Rod Martin Returns: Trump, A.I. Woke Right, SBC, and is the Constitution Dead? DMW#226

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Exploring theology, doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between, broadcasting from an undisclosed location,

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Dead Men Walking starts now. Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Walking podcast.

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I'm your host Craig Moore. Thanks for coming along for the ride. Thanks for checking us out at dmwpodcast .com where you can find more about the show, support us through the merch.

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We've got some new t -shirts up there that have been selling. We've got Turn Down for Watts, which is a little play on a rap song and Isaac Watts.

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We have How About You Shut Up and Let That Be Your Wisdom, Job 13 .5. That's a nice one to quote to the pagans.

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And of course, the ever famous Wynum, Dynum, Romans, Nynum. So go check it out, help support the show.

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But up top, we like to tell you about our sponsors. These guys are great. Jacob's Supply.

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I mean, it's summertime. It's time to start construction, doing those jobs. I mean, we are in full swing.

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Jacob's Supply is located in Temperance, Michigan, but they ship nationally and we've had guys come up 8, 10, 12 hours away.

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What they do is they bring you building supplies at 30, 40, 50 % off retail. He's a reformed brother in the

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Lord. I attend church with him at Christ the Word. He is just a good dude building something for the Lord and they treat you right.

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I mean, he's got PVC decking, 299 a square foot. That's more like six or seven at Lowe's or Home Depot. Composite decking, 30, 40, 50 % off appliances, all new, all name brand, all ready for you to take home.

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So whether you're construction management, you're doing that home project, make sure you check out jacobsupply .com

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or call them at 734 -224 -0978. And of course you can click through on that on the link below.

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Love those guys. Let's make sure we support our brothers in the Lord. Two conferences I want to tell you about very quickly, Workspace.

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It's coming up. You got about a week to get tickets, guys. David Bonson, Sierra Wiley, Steve Jeffrey, Dave Reese, Andrew Krapiszewski.

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Krapiszewski was just on the podcast last week. You guys should go check that out. They're going to be talking about what are we doing with work?

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Why do we work? How do we glorify God with it? It's going to be a time of networking. There's going to be business classes there.

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There's going to be some after beer and Psalms. I mean, it's going to be a great time in Fort Worth, Texas, June 28th and 29th.

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So when you hear this, you're going to have about a week to go get tickets. They've only got a few left, if not already sold out.

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So, but hey, they wanted me to talk about it to this date. We're going to talk about it and get those tickets sold for them.

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So check it out, guys. It's going to be a great time. And then finally, thank God for Bitcoin. I met

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Jordan Bush three, four years ago. Love what this guy's doing. Talking about fiat money versus digital money versus how we invest it, how we use it, how it can glorify

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God. And they've got a conference coming up in Rockettown, Nashville, July 24th and 25th. So about a month to get tickets there.

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And I heard that one is just about sold out. So you're going to have to move fast on that.

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They're going to have guys like Michael Foster again, C .R. Wiley, Dr. Ben Merkel, Dr. Glenn Sunshine, Nate Fisher, Jordan Bush.

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I mean, you're going to be in good company. Plus like 10 other speakers, special breakout sessions. You're going to have a blast in Nashville.

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You're going to learn about the glory of economy. Like I said, how to use money, invest money, all those things that we support here on the podcast.

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So go check those guys out and buy your tickets there. As I said before, all links below if you're listening or watching.

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So with the business portion out of the way, let's get right into it. We've got a special guest second time on the podcast,

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I believe. Maybe third. I don't know. I have to go back through over the fourth four years, but is it third? OK, it's third.

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It's been a while. He's the founder, CEO at Martin Capital and Martin Organization dot com.

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Excuse me, CBN co -founder, former SBC executive committee officer, part of the team that started PayPal.

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The man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Rod Martin. How are you, Rod? Doing well. Good to be here.

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Good to have you back on. Listen, you know, I follow you on social media. I really love your posts, the

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Facebook stuff. There's some friends that I don't get in my algorithm all the time. So I just go check in because I go, hmm,

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I wonder what they're up to. You know, the the Doug Wilsons, the Joel Webbins, the Rod Martins, the, you know,

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Tom Askills. And I just love what you're posting on social. And some of the stuff that you're posting and I'm thinking

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I went, boy, we got to have him back on and maybe just do like a kind of state of the state, state of the union, state of the culture, you know, maybe go over some stuff that just rolling around on Twitter and online and maybe have you break it down a little bit.

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But before we get into that, just for the new listeners, since you've been on last since it's been a while. Can you give us a little bio?

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Introduce yourself. Absolutely. I just celebrated my 41st year as a

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Christian. That was kind of exciting. And praise the Lord. And I grew up in Arkansas.

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I was one of the guys who started PayPal. I've been involved in politics my whole life, been involved in the

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Southern Baptist Convention my whole life. And we're just really committed to the the two sided coin of the

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Great Commission and the creation mandate. And most of our I will use the term somewhat loosely, but it's true.

