RLL 30 Happy New Year 2020! A Look Back and a Look Ahead

You're listening to Radio Looks Lucid. I'm your host Steve Matthews. Thanks for joining me for episode number 30. Well, today's January 1st, 2020 and it's been, from what I checked, it's been, I don't know, I guess what about eight months since I did my last podcast.

So what is it? You do a podcast once a year and I guess that's good enough, right? Well, no, actually it isn't good enough. You know, when I started this podcast, several, well I hate to admit this, but it's been about three years since I started doing this podcast, I had intended to do it once a week.

Well, as you can tell, I'm only up to episode number 30. I haven't exactly met that goal. So, you know, it's funny, you know, you start doing things and you want to want to make something good happen and then kind of life gets in the way.

And that's sort of what's happened to me here over the past few years. And I really, you know, this is kind of a dangerous thing to say. I don't generally make New Year's resolutions, but I have made a resolution to do better on my podcasting frequency here in 2020.

So this is a pretty good day to get started on that, right? It's January the 1st, 2020, kick off a new year and Lord willing, I'd like to be able to do this at least once a week. So I'm saying that on a podcast, that way, see, you can hold me to it.

If I start falling off, you can send me, send me comments. Hey, Steve, where's your podcast? In fact, I've already had a few people comment on that and they've asked me to do additional podcasts. So I'm really kind of, I'm glad to be back in the saddle again, so to speak, and to be doing this.

And again, Lord willing, I hope to be able to do this much more consistently here in 2020. This is an awful lot of interesting things going on. Well, you know, one of the things when you do a sort of end of year, beginning of the year type of a podcast, it's always kind of a convenient time to look back on where you've been over the past year and maybe make some plans for the new year as well.

And, you know, one of the things I was just kind of going back and going over some of the things that I've written on my blog over the last year, and there's quite a bit of material out there. I got, I don't know, probably somewhere around 60 posts out.

A little bit more than that, I think, actually. So I was writing at least once a week. And just kind of looking over the posts, I guess I would say that they kind of break down into roughly three major categories.

Faith, Politics, and Economics in the Past Year

You know, that is matters dealing with Christian faith, matters dealing with politics, matters dealing with economics, and maybe a little bit of culture thrown in there as well. You know, one of the things that I wrote about quite a bit in 2019 was the Roman Catholic Church.

I have to admit, I find the subject of the Roman Catholic Church, or the Roman Church State, as John Robbins would call it, I find that an endlessly fascinating subject for a couple reasons. Number one, it's extremely relevant.

It's very relevant. I mean, the Roman Catholic Church is just constantly in the news. Number one, so I mean, it's very influential. Number two is that despite the fact that it's constantly in the news, it's substantially ignored by Protestants.

There's very little commentary done on the Roman Catholic Church. And maybe I'll even add a third reason in there. I said two. Maybe I'll add a third reason in there. Not only is the Roman Catholic Church in the news and influential, not only is that influence substantially ignored by Protestants, but number three, the effect of what Rome does is incredibly evil.

And of course that's what we would expect. Now one of the things that I've talked about quite a bit on the blog, and I make no bones about saying that, is I believe that the Church of Rome is the Babylonian harlots, Mystery Babylon, the mother of harlots, as the Apostle John said in Revelation.

You know, and we saw this, this woman who rides the beast, he was amazed, he marveled at her. This is the woman who's drunk with the blood of the saints. And of course that's the Roman Church state. And it has an incredibly evil influence on the world.

One of the things I've talked about when it comes to Rome is that the Roman Church state is really the original globalists. They really are the original globalists, these guys. You know, it's kind of interesting when you, you follow, if you consume anything, you know, any amount of sometimes what's called the alternate press, or the independent media, you know, and I'm thinking out here about maybe some of the big names, just as an example, you know, somebody like, say Alex Jones, for example, or some of the other independent news sites out there, YouTube channels, bloggers, podcasters, this type of thing.

