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Voice-over (Male): This is Viewpoint with attorney and author Chuck Crismier. Viewpoint is a one-hour talk show confronting the issues of America's heart and home. And now, with today's edition of Viewpoint, here is Chuck Crismier.

Chuck Crismier: There's an assault on America's institutions, but what are America's institutions and what does that assault look like? Today on Viewpoint, we're going to be taking a look at that, and I'm glad that you've joined us. It's conversation as always with ever-increasing conviction, talk that transforms.

More than two decades ago in 2004, the Harvard professor Samuel Huntington related to, I think, Samuel B. Huntington, who was the first president of the United States under the Continental Congress, also my wife's great-great-great-great-great uncle. Samuel Huntington warned in his book, "Who Are We?", that America was facing a crisis of identity.

He argued that a nation cannot remain united without a common culture, a common history, and a common understanding of itself. He said remove those foundations and a society inevitably fragments into competing tribes, interests, and identities. Huntington pointed to the Anglo-Protestant Creed as the core of America's unifying identity. In fact, he argued that America's political institutions and civic ideals did not arise in a vacuum but were rooted in a culture shaped by Protestant Christianity.

That identity was transmitted through a common biblical literacy that provided Americans with a shared vocabulary, history, and moral framework. Without that shared knowledge, the cultural foundations of national identity, he said, eventually and inevitably begin to erode. The Bible, he said, shaped how Americans understood freedom, law, covenant, human dignity, and self-government.

Even those who were not orthodox Christians were influenced by the biblical worldview that permeated colonial America. All you have to do, by the way, is look to the area right above the Supreme Court justices' bench to see how effective and how utterly prominent the message of biblical Christianity was, and in fact, Judaism as well, to the foundation and institutions of the United States of America.

But Huntington asked this question: What happens when that biblical literacy disappears? A nation that forgets its story loses its identity. And when people lose their identity, they become fragmented. And that's precisely what Huntington warned about. Americans increasingly identify themselves by race, class, political ideology, or special interest rather than by a common national story.

The consequences of this loss of history, memory, historical memory, extend beyond America's understanding of itself. They also affect America's understanding of one of the most important sources of its cultural heritage, that is the Jewish people and the biblical story of Israel. In fact, America very well may never have existed but for a Jewish man, a very wealthy Jewish man called Haym Salomon. Maybe you need to read about him if you've never heard of him.

Huntington goes on to say for generations Americans viewed Jewish history through the lens of Scripture. As biblical literacy declines, Israel's increasingly viewed only through a contemporary political lens, ignoring its biblical and historical foundations. So as America celebrates its 250th anniversary, my friends, we have an opportunity not merely to commemorate our history but to recover it.

And one of the ways that we can recover it is by looking at our fundamental institutions in this country. But what is an institution? Well, some of us feel like we're in an institution. Actually, the way things are going in our country, we don't even recognize our country anymore. And it was one of our presidents, Woodrow Wilson, who said that a nation that doesn't remember what it was doesn't know what it is or even what it is trying to do.

Sounds an awful lot like who we are today. So our special guest today on Viewpoint, Seth Barron, is joining us with his book "Weaponized: The Left's Capture and Destruction of America's Sacred Institutions." Seth, it is good to have you on the program, even if you are from New York.

Seth Barron: Well, thank you, Chuck. It's great to be here. I'm very happy to be talking to you and to your audience.

Chuck Crismier: Professionally, you're a journalist. You've been with the New York Post?

Seth Barron: I'm on the editorial board of the New York Post. That's right.

Chuck Crismier: All right. And what does it mean to be on the editorial board? Does that mean you're an institution?

Seth Barron: I guess in a way, I'm an institution myself. We, the editorial board, are a team and we meet every day and discuss the previous day's events and formulate a perspective that the institution of the New York Post has and then we put that out in the form of editorials.

Chuck Crismier: So how would you define the institution known as the New York Post?

Seth Barron: I'd say the New York Post occupies a kind of a contrarian point of view for New York City anyway. You know, basically a conservative populist, with a populist bent, that doesn't spare the foibles and ridicules the liberal establishment that really dominates our city and to a large extent our country. So I'd say we're tolerant, but we don't suffer fools.

