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Conversations That Matter

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00:11

Welcome to Conversations That Matter Podcast. My name is John Harris. I hope you enjoyed that intro music, compliments of Tim Bouchon.

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Little more fancy, higher quality. He may be a better guitar player than me, that's true.

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And of course, if you're watching, you saw that there's a new intro video as well. So, you know, sometimes the stack of stuff is so high,

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I can't get to changing sometimes what I wanna change. And I've lived with that intro video now for, oh man, maybe a year or so.

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And I've always thought, for a long time I've thought, probably a month into it I thought, I really gotta change that.

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And so finally, I've been sitting here a lot the last few days, and that's one of the things I just finally decided I was gonna change.

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So there you go. New updated intro video, new updated music. And if you wanna check out

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Tim Bouchon, the guitarist who put that together, his album, his music, you can go to the info section, and there's a link to a

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Spotify album. The album is called, let me look it up real quick so I remember here,

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Battle Hymns for Weary Souls. Battle Hymns for Weary Souls by Tim Bouchon.

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So yeah, check that out. And I think he'd appreciate it.

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I have been busy the last few weeks doing a number of different things. One of them is filing all the necessary paperwork for Last Dance Studios LLC, which right now

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I am involved with. I don't know what'll happen in the future. My hope is that it'll become more of its own thing, and I can kinda do my thing.

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I can write, and I can maybe do this podcast and some other things, and then there'll be a team that can carry on the mission of Last Dance Studios.

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But it's good. It's fun, it's a lot of work, but it's been really good starting this new production company and just seeing what we can do.

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I didn't know what was possible, and we have a great editor and just a great team that's forming right before my eyes.

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And I think there's some good projects in the future. Of course, the documentary on Nini's Deli and Juan Riesco, the

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Paint the Wall Black, the story of Nini's Deli, that's our first, that's the maiden voyage. And I'm really pleased with how that came out.

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And I just wanna give all of you all a big thank you for helping, those who prayed and then those who also contributed financially to this.

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I mean, we were able to do this really, we're lean, and as the military says, lean, green, and mean.

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I mean, we were able to get this shot, working hard to get it shot quickly, and then put it together quickly.

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I mean, it's just a little over a month and we're able to have this out, from shoot to having it out. That's not bad,

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I don't think at least. I'm kind of new to this world, I guess, in some ways, so I don't know exactly all the expectations when it comes to filmmaking, but I was just really happy with the quality of the product.

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And then the message, I think the message is just so good. Not only does it rip a hole in the

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Black Lives Matter narrative, but it also shares Juan and the pastor and everyone else in that story shared the message of the gospel.

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And that's ultimately, that's the main reason we decided to do this, because we thought that there was more than just a political message here, but there was something very heavy, very spiritual, very important.

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And I just wanna thank you all for helping us with that. Here are the stats right now as it stands, with the, so almost 35 ,000 views with the video.

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It's in different forms, different places online. It is on Rumble. Some people have asked, what if you get banned by YouTube?

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Well, it's on Rumble. So we, Last Dance Studios has a Rumble channel, but we're at almost 35 ,000 views.

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I will say this, I do believe it is getting shadow banned. I do believe that. And the reason

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I say that is because a number of people have shared it who, some of them with big platforms. And if you look at, sometimes the, look at the ratio of shares versus the ratio, shares versus likes.

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So sometimes you'll see like 60 shares and then 20 likes or something like that. And it's just, that doesn't happen on Facebook, not too often, unless there's a shadow ban going on of some kind.

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And I found it very interesting when I shared an article about Paint the Wall Black, it got a lot more traffic than the actual link to the video got, which that's weird, in my opinion.

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It's very weird. But, you know, it is still getting out there. And so what

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I'd encourage you to do is send it through text message and email. Yeah, post it on your Facebook. If you have

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Gab, that's not shadow banned. So post it on your Gab, post it on your Parler. Post it, but also send it out to people you really wanna have see it, send it to them directly.

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And that will ensure that it gets out there, at least the YouTube link. I don't know if the Rumble link is shadow banned. I don't,

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I'm new to this. I think we're all new to this, this, how big tech is treating conservatives in general.

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This is uncharted territory in some way. So we're figuring this out together, but it is still getting out there. That's the encouraging thing.