You listen to these guys and, you know, they talk quite a bit about globalism. They talk about George Soros, and they talk about, oh, I don't know, you know, the Council on Foreign Relations, or other types of individuals.

Maybe they talk about the European Union, or the United Nations. And, you know, what they say, the warnings that they give about some of these individuals, about some of these organizations, is perfectly legitimate.

I mean, these are organizations that I think are very much opposed to individual liberty. I think they stand really against the the will of God in many respects. And I'm not going to try to get into all the particulars of that right now, but my point being is that a lot of these people in the press will talk a lot about some of these various more secular type organizations, and they completely ignore the influence of Rome.

You know, it's as if, you know, Rome goes around and it's really remarkable the amount of globalism involved in the Roman Catholic Church, and yet very few people talk about it. And I discussed it a fair amount on my blog over the past year.

One of the ways that that Rome implements globalism is, of course, by encouraging mass immigration, mass migration, asylum seekers, refugees, this type of thing. What they want to do, they have a strategy of trying to flood the independent nations of the world with basically welfare migrants.

You know, it's not enough for Rome. You know, sometimes they get out there and they try to posit themselves and say, oh, you know, hey, this is, you know, we're just doing this because we care about people.

But, I mean, what they're really doing is they're flooding countries with migrants, putting them on the dole, and bankrupting those countries. You know, they're making those societies to a significant degree ungovernable.

We have major problems here in the United States with that. We have problems with that going on in Europe as well, and many other Western countries. The Pope, toward the end of 2019, was even in Japan.

He was lecturing the Japanese and trying to tell them that they should take on more migrants, and I don't think the public sentiment in Japan is up for inviting mass quantities of welfare migrants. But that doesn't mean the Pope's not trying, and he's going to try again.

He's not going to give up. So really, that's one of the big themes with faith. The next thing is, of course, closely with politics. Now, you've got this Roman Catholic Church out there attempting to influence politics in a major way.

So that was one of the big themes on my blog over the past year, was just talking about the Church of Rome and some of the nefarious activities that are carried out by that Church and by its Antichrist head.

And, of course, I'm talking about the Pope. And when I say the current Pope is an Antichrist, what I really mean is that all Popes, you know, the office of the papacy is the office of Antichrist. And all of those Popes that occupy that office are in the office of Antichrist.

So it's not just an individual. You know, we have what Francis I right now, Jorge Bergoglio is his name, and he's doing business as Francis I. But, I mean, that was also true of his predecessor, Ratzinger.

You know, he was the, what, Benedict XVI, I believe, and then, of course, John Paul II, who was a Pope for, goodness, I guess, he was Pope well over 20 years. I can't remember now when his pontificate ended, but, you know, he was maybe even closer to 30 years.

I mean, it seemed like he was Pope for most of my life, and, of course, he was a major global figure throughout that entire period. But all these guys, all of these Popes, and the Popes that were before that, they all occupied the office of Antichrist.

And yet, there's very little discussion about that in Protestant circles. If you're like me, for example, you've probably never in person, I mean, even if you're, say, if you're a conservative Protestant, if you're an evangelical, you've probably never in person heard somebody talk about the office of the papacy as the Antichrist.

That used to be very common among Protestants, but toward the end of the 19th century, that began to disappear. And, in fact, even the Presbyterians wrote that out of the Westminster Confession. There was a portion of the Westminster Confession that explicitly identified the Pope as Antichrist, and yet that was written out.

That little sentence, that clause, was removed from the Westminster Confession. Now, there are a few, maybe smaller, Presbyterian denominations that still retain that language in the Westminster Confession, but most of the bigger Presbyterian denominations, the ones that you've heard of, do not have that.

I'm thinking, of course, of the PCUSA, for example, that doesn't even really follow that. They don't even pretend to follow the Westminster Confession. But this is true even of the, say, the conservative Presbyterian denominations.

For example, the Presbyterian Church in America, the PCA, they have removed that language. And I think that's also true of a good portion of the other, more conservative, Presbyterian denominations. And that's unfortunate, because it's left people confused.

