August 2, 2016 Show with Tom Hoefling on “The Citizen-Led Campaign to Save America”

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October 7, 2016

Tom Hoefling, candidate for President of the United States for AMERICA’s PARTY: “The Citizen-Led Campaign to Save America”

00:01: Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
00:08: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
00:16: Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world.
00:23: Proverbs 27, verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
00:32: Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
00:46: It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
00:56: Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon,
01:05: Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming.
01:13: This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on the second day of August 2016, and we are going to have a very unique program today.
01:26: We are going to have a candidate for the President of the United States on Iron Sharpens Iron today.
01:33: He is running for that high office under the America's Party, the citizen -led campaign to save America, and his name is
01:42: Tom Hofling, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron for the very first time,
01:49: Tom Hofling. Hey, Chris, thank you for having me today. It's great to be here.
01:55: Well, it's great to have you on the program, Tom, and before we even get into some more details about you personally, let our listeners know something about America's Party.
02:07: Many, if not most, of our listeners may be totally unfamiliar with that party, but somebody fairly well -known has some connection with its origins, and that would be
02:18: Alan Keyes, correct? Yes, I had a very long relationship with Dr.
02:25: Keyes, worked on many of his campaigns, and he was our first nominee for America's Party in 2008.
02:32: Great. Well, tell us something about this party that makes it unique and, in fact, even not only unique when compared to the
02:42: Republican Party and the Democratic Party, but also even the Constitution Party and some other independent parties that might be out there.
02:51: Well, America's Party is unique, Chris. When we set out to build a new party, we didn't want to make the same mistakes everybody else had made.
03:01: Our first reference point was back to what our very wise first president said in his farewell address.
03:11: George Washington warned us, his posterity, in a very long passage,
03:18: I don't know, eight or ten long paragraphs, about the dangers of party factionalism.
03:25: And so we set up America's Party, our slogan, one of our slogans is, we're partisans only for principle.
03:34: In other words, we couldn't give a rip what letter is by your name or by the name of some candidate.
03:40: All we care about are the core moral constitutional principles of the
03:45: Republic. So the other unique thing about America's Party is our platform. We worked very hard to simply boil down the essence of what the
03:57: American Republic is all about and come up with a core set of principles and purposes that we believe any
04:04: Christian, any conservative can unify around. We're trying to unify around those principles and also accountability for all of us, most especially those who are running for office to those principles.
04:19: Well, could you list some of those core principles for us? Well, the first one is the first principle of our republic that we find in the
04:27: Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self -evident that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
04:36: And of course, it starts with the right to life. So that's the cornerstone of our
04:42: American civil creed. So that's what America's Party is built upon, is that understanding that our rights to life, liberty, property come from God, not from any man.
04:57: And that those rights are therefore unalienable. Not only can no one take them away from us legitimately, but we can't even give them up because God ordained these rights for all people.
05:12: Now, I understand that you are the citizen -led campaign, and as you call yourself, or your party calls itself the citizen -led campaign to save America.
05:23: What exactly does the citizen -led campaign mean? What it means is we've recognized, and I think more and more people are coming to the same realization as each election rolls by, that the media and the big money guys are not our friends.
05:40: They're not friends of principle. They're not friends of the sovereignty of we the people.
05:45: They're on their own side. They're not on our side. So we decided to take some very radical steps to not just return the people, especially the church, to the core principles and moral principles of our republic, but also to rebuild the way we do our politics in this country from the bottom up.
06:05: And one of the most radical things we did is we put up a link on selfgovernment .us,
06:11: which is the America's Party National Committee website, that says no donations accepted.
06:20: In fact, this is the second presidential election cycle in a row that I've ran using the old technique that was once prominent and prevalent in American politics, which is we're running a front porch campaign.
06:36: We're not raising money. We're not spending money. Wherever we're getting on the ballot, it's grassroots citizen action.
06:44: We're doing everything we can to help them, to guide them, to teach them, and everything else. But if this is going to get done, if we're going to take our country back, it's got to be done by the people themselves, starting with the church, starting with the
06:56: Christian folks, them giving up the lesser of two evils nonsense, stopping the compromise on life, you know, on marriage, on our right to keep and bear arms, on our national sovereignty, our security, our borders, all of these things.
07:17: Walking away from that culture of compromise that the GOP has become and beginning to build a culture, a principle of accountability to principle and to God.
07:30: I'm going to give our email address for our listeners who would like to join us on the air with a question of their own.
07:38: Our email address is chrizarnsen at gmail .com. That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.
07:46: I ask that you please give your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the
07:53: USA. And of course, if you feel more comfortable remaining anonymous, we will accommodate your desires in that regard, but we would ask of you, if at all possible, that you at least give us your first name, city and state, and country.
08:12: And obviously, you know, Tom, that there are a lot of folks who say that all of these very important rights that we as American citizens and even as created beings of God Almighty, these rights that we cherish, they're going to say that people voting for you are going to be siphoning votes away from Donald Trump.
08:41: And even though Donald Trump may be, in the minds of many, a horrible candidate, he at least is going to be appointing
08:50: Supreme Court justices that are more in alignment with some of these rights and liberties that we cherish, especially the pro -life issue.
09:02: How do you respond to that very common retort? Because obviously,
09:08: I'm even getting some nasty emails for even daring to interview you.
09:14: And Daryl Castle of the Constitution Party is going to be interviewed at some point in the near future,
09:22: God willing, as well. But there are people that really get angry by saying that all this is doing is helping to secure an election for Hillary Clinton.
09:35: Well, let me tell you how I answer that, Chris. I answer with the truth, okay? That is a tissue of lies.
09:42: It's interesting that the Trump campaign has to lead, has to lay as their chief cornerstone lie, the lie that there are only two choices,
09:53: Trump and Clinton. That's just simply not true. It's a fallacy.
09:59: That is a logical fallacy. It's a false dichotomy.
10:04: But you know, to put it in plain English, it's a big fat lie. So, it's a lie.
10:11: They're predicating their arguments on that. But let me use this analogy, Chris.
10:16: If somebody came to you and they said, okay, here's a glass of red Kool -Aid, and it's full of strychnine, okay?
10:24: And they held up another glass and they said, this is blue Kool -Aid over here, and it has cyanide. These are your only two choices.
10:32: Okay, what would you do? Would you say, well, you know, if I don't vote for poison, then
10:39: I'm siphoning off votes from cyanide. No, look, the main problems besetting this country,
10:51: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump represent the status quo, the continuation of abortion on demand, his stated principles.
11:01: Even if you put aside the fact that the man was a lifelong radical pro -abortion person, you put that aside and take the positions he's now adopted so conveniently when he wanted to run as a
11:14: Republican for president, even if you take those, those positions absolutely assure the continuation of abortion on demand.
11:22: He is not in defense of marriage, so we guarantee the continued destruction of the civil institution of marriage the way
11:30: God created it, the way God defined it, and the way he set it up. So it doesn't matter in terms of unconstitutional spending outside the enumerated powers of the
11:43: Constitution, he's a socialist, just like Hillary Clinton. He believes that it's his job to take care of everybody.
11:51: That is not what our government is for, is to take care of everybody. That's the job of the individual and the family and the church and the community, not the job of the federal government.
12:01: If you want to continue to go down the road of unlimited government, don't come and complain to me when all of your liberties are gone, when the country lies in ruins, economically and in every other way.
12:13: You know, don't blame it on me. Look, I'm going to fight these people, and I'm most certainly not going to participate in my own destruction and the destruction of my nine children and my three grandchildren so far.
12:28: I'm not going to participate in that. So the Christians who are making these lesser -to -evil arguments, my
12:35: Bible tells me to overcome evil with good, not to try this vain exercise in overcoming evil with evil.
12:43: When you do that, in the end, you're assured that evil will control you. Well, before we continue on with some of the specific things that make the
12:54: America's Party unique and also make you unique as a candidate, I want to find out more about you as a person.
13:02: You as a Christian, I understand that you profess faith in Christ. Tell us something about your upbringing, what kind of religious background you come from, if any, and how you came to know our
13:13: Lord and Savior. Oh, I'd love to do that, and I appreciate the opportunity to do that.
13:19: Look, I've studied my family history, and some of it goes back to Plymouth and Jamestown.
13:27: You know, my family history is Christian. I came from that.
13:33: I, my mother became ill before I was born. I was not raised by my own mother.
13:40: I was raised by aunts and uncles. My dad remarried when I was starting first grade, and we moved back to the family home down in Ralston, Nebraska.
13:50: I was born in Omaha, raised in Ralston, Nebraska. You know,
13:55: I went to church. I think it was a fairly liberal church. Of course, that didn't really occur to me at the time.
