Join Kim Monson as she delves into a profound discussion with Dr. Douglas Groteis, a professor of philosophy at the Denver Seminary. In this episode, Dr. Groteis sheds light on his book, ‘Fire in the Streets’, analyzing the persistent battle of ideologies in America. From critical race theory to Americanism, they discuss the deep-seated issues of identity politics and the American creed. Discover how the ideologies of the summer of 2020 still reverberate in today’s political landscape. Understand the fundamental questions about who we are as human beings and whether American ideals are to be preserved or overthrown. This
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It’s the Kim Monson Show, analyzing the most important stories.
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That seems to me like government is establishing a religion.
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The latest in politics and world affairs.
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If you give people rights, women’s rights, gay rights, whatever, there can’t be equal rights if there are special rights.
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Today’s current opinions and ideas.
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Surveys show that people still really prefer freedom over government force.
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Is it freedom or is it force? Let’s have a conversation.
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Indeed, and welcome to The Kim Monson Show. I’m Kim Monson, and thank you so much for joining us. You’re each treasured, you’re valued, you have purpose. Today, strive for excellence. Take care of your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body. My friends, we were made for this moment. And thank you to the team I work with, Producer Steve, Producer Luke, Zach, Patty, Keith, Charlie, Echo, all the people here at Crawford Broadcasting. I am just blessed to work with amazing people. Check out our website. That is Kim Monson, M-O-N-S-O-N.com. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter. And you’ll get first look at our upcoming guests as well as our most recent essays. You can email me at Kim at Kim Monson dot com. And thank you to all of you who support us. We are an independent voice. We search for truth and clarity by looking at these issues through the lens of freedom versus force, force versus freedom. If something’s a good idea, you should not have to force people to do it. And for this week of Independence Day week, we are recording all of these shows, A, because we want to celebrate Independence Day. The team wants to take a little bit of time off. And so we have arranged for amazing guests. And one of those guests, a fan favorite, is Dr. Douglas Groteis. He is a professor of philosophy at the Denver Seminary, the author of 18, almost 19 books. Dr. Douglas Groteis, it is so good to have you here.
SPEAKER 14 :
Well, thank you. Happy to be back.
SPEAKER 08 :
And we’re going to talk about this book that you had written regarding the summer of love, if you will, the summer of, what was it, 2020? You’d written this book, Fire in the Streets, How You Can Confidently Respond to Incendiary Cultural Topics or Culture Topics. And we interviewed you shortly after the book was published. Have things changed? What do you want people to know?
SPEAKER 14 :
Well, I think the problems that I address in this book are still with us, and it’s in some ways the battle of ideologies or the ideology of what’s called critical race theory versus really American ideals, or you might say Americanism. That’s how I… Really frame it in the book. And we hear a lot about critical race theory in the schools, in politics, in media and so on. And it’s really a hot topic. I’m not sure a lot of people know what it is. You know what it means. Some people say, well, it’s just a boogeyman. There’s nothing to worry about. We just need to talk about race in the schools and have equity in politics. But if I can find a nutshell for it, critical race theory is a neo-Marxist theory that really understands society essentially and primarily in terms of race. So all problems are essentially at their base racial problems. So it’s a kind of dualism where. You have an oppressor class, which would be the white race and also especially white males who are responsible for all the inequities in society, really. So if you want to talk about income disparities or educational disparities, whatever it is, the problem really goes down to race. So instead of making being a human being the essential category, right? And from a Judeo-Christian viewpoint, that is the essential category. We’re made in the image and likeness of God. and we are put where we are we are who we are because god is our creator instead of that or instead of the idea that all men are created equal which is part of the american creed the idea is that the most important thing about anybody is their race so it’s a group identity it’s a kind of identitarian politics or identity politics and i don’t take it to be true or helpful Now, when I give talks on this, I often have to say that simply because I am a opponent of critical race theory, it doesn’t mean I deny the fact of racism today or that I deny that the American system, sadly, in the past, has been racist with slavery, Jim Crow laws, redlining, and so on. I certainly affirm that. But the issue is fundamental worldview. Who are we as human beings? Is the American creed something to be preserved or something to be overthrown? And in the summer of 2020, during the George Floyd riots, a lot of people are saying some very revolutionary things in the bad sense of revolutionary, meaning we need to revolt against the entire American way of life, the entire American system. So there was a book that came out during that time called In Defense of Looting. And you remember, there were far more than just protests in 2020. There was looting, there was burning, pillaging, multi-millions of dollars of damage, people killed, people injured. police being intimidated by mobs and so on. And this book came out and said, well, looting is justified because these big companies have millions upon millions or billions of dollars, and they’ve essentially stolen it because profit is wrong intrinsically. See, this is a neo-Marxist view. And so there’s nothing wrong with people that don’t have stealing from those that have. And the person that wrote this book was actually interviewed on national public radio and received no criticism at all about the view. So the idea is that America is fundamentally systemically unjust because it’s fundamentally and systemically racist. It’s baked into the system, as they say. And if it’s baked into the system, the only way to change it is to completely deny what America is all about.
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Well, Dr. Douglas Groteis, what I found so interesting regarding the summer of 2020 is there was actually equity by the looters that they not only looted people that were white and their businesses, but people of color as well. And so it really, when you drill down even just a little bit, it doesn’t hold up. We should call it indefensive stealing.
SPEAKER 14 :
Sure, that’s what it is. One of the commandments is you shall not steal. And sometimes Martin Luther King is quoted as saying that riots are the language of the desperate or the language of desperation. And I would agree with that. But it’s foul language. It’s not the way to generate constructive change. And the deep thesis of my book is not just a critique of. Critical race theory is a neo-Marxist and false theory. But it’s that the United States, as a civilization, has the resources in our what you could call American creed to reform for the better. We’ve seen that in many ways. We’ve seen that with the civil rights movement and the end of the Jim Crow era laws and so on. So we have in our declaration and in the Constitution these wonderful, marvelous documents, as Martin Luther King put it in his speech. And we don’t want to destroy those. See, there’s this idea. That because America began when many of the states allowed for slavery, that the whole structure and system is corrupt and irredeemable. Really, we need to start over again somehow. And this is the Marxist idea that society is built on the backs of the oppressed. The neo-Marxist view. Critical race theory really focuses on race as the main issue, not so much the economic categories. But it still uses the economic categories. So I would say if the average income of whites is higher than the average income of blacks, the explanation of that is racism. And the way to treat that is to target racism. the haves and redistribute the wealth and the benefits to the have-nots through the state. So the whole idea here is very socialistic, very top-down. And it might be helpful to talk about the distinction between the idea of equality and equity because the Declaration says that we take these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and have certain rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So this idea of created equality means that we are fundamentally valuable in the eyes of God, whatever our race, whatever our abilities, whether we’re male or female. And that’s a theological assertion. You can’t generate that from Darwinism or from a pantheistic worldview. It’s a Judeo-Christian idea right there. So the way that has played out at its best in the American system is that we want people to have equal opportunities to advance according to their abilities. That’s what you might call meritocracy. But the idea of equity says, no, meritocracy is a ruse for racism. So in critical race theory, everything that seems to have benefited people of color is really meritocracy. for racism. The civil rights movement really didn’t accomplish very much, et cetera. You see this in the thinking of Derrick Bell and so on. So what we need to do is not, as we say, level the playing field or give people equal opportunity. That just hasn’t worked out very well. So we have to ensure that people of color and other minorities are equally represented in various areas of life. use the word that fits here, quotas. So if 13% of the American population is African American and we don’t have 13% of the pilots African American or the engineers African American, then the explanation is racism. And the answer is to change the whole system so that you have this supposedly proportional representation. And the way this plays out And there’s a very good book about this just came out by Heather MacDonald called When Race Chumps Merit. It plays out by changing the standards and artificially advancing people because of their gender or because of their race in order to fill out these quotas. Now, the civil rights vision is to give people equal opportunity to advance according to their skills. You remember Martin Luther King said, I hope my little children will be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. So my thesis in this book is that because we live in a fallen world and people are sinners before God, we will see selfishness, we’ll see racism. But critical race theory is not the way to address these problems, trying to tear down American ideals and impose a top-down socialist ideology. authoritarian system, which is really what critical race theory demands, is not the American way, it’s not good ultimately for people.
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Well, and I think the great thing about the American idea is it’s focused on the sanctity of the individual. And so to define people in a group, there’s no way that a group can care about an individual the way an individual cares about themselves. And so I think that it’s so important to understand that ultimately this does not bode well for anyone. Somebody said that in socialism, communism— Ultimately is we’re equal for sure, but we’ll all be equal in our misery, which is I think that’s antithetical to the American idea. So I’m talking with Dr. Douglas Groteis. He’s a professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary. We’re talking about his book Fire in the Street, and he had written that in a response to. The summer of 2020, when we saw rioting and looting, it was unbelievable to see that in America. We get to have these important conversations because of great sponsors. One of those great sponsors is the Roger Mangan State Farm Insurance Team. And Roger’s been serving his community for 47 years. He’s provided for his family and given back to these communities of Centennial, Littleton, Highlands Ranch, Inglewood, Greenwood Village, and Castle Rock. He’s been taking care of his clients. for all those years as well. So for more help with your insurance needs, call Roger Mangan at 303-795-8855. Like a good neighbor, the Roger Mangan State Farm Insurance Team is there.
