Elon Musk, Ray Harryhausen and the Future of the West

In Israel recently, I had the opportunity to connect the dots in some breaking stories including Elon Musk's #TwitterFiles to the pillars of our Western World

I get this question all the time: “Why is it  people like you, who are immigrants, get America?” There’s a reason: because LEGAL Immigrants like me - and my buddy, Dinesh D’Souza - we chose America. Most Americans have no idea how blessed they are to be born in the greatest nation on God’s earth.

I am an American by choice, born in the U.K., but my blood is Hungarian. My parents escaped Hungary in the Revolution, my dad was actually liberated from a Communist prison. And as such, because I have Hungarian blood, I can depress you very easily. Hungarians are good at that. So here’s the bad news: On my show every day, I often use the phrase “the greatest nation on God’s earth,” and the freest nation. I’m not so sure about that second part. Not so sure about that second part anymore.

Because what we’ve witnessed in the last 7 years is fundamentally un-American. We didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, and one of the reasons was, at about 2:00 A.M., I get a text from a friend of mine, a really good guy; and he says “Hey, you’ve gotta get on this Twitter teleconference with Elon Musk right now.” What?

I’m a social media addict, and my wife knows this, I’m on it for about 25 hours a day. And there’s a thing on Twitter called “Twitter Spaces,” where anybody who’s got an account can host an audio teleconference live. And yesterday, we broke a record, we had 94,000 people on a live audio teleconference with Elon Musk talking to us from his jet via one of his Starlink satellites. And whatever happens with the Twitter Files, whatever happens, I’ll tell you something: Never in the history of mankind has a man as rich as him, as powerful as him, been open to questions from anybody for two hours. Think about that.

I got to ask him a question. I asked the host, “Hey, I’ve got a quick question, can I ask a question?” And they let me ask a question about the “smoking guns” his #TwitterFiles dump promise. You can hear our full conversation here. But whatever happens with the release of documents in the few weeks, we know one thing: There are dark forces afoot that wish to strip us of our God-given rights. Rights that are unalienable, and rights that we derived not from the government, or even from a piece of paper, but from the fact that we are made in the image of “our Creator.” And it is very hard not to have doubts, when you see a pro-life father of 7 arrested by 20 FBI agents with loaded AR-15s pointing at his wife as his children are screaming “what are you doing to our daddy?”

You’ve got to ask tough questions. My wife and I had the only contract, the only external contract to provide counter-terrorism training on ISIS to the FBI before I joined the Trump Administration. But if the FBI came to my door today, I would say “pound sand, talk to my attorneys.” I’ve trained literally 10,000 FBI agents, analysts and Support Staff, nevertheless, I would say “Go to hell, talk to my attorneys, because you have become a political police force. In America.”

Alright, that’s enough of what my wife calls “clearing your throat.”

If you’ve never been to the Hoy Land, you must make time to walk where Jesus walked. With Katie, my Muse, undertone Temple Mount in Jerusalem

So, I don’t know how you chose this venue. I have lectured to the SEALs, I have lectured to the Green Berets 200 times, but his is pretty cool! In an amphitheater in Caesarea with our listeners, the best Americans out there, God bless you all. It’s something else.

But the choice of this venue is just utterly perfect for what I’m going to talk to you about today. And I know you knew that. I knew you planned that, because think about where we are right now. Just take a snapshot, imagine there’s a satellite looking down at us that takes a photograph of us. Hi FBI! Hello Joe!

So there’s 350 patriots from America, sitting in a Roman, Jewish amphitheater. That’s fun. What’s all that about? Why is there an amphitheater in Israel? It’s not exactly very Jewish, is it? It’s not a Jewish type of architecture. Well, that’s what I want to talk to you about.

With 350 listeners to AMERICA First in the Roman amphitheater Herod the Great built in Caesaria. We will be back to the Holy Land in 2024. Join us!

We are in the Roman Empire’s biggest port, biggest man-made port, built by King Herod. Oh, by the way, the same King Herod who slew the babies, that King Herod. We know him as the man who slew the infants after Jesus, our Lord and Savior, was born. But he also has a very interesting other part to his historic legacy. Why? Because – and this is funky for a guy who was called King of the Jews, since he was actually an Arab. The Jews did not like him, he took over from the Maccabees because he managed to inveigle himself, since gather had been Prime Minister for the Jewish kings, and he comes in the young politician, crushes an uprising in Galilee, and then the Romans make him “King of the Jews.”

