Friends and Enemies

And you don't let bad actors near the steering wheel. If you want to accept their vote, sure. Joab was a good military leader, but he got bad as soon as he tried to step outside of his lane and be the king.

You don't want people that don't have the virtue necessary to lead in leadership positions. So don't make them the commanders.

I don't care if they're billionaires, right? I don't care. If they want to be part of the movement, okay. You can take a seat, or you can be a corporal over here or something, but this is one of the problems that a lot of right -leaning people have done over the years.

Our podcast,

I'm your host, John Harris. It is a late night here in Houston, Texas. I'm going to be flying back home tomorrow morning.

And I accidentally had a little too much caffeine. I should have tempered it just a little bit. So I'm up.

And I figured since I'm up, I'll give you a little bit of an update. I haven't had a update for over a week now.

And I will present to you some of the things that I've been talking about across the country. And primarily it's been on the friend -enemy distinction.

So I think that's a topic that's more on people's minds now than when I was preparing for this, given

Tucker Carlson's platforming of Nick Fuentes. But I think this is an evergreen episode.

This is beyond one particular person or one particular moment. I've been concerned for years about the possibility of very liberal people coming into the

Republican Party, coming into the quote -unquote conservative movement and subverting it from the inside.

And part of that is because of the social conditions that we live in, which I'll explain in a moment. But first,

I just want to give an update real quick for everyone who follows the podcast. Thank you for your prayers. I have had some interesting travel situations, but I have been safe, which

I'm really happy about. Just some delays and frustrating situations with hotels and rentals and all that kind of stuff.

But it's worked out. I had a great time at the Jesus in Politics Conference. I had a wonderful time with Tim Bushong, who hosts that conference.

By the way, if you don't know about that conference and you live in Northern Indiana, even as far away as Chicago, you should come.

It's in Syracuse, Indiana, and we just have a great time every year in October. Anyway, I was able to worship on the

Lord's Day with Syracuse Baptist Church. First time I actually attended a service there, which was great. Andrew Rappaport was the guest preacher that morning.

Got to see him, got to see Joseph Spurgeon, just got to see a bunch of people that I love to see every year, and then did some recording in the studio with Tim on Monday.

So those of you who don't know, johnharristunes .com, I do recordings of songs

I've written. I put out an album last year. I'm gonna do another one. It's fun. I like doing it. And Tim's really great at just making sure everything flows well.

He points out things that I didn't recognize. So if you're someone who's also a musician and you want to record,

I recommend checking Tim Bushong out. So that happened Saturday through, or Friday, I guess, through Tuesday and then, or Monday, Tuesday morning

I left, and then Tuesday, which is when I'm recording this, I've been in Houston, Texas at the

Texas Truth Project. They're doing a great job. Mary Ann Jackson, Robert Jackson, just getting the truth out there, helping promote good conservative candidates, and had a lovely time at their home, and then speaking to the group this evening at a barbecue restaurant.

And so those of you who know me know I like smoked meat and stuff. So a lot of things came together that I very much enjoyed.

But one of the things I was talking about, both in Indiana and in Texas, has been this friend -enemy distinction.

And I think this is an important topic. I think this is gonna be something that, in the years to come, we're gonna have to think about more and more strategically regarding, because with the changing conditions and with the wide -tent the

Republican Party and the movement, the anti, we'll just call it the anti -liberal movement or anti -leftist, really it's an anti -leftist movement because it includes some liberals, that whole resistance to the innovations of the left, that's going to broaden,

I think, even more potentially. And we're gonna have to be ready for what to do about that.

How do we navigate these dilemmas? And there are gonna be moral dilemmas. What is platforming?

What is endorsement? What does it mean to be a co -belligerent? And this gets into the whole discussion of no enemies on the right and the friend -enemy distinction.

And there's a lot of ideas people have about these things that frankly are wrong, they're erroneous, and I don't know if I have time to get into every single misconception, but I'm gonna try to focus on biblical examples, on some common sense, and hopefully give you a roadmap, some principles, some guardrails by which to navigate this brave new world that we live in.

So I wanna start here. I think the whole discussion needs to acknowledge first that we are entering a stage where there's a wider tent simply because of the social conditions that have changed in regards to how far the left is pushed.

The left got totalitarian in 2020. The masks were off, people saw that. Even before that,

I think when Donald Trump was running for office in 2016, there was a perception that this New York City playboy with socially liberal views belonged more in the

Democratic Party. At least Democrats had been elected that had that kind of a temperament.