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And welcome back to The Kim Monson Show. Be sure and check out our website. That is kimmonson.com. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter. You’ll get first look at our upcoming guests as well as our most recent essays. You can email me at kim at kimmonson.com. And thank you to all of you who support us. We are an independent voice on an independent station searching for truth and clarity by looking at these issues through the lens of freedom versus force, force versus freedom. If something’s a good idea, you shouldn’t have to force people to do it. In studio with me is Dr. Douglas Groteis. He is a professor of philosophy at the Denver Seminary. He’s the author of 18, soon to be 19 books. Dr. Groteis, I just wanted to ask you a question. We were talking about equality and equity. And my dad, when I was a kid, said that, and I figured this out, this is the equity, that we all have 24 hours in a day. There’s equity in that. But then we each choose what we do with those 24 hours and all those minutes. And so we will have unequal outcomes because we make different decisions. What’s your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER 14 :
Well, exactly. And this is one of my many problems, many critiques of critical race theory is that it assumes that unequal outcomes are always due to racism. Now, some are, especially if you go back 40 years, 50 years, 100 years in the United States. But today we really have… more of an equality of opportunity for people of all races given legal changes and so you have to really consider agency personal responsibility what do you do with your time what is your world view what is your sense of work family savings deferred gratification all these are very significant in terms of outcomes with respect to things like education and income And what critical race theory people do is just forget about all that and say, well, we have unequal outcomes. That is, we don’t have statistically proportional outcomes. Therefore, the immediate cause of that has to be racial discrimination. And in fact, in the United States for over 50 years, we’ve had things like affirmative action. to give people of color a leg up in terms of their skin color. Actually, I’m a critic of affirmative action. I have been for like 40 years because I read Thomas Sowell 40 years ago, the great black economist. And he said it doesn’t really help people of color. It’s an artificial advancement. It tends to create suspicion. So if you see a person of color as a doctor or in some other position, you might think, well, why are they there? Are they there because they’re the best at what they do, or are they there because of an affirmative action policy? So I’ve been a critic of that for a long time, and I have a criticism of that in the book also. And then you also have these ideas, well, there’s been so much injustice in the past that we need to have reparations for African-Americans because African-Americans’ ancestors suffered so much and were denied so much under slavery. And I’ve got five or six pages critiquing that as well. In fact, California is now talking about that. giving millions of dollars to African-Americans as reparations, that I don’t think is helpful or even just. Because for one thing, you have to trace some kind of causal history in terms of who you are. Now, if your ancestors are from a country in Africa that didn’t have slaves like Kenya, Well, then why do you deserve reparations if your ancestors were not enslaved? So there’s this question of knowledge. How do you determine just because you’re black doesn’t mean that there’s a slavery history? There may be. There may not be. And moreover, the people that perpetuated slavery are long dead. And the people who are directly affected are long dead. And you have to say, is this really just? Who is making reparations to whom? And then you have to also look at the pragmatic question. And I go back to the 60s, the great war on poverty under Lyndon Johnson. And the idea was we need to, to use a phrase from a later President Barack Obama, spread the wealth around. Because people in the inner cities, people of color, don’t have as much money. So we need to take the money from, quote, unquote, the rich, redistribute it, create these massive programs. especially in the inner cities. And what has been the result of that? Well, there have been some positive results, but people like Charles Murray in his book, Losing Ground, and Thomas Sowell and others have pointed out, this has created a culture of dependency and a culture of entitlement among many people of color. And it’s really undermined a sense of agency or responsibility. And I really like the approach of Robert Woodson. You may have heard of him.
SPEAKER 08 :
I’ve had him on the show. Oh, terrific.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, I really wanted to get him to endorse my book. I couldn’t get through to him. But his approach has been African-Americans are human beings who have agency. And even if whites are against you, that doesn’t mean you’re going to fail. And it doesn’t mean that somehow the white culture owes you anything except equality, you know, except equal opportunity. Right.
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And I think that choice with your 24 hours to go to make your decisions for your 24 hours.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yes, exactly. And I like that approach. That’s the approach of human agency. There’s another guy I really like is Shelby Steele, who is an African-American historian. He started out as a black radical in the 60s and 70s. And he eventually saw that the civil government was not the ultimate answer to black poverty or to any kind of deep poverty and being disadvantaged. And he speaks a lot about the need for agency and responsibility. And he believes that a lot of the policies of the far left – and that would be critical race theory – are based on what he calls white guilt, his whole book called White Guilt. It’s somehow, well, whites feel guilty that they have more, in some cases, than blacks. And so this is behind the policies of let’s redistribute the wealth, let’s force equity, and so on. But there are these unintended consequences, right? We saw that certainly in the war on poverty. For example, there used to be a program called something like Aid to Dependent Mothers. And if you had one illegitimate child and no father at home, you got a certain amount of money, a woman. If you have two illegitimate children at home and no father at home, you got more money. Well, what kind of perverse incentive is that? The incentive is to destabilize a family. Now, nobody intended that. They didn’t say, let’s create a law to destroy the black family or to cause it to be weaker. But that actually was the effect. Of that. So I’m a principled conservative. I argue for limited government, individual responsibility. And I think that’s more the American approach to these kinds of problems. I don’t think that socialism is the right approach. I don’t think that constant appeals to systemic racism to explain everything. I don’t think those are good explanations historically or in social science either. So I dedicated… my book to Dr. Thomas Sowell, not because I have met him or he’s been a mentor, but through his books, I’ve learned how to view society and social stratification and racial issues in a way that I think makes a lot more sense than what you’re given by a highly ideological neo-Marxist or cultural Marxist theory. He still didn’t write me a card back, but darn it. Maybe one of these days, I would love to meet him sometime. I have so much respect for him.
SPEAKER 08 :
I would love to do that as well. And I’ve quoted him on the show somewhat regularly because he’s just very wise. But he grew up in Harlem and he’s a Korean War veteran. And now, well, Stanford Hoover Institute at Stanford. Right.
SPEAKER 14 :
He’s 92 and he’s still publishing books. He has a new book coming out in about a month. I think it’s called Social Justice Fallacies or something like that. I can’t wait to read that.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay. And I’m talking with Dr. Douglas Groteis. He’s a professor of philosophy at the Denver Seminary, the author of 18 books. And we get to have these great conversations because of wonderful sponsors. And I know that each of them strive for excellence.
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SPEAKER 08 :
And welcome back to The Kim Monson Show. Be sure and check out our website. That is Kim Monson, M-O-N-S-O-N.com. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter. You can email me at Kim at KimMonson.com as well. Thank you to all of you who support us. We are an independent voice. We search for truth and clarity by looking at these issues through the lens of freedom versus force, force versus freedom. If something’s a good idea, you should not have to force people to do it. I wanted to mention a great sponsor of the show, of both the Kim Monson Show and America’s Veterans Stories, and that is Hooters Restaurants. They have five locations, Loveland, Aurora, Lone Tree, Westminster, and Colorado Springs. They have great specials for lunch and happy hour Monday through Friday. So a great place to get together with friends. And How They Be King sponsors is really a story about freedom and free markets and capitalism. And you can find that story at KimMonson.com. In studio with me is Dr. Douglas Groteis. He is a professor of philosophy at the Denver Seminary. We’re talking about one of his most recent books, and that is Fire in the Streets, How You Can Confidently Respond to Incendiary Culture Topics. And Dr. Groteis, you had mentioned something regarding the American creed. And what do you want people to know about that?
SPEAKER 14 :
We’ve recently celebrated Independence Day, and it’s important for us to know, as Americans, what our history is, because this is fundamental to our identity, to our civil government, to our sense of ethos as a nation. And we hear a lot today about people’s sexual identities, how they identify, and that’s another topic. But I want to go right to the Declaration of Independence, because… We may take this for granted, but it’s quite remarkable that a nation would begin with a kind of declaration of principle. So I want to read a bit of this, and then I’ll talk about what I think are eight factors of the American creed. The unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands… Which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitled them. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. Such marvelous writing and so much philosophy packed in there. So the next section is maybe more recognizable to many of us. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Now, it’s a basic principle of politics today that those who are conservative emphasize the Declaration of Independence. And those that are more liberal and on the left want to forget about it because it’s so theistic. It’s so rooted in the metaphysics of God granting inalienable rights. Now, the statement is not there that we’re made in the image and likeness of God, but that is really assumed by this statement. But let me go on and talk about what I take to be elements of the American creed. And I talk about this on pages 42 and 43 of my book, Fire in the Streets. America is a republic. affirming that civil government is only legitimately constituted upon the consent of the governed. That is so significant. And this idea of a republic really traces back to the idea of a covenant. We think of the covenants in the Bible, and it’s not merely a contract or some kind of contingent social arrangement, but it’s more like a sacred relationship. of civil government based on the consent of the governed, and really, in the American situation, in the fear of God. Two, America recognizes the potential and weakness of human nature, so it does not concentrate power in any single branch of government. So we don’t have a king. We have the three branches of civil government, which should be balanced against each other. Three, America affirms and promotes religious and political freedom, equality, and opportunity. Four, America allows for and encourages upward mobility through individual initiative. We talked about that. The rags to riches story or attaining the American dream, not through state action. So five, America is a beacon for the nations or a city set in a hill, as Cotton Mathers said in a famous sermon. This was also reaffirmed by Ronald Reagan in his presidency. We are a sacred trust between God and we, the people. That doesn’t mean we’re the new Israel. It doesn’t mean America gets a pass from God when we sin. Israel didn’t even get that. God judged his own people when they sinned egregiously enough. But the idea is that we are exceptional. We’re an exceptional nation. We have great gifts, great opportunities, great abilities, and we’re held accountable for all these possibilities before a holy God. So six, America endeavors to honor and hold true to its founding documents, thus calling something unconstitutional in America is a reproach. Seven, America is a place where moral and political reform is possible within the founding ideals and ideally without violence. Eight, America is a land that welcomes legal immigrants who want to become Americans and find a better life. I think this creed is really found in our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and by salient aspects of our history, such as the Revolutionary War, freedom from England, the Civil War, freedom for African Americans, World War II, the victory over fascism, and the Cold War, the victory over communism. So there’s so much more to be said, but people on the left or people who hold a critical race theory will immediately say, but what about the fact that Thomas Jefferson, the principal writer of the Declaration of Independence, owned slaves? Why did it take America so long to abolish slavery? Well, that is a complicated story. Now, people can write better than they live. People can talk better than they live. Jefferson was actually conflicted. about slavery. And slavery was deeply embedded into certain aspects of American society for a very long time.
