RLL 116: The Unconstitutional Antisemitism Awareness Act

You're listening to Radio Looks Lucid. I'm your host Steve Matthews. Thanks for joining me for episode 116. The title of this episode is, I don't know, I had a title of this episode. It's the Unconstitutional Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.

Radio Looks Lucid 116, the Unconstitutional Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. There we go. See, this is a highly professional podcast and outfit here. I have to get my producer. I have to get on him because he didn't have the title for the podcast up the way that it should have been.

Of course, I'm the producer. I got to get on myself. Anyway, welcome to the program. It's been a few weeks since we've had a chance to talk. Welcome to everybody that's watching. Had a big frustration with my regular computer that I use.

I normally use a desktop and I've used that for years. It's having some problems and I'm trying to get it fixed, but I don't know, it doesn't seem like it's something that wants to get fixed very easily.

The place that I have, it's having a difficult time figuring out what the problem is. I don't know. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. We'll have to see. Right now, I'm using my laptop. I don't know.

It seems like it works pretty well here. Hopefully, this will do the job. I don't know how that sounds, but I guess we're going to find out when I go to do the editing. I think today was officially the first day of summer.

I actually had grilled hamburgers for the first time this year. Grilled hamburgers and potato salad, too, on top of that. I think it is. They always use Memorial Day as the official first day of summer.

I think the first day that you grill hamburgers, to me, in my opinion, anyway, that's the official first day of summer. I don't care what anybody else says. That was a good day. I had a good day today.

I had a chance to go out and do a little bike riding today. That was nice. I got some flowers planted around the house. I got that taken care of. I guess I had a productive day. I'm doing a podcast, so what more can you ask for?

Well, anyway, hey, I wanted to—it'll probably be a fairly short podcast here tonight, but that being the case, I still think that there are some good things we have a chance to go over here. I titled the podcast that I did about the Unconstitutional Antisemitism Awareness Act because I think this is something—it actually builds on a couple of the podcasts that I've done here recently.

There are some things that are going on in our government that are very dangerous for freedom. These are things that are being done by the Israel lobby. Again, I think that there's a real problem among evangelicals in the United States.

There's this widespread opinion. I'm not saying that everybody holds this opinion, but there's a widespread opinion among people that Israel can do no wrong, that Jews can do no wrong, and that any criticism of them is somehow off the table, and you're simply not allowed to criticize them.

Well, Israel is a nation like any other nation. Jews are people like other people. You know, we're all sinners, and we are all subject to being criticized, and they don't get a free pass on this, although there are a lot of people in the—a lot of the Israel supporters out there and some very powerful organizations think that they should not—that they're above criticism.

This is a huge problem, and what I wanted to do is I wanted to take a look. Let's see if I can do this on the new computer here. Let's see. Oh, I don't know. Let's see. I don't think it's going to make me.

Okay. Anyway, it's asking me to do some settings updates, and I don't think I want to do those right now, because when you do settings updates, you know it always manages somehow to mess things up. And let's take a look here.

Okay. We're going to do a screen share here. Okay, so it won't let me do a screen share. All right. Well, you know what? Bye, golly. We're just going to do it myself here. All right. So, you know what?

We're going to give up on the screen share. This is what always happens when you have a new piece of equipment out. Well, I mean, I've had this laptop, but I haven't tried to do a live stream on it. That's always what happens.

You know, you run in all these technical problems, and you don't think about these things ahead of time, and then they end up always causing problems. So, anyway. Well, we just won't do a screen share, but I'm going to read an article here.

I'm not going to read all of it, but just a part of it by a gentleman named Philip Giraldi. The title of the article is Protecting Israel as Washington's Number One Job. The White House and Congress rally around the Star of David flag.

Now, one of the things that I think can make researching Israel, issues related to Israel, a bit of a challenge is trying to find people who I think are responsible, level-headed critics, analysts. You know, sometimes you got to develop your sources, right?

