Jordan Peterson & Conrad Black
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Believe it or not, I am the moderator. I'd like to start by just replying to some of the things Tucker said. And generally, our challenge here tonight is that Tucker and Jordan and I agree on almost everything. So we're trying to get a bit of controversy going. But I would say this, Tucker.

As far as I can see, the governing party in your country now has as its sole claim to resumption of its mandate the equation Trump equals Hitler, which is, of course, so fatuous and outrageous that no person with an IQ in at least double figures could believe it. And it will get the reception it deserves on Election Day, I think, despite massive efforts at stuffing the ballot boxes and

bringing nonexistent people onto the voting list. But because of that, I think we should be doubly careful about suggesting that Chrystia Freeland, whom I also know, I've known her for some years, is worse than the Nazis. I mean, she isn't. She's actually quite a nice lady, but she's politically misguided, has always been misguided.

The FT, which you support other than for hiring her, is itself not an acceptable publication anymore. It's a ludicrous, globalist, socialistic, interventionist, regimentationist paper. Not really the paper it was under Nigel Lawson and others of a legitimate nature.

newspaper for commerce, free commerce everywhere in the world. And so what we have is bad enough without suggesting it's Nazism or worse. It isn't. It's not that bad, but it's bad. If I could just, and this is a problem that I have had my whole life, I don't fully explain what I think, and you raise a really good point. I made a serious charge against her, and let me just be a lot more precise about why I believe what I said.

I saw the video the other day, and I've never taken her seriously, as I said. But I didn't think that she was as malicious and cold as I now believe she is until I saw the video of David Menzies from Rebel News being arrested after trying to ask her a question. And I thought to myself, as someone who is often approached by people as I walk into buildings with questions, how would I feel if someone approached me and asked a question, even a question I don't like,

And my security team threw him against a wall and put him in handcuffs. I would say, "You stop that immediately." I could not, as a matter of conscience, allow a man to be arrested in my presence for asking a question. And I think that anyone who thinks that's okay is a truly dangerous person who should not have power. That's how I feel. I agree with you, except I don't think she ordered it. -I think we have to-- -But she watched it. No, no, let me say something.

I think in a way what happened is even more worrisome than that. Some palooka from the RCMP took it upon himself as a demonstration of initiative, precisely the kind of initiative you attributed to the people in goose-stepping and tight uniforms. Many people, especially in the United States, still think of the RCMP as...

People in red tunics with the musical bride and, you know, Rosemary with Nelson Eddie and so on singing in the Rockies here. But...

We saw in the McDonald Commission inquiry after the imposition of the War Measures Act by the elder Trudeau in 1970, what an absolutely incompetent bunch of palookas the RCMP are. So some of the blame belongs on them, their initiative. I don't think the news is for all of that. - I agree, but it's her security detail, and as someone, I know you spent a lot of your life with security around you, whatever, you just can't allow that. You just cannot allow people to behave that way because it's such a violation of human rights

And that's happening in this country and no one's saying anything about it.

I want to turn to Jordan. We've had discussions in Calgary earlier today and last night, and I emerged as the optimist. I'm not an absolute optimist, but in fact, I think the public is turning in this country and in the United States. I'm afraid as a member of the British Parliament, I can't hold out any hope for England for the next five years, but it'll come to its senses eventually.

I think it's turning and we see it tonight. We see it, believe it or not, it is even the case in Toronto where you Albertans have more friends and admirers than you think, including Jordan and me. A city I may say that I understand Albertans don't like Toronto and I don't blame them, but when Tucker compares Toronto to Gary, Indiana, which is a bombed out rubble heap of abandoned steel factories and rioters and drug dealers,

He stirs up something I was not aware that I possessed, and that was a bit of municipal chauvinism. But I want, I would like to ask Jordan, on this business of, I mean, we agree, I think everyone in this great

agrees with Tucker's denunciation of our health system. It's a shambles and a disgrace, and it is so bad that, as he said, the health system that's supposed to promote life is now selling the virtues of suicide, and not only to sick people, to poor people as well, as if you have no chance of recovering and becoming prosperous. But Jordan, where do you stand on this optimism-pessimism scale that Tucker and I have built up a little here?