14:02: My stepmother became involved in a cult, which was Armstrongism, the
14:08: Worldwide Church of God. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And so I was, I had all that stuff floating around, but somehow the
14:15: Lord prevented me from ever really buying into any of that. When I was,
14:21: I'm not sure, it must have been 10 or 11, I went to a Wesleyan church camp out on the headwaters of the
14:30: Elkhorn River out in Nebraska, and I got saved at that meeting.
14:37: Oh, praise God. Very vividly. I came home and told my family,
14:42: I got saved, you know, and it's so wonderful. I was so full of joy, and there really wasn't anybody there to water or tend that newfound faith.
14:53: A couple years later, my family broke up. I was a 14 -year -old street kid from a broken family.
15:05: I was on my own from the time I was 14 on. Interestingly, you know, and of course my teenage years, my early 20s,
15:16: I was living like the world. But in my mid -20s, the
15:21: Lord really got a hold of me. I had a lot of conviction. I had this heavy burden of guilt and things that had gone on with a failed business that I had started, and all of this pressure on me, it really made me turn to the
15:37: Word of God and begin to read and to begin to seek God. And at a given point, in about, well, let's see, it would have been, what year would it have been?
15:48: 19, I can't remember the exact year. It would have been probably about 88.
15:56: The Lord just took that burden away from me and really revealed Himself to me, and that really began my real adult walk with God.
16:05: I spent many years with my nose in my Bible and trying to do what it says, the best that I could.
16:14: When I was 40, my wife of 20 years abandoned me, and it was quite a blow.
16:26: She took my three children. Her and I had lost three children, one to a miscarriage, our oldest son when he was a day old, and a daughter when she was seven months old.
16:40: But my three living children, she took them with them. And so my early 40s were really, really rocky.
16:47: I had a tough time of it. And frankly,
16:52: I backslid a bit in my early 40s. But by the time I was 45,
16:58: I remarried my wife, Sienna. We've been married a little over 10 years now. And God has blessed us with six beautiful children.
17:08: Oh, praise God. Wow. And they, of course, are everything to us. And in the meantime,
17:16: He's also blessed me so far with three beautiful grandchildren as well. Somehow through all that rockiness,
17:22: I've managed to get along with my first wife. And my children have turned out very well.
17:28: My oldest son is an officer in the Idaho National Guard.
17:35: My daughter Katie is a production manager at a big food warehouse here in Iowa. My son
17:42: Timothy is a body man, went to school to do body work, and he has a good job and is making a decent living for himself.
17:53: So somehow through these rocky things in life, you know, this is where the Lord has brought me.
18:00: Of course, my political activism sprung out of fact we were homeschoolers back in the late 80s.
18:09: We've been homeschoolers that whole time. My wife, in fact, my wife, Sienna, is in fact a second generation homeschooler.
18:16: She never stepped foot in a public classroom, and frankly, she's one of the most brilliant, educated people you would ever want to meet.
18:23: And what is your current denominational affiliation or church affiliation?
18:32: I don't have one. I pretty much, you know, if you go to my bio at tomhofling .com,
18:38: I say Christian, and that's what I am. Since we formed
18:44: America's Party, we have tremendous fellowship with great, great principled
18:50: Christians all across this land. We ask people to leave their denominational differences at the door.
18:56: Doesn't mean we don't want anybody to share their faith ever or anything like that. It's just we don't want to be
19:02: Northern Ireland. But we have a political party.
19:07: We have some tremendous number of tremendous evangelicals.
19:13: We have some great Catholic folks. We have Mormons. We have Jews in our party.
19:19: And what is—go ahead, I'm sorry. No, we're united by our common civic creed that's founded in the
19:26: Declaration of Independence, entirely united on those things. And what would be your vocational experience outside of your candidacy for President of the
19:37: United States? Oh, that's a great question. Well, I spent 10 years as a youth in the carnival business, believe it or not.
19:47: When I was 15, that's how I found a way to make a living and feed myself.
19:54: And so I did that the last half of my teens and the first half of my 20s. And once I started having children,
20:02: I soon discovered I didn't want to raise my children doing that. So I got out of that. I did every kind of work you can imagine.
20:11: Drove trucks, worked in feed mills, worked in mills and factories and assembly plants, upholstered chairs, riveted trailers, did all kinds of things to keep a roof over my family's head.
20:26: I ran a Main Street, Iowa retail business, an old -fashioned dime store for a few years.
20:34: Found out it wasn't very successful competing with Walmart. So, you know, since then, that's about when back in the mid -90s is when my real political activism started.
20:50: Since then, I'm primarily an activist, but I have over the years taken in, you know, some political consulting work, political messaging.
20:59: My wife is a coder and a website builder. You know, we take in some work here and there just to keep going.
21:08: But we're primarily activists. We're poor activists. And of course, there's going to be people who mentally can't get past the carnival experience.
21:17: What exactly... Yeah, I know. You know, frankly, I'm not ashamed of it. I'm not saying you shouldn't be.
21:23: No, no. I, you know, I understand my enemies will make hay out of that.
21:30: But it's the truth, and it is where I came from. A sword swallower? Or what would you do?
21:36: Oh, no, no. No, we owned carnival concessions and rides. You know, did help with the local
21:43: Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota county fairs. And, you know, it was legitimate work.
21:50: And, you know, it taught me how to work. I wasn't in the military, but those early years doing it, in a sense, it was similar to being in the military in that, you know, you had to learn logistics.
22:04: You had to learn how to work. Sometimes you had to work two or three days straight without sleeping. You know,
22:10: I learned how to make my own way in the world and work for my pay. And so I don't regret it.
22:16: I don't talk about it much because, again, I don't like giving my enemies the weapons to hurt me.
22:23: And I know that that's the way people can be. But anyway, I, you know, look, in a sense, my experience, you know,
22:33: I've swept floors for a living. You know, I've been down there with the folks who are dependent on a paycheck every month or every week, you know, but I've also worked in D .C.
22:46: I've been in the Capitol. I've gone in and out of the elevators and had U .S. senators say, oh, hi, Tom, you know.
22:53: So, you know, actually, I think I represent the common people far more than Donald Trump, who lives in a glass tower in Manhattan and flies in and out in his private helicopter.
23:08: And we do have a listener, believe it or not, in Kinross, Scotland, who has a question.
23:15: Oh, wow. Okay. Murray in Kinross, Scotland, says, born -again
23:21: Christians like me would automatically vote for another believer, but why do you feel unbelievers should vote for you, given that many of them won't be
23:31: Christians at all and some of them downright hostile to the views we hold?
23:38: Oh, that's a great question, and I'm going to lay a little predicate before I really answer the question directly, okay?
23:47: Frankly, my main target in this election is not unbelievers. It's not the heathens, because it is my belief that the salvation of this country in the physical sense, the salvation of this republic, rests on the backs of the church.
24:02: I believe the reason we're in the mess we're in is because of the compromises of the church. Gallup, over decades and decades and decades, has polled how people identify religiously, and to this day, still, three quarters of the
24:20: American people still claim to be Christians. Now, you and I, Chris, both know that much of that is cultural, but if even one -third of that 75 percent, one -third, would quit compromising with the corrupt
24:35: Republican party and start doing the right thing and support me, I would win. So, I had to say that before I answer the question, okay?
24:45: The heathens are not my main target. I want them to vote for me. It would be great if they vote for me. It's in their interest to vote for me, because I want to get rid of the federal income tax.
24:56: I want to get rid of the IRS. I want to fix our monetary policy.
25:03: I want to reign the federal government back to within its enumerated powers. I want to stop this debt spending, robbing our posterity of their
25:16: God -given right to government. Our great -grandchildren did not agree to be burdened with this debt.
25:27: It's in their interest to have this government restored to its original basis, whether they agree with what
25:35: I say about my belief in God or not. And going back to the uniqueness, not only of you as a candidate, but the party,
25:48: America's party, the uniqueness of that party, how would you differ from, say, the
25:56: Constitution Party, where we have Darrell Castle as their candidate running for president?
26:02: I understand that there is some kind of a connection with the origins of the
26:08: American Party. Didn't that party somehow break away from the
26:13: Constitution Party? No, no, no. First of all, the
26:18: American Party is a separate party, so let's put that aside. Of course,
26:24: I'm the founder and chairman of America's party. The Constitution Party, when we left the
26:30: GOP in 2008, by the way, they didn't count Alan Keyes' votes here in the Iowa caucuses in 2008.