And I've read Philip Giraldi over a number of years, and I think he's actually a former, he's a retired CIA officer. And in my opinion, I think he's done some of the very best work that I've seen of any of Israel's critics.

He has a website, it's called Council for the National Interest. That's one place you can read them. They also appear on a website, it's called the UN's Review, where he has his columns appear. And I think he does some of the most thoughtful, intelligent work on the subject of Israel.

And he has been very concerned about the degree of Israeli foreign, foreign Israeli influence on the United States. But I just wanted to read just a brief, this is like about 2 ,800 word essay or so, I'm not gonna obviously read the whole thing.

I wanted to read a little bit about the opening paragraph here. And it says, when is expected President Joe Biden signs off on the Antisemitism Awareness Act, the Department of Education will be empowered to send so-called antisemitism monitors to enforce civil rights laws at public schools, as well as at colleges to observe and report on levels of hostility toward Jews.

Okay, so this was something that the House of Representatives passed. I think it's been a couple of weeks now. It's called the Antisemitism Awareness Act, and it was rushed through Congress substantially as a response to all of the campus protests against the Israeli attacks on Gaza.

And listen to what he says here. So this is a bill that was actually passed by Congress. And if this thing goes into effect, and it probably will, you're going to end up with regime commissars, Israeli, you know, Israel commissars at American college campuses.

And they're observing important levels of hostility toward Jews. Now, someone might say, well, you know, we shouldn't have hostility toward Jews. Well, you have to understand the way they define these things.

Hostility toward Jews could simply just be criticizing Israeli policies. Now, that could be considered antisemitism, and you could be shut down. Potentially, I suppose you could get kicked out of school.

Maybe you could have criminal charges filed against you. I don't know. There are places in Europe where that can be done, where you can actually go to jail for criticizing Israel, for raising questions about the Holocaust.

And these things are entirely foreign to our constitution, to the First Amendment. Congress shall pass no law or make no law attacking free speech or limiting free speech. The First Amendment covers criticisms of Israel.

You are allowed to criticize Israel. You have a God-given constitutionally guaranteed right to criticize Israel. But the partisans of Israel think that you do not, and they don't want you to have that.

And this is something, and I say this especially to my fellow Christians, my fellow evangelicals. We need to, we seriously need to reevaluate our, what we think about Israel. There are lots and lots of evangelicals.

I'm not saying everybody, but there are a lot of them. I think Israel is just the cat's meow. They think that Israel is the bomb, and it's the fulfillment, you know, the nation state. I'm talking about the nation state of Israel.

People think that that is somehow blessed by God, and anything that Bibi Netanyahu or some other Israeli representative says, well, we just have to fall at our feet and do it as if it's a pronouncement from the Lord himself or the prophet Isaiah.

Well, that's just nonsense. In fact, a lot of the things that the Israeli government does are quite evil. The Israeli government is not a republic or a democracy in the sense that you and I think of it.

They don't, people do not have a lot of the rights that you and I have, and the reason for that is very simple, and that is that Judaism lacks the necessary ideas to create and to sustain a free society.

You know, the reason that we have a First Amendment in this country, the reason that we have the kinds of civil rights that we have, that flows out of Protestant Reformation, and of course, Judaism is all about rejecting the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, I mean, it is not a Christian religion, and I think that, you know, there are a lot of people, I think, who have a hard time distinguishing Judaism from Christianity. Judaism is not Christianity, and Jews are not Christians.

Now, that doesn't mean that we hate them. That doesn't mean that we wish them ill. That doesn't mean that we don't pray for them to come to Christ. It doesn't mean that we can't, you know, love them as our neighbors.

You know, we're told to love our neighbors as ourselves. That includes people who are Jewish. You don't want to abuse people, but it doesn't mean that we have to agree with them, and it doesn't mean that we can't criticize Jews or Jewish organizations when they advocate evil policies, and this Antisemitism Awareness Act is an incredibly evil bill.