I think we have every reason to assume that, and I guess this is why I'm going around the world talking to people, I guess, is that I think that if we put our hearts and our souls into it, that we could make this world into a place that's so good we could hardly imagine it. And I think with the technology, I think with the technology that's in front of us, which is transforming at a rate that's beyond comprehensible, literally, that...

we could do much better in the next 50 years than we did in the last 200, and that's really saying something. But I also think that if we let the worst parts of ourselves gain the upper hand, given our enhanced technological power, we could produce a hell that would make Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany look like practice. And so there's a great hope in that, but a great warning.

One of the things you all want to consider too is that because you're so much more powerful than people were in the past with the technology that you have at your disposal, with the influence that you can have in the world, that all your particular and individual moral flaws are going to find their amplification in the world in a way that wasn't really evidently true in the past. And so I think that if we got our act together, things could be better.

unbelievably positive. But if we remain narcissistic, infantile and foolish like certain of our leaders, then things could go extraordinarily badly. And I think we'll see how that plays out in the course of the lifetimes of most of the people in this room.

I have the honor of sharing a podcast with the eminent historian Victor Hansen and the former U.S. drug czar and education secretary Bill Bennett. And Victor presents, I think very accurately, the correlation of forces in our English-speaking countries, societies that Tucker referred to.

The enemy of practically all of us here, unless they're spies from the CBC or elsewhere, they possess the academy, they possess the media, they possess Wall Street and the equivalent to an extent in Canada, Silicon Valley, which I agree with you is an abominable place. You should direct your strictures against them instead of Toronto. And...

And they have big entertainment and big sport. I mean, people are tremendously talented at entertaining and athletics, but are utter morons politically, malignant morons, many of them. They have all of that, but we have the people. And we are going to show that. And despite their attempt to steal elections in your country, we don't much stoop to that here, although we may learn. We imitate everything else you do.

Despite that, we're going to win. And I feel I'm very confident about that. And what Jordan said is

Even the period since World War II, when the great powers haven't been at war with each other, has shown an astounding increase in prosperity in the world. The total percentage in the whole world, huge populations it now has, that's in designated poverty, severe poverty, is down to under 10%. And we are making progress. It's just...

It's frustrating that these leading countries, such as ours, are at the moment so incompetently governed. And we are ultimately going to lose our position of moral and practical leadership if we underperform, as this country now is underperforming. So, but, you know, I wish I could say, I could suggest any better way of

getting out of this and reversing the trend than the one I have. I think if we all keep our heads about us and go to the polls and change governments, I think we'll get what we want. The people do get the government we deserve, and if we deserve a good government, we'll get a good government. And you have one here in Alberta. May I just clarify one thing? I'm sorry to beat up on Toronto, and I'm certainly sorry to compare it to Gary, Indiana.

Toronto is not the worst place in the world, and I'll concede that Gary ended up maybe a little worse. My problem with Toronto is not with the city itself, which is, again, fine, as cities go. It's the metaphor of Toronto and the vision of the future that Toronto represents. And so the question that no one ever asks about most places is, "What do they do here? What's the point of the city? What's the business here? What do they add to the country?" And Toronto represents a vision that I reject.

which is an economy based on banking and real estate. I don't think it's a real economy. I think banking has its place, real estate has its place. I don't think you can build a country on that, and I don't think you should. This province represents the alternative vision, which I support, which is a place that actually adds to the sum total of good in a country that produces energy and food.

And energy and food are non-negotiables. You have to have them. You do not have to have banking, and you do not have to have commercial real estate. Okay? You just don't. There are places without them. In fact, most of history has been sort of fine without them. But no place can exist without energy or food.

And so when I see the relative status allocated to Alberta versus Toronto, that part of Ontario, I'm like, this is out of whack. There is no sane world in which a city that produces nothing is more impressive than a province that produces everything that the country needs. So that's all I'm saying. Jordan, you're a renowned psychologist. So far. Your renown has been...