And this wasn't a Republican thing. Why is this happening in our party? And I think since then, there's been kind of a space made for people like Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, RFK Jr.,

Tulsi Gabbard, and others who are more socially liberal, have former

Democrat credentials. And they have found a home, essentially, in the Republican Party, whether for good or not for good.

These are things that if you have someone who's a billionaire who wants to join your movement, he's gonna expect, if he pays money, he's going to have some benefits from that.

And what do you do with someone like that, right? I think Christianity's also been waning.

We have Zoomers. I know Mark Mitchell reached out to me the other day from Rasmussen. I don't think this is published yet, but 18%, only 18 % of Zoomers identify as very religious.

And I know there's a lot of optimism that maybe this is changing, but if you take the long view, it looks like Zoomers are actually much less religious.

You also have peripheral movements that have gained influence, the Gropers, the pagan right, the

Manosphere, although that's kind of decentralized. But you have these movements that were a little more on the margins that have become more mainstream, or at least they're getting some mainstream appeal.

And what do you do with these movements? Movements, some of which that are blatantly anti -Christian or not in keeping with Christian ethics or morals whatsoever, different animal than the liberalism we're used to.

And where are the lines on this? And so I think this is a prudent question to tackle. And I think

Matt Walsh encapsulated this when he tweeted out on the 14th of October, this is the day the

Politico hit piece on the Young Republicans went public, where Politico found a bunch of screenshots or someone leaked them to Politico of Young Republican groups, members in these groups saying very racy things, and some of them very evil.

And on that day, Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire said, the right doesn't stick together. That's our biggest problem by far.

Conservatives are quick to denounce each other, jump on dogpiles, disavow, attack their allies. And he goes on to say, look, we got to band together.

And I'm getting pushback that other conservative leaders don't want to band together. And what he's looking for here is political alignment, essentially.

He's saying we should have political alignment. Now he doesn't define who he's talking about. Who are these people that we're refusing to align with?

He doesn't say. And I've seen all kinds of speculations on this. Is it Elon Musk and Joe Rogan?

Is it more liberal types? Is it Bill Maher? Is it Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate?

Who is he talking about exactly? And there was some pushback. Seth Dillon said, what is a conservative?

Let's start there. So philosophical alignment is what Seth Dillon says. The political alignment needs to come after there's philosophical alignment.

Mikhail Olsen, hopefully I'm pronouncing the name correctly, we won't sell our outtruth or moral convictions just to build a coalition or win an election.

So he wants moral alignment before you can get to political alignment. So you have these competing views.

You need philosophical alignment, you need moral alignment. And Matt Walsh saying, all we need is political alignment to do political things.

I think the deeper question here beyond just who are our friends in the culture war is, can American Christian conservatives pursue political intention, political goals without compromising our identity or our integrity?

I think that's the big question here, right? And I think the answer is yes, but we must be careful when we do this.

We must understand where our goals should be, who we are as a people and what our duties before God and neighbor are.

And that's what I want to talk about. That's what I've been talking about in Houston and Indiana.

Who are we? What are our goals in politics? What is politics? I mean, if we don't understand that, we're going to get this wrong.

And what are the moral guardrails that God has given us? And I think some of these questions can be answered, and I'll try to give you examples as we go through it.

But first of the intention, where should our goal be? I think the goal of politics is preserving our way of life. Pretty much as simple as that.

That's the central plank of MAGA, America first, right? But this goes for any country, right? I think in the

Old Testament, it would have been Israel first. And I'm going to give you some examples from that. But one of the quotes that I thought was helpful in this regard is from Sir Roger Scruton.

He says that politics is not about rearranging society, but maintaining a vigilant resistance to the entropic forces that threaten our social and ecological equilibrium.

In other words, there's threats out there, and politics is about staving off those threats.

It's about preserving a way of life against the threats that come against your way of life.

Innovations, ideas that would rearrange society, mass immigration, whatever the threat that you can think of, abortion, all these kinds of things, they threaten your way of life, essentially.

And I think we're used to common conflicts. We can sort of take other examples. They're not the same, but in sports, you're supposed to defeat the enemy team.

Business, you're defeating the competition. We don't mind in those arenas partnering with people who are even unbelievers.