Chuck Crismier: All right. So how long you've been involved with the New York Post? You see, here I'm an attorney. You're coming to us as an expert witness here and I have to qualify you as an expert. So how long you've been with the New York Post?

Seth Barron: I've been writing for the New York Post for about 15 years. I've been employed directly by the New York Post as an editor coming up on one year. But I've had a series of other jobs as an editor, journalist, both in New York City and for a California-based think tank.

Chuck Crismier: There are many who would say that New York itself is an institution. How would you respond to that?

Seth Barron: I would say New York City is definitely an institution. It's the financial, many ways cultural capital of the United States. A great deal of innovation has taken place here. A great many people of tremendous import have been born here. Yeah, absolutely. New York stands in the American imagination as basically the crown jewel of our metropolises.

Chuck Crismier: Well, if it's the crown jewel of our metropolises as an institution, and we look at what's happened to New York, then metaphorically the whole nation then is covered by what's happened to New York, and New York itself has been weaponized against our country then.

Seth Barron: You know what, if you look at this crew that's taking over New York City, the Democratic Socialists of America, who essentially have a Bolshevik, communist perspective, their open aim is to destroy America. They are not shy about that. Yeah, I would say that their rise here, I'm not saying that they are taking over the entire country all at once, but that is their goal and I would say it's not auspicious. It's not great for the country.

Chuck Crismier: Well, if you can take over as they have the number one city in America, which some would argue is the number one city in the world, 8 million population, being virtually institutionalized historically in this country and the world, then you can see how everything else can be weaponized and the entire country's in jeopardy. And that's, I think, the substance of your book, not about New York, but about what's happened in the destruction of America's sacred institutions as broadly as they are.

Voice-over (Male): Once upon a time, children could pray and read their Bibles in school. Divorces were practically unknown as was child abuse. In our once great America, virginity and chastity were popular virtues and homosexuality was an abomination. So what happened in just one generation? Hi, I'm Chuck Crismier, and I urge you to join me daily on Viewpoint where we discuss the most challenging issues touching our hearts and homes. Could America's moral slide relate to the fourth commandment? Listen to Viewpoint on this radio station or anytime at saveus.org.

Chuck Crismier: Welcome back to Viewpoint, friends. I'm Chuck Crismier. It's conversation as always with ever-increasing conviction, talk that transforms. We're talking with Seth Barron today. He is an editor for the New York Post. He's written a hardcore book called "Weaponized: The Left's Capture and Destruction of America's Sacred Institutions." So what are America's sacred institutions? How do you define them, not necessarily limiting to just the ones you focus on in your book, but how would you define broadly America's sacred institutions?

Seth Barron: I look at institutions as essentially coherent fictions that Americans share, sometimes below the level of active consciousness. We're not even aware that we're participating in them, but this is how we shape our reality. So in particular, I look at education. I look at housing and how our communities are constructed. I look at public safety. That's the police, the courts, the sensibility of doing right and of obeying laws. And I look at the meaning of civic involvement, citizenship, voting, the border.

Chuck Crismier: In other words, the customary ways in which people in a nation function and that governs their general practices and viewpoints.

Seth Barron: Yes, exactly. I mean, you might not think about these things during the day, but you're interacting with them all the time.

Chuck Crismier: You know, I'm looking at the inveterate wisdom of AI here. An institution is a well-established organization, custom, or system that shapes and guides human behavior. It provides the fundamental structure such as laws, traditions, and organizations that maintain social order, govern communities, and fulfill basic societal needs.

Another definition would be the building blocks of social order, representing socially approved or sanctioned practices, collectively enforced expectations with respect to the behavior specific to people in a country or even in a general community. And so institutions are very, very important for stability, aren't they?

Seth Barron: Oh, absolutely. They're what define a society. And if you overturn them, well, there goes your society.

Chuck Crismier: Well, Samuel Huntington said that from his viewpoint, the foundational institution of all was the religious institution that actually laid at the foundation of what happened in the political foundation of the country 150, 170 years later. He said that it went all the way back to 1620, 1630.