26:36: This is what had us going towards the door. What good is a political party that won't capture votes? And what sealed the deal was the impending nomination of the guy that I, forgive me, call
26:50: John Judas McCain. So when we were fixing to leave, we thought it was our duty to try and find common cause with the
27:01: Constitution Party. Alan Keyes was invited to run for their nomination eight years ago.
27:09: And I spent two months trying to bring these two groups of people together and find common cause.
27:16: The founder of that party kind of cut Dr. Keyes' legs off down there in Kansas City.
27:23: And so the next day... Howard Phillips? Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty ugly, actually.
27:29: The overt difference was a disagreement over foreign policy.
27:36: Howard Phillips and the Constitution Party tend towards what most people call the isolationist position.
27:44: I say that that's one ditch. Globalism, transnationalism is the other ditch.
27:52: And I try and stay on the road, which is, look, our primary interest is the sovereignty, the security, the borders of the
27:59: United States, the rights of the American people and their interests. But we do have obligations in the world.
28:06: And I don't think God is going to... Look, we can't do everything. I always quote that great political philosopher,
28:16: Clint Eastwood, who said, a man's got to know his limitations.
28:22: I think that's true of nations as well. I think Donald Trump running around telling everybody, we're going to take care of everybody is a foolish boast.
28:32: It's not possible. So what I'm trying to describe here is a balanced foreign policy.
28:39: And I think Dr. Keyes had a tremendous amount of experience in terms of foreign policy. He was part of the
28:45: Reagan team that ended up bringing down the Berlin Wall, bringing down the
28:51: Soviet Union. But they didn't want to listen to him in that regard. So that was the main sticking point.
28:59: Now this year, because we're trying to build this meta party, this party that is beyond party, we set out this year to try and collect up as many of the smaller principal parties that we could.
29:11: For example, I've already been nominated by the American Party, which is a 40 -year -old, 45 -year -old national political party.
29:20: I'm about to be nominated by America's party. I hope to be nominated in less than two weeks by the
29:27: American Independent Party and obtain, again, the California ballot line. But this year
29:38: I decided, well, someone in the Constitution Party got ahold of me and said, you should run for their nomination.
29:44: They have no leadership. And I hemmed and hawed and finally said, okay. I spent another two months trying to bring these two groups of people together, the
29:53: Constitution Party people and our abolitionist, you know, very principled activist people across the country.
30:01: Now the Constitution Party didn't want anything to do with it. They just wouldn't listen.
30:07: So that just didn't work. Okay. We're going to be going to a break right now. And if anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question for Tom Hoefling, our email address again is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
30:20: C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. And please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside of the good old
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33:59: Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back, this is
34:05: Chris Zarnes, and if you just tuned us in for the full two hours today, we have as our guest Tom Hoefling, candidate for the
34:12: President of the United States for America's Party, the citizen -led campaign to save America, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
34:25: chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Before we go to the discussion at hand,
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36:26: God willing, tomorrow on Iron Shepherds Iron for the full two hours.
36:32: And we do have CJ from Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who asks you,
36:40: Tom, you gave an analogy before about drinking either Hillary's poison or Trump's poison, but obviously you must know that barring some kind of a miracle, you're not going to win the election, and therefore we are going to be drinking poison anyway.
37:02: Wouldn't it be safer to drink the poison that has more pure water in it?
37:09: And in this regard, the analogy would be involving the Supreme Court justices. Well, there's so many problems with that question.
37:19: The first one is that the notion that the Supreme Court rules over us is at the core of why this republic is dying, and it's also the core of why the
37:29: Republican Party is dying. When these people stand up and try and scaremonger you into voting for their candidate because of judges, remind yourself that it was the
37:40: Roe v. Wade court, which was heavily Republican. And it's been heavily
37:46: Republican ever since, and all of these pro -abortion opinions that came down have been courtesy of Republican judges.
37:54: So I'm sorry, that tactic doesn't work with me or the people that I work with any longer.
38:01: That would be the first problem I would have with it. Uh, look, I'm not drinking poison no more, okay?
38:07: I don't care how you think you claim you've watered it down or anything. I'm not drinking it.
38:13: Are we Christians or are we political bookies sitting there, sitting around, setting odds?
38:19: That's what the whole world is doing around us, is playing political bookie. They think this is a big horse race.
38:24: No, we're supposed to have a representative form of self -government, and we will never, ever restore that as long as we continue to support people who do not represent us.
38:37: You need to look at all of these candidates and say, okay, who represents me?
38:42: Who represents what I believe? Who will stand for equal protection for innocent human life?
38:49: Who will stand for equal protection for our posterity? Who will stand in defense of marriage? I'm the only candidate who is standing in defense of marriage, including the constitution party candidate.
38:59: He wants to finish off the civil institution of marriage, okay? So who represents you?
39:05: Who else wants to get rid of the income tax? Who wants to rein in this out -of -control federal government but me?
39:11: I mean, look, if Donald Trump, if you live in a high -rise in Manhattan and you fly around in helicopters and private jets and if you've been a lifelong liberal pro -part, support
39:22: Donald Trump. But if you're a Christian, support me. And could you explain a little bit in more detail how the constitution party and Darrell Castle specifically might be detrimental to biblical marriage in this country?
39:41: Well, you know, Darrell Castle, I know him. I've spent time talking to him. I like him.
39:47: I have no doubt he's a sincere Christian man, okay? But he's a follower of Ron Paul.
39:54: He's more libertarian than conservative in many ways. He follows
39:59: Ron Paul's lead in pointing to the Tenth Amendment when it concerns abortion, which is a big screaming sign that he thinks states' rights trump the unalienable right to life.
40:10: That's not moral. That's not constitutional. Again, he's following Ron Paul's lead. Let's get government out of marriage.
40:17: Well, the civil institution of marriage is the basis, the foundational building block for our civic life, for property rights, for inheritance rights, and for so many other things.
40:28: You cannot fulfill any of the stated purposes of the U .S. Constitution and the preamble without the civil institution of marriage the way
40:36: God made it. He also is following Ron Paul and the libertarian lead on wanting to legalize drugs.
40:42: I don't support that. I don't want to live in a drug -addled nation with a military that's high.
40:49: So that's the difference between me and Castle. You know, the
40:56: Constitution Party platform is one thing, but Darrell Castle's running himself, and these are the positions he's taking.
41:03: I don't agree with that. So you think that the legalization of drug use will develop into people where they would not be using them illegally, that the use of drugs for recreational purposes would be more rampant?
41:25: And you could follow it up with answering this. One of the reasons that I see some legitimacy in the argument that we as a free people do not need a government that is our babysitter to protect us from ourselves is the whole issue of prohibition and how prohibition actually helps create organized crime as we know it.
41:57: How do you respond to those types of issues? Look, anybody who knows me, anybody who reads any of my political stuff, anybody who has followed me at all, knows that I don't spend a lot of my time or effort fighting vice.
42:12: Human vice is as old as mankind. It will always be there. It's a fact of life.
42:21: And in most cases, vice is handled at the local and the state level. That's the way it was in the founding generation.
42:27: Go back and look at the thousands of laws that the founding generation had on the books in their state against various forms of vice.
42:36: But I also don't want to be an enabler of vice. I don't think my state should be licensing gambling casinos.
42:47: I don't think that government should be complicit in vice. So in terms of our national life, again, if we're going to go down that road of civic degradation, well, be prepared to live with the consequences.
43:05: We've already got so many moral problems. If you want to pile rampant drug use on top of that,
43:13: I mean, go for it. But I'm not going along with it. Again, I have bigger fish to fry. They're killing another 3 ,000 or 4 ,000 babies in the abortion clinics today.
43:23: Okay. They're destroying the civil institution of marriage. Our borders are being overrun.
43:31: They're spending billions of dollars every day that we don't have, etc., etc.,
43:38: etc. So I have bigger fish to fry, and I'm not going to waste a lot of time on vice, but I'm not going to go along with it and promote it.
43:50: Now, I have been told that murder is not a federal crime, unless there are certain circumstances involving the murder, that it is a crime of the state against the state.
44:05: And therefore, that is the excuse that people like Ron Paul and Rand Paul and other libertarian -leaning pro -life people use to say that there is nothing inconsistent with being pro -life and believing that it is a state rights issue in regard to this.
44:27: How do you respond to that specifically? Because, you know, you're talking to a very strongly pro -life person here, and I just want to be further educated on the issue.
44:37: Sure, this is a fallacy that I've been fighting for several decades now. And frankly, we've pretty much won this argument in most circles, but every election cycle it pops back up because some
44:48: Republican politician or someone adopts it once again. You need to know in the modern sense that this idea originated with Gerald R.
44:58: Ford and his minions, his political hacks in the wake of Roe v. Wade.