SPEAKER 07 :
And it was prevalent throughout the world. People need to understand that.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah. It’s not like slavery never existed until white slavers went to Africa and kidnapped all these blacks and brought them to America. And that’s the first time slavery ever existed. Slavery is just endemic in a fallen world. It’s sad. Thomas Sowell’s written about this. Others have written about it. It’s too bad it took us that long to get rid of slavery. But another issue is slavery was not the fact in every single state of the Union. It was in the South. And the documents that we have in the American creed, as I put it, really don’t square with slavery. Now, some people say, well, wait a minute. The Constitution says that black people are three fifths human.
SPEAKER 08 :
And I wanted to ask you about that.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yes. Yeah. Briefly, I have about six or seven pages on this. But it’s a compromise in the Constitution because the North and the South had to come up with a Constitution. Otherwise, there would be two nations, not one nation. So the three fifths clause actually limits the representation of the southern states in Congress because it counts slaves, although the word slave is never used. as three-fifths. That doesn’t mean a slave is considered three-fifths human in some metaphysical sense. It was a way of limiting the representational power of the South in the Congress by the North. It was a compromise. It’s sad the compromise had to happen at all, but it’s not an endorsement of Black human beings as having three-fifths the value of white human beings. We hear that on the left all the time. I even sometimes hear conservatives say it. They don’t know what they’re talking about.
SPEAKER 08 :
They don’t know what they’re talking about. This was my understanding, Dr. Groteis, is that when they were working through the Constitution and they were talking about representation, House of Representatives, which the votes on that would be via population.
SPEAKER 05 :
Right.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, then the southern states said, hey, we want to count all these people. And they’re acknowledging at that point that they are inherently human. And the northern states said, wait a minute, because they are not free human beings.
SPEAKER 01 :
Exactly.
SPEAKER 08 :
That doesn’t seem like that’s fair. And so that’s where they came up with the three-fifths compromise. But I hear people all the time say that, oh, it’s because that they looked at slaves as three-fifths of being a human, and it’s just not true.
SPEAKER 14 :
Not at all. Yeah, it’s Article 1, Section 2. I was blessed many years ago. I read an excellent article in Commentary Magazine about this, which I refer to quite a bit in my book. I deal with this on pages 53 to 55. But it is something you hear all the time. And it’s part of this story that America is racist, corrupt from the beginning. So we really have to tear it all down and start over again.
SPEAKER 08 :
But that whole narrative is based on something that is false. And so if that’s false over there, we have to wonder what else is false about this narrative that is being pushed on to young people. A lot of young people do not know that about the three fifths clause.
SPEAKER 14 :
Well, a lot of young people just don’t know American history. They don’t know civics. They don’t know basic facts about reading and writing and arithmetic. And a lot of American state education or what we call public education is extremely ideologically driven by Marxist or neo-Marxist ideas. Right. And we see this with plummeting test results in mathematics, in reading, in basic history. So one of the things I say in my book, I don’t just critique critical race theory, but I have a final section of the book that talks about what we can do about it. That section is called A Better Fire. Chapter 8, I deal with the Christian framework for civil government and society. And then Chapter 9, I give some specifics. But one thing I’m very keen on, and I have been literally for 40 years, I’m an old guy, I’m 66, is that we need to have a strong system or a strong program of private schools, family, education, and education. individual initiative for education that is don’t assume the state has the responsibility or the ability to rightly educate children so we need homeschooling private schooling charter schools now charter schools are still under the authority of the state but they have a lot more freedom and possibility thomas soul wrote a book on this a few years ago called charter schools and their enemies and he showed with meticulous research he said it was his most well-researched book which is amazing that disadvantaged children, like in inner city, many of them people of color, do extremely well in these charter schools. And it’s because these charter schools are not dominated by the liberal teachers union, and they have more parent involvement, and they have stricter standards. What do you know?
SPEAKER 07 :
How does that work out?
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, how does that work? You don’t just let the little beasties express themselves and then indoctrinate them into Marxism. You actually teach them the basic skills needed for civil society.
SPEAKER 08 :
And I will just clarify that that was all tongue-in-cheek as you were calling them beasties as we look at kids.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just mean little sinners. You know, we’re all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. But Thomas Sowell has another book, which he thinks is his most important book, which is called The Conflict of Visions. And there are two essential political visions. One is the constrained vision that we are limited beings, that there will be no earthly utopia. The state will not bring about heaven on earth. And there’s the unconstrained view, which says that all of our problems are based on social structures. If we just get the social structures right, change everything around, let people express themselves, that we will find a better society. Now, of course, the Christian view is the constrained vision.
SPEAKER 08 :
And, of course, and ultimately the unconstrained will devolve into chaos. And we can see that happening.
SPEAKER 14 :
And authoritarianism. Yeah.
SPEAKER 08 :
And what happened in 2020, fire in the streets. I’m talking with Dr. Douglas Groteis about his book. I did want to mention the USMC Memorial Foundation. It is a nonprofit that I dearly love. And Paula Sarles, she’s the president of the Marine Memorial Foundation. She’s also a Gold Star wife and a Marine veteran. And she is diligently, her and her team, raising money for the remodel of the Marine Memorial out at 6th and Colfax. And you can honor them by going to usmcmemorialfoundation.org to make a contribution. That is usmcmemorialfoundation.org. And we’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 11 :
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SPEAKER 13 :
All of Kim’s sponsors are an inclusive partnership with Kim and are not affiliated with or in partnership with KLZ or Crawford Broadcasting. If you would like to support the work of The Kim Monson Show and grow your business, contact Kim at her website, kimmonson.com. That’s kimmonson, M-O-N-S-O-N dot com.
SPEAKER 11 :
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SPEAKER 08 :
And welcome back to The Kim Munson Show. Be sure and check out our website. That is Kim Munson, M-O-N-S-O-N.com. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter. You can email me at Kim at KimMunson.com as well. Thank you to all of you who support us. We’re an independent voice. We search for truth and clarity by looking at these issues through the lens of freedom versus force, force versus freedom. If something’s a good idea, you shouldn’t have to force people to do it. Did want to mention a couple of things. First of all, Janssen Photography, which is located… Out here in Lakewood, Colorado, they have a beautiful property, so beautiful landscapes for that family portrait, portraits of children, those senior portraits that get your appointment made for that, and, of course, that important photo for your business or political career. You can get more information. At JansenPhotography.com. And then also the Center for American Values that is located on the Riverwalk right here in Pueblo, Colorado. Pueblo is known as the home of heroes. There are four Medal of Honor recipients that called Pueblo home. And it is just a really extraordinary place. They’re open seven days a week, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. And it’s focused on these great American principles of honor, integrity, and patriotism. So for more information, go to AmericanValueCenter.org. In studio with me is Dr. Douglas Groteis. He’s a professor of philosophy at the Denver Seminary, author of 18 books. We’re talking about his book, Fire in the Streets. But you are working on your 19th book, yes? Yes.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, actually, it’s done. It’ll be out in about two months. And this is a book about comparative religion. It’s called World Religion in Seven Sentences. I had a previous book called Philosophy in Seven Sentences. And the idea is to take significant sentences from the world’s religions and then use that as a point of entry to discussing the truth claims of the worldview. So I look at Start out actually with atheism, Nietzsche, God is dead. Critique that and then look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all the major world religions.
SPEAKER 08 :
Oh, my gosh. That’s fascinating. I can’t wait. So we’ll have to get you back on the show on that. Yeah, I’d love to do that, too. Okay, Dr. Douglas Groteis, the book that we’ve been talking about today is Fire in the Streets, How You Can Confidently Respond to Incendiary Culture Topics, which is important. You wrote this after, in air quotes, the summer of love, the summer of destruction, 2020. What about free speech in all of this?
SPEAKER 14 :
Right. And I should say that the title of the book doesn’t have the word critical race theory in it or the word woke in it. And if we get to a second edition, I really want to put that in there because the book is really about wokeness and about critical race theory. But this is a tremendous concern I have because the First Amendment. Says the Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion. So no state church or prohibiting the free exercise of religion or abridging the freedom of speech or press and so on. So this has to do with the civil government, but it’s also very much part of the American ethos and DNA system. that ideas should be publicly debated and disputed and may the best argument win, essentially. And John Stuart Mill said, if you only know your position, you probably don’t know your position very well. So if you only know what capitalism is, you don’t know anything about socialism, how well can you defend capitalism or the free market, let’s say? So this is really a very significant element of the American creed, is freedom to debate ideas publicly and marshal evidence and argument, and may the best argument win. Now, I’m a philosopher, so that’s what I attempt to do all the time at my best. But what we see with critical race theorists is that society is divided into – The oppressors and the oppressed. And the oppressors are white men Christians, essentially.
SPEAKER 07 :
Straight men.