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Here are some of, and there's been more since I put this together a few days ago, but here's just a few people that have said things about the documentary that you might recognize.

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Trevor Loudon, his Facebook profile, the message went out, please watch this documentary.

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Then you have Tom Askell said, watch and see real love for God and neighbors on display by Christians who weren't duped by the social justice movement and BLM anarchy.

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Phil Johnson from Grace To You, how the woke mob shut down one of Chicago's best eateries and accidentally energized a church.

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And then AD Robles, yeah, he's responding to someone. Yeah, I watched this last week. Highly recommend, all caps, which

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I appreciate that. Thank you AD for that. Let me blow this up so you guys can see what

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I'm looking at. Now I don't know who Damani Bryant Felder is, but has a pretty large following on Facebook.

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He shared it, said I highly recommend it as well. He's friends with Juan Riesco. And he's also a

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Christian as well. Virgil Walker from the Just Thinking Podcast said I did not want to watch an hour -long documentary.

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I'm so glad I did. And he liked it. Bill Roach, an apologist, also put out a positive review of it.

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And there's others who have reached out to me and said how much they like it who haven't publicly said anything. But it helps when you have people with platforms that are just a little bigger to share it.

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It does spread the message farther. So thank you all, just everyone who shared it, everyone who's gotten behind this.

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I'm just very pleased. And I think the Lord is pleased. That's the important thing. That's why we do this. We wanna please the

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Lord. And this message is just filled with God -pleasing things.

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Faith, I mean, it really is a story about true faith, having confidence in Christ, sacrificing because eternal things matter more than temporary things.

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I mean, Juan has been such an example. We are planning on bringing him up to Liberty University in April.

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And I'm looking forward to that. I'm sure I'll have more details as we go forward. So that's some of the impact so far from that particular documentary.

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Now, what now? Here's the question. What now can you do if you wanna get this message out further?

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Which I would appreciate if you do. Like I said, we are being shadow banned, at least on Facebook.

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And I'm not sure where else we might be having the same issue. But like I said before, the documentary is uploaded to Rumble and Facebook as well.

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It's on Facebook video. And the ways to promote, I mentioned before, you can share via email and text.

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You can share the Rumble link as well if, I'm not sure if YouTube's giving us a problem, but I just wanna make everyone aware it's there.

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And then here's what a number of people have been doing. Host a public showing at your home, at church, or another civic organization.

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Show this. If you're in a politically conservative group, show this. If you're at your church, show this movie.

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And I know a number of people have told me that they're showing this at their church. I think that's a great way to use this and then have a discussion perhaps about it.

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And then ways that, and this is important, ways that you can help Last Stand Studios so we can produce content like this.

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Obviously prayers, number one. Number two, and so I thought about this.

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I thought long and hard. People were saying, how can we get this to bigger names, to put it out there, right?

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And I thought the two people that I would think that are, you know, that have somewhat of a following and can get this to people that might even have a bigger following would be

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Matt Walsh and Allie Beth Stuckey. So Matt Walsh works at The Daily Wire. Allie Stuckey works at The Blaze, right?

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One's Ben Shapiro, one's Glenn Beck. And they could certainly get this into the hands of the people that they work with.

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But they're both also, they'll take stories that are also more religious in nature, not just political.

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And so I think if I, this is what I'm asking you to do. Share, if you've already shared it, share it again.

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Share the documentary link. Probably the best one to share would be the YouTube Last Stand Studios version without my commentary at the end.

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Just share the full, here's just the documentary. Put a little short, you know, hey, this is a great documentary, just a little testimonial.

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And then tag one of those two, or both. Tag Matt Walsh or tag Allie Beth Stuckey.

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Those are the two people that I think would be probably the most likely to watch it and get it out there.

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And if they get 100 people saying, you should watch this, they're probably likely to at least take a look at it.

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So that would be, that's what I'm asking you all to do. Of course, you can donate funds as well to Last Stand Studios for future projects.

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And then you can also, and I kind of wasn't sure if I was gonna put this, I decided to. You can also donate your time.

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I know a couple people have reached out to me with skills in regards to video and music, composing, video editing, graphics design.

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I mean, all these things are things that we're gonna need going forward. And we're in the infant stages.

