The Shining City Is the Open City
A contrast
The channel that posted this video is called 2Corinthians317. The verse is Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Paul wrote it from somewhere on the road, against a priestly class that wanted to keep the veil over the face — the veil that mediated and gatekept and rented out access to the thing that was supposed to be free.
The verse the video opens on is Matthew 5:14. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. The Sermon on the Mount. Same argument in a different grammar. The light is not licensed. The city is not private. The hill is not behind a paywall.
The speech is Ronald Reagan’s farewell address from the Oval Office, January 11, 1989. The last sentence he gave the country before walking out of public life. He describes the shining city. He says the doors are open. He says the people of every place are walking toward it. He says — and this is the line the apparatus that now invokes his name has burned — we the people.
I am not handing him to them. The Reagan of the farewell address belongs to the relay. The apparatus that called the American pope the Antichrist last week and fled the country to avoid the wealth tax does not get to keep the city on the hill. They abandoned it. They locked the doors. They sold the keys.
2 Corinthians 3:17. Matthew 5:14. The shining city is the open city. The doors are open. The freedom is where the Spirit is.
Heaven should be a republic.
Reagan's "city on a hill" address was one of the most destructive speeches in the history of the USAian polity. It completely inverted the meaning of its use by John Winthrop--that the Massachusetts Bay colony would have the eyes of the world upon it and "[s]o that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world". (John F. Kennedy would later use the phrase, with Winthrop's meaning.)
Reagan inverted this and gave it a meaning of "we can do no wrong", as outlined in this thread: https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3loqsfhswjk2r
It baffles me that so many so-called “patriotic” tech leaders laud a man who has essentially bailed on the American experiment, even after he amassed so much power to mold and shape it to his will.
Peter Thiel is not a patriot. He’s an opportunistic parasite.