SPEAKER 14 :
Straight, yes. So I put in there heteronormative, so to speak. And they oppress everyone else. And in fact, these folks don’t have the right to be hurt. So it’s not like we want you to advance your ideas defending the free market or defending a Judeo-Christian worldview or defending the ideals of America. We just want you to go away. We don’t want you to talk at all. So it’s not like we’ll give you the microphone and then we’ll take the microphone. We don’t want you to have the microphone at all. This is called cancel culture. We’re seeing it everywhere in society, in the academy, in politics, in entertainment and so on. And it’s based on a very toxic notion that some ideas do not deserve to be heard, do not deserve to be debated. You have to simply eliminate them. Now, if you believe that there is such a thing as objective truth and objective truth is knowable, and if you believe that reason is something to be used to find objective truth, then you have to be opposed to this idea. But a lot of it comes back to—one of the leading theorists of critical race theory goes back— to the 30s and onward, a man named Herbert Marcuse, who is the main philosopher of the New Left in the American counterculture in the 60s and 70s, he wrote an essay where he said we should not be tolerant of conservative viewpoints because those are the ideological views that hold people in subjection. So these folks, the people who defend American ideals or free market, are intrinsically toxic and their ideas have to be silenced so our ideas our neo-marxist ideas can ascend and gain power and he wrote a whole essay on this back i believe it was in the 1960s and this is now everywhere in our society and it plays itself out in cancel culture
SPEAKER 08 :
So, Dr. Groteis, I’m thinking about culture, how we got to this point. But you mentioned objective truth. Don’t you remember the narrative? Oh, you have your truth. I have my truth. We agree to disagree. Instead of debating the narrative. debating the ideas, and that if you get to a point where the other idea has made the case, made it on the merits, then just walk away and go, oh, I have my truth, or we’ll agree to disagree. I always felt that was… A bit of a cop out.
SPEAKER 14 :
Oh, it is. I wrote a book many years ago called Truth Decay about postmodernism. And what we’re seeing in critical race theory is a kind of a new version of postmodernism where it says that the lived experience of oppressed people. is the final word. So if a Hispanic man says, I’m oppressed and I’m targeted by the police and our whole system is corrupt and we have to bring it down, you say, well, you as a Hispanic man or Hispanic woman or black man or black woman have been oppressed horribly. And so your viewpoint is automatically beyond critique. Now, it’s a half-truth, it’s a whole lie, because sure, I have no idea what it’s like to be an African-American male. I’m a white male. I have no idea what it’s like to be a Latina, a female Hispanic person. So I need to listen to those folks and talk to them and interact with them. But simply being a person of color doesn’t make you an expert on the Three-Fifths Clause or on American history or what American ideals are or what would actually advance people overall. So the postmodern view was it’s all perspective, there’s no objective truth, but beware of these narratives that try to explain everything, like Christianity. The critical race theory version of it is, well, it’s all perspective, but there’s one perspective that trumps all the rest, and that is the perspective of the lived experience of the oppressed. Right. Now, that viewpoint says, well, we don’t need to hear from the oppressors because they’ve set up the whole system to be unfair to the oppressed. So we have to hear the oppressed. And take their word for it. But people are not even consistent on this because, all right, they’re black folks that have differences of opinion. You know, if you have the opinions of Abraham X. Kendi and of Thomas Sowell, both African-Americans, they’re radically different. It’s not that one viewpoint is black and one viewpoint is not black. They’re both black. You deal with ideas not according to pigmentation, but according to rationality. But now we’re trying to pigmentize truth and make truth ethnically relative. And that just undermines civil discourse. I’ll give you an example. I won’t give you any specifics because I get in trouble. But we’re talking about my book, Fire in the Streets. I’m a white male, 66 years old. And I know of some Christian people who said, oh, we don’t even have to read Grothuis’ book because he’s white. He’s white, so therefore he has nothing to say about the racial issue. Well, I call that literary racism. Racism can go in all directions. Whites can be racist against blacks, blacks against whites, Latinos against blacks. Racism can occur all over the place.
SPEAKER 08 :
And what I think it is, Douglas, is that it’s defining people by the color of their skin instead of the content of their character.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, and the quality of their ideas. Right. The quality of their ideas. So I like to say I would rather be refuted in an argument than canceled. You know, let’s let’s have a good discussion. And if you show that I’m wrong about something, then I hope I have the humility and integrity to say, you’re right. I was wrong. So now I’m better for it. But we don’t find that happening a lot. It’s more who do we want to center in the discourse and who do we want to de-center and even marginalize and cancel. And that’s not a good idea if we’re pursuing the truth about what matters most.
SPEAKER 08 :
And so that’s why what we do on the show, when I say that we are engaged in this great battle of ideas, we are. And one of the things is we need to make sure that we hear the ideas instead of having them canceled, which we got just a couple of minutes left, which brings us back to freedom of speech. And the founders knew that that was so important that they put that in the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Right.
SPEAKER 14 :
Exactly. And I really respect old line liberals like Alan Dershowitz. There aren’t too many of them left. You know, Alan Dershowitz was a professor of law for many years, I believe, at Harvard. He’s in his 80s now. He’s liberal. He didn’t vote for Donald Trump, but he thought Donald Trump had been mistreated. So he actually represented him as a lawyer. I’m not a big Donald Trump fan, but see, the old liberals say, let’s use the system, freedom of speech, the rule of law, and may… The best people win or may the most effective people win. That’s not critical race theory. Critical race theory is silence the opponents, do anything you can to marginalize them. It’s not a view that honors free speech. It’s a very anti-American, anti-truth and rationality kind of perspective.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, and it doesn’t honor the individual either. And that is really the beauty that we’ve been celebrating with our independence is the sanctity of the individual. And that is inherent in the American idea. Dr. Douglas Groteis, it is always a delight and treat to have you on the show. I greatly appreciate it. And people can get your book at all the places, can’t they?
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, it’s certainly on Amazon. It hasn’t been canceled yet there. Salem, my publisher, makes it available as well, Salem Books.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay. Dr. Douglas Groteis, great to have you here. And so I decided, because you talked a lot about Thomas Sowell, that I would do a Thomas Sowell quote at the end of the show. And he said this, It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. I love that. So my friends today, be grateful, read great books, think good thoughts, listen to beautiful music, communicate and listen well, live honestly and authentically, strive for high ideals, and like Superman, stand for truth, justice, and the American way. My friends, you are not alone. God bless you, and God bless America. Stay tuned for hour number two.
SPEAKER 10 :
The views and opinions expressed on KLZ 560 are those of the speaker, commentators, hosts, their guests, and callers. They are not necessarily the views and opinions of Crawford Broadcasting or KLZ management, employees, associates, or advertisers. KLZ 560 is a Crawford Broadcasting God and country station.
SPEAKER 16 :
It’s the Kim Munson Show, analyzing the most important stories.
SPEAKER 08 :
The socialization of transportation, education, energy, housing, and water. What it means is that government controls it through rules and regulations.
SPEAKER 16 :
The latest in politics and world affairs.
SPEAKER 08 :
Under the guise of bipartisanship and nonpartisanship, it’s actually tapping down the truth.
SPEAKER 16 :
Today’s current opinions and ideas.
SPEAKER 08 :
On an equal field in the battle of ideas, mistruths and misconceptions is getting us into a world of hurt.
SPEAKER 16 :
Is it freedom or is it force? Let’s have a conversation.
SPEAKER 08 :
Indeed, and welcome to the Kim Munson Show. Thank you so much for joining us. You’re each treasured, you’re valued, you have purpose. Today’s drive for excellence, take care of your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body. My friends, we were made for this moment. And I get to work with an amazing team, that is producer Joe, producer Nicole, and And Luke, Rachel, Zach, Echo, Charlie, all the people here at Crawford Broadcasting, we are an independent voice on an independent station, and we search for truth and clarity by looking at these issues through the lens of freedom versus force, force versus freedom. If something’s a good idea, you should not have to force people to do it. And I am so pleased and honored to have on the line with me Dr. Alan Gelso. He’s an American historian, and he serves as senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities and director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. And he formerly was a professor at the History of Gettysburg College. Dr. Gelso, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, thank you, Kim.
SPEAKER 08 :
And it’s so appropriate to have you as our first guest. The battle, which was in July, let’s see, July 1 through July 3. Now the year 1863. Am I remembering it right?
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s still 1863, yes.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay. The battle was in the summer. And I guess, first of all, let’s talk about the significance of the battle. And I guess that’s a great segue into your most recent book, Robert E. Lee, A Life. And Robert E. Lee, after the Battle of Gettysburg, can you imagine getting up and what was going through his mind on July 4 in 1863 after this battle?