That's one of the things that I write about quite a bit on my blog, is again, the Roman Catholic Church, and I make that point consistently, and I hit it pretty hard. I don't try to be subtle about it.

I mean, when you talk about the Office of the Papacy, you're talking about the Office of Antichrist. When you're talking about the Roman Catholic Church state, what you're talking about is Mystery Babylon the Great, you know, it's the woman who rides the beast.

There was that title of that Dave Hunt book from a number of years ago, so we call it The Woman That Rides the Beast. So there's a big theme in my blog, of course, this past year on faith, and I fully expect that to continue here in the new year.

Rome, Globalism, and the Papacy

It's kind of interesting, if you actually start looking for it, it's amazing how many stories there are about the Roman Church state, just in the mainstream media. And there was one, this was, well, there's a story dated December 26, 2019.

It was in the Washington Post, and it has a headline, it says, Ousted Cardinal McCarrick. This is that chap, that fellow Theodore McCarrick, he was what, the Archbishop, I think it was in New York? But this fellow, and I know he was Archbishop of Washington DC, maybe I'm getting confused exactly which Archbishop he was, but anyway, he was a very major figure in the American Catholic Church.

And you may recall that he was removed from office, he was actually defrocked because of all these claims of sexual improprieties. I think he was was praying on seminary students, I think was the principal charge against him.

Anyway, this headline in the Washington Post from December 26, it read, Ousted Cardinal McCarrick gave more than $600 ,000 to fellow clerics, including two Pope's record show. And you read through this story, it's very interesting, it says, Former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in church money to powerful Catholic clerics over nearly two decades, according to financial records obtained by the Washington Post.

While the Vatican failed to act on claims he had sexually harassed young men. Starting in 2001, McCarrick sent checks totaling more than $600 ,000 to clerics in Rome and elsewhere, including Vatican bureaucrats, papal advisors, and two Pope's, according to church ledgers and former church officials.

And when you read through this article, it's actually some pretty good reporting. Now you know, you may, if you're maybe someone who's a bit of a conservative or Republican or something, you may say, oh it's the Washington Post, you know, it's Jeff Bezos rag and what have you.

Well, I mean, there's a lot of bad stuff in the Washington Post. And they definitely do have a liberal bias. But one of the things that's kind of interesting about some of these mainstream press outlets, such as the Washington Post, is while they definitely do have a liberal bias, they actually do have some pretty bright people that work for them.

And they're very capable of doing some good reporting. And this is actually a pretty good story here. And it's very detailed. I mean, the reporter, the writer on this, let's see, it's Sean Boberg, Robert O 'Haro Jr. and Chico Harlan, the writer's credited with this.

And I think they do actually a pretty thorough job of investigative journalism here. This is a good piece. It talks in here about how McCarrick sent Pope John Paul II $90 ,000 from 2001 to 2005. Pope Benedict the 16th received $291 ,000, most of it in a single check for $250 ,000 in May 2005, a month after McCarrick was elevated to succeed, or excuse me, the month after Benedict the 16th was elevated to succeed the the late john paul.

One of the things too is is where some of this money came from. The money actually came out of a of a fund. And bear with me just a moment here when I Okay, yeah, here we go. So looking through this story, it's a little interesting.

It they actually talk about where this money came from. So you know, okay, so where did this? Where did all these this roughly $600 ,000 come from it? Well, it says, according to the story, it says that McCarrick had a fund.

Yeah, the the fund from which these checks are drawn, it was called the Archbishop special fund. In the Archbishop special fund, they describe in this article as as a little known account of the Archdiocese of Washington, where McCarrick began serving as the Archbishop in 2001.

In the Archbishop special fund enabled him to raise money from wealthy Catholic donors, and to spend it as he chose with little oversight, according to former officials. So you know, all of this money that the Archbishop was sending out to these popes, and apparently he was also sending funds to people who were, I guess, overseeing some of the, I guess, the cases, the charges that were brought against him.

