TGC Insinuates Trump to Blame for Afghanistan

California Update and Upcoming Projects

Hey everyone, just chilling in California. I'm at my grandparents house right now. This is probably the last podcast I will do with my cell phone from here. Another day and a half, I'll be back home, and I got a whole backlog of things to talk about next week.

One of the things, and I'll just briefly mention it now, I'll go into more detail next week, is I've been told if you go to the Discerning Christians website, discerningchristians .com, there's been an updated feature.

So if you are a church looking for a pastor, or a pastor, potential pastor, looking for a church, that process apparently is much easier than it was. That's happening. I've actually, before I left, I messaged someone and said, I want to build an app.

I want to make this available on cell phones, if possible. I'm not sure if it'll just be me, or there'll be others that come alongside me to help finance this and do this, but it needs to happen. Just give you a little update on that.

We also, and I don't think I've said this for a while, we're also continuing to work at Last Stand Studios on various projects, and the Monument Project is one of them. So lots of updates when it comes to that, making some very good progress.

Joe Carter's Gospel Coalition Article on the Taliban

Right now, though, I only have a few minutes, and someone sent me recently, I think it was yesterday, a Gospel Coalition article. I think it was published maybe yesterday or the day before. I think it was yesterday.

It's by Joe Carter, who is a pastor. I don't know if he's associate pastor. I want to say he is. He may not be, but he's a pastor at McLean Bible Church, where David Platt pastors. It's called The Nine Things You Should Know About the Taliban.

Specifically, the person who sent me this wanted me to look at number four, and so I did. It did irritate me a little. I'm going to be honest with you. So I'm going to just read for you what it says, and then analyze it a little bit.

It says, number four, the U .S. government had made a peace agreement with the Taliban. In February 2020, the Trump administration signed an agreement with the Taliban that required the U .S. to withdraw troops and release up to 5 ,000 Taliban combat and political prisoners.

In exchange, the Taliban agreed to prevent the use of the soil of Afghanistan by any group or individual against the security of the United States and its allies. President Biden has agreed to honor the agreement.

It is, and this is a quote from Biden, it is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself, but it was the arrangement made by the U .S. government, and that has to mean something. So this little section, it here's the thing about it, because I was looking at it and I was like, is there anything like technically inaccurate about this?

I mean, technically, there's there's there's nothing that's a lie that like is here's here's something that's factually just not true. Biden did say those those things. It is true that the Trump administration did make an agreement in February 2020.

However, it's what's left out. And that is often the case. It is a history guy. This really irritates me when I see it. I'm just being honest. That's that's how I view it when people leave out significant facts.

Obviously, if you're doing scholarly work or if you even if you're just doing reporting, you can't you can't get everything. You can't be as thorough sometimes as you even want to be. You have to focus in on facts that are significant with the goal of informing people about the situation that's unfolding or a historical situation that did happen.

And I think a lot of the deception that we see in the historical field especially, but it's also in the journalist field, is people who write articles and write books that are slanted in a certain direction.

And the reason they're slanted is because they leave out things. And when they leave certain significant key things out, the reader is kind of left with drawing an incorrect conclusion based on incomplete information.

And so and it's not like the information isn't available. It is. So what's the conclusion that someone would draw from what I just read from Joe Carter at the Gospel Coalition? Well, they would say, OK, President Trump had an agreement with the Taliban.

And it sounds it kind of it only portrays part of that agreement. But it sounds like there is kind of that, you know, we're going to release prisoners and they're going to agree not to hurt us. But it kind of like it says nothing about the current situation and how the withdrawal has been handled really.

Hardly anything about that. And then, you know, Biden wouldn't have signed this. Biden is against it somehow. But Biden's kind of his hands are tied. That's kind of how you feel like he's going to have to just go along with the agreement that was already made.

And so it's not really his fault. And this is the narrative that MSNBC and most of it's interesting. Actually, it's not even all the mainstream media, but a lot of the mainstream media is going with this.

It's really the hard left media that's going with this narrative that, you know, this the situation in Afghanistan is not Biden's fault. It's the Trump administration's fault. And and of course, this is what Biden's been doing.

He's been blame shifting. He will not take personal responsibility. And I made a video where I talked about how terrible this is, how this just damages the United States credibility. And it shows how weak and ill prepared for leadership are our, quote, unquote, leaders are.

So this is the impression it leaves you with. It's like it's not really Biden's fault. It's Trump's fault because he negotiated this bad deal and Biden stuck with it. And that's simply not the case. That's not the right conclusion to draw.

If you know more significant facts, if you know that Biden, first of all, could have renegotiated it if he didn't like the deal. He wasn't stuck with the deal. He could have renegotiated it if he had wanted to.

But also, and maybe more significantly, the agreement had a lot more teeth in it. It stipulated that the Taliban was to actively discourage groups opposed to the United States. And I did read it, by the way.

That's where I'm getting this is my summary of it. Or the allies or allies of the United States and prevent them from operating and not allowing them to immigrate or have visas. So there's a lot of teeth in this, a lot of stipulations that they had to abide by.

Mike Pompeo has gone on, at least he did one interview that I saw where he was pointing out how unnecessary the situation with the withdraw and how quick it was and how clumsy it was, how unnecessary it was.