45:04: They were looking for a way to not have to do anything about it. And they came up with a masterful formulation.
45:10: Well, let's leave it up to the state. Well, this whole problem started in the states. It was states that began to allow, even
45:17: Ronald Reagan himself signed the Therapeutic Abortion Act. He was talked into it.
45:23: And within a very short time, they were murdering, slaughtering 100 ,000 babies a year in the hospitals in California.
45:29: He later admitted, he said, that's the worst mistake I ever made. So look, states are not some magical entity.
45:38: In fact, if you think we're going to save this country without cleaning up our state capitals, that it's just all a
45:43: D .C. problem, you're fooling yourself. Here's the thing. And I assume
45:49: I'm talking to Christians. Go back and read Genesis chapter 9.
45:56: It was in the wake of the flood. It was God's commands and promises to Noah and his sons.
46:04: And he said that innocent blood had to be requited. It was the granting of the executive power to the body of the people.
46:14: That was the genesis of God -ordained human government, was not the suggestion, but the absolute requirement by God that if somebody sheds innocent blood, be they a man or even a beast, that by man shall their blood be shed.
46:33: So that's where mankind as a group was granted the executive power. Go over and read
46:39: Romans chapter 13. Why do we have human government? It is to restrain and punish evildoers.
46:49: Abortion violates those things. Abortion violates what later became known as the philosophy of the natural law, all the way back to Cicero, Aquinas, Blackstone, Locke, others.
47:03: Any law that violates the laws of nature, nature's god is null and void. These things were expressed in our
47:10: Declaration of Independence as the moral cornerstone of our country. Abortion violates those principles.
47:18: Every single clause of the stated purposes of the U .S. Constitution is violated by abortion and gay marriage, by the way.
47:26: And our Constitution in the 5th Amendment and in the 14th Amendment requires equal protection for the right to life of every innocent person.
47:37: And in fact, the 14th Amendment specifically imposes an obligation on the state to protect innocent human life.
47:45: So morally, constitutionally, legally, no state has the option of allowing murder.
47:52: And this is not a state decision. God already decided, thou shall not murder.
48:00: Okay, He already decided, what God has joined together, let no man put asunder. There's no decision -making with abortion or marriage.
48:09: God has decided. States have no rights in this regard. All they have is duty, duty, period.
48:18: Amen. Well, you definitely ring true with my heart and mind on that.
48:24: We do have a listener in Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York, Tyler. Are you familiar with the
48:31: United States military putting our faith on the same level as the Ku Klux Klan?
48:38: Why is it that our country has become so ignorant to its real threats?
48:46: It's because, in short, you know, every year I try and sit down and take the time to reread
48:53: Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. And one of Solzhenitsyn's famous quotes, and I'm going to botch it, but I'll give you the general, or the idea.
49:05: He said when he was young, and this was just after the takeover by the
49:11: Communists in Russia, he said he asked the old people why this happened to us, and they just told him it's because we abandoned
49:19: God. And he said after 40 years in the Gulag, something like that, decades in the
49:25: Gulag, he said, you know, I can write books about what went wrong, but if I had to boil it down to one sentence, it would be, why did all this happen to us?
49:35: It's because we abandoned God. As far as what's happening in our military, it's an atrocity.
49:42: Obama is an abomination. He has no moral basis, especially in Christianity.
49:52: He's an enemy of what's right. He's an enemy of this country.
49:57: And, you know, if we survived his two terms, it just, it fills me with amazement at God's mercy and the durability of this republic.
50:08: Whoever wins, you know, as I've already expressed, I think the people who are running in the two so -called major parties, these dying dinosaurs,
50:18: I think things will continue to go bad under them. But if we get a decent president, there's going to be a lot of work to do to clean up our military, to clean up our foreign policy, to clean up our security stance and everything else.
50:32: It's going to be a huge job just to put things back right. In 2004, my good friend, old friend,
50:40: Alan Keyes ran against Barack Obama in Illinois for the U .S. Senate. Some of you may recall.
50:47: I was in the room when they debated foreign policy. And Barack Obama was talking about the wonders of soft power.
50:59: And Dr. Keyes looked at him and shook his head and he said, soft power, he said, soft power won't work with hard threats.
51:07: He says that's like taking on a man with a bayonet with a limp spaghetti noodle. One thing that I wanted to have you clarify,
51:17: I don't know if you specifically were aware of what Tyler was asking about as far as the military.
51:24: I have never heard of this. I haven't either, Chris. I have a good, there's so much going on there.
51:31: I have a very dear friend, he's a former chaplain in the U .S. Navy, Chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt.
51:37: He was kicked out for praying in Jesus' name. And so he's been fighting that over the years.
51:44: Actually, his case may actually be coming before the Supreme Court shortly from something that I read the other day.
51:53: Well, one of the things that the libertarian movement, and I'm talking here about primarily those that we have some affinity with, not those who are giddy and excited about giving women the right to murder their unborn children or maintaining those alleged rights.
52:14: I'm talking about the conservative libertarians or those that have biblical moral values and so on.
52:24: They would say that when we give too much power to the government for any reason, that is only going to be a detriment to all of us when someone who disagrees with us is in power, is elected and so on.
52:43: So in other words, we might enjoy freedoms and liberties and the protection of the innocents when someone who agrees with us is in the office, but once that person loses an election or another person of a far more leftist persuasion gets into power with the federal government stronger, then it's only going to stab us all in the back.
53:12: Am I making... Yeah, no, let me answer it. I know what you're driving at. I've dealt with these arguments and these debates for decades with libertarians.
53:21: Many libertarians support me because they believe in true liberty. Yeah. Liberty is not licensed to do anything you want.
53:29: It's the freedom to do what's right. And many of them understand that to a great degree.
53:34: I have a history of attracting libertarian support. The libertarian, big L libertarian party candidate this year is such a leftist.
53:42: Pro -abortion, pro -gay marriage, doesn't think Islam, he thinks the threat of Islam is overblown, et cetera, et cetera.
53:50: You know, so we're attracting quite a few libertarians, but again, liberty is not licensed, at least not as defined by God in his word or by the founders of this great country.
54:03: And there's no moral equation between a president doing his primary duty and a president violating our constitution or violating the people's rights.
54:15: It is not tyranny to protect innocent people. Mm -hmm.
54:21: If he turns around and uses the power of the office to tyrannize people, that's not the same thing.
54:26: Those are two entirely different things. And to try and draw a line between those two as being the same thing is just simply not true.
54:36: We have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who asks, what do you make of Donald Trump's statements that he would even seek a legal penalty against women who have abortions?
54:54: That sounds pretty strong. Oh, he took about, I think that same day, he probably took like four different opposing opinions in like 10 minutes.
55:06: He was just spouting whatever was on the top of his head. That's what he does. So I wouldn't give it any credence.
55:14: It was probably the first time the thought had ever occurred to him, and it was because it was broached by a questioner.
55:20: And he just spouted off and immediately backtracked on it. This man will do nothing to stop abortion on demand, rest assured.
55:28: He will not. He's a judicial supremacist. He thinks the judges make our laws. Anything anyone says about life, about abortion, is negated if they are a judicial supremacist.
55:39: The President of the United States does not swear an oath, that Article 6 oath, to obey out -of -control, immoral, usurping, unconstitutional opinions of judges.
55:54: Don't they teach checks and balances in school anymore? They probably don't. But that's what the form of government we're supposed to have.
56:03: When one branch gets out of control, it's up to the other branches and the other levels of government to oppose them with all their might in the keeping of their own oaths to God.
56:14: We have Richard in Albion, I'm assuming that's how to pronounce it,
56:21: Albion, Idaho. And he says, and I'm sorry that this is something that you already covered, but perhaps some people are tuning in late, so I'll just read
56:32: Richard's statement anyway. Any vote for anybody other than Donald Trump is a vote for Hillary, so please tell
56:40: Mr. Huffling and all those who think they ought to vote for him, they are just ensuring a
56:47: Hillary election. That's the chief cornerstone of the
56:52: Trump campaign, and it's a big, fat lie, as I said earlier, it's just not true. They're not your only choice.
56:59: I will be on a number of state ballots directly, I will be on most of the rest of the states, you'll be able to write in my name.
57:09: There's only a tiny handful of states in which you won't be able to vote for our ticket so far, only three.
57:17: So no, it's simply an untruth, what they're saying, it's just not true. And if people continue to fall for that lie, they're going to continue this death spiral for their country, for their children, and for their posterity.
57:33: Goodbye and life. We're going to go to a break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
57:47: that's c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com, and as I said before, please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside of the good old
57:59: USA, and you may remain anonymous if it makes you feel more comfortable, but if you can, please identify yourself.