So people were donating to this, this fund. And and in this, this Cardinal is, is taking their money. And he's, he's spending it willy nilly, or well, maybe not willy nilly, but he's spending it really to to defend himself against some of the charges of sexual impropriety that were being being brought against him.

One thing that was interesting about the the fund is, I guess, apparently, according to, to the ledgers that were obtained by the Washington Post that show the names of the beneficiaries, one of the largest donors to McCarrick was, was Marianne Trump-Berry.

That's the sister of President Donald Trump. She was, she's a now-retired federal appellate judge. And she gave this McCarrick at least $450 ,000 over four years. And the story mentions that the Marianne Trump-Berry declined comment.

There's another interesting comment by another large donor, a gentleman by, by the name of Tom Riley. He's the president of the Connolly Foundation, based outside of Philadelphia. And he, he said in a statement that his group's contributions, that is from the Connolly Foundation, were meant to help, quote, the poor, the needy, refugees, and the mission of the Catholic Church, end quote.

And he expressed that he was very sad about this, this whole affair, the fact that, that this guy, this, this archbishop was was taking essentially a tithe. I guess he received about six million dollars in contributions.

He spent about $600 ,000, I guess, trying to bribe people. So maybe that was a sort of a personal tithe. Maybe that was his, his agent's percentage or something. I, I don't know. But anyway, he, he took some of this money and, and that was given to the Catholic Church by, by some of these people for charitable purposes.

And he was, was using it to, to advance his own career. And, and really that's not all that surprising because that's, that's how these guys roll. But anyway, that, that was just an example of the sorts of things that go on with Rome.

I talked about this, as I said, quite a bit on my blog and in different respects in, in 2019, and I'm sure I'm going to continue to talk about that in 2020 because, again, that's just how these guys roll.

You know, one of the things that I've, about myself over the years is sometimes I'll say, you know, Steve, you've been, you've been awfully hard on these, these Romanists. I mean, you're just constantly talking about all the nefarious doings of, of the Vatican, the Pope, the Roman Catholic Church, you know, the various officials of the Roman Catholic Church.

And yeah, sometimes I think, well, maybe I'm just being too hard on these guys. Maybe, you know, no, you know, what ends up happening is I'll come across a story like this and it just, it slaps me in the face and it, it tells me number one, I've been right all along about these guys.

And if, if I have made any kind of mistake at all, it's because I, I haven't been hard enough on them. You know, whatever, however harshly I denounce the Roman Catholic Church, they always manage to exceed my, to exceed my expectations when it comes to doing evil.

I mean, these guys are just really, really amazing in, in the way they handle things. So anyway, this is, this just happens to be the latest scandal. And of course, it's very, very difficult to try to keep track of all of this stuff, but I do the best that I can.

I read this stuff so you don't have to. That's my service to you. So anyway, that's just some of what's going on with, with issues related to, to faith. And of course, there's much more that could be said, but I don't want to spend the next two hours here talking about that.

Politics, the First Amendment, and the Limits of Civil Government

Another major theme, of course, in, in my blog is, is the issue of politics. Now I have, you know, when I talk about my, my blog, Luke's Lookit, my Luke's Lookit blog, Luke's Lookit. Can't even talk this morning.

One of the things I've always been fascinated about is politics. I remember this goes back even way, way back when I was even fairly young, I used to kind of get geeked on politics. And I think the thing that really attracted me to politics, and this kind of goes back in the late 70s and early 80s, is because I would start reading these magazines, some of these news magazines, and they, there were all these problems that were occurring.

You know, again, this is late 70s, early 80s, with a lot of the welfare programs that were begun under President Johnson, you know, the Great Society back in the mid to late 60s. I mean, the U .S. went whole hog on the, you know, into the welfare state.

And there were lots of high ideals, and oh, we're gonna create all these programs, and we're gonna have this war on poverty, and you know, we're gonna bring, you know, take all these people who are living in poverty, and, and, you know, make them all into, you know, I don't know, respectable citizens, or what have you.