And to say “thank you” to the Romans who made him King of the Jews, he did things like this. He built a Roman amphitheater. He built aqueducts. He built the port. He brought Roman influence to the Middle East, to the territory occupied by the Romans. So that’s interesting. Rome and Judaism. And Christianity. Now why is that interesting?

Because those are the constituent principle elements of our civilization. Western Civilization is built upon what? Judeo-Christian, Roman-Greco tradition. If you want to understand why you are free, why we celebrate “government of the people, for the people, by the people,” it’s because of our Jewish, Christian, Roman, Greco heritage. That’s it.

How come? Because look at what came before that for millennia. What was life like for humans prior to Western Civilization? It was natural, brutish, and short, to quote a certain philosopher. Why? What was the lot of an average human prior to Judaism, to Christianity? What mattered? Nothing mattered! Your life wasn’t worth a bean! The only thing that let you survive was what? Whether or not your tribe was stronger than the next tribe. What was the value of life? Nothing! If you were defeated in war, you would be killed as a child, as a woman, as a man, or enslaved. End of story.

The idea of universal, unalienable rights was anathema. There was no such thing. And life was capricious. You were a victim of fate. And even if you had faith in gods, and they were gods, what were those gods like? The gods of the ancient world were what? They were as evil as we are. They were as fallen and random and evil as we are. And nobody had a relationship with the gods. You were a little pawn.

I’m going to reveal my age here: have you seen the original “Clash of the Titans?” Great movie. Ray Harryhausen’s special effects, I met that guy, what a dude. Do you remember the beginning? They have the biggest stars, were hired for a 5-minute scene. You have Laurence Olivier, you have Ursula Andress, and they’re playing the Greek gods, on Mount Olympus. And do you remember the scene at the beginning? Zeus comes up to this chessboard, it’s actually a mini-amphitheater, a model, and he’s moving human beings like Perseus, a little statue of Perseus, a game piece. That was your relationship to the gods. You were a toy. You were something to be played with, to be exploited.

Laurence Olivier at Zeus in the OG Clash of the Titans. In the Ancient World humans were just pawns of the Gods to be capriciously toyed with

What happens with Judaism? With Judaism, for the first time in human history, man has a relationship with his Creator. And that’s utterly revolutionary. Utterly revolutionary. It’s not capricious. It’s based on standards: “I want to have a relationship with you, Israel. Here are My laws. Obey these laws, and I will protect you, I will provide for you. I won’t be random. We will be in relationship with one another.”

And then what happens? Here, 2,000 years ago…we are where Saint Paul was tried. In Jerusalem they wanted to kill him when he said “Excuse me, I’m a citizen of Rome. Slow your roll.” Right? “You don’t get to do that to me. I get to have a trial in front of the Roman powers.” This is where it happened, here Caesaria. Where does that come from?

Before Judeo-Christian Civilization each human was disposable, just a pawn. Then we were recognized as having “unalienable rights,” as make in the image of our Creator

Think about Christianity as the 2.0 Judaism. It’s the upgrade, right? Why? Because you still have a relationship with God, but this time, the relationship is for anybody. Not just the chosen people of God, it’s for everyone. And what is the message of this upgrade of the 2.0?

Can we stop for a second? I realize this is about five years ago, but it blew my mind. What is the symbol of Christianity? It’s the Cross. Now that’s really weird. In fact, it’s perverse. Why? What is the Cross? It’s an instrument of death and torture. It’s an instrument of judicial murder. We have, as our symbol, the object that is the symbol of the most vicious form of judicial murder man ever devised, because it is.

Do you know how you die on the cross? Asphyxiation. You are nailed not through your hands, but through your wrists. You’re nailed through your wrists and through your feet, in such a way that, because of the mechanics of how the body’s weight is pinioned to your wrists and to your feet, you cannot raise your ribcage. The way that your bod, gravity, pulls your ribcage down, because your legs can’t function, and you can’t drop your arms. Which means, in the process – Jesus was far quicker – but usually, in about 2 or 3 days, you drown in your own body fluids, in your lungs. You are asphyxiated by gravity. Compare that to a firing squad.

And our symbol is a symbol of torture. Imagine if I created a new religion, “Hey, do you want to join Gorkaism? And our symbol is handcuffs?” It’d be a little bit weird, right?