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I mean, it's possible that if this takes off, that people who help us early on, who worked for not much or just volunteered their time, maybe there will be more work that we could put your way.

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I can't guarantee that. I don't know where this is all going. But I know we benefited tremendously from people who were able to send us scores for the music in Paint the

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Wall Black, and they didn't ask for compensation or anything like that. That's how we could do it at the price we could do it.

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I know if this continues, the price may go up a little bit for projects. But right now, we are trying our best to do this in a way that is as cheap as possible, but also retaining a really good quality.

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So if you have those kind of skills, you can reach out to me and let me know. Make me aware of it. So here's what we're working on now.

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And this is one of the things that I was doing in Florida. Here's a picture, if you're watching, there's a picture of a monument, a

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Civil War soldier in the middle of the jungle, looking out into the wilderness, into the jungle.

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And you think maybe that's a strange place to have a monument. Well, the reason is, is because it was moved. It was actually salvaged because it was gonna be destroyed.

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And someone in the community who started a campaign decided to save this monument.

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And it was a grassroots thing. They had to raise thousands of dollars. They were able to get a company to come and move it to a place where it would be kept safe.

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And you can see on the right -hand side, it's a lot of Spanish moss in that area in Florida. It's very pretty. I was kind of blown away by that.

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I love Spanish moss. And the trees, and it was like a tree tunnel. So there you can see the little bitty dot is our cinematographer there walking around, getting some

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B -roll. But this is gonna be a story about the explorers, soldiers, founding fathers.

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I mean, people, heroes, American heroes who are now under attack in many places.

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And it's sad. I went to Pensacola the first day.

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We were interviewing someone who was previously in the Florida legislature, introduced a monument protection bill, and he took us around to some of the monuments.

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I mean, we even saw a Purple Heart monument that had been damaged from protesters. And this kind of thing is, it's gonna...

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When 2015, when the monument craze, Let's Take Down Monuments started, I remember saying to people, it ain't gonna end here.

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You think that taking down some of these Confederate monuments is a good thing. Some conservatives, quote -unquote, said that.

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And I knew this was gonna be a colossal mistake. And sure enough, time has proved that to be true.

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Because now they're going after everything. It's Christopher Columbus, it's the founding fathers. And just wait for the next moment.

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Wait for the next similar moment to what happened with George Floyd to happen, and it'll happen again.

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The destruction will just be on steroids once again. And the World War II veterans aren't gonna escape this.

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Once they're gone and they're not able to defend themselves and their children are gone, especially. I mean, how are you gonna defend, especially someone who was in the

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Pacific Theater? Two times that a nuclear bomb was dropped, ever in human history, on a civilian population of minorities, from an

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American standard, right? Racial slurs used by some of the soldiers and people who went in there.

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You got concentration camps. That's what the social justice advocates called them, at least, on the

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West Coast for Japanese people. I mean, it's just,

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I don't know. I mean, how are you going to, a segregated army, right, going into these places? How in the world are you gonna defend the

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World War II vets? I'm just asking. And no one's been able to give me a good response to this yet, who wants to try to take down monuments from other wars or other eras, but they love

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World War II. They love the World War II vets. Well, I'm sorry. It's just, it's not gonna, your logic's not going to work consistently.

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You gotta be consistent. And so, why are we doing this? One of the reasons is because we see the writing on the wall because we see that during the

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Biden presidency, something's gonna happen, we believe. Something is going to, you're gonna have your

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George Floyd -type moment and there's gonna be, it's gonna be a shot in the arm to the social justice movement and they're gonna start round two.

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Round two is going to incorporate a lot more of the Founding Fathers. I know Lincoln's statue was removed from Boston.

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Lincoln will be included. I don't even know who all will be included, but it'll be a lot more than just Christopher Columbus and Confederate soldiers and Thomas Jefferson or a

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Lincoln monument here or there. So that's one reason. We also know that this is not a subject that, conservatives have kind of given up on this.

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Trump seems to be one of the only ones who has consistently articulated that this is a problem because he seems to be more tapped into culture.

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But conservative incorporated, the conservative industrial complex, they're not as interested in these cultural things.

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They tend to be more interested and they tend to put their money into things that they think will win them elections. They don't think these cultural, social battles win them elections.

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So we have no competition. We can put the story out there. And then third, we believe that this is, underneath all of this is an attack on Christian, Western civilization and Christianity in general.