We usually agree that the rules need to be filed. There needs to be some ethics, but we can cooperate with people who don't share all our spiritual convictions.

I think oftentimes, Christians will look at politics wrongly, though, and they look at it like they do the cosmic spiritual war that exists out there.

Not to say that politics doesn't have elements of that. There is a spiritual war, I think, happening even in politics, but it's not reducible to the spiritual war.

There's actually tangible goals in the real world we're trying to accomplish. And like, for example, we want, let's say, to seal the border, to uphold the immigration laws we have as a country.

You can work with someone who doesn't share your convictions about the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the Trinity, and those kinds of things to get something like that done, but you never want to give the impression that that person is a believer.

And I think that's where the difference is. But we have these other common conflicts, and I don't think we should just import the cosmic spiritual war between good and evil into every single one of these.

In other words, politics is its own thing, just like sports is its own thing.

Politics is a battle for the survival of a tangible way of life that you share, that you've received, and that you want to pass down to your kids and hopefully your children's children.

And let me give you some illustrations of this from Scripture so it's more, I think, clear.

Genesis 14, we have a number of pagan kings that come and take Lot. Lot is

Abram's nephew in Sodom, and Abram decides to go after the people, these pagan kings, and you know who he sides with are

Mamre the Amorite and also the brother of Eschol and the brother of Aner.

And this is an interesting statement because it means that Abram was going out with people who were not worshipers of the

Most High God. These were people who were likely pagans in the area, and he has no problem partnering with them to rescue

Lot and the possessions that Lot had. And I think there are times to politically associate with others in uncompromising ways to achieve or to protect or preserve a way of life and to defeat those who threaten it.

Essentially, that's what Abraham does, Abram, and I think it's also what Nehemiah does in Nehemiah chapter 4.

And if you go to the beginning of chapter 4, you have these two figures, Sambalot and Tobiah the

Ammonite, and they're mocking Nehemiah. They're saying a fox would stand on this wall and would come down, and then they get violent and they start threatening violence.

And Nehemiah appeals to the people of Israel and he speaks to the nobles, the officials, and the rest of the people.

He says, don't be afraid. Remember the Lord who is great and awesome and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your houses.

This is the order of Amorites, or the order of loves. God has given you a specific responsibility for your neck of the woods, your local community, your family, above other families, other places, other nations, etc.

And this is the rallying cry. It's not sinful, I don't think, to receive help from evil or pagan people against a greater threat, a near tangible threat in the temporal world.

We have Joseph and Pharaoh. We have Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar, Esther and King Ahasuerus, David and King Achish and Gath.

These are all examples of those with authority and the pagan people with authority in the governmental realm and the rulers, essentially.

And they are banding together to accomplish something that's actually good.

And I think this gets us into the second part of this, right? If the goal is to preserve a particular way of life, the true valuable good things that God has given, and then being good stewards of those things, if that's what politics is really about, and you're willing, when a push comes to shove, you're even willing to die.

This leads into war, if necessary. And the question is, where, you know, or who, who, what, where, what group am

I supposed to be defending? And if I know I'm supposed to be defending something, what group?

Where? Well, Nehemiah, when he was faced by Sambalat and Tobiah the

Ammonite, could have said, we're going to just fight for our shared human rights, right? That wouldn't have been a bunch of rallying cry.

He could have said, we are fighting to set up a democratic government to adjudicate our differences. We want to give

Sambalat the vote or we're fighting to make love and not war. Actually, that wouldn't really be fighting.

You just put down your weapons and say no to politics or tell them that they're in violation of Arctic Xerxes decree.

Say you're an original intent guy in Arctic Xerxes decree. They'll really listen to that, right? And when it comes down to it, these are all liberal solutions.

They seem funny importing them into an ancient context. But how often do you hear these things in our modern day and age, essentially?

Ultimately, this denies the evil of man. It denies also the natural order that man is broken up into groups and these groups have unique ways of life that are worth defending.

We hear a lot of times diversity is our strength. We're a nation of immigrants. That's Republicans even celebrating

Hindu holidays and so forth. And all of this undercuts the moral foundation of our society.

It does not preserve the uniqueness that ought to be respected and defended.

And I think these natural distinctions, this uniqueness, this homogeneity was respected by many of the characters in the

Old Testament. Think of Moses, Esther, and Nehemiah as three. All three of these individuals were in places, pagan places of royal power.

