20
  Ironically, that new body will not be able to accredit the Ivy League until the Ivy League learns to adapt.
• 37:28
  In time, the new institutions will be built will also begin to rot.
• 37:32
  Everything eventually rots.
• 37:33
  As I said, it's about a 200-year pattern.
• 37:36
  And that pattern never ends.
• 37:38
  The institutions don't rot so much as those within them do.
• 37:41
  That's really the problem is that the people within the institutions rot.
• 37:44
  And they do so because of the fallen nature of man.
• 37:48
  Every 200 or so odd years, we have to start this process all over again.
• 37:53
  And it's no coincidence that America needs to be reborn at the same time its institutions do.
• 37:58
  Our political rot, it's a part of the exact same cycle.
• 38:01
  Our political leaders, by the way, on both sides have forgotten that they exist for the country rather than the country for them, and have begun to do things that 200 years ago would have led to the gallows poll.
• 38:13
  Nobody seems to be able to put their finger in exactly why Trump is so hated, so let me try.
• 38:18
  He is hated because he comes for the exact same place from which the new intellectual class will emerge.
• 38:25
  I personally view Trump not so much as a hero as in this as an anti-hero, but understand that an anti-hero, when you're looking at what we're looking at is often the tip of the spear.
• 38:35
  One might ask how the transition from the old intellectual class to a new one will happen, but the new intellectual class already exists.
• 38:43
  It's just not very big yet.
• 38:45
  It will expand, and now that we know where to look for it, it will likely expand faster than we expect.
• 38:52
  Terms of transferring legitimacy, that too is happening.
• 38:56
  I talked last week about what I call fight or flight politics.
• 38:59
  Well, the political left is heading toward kind of a political version of cardiac arrest.
• 39:04
  And we see that approaching by watching polls of the popularity of the Democrat Party.
• 39:09
  It's dying.
• 39:11
  It's going to be replaced by something after the collapse, of course.
• 39:14
  But what we have today, the Democrat Party today, the DNC leadership of today is dying.
• 39:20
  Now, once that cardiac arrest moment happens, the credibility of the left's current leadership will necessarily change, even among their own voters.
• 39:29
  Whether that is something akin to what the party was in the 1990s, or whether it's going to flip over to the new AOC Mamdanny wing, that's going to determine whether the party remains national or if it becomes regional.
• 39:41
  Believe me, AOC and Memdami are not going to run a national party.
• 39:45
  They're not going to put a president in place.
• 39:47
  They may run, they won't win.
• 39:49
  So either way, the will of the public is going to transfer legitimacy to the new intellectual class.
• 39:54
  And here is the crux a rebirth of institutions does not remain academic for long.
• 40:00
  Whenever legitimacy relocates, political authority will eventually follow.
• 40:05
  So let's talk about what that looks like.
• 40:07
  America reborn.
• 40:09
  The Constitution was built on the assumption that truth exists outside of government and that free people can only govern themselves when truth is not controlled by power.
• 40:19
  Once a new intellectual class restores custodianship of truth, the states will again be able to assert the sovereignty the federal architecture presupposes.
• 40:29
  Intellectual renewal is therefore the precondition for political renewal.
• 40:34
  And federal reform becomes possible only after the authority defined reality is passed back to we the people.
• 40:41
  Once we have new institutions, then we will necessarily enter a new age.
• 40:46
  But we have to decide is what this new age will look like.
• 40:49
  It's coming whether we like it or not.
• 40:51
  Also, the renewal is happening specifically inside the United States, so we're going to have to figure out how to export it back to the rest of the Western world.
• 41:00
  The answer, by the way, is not in retreat from liberty.
• 41:04
  And it's definitely not by handing power back to the prior unelected elites who believe civilization can only endure if they're in charge of it.
• 41:12
  No, we do not want freedom restrained.
• 41:14
  The solution points the other way.
• 41:17
  We need an expansion of self-government, not of bureaucracy.
• 41:21
  We need to return to constitutional limits on federal power so that liberty can scale.
• 41:26
  I already touched on this last week when I talked about from the lie to the blueprint, but I'm going to expand actually several weeks ago, but I'm going to expand on it here.
• 41:35
  The Constitution is an empowering document that defines what the federal government can do.
• 41:40
  It's an empowering document, and the Bill of Rights is a constraining document that defines what no government at any level can ever do.
• 41:50
  Any nation that is willing to abide by that framework should be willing to join, but only if that framework is actually followed.