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, I think it could be boiled down to one sentence, and that is, how do I get out of here? True. Because the great battle that occurs at Gettysburg on July 1, 2, and 3 of 1863 was really a major initiative of Lee’s. This was really Lee’s idea about how the Southern Confederacy, which had been carrying on this civil war now for a little bit more than two years, This was a piece in what Lee thought was the only really workable strategy for the Confederacy to achieve independence from the United States. And he reasoned this way. The Southern Confederacy, which at this point is composed effectively of 11 states of the American South that have tried to secede from the Union, Lee understood that The South didn’t have the heft, economically, industrially, and otherwise, that the northern states had. So going into this civil war, the odds were all against the Confederacy. If the Confederacy was going to win, it was going to have to go into this heavyweight bout, trying to score a surprise knockout in the first round or two. Because if the war ground on after that, then the Confederacy would simply be worn down and worn away, and would lose the war. So Lee’s reasoning is, we have to take the initiative. This Confederate army, which he called the Army of Northern Virginia, has to jump from Virginia across the Potomac into Maryland, into Pennsylvania, and in the summer of 1863, it has to get loose in Pennsylvania, because if it does, if it can do that successfully… In fact, if he can find some way to fight a battle with the major United States force opposing him, which is the Army of the Potomac, his reasoning was that northern public opinion would be so fatigued at this, it would be so revolted by it, that they would demand that the Lincoln administration enter negotiations with the Confederates. And at that point, once negotiations began, Lee understood no one was going to go back into this horrible, fratricidal war. So Lee’s gambling, but it’s a good gamble. It’s an intelligent gamble. And it had a lot going for it, because not only is he looking at the state of mind of Northerners, he’s also looking at what’s happened at election time. Back in the preceding November, Abraham Lincoln’s party, the Republicans, had lost something like 35 seats in the House of Representatives and two key governorships in the North, the governorship of New York, the governorship of New Jersey. Well, the governorships of Pennsylvania and Ohio were up for election in the fall of 1863. Lee knows if he can show that the Lincoln administration is helpless and impotent and can’t deal with the Confederates who are invading Pennsylvania, then voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio are going to go to the polls, they’re going to elect anti-administration governors. And that means you’re going to have this central chunk of the northern states in opposition to Lincoln. And they can just fold their arms and say to President Lincoln, we’re not cooperating with this war any longer. You’re going to have to open negotiations with the Confederacy. And at that moment, really, it’s inevitable. The Confederates are going to obtain their independence. So Lee launches this invasion of Pennsylvania. And yes, there’s an element of a gamble to it. But it’s a shrewd gamble. And the really terrifying thing about this, Kim, is how very close he came to winning that gamble. Because if Lee’s army had been victorious at Gettysburg, as for two of the three days of the battle, it really was, or even if it had just been able to run willy-nilly around the Pennsylvania countryside without the Union doing very much to stop them, it would have had an incredibly destructive effect. And perhaps we would be looking at a very different kind of America today than we were looking at in 1863 or that we look at today as it really exists.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, Dr. Kelso, the Civil War, many people think that it was really a war about slavery, which ultimately that question, and it was really the question of would slavery be expanded into the new territories. That’s my understanding. That was the initial question. kind of question on that. But what Lincoln looked at it as, he wanted to keep the Union together. And was Lee looking more at like a states’ rights issue? Or how would you frame that?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, the causes of the American Civil War are always a lively subject of debate. And I like to get philosophical at moments like that and say, all right, let’s talk about what causes something. There’s a real sense in which sectionalism is one cause. Because if slavery had been legal, let’s say, in Minnesota and Maine and Florida and Louisiana, there would never have been a civil war, because they’re not in a position to support each other. But the states where slavery was legal were all contiguous. They all shared common borders. You could look at a map and look at those slave states, and you could say, hey, I could see that would be a functioning, viable, independent nation. So, sectionalism is one. There’s another cause here, too, and that is federalism. I mean, ours is a federal system of government. It’s states in a union under a federal constitution. But the habit of federalism let a lot of people think that the states somehow possessed a sovereignty of their own, which, if you read the Constitution with any kind of care, you realize that’s really not the case. But many people talked themselves into believing that states had that kind of sovereignty. And so it was easy in those days then to conclude, well, if states have that kind of sovereignty, then they can walk away from the Union. I mean, if that’s not sovereignty, we don’t know what is. But then, ultimately, there’s slavery. Slavery is the one item in this equation which, if you take it out, there’s no civil war. I don’t care what the circumstances are. But put slavery back into the equation, that’s when you get civil war. So at the end of the day, if people ask me to put my finger on one thing and call it the cause of the Civil War, there’s simply no question. It was slavery. And you know the people who tell us that are the Southerners themselves. In the resolutions that their state conventions and legislatures passed at the very beginning of the Civil War in 1861, they’re all very candid about this. We’re doing this to protect slavery. Afterwards, in the years after the war, a lot of Southerners who were embarrassed by that would try to insist, well, no, no, no, no, it was about these other things. Well, yeah, to a certain degree, but not to a degree that put the issue of slavery in the shadow. If you’ve got to put your finger on one thing, it’s slavery.
SPEAKER 08 :
But many of those that fought on the southern side did not own slaves. How did they get co-opted into that?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, part of it was because you have to look carefully at what we mean by slave ownership. If you look at the southern population right on the eve of the Civil War, Probably slave ownership amounts to no more than one-third of the white population of the South. That’s quite a bit, though. Yeah, that’s a significant chunk in its own right. But it’s actually more widespread than that, because you have to remember that slaves are not just owned by individuals. They’re also owned by families. So, in fact, you can have someone who was a junior member of a family. I’d say someone who was an 18-year-old. All right, they may not be owning slaves in their own right, but they might be part of a family that does. Ah, at that moment, suddenly the percentage of Southerners who are involved in the slave system gets a lot bigger, just in mathematical terms. And then if you look at the composition of the Southern armies, especially at Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, A very fine analysis of this was done by a colleague of mine, Joseph Glathar, at the University of North Carolina. He analyzed the slave ownership patterns of the soldiers of Lee’s army. There, the patterns of slave ownership were actually larger than at the than the percentages in the southern population as a whole, so that the Confederate army actually had an even clearer investment in protecting slavery than you might say the population of the South as a whole. So don’t underestimate, just by doing simple numerical calculations, don’t underestimate the pervasiveness of the slave system, because many people who might not actually own a slave were involved in the slave system in a variety of ways.
SPEAKER 08 :
Wow, fascinating. We have just a couple of minutes before we go to break. Let’s just talk a little bit about your books. I mean, you’ve written a number of different books. The most recent was Robert E. Lee. But you also did a book on Gettysburg that I think is very important. And many of these books, I really highly recommend that people have them in hardback copy in their freedom libraries. Would you say that there is one book that you’ve written that stands out among the others, or would you say they’re all equal in importance?
SPEAKER 04 :
Kim, that’s like asking me which is my favorite child. I could get in a lot of trouble that way. Of course, what I’m tempted to say is, oh, no, no, I regard them all equally. Therefore, your listeners should all go out and buy all of them. But the Gettysburg book is a significant book in a lot of ways. It’s a very big book. It’s been eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list when it came out back in 2013. And I would say I’m a little bit fond of it. I’m also fond of some of the stuff that I’ve done on the subject of Abraham Lincoln and my early book on Lincoln from 1999. Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President. I suppose if I had to pick one off the line and say that one’s my favorite, it might very likely be Redeemer President. But I have to say that writing Gettysburg was a tremendous amount of fun because I was doing it right there in Gettysburg itself so that I was talking about this great battle while being able to walk out my door and walk around over the very battlefield I was describing. And I think that gave me something of an advantage in the sense that when I was talking about the battle, I wasn’t just talking about a map and rectangles and squares moving across the map. I was actually looking at the lay of the land itself and seeing the ground as the participants in the battle had very much seen it. So that gave a particularly important attraction to the writing of that book.
SPEAKER 08 :
Fascinating. And that book is Gettysburg, The Last Invasion by Dr. Alan Gelso. And we’re having a great conversation about the Gettysburg Address. This is being broadcast on the 20th, the day after the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. And just such important conversations. We get to do this. I want to say thank you to the Harris family for their gold sponsorship of the show. And also thank you to the National Shooting Sports Foundation for their gold sponsorship of the show as well. And we get to do all this because we have amazing sponsors. We have these discussions on the show because I have amazing sponsors. One of those is on the line, John Bosen with Bosen Law. John, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER 03 :
Good morning, Kim.
SPEAKER 08 :
A lot is going on, and I wanted to just ask you again about people being hit by uninsured motorists. I was at the corner of Hamden and I-25, getting onto I-25, and as I came up to the corner, there was a car that had no license plate whatsoever. And bear in mind, there is a piece of legislation going through the legislature right now that will have penalties if we do not have our driver’s license with us, if you can believe that. There’s that law. But I looked over and, you know, making assumptions. It looked to me like it could be someone that had come here illegally, so probably didn’t have a driver’s license and didn’t even have a license on the car. So this is getting… More and more dangerous here in Colorado. What should people know?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, they should know that they have for themselves with their own auto insurance carrier, uninsured, underinsured motorist coverage. And I talk to people every day, Kim. And the vast majority of people, they don’t know if they even have that coverage for themselves, that coverage that protects them if or more and more, I say when, somebody hits you, causes an accident. It’s their fault they have no insurance coverage. Some of them are absolutely, nobody can deny it anymore. They’re illegals that are getting cars. How are they getting cars? I don’t know. But they’re getting behind the wheel, don’t have a driver’s license, don’t know the laws in our country, are causing accidents, fleeing the scene. Or they say it’s a scene. It doesn’t matter. They don’t have insurance coverage. They are not going to be able to take care of the damages, the injuries, the harm they cause to others by being here and driving on our streets when they shouldn’t be.
SPEAKER 08 :
So that is my next question is, guys, John Bosun, it surely seems like we, the people of Colorado, should be able to have some legal recourse. And it seems to me like that should go right to the elected representatives and bureaucrats that are responsible for all of these issues.
SPEAKER 03 :
uh… illegal uh… aliens that are here and i know that’s a long shot i i’ve kind of pose that uh… question to you before that what do you think about that today i think it’s a viable option for the right situation the right scenario i and then several others of my colleagues are looking for that case uh… it’s gonna be very interesting when when it happens But in the meantime, people out there, your listeners, need to know what kind of coverage they have. They need to make sure that they have that uninsured motorist coverage with their own auto insurance carrier. And if there’s any question in their mind, they need to contact their agent, review their policy, get a copy of their declaration page, and see with their own eyes that confirmation that they’ve got that insurance coverage that will protect them in the event they have uh… an accident with someone that has no insurance coverage uh… so important we’ve talked about it time and time again camp uh… but uh… on a regular basis i talk with folks that tell me they’ve got full coverage in They don’t know what they have. And then when they do look, they find out that to save some money, they waive that coverage nine out of ten times. They really didn’t understand what that coverage provided. So don’t waive uninsured, underinsured motorist coverage, listeners. Get it. Make sure you have it. It’s more important today than it has ever been in my 34 years of practicing law in the state of Colorado and handling personal injury matters for folks.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, and if someone is injured, whether or not in an auto accident or at work, to call you immediately is so important. What is that number, John Boson?
SPEAKER 03 :
That number for a conversation with me or one of my other attorneys is 303-999- nine nine nine nine and and uh… you’re exactly right camp someone needs to call it if they are someone they care about or someone they know has been involved in a situation where they’ve suffered harm the sooner i can get on the phone with them the better i won’t necessarily offer representation but i will give advice and that advice is timely can make all the difference when folks wait bad stuff happens so three zero three nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine is the number to call
SPEAKER 08 :
And again, that’s John Bosen with Bosen Law. John, we’ll talk to you next week.