They could have stayed in those places and had actually a pretty good life. But they realized they had an obligation to their people.

Moses realized that despite the fact he could have been in Pharaoh's household, that he had a responsibility to the people, the

Jews, his kinsmen according to the flesh. And God had a special purpose for him in leading them out of Egypt into the promised land.

And of course for Esther, she has a situation where her people are threatened by Haman and she risks her life to go tell

King Hagioarus about the plot. And Nehemiah, of course, is also in a bit of a dangerous predicament.

He has a gloomy face as the cup bearer, which was not something that Artaxerxes probably would have been used to.

And it would have been something that probably could have gotten him in trouble. And instead, he finds compassion and he's able to protect his people by going back to Jerusalem and building a wall.

In each case, there's an in -group, there's an out -group. And the identity, the natural responsibility lies with the people to whom one belongs.

And I think this gets us into the friend -enemy distinction, right? So this is not about your personal friends or enemies.

I see this actually conflated quite a bit and it's a little ridiculous to me. Sometimes petty things even, right?

Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean necessarily that they're your enemy, right? Even Christian right circles, you may see someone like a

Doug Wilson say something and you don't agree with it theologically or he doesn't agree with you politically or theologically.

Well, okay. But an enemy, and I'm gonna quote here from Carl Schmitt since he's the one that is most attributed, well, really the people who talk about friend -enemy distinction and aren't

Carl Schmitt are usually derivative of Carl Schmitt. So he's kind of like the headwaters of this thinking and political philosophy.

So from what I understand, maybe you could say it's all an Aristotle. I mean, that's possible. But, and I should probably also qualify this just because there are people who will say

Carl Schmitt was eventually became part of the Nazi party and you can't quote him or whatever.

Well, whether, I mean, I know he fell out with the Nazi party too, but regardless of that,

I think some of the observations he made, if you read his book on the political, these are just things that are in reality.

They're basically true. A lot of the things he talks about, at least I don't wanna say all of them, but his main thesis is basically just something that's true.

It's not something that he is recommending or wants to be true or something he's telling you. I mean, he does have his own recommendations, but this idea of friends and enemies though is just an observation essentially.

So it's to quote him is just fair attribution. It is not an endorsement of everything he said or believed.

Anyway, in quoting him, he says that the enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general.

He is also not the private adversary whom one hates and enemy exists only when at least potentially one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity.

And he even quotes Matthew 544. He says, look, this ain't about political enemies. This is about personal things.

Sermon on Mount's about personal things. This is not about war, which is what he basically says is the extreme end of politics.

That's where it leads. If things get out of hand, he think of a magistrate carrying out justice, right as a magistrate, personal enemies with the person that he punishes or a pastor disciplining a former congregant as a pastor enemies with the congregant that he's disciplining.

No, not in a personal way, but yes, in a way, in a more of a public way.

And so this is a public, not a personal distinction. I think it's really important. So when you start saying, well, someone's my enemy, friend, enemy, make sure that there's someone actually is trying to destroy, undercut, undermine your way of life, the true and good and valuable things

God's given you. That would be an enemy in this particular context. And a friend would be someone who would support you in opposing them.

So a unique distinction. It's a unique distinction also because Schmidt says, in the realm of morality, the final distinctions are between good and evil and aesthetics, beautiful and ugly and economics, profitable and unprofitable.

And then of course, in politics, friend and enemy. This is something that is not the cosmic war of good and evil, which is what many

Christians, I think, think of politics. It is getting tangible goals in the real world taken care of.

It is about defeating threats in the real world, in the temporal world. The spiritual world is also real, in the temporal world.

And there could be fault lines here that very much do parallel things that take place in the spiritual realm.

But there are also issues that are like the tax rate and the border.

And there's just wisdom issues and so forth out there that are things that would, if improperly calibrated, destroy very good things.

And so politics is uniting of people against those threats to stop them.

And it's a reality liberalism seeks to eradicate, because liberalism attempts to suppress group identities, right?

They don't like religious wars, so let's get rid of religion as a primary identifier. They don't like cultural differences, let's get rid of culture as a primary identifier, because we want to avoid conflict.

This is what Hillary Clinton said in 2016, Trump is bad because he's dividing us between us and them. And what she was doing was dividing everyone between those who see us in them and those who don't see us in them.

So she was doing the same thing. Liberalism can't get rid of this. You're always going to have groups, but the groups might have, they might emerge in different areas and ways, but you can't escape the fact that there's going to be groups.

