Jay Dyer: Demons in Hollywood, CIA, Secret Societies, Lone Gunmen, Epstein & Attacks on Christianity

**Tucker Carlson** (0:04)
Jay Dyer, thank you very much for doing this. I have a lot of questions to ask you, but I want to begin with orthodoxy. You are one of the most visible and maybe effective evangelists for orthodoxy, Christian orthodoxy, certainly in your age cohort, maybe in the country.
You're orthodox, why are you orthodox? What is orthodoxy?

**Jay Dyer** (0:29)
I'm orthodox because I went through a long journey trying to figure out what authentic Christianity is. And so I was raised Baptist. That took me eventually into Catholicism when I was about 20, 21, I think. I read St. Augustine's City of God. I read a bunch of his other works and I thought, well, Baptist isn't right because I'm finding in the church fathers all these teachings that are not Baptist. And so that kind of gradually took me in the realm of traditional Roman Catholicism, did that for a long time.
And as you get into, I think, the more recent problems of Vatican II, post Vatican II theology, that led me to the question of how do I reconcile this with what I know the first thousand years of Christianity teaches. So long story short, it took me about eight or 10 years. I finally came to the Orthodox Church about 10 years ago. So that's the simplest, quickest reason is because I think it's-

**Tucker Carlson** (1:26)
The first thousand years of Christianity, I think to most modern Christians, certainly American Christians, that's like a black hole. What does that even mean, the first thousand years of Christianity?

**Jay Dyer** (1:35)
It's an area that we're not taught. I know that when I went to college, the only thing that we talked about from that whole period was like Augustine's Confessions and maybe one other book or two.

**Tucker Carlson** (1:46)
Then we have something called The Dark Ages and nothing happens.

**Jay Dyer** (1:49)
Nothing about Byzantium.

**Tucker Carlson** (1:51)
It didn't even exist. Then these people called the Medici's make a ton of money in Italy and start funding beautiful art and that's the beginning of civilization.

**Jay Dyer** (2:00)
I remember at college, I was pressing the department, why don't we study some medieval stuff, some Byzantine stuff? They were like, why should we? We don't care about that Christian stuff.
Yeah, I think there's probably a little bit of an intentional desire to suppress that for American education, I think, it's pretty much brainwashing, so.

**Tucker Carlson** (2:22)
But one sentence this might take between Constantine and the 4th century and the Renaissance, you had Christian civilization.

**Jay Dyer** (2:32)
The most successful empire in history is the Byzantine Empire, from Constantine all the way up until the fall of Byzantium to the Muslims.

**Tucker Carlson** (2:43)
Why do you say it's the most successful?

**Jay Dyer** (2:45)
It's a common sort of academic assessment, just in terms of they flourished on a gold standard for a really long time. They started clipping the gold, money clipping, like the Roman Empire in the West had done before them and other empires. So they fell prey to usury as well. Yeah.
So they fell to a lot of the same issues that empires tend to fall to.

**Tucker Carlson** (3:07)
Human weakness and recognizable stuff.

**Jay Dyer** (3:10)
Degeneracy, all of that. Also, rabid nationalism had a tendency to break down empires as well.
I like Spangler and I think if you read Oswald Spangler, he talks about how there's a life cycle. But I think the unique aspect to the business of the empire was that it was explicitly Christian based on Orthodox Christianity. So in many metrics of what it is to be successful or flourishing, it flourished.
But it did fall. I think, again, I'm not trying to measure Christianity just on worldly success, but I do think it does play out in that way at times, right? If you're really based around Christ, if your theology or civilization is logo-centric, then it's gonna play out that way. You're just going to prosper because you're aligned with what's true. You're aligned with that transcendent source. So anyway, for me, that journey ended up being eventually Orthodox Christianity.

**Tucker Carlson** (4:05)
So, but just really quick back to the Byzantine Empire, did you know it existed before? How many people are aware that there was a Byzantine Empire and know anything about its outlines?

**Jay Dyer** (4:16)
Not many people in the West. Again, there is a very clear, especially if you take humanities courses, the way they're constructed in college and maybe even younger private schools, like you go from the pre-Socratics, you do Plato and Aristotle, and then you do Augustine, maybe a Stoic or two, and then you jump to Descartes, so you skip that whole period.