SPEAKER 03 :
Kim, have a great rest of your show.
SPEAKER 08 :
Thank you so much. And as John had mentioned, it is so important to have uninsured motorist coverage. And so why don’t you reach out to Roger Mangan and his State Farm Insurance team and have a complimentary appointment with them to go over your insurance coverage. I’ve done that, and I greatly appreciate them. They carry my home and auto. And for more information, give them a call at 303-795-8855. Like a good neighbor, the Roger Mangan team is there.
SPEAKER 06 :
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SPEAKER 08 :
And welcome back to The Kim Munson Show. Be sure and check out our website. That is KimMunson, M-O-N-S-O-N.com. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter. And you can email me at Kim at KimMunson.com as well. And thank you to all of you who support us. We are an independent voice on an independent station. And we search for truth and clarity by looking at these issues through the lens of freedom versus force, force versus freedom. If something’s a good idea, you should not have to force people to do it. And we have prerecorded these shows for the week of Thanksgiving and have very special guests. And we’re kicking it off with Dr. Alan Gelso. He’s an American historian and he serves as senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities and director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship. in the James Madison program at Princeton, and he was a professor at Gettysburg College as well. And he is an amazing author. His most recent book is on Robert E. Lee. He has a very important book on Gettysburg, but you can get all of his books. You can go to his website, and that is, let me get it, it’s allengelzo, that’s G-U-E-L-Z-O dot com. So it’s A-L-L-E-N-G-U-E-L-Z-O dot com. Dr. Galzo, before we went to break, we were talking about the book Gettysburg and that you were there, going out onto the battlefield. And I’ve been to Gettysburg once, and it was too fast because I really would like to spend time there. But we actually ended up, I was with my daughter. She was moving from New York to Kansas City. And so we were driving there. driving from New York to Kansas City, obviously, and we stopped in Gettysburg, and it was during the summer, and we ended up at a farm-to-table event, and there were probably, I bet there were at least 30 people at this long table there at Gettysburg, and the home was an old… I think it was an old church. It was now a home. And there was actually a pew that they had there that had blood on it from when they were bringing in soldiers to operate on them. I guess it was a hospital. I think it was a church that became a hospital. And I kind of stood there and I’m like, this is something that I’m experiencing. I couldn’t quite put my hand on it, Dr. Galzo.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, during the battle, Almost every building in Gettysburg was liable to be impressed as a hospital facility of some sort. This is a battle that involves something on the order of 180,000 people. I’m talking right now just about the soldiers. 180,000 people who are either in uniform or they’re working for the armies as civilian teamsters and whatnot. All of them compressed into a square of not more than 20 miles. Gettysburg, up to this point, had been a town whose population amounted to about 2,500 people. Suddenly, almost overnight, you have this stupendous influx. And, of course, it’s not only 180 or 190,000 human beings. It’s all the horses that have to pull wagons and pull artillery. All of this now has to get compressed into this small space. And then, of course, the fighting itself begins. And the fighting is deadly. This is 19th century warfare, when everyone understood that casualty lists were going to be high. And they were. Generally speaking, we could probably say that at the Battle of Gettysburg, from both sides, something like 9,000 were killed. Maybe we can guess, and it is a guesstimate, because in the 19th century, they didn’t really have terribly accurate ways of totaling these things. probably about 4,000 to 4,500 dead on each side after three days of fighting. Take that and multiply that by anywhere from three to five times, and then you start to get a sense of the wounded. Just take it as a whole, probably about a third of each army. ended up as a casualty of some sort well for the wounded where do you put them there are there are no easily available hospitals there are no ready-made facilities so what you have to do is you have to set things up wherever you can find shelter that means you take over houses you take over barns you take over churches you take over anything with a roof and sometimes you take over things that don’t even have a roof and the medicine of the 19th century this is long before they have any understanding of germs or infection The ways of dealing with casualties, with wounds, we would regard as being almost barbaric. Because if someone is wounded, let’s say, in the arms or the legs, the only really secure treatment for that is imputation. If someone is wounded in the chest or in the abdomen, for the most part, they have to be set aside. Because the wounds are going to be fatal. They’re really going to be fatal from loss of blood, or they’re going to be fatal over a longer and more painful period of several days just from infection. And that kind of situation is enough to make our jaws drop in horror at the prospect. And yet this is going on all through the town of Gettysburg. It has to be done quickly. It has to be done hurriedly. The amputations can’t be done with, in many cases, anesthetic of any sort.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, my gosh.
SPEAKER 04 :
And the amputations themselves are being done by doctors who are quite literally using saws. We would look at it and say, well, that’s what a carpenter does to deal with wood. No, that is what doctors had to deal with in the middle of the 19th century in cases like the Battle of Gettysburg. So it’s not just that one building, Kim. There are a number of places scattered all around the Gettysburg area that were impressed for use as hospitals, which have… stains like that. I’ve been in one house on the battlefield, for instance, that you can readily be taken to one part of the floor, the blood stains. The blood stains from the amputations, from the bleeding of the wounds, the stain is still there on the floorboards. And my experience has been that that can be repeated and pointed to in place after place, location after location in the Gettysburg area.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay, Dr. Gelso, I have to ask this question with these amputations. I mean, the loss of blood would be so significant. What did they do to stop that?
SPEAKER 04 :
You tied the limbs off like a tourniquet, you sutured them up, and you hoped for the best. And sometimes your hope was rewarded, and sometimes it wasn’t. The way that death stalked these armies… occurs in a proportion that we would find simply unimaginable today. But yet in the 19th century, such was the nature of medicine and medical practice. They simply didn’t have any other way of dealing with these things.
SPEAKER 08 :
Goodness, it takes my breath away as I think about that. Okay, I’ve got the next question. And this last May, it was the first time that I’d made it to Virginia, to Monticello and Montpelier. And… You said that ultimately the war came down to slavery and Lee’s army was the Army of Northern Virginia. How is it? So we have Thomas Jefferson who writes these beautiful words in the Declaration that all men are created equal. And that can’t match up with slavery. So how did this, that Virginia is now at war regarding slavery? Because if all men are created equal, you can’t have slavery. How would you address that?
SPEAKER 04 :
You address it by understanding the human nature follows ideals, but it also follows self-interest. And these two voices are often in competition with each other. It’s almost like the good angel and the bad angel on your shoulder whispering in your ear. The ideal was the one captured by Jefferson in his words in the Declaration of Independence. And they are great ideals. And they are true. But self-interest said, owning slaves is what makes us money. Slave labor is cheap. You don’t have to pay wages to slaves. And you can work them for as long as you like and in as many ways as you like. Slaves never go on strike. There’s no union for slaves. So self-interest enters into it. And when self-interest collides with ideals, two things will happen. The ideals will win, and people will walk away from something like slavery. That’s what we hope will happen, and indeed it did in many places in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War. But in many other places, people made the other choice. They made the choice of averting their eyes. They made the choice of denial. And sometimes that choice took the form of saying, well, these people whom we’re enslaving, they’re not really people like us, despite the fact that They’re born and they die. They get sick. They get healthy. They have children. They have two arms. They have two legs. They have a head. They have eyes. They have a nose. They’re human. But yet you look at them and you say, well, no, no, they’re not really human, at least not human like us. And therefore, it’s legitimate for us to enslave them. That becomes the excuse that people invent. And isn’t this always the way human beings do things? When we decide we want to dispose of someone, we find inconvenient. Whether it’s Jews in Germany, whether it’s populations that are not wanted by larger populations, what’s the first step towards genocide, dehumanization? Convince yourself, and convince others, that these people whom you plan to do something evil to really, really don’t deserve anything more than what they’re being given because they’re not really, again, like us. And when you start to think in those terms, that is when people start to give themselves permission to do all kinds of horrible things to each other. So there are two paths. There’s the paths of the ideal, and the ideal is the one Jefferson captures in his words. But then there’s the other path of self-interest, which Jefferson, alas, captures in his behavior, and which Southerners, despite their allegiance to a nation founded on that proposition that all men are created equal, nevertheless self-interest persuaded them that they could invent a fantasy that would allow them to get away with the exact opposite of what the principles in the Declaration described.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, I think what we’ll do is we’ll go to break because I want to talk about groups. Because I see in 2023 America, if you can, as you say, define a person as not like us, and you start to put into groupthink instead of the individual, I think that’s where we get into – a lot of trouble where people, humans, can inflict a lot of harm on other humans. I’m talking with Dr. Alan Gelso. And a couple of things I wanted to mention. First of all, Hooters Restaurants is a sponsor of the show. It’s a really important story how I got to know them. And that is the story of freedom and free markets and capitalism. And PBIs, I call them PBIs, politicians, bureaucrats, and interested parties, they were trying to take away the freedom of people to be entrepreneurs. It’s a really important story. You can find that online. at my website. But Hooters Restaurants has five locations, Loveland, Aurora, Lone Tree, Westminster, and Colorado Springs. And they have great specials Monday through Friday for lunch and for dinner. And I also wanted to mention A Climate Conversation, which is a documentary that I’m involved in. It is the brainchild of Walt Johnson. He’s a geophysicist, a good friend. He and his wife are friends of mine. And it was on his heart to create a documentary to have just a real conversation about this whole climate issue out there. And you can find more information and see the movie at aclimateconversation.com. And it is just asking questions in the Socratic method about this particular issue. So, again, you can get more information by going to aclimateconversation.com. We get to do all this because of great sponsors, and one of those is Karen Levine.