And, you know, the reason is, is because they just, you know, they, you know, there just isn't enough government help out there. And we're gonna, we're gonna, you know, build all these houses, and we're gonna give them all this money, and, you know, these single mothers out there, well, we're gonna give them, give them money, and the more kids they have, the more money we're gonna give them, and everything's just gonna be great, right?

Well, in the, you know, by the late 70s, I mean, the, the problems of some of these programs are becoming very obvious. And one of the things that, you know, you would read these stories, and it was always interesting reading some of these stories, you know, they would talk about, you know, housing and urban development, and, or, or various welfare programs, and, and how the, the problems that these programs were supposedly designed to solve, not only had the, had the problems not gone away, they actually had gotten worse.

You know, there was more poverty, there was more illegitimacy, there were more children born out of wedlock, there were more single mothers, there was more crime, but, you know, you know, on down the line.

And, and you would read these articles, and people would discuss, well, why is this? How come, how come there's, there's more poverty? How come there's more crime after we've instituted all these anti-poverty programs, and spent, you know, tens, hundreds of billions, I don't know, maybe, you know, of course, by now it's in the trillions, but, you know, spent these huge sums of money on these programs.

Well, you know, you would, you would, some of these articles, they'd talk to somebody who was, was maybe a, maybe a liberal, and they'd say, well, you know, the problem is, is there just hasn't been enough money and enough authority given to X agency.

And if we only would increase the budget and the authority of X agency, why, they'd be able to solve all these problems, and things would be wonderful, and it'd be the Garden of Eden. And then they would talk to someone else, and, and maybe someone, maybe you would call a conservative, and they'd say, well, you know, what's happened?

You know, the reason that you have more crime, more poverty, more of all these negative things out of wedlock births, and collapse in marriage rate, and what have you, they'd say, well, the reason you have that is because these government programs incentivize bad behavior.

You know, the more children that a woman has outside of marriage, the more money she gets. And, you know, that tended to make a lot of sense to me, but I wasn't, I didn't have a solid understanding of Scripture, and how that would apply.

And one of the things, one of the real strong sort of desires that I have when I, when I write my blog, is I want to apply the Bible to all of life. Now, as you've probably noticed, if you've read my blog, or maybe even listened to some of the prior podcasts, I am a scripturalist.

Scripturalism is the name that John Robbins gave to Gordon Clarke's philosophy. And if you wanted to, say, put, you know, you say, well, what is scripturalism? Well, if you wanted to put that into a nutshell, probably the best way to describe it that I've heard is this, and that is, this is something that John Robbins said, but he said, the Bible has a systematic monopoly on truth.

You know, scripturalism is the idea that the Bible has a systematic monopoly on truth. And what that means is that the Christianity, it's more than what a lot of people think it is. You know, we tend to be trained as, even as, say, Bible-believing Protestants, we tend to be trained that, okay, you know, you go to church on Sundays, and you need to have the Bible because you find out about God, and Jesus, and sin, and how to get saved, you know, how, you know, justification by belief alone.

You know, we hear these things, and this is all great, and these are all good things. I'm not here to argue with any of that. That's all true. But then we say to ourselves, okay, when I get out the other six days of the week, and I have to deal with life's problems, you know, and, you know, and I see the news, and I see about wars, and rumors of wars, and economic crises, and political problems of this, that, and the other thing, we tend to say, oh, well, you know, if I want to find out about economics, well, I better go read some secular economist.

Or if I want to find out about politics, you know, I need to go find out the latest thing that so-and-so said, or the latest thing that someone wrote in his latest column, you know, maybe some secular thinker, or what have you.

And we don't tend to make a connection between the teachings of Scripture and things such as politics and economics. And I would argue, you know, going back to that premise that, you know, that scripturalism, that the Bible has a systematic monopoly on truth, if we want to solve the very obvious political problems that we have in the United States, or in the West, maybe more broadly speaking, those answers are going to be found in the Scriptures.