And because the natural order has basically ordained, God has ordained groups that form in organic ways, you can't really escape this in the real world.

It's like the ball full of air, the beach ball you try to push under the water.

It's going to emerge somewhere else. And this is the basis of no enemies on the right. Charles Haywood said about this that it is a present day admonition for political success aimed at the critical goal of breaking the left's power, not a philosophical claim that the right has no theoretical enemies.

So it's not saying the right doesn't have enemies, it's just we can't reinforce the left's authority.

We don't want to look to the left to arbitrate our issues.

Those should be settled more or less on the right. And it's because the left's the threat, the left's in power, the left has more power and is more of a threat and with limited resources, it's better to concentrate them on the left and to try to break their moral authority while also upholding our own moral standards.

But we should police our own ranks. We should have our own gates. We don't rely on the left to form those for us.

And that's what a lot of, unfortunately, elected officials on the right have been doing for a long time, is letting the left define who they should be.

That's not what we do. There's a lot of misunderstandings of no enemies on the right. I'm not going to tackle all of those right now, but you can go read my article for American Reformer on this particular topic.

It is not universal. It's for a particular moment in which the left has the institutions under its authority.

It is something that doesn't require you to be infiltrated. You can have your own standards that you police internally.

And of course, it doesn't mean that there should be a purity spiral that you initiate.

Some people take it that way, like anyone who's slightly to, supposedly, the left of them is fair game, but you can't attack anyone.

You can't police anyone that's on the right. No, that's not really what it means. And most people who say those kinds of things aren't usually that far on the right anyway.

They think they are. Because they're transgressive against the left. So, it is based on the friend -enemy distinction though.

And I think that's the real reason I wanted to bring it up. Now, liberalism sets up this neutral pluralistic society of individuals that are really united by a shared humanity, supposedly.

But that's about it. It's a humanistic system. Man replaces God. And there's this lie that democracy will save us if we can just find these shared values based on internal humanness.

And so, it's denying the particularity. And this is not working.

I think we had an illusion that it worked for a long time because we had this sort of Anglo -Protestant Christian society that is now breaking apart.

And we're reaping the effects of this. We have Newsweek in June saying that 40 % of Americans think in the next 10 years we're going to have a civil war.

We have the government shutdown going on right now, right? We have gridlock, essentially. We have all kinds of kind of surreal multicultural things happening, whether it's in places like Dearborn and Minneapolis, or it's just all the

Diwali celebrations that all of a sudden Republicans are getting in on. The issue is that democratic forms of government are intended to express a common will whereby decisions can be made in the most beneficial manner for all interested parties.

This can only work where mutual interest exists. So it's like the rubber band keeps stretching, and the more you stretch it, it's going to snap eventually.

You can't just have all these differences and think that you're going to have a mutual will that arises from this.

So diversity of purpose is a threat. Diversity of purpose is a threat. This is a principle in scripture,

Amos 3 .3, can two walk together except they be agreed. Aristotle pointed this out with classes.

He said of the poor and the rich, basically they're at enmity with one another and they would rather not even share the same path.

How are they going to share the same democracy? This is why he thought the middle class was the best place to have democracy essentially.

Democracy rests on the principle that there's a homogeneity that can express a common will.

If you don't have that, democracy starts breaking down. And that's what we're seeing. We're seeing that people do not trust the institutions.

They do not trust the government. A crisis will easily expose the weakness and then you have a problem.

And that's what's happening right now. And so what can we do about it? I mean, it's hard to say because, you know, there's multiple solutions that people have for it.

I mean, I'm going to give you mine, but when you have an unstable government held together by propaganda, which is what we have, about a shared purpose and high ideals, but there's no confidence in it anymore, then we're one crisis away or two crises away from complete disentanglement and balkanization and all the rest.

And I think that there's a lot of people now on the right who are starting to adopt more of an authoritarian kind of decisionist mindset, right?

And Carl Schmitt, I think, talks about some of this. I mean, you have to understand the context in which he lived where you had the

Austro -Prussian war, World War I, the map of Europe's being redrawn in ways that aren't taking into account shared interests.

It's fueling political instability. And then you have all these economic issues and President Paul Van Hindeburg uses the emergency powers in Article 48 to impose order.