• 41:58
  If this framework within this framework, the states, not the federal government, are truly the sovereign entities.
• 42:04
  The federal government exists only within the narrow space defined for an Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, and it's a very short section.
• 42:14
  The federal government was never supposed to control the states.
• 42:17
  It was only supposed to do the very few things that the states cannot do on their own.
• 42:24
  From its onset, it's what the United Nations pretends to be, a covenant of sovereign equals bound by moral law.
• 42:32
  That's what our federal government is supposed to be.
• 42:34
  The United Nations pretends to be that.
• 42:36
  Our federal government was designed to be that.
• 42:40
  The Tenth Amendment, incidentally, reaffirms the federal boundaries such that anything not explicitly given to the federal government is supposed to remain with the states or the people.
• 42:51
  The Bill of Rights then stood stands as a firewall, protecting the individual from intrusion at every level.
• 42:57
  This, by the way, is an ingenious idea that allows the individual, and I mean all individuals, to flourish just as far as their time and talents can take them.
• 43:07
  We have lots of things, of course, that are unconstitutional.
• 43:10
  Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a plethora of other government programs are all constitutional if done by the states, but they are not constitutional when done at the federal level.
• 43:22
  The courts then don't have to order those programs completely removed, but they could order them spun off onto the states, which is of course where they belong.
• 43:31
  Now I want to be clear.
• 43:33
  Any spin-off must include multi-year funding transfers, beneficiary portability, and state compacts to avoid cliff effects.
• 43:41
  The idea is not to hurt people.
• 43:43
  It is to ensure that we are helping them at the appropriate level of governance.
• 43:47
  And why is it important to help people at the appropriate level of governance?
• 43:51
  Well, because governance is most responsive where it is most local.
• 43:54
  Your mayor is far more likely to know you than is the president of the United States.
• 43:59
  So the notion that everything must be done top down is absolutely false.
• 44:04
  We want bottom-up self-governing systems.
• 44:06
  You want self-governing systems wherever and whenever possible.
• 44:11
  You want things that run themselves.
• 44:13
  You want governments at the lowest level practical where it is the most responsive to the people.
• 44:20
  Reapplying federalism, however, is not enough.
• 44:24
  Our forefathers did not put in backstops to prevent federal expansion in the future.
• 44:28
  And now that we know that it will happen, we need to put backstops in place.
• 44:33
  Power corrupts.
• 44:34
  And as that corruption grows, so too does the desire for more power.
• 44:39
  That is a problem in human nature rather than a problem in our governance structure, and the solution is to ensure that this kind of corruption grows in a way that keeps it in constant check.
• 44:49
  The framework must create checks and balances between the states and the federal government, such that as the two work against one another, they also prevent one another from expanding beyond their scope.
• 45:00
  That requires giving the states the final word in interpreting the Constitution.
• 45:05
  Now we need a constitutional amendment that gives state legislatures the power to collectively nullify any federal law, regulation, or court ruling by declaring that it exceeds the enumerated powers of the federal government.
• 45:19
  No agency in Washington should have the ability to rewrite the civic compact of Utah, or if the United States expands perhaps Jerusalem simply by issuing a rule.
• 45:29
  No, individual states should not be able to nullify federal programs and laws, but there needs to be a framework in which the states can collectively do so.
• 45:37
  Maybe it's a majority of states, maybe we require a supermajority, but some sort of framework is needed to allow states to collectively nullify federal programs and laws that violate the Constitution.
• 45:49
  The nullification, this nullification process, that only guardrails too to prevent abuse.
• 45:55
  And I'm not going to tell you exactly what it should look like.
• 45:58
  We need to debate exactly what that amendment will look like, because we need to get it right.
• 46:02
  There will, for example, be a huge difference between requiring majority of states versus requiring a two-thirds majority of states.
• 46:09
  We also need to make sure there's always enough time between the start of the process and any vote to ensure ample debate any time nullification is attempted.
• 46:18
  The bottom line is all new federal powers should be approved by the states, either implicitly by doing nothing or by nullification failing.
• 46:28
  And any state within the Union should be able to start that process.
• 46:33
  The bottom line is the Constitution is still the highest law of the land.
• 46:36
  So following it as written is supposed to be the law.
• 46:41
  Now I don't believe the federal legislature is going to vote itself smaller, and whatever Trump is able to cut some future president can simply restore.
• 46:48
  It is the courts that will have to do the heavy lifting.