Most recently emphasized by the attempt of your peers to discipline you and send you for lessons in public relations. The fact that they would do this does indicate how extraordinarily accomplished you are and how widely admired you are. And notwithstanding my city of residence, I am

very proud that you replaced our former mayor, Rob Ford, as the world's most famous Canadian. But I want to ask you, as a psychologist, do you think that the psychology of the United States and Canada right now, mass psychology, is such that we are in upward mode? We're going to

cast off the incompetence that has ruled us and the perfidy and venality that has ruled us and do a better job of self-government? I mean, is the psychology right for an upward movement or do you feel we're sinking? No, I think, again, I would say I'm optimistic on that front too because I think

the best thinkers that I've encountered and I'm privileged because well apart from the fact that I'm male and white obviously, but Sorry about that, but I've been privileged to meet some of the world's brightest people and and To talk to them in depth, you know, and I see a realization dawning even in unlikely places that

the core values of our civilization, and those are really Judeo-Christian values, are valid, true, and irreplaceable. And let me explain what I've seen. So, in recent months, I've watched a number of surprising conversions or semi-conversions, and so

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, some of you may know of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and if you don't you should because she's one of the world's bravest people and she was a real admirer of the new atheists for a long time and she had her reasons because she suffered greatly at the hand of psychopathic fundamentalists and she's concluded that

the Christianity that underlies our society is irreplaceable and has actually converted. That despite being an admirer for a very long time of the new atheists, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hickens and Sam Harris, who are very intelligent people by the way, but wrong in a deeply interesting way. Her husband Neil Ferguson, who was also an atheist, has also converted

My friend Douglas Murray, who was also a follower of the New Atheists, now realizes and understands, and I would say intellectually, that a humanism unmoored from a deep metaphysical substrate will fall prey to the kind of ideological lunacy that now characterizes our times and that threatened the entire planet a number of times in the 20th century.

I can see this happening all over. And there are deep reasons for that, and they're going to become more evident in very short order. And so I think that, I think we're on the verge of a conscious metaphysical revolution that will reveal to us once again the profundity

depth, necessity, and value of the core propositions that made the West free, prosperous, and great. And so... May I just add one thing to that? I couldn't agree with that more. I can't express it as eloquently as you just did, and I want to try. But I'll say two things. One, I noticed that.

And I've never been an atheist, but I've never been, you know, that far from atheism. I always lived in sort of ritual-educated world among people who mock the religious because they're primitive. And in the last two or three years, I have heard more people talk about the possibility that all that we can experience with our senses is not all that there is. And of course, that's true. It's obviously true. And there's no society in human history that's believed otherwise.

Only the West, since we dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, only the West, since 1945, has proceeded as a society with the assumption that there's no God. That's never happened before. And of course, it doesn't work at all. That's changing really fast, and I feel it. I also see, and it's very obvious if you just look for it,

that the main thing that people who run this country and my country and a lot of Western countries hate is Christianity. They hate it more than anything. And you see it in their behavior.

You see it in the arrests of Christian pastors. And if there's one group in the world, whether you're a Christian or not, you certainly don't need to be a Christian to acknowledge what's obviously true. These are the least threatening, least bad people in your society. These are the people who mean you the least harm. These are the people who commanded to pray for their enemies. These are people who commanded to give up their life for people they don't know and for others.

And so again, you don't have to be an adherent of that religion to see those people as a group you might want more of. Because what's the downside to having people who love you despite the fact you hate them? Like, that seems like you'd want more of those. And yet those people are the first to get arrested. And their churches are burned, 90 in this country, with the full tacit support of your government. Like, what is that?

Why are they going after them? Of all the problems your country has, my country has, why are the Christians being persecuted? And they are being persecuted. Well, it tells you there's something else going on here. There may be their goals. Maybe, you know, maybe this is part of something bigger. I mean, just meditate on that for the weekend and see the conclusion you come to. That's all I would say.