In fact, there was a godly attorney by the name of John Winthrop who before he landed in four boatloads of Puritans on these shores wrote what was called "A Model of Christian Charity," which some historians have said was the clearest expression of the American vision ever penned. It was all rooted on a biblical vision based there, not only in the broader Bible but also in the Torah. So when you go back that way, you begin to find out why the attack has been so strong against America's religious institutions.

Seth Barron: Absolutely. And you know, I should add that the whole basis for the American system indeed comes out of this early Protestant tradition and the sense that early Protestants believed that they could read the Bible, that the man himself could open the Bible and read it and understand what's happening.

Chuck Crismier: In other words, the foundation of freedom was the freedom to read the Bible.

Seth Barron: That's exactly it. And then this became translated in the American political system, including some things from various political philosophers, but the idea being that power derives from the people, that the people are sovereign in our system. Power does not come down from the top, but it's based in the self-governing subject.

Chuck Crismier: Which is why John Adams, our second president, said our government was made for a moral and Christian people and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Seth Barron: Indeed. Yes, because the American people are trusted. We are trusted and our leaders are trusted servants. So this is the essence, I think, of the American system and all of our institutions are built on this.

Chuck Crismier: Well, you've written a very provocative book here, "Weaponized: The Left's Capture and Destruction of America's Sacred Institutions." And so something like this had to come not just from your mind, from your heart. What was it that dug deep in your soul, Seth, as a Jewish writer here? What was it that dug deep into your soul to cause you to write this book?

Seth Barron: You know, that's a great question. I think what really got to me was observing politics in New York City and then nationally, seeing this, I guess what you'd call an elite disregard for the sovereignty of the individual and this sense that power needs to be taken away from them and delivered up and up and up into unaccountable realms where an expert class can take control. You know, there's this funny saying that we hear a lot. It's "think globally, act locally."

And you know, we hear that in terms of the environment and so forth. And it sounds kind of seductive. It's interesting. But if you think about what it means, it's saying don't use the evidence of your own senses and your own soul to understand the world. Don't use your comprehension. We have experts who have already done the big-picture thinking. So what we want you to do is to take their advice. They've already figured out the global perspective and your job is to just go in and enact it.

Chuck Crismier: Well, it reminds me of a phrase that came out of the early 1970s, "We are the world." That was the beginning of this identification causing us to refocus not on nationhood, whether it be United States or France or Germany, but on the globe, which leads us to the foundation of ultimately the rapid progression toward a one-world order instead of the nations that God ordained.

Seth Barron: Absolutely. And you know what, I wish I had come up with that because that fits perfectly my thesis. The idea that all actions must take into consideration not just you, your family, your community, your neighborhood, but people across the globe. It becomes what I think Charles Dickens called telescopic sympathy. You're not really worried about your own children, but you've got a telescope aimed at the children in Africa to make sure that they have enough food while your children have lice or whatever.

Chuck Crismier: Well, you mentioned Charles Dickens, his famous book "A Tale of Two Cities." I'm wondering if we're not living that out today in America. Maybe New York is one of those cities leading us to the great terror that occurred there as the heads rolled off of Madame Guillotine along the streets of Paris.

Seth Barron: You know what, I think we're heading there. When the socialists had their big victory the other day, they were standing out in front of Hakeem Jeffries' house yelling, "You're next! You're next!" Talk about tumbrel noises, you know, like the carts they used to drag the bodies around in the French Revolution. We are in a dangerous time. And the funny thing is, if it's a tale of two cities, I'm not sure what city contrasts with New York because we're seeing the same thing taking place in London, overseas certainly, London, Paris. We are seeing the same thing happen everywhere.

Chuck Crismier: So in other words, we are the world now. All those cities now are conforming to the same revised institutions that are rebelling against the existing institutions that formed those countries.

Seth Barron: You know, I would say that's probably true and we're seeing this expert class, this progressive, elitist, globalist class imposing the same policies and ideas across the world. So, I mean, is it not odd that all of these countries have adopted the same migration policies and that every one of them is forced to open its borders to people from the Third World, people whose aims are essentially not convergent with the American or Canadian history and way of life? Yeah, I mean, why is this happening?