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01:01:14: That's wrbc .us. Welcome back.
01:01:22: This is Chris Arnz. And if you just tuned in to Iron Sharpens Iron, our guest today for the full two hours is
01:01:28: Tom Hoefling, the candidate for President of the United States running for the
01:01:33: America's Party ticket. And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is
01:01:39: ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. And just want to let our listeners know that our listener
01:01:47: Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island, who posed a question earlier about the
01:01:54: United States military equating Christianity with the Ku Klux Klan. He has supplied me with a link that will take you to a
01:02:05: Fox News article on the subject. So if anybody would like that link,
01:02:11: I can forward that to you after the program. So thank you, Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island.
01:02:17: Hey Chris. Yes. Could I follow up with just a little addition from what we were talking about before the break before you go to your next question?
01:02:27: Oh yeah, definitely. Okay. I'd like to kind of give people a brief history lesson.
01:02:33: Sure. And it's specifically those who say, oh, he can't win. He's got to be on all 50 state ballots.
01:02:40: I would remind people that in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was only on enough states to represent about 75 % of the state ballot.
01:02:58: And he ended up winning, even though he only got about 39 % of the popular vote, he won 58 % of the total electoral vote.
01:03:08: So the people who say you have to be on all 50 state ballots, they don't know anything about our electoral system or how it works.
01:03:17: Well, wouldn't you say though, that it would still be nothing less than a miracle for someone such as yourself to win, even if you're talking about purely the recognizable names of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump through the media and through advertising, the millions of dollars that have spent, they are household names.
01:03:40: And obviously you would have to admit there are probably just a handful comparatively of conservative independently thinking
01:03:48: Christians who are familiar with you and even the America's Party. I was actually interviewing a professor of politics at the
01:03:56: King's College who had not heard of the America's Party, which surprised me. But anyway, how do you respond to that?
01:04:04: Well, the first thing I would grant that to the world's eye, it would look like a miracle.
01:04:10: Okay. But it wouldn't actually take a miracle at the level of the parting of the Red Sea.
01:04:18: In Proverbs, it talks about how the king's heart is in the
01:04:24: Lord's hand, and he can turn it like he can turn the waters. And remember, in this country, we left a country,
01:04:33: Great Britain, that was ruled by one man sovereign, and we set up a country in which the people as a body are sovereign.
01:04:43: So what I'm saying to you is, the miracle would be the turning of the hearts of the
01:04:49: Church away from these luster of two evils arguments that just continue to lead us further and further into evil.
01:04:58: My reading of history, Chris, is that when people begin to go down that path,
01:05:06: God ends up giving them everything they fear. For example, the 1932
01:05:13: German election. They had three choices. It was a luster of three evils election.
01:05:20: They had Field Marshal Hindenburg, who was an old, tired out, checklist, unprincipled guy.
01:05:30: Plus they had Hitler, and they had a communist. And so they said, oh, we better pick the luster of three evils.
01:05:37: So they picked Hindenburg. Within a month, the Nazis were in power. And within a dozen years, the country lay in waste, and the communists were in power.
01:05:52: You know, in 2008, they started with this luster of two evils nonsense. What did they end up with?
01:05:59: They ended up with the evil they feared, and the McCain Republicans ruling over them in the
01:06:04: Republican Party for four more years. 2012, what did they end up with?
01:06:10: The greater evil. Obama. And being ruled over by Romney Republicans for another four years.
01:06:19: And they, by the way, surrendered the fight against marriage. For years, we were winning every fight on marriage.
01:06:27: 31 straight times in 31 states. We won on the marriage fight.
01:06:33: The Republicans were piggybacking their campaigns on that effort and winning. But in 2012, the
01:06:40: Romney Republican stood down. They opened the door wide to this whole homosexual agenda to overtake the entire country.
01:06:50: So I would, I would warn people, you keep buying this stuff, you know, don't come to me and complain.
01:06:57: When the country continues to go to hell in the handbasket. Now, how do you respond, again, to the conservative libertarian, the
01:07:13: Christian libertarian, the libertarian who has, holds tenaciously to biblical morality, and a biblical concept of marriage, who says,
01:07:25: I agree with you wholeheartedly that the only thing that is marriage is a man and a woman, one man and one woman in covenant together with God for their entire lives.
01:07:40: And that the purpose of this, one of them is to procreate, and so on.
01:07:48: And that these are Christians who are libertarian leaning, but who wholeheartedly agree with the biblical concept of marriage, an institution that Jesus Christ himself discusses in the scriptures.
01:08:01: And the issue is that these libertarians will say that the government doesn't have any business in any of our marriages.
01:08:12: They don't need to be getting their fingers into anything that is between us, our fiancé, and a minister of the gospel, and our
01:08:23: God. That this, the government's intrusion upon anyone's marriage is illegitimate.
01:08:30: How do you respond to that? You know, if you go back and read Marx and Engels from almost 200 years ago, they made it very clear, they understood that they could not accomplish their utopia without destroying the family first.
01:08:50: They understood that in Western civilization, Christian civilization, that the family was the foundation of our liberty, our property rights, our prosperity, our national security, and everything else.
01:09:05: So this institution is not dispensable. It's the basis for our civilization.
01:09:14: Look, in its highest sense, as Christians, we know what marriage is. It is a picture, it is a type of Jesus' relationship through his body to the church.
01:09:28: Okay, we know that. We know that it is an important function of the church, but it's also the basis for our civil institutions, for property rights, for inheritance rights, for contract law, and everything else.
01:09:45: It's there for the protection, primarily, of women and children and posterity.
01:09:55: We have Tyler again in Mastic Beach, Long Island, who wants to know if you've ever heard of these two quotes, when
01:10:03: God wants to judge a nation, he gives them wicked rulers, that's John Calvin, and of two evils choose neither,
01:10:12: Charles Haddon Spurgeon. He just wants to know if you've ever heard of those two quotes. Yes, absolutely.
01:10:18: I'm a big believer in digging back into the treasure house of wisdom that we have available to us.
01:10:26: If people visit my Facebook pages, every day they'll see me sharing quotes just like that.
01:10:32: In fact, I have shared those exact quotes a number of times, and there are thousands of others that we continually keep pushing out to people, because our primary goal is to push the church back towards principle, back towards self -evident truth.
01:10:49: We have BB in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, that asks, when do you think both the
01:10:58: Republican and Democratic party took a turn for the worst in history, or were they corrupt from their inception?
01:11:08: Oh, that's a great question. My compliments to the person who asked that. My wife is a brilliant lady.
01:11:18: She is also a great researcher. She was one of the primary archivists for Dr.
01:11:24: Alan Hughes for many years. She studied a lot, and we've studied together the history of the
01:11:32: Republican party at its very beginning. It really was probably more corrupt than most of us would believe, having listened to decades and decades of propaganda.
01:11:45: They had already pretty much departed from principle in their first four years. By 1864, people don't know that, but by 1864,
01:12:00: Lincoln didn't even run as a Republican. They started a new party called the National Union Party, and that's what he ran on and won his second term.
01:12:10: The Republican party, of course, came back in the Reconstruction era and was dominant for many decades until Roosevelt.
01:12:20: In my lifetime, the
01:12:26: Republican party has been corrupt in terms of principle the whole time. As I had said earlier, it was mainly
01:12:33: Nixon -appointed Republican judges who decided against the equal rights of the unborn person in Roe v.
01:12:40: Wade. And it just continued to get worse and worse and worse until we are where we are, where the party is worse than usual.
01:12:53: Can you be more specific about the most vital areas where the
01:13:00: GOP, the Republican party, would be a detrimental party to be affiliated with for Bible -believing
01:13:10: Christians? Look, I just want to say first, before I answer that, that America's party supports candidates no matter what party label they have.
01:13:21: We continue to support Republicans if they truly are in principle, that they have a track record of doing that.
01:13:27: We've managed to elect some people as Republicans. We don't care about that. But the
01:13:32: Republican party as a whole, they're not defending innocent human life.
01:13:39: They have no intention of stopping the abortion holocaust. They have a strategy that is utilitarian.
01:13:47: It is not Christian. It is not scriptural. It's not moral. It's not constitutional.
01:13:53: And it's lousy legally. They continue to pass laws that, in effect, give permission to do abortions, as long as those abortions are committed on schedule and by their arbitrary set of rules.
01:14:11: Almost none of the laws passed by pro -life Republicans in our lifetime actually provides equal protection for every person as God and as our
01:14:21: Constitution absolutely requires. We have
01:14:27: Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know if Alan Keyes is still remaining loyal to America's party and you specifically as their candidate.