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Ministry is aimed at that creation mandate side and particularly innovation aimed at reducing poverty, expanding liberty and shaping the human future in a way that is

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Christ honoring. And, you know, we obviously anything we make, we then want to tithe and more than tithe.

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So we want to support the evangelization of great cities like like Miami, which is ridiculously uncharged.

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And we're working on some pretty significant things down there. And what is an orphan's ministry and lots of other things.

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So we have our fingers in a lot of pies and really grateful to be here with you. Oh, I love it.

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And I do have to say for the listeners, too, and I'm not just saying this because you're on the the podcast today, but four years ago when we met,

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I think was the first time you were on. It was at the very first Fight, Laugh, Feast conference in 2020. And up until that point,

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I had understood the post -millennial theology, you know, for 10 years, many of those years, a closeted

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Calvinist, as I called it, coming out of more legalistic and then very Pentecostal churches. And I understood the building of things theologically in the post -millennial view.

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But you were one of the first guys when I sat down with you at that conference and went, oh, this is a guy that's putting his money where his beliefs are.

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He's building things. He's looking towards the future, going, no, that doesn't belong to the succulents and the pagans and the unbelievers.

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It belongs to us for the glory of God. And it was very inspiring to kind of have a paradigm shift for me.

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And it's embarrassing to say it was only four years ago, but just going, oh, it's not necessarily you know, you do the missions and the orphanage and we preach the gospel and we evangelize and all that.

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But we're also building things. We have our hands in pharma and we have our hands in small businesses and large businesses and tech and all these things that you're involved in.

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And I went, wow, how inspiring to see someone actually living that out. Now, you're not the only one. Obviously, there's a lot of people doing that.

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But you were the first one we sat down with. And the way you talked about that, it really made me shift something in my mind.

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And it's been inspiring to me over the last four years. So I appreciate that. I'm grateful to hear that.

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And I think that everyone, regardless of their eschatological view, needs to remember that Jesus has told us that he intends to reward those he finds faithful, working, tilling his garden and serving in his home when he returns.

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And I think a lot of people just ignore all of that and act like, well, we're just waiting for the rapture or whatever.

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And it's and everything we do is going to be burned down. Well, even if it is burned down, that doesn't change the fact that you don't have a calendar for when.

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So, you know, if you're a total dispensational premillennialist,

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I remember when Hal Lindsey was telling us that the rapture was going to be in 1988. And oops, it wasn't.

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And a lot of things have happened since then, including the birth of my children and grandchildren.

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So if we just let the world go to pot at any given moment, we are really missing the boat and the

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Lord will not find us faithful. And there's not going to be a well done, my good and faithful servant.

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But of course, from a postmillennial standpoint, anybody who anybody who has taken

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David Chilton or Ken Gentry or any of those guys seriously believes that we're building something that may take 10 ,000 more years or longer before the

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Lord returns. And you're not going to eliminate sin in that amount of time. I mean, you're not going to bring in the kingdom through any kind of works you may do.

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That's not how that works. But at the same time, the things that we do matter.

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They build, they accumulate. And the Lord has been very clear that the wealth of the wicked is being stored up for the just.

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So there is, you know, that fifth point of the five point covenantal model of inheritance.

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God is God is providing an inheritance to his people through the disinheritance of his enemies, which is consummated in the life to come.

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There will be a new heaven and a new earth, and there will also be a lake of fire. So we want to build things in this life that matter because God cares very much about this life.

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He cared about it so much that, A, he created it. B, he put us in it. C, he incarnated his own son to live among us and die and rise again.

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And he has a resurrection body. And he will be coming back here. And we see at the end of Revelation that that in the new

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Jerusalem, in that city, there is no temple for the father and his son are its temple.

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He's going to dwell with us here. And heaven is a way station. So we're we're building, regardless of eschatological view.

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One of those, I think, is a lot more optimistic than the other. But both require the same work.

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And this is something Christians should be united around, especially in a time when the left is moving so aggressively against all of us.

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Yeah, no, so good. I'm so glad that and I should have known, you know, bringing you on.

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We're going to start off on kind of current events. And you just start preaching right off at the top of the show.

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I love it. And I'm here for it. But let's shift gears here. I wrote down five things. And if you go, hey,

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I don't care about that. Not important. Move on. We will. If you have a comment on it or thought on it, maybe we could talk about it for a few minutes.

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But here are some of the hot topic kind of issues that I see on Twitter and in social media.

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And I try not to take that too seriously. I usually let something go at least a month before I comment on it sometimes because I go in a few weeks, it'll fizzle out.

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We'll never see it again. And everyone got up, you know, all crazy about it. And I don't need to get in the middle of it. But what I've seen over the last few weeks, maybe three or four weeks, even, is a lot of talk about the woke right.