Chuck Crismier: So why have you chosen citizenship and education? You've chosen four things: citizenship, policing, housing, and education as the premier institutions that you've talked about. Why those four?

Seth Barron: Well, you know, it's funny. I had this little revelation and I was thinking about open borders and how this is something that we never really voted on. It was never decided, yes, we're going to bring in 75 million people. This was kind of handed to us. And I'm also very interested in the question of YIMBYism, you know, "Yes In My Backyard." The idea that every community must permit high-rises and permit affordable housing or subsidized housing and that people in a community don't really, that we need to take away the power of zoning.

This is a very big thing that's going on across the country. So what occurred to me is that in both cases, both the macro level of the country's border and the micro level of just zoning boards and commissions, the people who live in a place are not given the authority to decide what happens there. And that just floored me. I'm like, wow, they are taking power away from people, the individual, at the local level, the national level. And with policing and education, I just noticed that the same sort of things were happening.

Chuck Crismier: Well, it is true. So the question that I have though is that's what's happening, but why is it happening? When we have supposedly a republic, a democratic republic, where we the people vote into power, into authority, those who are going to help protect and establish those institutions and yet they're doing everything they can to undo them. Is it because we the people have lost all personal identity with those institutions and values? Do we not value them anymore? Maybe not.

Seth Barron: Well, there is an element of that. There's been a massive decay in values and value formation. I think a lot of that goes along with the growing destruction, growing deterioration of the family, the increasing irrelevance of the father figure, which I think has been supplanted in many cases by the state, which is where I think the schools come in. And you know, this whole idea, it takes a village to raise a child. All children are our children. Teachers want what kids need. We are the world. Yep, there it is. I believe these are essentially aimed at women.

Now, I'm not blaming women, but in our society today, an increasing number of children, a majority in some communities, are being raised only by their mothers.

Chuck Crismier: True. In fact, let's be really honest about it, Seth. To be really honest about it, 70% or so of all black children in this country are living in homes without a father.

Seth Barron: Yes, indeed. And I believe among white children it's 30%, I think.

Chuck Crismier: It's in the upper 30s. The combination of the two is about 40-some percent, 44% of our America's children living in a home without their fathers. And if that be the case, and sociologists are now telling us that the number one social factor that contributes to all the other deteriorating statistics in our country always comes back to fatherlessness. Goes right back to the home, right back to fathers. Why is that not seen then as one of the foremost things that we should be looking at as a people?

Seth Barron: I think in a sense, the idea that the families are like little platoons, right, that old saying, little platoons of liberty. And this contradicts the leftist viewpoint, which is completely centralized authority with the state as big daddy. There you go. A surrogate father, the state.

Voice-over (Male): $17 will put "Weaponized" in your hands, friends. It's a $30 book, yours for $17 on our website, saveus.org. There is so much more about Chuck Crismier and Save America Ministries on our website, saveus.org. For example, under the marriage section, God has marriage on his mind. Chuck has some great resources to strengthen your marriage. First off, a fact sheet on the state of the marital union, a fact sheet on the state of ministry, marriage, and morals, saveus.org. Marriage, divorce, and remarriage. What does the Bible really teach about this? Find all of this at saveus.org. Also, "A Letter to Pastors," the Hosea Project, saveus.org, and many more resources to strengthen your marriage. It's all on Chuck's website, saveus.org. Again, you can listen to Chuck's Viewpoint broadcast live and archived, Save America Ministries website at saveus.org.

Chuck Crismier: Welcome back to Viewpoint, friends. Our viewpoint does determine destiny. There are no neutral viewpoints. None. Every viewpoint that we have determines destiny in one way or another. Everything leads in a trajectory toward one goal or another. So I have a question for you, Seth. There was a poet who once wrote, "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet." So the question that I have with that idea is what is the left? What is the left? What is the right? We don't even know what they are anymore.