On this, Tucker, I have to agree with you completely, and I'm afraid that Canada is in the forefront of advanced Western countries with a Judeo-Christian tradition and a tradition of tolerance also. On the forefront, the vanguard of effectively shedding even what is now a

officious and paper-thin adherence to the idea of divine intelligence existing. We're getting perilously close all the time. And you see it in judgments of the Supreme Court that are terribly poorly reasoned and

agitate against any religious notions that should cause them to temper their idea of interpretation of the law. And I would just say that we all of us know enough that if you... I'm not talking about what people's religious practices or anything like that, none of my business. But if you banish absolutely the idea of

in a militant atheistic manner, that it is impossible that there are any spiritual forces or anything whatsoever beyond what we absolutely know. You are creating a vacuum in the human mind and in society that ultimately will be filled by horrible pagan monsters like Hitler and Stalin.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. You know, one of the saddest facts of our current civilization is that like there's just no history. You know, the iPhone makes history irrelevant. It's all about right now.

But it's worth learning some things about history, and here's my recommendation. Spend an afternoon reading about the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Spanish Civil War, and what do they all have in common? At their heart was a desire not to replace Christianity with reason, as the Jacobins claimed,

but to crush and destroy and to humiliate Christians in a way that's very reminiscent of what the Romans did in the first and second centuries. It's not just like, "Oh, that's silly and superstitious. We're gonna move on to something better." It's, "No, we're going to crush you.

and we're going to ritually humiliate you. And that is very much what the trans thing is about. No one is helped by transgenderism. You've never met anyone who is happier because he's self-castrated. I personally feel very sorry for trans people. I'm not angry at them at all. I think they are victims of bigger forces. But to officially promote that

Is a humiliation ritual designed to put Christians in an untenable position where they have to either swear allegiance to the new state religion, which is transgenderism, or to their ancestral religion, which is Christianity? It is a loyalty test, and it's meant to humiliate and destroy them. And let's just be honest about what we're seeing. So I've been thinking about this idea of what should be properly put in the highest place for a very long time.

You know, I became convinced 40 years ago, I suppose, of the existence of evil in some transcendent sense. I suppose when I tried to look for something that I had, what would you say, that I could claim with unshakable faith, what I discovered was that there were certain acts that occurred in the 20th century that were so brutal and so malevolent that

they absolutely convinced me of the reality of evil. And there's a corollary to that that's necessary to understand is that if evil, an absolute evil exists, first of all, if absolute evil doesn't exist, then what happened in Auschwitz was just a matter of opinion, right? The moral...

catastrophe of Auschwitz is just an opinion and that in itself is a conclusion that has no small degree of malevolence. So we should be clear about that. If what happened in Auschwitz, if the fact that Auschwitz camp guards could conduct themselves in the utterly brutal manner that they did and enjoy it, if that was evil and that's a fact, then hey, pipe down. This isn't your conference.

then there's an opposite, right? If you identify something on one pole, you've implicitly identified something on the other pole. And so one of the things you might say is that whatever absolute good might be, and that would be something akin to God, would be that which is as far away from Auschwitz as you can possibly get.

And to pursue that would be to pursue the direction that leads you as far away, let's say, from the horrors of Nazi Germany as you could get. And I believe that technically there is no difference between that and the pursuit of a religious path. And then I would say,

If it's true that the core of malevolence is something like the sacrifice of others in a painful manner to your own idiot whims and desire for power, which isn't a bad encapsulation, then the opposite of that would be your voluntary self-sacrifice in the service of what's best and others. And that is the ideal that Christianity puts at the center of the moral universe. And so I don't see a way around that. And...

That's not a conclusion that I drew lightly, you know, for what that's worth. I've spent 40 years thinking about very little else than that. And I think that we're going to come to understand that consciously, widely, far more rapidly than anyone suspects for any number of reasons. And that that will be...