And one of the things that I try to do, and this is something that has been consistent since I've been writing that blog for over 10 years now, going on 11 years, it'll be 11 years in March, is to bring that idea that the Bible has a systematic monopoly on truth, and to bring the light of Scripture to issues related to politics and to economics.

That's one of the things that I've really wanted to do, and I hope to continue to do that over the next year. Yeah, and when you talk about politics, I think one of the things that's really disturbing, that really kind of came to a head in 2018, or 2019, and really in 2018, is the attacks, the continued attacks on the First Amendment.

You know, in the First Amendment here, I'm thinking particularly in the ability, the free speech clause. Now, that's one of the things that we have here in the United States, is we still have First Amendment protections.

We're still allowed to speak and discuss and to challenge and to argue as we wish, but there are people that are trying very hard to restrict that. One of the very obvious examples of that is what's going on in big tech, and I'm thinking here of, for instance, Facebook and in Google and in YouTube, and the very obvious program that they have to try to essentially shut down anybody who doesn't agree with the mainstream media.

And there's been a lot of very disturbing examples of that over the past few years. Probably one of the most obvious ones was in late 2018, when simultaneously, you know, Alex Jones and Infowars were banned from pretty much all of the the major tech platforms overnight.

This was in, I believe, early August of 2018, and I wrote about a six-part series on it at the time, and of course things haven't gotten any better in intervening roughly a year and a half. It's still the same, and in fact it's gotten worse.

There are many, many channels, YouTube channels and what-have-you, that have been shut down, that have been just disappeared, because these people challenged ideas that the mainstream, that the establishment does not like.

Now, of the things that people will argue about is they're saying, well, you know, these are private companies, and they're acting as private companies, and therefore they have a right to do what they do.

But there are at least a couple of problems with that line of argument. And just from a high level, one of them is that a lot of these big tech companies are in bed with the government. I can think, for example, there are some stories that were put out, and again this goes back about a year and a half, of Facebook hiring a group associated with the Atlantic Council to vet the news that was put out on Facebook.

So who's the Atlantic Council, you may say? Well, the Atlantic Council is a Washington DC-based think-tank that's affiliated with NATO. So, you know, of course, NATO is funded by, in part, by the United States and by other entities, but I think the United States government certainly is, the federal government, is the biggest funder of that.

And so the Atlantic Council is really representing the views of the ruling class. Well, you know, the Atlantic Council, where they have this cyber unit that's helping Facebook vet its news, well, you know, very obviously, you know, they're going to try to get rid of, say, people who come along and challenge some of the globalist assumptions that undergird NATO and the people and the organizations that support NATO.

So, I mean, that's one thing, you know, it's really, I think a lot of this censorship and big tech is really just an attempt by the establishment to do an end around the First Amendment. I mean, the government can't come out and say, oh, well, you can't discuss that, you can't say that, this sort of thing.

But if they can work with, in conjunction with some of these major tech companies, these big tech companies, they can do that, and they can kind of do it behind the background in a way that's sneaky, that most people don't realize.

And I'm just giving you one example of that. Here's another issue where there's a problem with this argument that big tech, it's just private companies doing what they want. There was legislation passed a few years ago, and I don't have handy with me the exact name of that legislation, but this goes back when the internet really started to get big.

I think it's been within the last 10 years or so. But Congress gave these big tech companies immunity from lawsuits. And the reason is, is because the way the law was written, is they said that these big tech companies, again, I'm talking here about Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, the places that you've heard of, that these big tech companies were not responsible for the content that was put out there.

In other words, basically they served as a platform. Now, if you or I maybe went out and say we put out a slanderous post on Facebook or something on Twitter, that slandered somebody, we could be held responsible for that, because we're the ones that are putting these slanderous ideas out there.

But Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, what have you, they would be immune from that because their defense, because they were protected by this law. Because they were just a platform. They say, okay, we're making this available to people, and people can put out there what they want.