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And it confused the heck out of me because I know what the woke left is. And then I see this woke right going on and a lot of stuff on X, a lot of stuff on Instagram, especially within reform circles and kind of the

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Christian nationalism and in the in the far left, Christian air quote preachers and stuff talking about the woke right.

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What are your thoughts on that? Are we just rebranding something that was always there? Or is it an attack from the left to try to rebrand some conservative things on the right?

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What do you think is going on there? Well, I'm going to criticize the term woke right. But in the process,

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I'm, you know, to be fair, because I've got friends on both sides of this. I'm going to criticize the term Christian nationalism a little bit, too, and understand where I'm coming from.

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You know, like I said, I've been political all my life. I'm a Christian, obviously.

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I believe in nationalism, which is the idea that a discreet group of people should have the right to rule itself and not be ruled from Brussels or London or Moscow.

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I believe in nationalism. That's that's what that is. That's how you broke up the British Empire.

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That's how America became independent. That's how Poland is independent. And India, I believe that nations should be

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Christian because I believe that every knee not only can and should, but will now to Jesus Christ, the

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Lord. And the more we evangelize, the more people will operate consistent with their newly

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Christian presuppositions, and that will translate into culture and into law. So, you know, that's where I'm coming from.

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So let's not let the terminology muck anything up here. But I've said for several years now,

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Christian nationalism was probably a bad term for a bunch of our friends to adopt because the left has been setting that up as a bear trap for about a decade.

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There have been all these books written from the left about the evils of Christian nationalism. And of course, they define literally anybody to the right of Joseph Stalin as a

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Christian nationalist. You know, they want to put you all in a camp. So, you know, it's it's a bad rhetorical decision that I also said, you know, you're on a panel with Michael Fallon.

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And I said, this is a bad idea. We shouldn't do this. And also, it's inevitably going to be done.

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You know, a bunch of people are going to adopt this. It's an attractive term. Why wouldn't they? So so here we are.

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Same kind of criticism of woke right. I understand why it's being used.

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I'm not entirely sure that some of the people using it understand why they're using it. It's entirely pejorative from my point of view.

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It doesn't really criticize an ideology. So the woke part is wrong to the degree that its its users are claiming that Christian nationalists are monarchists and so forth.

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Well, some of them are historically in the European context that monarchism is on the right in the

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American context. It absolutely is not. So that, you know, the right part of it isn't terribly useful.

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The woke part of it isn't right. Woke designates very specific beliefs derived from critical theory on the left.

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So what's really being criticized is methodology. Well, OK, so you don't like your opponents and you think they're not being fair to you on Twitter.

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Calling them woke is unhelpful. So, you know, I think both of these terms are muddying the water and we're not really getting where we ought to.

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Yeah. So I have a feeling that I don't think that term's going to stick around for too long. We see some that try to stick, some that go away.

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That one, like you said, is very confusing to me because both of those words don't seem to go together or seem to correctly tag what it is maybe the opposition is criticizing.

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So I think we're on the same page there. It's very pejorative. It's catchy. It sticks in memory. Beyond that,

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I don't think it's terribly useful. I think it is the opposite of useful. All right. Tell me what you think about this, because this one is driving me crazy, not literally, but, you know, to use that term.

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We keep seeing the Constitution is dead everywhere online, especially, like I said,

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X, Instagram, you know, TikTok, those type of places where I think that the younger generation seems to pick up on it.

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And then we get into the next generation that then interprets it. But it's been co -opted,

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I think, a little bit by the minority, if I guess you call it far right. Not, you know, neo -Nazi.

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I don't even know. It's hard to even say those words because it's so minuscule and so small and is blown so out of proportion that even uttering those words seems to give it some type of credence that isn't there.

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But people say, oh, the Constitution is dead. This feeds into Christian nationalism. We need to replace it.

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And I've I've gotten called far right and Nazi for saying, I don't think we've we've beholden to the

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Constitution for quite a long time in this country. I've been saying that since the late 90s when

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I was in high school and did my senior thesis on the buying of Congress. Everyone else was, you know, doing

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Led Zeppelin and, you know, my favorite food. And I went, oh, I want to talk about how Congress is bought and paid for by lobbyists.

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And my teacher looked at me and went, wow, you're a real political nerd. I went, no, this this is interesting to me and we need to talk about it.

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So things like that. To me, I go, I mean, sure, we still adhere to some of the Constitution. But I mean, with the federal expansion of powers and 14th

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Amendment, all these different things, I kind of go maybe not dead, but we certainly it certainly doesn't have the hold on this on our elected officials like it did 100 plus years ago.

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I mean, heck, I would even see 1913 income tax, the whole Woodrow Wilson thing. It started then. Right.

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So what are your thoughts? What's that? If not before. If not before, maybe we had 40 good years here.