While the consequences of that are very difficult to predict, but the fact that it's going to occur is definitely one of the things that makes me optimistic. You know, we've all been faced in the 20th century, I would say, with the irrefutable evidence of transcendent evil. And that means we all now have the opportunity to discover

the existence, irrefutable existence of transcendent good and to allow that to guide us and if with our technological power we had the capacity to be guided by what is truly and transcendently good then there's nothing we couldn't accomplish in the positive direction. Tucker, whether everybody in this country is happy with it or not, the whole world is extremely heavily influenced by the United States and

And whatever any of us think of any American regime, none of us, none of us in the West should ever fail to remember and be grateful for the fact that we owe chiefly to the United States the greatest strategic bloodless victory in the history of the world, our victory of war.

Western civilization in the Cold War and the tremendous spread of democracy and the free market in the world. We owe it chiefly to your country and we must never forget that. So with that in mind, I'd like you to be as daring as you can and as perceptive as only you can be as someone who knows the United States, all of the United States very well. What do you predict is going to happen in this political year in that country?

You know, it's, I mean, thank you. I couldn't be more grateful to be an American. I've always felt that way. As I said, my dad's family was from Nova Scotia. They left at the time of the American Revolution because they didn't want to be free. So they fled to the Maritimes. And I'm just kidding. But anyway, then they came back. Ultimately, many are still there. Their name is Ray Fuse. I think they're liberal.

But I have always been grateful for my birthright as an American and for the God-given rights that are protected by my government officially in the Bill of Rights, which is a beautiful document, the greatest document I've ever produced, and that no other country has. And I will feel that way until I die. And unlike a lot of people in our leadership class, I have no plans to go anywhere else. I've got too many children and too many dogs, and I'm dying there.

But I'm definitely very concerned and I can't see the outcome of this year clearly at all. I was thinking yesterday, it really is like looking through a shower curtain. You see these opaque shapes lurking, but you can't tell if they're, you know, friend or foe, nude or clothed. You know, you don't really know what you're looking at.

But you know that there is a collision coming between titanic forces, the population of America versus its leaders. And it's coming to a head because of the structure of this election. And so you have the Republican candidate, and he is going to be the candidate, whose election is the one thing...

But I think it's kind of determined. And of course, it's politics, so it's filled with all sorts of... I mean, the amount of ugliness displayed beneath the surface in all politics everywhere is really awe-inspiring. You know, these people are really dirty everywhere, not just my country. You may know about that. But...

The one thing that the people in power, and I don't just mean in Washington, in our government, I mean in our financial centers and entertainment centers, our country's kind of cool because they're identified by cities. So Los Angeles, New York, Washington make all the decisions, of course. And the one thing they won't tolerate is the orange man in power. And you sort of, and that, like, you wonder, well, why? Because Trump is not a radical at all.

And Trump's vision for America, this is an informed assessment of Trump, Trump's vision for America is like Studio 54 in 1978. Like, I'm serious. Trump really loved the country he grew up in. He really loved it, and he means it. He loved the people who lived there. He loved its traditions, its weird little customs, its idiosyncrasies, and that's kind of what he wants. He doesn't want a brave new future of new things. He wants to return not to antebellum America, but to, like, 1980 America.

And it's kind of hard to argue why that's bad, actually. And so that's not a revolutionary agenda, nor is it a counter-revolutionary agenda. It's a return to normalcy. And the phrase "Make America Great Again" means return it to a period not so long ago, when everyone was enfranchised and everyone had rights, but everyone was roughly-- not everyone, but most people were sort of united in a sense of common purpose and culture. They were Americans, and they knew what that meant.

We don't have that anymore. And that's Trump's vision. So you may not think that's possible. You may not think maybe that's even virtuous to want that. But if you think that's a grotesque hellscape that he's describing, you're the freak, not him. And yet they all feel that way. They mean it too. They really feel that way. It's not a joke.

And so what's gonna happen? And I guess I dissent a little bit from the much more optimistic view that you have, both of you, which I really appreciate hearing and I want to believe it, but that in the end, the will of the people matters. The conclusion that I've come to is that it matters less than it should and that the people in power really do make the bulk of the decisions. And I say that after spending 35 years in Washington and watching the agenda of both parties and comparing that agenda to the public opinion polling of what people actually want and finding no union set.