Now, if you happen to put out there something that's false or slanderous or libelous, maybe something that you're encouraging people to do illegal things, something like that, yes, you can be held responsible for that as an individual.

But as a platform, they were not responsible for those things. They were given immunity to that. You say, okay, that's fine. But here's the thing. When you're a platform, what that means is you don't curate content.

In other words, if you're a platform, you don't say, oh, you know, we're going to boost the post of people whose views we agree with, and we're going to shadow ban or delete the channels of people with whom we disagree.

Because once you get into curating content, you've become a publisher, and publishers can be sued. It's interesting that nobody... I've read this from several commentators. I'm not a lawyer, and so I'm having to go a little bit based on some things that I've read.

But the argument along these lines actually seems pretty sound to me. You know, these big tech companies have really opened themselves up to being sued for their curation. And it seems to me they can also be held responsible for the content that's put out there.

And yet nobody has really gone after them, at least not yet. And now maybe that will happen. But yeah, the censorship of... you know, the attacks on the First Amendment have been very serious. Another area where attacks on the First Amendment, the attacks on free speech have come from, is actually the Israel lobby.

And it's amazing some of the work that the Israel lobby has done to shut down free speech, to shut down discussion, to shut down criticism of Israel. Now, my stance on Israel is that it's a foreign country, and that it's not something that Americans have any responsibility to be involved with.

But the problem is, is due to partisans of Israel, and I'm speaking here principally of a lot of Zionist Jewish organizations, as well as these dispensationalist evangelicals, have gotten us involved neck-deep in the politics of the Middle East.

And what's happened is you've had some people pushing back on the activities of Israel, some of these Palestinian organizations. And again, I'm not here to pick sides between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

But what I am certainly in favor of is a free discussion. And if somebody wants to criticize Israel, they have every right to do so. Donald Trump signed an executive order at the end of 2019 where effectively the executive order removes or threatens to remove federal funding of universities that essentially allow criticism of Israel.

So it's really an attempt to shut down free speech, free discussion on the nation's campuses, which is of course one of the big things, one of the reasons universities exist in the first place, is for people to be able to discuss ideas.

You know, I'm not even here, again, I'm not trying to argue for or against Zionism, for or against what's going on with with the Palestinians. I think there's certainly some things that can be said about that.

But my main point here is simply the fact that people have a right to discuss this. People have a right to disagree and have a right to openly express that. You know, and of course one of the other problems with the Trump executive order is the fact that highlights, there's that old saying, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

You know, it raises the question, of course, why is the federal government funding universities in the first place? I don't see any provision for that in the Constitution. So maybe we ought to really be taking a look at that as well.

But I think that that's probably not something that's going to go away at least any time in the immediate future. But I think it's a good question to raise because, again, if you look at what the Bible has to say, the Bible gives a very limited authority to the civil government.

You know, the Apostle Paul talks about that, you know, in Romans chapter 13. I think Peter also says something very similar to this. But the idea behind government, behind the civil government, is that it's to punish evildoers, you know, not evil thinkers.

You know, there aren't to be thought crimes. It says, you know, those who practice evil, you know, those people who do evil, those people who steal, those people who murder, those people who do things to harm their neighbor.

But it doesn't say anything there about thought police. And the other thing is to praise the good, you know, which is generally taken to be, when we talk about what does praise the good mean, well, it means that they need to pass laws that are in accord with the law of God.

And, of course, that's a whole other area where, in the United States, we have major problems. Probably the most obvious example of that is the decision by the Supreme Court in 2015 to allow gay marriage throughout, same-sex marriage throughout the United States.

And, of course, now we have a major Democrat candidate, Pete Buttigieg, who's openly homosexual and is openly gay married, same-sex married to a man. And that's an extraordinary thing to watch. I mean, that is a level of perversity, a level of moral depravity that, you know, honestly, I never thought that I'd see that.

I mean, I'm going to be 54 this year, so I know I'm kind of an old fuddy-duddy. But, you know, I never thought that I would live to see the day where you would have a same-sex married presidential candidate.