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I don't know in this country. But so so what are your thoughts on that? When you see that kind of slogan, the

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Constitution is dead and we're going to have some other guys over the summer come on and kind of interpret that as well, too, because I see this picking up steam of people saying, well, if we can say that, then we can kind of co -opt it and say,

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OK, now we want to you know, we want to get to an extreme Christian nationalism or we want to get to an extreme CRT type of society because, hey, the

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Constitution's dead. Both sides would love, you know, extreme sides, in my view, would love to see that because then they can institute whatever extreme ideologies they wanted to put in place.

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What are your thoughts on that saying? Well, first, if the Constitution were dead, we'd be toast.

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You know, it's not gone, obviously. It's restraining a tremendous amount of wickedness.

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It's also limping along, you know, on its last legs. And if we don't pump some life into it, it is for sure gone.

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There's no question about that. It is certainly not in use in the way that it was intended to be.

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This actually happens to be my academic area. I studied the drafting ratification of the

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U .S. Constitution at Cambridge before I went to law school and focused on constitutional law. So I happen to know an awful lot about this.

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And, you know, you are right to identify 1913 as a pivotal point with the creation of the income tax and the elimination of legislators electing senators.

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You really take away the key bulwark of federalism.

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Before that, you know, aside from tariffs and imposts and such, if Washington wanted to raise money, they had to divvy it up based on the census and send an invoice to Tallahassee or Austin or Sacramento.

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And it's up to the state legislature to collect it. Well, they don't want to do that.

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And they have control of who sits in the Senate prior to the 17th

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Amendment. So they just tell those guys, no, don't you even think about it.

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So federal spending on a per capita basis stays really constant from the institution of the

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Constitution until Woodrow Wilson. And then, boom, it just shoots to the moon. And that's why.

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The Senate used to be a house of ambassadors. You know, the House of Representatives was a house of the people.

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The Senate was a house of ambassadors from the state. The president represented everybody.

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You know, so you have this, you have these multiple checks and balances that make the system constantly keep itself under control.

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And with the 16th and 17th, that is largely not destroyed, but crippled.

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So from there, you have the growth of the administrative state. There's an interesting case you might want to pay attention to before the

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Supreme Court, Jharkhasi versus SEC, which actually, if they uphold it, it won 10 to 6 at the

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Fifth Circuit last year. That case reestablishes non -delegation doctrine, which means that Congress cannot delegate legislative power to an agency.

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That would be a revolution. That turns back the clock in some ways to 1935. Yeah, and the bureaucracy associated with that, yeah.

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And that's my point. The Constitution isn't dead. We still have constitutional processes, but personnel is policy.

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So you get a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and other courts, and you start being able to enforce the provisions of the

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Constitution. So my take on this would be, yeah, we can absolutely lose the

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Constitution, but if we did, we'd want to resurrect it. And you're exactly right.

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There are people on both sides that would really like the Constitution to die because they want to replace it with something different.

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And I would contend that while I could certainly see a couple of amendments that would make sense, our actual constitutional structure is the high point of human thought on self -governance.

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And if anything, we should be restoring it to look more like it did prior to 1913.

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Wow, you know, such a good point. And I'm going to tell you, Rod, you kind of just blew my mind again, kind of like four years ago, because I'd never heard it put that way.

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I don't think, you know, the House is the house of the people, but then the

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Senate was a chamber of ambassadors. That's crazy, because that makes total sense, because now we have two chambers that are popularly elected, which does not do us any good.

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And I don't think a lot of Americans even understand their history that the state legislatures used to appoint the senators to represent the state.

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So even further degrading the state's powers. But the fact that even used that word shows my ignorance, but also it just blew my mind.

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Like that makes sense. House of the people, ambassadors to the state, and then the executive. And that would be such a much better balanced, if the

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Senate was actually doing that. It worked really well. And is it possible for that system to be corrupted?

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Because certainly that was the basis for which, you know, the 17th was passed. It's like, oh, you know, they're cutting backroom deals in the state legislature.

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Well, duh, they're cutting backroom deals to elect senators directly today. That, you know, you're never getting rid of that.

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The way to fix that is more oversight, more media, you know, people being engaged, civic involvement, all the things that we know we ought to do and are usually too lazy to get done.

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But the system worked brilliantly because it contained the federal government and it allowed the states to actually exercise a degree of sovereignty, not a ridiculous degree.

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They aren't all running off 400 different directions, but you actually had more and more and more local power so that there was a responsible person you could buttonhole at the coffee shop.

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And he actually had a say over things and could make a difference. So it pushed government very, very far down the totem pole toward the people.

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And the people could have much more control over their lives. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm in total agreeance with you.

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Probably the peak of human accomplishment was the Constitution. If you really look at that document, how it was drafted, what they pulled from the

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Magna Carta, how they crafted it. I'm just agreeing with you. And the English Bill of Rights. English Bill of Rights.