It is an attack on our First Amendment. It's an attack on our Constitution, and the people that promote this type of thing need to be sharply rebuked, and it's the type of... We cannot listen to these people.

These people cannot be allowed to dictate how our country operates, because if they're allowed to do that, then we're not the United States of America anymore. We're some other country. So, let's continue reading Philip Giraldi here a bit.

He talks about the monitors. These are the monitors that are going to be put in college campuses if this amendment, this bill passes. The monitors' reports will eventually wind up in Congress, which can propose remedies as required including cutting funding and recommending civil rights charges in extreme cases.

One of the more regrettable features of the act is that it accepts the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of Antisemitism as it applies to the state of Israel, making criticism of the Jewish state ipso facto antisemitism.

That's exactly right. So, you've got this law that says, well, you can't be antisemitic, but you say, but I object to some policy or another. I object to the Israeli attacks on Gaza, or I object to this or that.

That's antisemitism. And you, I don't know what could happen to you as a student. I mean, we don't really know right now. The bill hasn't been passed, but it's not going to be anything good. So, you essentially cannot criticize Israel according to this bill.

That is profoundly un-American. It's profoundly un-Christian. You know, as a Christian, I don't like receiving criticism, but I mean, there are people who can criticize Christians all day long, and they have a right to do that.

Now, they're also going to have to answer for that. You know, we must all appear at the judgment seat of Christ, and people that do that, they don't repent. Things are not going to go well for them. I certainly don't believe that someone should be barred from questioning Christians or criticizing Christians or attacking verbally, intellectually attacking Christianity.

I don't believe that. I think that they have a right to speak freely again, but their, you know, their words will be judged at some point. But the supporters of Israel don't think that that should be the case.

They think that they should be above criticism. And this is really getting, you know, again, this gets into sort of this medieval, what's the word I'm looking for? It's medievalism. It's dogmatism. It's like you must believe these things.

You have to believe everything that we say about the Holocaust. You have to believe, accept our definitions of anti-Semitism. And by the way, the Constitution doesn't bar anti-Semitism. I mean, again, you can say things that you don't, that people don't like.

You can even say mean things. I'm not saying you should, but from a legal standpoint, you do have a right to do that. And again, all of our words, all of our thoughts, all of our actions, we all have to give account for those things someday.

But this is not something that the government should be involved with. In other words, what I'm saying is there should not be thought crimes. And this is essentially establishing a framework for creating thought crimes in the United States.

And this is, again, it's profoundly un-Christian. It's profoundly unconstitutional. So let's see. Philip Duralde continues. He's talking about its text. When he's talking about its text, he's talking about the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.

Its text includes the, quote, targeting the state of Israel conceived as a Jewish collectivity, end quote, as an anti-Semitic act. In reality, however, actually anti-Semitism is not as prevalent as Israel partisans claim.

Most of what they call anti-Semitism is simply criticism of the legally self-proclaimed apartheid Jewish state. And most of the animosity Israel experiences is opposition to its brutal treatment of the Palestinians.

And I agree with that. I mean, I think, you know, you hear people screaming about this rise in anti-Semitism, and really, you know, it gets back to that question, okay, what do you mean by anti-Semitism?

It's just like you've got lots of people like to scream racism. Well, you know, well, what is racism? Well, racism in a lot of cases is just dealing with, say, disagreeing with a black person. That can be racism.

And it's the same way with Israel. I mean, essentially, the way they want to use this language, disagreeing with a Jew or disagreeing with Israel is anti-Semitic. You're just not allowed to do it. Your job is just to shut up and accept everything that they say and fork over massive amounts of money.

No questions asked. You know, I mean, you're not allowed to ask questions. You know, Nikki Haley, she's one of these uber Israel nuts. And she was campaigning last year for president. She thought she was going to be president.

And one of the things that she talked about, I remember she puts this out in a tweet, you know, I don't know, maybe it was an interview. I don't know. But what she said is, you know, that we have to just rush all this money over to Israel to fight Hamas and give them everything they need.