And this was something that Schmitt essentially supported. And we can see obviously where that ended up eventually but I think the issue that Schmitt was trying to solve is what do we do with this government that's basically in gridlock with way too many interests, with way too many ideas about the good and what should happen with revolutionary mindsets coming from the communists and then also obviously the

Nazis as well. But I think the initiator here the

Bolshevik revolution, Ares. And so he just thinks someone needs to come make a decision.

And if you lose the confidence, you lose the ability to govern when someone can do that. I think the

American system, the American tradition and the instincts of Americans has been towards localism, federalism.

We've obviously had a lot of centralization over the last 160 years. But I think a defining feature of American political thought has been a resistance to centralization and a recognition of different regions where essentially at this point we're basically an empire with various nations and that if each region has a greater share of its own control, if each state can control itself, that this is a better arrangement than having everything forced from the center.

And before the civil war, I think this is interesting before we had an actual civil war in this country, John C.

Calhoun was trying to avert conflict by coming up with an idea called the concurrent majority to mitigate sectional conflict.

So he wanted to allow states to nullify federal laws deemed unconstitutional, but he also wanted to enable regions to veto legislation harmful to their interests.

And these were economic interests because that was the primary dividing line, thus preserving the nation's diverse way of life.

And so when you have a federal republic, you can get together on certain fundamental things like trade and treaties and self -defense, and then you can let the other regions do whatever they want, what suits them on these other matters.

This has been so eroded though at this point, it's very hard to get back to that. So what mechanism would you use to even get back to that?

States don't really have the guts to stand up. Maybe an emergency comes along and overnight, you know, the currency is devalued and this creates a crisis whereby states can do that and they don't wanna be holding the bag for states that are less responsible.

So more responsible states will be able to exert more of their freedom and their own self -determination.

Maybe it could be that maybe an authoritarian figure does rise and then uses the deep state against itself, kind of like a

Cincinnatus kind of figure. And then that figure then, like a George Washington retires and just doesn't seize the opportunity for their own gain.

There's a couple of ways this could go down, but I think that that's the goal that I would have as an

American, as a Christian, someone who believes in self -government, wants to see that, wants to preserve America where it still exists.

I think that federalism is basically part and parcel to what this country is. But no matter what route we take to kind of get out of the gridlock that we're in, it's probably going to be very difficult.

There's just no two ways about it. And it's gonna require people with virtue and integrity, which brings me to the third point.

So in addition to knowing your identity, knowing the goals that you should have in politics, you need to have integrity.

You have an ethical duty in whatever conflicts that exist. And personal integrity means that Christians should keep a clear conscience in all realms.

That's 1 Peter 3 .15. Some things are more important than temporal winds. Daniel made up his mind he would not defile himself.

Joseph would not lie with Potiphar's wife. Jesus even said, hey, be in the midst of wolves, you gotta be shrewd as serpents, but innocent as doves.

And so I think all this really means that we have to be careful with the alliances, how close those alliances are, who we platform, what we do that might compromise us.

If we are participating in evil, if evil is having an influence over us, this is not an alliance that is worth it.

This is not a good thing at all. It's really a no -brainer at that point. You can't participate in evil, right?

Don't get into alliances that make you sin. And I think it's not just personal integrity, it's also group integrity. If you have people under you that you're in charge of, then you need to make sure that they are not exposed to, tempted to, incited to do evil.

I think of, there's this old Twilight Zone episode called The Valley Was Still, or Still Valley, I think is the name of the

Twilight, the short story by Manly Wade Wellman is The Valley Was Still. And long story short, it's this soldier that, a

Confederate soldier named Joseph Paradine, he is a scout, he rides into this mythical Chino Valley.

There's 5 ,000 Union soldiers there, but he can't hear them, see where are they? And he finds in the main street, there they are, they're all frozen.

And there's this warlock named Teague, and Teague tells him, well, I use this witchcraft book, and I basically, in the name of the devil, cast a spell on them, and we can use this to win for the

South. And Joseph Paradine decides to kill Teague, to reverse the spell, and as a result, the devil decides to fight for the

Union, fight for the North. And at the end of the book, it says, at the end of the short story, in the later years,

Joseph Paradine was apt to say that the war was lost, not at Antietam or Gettysburg, but at a little valley hamlet called Chino. Refusal of a certain alliance, he would insist, was the cause that offered ally -fought henceforth against the

South. It's a mythical story, but it's obviously an age -old literary concept that the devil will come to make a deal with you.

