Reviewing 2020's Battle With #BigEva (They're Losing)

AD Robles

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Now, I consider myself something of an amateur expert on the social media usage of Big Eva and evangelical celebrities of all tiers and levels, and, you know,

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I'll be honest, there's one take that I can't quite wrap my finger around, and it's this one by Joe Thorne.

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I think Joe Thorne's in the Guild. I don't know, what do you think? Let me know in the comments section if you think

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Joe Thorne is in Big Eva. I think he's kind of like, you know what I think? I think he might be in his probationary period where you have to prove your loyalty, and so he's in that probation period where he's kind of in the

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Guild, but he's not 100 % in the Guild yet. He's still got some hoops to jump through and things of that nature, but he's on his way.

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I mean, that's for sure. He's kind of like, what is it? He's a friend of mine, but not quite a friend of ours, you know what

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I mean? That kind of thing. But here's what Joe Thorne says. He says, Twitter is like a nuclear -powered terrible opinion generator that never stops.

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I gotta be honest. I don't get this. Yeah, well,

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I hope you had a very merry Christmas. And let's just chat about this for a little bit.

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This is a take that I just, I see it a lot, and I really don't get it. It's a take where you're complaining about Twitter on Twitter, and it's not that you're complaining about the company.

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I can at least understand that at a certain level, because Twitter does engage in a lot of shenanigans with how they curate the trending bar and stuff like that, and what they censor, what they don't.

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It makes sense to complain about that on the platform itself, because obviously you enjoy the platform enough to want it to be better, you know what

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I mean? I can understand that. But this take where it's like, complaining about the users of Twitter on Twitter is so weird, because a lot of people notice right away.

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You get to curate who you see on Twitter. You can follow certain people, you can block people, you can mute people.

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There's a lot of tools at your disposal to not want to whine like a little baby on Twitter about Twitter users.

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I just don't understand it. It makes no sense to me. Could something be more indicative of just a whiny little, who's that?

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You know what I'm saying? You're just going to whine about how people use Twitter. You're going to whine about bad opinions.

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I read something on the internet I didn't like. You're going to complain about it on the platform that you see it, and you're going to talk about how evil and awful it is.

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I responded to this. I did a quote tweet. I actually think social media, and Twitter included, is like a

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Rorschach test. What you see in it tells you a lot about yourself, you know what I mean?

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A Rorschach test, people believe different things about them, but what

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I'm talking about is what a Rorschach test claims to be. I don't know if it's real or not. I'm just saying what it claims to be.

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You see what you want to see. You see what you are, in other words, in the picture.

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I don't know if that's legitimate or not. It could be pseudoscience. I'm not making a comment on that. I'm saying what a

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Rorschach test should be, I believe social media is like that, because you get these people that get so angry on social media, and that anger is in you, because social media didn't do that.

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That's you who's angry. You know what I mean? You've got to take responsibility for yourself, and I do this for myself.

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It's not like I don't have any skin in the game. If there's a person online that gets my blood pressure rising and I feel that in me,

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I take a break. I take responsibility for that myself. I say, you know what? I can't do this.

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I have to stop with what I'm feeling. I have to do... You know what I mean? It's not Joe's fault that I'm all angry.

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I'm not angry at Joe. I'm just saying if, let's just say it was Joe Thorne that was saying something that I was angry about, that's my fault that I'm angry.

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Maybe it's legitimate anger, maybe it isn't, but I can't blame Joe for making me feel a certain way.

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That whole thing about triggering, that's not real. You know what I mean? You cut your hand off if it causes you to sin.

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That's the point. The focus is on you. It's not the other people's fault. I don't know.

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I always find this take to be so ridiculous that you're going to blame other people for how you see

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Twitter. I think Twitter's great. Now, I want to compare this to another take on Twitter.

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This is from Michael Foster. I'm not hiding anything here. I like Michael Foster very much.

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I've talked to him privately a number of times in comm boxes and voice messages.

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I've been on his podcast. I'm friendly with Michael Foster. I agree with a lot of what he has to say.