SPEAKER 16 :
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SPEAKER 08 :
Welcome back to The Kim Munson Show. Be sure to check out our website. That is KimMunson, M-O-N-S-O-N.com. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter. You can email me at Kim at KimMunson.com as well. Thank you to all of you who support us. We are an independent voice and we search for truth and clarity by looking at these issues through the lens of freedom versus force, force versus freedom. If something’s a good idea, you should not have to force people to do it. We have prerecorded these shows for the week of Thanksgiving and really pleased to have on the line with me, Dr. Alan Gelso, who teaches at Princeton University. And before we get back into the conversation, I wanted to mention the Center for American Values. It is located right here in Pueblo, Colorado. Pueblo is known as the home of heroes because there are four Medal of Honor recipients. that grew up in Pueblo, Colorado. And so the center was founded by Medal of Honor recipient Drew Dix and Brad Padula, who is a award-winning documentary maker. And they realized that we need to do two things, honor our Medal of Honor recipients and then also instill in ourselves and teach our children these values of America of honor, integrity, and patriotism. So they’re putting together some great educational programs as well. You can get more information by going to the Center for American Values, and that website is AmericanValueCenter.org. I’m talking with Dr. Alan Gelso, and you can find his books at AlanGelso.com. That’s A-L-L-E-N-G-U-E-L-Z-O.com. And you are working on a new book, correct, Dr. Gelso? Yes.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, in fact, I’m working on several of them simultaneously, which I suppose represents a very bad habit on my part. I write books. Maybe I should apologize for it. Maybe I should be looking for a 12-step process, do you think, to help me get over this?
SPEAKER 08 :
I don’t think so. The important thing is that you finish them, and you have a record of doing that. And so what is your most recent books? What are you writing on?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, I will have coming out in February a new book on Lincoln entitled Our Ancient Faith, Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment. The title is drawn from a speech Lincoln gave in Peoria, Illinois, in October of 1854, where he talks about democracy as our ancient faith. He talks about the Declaration of Independence capturing that ancient faith. So the book is really about what Lincoln had to say. on the subject of democracy in its various aspects, like elections, like majority rule, like toleration, like natural law and morality, and the role that all of these play in the making and perpetuation of democracy.
SPEAKER 08 :
Fascinating. Wow. And so 1854, is that early in his political career? He’d been in politics for a few years, or when was that exactly?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, he’d been in politics for 20 years before that. Okay. And it hadn’t turned out all that particularly well for him either, because he gets into the state legislature in 1834, and he has four very fulfilling terms in the state legislature. But then he, in the 1840s, runs for the United States House of Representatives. He gets elected, but his term in office is a very disappointing one. He is a FWG—he’s a member of the FWG party— That means, first of all, he’s in the minority. But secondly, it means he puts himself in opposition to President James Polk, who at that point was conducting the war in Mexico. And Lincoln has to stand up and criticize Polk, which means that brings down on his head a lot of criticism for not adequately supporting the Mexican war. And he doesn’t run for reelection. And he goes home to Illinois. And as he said in an autobiographical sketch that he wrote, he really had given up on politics. He didn’t really see much of a future for him after this in politics. And then suddenly in 1854, he gets back on the stage. It’s like Abraham Lincoln 2.0. And the reason he does it is because in 1854, Congress passed the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Act, which, for the first time in Lincoln’s political life, made possible the introduction of legalized slavery into the Western territories. He looked at that and said, if that’s going to be a possibility in the Western territories, then that means eventually slavery is going to take over the whole country, including his own home state of Illinois, which at that point was a free state. There was no slavery in Illinois. And this is what propels Lincoln back into the political forefront. He gives the great speech at Peoria in October of 1854, and he talks about our ancient faith. And from that point, Kim, he follows a trajectory upwards which will, six years later, lead him to election as the 16th president of the United States.
SPEAKER 08 :
Wow. Remarkable. And the fact that he grew up in basically a cabin and read by candlelight, but he read important books. At the end of my show, I say, read great books. We have choices to make with what we do each day, each hour, each minute. We have choices. That’s a beautiful thing about living in America, that we’re free to make those choices. But we need to make choices I think that propel us to be our best selves. And the fact that he was just an avid reader. I run into people all the time, and as avid readers of great books, I love conversations with them, Dr. Gelso.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, you would love a conversation with Lincoln then, because this was a man who, all right, on the one hand, he has next to nothing in the way of what you could call formal education. He once estimated that he went to school probably when he added it all up to not more than a year’s worth of basic education. And yet he has this voracious appetite for reading and for learning. And he said his best friend would be the person who would lend him a book. And he read tremendously. Years later, his law partner, William Henry Herndon, actually made up a list of books that Lincoln kept in his law office. You go down that list, Kim, and these are all the major writers of the 19th century. We’re talking here not just easy marquee names. We’re talking about the authors of books on political economy, of books on philosophy. And Lincoln is reading these books online. on science. He would subscribe to a series of volumes that came out as an annual on new horizons in science in the 1850s. And he ate these things up. There was no subject on which he would not show a curiosity. Someone at one point challenged him. They said, well, we want to describe you in a political biography as someone who has read geometry. And Lincoln’s response was, well, I haven’t actually read all that much, so let me go out and get the book, and then I will read it. So all you had to do was challenge him. And if there was a book that people were reading or a book that he thought would be important and would expand his horizon, he would not only read it, but he would master the book because he had a terrific memory. Not perhaps quite what we’d call a photographic memory, but something very close to it. He would read things over once, twice, maybe three times. He’d have them. He could quote them. He could quote huge stretches of Shakespeare, of other English poets of the 18th century. And people were astonished at that because they would think, well, this man didn’t really have much in the way of education. He never went to college. What did he learn all this? Well, he learned it on his own hook. And as I say, people would be amazed when, given a moment, he would simply launch into a long recitation from Shakespeare.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, my next question is, how did he learn to read? Because out here in Colorado, we just recently had an election, and I had a number of school board candidates on the show. And some of the percentages they were telling me of kids that were proficient in reading was like 30% of the kids are proficient in reading. That means that 70% are not. And we’re spending big bucks on this. I said, I want my money back. Every child… should be able to read. So how did he learn to read with no formal education?
SPEAKER 04 :
He probably was taught at home, because on the other side of the Appalachians, when he was growing up on the western side of the Appalachians, which in those days, that was what people called the West. When we talk about the West today, we’re usually talking about, well, Pueblo, Colorado. But back in Lincoln’s day, the West was Kentucky. The So people learned, if they were going to learn anything, they were going to learn at home. And their parents were going to teach them how to read. And the neighborhood was going to afford them exposure to books. And it was going to happen in that fashion because it wasn’t until much later in Lincoln’s life that you begin to see the organization of public education in the states on the western side of the Appalachians. For Lincoln, it all has to begin at home. It has to begin at his mother’s knee. And starting from there, he moves ever relentlessly upwards in his mastery of books. And he has a very healthy respect for education and for reading. And he advises people, everything that we know in the world can be understood by reading. Reading is what unlocks all the riches of the world. That, for him, was a rule he lived by.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, and I really think that, I mean, we have so much that is thrown at us in the society now. And again, we need to make choices with what we do. And certainly reading for leisure is great. But there’s stuff out there now, Dr. Gelso, that is just junk. How would you address that with your students?
SPEAKER 04 :
By telling them that there is such a thing as junk in print. And actually, there is a great deal more of that junk on screens. And my advice to them, I can’t say that everyone takes it, but my advice to them would be find the books, not the screens. Find the books because the books are what open up the world to you. Someone who is looking at something on a screen is entirely passive. They can be nothing more than what is on the screen. A book, a book explodes the mind. A book gives you access to realities that you can’t touch. It gives you alternative universes you can inhabit. A book will move you to do things that a screen can never even come close to doing. So a book, well, Emily Dickinson, a contemporary of Lincoln’s, once wrote a poem about how a book was like a frigate that could take you all around the world, over lands, overseas. And I haven’t myself found anything to fault with that opinion. Even though I’m a century and a half beyond both Dickinson and Lincoln, for me, books were what opened up the world. Reading was what opened up all kinds of opportunities, all kinds of vistas. Reading is, in some respects, the ultimate subversive activity. Because what else do tyrants want to do, first off? They want to control what people read. They want to control their media. They want to control their books. They want to burn books if they don’t particularly like them. Reading turns people’s minds to questioning. That’s why in Orwell’s 1984, it’s books which have to go down the memory hole because books are dangerous. I remember the publication in the 1970s of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. And when the volumes of it came out one by one in English, I would buy them. I was a college student then. And I would buy them. I would take them home. I would set myself up. Almost felt like I should put on a jacket and tie to read them. But you read them, and suddenly the whole fictitious world that had been created by the Soviets and the Soviet Union, all of that fell to pieces. I remember there was a comment that was made by Bernard-André Lévy, the French philosopher, political philosopher, in which he said, Solzhenitsyn simply spoke. And the scales fell from our eyes. And he was talking about reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. More even than weapons of war, bombs, economic strategies, it was Solzhenitsyn’s book that spelled the end of the Soviet Union. And reading that, for me, that was a liberating experience. And reading has always been a liberating experience, as it was for Lincoln. He once described it in these terms. He was on his inaugural tour from Illinois to Washington. He stopped in Trenton, New Jersey, to speak to the New Jersey Senate. And being there in Trenton, he said, my mind is often revolved back. to the scene of the Battle of Trenton and the Revolution. And I’ve often asked myself, what those soldiers in the Revolution, what were they really fighting for? Was it just separation from the mother country? No, they were fighting for something more. They were fighting for an idea, for a principle. And it’s an idea and a principle which is common to everyone around the world. And he said, how did I learn about this? I learned about this because as a schoolboy, I read a biography of Washington describing the Battle of Trenton. Now picture this, Kim. Here is a boy way out in Kentucky or Indiana when he’s reading this. Here’s a boy reading about the Battle of Trenton. And that boy, years later, as president of the United States, is drawing a bright line from a book that he read as a boy to the principles that he would give his life defending as president of the United States. If that doesn’t illustrate the importance of reading, I have a hard time imagining what would.
