Guest Appearances

The Carousel and Over the Target

Last November I made guest appearances on several podcasts, including The Carousel Podcast and Over the Target with Lee Smith, and thought I would link them here.

• “Better Paths for America First” (The Carousel)

• “GOP Civil War with Lafayette Lee” (Over the Target)

Lee Smith also did a nice write-up of our conversation here.

An excerpt:

“Lee says the wilderness has always been Americans’ central metaphor for understanding our condition. The wilderness, he says, is “so important to our national story. When we first got here, we had an ocean on one side, and we had this terrifying wilderness on the other that was incredibly dangerous, and some of the worst terrain on Earth. I don’t think people appreciate the geography of the United States, and how treacherous it is. But these people, they stuck by it, and they probed into the wilderness, and they became changed by it.”

Here Lee has set up two opposing terms—civilization versus wilderness—that will resonate for those steeped as he is in scripture and American history. “The wilderness is the place that tests you and purges the impurities from your system so that you can hear the voice of the Lord,” says Lee. “It’s a place where you can find your destiny.”

In Exodus, Moses leads the slaves out of the fleshpots of Egypt destined for the land of milk and honey. But it’s in the wilderness where they shed their habits of servitude that they become a nation, ready at last to enter the land promised them.

In Lee’s view, the wilderness is where voters now rally under the banner of America First. The mission is to rebuild the nation and restore the people.

“The wilderness,” says Lee, “can help us to be able to become better, stronger, to be able to understand the terrain better that we’re on, to understand our place in history, and to also just to have that courage that we need to succeed.”