No questions asked. So if you're an American citizen, you're not even allowed to ask a question in her mind, or you shouldn't, about how our money is being used by Israel. And that is an absolute outrage.

I mean, first of all, we shouldn't be sending money over there anyway, or to any other foreign country to fight these ridiculous wars or for other things. I mean, this Ukraine thing is just a disaster in so many, on so many levels.

And our Congress just can't stop sending our money elsewhere. I mean, we're over $34 trillion in debt, we've got massive inflation, all these economic problems. But you know, yeah, we can fund wars in Ukraine, and we can fund wars in Israel.

And you're not supposed to ask any questions, especially about Israel. My goodness, you cannot ask those questions. Just shut up and fork it over. This is what I mean by dogmatism, and just the arrogance that you see coming out of the Israel lobby.

These are not good people. In fact, I would go so far as to say they act a lot more like the mafia than anything else. I'm going to talk a little bit about that in a few minutes here. But let's see, giving legal sanction to that presumption that Israel must be protected from bigots means that the United States is well on the way to forbidding any criticism of Israel at all.

Yes, that's exactly right. That is the intention. The Israel lobby is not going to stop with this act either. I mean, that's the one thing you have to remember. They get this thing through, they're going to push and push and push until any and all criticism of Israel is made illegal in any and all spaces.

I mean, this bill just deals with colleges. But you don't think that they're just going to stop at that. They're not going to stop at that. They will not stop themselves. Now, they have to be stopped.

But they're not going to stop on their own. They're just going to keep pushing this thing to its logical conclusion, which is to make any criticism of Israel illegal. I have no doubt that that's what they're trying to do here.

Americans can criticize their own country or nations in Europe, or at least are able to do so currently, but badmouthing Israel could soon constitute a criminal offense. Yeah, and Philip Derulo is exactly right.

And again, I would encourage you to read the rest of that article. It's say the title of it's protecting Israel is Washington's number one job. It was actually written back on May 8th. So it's a couple of weeks old.

But I would really, again, you know, Philip Derulo, P-H-I-L-I-P and his last name is G-I-R-A-L-D-I. I'd strongly recommend him to anyone listening to this. He writes very well. He's a balanced writer.

He's not somebody he's not some nutty person or something like that. He's got a Ph .D. and he writes like somebody who's a scholar. But I think he's very approachable. And I think that he does some some very good work.

I think he's one of the best writers on the among the critics of Israel that I have seen. And I don't hesitate to recommend him to you. At all. So anyway, you know, I mentioned one thing, too, I was talking about sort of the thug tactics of the Israel lobby this past week, of course, one of my my favorite congressmen is Thomas Massey.

He's a congressman from Kentucky, actually just right across the river from from here where I live in Hamilton County. So he's kind of a I guess you might say a local politician to some extent. He really is local here in the Cincinnati area, even though he's Kentucky.

And I think he may you could make a good case. He may be the best, the finest representative in Congress in terms of just being very constitutional in his thinking. In some ways, he's kind of like the Ron Paul 2 .0.

And he he's been very, very good on putting America first. You know, and when he said, you know, some people say that they they say it, but they don't really follow through. He actually follows through.

And and, you know, he will vote and he's voted consistently against sending money to Israel. And of course, the Israel lobby just goes ballistic. And they have a pack, you know, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has they have a super PAC.

I can't think of the name of it. It's kind of like some generic name. It's like democracy, protecting democracy or something like this. I don't know. You wouldn't get a sense that it's part of the Israel lobby, but it is.

But they've taken out like three hundred thousand dollars worth of attack ads. And they're trying to get rid of him because he is messy as being primary. He's a Republican. He's being primary. And I think the primary is next week.

It's on the 21st. They're trying to get him out. They're trying to get rid of him. But a lot of people have come to his aid. I know there are a lot of small donors who contributed to his campaign. I was one of them.