• 46:51
  If majority of Supreme Court justices decide that unconstitutional powers are unconstitutional, even if they have been in place for a long time.
• 47:08
  Those suits could be brought by states or by individuals, and we might already have a Supreme Court that would be willing to go along.
• 47:15
  Think about that.
• 47:16
  They might already be in place.
• 47:18
  We also need to keep electing people, particularly for president who believe in an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, and that may require civics classes.
• 47:28
  It is the living document interpretation that allowed the federal government to expand in the first place.
• 47:34
  The public needs to be taught to reject the living document interpretation.
• 47:38
  We can have honest disagreements about interpretation, but honest disagreements do not ignore what the Constitution actually says.
• 47:48
  We all know that America was not perfect when it was founded, but the American system was built to become more perfect over time.
• 47:56
  The Constitution says this explicitly.
• 47:59
  The preamble calls for a more perfect unit.
• 48:02
  It doesn't call for a perfect one.
• 48:03
  We have over time made it less perfect in construct, even if we even as we have made it more perfect in terms of application across groups.
• 48:13
  It is time, ladies and gentlemen, to also renew it in form.
• 48:17
  Now let's talk about exporting liberty.
• 48:20
  For this model to grow, the states must reclaim their original role as guardians of limited government.
• 48:25
  Without that, any nation joining the United States would not be entering the Constitutional Republic the founders built.
• 48:32
  It would be submitting to the administrative state that supplanted it.
• 48:36
  If we can reduce the federal government, though, back to doing only what it was created to do, then suddenly France could join, just as in Lafayette's time while still being France.
• 48:47
  That is the critical piece.
• 48:48
  The difference now is that the United States, which was once the weaker nation, is now the stronger one.
• 48:55
  We are in fact so strong compared to other nations that joining guarantees security.
• 49:02
  The United States of 1789 had little to offer the world.
• 49:05
  Most of Europe thought the American experiment would fail.
• 49:08
  Well, now they know we're now we know they were wrong.
• 49:11
  America became the most powerful force on earth because of that framework.
• 49:16
  Our strength is proof of that framework.
• 49:18
  And when used correctly, by the way, as you can see looking back at history, it works.
• 49:22
  That's how we got so powerful to begin with.
• 49:25
  The fact that we are now weakening is proof that our strength will not continue outside that framework and that we need to return to it.
• 49:33
  If we do go back to true federalism as designed, the security guarantees of statehood could look very appealing to other nations built on liberty.
• 49:42
  We could become a super nation of liberty that spans the globe, and that is utterly untouchable militarily from without.
• 49:52
  The methodology, by the way, to allow new states to join already exists.
• 49:56
  It consists of a treaty plus an admission act, plus enabling legislation.
• 50:00
  And if needed, targeted amendments for representation and cultural autonomy.
• 50:06
  There is looking back, there's really no reason this framework could not include modern allies.
• 50:11
  I can easily imagine Germany or Poland retaining their languages, their customs, and their legal traditions while adopting the same constitutional protections that are enjoyed by citizens in Michigan and Wisconsin.
• 50:24
  Their identity would be secured.
• 50:27
  Here's a better example.
• 50:28
  Consider Israel.
• 50:29
  Iran attacks Israel today because it calculates risk based on Israel standing alone.
• 50:34
  Well, if Israel were a sovereign state within a restored Union, an attack would carry the weight of a direct assault on the United States and would be met with an overwhelming force.
• 50:45
  Israel would still maintain cultural autonomy under a properly enforced Tenth Amendment, but its security would be absolutely unassailable.
• 50:54
  Israel would be allowed to have a strictly Jewish character too, as long as that character is political in nature and not predicated on belief.
• 51:03
  This, by the way, is precisely how Israel operates today.
• 51:07
  Cultural self-definition remains lawful so long as civil rights and equal protection bind every citizen.
• 51:15
  No civil disability can rest on creator ancestry.
• 51:19
  Even by the way, the problem of Islam is solved.
• 51:22
  As in this framework, Islam could only involve personal submission to Sharia.
• 51:27
  Forced submission would be prevented by the Bill of Rights within the Union.
• 51:31
  If a state should try to implement Sharia in a way that violates the Bill of Rights, the federal government could act decisively to store the rights of the people.
• 51:39
  Alaska, Hawaii, Texas, they were all once more distant and culturally distinct than most Americans remember.
• 51:46
  What I'm talking about, an expansion of the Union, we've done this before.