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This is another one of those things. He says, Social media posts change minds.

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People saying they don't is either ignorance or gaslighting. It's my observation that often the people who say this just don't like what's being said and at some level are worried that the post might change minds.

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I agree with this. I agree with this. You always hear, Twitter conversations never change minds.

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Arguments don't change minds. Okay, so then why are you worried? You know what I mean? What's the big deal? But it's false anyway.

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The number of people that I could ... I'm not a jerk, so I'm not going to put them on blast, but the number of people who email me and message me to talk about how their minds were changed by something so and so said or something

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I said on social media, the numbers are just too many.

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It's at least 100 at this point, right? I've met a lot of these people in real life. I've met them on social media.

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This is the thing. Of course, social media changed minds. This is the truth. You have to understand, if social media posts didn't change minds, then nobody would waste their time doing it, including

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Big Eva, including Joe Thorne. He wouldn't tweet if he didn't think the tweet was going to be meaningful.

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If he would, then that's his problem. He's wasting time. You might as well just play video games all day.

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You know what I mean? I have nothing against video games. I enjoy video games. But you're not changing the world playing a video game, obviously, which is actually not always 100 % true.

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In fact, I remember when I was coming to faith, I got my brother to stop a backslide that he was currently engaged in while playing video games with him.

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Of course, it was through conversations. We had one of those audio things, and we were playing Madden or something.

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I believe it was Madden, and we were talking to each other. We would talk every day for hours a day playing these video games.

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Yes, it was a lot of wasted time, but we redeemed some of it and all of that kind of stuff. This whole idea of social media being the devil, that says a lot more about the person who's saying it than social media itself, because I get edified on social media all day.

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I really do. I follow a lot of people that I think are poisonous to the church, but nobody that I think affects my mood negatively.

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Sometimes when I catch myself getting that high blood pressure feeling, you know what I'm talking about.

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Just a word of advice for you, if you find that you're doing that a lot, my advice is to maybe take a break from following those people, unfollow them, or mute them, or whatever you have to do.

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That has happened to me before. I take action. I take responsibility for myself.

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If I'm all upset about Jory Mica posting nonsense again, that's not Jory's fault.

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That's my fault. It's my fault for getting to the point where Jory Mica affects my mood or affects my blood pressure.

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You know what I mean? That's my fault. Jory Mica doesn't. I find her tweets ridiculous, and I just laugh at them, and it's all good.

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If you find yourself in that position, take responsibility for yourself and your own experience on social media and get rid of it.

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Let me tell you right now, social media isn't a hobby for me. The minute it stops being useful to me,

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I won't use it anymore. It's just that simple. All of these Big Eva types feel the same way about it.

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I think they're probably in the process of abandoning it because it has no benefit to them.

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It has no benefit to them. Yes, of course they think you can't change minds on social media because all that happens to them on social media is that their nonsense and their lies get exposed again and again and again and again, and there's nowhere to hide.

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Of course, they think you can't change minds on social media because it's been a negative experience for them.

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That's great. What I would say is the pressure must be kept on these people.

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It must be kept on these people. We cannot let up now because right now, we have them where we want them.

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Let me give you a perfect example. These people are running scared, and now is not the time to give in to their pleas for no, no, no, no, no, like that kind of stuff.

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Forget that. Forget that right now. When they repent, then we stop, but they haven't repented.

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Here's the reality. So, ERLC on the day before Christmas posted this tweet, and it was linked to an article written by Casey Huff, who

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I guess has women serving as pastors at his church. So, he's a liberal. I mean, this guy's a liberal, obviously.

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So, anyway, they say this. They say,

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So, basically, Jesus is mixed race, according to this tweet, and it links to an article that points to the genealogy from Joseph that Matthew says this is

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Jesus' genealogy and all that kind of thing. So, obviously, people dunked on this all day because this is preposterous.