No union set. Like, there's not the same agendas. And we have a democratic system where these people are elected every two years in the Congress, every six years in the Senate, every four years in the White House. And their agenda never changes. And the desires of the American public, by and large, are never met or even addressed. And you sort of, after a while, conclude maybe it doesn't matter what people want. It only matters what the people in power want.

I don't want to think that, but I don't know what other conclusion to reach. So what you have now is a legit mass movement on behalf of Donald Trump that's 100% real, and you have absolute ironclad resistance to the democratic process working its way to legitimate conclusion by the people who have all the power. What happens next? I don't even know.

And I'll sum it up this way: today it is a race in the foreseeable future between Donald Trump, the former president, now effectively the Republican nominee, and the incumbent president, president, who got more votes than Barack Obama somehow, because he's just so popular. This is the magnetism. He spent the entire 2020 campaign moldering and deteriorating in his basement, and somehow he was more popular than Barack Obama.

Right. Okay. Anyway, so it's the race between Biden and Obama. I just don't see that happening. I just don't. And I hope to be wrong. I want a return to normalcy, too. I'm the opposite of a revolutionary, too. That's what I love about Trump. He doesn't want radical change. We're not actually made for radical change. We can't digest it. People hate radical change. They want kind of continuity. And I do, too. But I just don't see this playing out the way it's currently formulated. Sorry. See, so...

I would say maybe that, and you, Tucker, you actually asked for an alternative to the view that you were expressing, the somewhat pessimistic view of the dominance of people in power. In the video that led up to your entrance onto the stage, you pointed out a realization that you had, which was that nothing better in your life can happen to you than what happens if you tell the truth.

And I believe that to be the case. I actually believe that that's why we have the idea that power is vested in the people. And I don't think that power is where people think it is. I don't think that power is in the hands of the elite. The ability to manipulate misused power might be in the hand of the elite, but the power that we need to set the world straight is actually at your fingertips. And this is actually a rather terrifying realization.

You know, because there's some relief in thinking that the elites can do whatever they want and there's nothing that someone as small as you could possibly do about it. And that's wrong because you're not small. And it's wrong because

It's irresponsible to presume that, and it's wrong because the truth is more terrifying and also more liberating. And the truth of the matter is, is that if you utilized what you had at hand, which at least is the ability that you have at hand to say what you think truly, and as

as clearly as you can, even if you're not that articulate, that the world would change around you in ways that would make you immune to the blandishments of the power-mongering elite. And I'm hoping that enough people will realize the power of their affinity with the truth, especially when it's allied with the will to aim up, to have the courage to speak that truth. And if enough people do that, then

the terrible things that we're concerned about coming forward at us in the future will have no purchase whatsoever. You know, like I learned a long time ago that the war that we're in is psychological or spiritual, if you want to look at it that way, rather than political. And everyone has a sense of that now, that something is moving that's more, that's deeper than the mere political. The tectonic plates themselves are shifting and

You're all going to play a role in that, you know? And the role you'll play is going to be determined by what you determine to ally your speech with, for example. Your decision about whether or not you're going to tell the truth in the confines of your own life.

And if enough people, all of you, if enough of you decide in the local circumstances of your own life to say, to dare to say what you believe to be true, then the tyrants will have no purchase on you and you won't be slaves. And just by definition. Can I just, I just want to say what a beautiful sentiment I think that is. And I wish I had said that.

And I'm so thankful that you said that. And the message that I often get, who knows from where, is that when I really feel like things are falling apart, that really the only thing I can do is to really try my best to be a better person. And that that really matters. And specifically, I mean, to tell the truth all the time, not just in public, but in private, to really love the people around me and be attentive to them more than anything.

And that in doing that, you lose your fear of the future. And you know that no matter what happens, you're going to be okay. You're not afraid of death. Anyway, thank you for saying that. Since Tucker didn't exactly answer my question, I'm going to give an answer and ask you to comment on it.

I love it. Many of the people in this stadium would be aware that I am probably, though not an uncritical one, the most vocal and consistent supporter of President Trump in Canada.