Seth Barron: Well, that's a good point. And no, it's true because in a lot of ways they seem to overlap. The way I think about it is there's this old saying, you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you. Now, to my mind, when conservatives hear this, they think, well, I don't really care if politics cares about me because I have other things I want to do. I have a family. I have my church. I have my house. I have my hobbies. I have my job. My marriage. Politics, you know, that's secondary. But here's the thing: for the left, politics is everything. It's their family. It's their community. It's their romance. And you know what, increasingly, it's their job because the government sector and the non-profit sector, they are taking up an increasingly large portion of employment, especially in places like New York City.

So the left is what's interested in politics. They're interested in meetings. They're interested in other people's business. You know, Benjamin Franklin, since we're talking about the founders, he, on the first coin that the United States put out, it was a large penny and on it it said, "Mind your business." Now, I think that's great. It's got a double meaning because yes, it means mind your own business, sure. But it also means like cobbler to your last, you know, it means like take care of what's in front of you. Take care of your business.

Chuck Crismier: But he was also one that wanted to have the American symbol, the American seal featuring Moses. Moses leading the people across the Red Sea and out of Egypt. So when you put all this together, you see how even a guy like Benjamin Franklin, who wasn't exactly known as, shall we say, a fundamentalist Christian, but he saw how incredibly important our spiritual foundations were upon which everything else would be built. And when we have, it seems to me that if anything has been weaponized, it's those spiritual foundations.

We can track it back. You can go to 1947 with the infamous decision of the United States Supreme Court to say there was a separation between church and state. You can go to 1961, '62 where they eradicated prayer and then Bible reading from the public school. You can go to 1982 where they eradicated the Ten Commandments from the schoolhouse wall and then ultimately they were taken down from the church house walls as well. You can see how there's been a weaponization even of the law as an institution against the lawmaker.

Seth Barron: Indeed. Indeed. Yes, that's true. One way I think that this works out very deviously with education in particular, here's the thing: I think that the way the left views money and taxes, they don't think that taxation is a burden because they think whatever they don't tax is a gift that the state gives you. So whatever's in your pocket is what they let you keep.

Chuck Crismier: So that was the idea that Barack Obama had when he, as a lawyer, said he despised the Constitution the way it was written because it gave all the power to the people in the states except for those things specifically reserved to the government. He said it should have been just the opposite, that everything should have been given to the government except those things reserved to the people. So he had a complete radical view of what our country was about and sought to conform us to it.

Seth Barron: That's a fantastic analogy and I see it, this is the way the state thinks about children. Children belong to the state. Parents, you know, are responsible for feeding them and clothing them, but ultimately their minds belong to the state.

Chuck Crismier: Well, that's why we see a family that was just, the parents were just condemned to 50 days in jail because they home-schooled their children.

Seth Barron: Home-schooling is a fascinating question. There's this professor at Harvard, Harvard Law, this woman Elizabeth Bartholet, who is just this fanatic opponent of home-schooling, which is growing. Home-schooling is growing in America and it's the biggest threat to the teachers' union. And she says that home-schooling poses a danger to children and to society because it isolates children from mandated reporters, basically people who are keeping an eye to see, you know, if you're making your children pray too often or do whatever.

Chuck Crismier: I think I would put it: it isolates your children from mandated controllers. That's what the real issue is.

Seth Barron: Yes, exactly, mandated controllers. And she agrees that there's no clear evidence that home-schooled children are being abused or are deprived of anything in particular. And she says the answer to that is not to leave them alone, but that's exactly why we need to start investigating all these home-schoolers so we can know how bad it is.

Chuck Crismier: Why don't they do the same investigation of the public school system and how bad that is? Because they can't do that because that was established as the norm as an American institution that actually replaced the original American institution which was home-schooling.

Seth Barron: Yes, and you know, it's funny because the Supreme Court has made a lot of decisions that go against the centrality of the family and religion in education. But at the same time, they have made some very, there was a 1925 case called Pierce v. Society of the Sisters. And the court held the fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.