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And you know much more about this than I do, but what an absolute masterpiece of a document.

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And unfortunately, the average American has lost the respect for that, doesn't understand it.

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I think it goes to the quote too. You would probably know who said it, but something like, our Constitution was made for a religious and moral people.

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And is wholly unsuited to any other. There you go. I know you know it. And we know the problem. All our kids go to these public indoctrination camps we call schools, and they're taught that the

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Constitution is some kind of slave -supporting oppressive regime.

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And so they don't know anything about it. They don't know how it works. They couldn't begin to explain to you how this was supposed to somehow buttress slavery, which it absolutely did not do.

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It actually abolishes the slave trade and sets up a mechanism by which over time, the free states became the majority and were able to impose their will.

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And this is, you know, you can argue about the Civil War all day. That's not the point. The point is that the allegations made against the system by guys like Howard Zinn or the 1619

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Project are just utterly fallacious. And our children don't know that anymore unless we homeschool them or Christian school them, which is what

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I did. And I encourage everybody within my hearing, homeschool your kids if you possibly can.

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And if not, at least send them to a good, private, ideally Christian school. You as a father are responsible for the upbringing of these children and what they learn.

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And you, you know, Bodie is always saying, you know, you can't send them off to Rome and expect them not to come back

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Roman. That's just, that's just basic logic. So, so take control of the schooling of your children.

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And by the way, have a bunch, be fruitful and multiply, fill America and subdue it. Amen. Yeah.

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One of my proudest moments as a father is when my second grader years ago came to me and said, driving is a legal right, not an inalienable right.

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Right dad? And I went, okay, we're doing something right. She's, she's starting to distinguish. So yeah, let's, let's, let's shift gears.

26:59

SBC, I've been seeing this all over my feed. Last time we had on Dusty Devers to give us the update.

27:05

He's busy speaking to senators. He's a state senator now. So he's busy doing his thing in his chamber.

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But I know that you've had a lot of, you know, obviously being associated in the past with that.

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Can you just give a breakdown of people who maybe they're not in that denomination? Maybe they're just looking from afar, non -denominational,

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Presbyterian, Lutheran, whatever they are listening and going, what's going on with that? I keep seeing law amendment and this and that. Can you give us like a little synapse of that just so we can be updated on it?

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Well, let's define why it matters before we do that, because people don't know. Baptists don't even know.

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What really matters here, you know, you could talk about, you know, we've got the biggest mission boards and we're the biggest

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Protestant denomination and blah, blah, blah. No, no, no. Ignore all that. That doesn't matter. What matters is we are 11 % of America's churches, but our six seminaries educate one third, 33 % of all the seminary students in the country.

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Now, if I lose Harvard, oh wait, we already did. There's nothing I can do about that because that has a legal structure, which is known as a self -perpetuating board.

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That board appoints its own successors. There's nothing I can do to affect that.

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And they've got a huge endowment. So it's not like I could even go in and give them a big donation and change their mind.

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They don't need my money. They don't need anybody's money. They don't even need Bill Ackman's money. So you're not gonna affect them.

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The Southern Baptist Convention is completely different. Those six seminaries have trustees that are indirectly elected by the annual meeting.

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So every single year, you've got a shot at affecting the board composition at the six seminaries that educate one third of all the seminary students in this country.

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And lots of those people, of course, are foreign or they're either American missionaries abroad or they're foreigners who come here.

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So it's not just America being affected. And it's also not the SBC. I told you, we're just 11 % of America's churches.

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So an awful lot of those people are in other denominations, non -denominational churches. I know a

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Lutheran pastor who went to Southern Seminary. There are all kinds of people affected by this.

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So that's the why. We can't let those institutions go to the enemy.

29:26

And are they there right now? Well, I would suggest that Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Woke Forest of North Carolina is about as bad as it can get.

29:36

Although I promise you it will get worse. But the other seminaries, for the most part, are doing reasonably well.

29:44

They aren't exactly where I would have them to be. We have a couple of Woke guys at Southern and we have some other issues around the system.

29:52

But it's just a matter of time. Because we've elected bad presidents over the last several years, starting with J .D.

29:59

Greer. And they control the appointments process. So it's just a matter of time until you get left -leaning boards at all those institutions.

30:08

So it matters that people be involved in the Southern Baptist Convention. It matters that they show up at the annual meeting.

30:15

And it matters that they vote for a presidential candidate who will make good appointments. The pulpits of the world depend on this.

30:25

Yeah, yeah. Well, you said we don't want to talk about 11 % of believers in the

30:33

United States, but the number - Which is not insignificant. That's huge. And then 33 % of seminary.

30:41

That is just mind -boggling when you think of that. I think of even just the numbers being pumped out north of me here at the

30:49

Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary. Joel Beek, he comes down from Grand Rapids.

30:55

I come up from Monroe County and see him every year there. And they invite him. And it's a great one -day seminar that he does there.