• 51:50
  We already share military alliances, intellectual networks, and economic ties across the Western world.
• 51:56
  A constitutional union is a logical extension of what already exists.
• 52:01
  See, the Constitution is not really what makes America unique.
• 52:04
  It's the Bill of Rights.
• 52:05
  Moral relativism, moral relativism erodes rights quickly when they are not enshrined beyond reach.
• 52:12
  But in this union, the Bill of Rights would be as in the union today they are.
• 52:21
  It's global inertia.
• 52:22
  The global ruling class distrusts liberty as liberty transfers power back to ordinary people.
• 52:28
  The global elites want that control for themselves, so taking this proposal seriously would cause major pushback by the globalist groups.
• 52:36
  This framework, however, does not just address encroachment by the WEF or the UN.
• 52:42
  No, it makes those organizations obsolete.
• 52:44
  This is a model that maximizes human potential in a way the global elite can complain about, but they can't stop.
• 52:53
  Some say our national collapse is inevitable, but collapse only becomes inevitable when people wait for existing institutions to reform.
• 53:01
  I am explicitly calling for new institutions under a new intellectual framework.
• 53:06
  The Constitution was built by the way exactly for this moment.
• 53:10
  It was not written to help us sift through rubble after collapse, but to restore balance before collapse occurs.
• 53:18
  The founders designed a system capable of expansion, not as empire, and not under central control, but as a shield for liberty that can widen to include any people willing to uphold its principles.
• 53:30
  Some may call this empire building, but you can't really call it empire when it is done by consent.
• 53:36
  Empires are built by conquering.
• 53:38
  This is voluntary.
• 53:40
  We could even discuss a mechanism where states could leave as a threat that some might is a great way to keep the federal government constrained.
• 53:47
  It's not a question of whether or not other countries will join.
• 53:50
  If we reform our nation around our first principles in such a way that we are worthy, nations that still wish to remain free will gravitate toward the shield we represent, not out of allegiance to the United States, but out of allegiance to the liberty of their own people.
• 54:07
  Poland joined NATO for protection against Russia.
• 54:09
  Now it wonders if the rest of NATO really would come to their aid.
• 54:12
  Well, statehood, not as subject, but as a sovereign equal, with their military fully integrated into our own, answers that question definitively.
• 54:22
  England need not worry about becoming Islamic state.
• 54:24
  It accepts the Bill of Rights as supreme.
• 54:27
  The role of government is to protect liberty, not to manage decline.
• 54:31
  Federalism only works when the people practice the virtues that make liberty livable.
• 54:36
  That's courage, honesty, restraint.
• 54:39
  All with the ability to solve problems of the lowest competent level before appealing upward.
• 54:44
  Our constitution was a moral structure before it was a legal one.
• 54:50
  Its strength depends on a citizenry capable of self-government.
• 54:54
  If the federal government returned to its proper scale, we would find that liberty can expand again, and if liberty expands, so too can civilization.
• 55:04
  Real federalism allows California to attempt a socialist model if it wishes, provided it does not violate anyone's civil rights, and provided that people remain free to leave.
• 55:15
  That is genuine pluralism.
• 55:17
  That is how a diverse system stays stable without force.
• 55:22
  Mendami wants to become a socialist city.
• 55:25
  Knock yourself out.
• 55:26
  Just don't tell people they can't leave.
• 55:28
  And ladies and gentlemen, this is not a fantasy.
• 55:31
  This is a framework to liberty deliberately designed to be lived.
• 55:35
  The stumbling block is not the vision.
• 55:37
  The stumbling block is getting the world to look through the lens of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, rather than through the lens of Thomas Payne or of Karl Marx.
• 55:48
  When enough people again see the world through that lens, liberty will not merely survive.
• 55:55
  Ladies and gentlemen, liberty will lead the world.
• 55:59
  And just like that, we are out of time.
• 56:02
  But that's okay.
• 56:03
  I got through the entire architecture of liberty.
• 56:06
  We talked about even expanding the United States into other like-minded countries voluntarily, not by force, building a shield of liberty that crosses the globe, not an empire.
• 56:18
  As always, thank you for tuning in.
• 56:21
  Please tell others who might be interested in cutting through the chaos to listen in either on Saturday and Sunday at 9 a.m.
• 56:28
  or PM Eastern Standard Time, repeats in the evening, or on podcast whenever they have the time.
• 56:34
  And we will see you next week at the same time and place where it will once again be time to get involved and to get loud on America out loud.