So this was a huge win for the forces of religious education. The idea that the people are not property of the state. It's not the role of the state to regiment the people. You know, as far as religious education goes, look at the Amish. They're a test case of religious liberty in our country because Amish children go to school through the eighth grade and they're taught by girls with an eighth-grade education. Okay, well maybe that doesn't work so well if you're looking to create, I don't know, consumers of television and people who are going to basically live American secular lives, but that's not what the Amish are about.

Chuck Crismier: They're about an agrarian society.

Seth Barron: They're about an agrarian society and frankly, the perpetuation of their community. People may not like that, but that's the whole point of American religious liberty is that communities like that are permitted to operate that way. New York City's yeshivas, these are religious institutions for Orthodox Jews, get a lot of heat. Some people say, oh, they're not teaching them about whatever, they're not teaching them enough English subjects. Now, in a couple of cases, that's true and they say, look, these kids are not doing well on the math and reading test.

But they never point out that the public schools where the whole point of it is to do well on the math and reading test are doing really poorly. They're doing terrible, failing. So I find the religious education, I mean, I went to public schools, I mean I'm not against public schools, but I think it's very interesting how religious education draws certain, it's a real, it draws certain lines in the sand and we can see where people stand on many issues based on their sense of the right of parents to either home-school or send their children to a religious school or even a charter school. These are all things that the teachers' union and the entire educracy cannot abide.

Chuck Crismier: It's not about education anymore, it's about propagandizing a "we are the world" viewpoint where government controls. The purpose of government, I understood, was to protect the people, the citizens from enemies, foreign and domestic. But then we've expanded it to all kinds of other things and institutionalized government to do many other things. And when we did that, we actually were undermining and destroying the very foundations of what government was for in the first place.

Seth Barron: Oh, absolutely. If I may, there's this thing that's come up called Drag Queen Story Hour. And I don't know if you have it where you are, but in New York City it's a big deal. And the idea is you bring people dressed up as women, but not really just as women, they're dressed in like a parody of what a woman looks like. And they come in and they read stories to children. And this is portrayed by the left as this utterly wholesome activity, even though there's no direct connection between drag queens and literacy. Moreover, drag is not even over reality. Over reality. Drag is not an identity. There aren't people out in the world saying I, like there are gay people, there are transsexuals, a lot of these people are just mentally ill, but they exist in the world. Drag queens don't exist in the world. It's just a performance. And the funny thing is, why do they insist on going to schools? They could go to hospices, prisons, there's all kinds of people who would like to hear stories. The whole idea is to confuse children. I don't think it's so much a sexual thing.

Chuck Crismier: Indoctrination, yeah. Friends, get a copy of the book "Weaponized: The Left's Capture and Destruction of America's Sacred Institutions." It's a $30 hardbound book, yours for $17 on our website, saveus.org. Call us 1-800-SAVE-USA. Write to us at Save America Ministries, P.O. Box 70879, Richmond, Virginia, 23255. Add $6 for postage and handling. "Weaponized," we'll be right back.

Voice-over (Male): Have you ever considered what the early church was like? Many people are developing a heart longing for a greater fulfillment in our practices as Christians. A recent study showed 53,000 people a week are leaving the back door of America's churches in frustration. What is going on? Why has there not been even a 1% gain among followers of Christ in the last 25 years? Could it be that God is seeking to restore first-century Christianity for the 21st century? Jesus said, "I'll build my church." Is Christ by his Spirit stirring to prepare the church for the 21st century?

The early church prayed together and broke bread from house to house. They were family and it was said by all who observed, "Behold how they love one another." Incredible. But the same can be found right now. Go to saveus.org and click Sell Church. We can revive first-century Christianity for the 21st century. It's about people, not programs. It's about a body, not a building. That's saveus.org. Click Sell Church.

Chuck Crismier: Institutionalism can either serve you or enslave you. Institutionalism can either serve you or enslave you. I want you to think about that. When you go back to the early church, when you go back to the early practices of the Jewish people in Israel, where did they worship? Did they worship in grand cathedrals and so on? No. They worshipped in synagogues in small groups, relatively small groups, where they actually had a more conversational kind of people-oriented gathering. That's how the early church gathered, in homes.