01:14:38: That's a good question as well. Alan was only involved in our party at its very beginning.
01:14:45: He didn't stay around very long. I don't know all the details, but he just hasn't been politically active.
01:14:55: He's written a lot of good articles. He continues to write for WorldNetDaily and his blog, which is loyaltoliberty .com.
01:15:05: But he just hasn't been active for about the past seven years in our party or so.
01:15:12: And we have an anonymous listener in New Jersey who wants to know if you were not running for president yourself, who would you think would be an ideal candidate for President of the
01:15:31: United States? Well, obviously, I've supported Dr.
01:15:36: Keyes from 96, 2000, 2008. He's one of the few that gets it.
01:15:44: It's very hard to find principled leaders who actually understand the things we're talking about here today.
01:15:51: So, you know, pick any run -of -the -mill member of America's party, and they would be better than virtually anyone that the
01:15:58: Republicans are offering. But they're not named people. These are just regular folks who've thought these things through, who've prayed these things through and get it.
01:16:13: We have Christopher in Suffolk County, New York, who wants to know what your position is on illegal aliens in this country.
01:16:23: One of the things that seems to excite those who are more conservative to support
01:16:31: Donald Trump, and also the very thing that alienates him from those who are more liberal, appears to be the issue of his hard stance against illegal aliens.
01:16:42: Where do you stand on this issue? You know, folks will go to TomHofling .com,
01:16:50: Chris. In fact, I just had an exchange with somebody that was in the written form that is at the very top of my home page right now on this very subject.
01:17:02: And this was a person who was coming from the standpoint, hey, I'm a Christian, we're supposed to care about everybody.
01:17:08: These people who are here, they're hardworking, honest people. So, you know, aren't we going to be compassionate?
01:17:17: And I explained in the first place, I've seen with my own eyes over my 55 years, that the
01:17:25: American people are very compassionate towards those who are in our country, both legally and illegally.
01:17:32: We treat them very well. Additionally, constitutionally, legally, our 14th
01:17:41: Amendment protects the rights of all persons to life, liberty, property.
01:17:49: But it also makes a distinction between the rights of persons and the privileges and immunities of citizens.
01:18:00: Look, if you don't have this standard of citizenship, you're no longer a country.
01:18:07: I compare it to, you know, you opening your house to anybody who wants to come, including burglars.
01:18:16: You're not going to be able to live in that house for very long. And you're not going to be able to help anybody.
01:18:22: I don't believe God requires us to do that. God created the nation in the first place.
01:18:32: And he also said, his word says, that if you don't take care of your own, you're worse than an unbeliever.
01:18:40: So, when compassion has no bounds, you're basically setting yourself up for destruction.
01:18:50: So, look, the President of the United States has an absolute obligation to do with the constitution guarantee, which is to provide security for our states from invasion.
01:19:05: That same constitution gives the authority over immigration and naturalization to the
01:19:13: Congress. And the President's duty is to enforce all constitutional laws.
01:19:21: So, if the Congress has set immigration laws, I mean, first of all, the President has to secure the country no matter what
01:19:28: Congress says. But he also has an obligation to uphold our laws.
01:19:35: And in a practical sense, that means deporting people who don't belong here. They need to go back to their own home.
01:19:44: They can't come here without our consent. They cannot be part of the American family without our consent.
01:19:55: Now, many on the left have mocked Donald Trump about his insistence that he's going to build walls on our borders.
01:20:05: That seems to be very common sense to me. I'm not saying that I support Donald Trump.
01:20:11: I'm not saying that he excites me as a candidate. I've said some very critical things against Donald Trump, both on this program and on the internet elsewhere.
01:20:22: But that one thing, I mean, everyone that has the ability to protect themselves typically builds walls around where they live.
01:20:34: I mean, without senses, you know, here in Iowa, we have an old saying, good senses make for good neighbors.
01:20:41: Look, Donald Trump is demagoguing this issue. But like most all other issues, he doesn't understand it.
01:20:50: I've been involved in this for more than 20 years. I had my boots on the ground with the Bennett Man down in our four southern border states.
01:20:59: I've been fighting against these people, trying to push through amnesty for years and years. I've been steadily about this.
01:21:06: And another thing, I've made it very clear for five years that the day
01:21:12: I become president, I will sign a presidential finding to the effect that our open southern border represents a clear and present danger to the security of the
01:21:24: United States. And I will send the military to secure that border. And they will stay there until the physical barriers are in place, until a civilian border force is securing our border.
01:21:42: It's a threat. Well, you brought something up that makes me think of another thing that those
01:21:51: Christian and conservative -leaning libertarians have said.
01:21:57: They say that our military doesn't belong overseas unless we are in war or at war with a nation or country or people where we have had officially declared war against them or they have declared war against us, that our military should be primarily here on our borders protecting us.
01:22:26: We're so worried about things that are going on overseas that people are coming into our own country who are a danger to our citizens.
01:22:36: What is your view on America's involvement in overseas conflict that is really involving issues that don't involve directly
01:22:50: America's security and so on? Well, look, defending the sovereign territory of the
01:22:59: United States is the primary purpose of our military. And so that's got to be at the top of the list, protecting our sovereignty, protecting our security, protecting our borders.
01:23:11: As far as overseas things, again, let's say I get elected, Chris. I'm walking into a situation where we have a worldwide fabric of treaty obligations.
01:23:24: I would remind people that our Constitution places those treaty obligations at a very high level.
01:23:31: So we either keep those treaty obligations or we go through the steps to get out of them.
01:23:40: So that's the first thing I would say. Again, I'll invoke Clint Eastwood. I've got to know the limitations.
01:23:47: So do countries. So look, every situation is different.
01:23:55: You've got to get people in that office with good judgment. Would I have fought World War II? Absolutely.
01:24:02: Would I have fought in Kosovo? No. Would I have sent our military in to decimate
01:24:08: Libya? No. So it's just not easy pat answer.
01:24:15: And frankly, to be honest about it, until you attain that office and have those vast resources of information and expertise, you can't come out with a full -blown strategy for everything.
01:24:31: What you've got to decide with these candidates is what kind of judgment do they have? Moral judgment, first of all.
01:24:39: And that's how they're going to operate in office. I think
01:24:44: Donald Trump has horrible judgment. He can't even control his own tongue. Hillary Clinton is a criminal who has endangered our national security through her selfish carelessness.
01:25:00: So listen to what I have to say. Try and decide. Do I have moral judgment? Do I have a reasonable, decent view of the world and our responsibilities in it?
01:25:12: Do I have a decent understanding of what government is actually for? And if you think
01:25:17: I do, then vote for me. We are going to go to our final station break right now.
01:25:26: And if you'd like to join us, try to write as soon as you can. We've got about a half hour left in our discussion.
01:25:33: Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. And as always, please include your first name, city and state, and country of residence.
01:25:43: But if you must remain anonymous, if it makes you feel more comfortable, we will accommodate your wishes.
01:25:50: That's chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Tom Hofling.
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01:30:28: Welcome back this is Chris Arnzen if you just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes and for the next half hour to come our guest today is
01:30:38: Tom Hoefling. He is running for President of the United States with the
01:30:43: America's Party and you can find out more about Tom Hoefling at his website tomhoefling .com
01:30:51: and that's spelt H -O -E F as in Frank L -I -N -G tomhoefling .com.
01:30:58: You can also go to the America's Party website which is selfgovernment .us
01:31:05: selfgovernment .us and hopefully we'll remember to announce those websites before we are out of time.
01:31:14: And again our email address if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own is chrisarnzen at gmail .com
01:31:22: chrisarnzen at gmail .com. We have John in Augusta, Maine who wants to know who were your favorite presidents from history not necessarily during your lifetime?
01:31:39: Oh I love that question. Of course you know George Washington is unequaled as a man of character as they called him the indispensable man and I pretty much agree with that.
01:31:54: He was the force that held this country together in its earliest days. I'm a big admirer of Lincoln.
01:32:02: I know some of my southern friends don't like him too much but I think God took you know fairly moderate
01:32:10: Whig politician and through a series of circumstances used him to do great things historic things.
01:32:22: I'm also a big admirer of Calvin Coolidge. I think he's one of the best presidents we ever had.
01:32:29: In fact he's the last president, I think he might have been the only president who ever balanced the federal budget and retired all of our debt.
01:32:38: I love Calvin Coolidge. I would point anybody to go read the things he said.