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Jesus Christ is a mixed race savior, right? So, you could tell that this is very important to the

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ERLC, that he's a mixed race savior. Now, people, of course, pointed out that Joseph wasn't his biological father, and so to call

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Jesus mixed race on the evidence of Joseph's genealogy is crazy, even though that is

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Jesus' genealogy, because Joseph was his father, at least here on Earth, so we have to acknowledge that, obviously, but to call him mixed race because of that is playing fast and loose with the facts, and it's doing it in service of some kind of weird narrative that I would call idolatry.

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This whole idea of race is the most important thing ever is idolatry, in my opinion. And so, people were dunking on this and all of that.

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And so, here's the point, though, like they put this out on their own social media, right?

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So, this is their fault. They put out this nonsense on their own social media. This is their fault.

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We pointed it out, which it's very effective to point this out on social media because you can quote tweet it.

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People can instantly see what you're referencing. You can dunk on it. You can meme on it. It's great because the memes,

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I think, can be effective. I think the memes can be effective. I think you can go overkill with the memes, of course, and people think you're just being mean, but, of course, that's a line that everyone has to try to walk, and so people were memeing on this.

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I memed on this. I called Spock the mixed race starfleet commander that pointed forward to the already and not yet glorious communist future and all that.

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That one didn't get too much play, but, you know, hey, you know, I'm just trying to meme on this stuff. And anyway, the point, though, is that this got all of the

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Big Eva guild out of the woodwork. How dare you? How dare you? Here's Andrew T. Walker. How dare you, sir?

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Casey Bowe is one of my closest friends and someone I trust with my theological life. However, a tweet was worded from an old article that can be justifiably critiqued, which he admits, it's not right to question his overall confessional.

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How dare you, sir? How dare you? That's one approach. And then, of course, there's the slanderer approach from people who said, yeah, but Jesus wasn't really mixed race.

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That's actually not true. That's not orthodox to say that. Danny Slavich here. The anti -woke fundamentalist

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Twitter mobbed a pastor and Christian man on Christmas Day, calling him a heretic. It was a sinful, slanderous burying of false witness.

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So it's the big crime here is that people called him a heretic on Christmas, mind you.

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How dare you? I can't believe it. You know what I mean? It's just slander, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know, this is the kind of thing you come to expect.

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Of course, they're circling the wagons. But let's not forget here that this was all started by them.

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The Guild put this tweet out. And so this is how the Guild works.

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They put out nonsense, a lie about Jesus, the Savior. And then people point out the lie about the

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Savior. And then, but then it's, they're the ones that are bad because some of them went overboard. They called him a heretic, whatever, and this and that.

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And it's like, yeah, but the wrong thing was the wrong thing. You know what I mean? Like that was what was wrong.

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The ERLC was wrong, not the people who pointed out the wrongness. But no, no, no, no, no, no.

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See, this is why they don't like social media. Because everyone gets, well, at least theoretically, an equal chance to get to control the narrative.

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And now that's actually not true because Twitter, you know, plays fast and loose with the algorithm, of course.

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But a guy like me can get more engagement on a tweet than ERLC can.

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And that's not fair because ERLC has a multi -million dollar budget with lots of guild support and everyone shares their books and everyone reviews their books and endorses each other's books.

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And I'm just an idiot on YouTube, right? Like that's not fair to Andrew T. Walker. Like I, he earned his degree.

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I never even went to seminary. And it's like, well, how is it that A .D. Robles has a platform and it's, you know, comparable to Andrew Walker's?

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He's got a lot more followers than me, but he's been at this for a lot longer. He's a theology professor at SBTS.

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How is it that his tweets get roughly the same or worse engagement than my tweets?

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That's not fair to them. So of course they hate social media and think it can't change minds because they're not the ones changing minds.

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That's the problem. We're the ones changing minds because we can expose the ERLC's nonsense and people's minds about the

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ERLC are changing. And they're like, well, I'm Danny Slavich. I'm the great Danny Slavich.

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I'm pro -guild. How dare an anti -guild member get as much play as I am or more?

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Like it's very upsetting to them because they're not changing minds. So therefore social media can't change minds.