Will you take it? He'll give you, he'll promise you things. I mean, it's what he did with Jesus, it's what he does with us. He tempts us.

And let's say that he has a reward that's gonna affect more than just you. Maybe it's, hey, I'll help your children, help your people, help your nation.

Should you ever partner with the devil? And obviously the answer is no. Obviously the answer is no.

You don't partner with Satan himself to accomplish it. If Satan's doing that,

Satan has a purpose that is evil and maybe you're just not seeing it, but it's there.

And you're already in a violation of Scripture in partnership with the devil. This is an obvious thing because it's a sinful thing.

And I think the principle here in all this is that if you are required to sin or induce people under your authority to sin, it is a compromised alliance.

That's all there is to it. And I'll give you some examples of I think what good co -belligerency or even alliance could look like.

But I want to say that I think to prevent subversion, to prevent bad actors getting into your conservative groups,

Christian groups, there's three things that you need to do. You need to have internal accountability, right? Jesus corrected the disciples privately without reinforcing the

Pharisees critique. Pharisees would say, look what they're doing. They're not washing their hands. Look what they're doing. They're picking grain on the Sabbath. Jesus never threw them under the bus and went after them in front of the

Pharisees. He actually went after the Pharisees and he did correct his disciples though, but he generally did it privately.

And what were you talking about on the road? Let's teach you about that. Who's going to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? I think also, and this is not political.

It's just these are the principles that I think apply to this political situation as well. I think you have to have a strong identity and keep that in the forefront.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego of course had a strong identity. And that's one of the reasons they were able to keep each other accountable and not bow before the idol.

So internal accountability is important here. I think not confusing the political with ecclesiastical categories is important here.

Evangelicals and Catholics together, someone brought this up tonight to me. I thought it was a good example. The reason some people did not sign that was because they thought,

I agree on these political social issues, but I can't give the impression that Catholics are my brother in Christ.

That's a theological bridge too far for me. Well, that's an honorable thing to do.

Yeah, you can still stand against abortion together, but yeah, you don't want to give the impression that this person believes what you believe or believes the right thing if you disagree with that.

I think number two, upholding virtuous leadership is important. You don't let bad actors near the steering wheel.

If you want to accept their vote, sure. But pursue competent leadership. Joab was a good military leader, but he got bad as soon as he tried to step outside of his lane and be the king.

You don't want people that don't have the virtue necessary to lead in leadership positions. So don't make them the commanders.

I don't care if they're billionaires, right? I don't care. If they want to be part of the movement, okay. You can take a seat or you could be a corporal over here or something.

But this is one of the problems that a lot of right -leaning people have done over the years because Hollywood owns the institutions or the left does and Hollywood's one of them.

The entertainment industry, they're fascinated by that. And well, let's put the famous person in front. I mean,

Christians do this too. Let's put the famous person in front. The famous person doesn't have the virtue to lead yet. Be careful of that.

And then are you receiving help or helping evil, right? Jehoshaphat and Ahab is a good example of this.

Is it an alliance where you're just receiving help from this person? Are they using you to do their own bidding?

And I'll give you some examples here that I think are important. First, I'll talk about Nick Fuentes just for a moment.

Nick Fuentes is surrounded by pedophiles. He has compared himself to Jesus.

He tells his supporters to rape, kill, and die for him. Of course, it's all a joke, right? Everything that you ever find of Nick Fuentes, all, you know, they always, his supporters always defend it like it's a joke.

He sexualizes underage kids. He watches transgender porn. He wanted or hoped that Kamala Harris would win over Donald Trump in the last election.

And this is scratching the surface. This is, I've known about actually all this stuff for a while, but Chris Burnett, I'm gonna just plug this, chrisburnett .com,

C -H -R -I -S -B -R -U -N -E -T .com. He put together one of the most comprehensive stories on Nick Fuentes I think

I've ever seen, and the Groyper movement. And you have to take a shower after reading it, to be quite honest.

Not a virtuous guy. And the question is, what do you do with someone like that? Now, someone who's not even supporting your presidential candidates, probably not the guy to alliance with anyway, but there are people who want to alliance with him, even in the

Christian world. They think that he's just politically very savvy, and he's going places and this and that.

This is someone you don't want to be giving moral credibility to. You don't want to be handing the steering wheel to.

You don't want to be, you know, giving the impression that you endorse them or they're good.