01:32:46: He's known as Silent Cow but when he opened his mouth it was worth hearing. I also of course started my political life under Ronald Reagan and there's much
01:32:58: I admire about him. I love his character and his attitude. I remember those days well he restored confidence to a nation that was faltering under Jimmy Carter and the mediocrity that it went before Carter.
01:33:16: He did come to a personhood pro -life understanding, 14th amendment protection understanding.
01:33:26: I don't think he fully carried that out as he should have his choice of judges and other things he made some bad picks but he was on the right track.
01:33:37: Go read his conscience of a nation and you'll see what I'm talking about.
01:33:44: He also actually set out to bring down the
01:33:49: Soviet Union. He had a strategy to do that and guess what it didn't happen on his watch it was soon after he left office but it happened so he was a great president flawed as we all are but in the modern sense he's the only one that I express a lot of admiration for.
01:34:16: We have an anonymous listener in Carlisle Pennsylvania who says
01:34:21: I'm surprised that you listed Calvin Coolidge as one of your favorite presidents.
01:34:27: He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. How do you respond to that inconsistency?
01:34:33: I've never heard that he was a New England Puritan. I would call him the last
01:34:38: Puritan so I'm not aware of any such connection. Okay and one of the things that keeps resurfacing in regard to choosing
01:34:56: Trump as a candidate or voting for Trump into office as being the way to go is because he although he may be undesirable himself may surround himself with God -honoring
01:35:16: Christian people who will steer him in the right direction. How do you respond to that kind of argument in favor of voting for Donald Trump?
01:35:27: I just don't believe it and it's based on experience. The man has contempt for the evangelicals who are supporting him.
01:35:36: If you watched his acceptance speech at the Republican convention and with discernment you can see the contempt.
01:35:42: He threw them a he paid lip service to them but then he kind of threw him an old crust of moldy bread.
01:35:53: He has a history of associating himself with the most liberal Republicans, people like Rudy Giuliani.
01:36:00: Giuliani is his top advisor. The people running his campaign now,
01:36:07: Roger Stone and his associates, Manafort, those guys. I was involved very heavily involved at the national level in the
01:36:15: Republican Party. I know who those guys are Roger Stone was an advocate for gutting the
01:36:20: Republican platform of any moral issues at all for years and years.
01:36:26: So that's the kind of people he's surrounding himself with now. Even Reagan, he surrounded himself with a lot of really good people but he picked
01:36:36: George Bush as his vice president and by the second term the
01:36:42: Bush people had forced out all of the good principled conservatives out of that administration.
01:36:48: By the second term there was virtually none of them left. So anybody who tells me that somehow a bunch of good people are going to come in and rescue
01:36:57: Trump from himself, they're fooling themselves. Robert in New York City wants to know why you called
01:37:07: Trump a socialist because he seems to have thrived off of capitalism and the openly socialist candidate
01:37:17: Bernie Sanders despises him and gravitated towards Hillary Clinton when he realized he was not a viable candidate any longer.
01:37:30: Lots of socialists have been capitalists. Those are the people who empowered the Nazi party in Germany.
01:37:37: So being a capitalist, look around at our country today. Who's funding the radical left?
01:37:45: It's the billionaires like Trump. And who did Trump finance his entire adult life?
01:37:53: The radical left, the people we've been having to fight at such great cost for so many decades.
01:37:59: Trump was funding them including the Foundation. These Trump people look at me and say, you're for Hillary.
01:38:07: And I tell them, what are you talking about? You're supporting a close personal family friend of the
01:38:13: Clintons and one of their financiers. I remember early in this campaign
01:38:20: Trump gave a speech down in Phoenix and the context of his comments was socialized medicine.
01:38:28: He was a long supporter of single -payer government -run socialized medicine.
01:38:35: And in that speech he said, sorry conservatives, but we have to take care of everybody.
01:38:42: Okay, anybody with discernment and understanding knows what that means. That's state socialism.
01:38:48: That is the idea that government is supposed to take care of us. It's not.
01:38:54: Not under our Constitution. Go read James Madison, the father of the U .S. Constitution.
01:39:01: He made it clear that's not the former government we had. He's advising that we have unlimited government.
01:39:09: And that's why we're in the mess we're in. We have unlimited government. On the one hand, they refuse to do the thing that they ought, like protect innocent human life.
01:39:20: And on the other hand, they're doing everything they shouldn't be doing. Most of what's going on in Washington, D .C.
01:39:28: is outside the bounds of the enumerated powers of our Constitution. And I guarantee you,
01:39:34: Trump will keep that going. He made his fortune as a crony capitalist, buying politicians, manipulating the system, misusing eminent domain, etc.,
01:39:47: etc. So, you know, let's get real. He represents the status quo.
01:39:54: He's not this revolutionary figure that so many are trying to pretend that he is. He's part of the problem.
01:40:01: He's part of the group of people that got our country in the mess it's in. So why reward him with giving him the most powerful office in the world?
01:40:13: And one of the issues that is really on the minds of a lot of voters is the way that we should be viewing
01:40:27: Muslim immigrants to the United States. We have not only
01:40:33: Democrats saying that it is a horrendous idea that Donald Trump has to even put on a moratorium, a temporary halt on Islamic immigration to the
01:40:47: United States, and you even have Republicans who are saying that that is not a good idea, whereas others saying that presidents have done it in the past, even
01:40:56: Jimmy Carter, as liberal as he was. What are your views on that kind of a thing?
01:41:03: Well, again, this is an area where Trump got onto something that's correct a little bit and then showed that he has no...
01:41:11: Tom? Yes, can you hear me? Yeah, you did break up a little bit there.
01:41:17: We lost your voice. I will try and work with my phone here.
01:41:24: What I was saying, Chris, is that, you know, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.
01:41:34: But Trump, as always, shows that he doesn't really understand what he's talking about, because when he first said we need to block
01:41:41: Muslims from the country, he followed... The second half of the sentence was, until we figure out what's going on.
01:41:49: Okay, we all know what's going on. We don't need to figure it out.
01:41:56: Islam is not just a religion, quote -unquote. It is a political ideology, one that has destroyed nations, one that houses its goal, the domination of the entire world, the subjugation of all of us.
01:42:14: Just study a little history, see what happened to the nations that were overtaken by Islam.
01:42:23: So, look, even under current law, the
01:42:28: President of the United States can exclude immigration from anybody or any group of people that he considers a threat to the
01:42:38: United States. That's under current U .S. code, right now. And I think we better do it.
01:42:48: Well, in response to that, you obviously must remember that there was this profound speech, moving speech, at the
01:43:01: Democratic National Convention, where you had the father of a
01:43:07: Muslim soldier, who obviously, a patriot, who gave his life as a member of the
01:43:16: United States military. And you had a man who seemed to be very much in favor of our
01:43:22: Constitution, and who was a Muslim, and yet didn't seem to have any desire for Sharia law developing here.
01:43:30: How do you respond to that kind of a thing? Well, the Quran and our
01:43:36: Constitution are diametrically opposed. So, if he says he supports our Constitution, that's dandy.
01:43:43: He's not a very good Muslim. Because the two systems are completely different.
01:43:51: People say, well, it's outlawed Sharia law. It is already outlawed. Our Constitution requires a
01:43:58: Republican form of government in this country. Sharia law is not a Republican form of government, in the sense that the founders of our country conceived that word.
01:44:10: So, I would honor this young man, of course. And I would certainly have great sympathy with his father.
01:44:17: But that does not mean that we have to open our doors wide to the
01:44:23: Muslim world. It's national suicide. Yeah, obviously,
01:44:30: I don't think that there are too many people that think we should, especially those who are conservative -leaning and Christian, that we should indiscriminately let all
01:44:41: Muslims into our country who desire to be here. But are we to treat them all as a monolith?
01:44:50: Are we not to judge them individually and so on? Historically, people have had to sign loyalty oaths in order to enter this country and in order to become citizens.
01:45:06: In fact, still to this day, you've got to raise your right hand and swear to support our system and our
01:45:12: Constitution. So, look, part of the
01:45:20: Qur 'an is the idea that it's okay to lie for Allah. So, this creates a real problem in the area that we're discussing.
01:45:31: I'm not saying we should have a hard and fast rule. You know, if somebody's life is incredibly endangered or something, we should try to help them.
01:45:40: But as a general rule, as a principle, allowing
01:45:45: Islam to overrun our country will be the death of this country and our children.
01:45:53: Do you have people from across the religious spectrum who are making it known that they are supporting you as a candidate and America's party as a party?
01:46:07: As I said earlier in the interview, Chris, we have evangelicals, we have Catholics, we have
01:46:12: Mormons, we have Jews. We have had a few Muslims participate.
01:46:18: They were treated with great respect. The one particular gentleman, he was very strongly pro -life, and we treated him with great respect.