31:01

But it's so important because whether you like to admit it or not, the influence,

31:08

I mean, I still feel like so goes the SBC, kind of so goes most of not only all

31:14

Baptists, but I would say 99 % of non -denominational churches. I mean, they're all

31:19

Baptist light, aren't they? Really? I mean, I was in a non -denom and I didn't realize, oh, we just held to a

31:25

Baptist confession, essentially, but we just didn't call ourselves a Baptist. It was insane to me to learn that later on in life that all these non -denoms are essentially going, well, what is the

31:34

SBC doing? And we're not paying dues or part of it, but we'll just kind of copy what they do. So I think it's very important just from where we see

31:43

Christian culture going too, wouldn't you say? And a shocking number of those pastors went to one of the

31:48

Southern Baptists. And by the way, just a small digression, a lot of those non -denominational churches should join the

31:57

SBC because it costs them almost nothing. You know, they're gonna give money to missions somehow, so they can send a little to the

32:06

Lottie Moon Christmas offering for foreign missions. And, you know, all of a sudden, they're qualified to send two messengers to the annual meeting.

32:14

It's not that the SBC gets control over them. The SBC gets zero control over them.

32:20

They get some control over the SBC. So affiliating makes a lot of sense.

32:26

And I wish a lot more conservative churches would do that. In any case, this really does matter.

32:32

You're exactly right. And the left understands this flawlessly, which is why Soros and others,

32:39

James Riotti and, you know, Mike Bloomberg and those guys are funneling money into promoting left -wing theology and political views in the

32:51

SBC and other denominations. And watch closely for Megan Basham's new book that's about to come out,

32:58

Shepherds for Sale. Grove got the receipt and it is staggering what the left has done to try to co -opt our denomination and other denominations, especially since the

33:12

Trump victory in 2016. That really freaked them out. And they knew that if Baptists in particular had scattered as a result of all of the things they were able to say against Trump, that Hillary would for sure be president and they would have an absolute lock on the courts forevermore.

33:33

There certainly wouldn't have been any Dobbs decision. We certainly wouldn't have overturned Roe v. Wade. None of those things would have happened, which is horrifying to them.

33:41

And a lot of the things that they would like to do right now, that they're doing under Biden, that they would like to do in a second term and beyond, would have already happened and there wouldn't have been a thing we could have done about it.

33:53

So we thwarted them for a good long time. Trump was killing it on judges.

34:00

We were on track, nobody seems to know this, but we were on track if he had gotten his second term, we were going to have a conservative majority on every

34:12

U .S. Court of Appeals by the end of the second term. He was flipping judges like mad.

34:19

And so they're desperate to stop him. They're desperate to stop anybody like him.

34:25

If you got rid of Trump and you got somebody of similar quality, say a

34:30

Ron DeSantis or a Ted Cruz or somebody, they would annihilate those guys just as hard as they're trying to do

34:38

Trump. It's not personal. They are on a mission and we are in their way and the

34:46

SBC is in their way. And so they've put a lot of effort into flipping it either to their position or in the alternative, just rendering it irrelevant.

34:57

Yeah. So let's move into Trump. But very quickly, I just wanted to confirm what you were saying and kind of what you teased about Megan's book too.

35:05

So we've known that there's some factions within the SBC leadership that is woke and left.

35:11

You're saying there might be some receipts on actual funding and how that's being funded through some elites.

35:19

It's just not a group of pastors sitting together going, hey, I think we should accept trans now. I think that's biblical.

35:25

There's a legitimate coordinated effort to fund these ideals.

35:30

And you're saying that's out there and you think some of that will come to light in the book and in the near future? Oh, yeah.

35:36

I mean, a lot of this just is the marination in the current culture that you see.

35:44

But some of this is being directed and some of this is being very well -funded.

35:50

And it's one of Morton Blackwell's laws of the public policy process.

35:56

Nothing moves unless it's pushed. Yeah. Some things are getting pushed. Yeah.

36:01

Okay. All right. Let's go to Trump. What do we think of this? We've got the verdict. He's gonna go to sentencing.

36:08

Is he gonna see jail time? Is it's gonna affect the candidacy? Do people even care? I know he raised $52 million in the first 24 hours after being convicted.

36:19

And 30 % of those were new donors that never donated to a Trump campaign. I have to believe the left is going, what have we done here?

36:27

It seems not to be working, whatever it is that they're doing. But what are your thoughts on the whole thing? Well, if memory serves,

36:34

I think he raised about $400 million over the course of two weeks, which is just staggering.

36:42

You know, there's nothing like that in history. And so, yeah, they are definitely making some mistakes here.

36:51

I wouldn't be surprised if the judge gives him jail time. I think that would draw a motion for habeas corpus pretty quickly.

37:00

And I think that would probably be successful. He's just not done anything wrong here.