But it’s not weird. Why? Because what is the message of Christianity? Love and sacrifice. That He took all our sins upon Himself, without having to do so. Willingly. Knowing that God could say “No, you don’t need to, Son.” And he said “Thy will be done. Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

That’s how we are where we are today. That’s the essence of our civilization. And right now, that civilization is in trouble. A lot of trouble.

The key elements of our civilization revolve around certain non-negotiables. Number 1 is that human beings are different. We may be mammals, we may breathe oxygen, we may live and die and be born, but we’re different because we have an eternal soul. And we also have reason. If you could stop for a second and just think about what Chapter 1 of John’s Gospel means: “First there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

In the original Greek, the word is “logos.” And it doesn’t mean “the word,” it’s not a word in a dictionary. What he means is “reason.” First there was reason. That is the antithesis of everything that went before it in every other civilization. There was no reason, there was fate. There was the capricious will of the gods, there was “who had the strongest tribe,” who would be victim and who would be victor. That ended with Western Civilization, and then the Founding Fathers, bless the Founding Fathers, building America upon those principles, built our unalienable rights into our founding documents, rights derived from our being made in our “Creator’s image.”

Can we just stop for a second? Anybody who tells you, “Oh, we have a separation of Church and State, you can’t pray in schools.” Really? Is that why the Founding Fathers put the word “Creator,” with a capital C, in our founding documents? The disestablishment clause of the Constitution has only two things to do with religion: There must not be a state religion, as in England, the Church of England, and there must not be persecution based upon the choice of the “wrong religion.” Period, end of story, nothing else.

If I want a Bible class in a public school, go for it. Absolutely. Why? Because we are made in the image of our Creator. That’s why. Because we are endowed with what? With reason. Reason, because we reflect the ultimate reason of God. Our God is the Truth. The Truth. Non-negotiable, and not random. He can’t make good bad, He is good. That’s why we are here today in the Holy Land.

There is no nation like America. America is the apotheosis, it is the zenith of our Judeo-Christian civilization. Why? Because it is based upon the principle that we are made in the image of our Creator. And it is based on the principle that government exists because we let it exist. Every government should be afraid of its citizens.

The ultimate evolution of human history is that man should govern himself. And that those who are above the citizens only have a mandate to be above them because they are gifted that mandate temporarily.

We’ve been living in America for 14 years now as a family. And for around a decade, I used to make fun of my fellow conservatives who said “Communism’s coming to America, the socialists are here!” “The Commies are coming? Let me tell you about Commies, let me tell you a little story.”

In every person’s life, you can sometimes identify where your life changes forever. Where you arrive at a fork in the road. You may not be aware you’re at a fork in the road, but you arrive at a fork in the road, and you make a decision, and everything changes. For me, I was about 8 years old, I was on summer vacation with my parents. And my dad, he was a bear, a big guy; my dad was like a shaved bear. And he was a sportsman, he was a rower, he was on the national crew team in Hungary, he loved to swim.

And I was playing on the beach, an innocent little kid with my G.I. Joe’s. My dad comes out of the ocean like Poseidon. And I looked up at him, and I see something on him that I hadn’t recognized before, I wasn’t paying attention. And I’m a silly little kid, I said to Dad: “Hey Dad, what are those lines on your wrists?” Because he was too young to have wrinkles on his wrists.

Without pausing, with no emotion, he just looked down at me and said, “Son, that’s where the secret police bound my wrists together with wire behind my back so they could hang me from the ceiling of the torture chamber.”

That’s when my life changed. Forever. Because from that point onward, I knew one thing for sure: Evil is real. Evil isn’t something in bedtime stories about witches and jackals. Evil is real, and it lurks in the heart of man.

That’s why I used to say to my fellow conservatives, “Seriously? You have the scars that your Dad has on his body from American prison camps?” I don’t make fun of those people anymore. 800 Americans were arrested after January 6th. 100 of them are still in prison. One of them, whose aunt I had on my show last week, a lovely man named Matthew Perna, committed suicide because Biden’s Department of Justice increased his 6-month sentence to a terrorist sentence of 6 years, so he hanged himself. That’s an American citizen, in America.

So it’s arrived, my friends. And it’s up to us. And here, in the birthplace, in such a seminal site in our civilization, where Jewish meets Roman meets Christian…let us recharge our batteries the next few days. Let’s redouble our efforts, because every single one of us has a role to play in saving, still, the greatest nation on God’s green earth.