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They're not winnings. Therefore social media radicalizes people. It's just all a scam.

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Now here's the thing, everyone who was saying that this was wrong to call Jesus Christ a mixed race savior was 100 % right.

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You see, there's no acknowledgement of that here because even the author himself said, yeah, you know,

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I wrote that a while ago. I probably shouldn't have said race. I probably should have said something else and this and that.

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I can understand that you could be a mixed race. Yeah, but then he went on the attack even more like, well, but how dare you call me this and that?

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It's just crazy. It's just absolutely crazy. So anyway, I just wanted to say that about social media because here's the reality.

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There's going to be a lot of pressure.

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Let me say this right now and I'm going to try to say this in a diplomatic way, not because I'm getting soft on you, but I want to make sure that I say this in a way that doesn't firebomb people that I really love.

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There's going to be calls in 2021 for a bit of a ceasefire.

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There's going to be calls for ratcheting down the rhetoric. There's going to be calls for coming to the negotiating table, let's say, with some of these liberals, right?

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And my opinion on that is that that is not the thing to do right now.

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That is not the thing to do right now. We have these people on the run, right?

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Like the ERLC, this guy who wrote the article on Christmas Day felt the need to backtrack some of the quotations about the mixed race status of Jesus Christ, the mixed race status.

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He wrote those words and on Christmas Day, he backtracked on some of those words. Now, he didn't backtrack completely.

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He still believes essentially the same thing and that's a problem, but this was important to him.

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The reality is we have these people on the run and so they're going to try to say social media is not legitimate.

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You don't have the degree. You don't have the guild membership. That's not legitimate. This and that. They're going to try to do what

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Twitter does to President Trump, what Twitter does to people who are questioning the vaccine or questioning the election.

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Like Big Eva is going to do the equivalent of what big media does, what the mainstream media does with tweets they don't like, with YouTube channels they don't like.

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They're going to attempt to do the equivalent. Now, Big Eva doesn't own the platforms, right? So they can't do it as effectively as Twitter does or YouTube does or Google does or Facebook does, but they're going to attempt the same thing where if a guy that's not in the guild like me says something, they're going to put that little asterisk, this is not an approved theological statement and stuff like that.

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That's going to happen and there's going to be a lot of people that want you to take your foot off the gas a little bit.

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At this moment where we have them on the run, there's going to be people from our side, good people, good men that are going to encourage you to take your foot off the gas.

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My advice is to not do that. That is how you lose. That is how the socialist, progressive, liberal wing of every kind of institution, not just Christianity, but every kind of institution, that is how they win.

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You allow them to get a foothold and to maintain that foothold and over time it spreads like gangrene.

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No, you cut the cancer from your body. You get rid of them.

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You get rid of them. It's just that simple. They either repent or they get the freak out of your church.

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That's how you handle someone who's a cancer to the church. All of these race baiters, I don't care how the optics look.

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If you've got black race baiters at your church, you get them the freak out of there unless they repent and that's not going to look very good, but it doesn't matter.

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It's the right thing to do. That's the right thing to do. You've got white race baiters at your church, do the same thing.

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See, that looks a little bit, that's not as bad optics wise, but you can't care about optics right now.

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You've got to care about purity. You've got to care about obedience. That's what you have to care about. I know that people are saying, well, you know, all these black people are going to leave the

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SBC if we come too hard against critical race. Doesn't matter. This is the time to have no quarter.

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This is the time to fight. This is the time to push the accelerator on the fight.

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And it's just that simple. Does it mean that you're not intemperate? It doesn't mean that you skip steps.

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That's what they do. They skip steps. They do things against what the Bible says.

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No, you follow the scripture, right? You kick them out of your church, but only after you warn them, only after you bring it to the elders, only after you follow the biblical steps, you don't do it the way they do it, which is to skip steps and they treat you like a

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Gentile instantly. Like don't follow their strategy, but we do need to have the same zeal that they have for their methodology, except ours has to be biblical.

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Ours has to be conservative in that way. I hope you found this video helpful. God bless.