37:08

I mean, at worst, there are some bookkeeping violations that almost certainly did not rise to his level in the company.

37:16

It's really absurd. And for these misdemeanors to be made into felonies, you have to have an underlying crime that enhances them.

37:26

And the judge never gave a theory of what that crime even was. You know, and the jury instruction says that the jury doesn't have to be unanimous on what the underlying crime is.

37:38

Well, wait, that's patently unconstitutional. So, you know, for the guys who say the constitution is dead, that would be really good evidence of it, actually.

37:48

But I have a feeling that the U .S. Supreme Court is gonna have a different opinion. So if he can stay out of jail from this, he's probably in pretty good shape.

37:58

I think the documents case is going nowhere. That could actually backfire on Jack Smith.

38:05

I think Fannie Willis is toast. You know, most of this stuff is just utterly absurd.

38:13

And the fact that they're weaponizing the legal system is really dangerous to everybody.

38:19

If you can go after Trump because you don't like his politics, you can go after Greg because he made the wrong face at the wrong waitress who turned out to be an important person's daughter.

38:32

You know, this is the problem. And that's why you're starting to see guys like Bill Ackman really, really wig out about it in New York, because who wants to have a nexus with New York?

38:42

New York is one of the two financial capitals of the world, but you see tremendous capital flight now, primarily to South Florida.

38:50

But now you even see, we're going to have a new stock exchange in Dallas.

38:57

And it is major players backing that happening because they don't want to have a legal nexus with the city of New York.

39:04

And they're right not to. We've got a company we're wanting to take public in the near future.

39:10

And if there's a way for us to do that in Dallas rather than New York, we're going to do it.

39:16

And that isn't something I imagined I would ever say. But you're just not safe doing business in New York or Delaware today.

39:24

Yeah. It's pretty crazy when you see the wealth shift and even updated census numbers, estimated anyway, of people going to Florida and Texas and out of New York and California.

39:36

I mean, it's almost a direct correlation. But yeah, they lost me in the Trump trial when I saw a CNN headline that said, why it's good that the prosecutor's star witness lied under oath.

39:48

Oh my gosh. That was an actual headline. I posted it on my Twitter or my ex account. And I went, you just got to shake your head because Cohen had said some stuff and then said, oh yeah,

39:58

I lied about it. He didn't know anything. I was just doing stuff and still got convicted off of their star witness lying under oath.

40:04

But why it's good that he actually lied. Why it could help the case that he lied under oath. So that, you know.

40:10

Well, Trump had a senior law professor who's a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission who was ready to come give testimony on the supposed underlying crime, which again, the judge never bothered to give definition to.

40:24

So, you know, the whole case is bogus unless you have that underlying crime. But one theory of that case was that this had been an improper campaign contribution, obviously.

40:36

And there's a federal background to that. This is the theory with which they tried

40:46

John Edwards some years ago. And of course that was a hung jury and they ended up not prosecuting it because the

40:52

FEC came out and said, this just isn't a crime. You're just going at this wrong. Well, Brad Smith was going to come testify to that.

41:00

The judge wouldn't allow the testimony. So we've got a former Federal Election Commission chairman who is barred from testifying.

41:09

But Michael Cohen can sit up there and lie all day. I mean, it's just insane.

41:15

And it shows you we no longer have a justice system that is vaguely American in New York.

41:22

We have a Venezuelan or Cuban or Soviet justice system in New York.

41:28

And if the appeals courts there don't do something about it, you're going to have massive capital flight from the city.

41:35

Yeah, and I would just reiterate as we wrap this up too, that we wouldn't say, we're not saying the entire justice system is broken all together and burned to the ground.

41:45

We would say we have a localized set of a group of people who had aligned motives and did something unconstitutional.

41:53

That's the way I kind of see it because I see the justice system working very well in other states.

41:59

I've seen in the last five or 10 years where the federal justice system has done some good as well too.

42:05

But those types of people, judges, prosecutors, crooked, they need to be pulled out, prosecuted themselves.

42:14

Yeah, absolutely. And you've got to do something about the senior ranks of the FBI, which has been utterly politicized and has utterly abused power.

42:23

And it's plain as day. And if some heads don't roll, it will only get worse.

42:28

You have to take care of these things. But you just nailed it. Most of our justice system still works really well, but elections have consequences.

42:38

And if you let the Democrats appoint all the federal judges over the next several years, you won't have a functioning justice system.

42:47

Everywhere will be New York. And that's what we're facing. So we actually have to take these things seriously, just as we have to take the elections in the

42:55

Southern Baptist Convention seriously. We're actually called by Christ to be stewards. We are to steward these institutions that he has gifted to us.

43:06

And if we don't, we have nobody to blame, but ourselves. Yeah, so true. All right, let's wrap this up.

43:12

Last one, four years ago, we touched on AI, artificial intelligence. I'd say even four years ago, it was still kind of, and it was brand new.