Today, we've institutionalized all of that and it began with Constantine. It began with Constantine and the so-called institutionalization of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Well, you can say that was good, but in reality, the institutionalization actually gradually has deformed and malformed the very foundations of the faith that gave birth to what we now see as things like the United States of America that was founded on not the institutionalism of those things but on the foundational reality of them based in the family and then based in the small groups of worshipping people.

So it's important for us to think about our foundations. Here we are right now, a week away from the 250th anniversary, political anniversary, of the founding of the country. We're about 400 and some years away from the spiritual foundation of the country. So what is it that's going to prevail? Have we allowed the political institutions to overwhelm the religious and spiritual foundations that actually were the foundation? Where are we? Who are we as a people? That's really what you're asking, isn't it, Seth? Who are we as a people anyway?

Seth Barron: Yes, I am. And you know, I really appreciate what you said about Jewish worship at the time of Jesus was not as temple-centric as people believe. More than half of the Jewish population of the world lived outside of the land because they'd already been dispersed. So Jewish practice at that era was already focused around the synagogue, around the calendar, around festivals, around family purity, and daily prayer at the synagogue. So that's a great point. I'm really glad you made that.

Yes, I believe that we have lost our way. I think the spiritual roots of the country have been largely torn out. And I think even now the political roots, I mean I remember in 1976 I was a boy, but I remember the excitement about the bicentennial. This, the 250, is not being celebrated in anything close to the kind of spirit, the patriotic spirit and sense of celebration and pride that prevailed then. Even two years after Nixon had resigned in disgrace. We have, it's now considered a shame to be an American. We just elected, we're electing to Congress here in New York City a woman who has openly called for the destruction of the United States.

Chuck Crismier: What does that say about "we the people" that elected her?

Seth Barron: It doesn't say anything good, Chuck.

Chuck Crismier: Well no, and you know what it does say too? It also says our educational institution has been so distorted and perverted that those who elected her have no clue about what America is or was or was intended to be.

Seth Barron: Yes, and I think they don't care. That reminds me of when Michelle Obama was asked if she loves America and she said she loves the potential of America. I think Hillary Clinton made a similar statement. She loves what America could be. Well, if you only love what you think something could be, then you don't really love it. Yes, I think there's tremendous scorn for America. People have been indoctrinated by godless professors in these universities that are essentially Maoist breeding camps for this wretched ideology. Chuck, you're right.

Chuck Crismier: Well think about it this way. William Jefferson Clinton was probably emblematic best of the pre-millennial generation, Generation X. And he went to, in 1997, he went to Los Angeles and was the first sitting American president to specifically knowingly address an exclusively homosexual audience. First one. Here's what he said. "We are," I'm quoting exactly, "we are in practical ways turning away from the principles that have guided us from the beginning." He said we're turning away from the immutable laws, the unchanging laws that have guided us from the beginning. He admitted that the practice of homosexuality was against the immutable, unchanging laws. But he said we're going to change it anyway.

Seth Barron: It's remarkable.

Chuck Crismier: It's the most egregious, blatant, blasphemous statement that I think ever made by a sitting American president. And he set the stage for utter and total rebellion, inaugurating, shall we say, the political embracing, the institutionalization of the sexual revolution and the complete rebellion of the baby boomers against all authority in America. That's how our institutions changed.

Seth Barron: Yeah, I would say you're really bringing me back down to the fundamentals here. And I have to say this is quite a lesson. I like it, frankly. I like it. It's remarkable to think that Clinton, it's almost like he was saying, "Evil, I embrace thee."

Chuck Crismier: Exactly. That's what he did. He carries this big Bible for photo ops and then turns around and said we are in practical ways changing the immutable or unchanging ideals that have guided us from the beginning. He's institutionalizing everything that's contrary to what we grew up with, everything that we stood for.

Seth Barron: Well, I think this kind of dovetails with what I was saying right before the break about the Drag Queen Story Hour. I think the whole trans thing, that oh, boys can be girls, girls can be boys, there is like kind of a perverse sexual element to it, of course. However, I think the real purpose, I think the idea is if you can convince children that sex is somehow mutable, that sex can be, sex is a matter of opinion, it's like fashion, you can be whatever you want, you can convince them of anything. The whole point is delirium, to derange the senses, to impose confusion as the basis of consciousness.