And I know Ron Paul has has backed him. And and I really I pray that that he is is put back into Congress because he's one of the very few men in Congress who actually seriously does put America first.

He puts the interest of of ordinary Americans first. United States of America first. He takes his oath when he puts his hand on the Bible and takes that oath to the Constitution. He's actually serious about it, unlike the vast majority of other people.

And these are even people who are Republicans, call themselves conservatives, what have you, who do not. And I've always, I think very highly of Thomas Massey. And anyway, I just, you know, if you want to pray for somebody in politics, you know, pray that he does successfully, you know, defeat his challenger in the primary and returns to Congress and is voted back into Congress here this fall.

I think as long as he wins the primary, I think he's he's a shoo-in for for for reelection in the election this fall. But he's got to get through that primary first. I don't know what the polls are, but I really do want to see him reelected.

And if you read through his Twitter feed, it's if you're on Twitter X, excuse me, I still call it Twitter. I hate that they changed that to X. I mean, I know Twitter was awful in terms of some of its policies, but I just I have never liked the rebrand of calling it X.

And I don't think I'm ever gonna get used to calling it X. But anyway, that's, that's the way it is. But yeah, Thomas Massey has a really good Twitter feed. I think he might have one of the best Twitter feeds of anybody in Congress, maybe the best for all I know.

I don't know. Let's see if he's got anything on here tonight. Anything further? Let's see. He wants to end the Fed. Couldn't agree more with that. In fact, he's got a bill in the house right now to end the Fed.

And that would be a great benefit to all Americans. Well, 99 .9 of us. Now there would be some some bankers and some people on Wall Street who would be upset. But you know, I have to say that that doesn't really terribly bother me a whole lot.

Now let's see here. I was just going through here to see if there's anything on. Well, there's a he's got a video up from Ron Paul. Thomas Massey isn't hostile to Israel. His loyalty to Americans. He's loyal to Americans.

They voted against all foreign aid. That's exactly right. I mean, he's very consistent about this. But of course, the Israel lobby, they don't care about that. They don't care about the Constitution. The only thing they care about is Israel.

And, you know, sometimes I was thinking about it this week. You know, I think that if the the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force, I think they dropped an H-bomb on a major American city and just vaporized the city, you'd have a lot of people in Congress who would defend them.

I really think maybe I'm being a little bit sarcastic when I say that, but I don't know that that's too far off the mark. I think there's certainly a lot of evangelical Christians would come to Israel's defense, as remarkable as that sounds.

You know, he talks here. He says approximately 1 of Gaza's civilian population has been wiped out by Israel in seven months. We should not fund this war. And I agree with him. Yes, we should not be funding this role, this war.

Now, I mean, I know you got people like John Hagee and others out there who cannot wait to do this. I mean, some people have even talked about, well, they should drop nuclear bombs, you know, glass it, they're saying, you know, whatever.

Well, yeah, I just, I don't know. It's, it's, the bottom line is this is not, we don't have, if you're a Christian, you don't have a dog in this fight. If you're a Christian, you do not have a dog in this fight.

The United States of America should not be involved in this. So anyway, that's, that's really about all I have on that. There's a whole lot of other things I guess we could talk about with respect to that.

But you know, I think that's, that's enough there for one day. So let's see, what else do we have going here? Oh, you know, I don't know if any of you seen any of this, there's kind of a dust up over this past week about this guy.

He's the kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, I believe his name's Harrison Butker. And he had given a speech, a college graduation speech. And, and he was espousing some, you know, anti-feminist talking points and the like, you know, that the, the, the, the, the women in the graduation, they should look to be, you know, being housewives and not so much pursuing careers.

And, and, you know, he'd attacked some, oh, well, I know one of the things he talked about was this, this law, you know, this antisemitism Awareness Act. I don't know if he used the term antisemitism Awareness Act, but he was talking about it.