43:19

You've been in the tech space before. What's your update four years later from when we talked last time about this?

43:25

Where are we at now? Is it something Christians should embrace, be worried about, be concerned from afar, be involved with, use it for business and God's glory?

43:34

Like, where do you land on that now? Having everyone and their mother introducing

43:41

AI in every aspects of technology. AI is a marvel, and it's also not a

43:47

God. And there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are trying to deify it.

43:54

And you saw that begin with the transhumanist movement, and it's moved into this idea of the singularity and so forth.

44:02

Is this a really, really powerful tool? Yes. Can it be horribly misused?

44:07

Oh my goodness, yes. And just the fact - So like every tool that the

44:13

Lord gives us then. You know, there are a million ways to abuse this. And we are not necessarily being very wise about how we're going about this, but is it a powerful, useful tool?

44:27

Well, yeah, in very much the same way that a combine and a plow and a tractor work.

44:33

You know, we went from nearly the whole population having to be engaged in the production of food to less than 2 % of the population being able to feed the whole world because we added technological tools.

44:48

And the same thing here. And by the way, we don't have some massive percentage of the population unemployed because they're no longer working on farms.

44:56

That allowed them to seek better employment, doing cooler things that no one would have dreamed of a hundred years ago.

45:03

So I think the same thing is true here, but the potential for abuse is enormous.

45:10

And I just end that thought on this note. I would encourage your viewers to read

45:19

George Gilder on this. George has done a masterful job, I think, of giving the countervailing view, which

45:28

I'll just summarize this way, that computation is not comprehension.

45:34

These things are artificially intelligent in a sense, but they're not actually comprehending.

45:41

They're not actually sentient sapient beings and they're not going to be.

45:47

And the effort to lead us in that direction of thought is fundamentally religious.

45:53

It's not really technological at its core. And there are a lot of people who do not have, who are not believers, we'll just say it that way, who are trying to create a belief system out of this.

46:08

Yeah, so I would say embrace it, but be, use discernment, like all tools that God gives us, right?

46:17

I mean - Yes, and we're going to have to have some powerful legal protections for people's privacy, for people's data, against what is effectively defamation when you create a fake video or a fake picture, use somebody's voice, have the computer imitate someone's voice.

46:35

I mean, I could easily create video that's convincing of Joe Biden meeting with the space aliens about the conquest of Africa.

46:45

You know, it's not hard to do. And in five years, it's going to be insanely easy for toddlers to do.

46:53

And that opens a can of worms that's going to be pretty hard to navigate. So we're going to need some good law on this, and we're going to need some good enforcement.

47:01

So again, the justice system really matters. Elections really matter. Yeah, well, that's all

47:06

I had for you, Rod. Thanks for being so gracious with your time. Did you have a final word or any other thoughts since we have you on here?

47:12

I'm just grateful for what you guys do. I mean, this is a wonderful podcast. Your ministry is fantastic.

47:20

Keep it up, keep the faith, keep encouraging people. It's easy to get discouraged, you know, especially with everything that seems to be going awry from every point of view, but you shouldn't because God is still the

47:33

God who parts the Red Sea and sends manna for 40 years and leads the people through the desert with a pillar of fire.

47:39

There is absolutely no lack of God's sovereignty available. And he says, call on me in the day of trouble.

47:48

I will deliver you and you will give me glory. And we have to cling to that.

47:53

Amen. So how can we help you out? martinorganization .com. What is it that you do?

47:59

If there's a listener out there right now that could be a potential customer or client, what would you tell them your pitch is?

48:05

What is it that you're working on right now? Well, we run, we manage a fund, the Martin Capital Growth Opportunity Fund.

48:12

It has a pretty large minimum investment, but you know, for people who might be interested in such a thing, we are working on taking over a large life insurance company.

48:24

We're going to build some financial infrastructure that won't de -insure you because you believe the wrong things.

48:31

And also that will deploy a lot of artificial intelligence for the purpose of dramatically reducing costs so that we can cut your prices and still make more money than our competitors are.

48:44

And so that'll be good for everybody. They'll give us more time, money and in every way we want to advance the kingdom.

48:51

So I would also encourage people follow me on Twitter at Rod D.

48:56

Martin. I know it's X now, but whatever. And also on Facebook. And I just,

49:03

I appreciate you and I appreciate your audience and happy to help out anytime.

49:10

Well, thanks, Rod. I appreciate it. Thank you for those kind words. And we'll link all that up, you guys in the description. If you're watching, listening, whatever you're doing, go through, you can click on, find them on X, find the website, all that good stuff.

49:21

Rod, thanks so much for being on today. Thank you. Yeah. Guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of Deadman Walking Podcast.

49:28

As always, you can find out more about what we do at dmwpodcast .com or follow us on socials,

49:34

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49:41

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49:46

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