Chuck Crismier: Well hasn't your state government actually now recently said we will no longer use the term man or woman, husband or wife?

Seth Barron: That I think happened a while ago. What they recently passed a new law saying that mother is no longer to be used. The gestating parent and the non-gestating parent. Talk about changing the immutable laws, ideals that have guided us from the beginning. There it is.

Seth Barron: Yes, I think this is absolutely foundational to the left's project, which is a complete obliteration of all categories, you know, turning everything, like Marx said, he wasn't going to turn things on their head, he wanted to put things back on their feet. He thought that everything was already upside down. They want to completely revalue all values.

Chuck Crismier: So you call it weaponization. Would there be another term that you might use instead of that? Reconfiguration? Turning on the head? What other term would you use?

Seth Barron: Revolution. Revolution. There it is. I think that's true. It's a revolution, a social revolution against all of the biblically-based institutions and foundations of the country and even the world. There it is. And it's removing this idea of the sovereign individual and dissolving it into the mass, what they would call democratic socialism, which is essentially leadership by a vanguard, like Leninism, of experts who understand the path of history, who understand the revolution, and who intend to impose a new way of existing that they think of as probably they think of as the original state of man, like living harmoniously in nature somehow. Paganism. There you go.

Hey listen, friends, perhaps you have heard during the program a lot of pounding, a lot of this, that, or the other. That's our metaphorical assault. A new roof is being put on here as we speak and I don't know if it's being weaponized against us but it's a metaphorical symbol of what's happening to our culture here.

And by the way, as we wrap up, Seth, let me just say this. I believe that the reason the world as a whole has mitigated itself, arrogated itself against both America and Israel is because those two nations more than any other two in the world, one Jewish, the other Goyim or Gentile, have represented the foundations, the institutional foundations set forth in the Scriptures that the entire world is reacting and revolutionizing against. That's why they have to be destroyed.

And it is that spirit that is uniting the world against both America and Israel. And I think our president is struggling right now with how to deal with what he sees as Israel saying, "Well, we have our own responsibility here. We are not just the world, we're Israel." What say you?

Seth Barron: I think you're right. And you know what, I think in a weird way, and maybe this goes a little too far, I think Israel is occupying the role of Jesus in the passion play. The hated scapegoat, like no one can stand to look at it because of what it represents. And so it has to be erased.

Chuck Crismier: Well there's a certain sense of this, I can see that that would be true. Of course the rabbis use that to describe away the reference to Yeshua, Jesus, in the book of Isaiah chapter 53, saying oh, this son of man, this guy who is treated beyond anything you can understand, that's really talking about Israel. Well, that's the rabbinical idea of it, but I can see what you're saying and I can't disagree with that. So here we are at the end of the road. How are you able to communicate to your two children who are in their 20s?

Seth Barron: You know, it's funny. At the end of my book, I say that at one point one of my children came home from kindergarten and said, "Daddy, the teacher wants us to come up with a New Year's resolution for the world." And I said, "Oh really? Well, I think a good resolution would be everyone should mind his own business because then there would be no fights." And she looked at me and said, "I don't think that's what they mean."

Chuck Crismier: That's a great way to wrap it up. Hey Seth, thanks so much for joining us here on the program today. Really appreciate it. Hold the fort up there in New York. You're going to have to in mountaineering terms, you're going to have to have a strong belay, you're going to have to have some protection in whatever firm rocks there are up there left because dangerous winds are blowing up there going to sweep you away.

Friends, get a copy of the book "Weaponized: The Left's Capture and Destruction of America's Sacred Institutions." $17 will put this $30 hardbound book in your hands. You don't want to miss it. Seth has some very interesting insights as a journalist. Get a copy of the book on the website, saveus.org. Call us 1-800-SAVE-USA and become a partner, friends. We depend upon the donations. Notice we have no commercial support because we don't want to be addicted to anybody else's viewpoint. God bless and be a blessing.

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