01:46:28: We gave him all consideration that anybody else did. He didn't stick. So, do
01:46:33: I have great Muslim support? No. And I'd like you, before we run out of time, to really have the floor to basically list the most vital reasons why you think the citizens of the
01:46:52: United States, the voting public, should cast their vote for Tom Hoefling. How much time do
01:47:00: I have, Chris? You have about nine minutes. Oh, that's all kinds of time.
01:47:07: Okay. Well, the first thing is, I'm the only abolitionist of abortion who is running.
01:47:16: Somebody who has led the fight. Last November, Newsmax named me one of the top 100 pro -life advocates in the country.
01:47:24: Hmm. American Right to Life, who is not like National Right to Life, owned by the
01:47:32: Republican Party. I'm the only tier one personhood pro -lifer that they have.
01:47:39: So, if you care about stopping this abomination of three to four thousand little boys and girls being slaughtered in this country every day,
01:47:49: I am your only real choice. The abolitionists are backing me. If you care about preserving a civil institution of marriage, again,
01:48:00: I'm your only candidate. And you can just go right down the line. If you want to get rid of the income debt,
01:48:08: I've been a strong national advocate for that for more than 20 years. I helped form the foundations for the bringing in of the fair tax plan, and I frankly think we can do even better than the fair tax.
01:48:22: If you want to begin to cut government agencies that are unconstitutional, if you want to get government out of education and get the power back into the hands of the parents and the teachers and the local taxpayers where it belongs,
01:48:38: I'm your guy. If you want to get rid of the Fed and make
01:48:44: Congress take their constitutional responsibilities to govern our monetary policy back where it belongs, then
01:48:53: I'm your guy. If you want secure borders, I'm your guy. If you want to deliver, read the preamble to the
01:49:05: Constitution. I would urge everybody to do that. That series of clauses, those are the stated purposes of the
01:49:13: U .S. Constitution. And the final crowning purpose of the Constitution is to secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
01:49:26: I'm the only one who's running this year who really understands what that means, who really understands what the obligations of the oath are, and who has shown a long -term, consistent, principled adherence to those things.
01:49:43: So if I represent you, vote for me. Don't listen to all the nonsense and the lies and the excuses and all of those things.
01:49:54: Just vote for who represents you. Let's restore Republican constitutional self -government under God in this country.
01:50:06: If you could now give our listeners reasons to vote for you, or even in theory, just a candidate, not even specifically you, but a candidate who champions their ideals, the things that they desire most in a president, but they know that, or they're pretty certain that this candidate is going to lose, is there any benefit to voting for a candidate that you wholeheartedly agree with, but are fairly certain they will not win the election?
01:50:49: Well, Chris, would you have voted for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego? Because they were certain to lose.
01:50:57: They were going in the fire. Mm -hmm. Would you have voted for Daniel? Because he was headed for the lion's den.
01:51:05: You know, look, Christianity is not supposed to be about bookmaking, oddsetting.
01:51:12: It's supposed to be about doing what is right, not trying to overcome evil with evil, but what the scripture says, overcome evil with good.
01:51:26: Amen. Well, I agree with that. Just out of curiosity, do you have a vice presidential running mate?
01:51:33: I do. He has already been nominated by the American party as our vice presidential candidate.
01:51:41: America's party is going to nominate him too, I'm positive. And the
01:51:48: American Independent Party, we're quite hopeful in about 11, 12 days, we're going to nominate him as my running mate as well.
01:51:56: Steve is an old friend of mine, a fellow warrior in this cause. He's from South Carolina.
01:52:05: He tends a little more kind of libertarian than me in some ways.
01:52:12: We don't always agree on every single thing. But again, these core principles that are represented by America's party, we agree 100%.
01:52:22: And that's why we're unified. And that's why we're able to go forward working together.
01:52:29: Steve is one of the best people I've ever known. He's just a solid, solid individual. Can you reveal his full name?
01:52:37: Oh, I thought I did say it. It must have blinked out. His name is Steve Shulin. Okay. And what can you let our listeners know about Steve Shulin in regard to his own personal faith and his vocational experience and that kind of thing?
01:52:54: Well, he's an evangelical Christian, just like me, Bible -believing
01:53:00: Christian. His vocation, I think he was educated at a
01:53:06: Catholic university, interestingly enough, because he was at another university, he was on the debating team, and he had a chance to get on the debating team at this other university.
01:53:23: I think professionally, he worked in the nuclear field for many years.
01:53:30: He still has a number of small businesses and financial concerns that he runs.
01:53:40: But that's pretty much Steve. Do you think that if you were to be elected president, that you would actually be able to get the
01:53:52: United States out of our incredible debt that we are in? Yeah, I know how to get out.
01:53:59: It's easy to get out of debt. You simply return to the limitations of the enumerated powers, and our debt problem will begin to go away.
01:54:11: And I'd like you now, as we are running out of time, just to basically unburden your heart and leave our listeners with what you most want to be etched in their hearts and minds when they leave this program today.
01:54:26: Well, if you're tired of the ownership of our politics by the money and the media, the billionaires and the big media conglomerates, then
01:54:37: I'm your guy again. Because we're on purpose, we're showing that this country could be taken back without any reference to them.
01:54:49: If I succeed, the whole political world is going to look around and go, wait a minute, they did this with no money.
01:54:57: They did this without media coverage. How did they do this? Well, it's the
01:55:02: American people realizing their own power once again. I often remind people,
01:55:08: Chris, that the men who won our independence from Great Britain, what did they have in terms of communication abilities?
01:55:17: They had handwritten letters delivered by men on horseback to the committees of correspondence.
01:55:25: They had broadsides, or what we call flyers, printed on crude printing presses, at least by our standards, they're crude.
01:55:35: That's all they had. What do we have? I've got a cell phone on my belt, so does almost everybody else.
01:55:43: We've got the internet. We've got free email, pre -web radio, pre -web video, pre -conferencing ability.
01:55:52: I'd really ask your listeners to think about this. If we don't take our country back using the tools that we have available to us right now, it's not because we can't, it's because we won't.
01:56:09: We don't have the will to save our country, to preserve this great blessing that was given to us by God and by our forefathers, and deliver it to our kids and our grandkids and our great -grandkids.
01:56:25: They'll curse our name if we let this great free republic go.
01:56:32: There are some who have said that our great free republic really doesn't exist anymore. How do you respond to those who are so pessimistic and disgusted about what they've seen happen to our nation and those who lead it, that they have really said that we are, barring a miracle of biblical proportion, that we are seemingly beyond hope?
01:56:57: How do you respond to that? There's nothing wrong with our republic, Chris. There's nothing wrong with our constitution, fundamentally.
01:57:05: I'd fix a few things in it. It's not perfect, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it.
01:57:11: What is wrong is we keep electing people to office who have no concern about the obligations of their oath of office.
01:57:21: They think it's just another part -a -lot. They think it's another formality. And until we start to elect men and women with the character to take that oath made to God seriously and start to do what the constitution requires, this country can't be saved, and it will be gone.
01:57:44: Well, I really want to thank you for being our guest today on Iron Sharpens Iron, and I want to make sure that all of our listeners have, again, your websites.
01:57:58: They are tomhofling .com. That's T -O -M -H -O -E,
01:58:04: F as in Frank, L -I -N -G .com. And of course, the America's Party website is selfgovernment .us,
01:58:14: selfgovernment .us. And I want our listeners to know, again, for those of you who tuned in late, that tomorrow
01:58:24: I'm going to be having a fascinating interview, God willing, with a missionary in Turkey who writes under a pseudonym in order to protect his life and the lives of those he loves.
01:58:36: He writes under the name James Wright, W -R -I -G -H -T, and he's the author of the book
01:58:42: Martyrs of Malatya, Martyrs for the Messiah in Turkey, and we hope that you tune in tomorrow for that broadcast.
01:58:52: Coming up later in the week, we have Lynn Wilder, who is a convert from Mormonism into Christianity, and next week we have
01:59:05: George Grant returning to our program. George Grant, who is no stranger to most of our listeners who happen to be especially theologically
01:59:17: Reformed, and so we look forward to that interview. And there's a whole bunch of other folks joining us on Iron Sharpens Iron in the days to come, including
01:59:27: Todd Friel from Wretched TV and Wretched Radio, who is author of the new book that is hot off the press,
01:59:34: Stressed Out, A Practical Biblical Approach to Anxiety, and we hope you tune in for that as well.
01:59:39: I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater
01:59:45: Savior than you are a sinner, and we look forward to hearing from you and your questions for our guests the next time on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.