Now, if someone like that invites you on their show to expose your views to their audience,

I think that's a different question. And that's a wisdom. That's a prudence issue. It may be that you need to take the opportunity to evangelize or spread better views and encourage virtue in these kinds of things.

I mean, I'm open to the possibility that there's situations like that that exist. But you don't want to ever give the impression you're endorsing this person or what they're doing, the sinful things they're doing.

Or that there are so many better options out there, obviously, politically. But to put yourself in a position where that's the guy, that's the person you should be following, that can be a dangerous thing, especially for people that don't have the discernment to see all the pitfalls.

I confess with Nick, I'm just like, I don't get it. Like, I do and I don't. Like, this is someone that's got so much terrible baggage and terrible character qualities.

It's a little astounding to me anyone wants to make him some kind of leader.

Now, he has a big audience, though. And I think this is what attracts some people, right? And let me give another example here.

So that's one example. That's sort of like the uphold virtuous leadership. Don't give Nick the steering wheel, right?

If he wants to come to you and compliment you and give you support and give you a platform,

I mean, that's something to consider, perhaps, depending on the situation. But to give an endorsement to someone like that, to platform them, to say morally, this is someone that you should follow or whatever, that's where I think you have issues arise.

Because you start lowering your standards and then you don't have virtuous leadership anymore. If you don't have virtuous leadership anymore, then you don't have, you certainly don't have a

Christian conservative movement, whatever movement you think you might have. And it's certainly not prudent movement either.

Glenn Beck. Let's talk about Glenn Beck. There was a dedication years ago in Virginia.

Michelle Bachman was there and David Barton and all these guys, charismatic guys. And they were basically saying, look,

Robert Hunt, first pastor, came to Virginia Beach. He dedicated America to the

Lord. Now, that's kind of speculative. We don't actually have a source for that. People think that happened. We don't have a source.

Anyway, Glenn Beck and these other folks come out a few years ago and they want to rededicate

America to the Lord. And Glenn Beck is a Mormon. And here's the problem I have.

You're giving the impression that this person is a Christian that has the same

Jesus, has the same theology. They have the same Lord, right? They can dedicate America to the

Lord, just like you're dedicating America to the Lord as a Protestant Christian. Now, you can do all kinds of things with Glenn Beck.

You can support pro -life causes. You can support many conservative causes. But to give the impression that you can have a spiritual brotherhood, that you have fellowship in the

Lord, that's a different thing altogether. That would be, again,

I think a problem with giving the impression that there's some kind of a spiritual alliance, spiritual commonality, when maybe there's just a political commonality.

You don't want to ever blur those lines. That could be a dangerous thing. So I think my conclusion really is that I think if we're going to have any kind of restoration of what

America was, the good, the true, the beautiful things that we've been passed down, if we're going to try to preserve what we have that we still have, we're going to need some virtuous leaders in the forefront.

We're going to need to trust God's providence, obviously. We're going to need to rely on Him because the battle is the Lord's ultimately in every ultimate matter, and I think there is a component of this that does at this point, especially with how fundamentally moral some of these issues are, we definitely have a good versus evil thing also going on here.

Many of the battles we're fighting are just blatant. We're upholding a righteous standard against an evil standard, no matter what particularity exists there as well, you know,

Anglo -Protestant, American culture, and so forth. So I think that's important.

That's also part of our own culture and heritage, though, as Americans. We are a Christian country in that sense. Our default settings are at least

Christian, culturally speaking, and to continue that, you can't do that without Christ.

You can't do that without God. You can't. The pagan right's not going to get you there, obviously. People with low character are going to be liabilities in that.

The best thing you can do is get involved. Pray, rely on God, get involved. Get involved in the political process because these are wisdom issues.

These are hard issues to navigate, and the last thing you want is for people who don't have wisdom from above.

Trying to navigate these issues. So it's really a call for Christians to get more and more involved in the process.

So hopefully that helps you think through this issue of friends and enemies in the political sphere, and no enemies on the right, and all of that.

I think people are having a hard time with this because of conflating categories and probably not thinking through what politics is, what the goal should be, the identity they have, the group that they have responsibility toward, and then also the integrity that they should carry in a political fight.

So those are the things I think that, I think if they're thought through, these lines become a lot more clear.

And that's at least how I try to think through them. And hopefully that's helpful to you as you navigate some of these issues that are before us now and are coming more so,