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We think that, because a lot of the monuments are for people who sacrificed, who died, who accomplished things that, especially if you're thinking about like a war memorial, you're thinking of someone who sacrificed for their friends.

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Greater love has no man than this than to lay down one's life for their friends. And Jesus is the quintessential example of that.

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And if we can take attributes like sacrifice and virtues like defending your home and loving your people enough to delay your gratification, giving your life, that there's things more important.

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I mean, if there's intangible virtues that don't matter anymore because of equity, diversity and inclusion, these are the new ones.

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These are the only virtues now. Then that's gonna push Christianity right out of the,

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I don't even know, it'll cancel Christianity. I mean, it's gonna be acid on it. And we see this, we see that this is the long -term strategy,

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I believe, of the godless left. And not all social justice warriors even probably are aware that that's the trajectory they're on, but the logic is gonna lend itself to that.

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And so we wanna defend these things by defending those virtues, showing authorial intent.

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Here's why some of these monuments were put there in the first place. What do they say on their descriptive markers on them?

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And ultimately, what is it that they're all pointing to? Ultimately, they're pointing to God.

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They're pointing to virtues that you can't make sense of in a materialistic world. Why would you do that?

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Why would you put up a monument to someone? Why in the Old Testament are there constant commands to the children of Israel to remember?

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Remember things, specifically things that God has done, but in their national history, tying them to the land.

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There's a lot more to unpack. And so as we're interviewing experts on this and people who have fought this from the ground level, we are also very aware of what kind of a culture produced the heroes that we've had and why those heroes are the heroes that they are.

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And it's because of a Christian culture. And now that we see a return to paganism and Christianity waning, that's why this whole craze even exists in the first place,

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I believe. And so, yes, it is going to be filled with Christian commentary as well, at least

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Christian messages. And we don't know exactly what it's gonna look like all yet because this is a little more complicated.

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We're going to various locations, talking about various heroes and groups of people with various experts.

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It's not like the Juan Riesco story, which was easy. We just go in for a few days and we fly him in and his brother, and we talk to people at the church, et cetera.

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This is a little more complicated. This requires us to go to various places. And if there is enough funding,

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I don't know if this will happen, but if there is enough funding, I think it would be good to go to England and South Africa where the same problems that are plaguing the

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United States are plaguing England and South Africa as well. And to explore that would be interesting as well.

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But we're not there yet. What we're doing now is we've had four interviews and I have a few more planned and we're just kind of taking it slow.

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We're just saying, okay, how, this is only gonna get as big as the contributions we have.

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And if there's a limitation there, then we'll only make the documentary. It'll be focused on the shoots that we have.

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But if there is a demand for this, if people really wanna see a really high quality put together defense of American monuments from a

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Christian framework, then this is the documentary you wanna get behind. So let me show you where you can go.

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And I'll put the link in the info section as well. This is definitely not what

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I wanted to show you. This is what I wanted to show you. American Monument Documentary, Give Send Go.

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It's givesendgo .com backslash American Monument Documentary. And you can see some people have already contributed.

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Thank you for that. We're excited about this project. And then here's the website.

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Here's laststandstudios .org. And you can go there. And there are ways to contribute.

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And I've added some ways. By the way, I've also added these to worldviewconversation .com, some of these. I should probably show you that.

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But for those who have asked, hey, how can we support you? We have PayPal, you can support us.

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You can support Last Stand Studios, I should say, through PayPal. You can support different projects directly like the

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American Monument Documentary. You can also support through Bitcoin. So here's a

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Bitcoin wallet link for those who know about Bitcoin. And so here's, yeah, the website.

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I've also added this to, for those who were wondering, to worldviewconversation .com.

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So I'll go there real quick, if it'll load. And there's a support section. It's not loading too well right now.

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But there's a section on the website now. You can go to the top, and it'll say support, and it'll have similar options.

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If you're curious about other ways other than Patreon. So that's,

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I think that's all I have just as far as an update. And I just wanna just thank you. And I just really appreciate everyone who came together.

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This could not have happened without your contributions and your prayers and your support by sharing this on social media, texting it to your friends, et cetera.

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And we're just looking forward to things to come. And I'll keep you informed on that. So God bless.