And he highlighted the fact that this bill could actually outlaw the teaching of the New Testament, because in, in the, the way the language of this bill is written, if you, if you say that the Jews killed Christ, that's considered to be antisemitic, even though the New Testament repeatedly talks and makes this point very clearly that the Jews did kill Christ.

So that, that's one point. That's another point that he made. I think there was some other things that he had talked about some of the problems with the, the transgender people. And anyway, I know that a lot of, a lot of conservatives, a lot of Christians have glommed onto his remarks.

And, you know, I think that he's this, this champion of, of Christianity, but I would caution you about that because his speech, he was, he was very clear. He's very Catholic. He's very Roman Catholic.

And the speech that he gave was actually given at some Benedictine college, I believe in Kansas. So, I mean, he's a, he's a very, this whole thing was, was set within a context of his, his, his Roman Catholicism.

Now, Roman Catholicism is not Christianity. We were talking here about, about Judaism, you know, and how so many evangelicals have been drawn into support of this almost, I wouldn't call it almost a superstitious support of, of Israel and Jews and Judaism, you know, and they, they, they, they latch onto this thing.

Somehow this is a savior. They're going to save the West. And the same thing is true with, with Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is another medieval false violent religion. And, and sometimes there are people who can get up and they can say some things they, because I'm Catholic, you know, I disagree with transgenderism.

I disagree with abortion. I disagree with these sorts of things. And I think a lot of times, you know, there's just a lot of Christians, you know, believing Christians, you know, they're hearing this stuff and they're saying, oh, this guy's a great Christian hero.

And he's somebody we need to follow. Well, no. Harrison Butker is somebody who needs to be evangelized. As a Roman Catholic, he does not believe the doctrine of justification by faith alone. He's not trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ alone for his salvation.

And that's the hallmark of a Christian. That, that, that's what, that's what defines a Christian. Do you have faith in Jesus Christ alone? You know, is, is your faith that you are saved, that you have a righteous standing before God through faith in Christ alone?

Not as a result of anything you do, you know, not as a result of your works, not as a result of your, your law keeping or anything of that sort. Not as a result of even giving statements or speeches that, that they uphold Christian, certain Christian ideas.

No, I mean, the righteousness, the, the, the, the salvation that, that God's people have comes through faith in Christ alone. It's not through anything that we do. And that's something that, you know, in Harrison Butker, I mean, he seems like he's, like I say, he's, you know, got a certain civic righteousness and, you know, I appreciate the fact that some of the things that he said, I mean, I think we're, we're good, but you have to understand he's, is coming within a system of, of conservative Roman Catholicism, and that has a false system.

So don't get drawn into that. I mean, if you're a, an evangelical, if you're, if you're a believer, if you are a, a saved Christian with, you know, puts his faith in Christ alone, you know, don't get drawn into this stuff.

You know, you, you don't have to go out and, you know, join the Harrison Butker fan club, even though he said some things that, you know, I mean, we, we could agree with his, he's coming at it from a system of Roman Catholicism.

He's very clear about that as not somebody that, that we need to be looking to as Christians to, to defend the West. That's one of the things, you know, and I talked a little bit about that in John Robbins' essay, The Religious Wars of the 21st Century, you know, that, you know, we as, as, as Protestants have just, we've really given away the store and we keep looking to all these other non-Christian faiths to, to save us from our mess.

And I mean, look, I mean, the West is a mess. That's something Gordon Clark talked about that in his book. It was written, what, 72 years ago, I think it first was published in 1952. You know, it was the Christian view of men and things.

And he talks in there about the, the collapse of the West. And, and I thought John Robbins really summarized Clark's position in that book very, very nicely in the, in a forward that he wrote. You know, he talked about that, that Clark's thesis is that the West is a mess.

You know, the West is disappearing because Christianity, and by Christianity, he's talking about the, the Christianity of the Reformation. You know, the, the Western civilization is built on biblical Protestantism.