And that is based on the fact that it has been my privilege to know him for 25 years, and he's always been a good and loyal friend, including in the worst of times that I endured when many of his financial peers in the United States and in this country had a merciless attack of amnesia and forgot my phone number, and he did not.

But I also evaluate him as a statesman. And I put it to you, Tucker, that there is a clear, really a clearly discernible tendency in the run-up to your election

the forces that abominate Trump and even highly intelligent friends of mine and yours, who when the word Trump is uttered other than a bridge context, bridge card playing context, a trap door opens in their forehead and a cuckoo bird flies out and they start screeching nonsense. These people so...

obsessed with the hatred of their president, are gradually losing ground. I mean, in the last election to defeat Trump, they had to mail out unsolicited 81 million ballots. Millions of them were collected. None of them could be verified. They were dropped in drop boxes out in rural America in

in the middle of the night, not on election day. And on this basis, the judiciary abdicated its role as a co-equal branch of your government and wouldn't hear any of the substantive cases or 19 of them. They wouldn't hear any of them and they wouldn't judge on the constitutionality of the changes in voting and vote counting rules supposedly to assist voting during the pandemic, but really to screw Trump.

And they were aggravated by the media locking arms and saying every word that Trump and his supporters have uttered criticizing that election were lies, not things they disagreed with, lies, conscious, intentional lies, deliberate, premeditated lies. And

This has so annoyed such a large group of Americans that they become progressively angrier the more unreasonable the attempt to destroy democracy by the incumbents has become. They see the effective leader of the opposition, a former president, buried under an avalanche of absolutely nonsensical,

spurious indictments, politically motivated. They've seen the corruption of the intelligence agencies with the Trump-Russia nonsense. They've seen the FBI director

Comey saying 245 times under oath, I don't recall, about events a couple of years before, having to do with his role in taking a pastiche of defamations, calling it intelligence and putting it out into the media. That's all been paid for by the Clinton campaign. The country sees it, and it is getting angrier and angrier.

And I think there's a sort of rumbling noise in America. And what is going to happen is ultimately, although it won't be quite put this way, it'll be a referendum between those who so hate Trump they're prepared to justify any desecration and corruption.

debasement and violation of the constitutional democracy of America to keep him out of the White House. And those who are so horrified at this desecration of the Constitution that they're absolutely determined to put him back in the White House. And I think he will win, and I think the fact that he will win when Kant and emotionalism subside and serious history is written,

I think it will be seen as one of the great positive watermarks in the strengthening and reinforcement of American democracy.

When Conrad Black ran the media in this country, it was a better time. That was a wonderful summation of the 2020 election in which Democrats cheated at scale. Fact. And I hope it plays out in the way that you describe. And in my personal view of it, my views align pretty substantially with Donald Trump's. Even if they didn't, I would vote for Donald Trump because you can't

and 250 years of representative democracy because you don't like a candidate.

Period. You can't indict people for political reasons, which they have done. And you can't take people off the ballot in the name of democracy when they haven't been convicted of a crime. I mean, it's like so nuts. So if you care about the systems that your ancestors created, and which was the envy of the world, I mean, half the world, more than half the world modeled their democracies after our democracy. So if your democracy is erased because people don't like Trump, it's kind of a profound change, not just in your country, but in the world.

And that's not a good change, and you just don't want that. So I absolutely hope that it plays out that way. I guess part of what I was saying is I don't believe with Trump up eight points or whatever he is now over Biden in the face of four indictments, facing life in prison for non-crimes. The more you know about it, the more it defies belief, and I think Conrad Black explained it fairly well. He's still leading Joe Biden.

So if the point of the Democratic Party is to hold power, not there's nothing ideological with the Democratic Party. The idea is we should have the power and you shouldn't. That's it. They're about to lose power to Trump because Biden is so demonstrably incompetent and they're going to make a change of some kind. That's not acceptable.