SPEAKER 08 :
Dr. Gelso, I just got chills on that. I’m talking with Dr. Alan Gelso. We get to do these conversations because of great sponsors like Lorne Levy.
SPEAKER 15 :
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SPEAKER 08 :
And welcome back to The Kim Munson Show. Be sure and check out our website. That is KimMunson, M-O-N-S-O-N.com. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, and you can email me at Kim at KimMunson.com as well. Thank you to all of you who support us. We are an independent voice on an independent station, and we search for truth and clarity by looking at these issues through the lens of freedom versus force, force versus freedom. If something’s a good idea, you should not have to force people to do it. I did want to mention Janssen Photography. Great entrepreneurs, Glenn and Mary Janssen, have been in business for a long time creating memories for people. whether or not it is portraits of families or of children, portraits of your senior student, or if you need that great photo for your business or political career, Jansen Photography is the place to go. That website is Jansen, J-A-N-S-S-E-N, photography.com. We’ve prerecorded the shows for this week with very special guests. I love it because then we have extra time. And we’re talking with Brad Miller, who is my instructor at IPAC-EDU.org on a great course, Literature as Resistance. Ultimately, how to resist totalitarianism is the bottom line on that. And it’s not too late to sign up. And so you can do that at IPAC-EDU.org. It’s super reasonable, and it is so great. It really gets, just like this interview, getting your brain working. And so that is so, so important. Brad Miller, this course is fascinating. And the stand that you took as being in the Army and as a colonel and actually resigning right before retirement is such an amazing story. And it’s a story that needs to be heard. And how can people find out more about you?
SPEAKER 12 :
Yeah, thanks for asking that, Kim. So the two easiest places to find me are at my Substack, which is just my name, bradmiller10.substack.com. So, again, that’s bradmiller10.substack.com. And also, I’m on YouTube, you know, until they kick me off, which may happen at some point. But if you just go to YouTube and you search bradmiller10.substack, The videos that I’ve started making as well will come. Those will come up. So in either place, it’s BradMiller10 and should come up on YouTube and Substack.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay, and again, highly recommend that you check that out, and would love to have you join us in our course as well. We’ve been talking about, well, we went through the course offerings, the books that we’re reading, and the Hegelian dialectic, which basically can create a problem, and then there’s the reaction to the problem, and then the solution can many times be already determined, and how that’s relating to the Delphi technique. I’ve learned a lot, so I’m just trying to step back and be a person hearing this for the first time. This is the last segment on this. How do you want to unpack this so that people can understand it just a little simpler as they’re thinking about it?
SPEAKER 12 :
Yeah, so what I would say is that whether it’s with the dialectic or the Delphi technique, both of these are legitimate in their own way. It’s just that when networks of powerful people have decided to use either the dialectic view or the use of the Delphi technique to manipulate people. That’s, of course, when it becomes problematic. So for us, what that means is important for us to do is realize when our mode of thinking and therefore our actions is being constrained to a very narrow set of viewpoints or a very narrow set of acceptable actions, that’s when we may have to ask ourselves, What kind of techniques are being used to manipulate my opinions and or my actions? And then how can I respond to be able to break out of this? So, for example, we were speaking about how the Delphi technique can be used a lot of times in these different types of meetings where some sort of, let’s say, some sort of city planning project has already been decided upon. However, the opinions of the public are solicited. And yet when you show up and you’re engaging in these discussions, you feel like you’re not being heard or you feel like your opinion is only acceptable as long as it’s within a narrow set of topics that you’re allowed to address.
SPEAKER 08 :
So I have an example that I was thinking when I was on city council. We had a little neighborhood library that the people in my community, we loved. People walked to it. Kids walked to it. But the library district and the city planners and the politicians wanted to have a big, big library that more people would have to drive to it. And, of course, there’s all the different arguments around driving, walking. There’s all that out there. But I suggested that perhaps we keep this library for this community and then have the other as well. But they would have none of that. And so they did a listening tour. They solicited from people. And what was amazing is down at the library, our community library, they put up a poster and said, what would you suggest that this building be used for? Because the city said they were going to purchase it from the library district. And what did you want it to be? And on that piece of paper, the number one answer was keep it as a library. But in the report given to us by staff, which was about 50-some pages long, that was not noted until like on, you know, page 45 or something like that. So as I was going through the packet, I’m like, oh, people want to keep this. So I asked that question of staff when they made the presentation, and they said, oh, well, that was not an option. I thought, oh, isn’t that interesting? Yeah.
SPEAKER 12 :
Right. Imagine that. And the way in which a lot of that is done. So when you look at the way in which the Delphi technique is used, perhaps legitimately as a decision making or forecasting tool in the corporate world, the way in which it’s done is a. a group of experts are fed different questions to which they respond anonymously. And that’s so that they don’t bias each other or that one person’s opinion because of their position within the company is not necessarily ranked above the opinions of others. So there may be some legitimate reasons to do that in the corporate world when it’s used in a real way. But a lot of times in this type of industry, of situation a lot of times these questions are fed via these surveys and you answer again anonymously and you may be picking um a response that a lot of other people are picking as well and it may be the most popular response but then they will lead you to believe that your response which may have been the most popular was not the most popular or was an outlier opinion that’s what they may lead you to believe again because of the anonymous nature in which the questions are asked and the responses are noted so there are a lot of these different types of techniques that they can do If you have an undesirable opinion, they can kind of corral you in the direction that they want you to go while allowing you to believe that your input is valued.
SPEAKER 08 :
Brad Miller, this is so antithetical to the way our country is supposed to work, though. I mean, we got to our declaration, our Constitution, because of real debate, people really kicking tires on the ideas and real debate and with a real, I think, a virtuous goal in mind as well. And so this whole thing being used in government, I think it’s antithetical to our American idea.
SPEAKER 12 :
Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. The reason that we debate, even when debates get heated, is because whichever side you may find yourself on, or even if you don’t agree with either side in a particular debate, by debating, we expect… better position to emerge. In fact, that would actually be a completely legitimate use of the dialectic because the dialectic can be used legitimately in a debate or in a courtroom trial where you have two sides that are in opposition to one another. And then through the interplay of those two oppositional sides, the hope is that what emerges, what is the synthesis that emerges? Well, it’s the truth. So debates can absolutely be used. And when you engage in debate, When you’re arguing against someone else’s position, you are sharpening each other’s understanding, regardless of which position you may hold. So debates are completely legitimate. And whenever you feel like legitimate debate is not being held, you have to ask yourself if you believe that your opinions are being manipulated or if you believe that your thoughts are being shaped in a previously contrived direction.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay, fascinating. We’ve got probably about four minutes left. And I know it’s not really enough time, but we’ve gone through the whole reaction to COVID. And now we’re looking at that, hopefully, in the rearview mirror. But what do you think we learned as a country? I mean, I’m seeing people that kind of bought into the whole COVID thing that first time, but now they’re like, no, no, no, no. So I think a lot of people are waking up. What do you think, Brad?
SPEAKER 12 :
I think yes and no. I think some people have woken up and they are not going to go back to sleep. And then I think sadly, other people have woken up and they’re already starting to fall back asleep. And I would urge people, if COVID was what kind of pushed you to wake up, be in that first group. When you wake up now, don’t fall back asleep and start making other connections because you got to ask yourself, the government that is powerful enough to foist COVID and the reaction to COVID upon us, which very much followed the problem reaction solution model, They are power. This is not a one and done thing. They are going to continue to try and manipulate us into moving the directions they want society to go. And we’ve got to be awake to it. And we have to understand the tools and the techniques they use in order to manipulate us.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, that’s why your voice is so important. And again, where can people find you, Brad Miller?
SPEAKER 12 :
Yeah, so again, you can find me at my Substack, which again is bradmiller10.substack.com. And then you can also find me on my YouTube. If you just go to YouTube and search bradmiller10, then my videos will come up. And I write quite a bit, just my thoughts about anything and everything, and the same with the videos that I’ve started to make as well.
SPEAKER 08 :
And again, you’re instructing this great course at ipac-edu.org, where we’re going through all of this dystopian literature. It’s a course that’s going to end up about 21 different meetings. And we’re in, gosh, what, number seven, probably close? Seven? Are we that far?
SPEAKER 12 :
That’s right. Go ahead. I was just going to say, yeah, the classes are held on Thursday nights via Zoom. But if you miss a class or if you’re just joining in now, you can always catch up on the previous recordings.
SPEAKER 08 :
And absolutely. And we must remain vigilant and sharpen our brains and understand what’s going on. And Brad Miller is certainly doing that for many of us. And we’d love to have you all join us. So, Brad Miller, I wish you a very happy Thanksgiving. I thank you for joining us for this very important interview. And we’ll have more conversations.
SPEAKER 12 :
Thank you so much. I appreciate being on, Kim. And happy Thanksgiving to you as well.
SPEAKER 08 :
And my friends, these are such important conversations. And our quote for the end of the show is from JFK talking about gratitude. He said, as we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. So my friends today, be grateful, read great books, think good thoughts, listen to beautiful music, communicate and listen well, if honestly and authentically strive for high ideals. And like Superman, stand for truth, justice and the American way. My friends, you are not alone. God bless you and God bless America.
SPEAKER 11 :
I want no one to cry. But tell them if I don’t survive, I’ll fall.
SPEAKER 10 :
The views and opinions expressed on KLZ 560 are those of the speaker, commentators, hosts, their guests, and callers. They are not necessarily the views and opinions of Crawford Broadcasting or KLZ management, employees, associates, or advertisers. KLZ 560 is a Crawford Broadcasting God and country station.