It didn't have to be this way. And Trump in February of 2020, this is from an article in the BBC, not your conservative news source, but February 29th. And they quote President Trump saying, if bad things happen, we'll go back with a force like no one's ever seen.

And that was Donald Trump. And this is for those who like have followed Trump's foreign policy and even his domestic policy. That's the way that he negotiates. He he kind of is unpredictable. And that's what kind of like Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan was like that. The enemies of the United States didn't want to deal with either one of those guys because they didn't want to mess with them because they didn't know if they were going to start sending some rockets, which basically is what Trump or Trump was going to do.

Like, we know where your families are. We can we can send some cruise missiles in and through a drone and you won't even know what's happening. And, you know, there's there's a big deterrent. And Trump's personality, his whole foreign policy was a lot of it was predicated on this attitude he had that was unpredictable and very pro United States interests.

And I mean, he says that back then. So the deal you have to understand the deal also in light of who Trump is. But the deal itself had teeth in it. And and so Joe Carter doesn't really go over all of that.

He makes it sound like it's kind of this it's really this kind of a lopsided deal. Like the U .S. really is made a bad, bad deal. They're giving up a lot and they're not getting much in return. And and that Biden was just the whole situation over the last few weeks has been Trump's policies playing out without Trump in office.

And it just happened to, you know, kind of like when you're playing catchphrase or something and or hot potato. And he's like he Biden was just landed with this hot potato. He couldn't do anything about it.

The timer went off and he had it in his hands. And that's just simply not true. It was a bungled withdrawal. There was a failure to evacuate. That's one of the biggest problems with this whole thing. And there's no deterrence.

They don't have any plan. I mean, now they're trying to scramble to come up with something to deter the Taliban and what they're doing. But this would never have I think any reasonable person knows who's followed any of this, even from a distance, knows that this would not have happened under Trump's watch.

Trump, his foreign policy was to be much more forceful, much more unpredictable. And people knew they couldn't take advantage of him. And Biden underestimated this a whole lot. And I think there in general, I think when you look at conservatism and progressivism or liberalism in general, you see conservatism allows and accounts for this understanding of man being depraved, that man's evil, that there's real bad guys out there.

And it's not the conservative Christians in the United States. Like there's real bad guys out there who want to do harm and really evil things. And Trump understood that, I think, to an extent. And I think in general, progressives and their foreign policy, even I'm in I'm in L .A. right now.

And I was just told by one of my relatives that they've basically they've reduced funding for the police, but they've also required, I guess, in certain circumstances, they've upped the level of psychologists.

It wasn't maybe it wasn't psychologists, therapists or something like that going with the police to try to. So they're riding with the police officer, with like a psychologist to try to deescalate situations and stuff.

And that's that's very typical. And I'm not saying there's no place for deescalation, that that should be something police officers are trained with. And they're just average, normal, general training.

But the thing that that separates the two philosophies, one of the big things is that it's not man's environment. I mean, this goes back to the French Revolution and Rousseau. This man's environment corrupts him.

Men are born free, but everywhere they're in chains because of society and social institutions. And if we could just eradicate these mediating institutions, you know, man can get back to this state of nature.

And this has really been in progressive Marxist, socialist, collectivist, totalitarian thinking for a long time. You're going to we're going to enter some kind of utopia or it's going to just be way better if man can just man doesn't have these limitations.

And because it's the limitations that are actually the problem. And and the fact is that actually men's hearts are evil, just like Jesus said. And that's why there does need to be at times very aggressive foreign policy.

There does need to be aggressive police presence in some situations. Force is is necessary for it's a good guy with a gun that's going to stop a bad guy with a gun, a true bad guy who will not listen, who will, who has intent that is very evil.

So in general terms, I think conservatives understand that more and progressives don't. And I think you see some of that playing out. Now, here's the bigger thing that the reason I wanted to just kind of pick on this article is what why is the gospel coalition pushing the narrative?

That it's or at least insinuating, and it's a strong insinuation, in my opinion, that it's it's not Trump's fault. It's sorry, it's not Biden's fault. It's Trump's fault that this is all playing out. Really, Biden was just dealt a bad hand.

And, you know, Biden's really not to blame in this. They're helping Biden get off, in my opinion, in this very small section in this article. But it's it's significant. It gives you a little window into to Joe Carter and to the gospel coalition, I guess.

Joe Carter, I think, writes a lot for them and maybe even for the whole situation at McLean. You know, this is it's yeah, there's the social justice movement. There's there's the theological ramifications of that.

But it's a political religion. There's also a political side to it. And you see that coming out in this. There's there's kind of a politically progressive narrative that's crept into this article. And more often than not, I see the gospel coalition really pushing these progressive narratives.

So another example of it right there. There's so many of them at this point, but figured it was a short thing I could talk about and just kind of let you know, again, this is why the gospel is one of the reasons why so many of us say the gospel coalition is progressive.

It's it's things like that. Sometimes you often people don't even catch those things. But but they are significant and it gives you a window into kind of how the authors are thinking. So anyway, there you go.

More coming soon. I hope that was helpful in some way. And God bless. And more more. Like I said, more coming by now.