That's where that comes from. You know, there's a whole book that John Robbins put us called, it was a booklet really, it's called Christ and Civilization. He makes that case. And this is something that I think, this is a major failing of the 20th and 21st century Protestant church.

And that is, there's almost no awareness. And I'm talking here, even among people who are, you know, genuine believers. I'm not talking here about liberals, not talking about people, you know, go to PCUSA churches or things like this that, you know, they teach a false gospel.

I'm talking about people, you know, genuine believers, people who are saved. And just because we're saved, that doesn't mean we can't be letters free or can't be confused on some things. And, and unfortunately, even in the, the believing Protestant church, I don't think that churches really talk about the close connection between biblical faith in Christ and the liberties that we enjoy.

These things are intimately connected, but we don't make that connection. Unfortunately, churches don't help people make that connection. I think this is really something that, that we need to do better at as Protestants.

We need to be doing much better at making explicit the connections between the Bible and, and our, our, our God-given rights, the kinds of rights that we have. And they're talked about in the constitution.

You know, I was talking there about free speech. Well, well, why is free speech important? Well, you know, you can find a lot of reasons for that. You know, the most important reason is to preach the gospel.

And we have that command of Christ, you know, the great commandment, right. You know, go and teach all nations, you know, teaching them to believe all things that I have said, you know, all butchering the quote, apologize for that.

But, but, you know, he, he commanded the, the disciples and, and, and also us as well, you know, the, we are to take the gospel and we are to teach, we're to teach other people where to, to go into the ends of the earth and, and, and teach the, the, the truth of what Christ teach his doctrine.

And if we can't do that, you know, if it's, if it's, we, we don't have free speech, well, we can't do that. You know, and, and of course that was one of the big problems in the middle ages in Europe is that you, you were not allowed to preach the gospel.

You couldn't do it. I mean, if you try to do it, you'd end up on the receiving end of some very nasty business from the Roman church state, from Antichrist, you know, and, and it's, it's not an accident that the first amendment is something that came in the context of the United States of America.

This is a, is, isn't, it always has been a Protestant Republic. And I know that upsets some people probably to hear that, but that's what America is. This is a Protestant Republic. We are built, our operating system is, um, ultimately the rest on the scriptures, on the Protestant Reformation.

It's where that stuff comes from. I know John Robbins talked about that. And I think I was in his book, Christ and Civilization, and he had this quote from some historian who said that John Calvin was the virtual founder of America.

And that's absolutely right. And, you know, again, this is my challenge that, that to myself, but also to, to, to, you know, anyone listening to this, you know, if, if you, if you love the Lord, if you are, uh, washed in the blood of Jesus Christ, if you are saved by my grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone, we need to, you, you and I, we, we need to be making that case that political, that political liberty really follows on spiritual liberty.

You know, spiritual, it's that spiritual freedom that comes first, and then you get the political and the economic liberty that, that follows upon that. And it works the reverse too. You know, when you become enslaved spiritually to sort of the false ideas, you're also going to become enslaved politically and, and economically, which is of course, is what's, what's happening to us here in the West.

And, and we need to repent. Uh, we need to be looking to Christ as the only way that we're going to be able to stand against the enemies of liberty. We're not going to be able to do it on our own strength and our own wisdom, because they got all the guns, you know, they got all the power, you know, you and I don't have much power at all.

Uh, but you know, by trusting in the Lord, you know, that is the only way we're going to be able to stand up against the enemies of liberty. Anyway, didn't mean to get off on that long tangent, but, uh, I think it was worth talking about.

At least I hope it was anyway. Uh, let's see, what else do we have here this week? Oh, oh, there was a, uh, very interesting article and I came across this somewhat by accident. Um, the title of it is Feminism in the SBC.

The SBC, that's the Southern Baptist Convention is what that means. And it was written by a gentleman named Doug Ponder, uh, who I was not familiar with, but he, apparently he's a Southern Baptist, um, uh, minister.