So I don't know what that change is going to be, but I spent my life living with them, so I know what they're like. And there will be a change. They will not lose to Trump if they can help it. And I mean it. And if that means replacing Biden or doing something unspeakable, they will do it. They're very serious about this. The other side is much more serious about power than normal people are. Normal people understand that power is, and I alluded to this, is like a double-edged thing. It's nice to have it, but it can also destroy you. People are, they don't necessarily want power. I definitely don't want power.

But a certain kind of hollow person needs it above all. So I just think beware they're capable of anything Thanks Unfortunately, we're gonna have to wind this up So I'm going to say one brief final comment on the American thing and then ask Jordan to close for it for the three of us I just very briefly make two points. I think that I

The Trump haters hate isn't there anymore. He doesn't have to walk his tweets back. His conduct is not embarrassing or gauche. And the Trump they hated, they portrayed with, he gave them plenty of ammunition to do it, as a boorish, boastful,

caricature of the ugly American, he isn't there anymore and what has replaced him is a man who of course is confident, an ex-president and a billionaire tends to be confident, but he is an underdog being persecuted and fighting it courageously and everybody respects that. And I don't think people realize how the public reaction to him has evolved according to that.

And the other, the final point I'd make is so often all of us here who are generally conservative lament that our party in whichever country is often sort of on a suicide mission. But this time, inexplicably to me, the Democrats are. They appear to be circling the drain

ostensibly led by a senescent sticky fingered old boob who couldn't run a two-car funeral. On that I say it pains me to be disrespectful of the occupant of so great an office but I'm afraid that's an accurate description. On that I yield the chair to my distinguished friend. Well we talked tonight you know about the political lot and I would say to some degree we centered on that. We talked about

fair bit as well about the psychological and the spiritual and I guess one of the things we might do is reflect on the proper ordering of those. You know, if there's a moral world, let's say, that has a hierarchical ordering, one of the things that was realized long ago is that there's a dominion of God and there's a dominion of Caesars and that you render unto God what is God's and unto Caesar what is Caesar's. And we rendered a fair bit of

unto Caesar tonight, and maybe I close with some concluding words about what it would mean to render unto God and what it would mean for you all as individuals, you know, and that would allow us to reflect a little bit more on this idea of upward aim and truth, you know. I think it's laudable that you're all here, even if it's primarily for political reasons, because I think that people in a democracy, in a representative democracy, in a free society,

People who aren't slaves have to take their political responsibility with all due seriousness, right? Otherwise, you're not self-governing. You abdicate that responsibility to other people and you'll abdicate it. If you abdicate it, you'll abdicate it to the psychopaths who enjoy power and you're not going to like that, the consequence of that. And so you have to shoulder your political responsibility. But then you also have to see it in the proper perspective. And I think Tucker was making an allusion to that is that

You have your important destiny right in front of you. You have to take responsibility for your own lives. Treat yourself as if you have a certain implicit intrinsic value that you're made in the image of God, you might say. You have to treat the people around you, your wife, your husband, as if they have the same value as you. And you have to do everything to

foster their development in your relationship and you have to do that with your family and then your family has to do that with its community, your town and your local businesses, your friends and then all of those local enterprises have to do that at the level of city and province and then if there's anything left over the higher order political system can deal with that. But you want to walk out of here tonight thinking about how you want to

aim the world in the proper place. Part of that is your political deliberations, but much more that is the ethic that you bring forward in your life and in your words. And I truly believe, as I said, that you have a very important role to play in how the world's going to lay itself out. Are we going to be optimistic or pessimistic? I would say to a very large degree, and more than you think, it depends on

the decision that you make with every act you take about whether or not you're aiming towards something better or towards something worse. And to the degree that you're aiming at something worse, you'll get exactly what you're asking for. And to the degree that you're aiming at something better, you could play a signal force in bringing that about. And the better you got at that, as your aim improved and the truth of your words

Mounted in power the more effective a force you would be in Promoting what's good and you have that opportunity as we all do and so I would say in closing We can watch this strange political year unfold and we can hope for the best But we can also strive with all of our might to make sure that we're part of the force That's actually aiming at the best and we can all do that Thank you