AD and Ruslan KD Sharpen Some Iron (Or Something Like That)

All right. I think we're live. If someone from the comments could let us know, because I don't use this platform myself ever.

Let's give it a second here. Are we live? I think we're live. It's almost as exciting as Pacquiao versus Mayweather.

Yeah, right. Yeah, right. All right, we're live. We're live.

All right, cool. So... AD, we should have charged for this, man. Yeah, yeah, next time.

We could have done a pay -per -view and charged for this and probably made some money or gave some money away for charity. Next time, let's do that.

That's right, that's right. I like that, I like that. Well, actually, let me do this. So, I think that between the two of us, you're the one who doesn't need the introduction, but since it's my audience here and you were so gracious to come on, why don't you introduce yourself?

I know you're a YouTuber, but from what I understand, you do a bunch of stuff. So why don't you let everybody know? Yeah, so my name is

Ruslan. For those folks who don't know, I was born in the former Soviet Union in the 80s and I came out to America as a refugee in the early 90s.

I grew up in San Diego. My mom and dad split, didn't have the best upbringing, got arrested at the age of 11, just being a complete derelict and knucklehead.

And all along the way, God kind of kept showing himself to me through people witnessing, sharing the gospel with me, people from the black church, people from the seeker -friendly church, people from the reformed community, people from every pocket.

And it took me a while to surrender my life to Jesus. It wasn't one of those instantaneous, I heard the gospel the first time.

I had a lot of hostility to God. And I was going to a kind of like a seeker church with a girl, it's always a girl.

And if I wanted to hang out with her on Sunday, I had to go to church. And I kept hearing his gospel and just so happened, my manager at Pizza Hut was a

Christian and the head delivery driver was a Christian. And they hit me to stuff like Evidence That Demands a

Verdict by Josh McDowell and The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. And I stopped dating this

Christian girl, started dating a Jehovah's Witness girl. And I really had to sort this idea of who Jesus is out to fully surrender my life.

That was really the last doctrine that I kind of had to surrender to, man. And so I surrendered my life to Jesus.

The end of my, I want to say the end of my sophomore year, junior year, somewhere in there in high school, started doing stuff around the school,

Christian club, Athletes in Action. And I kept ministering, met my wife in high school.

We started dating a year after I got out. She was a year younger than me. I was been dating her since 19. We dated for four years, got married, been married for 13 years.

This past July, we just celebrated 13 years. Yeah, I give myself a little hand clap. And we have two kids.

I, Levi's six, Zoe is four months tomorrow.

Yeah, she's four months tomorrow. So yeah, dad, husband, I worked at my church for a few years.

I worked with adults with developmental disabilities, 2015. I transitioned into full -time music. And that was kind of like the bread and butter for a couple of years.

And then I'd say within the last eight, nine months, YouTube kind of started taking off and kind of being the main thing.

And now I'm here with AD. How do you say your last name,

AD? It's Robles, like as if it was a Z. Robles, got it, okay. And your title is hilarious.

It's hilarious right now. Should I put the

Christian wokest, Wokenovia? That's up to you, man.

Well, on the live show that I do with my co -host, Matt Williams, I always put weird stuff down there, but I put

Christian Nationalist down there a few times, which I thought was good. I almost went with Noted Conspiracy Theorist.

That's the one people like. That would've been better. I think Noted Conspiracy Theorist, Confirmed Conspiracy Theorist, I think would've worked better.

AD, I don't know a whole lot about you, man. Where are you from? I'm 36, by the way, just in case people think

I'm trying to lie about my age. Rappers do that too, by the way. We lie about our age, but I don't. I'm 36. Tell me about you.

I know you're from the Northeast, Connecticut, Vermont area. Ministry, Reformed, and that's about as much as I know.

Yeah, yeah. Well, before I do that, let me ask you, when rappers lie about their age, do they lie up or down?

Down, down, down, down, for sure, down. No, that's like a document thing. It's really weird, but it's changing, man. I don't know if you saw

Fred Durst perform on Twitter, and Fred Durst came out there just with the dad swag, and I think that's evolving.

I think it's becoming okay to be an old head in hip hop now. Yeah, it's so funny that you mentioned

Fred Durst, and I'm not trying to dodge your very easy question to answer, but I saw a video today about Fred Durst and a video he produced for a song called

Break Stuff. It's like a very aggressive song, and they were giving him a lot of props because he had a ton of cameos in it, and this is a song from the 90s,

I think, either early 2000s, 90s, but every cameo was still relevant today, like as the rappers, and it was just amazing.

Like it was 100 % ratio. You would think that'd be impossible to get people in your video at the time that are still relevant 20 years later.

It's crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that. All right, cool. So yeah, I'm 38, and I grew up in a

Christian household, and I wish I could say that I was arrested when I was 11 because that would make me look a lot better, but I was arrested when

I was an adult because I lived like a pagan. I was partying crazy, all that kind of stuff.

I never really believed in Christ or the gospel or anything like that. I have two siblings who both were way more involved in the church, and they never walked away from the faith as they were a kid, but I did.

And so I graduated college, took a job in New York City, and was making a ton of money, way too much money for someone my age to be making, and I started my job right before the

Great Recession hit in 2008. So I was living this fast life. Then the Great Recession hit, and my income took a huge hit almost overnight, but I was still partying like crazy.

So I went into a ton of debt, and just eventually came to the end of myself. It's basically the prodigal son.

I was doing all kinds of stuff. So eventually I came to the end of myself and visited my father one

Christmas, and his pastor was going through a Tim Keller book. Well, he was preaching through the Bible, I'll give him credit, but he was using a

Tim, he wasn't preaching the Tim Keller book, but he was using a Tim Keller book. And I just heard the gospel really for the first time at that point.

I was that prodigal son. I was the guy who was squandering everything that God gave me. I'm like you,

I didn't have a moment where I came to Christ, but then I just came to Christ at that point. So what kind of church family, is it denomination or secret family?

Sure, sure. Well, growing up, we were in the Methodist church and then an evangelical free church, but we weren't really convictionally either of those things.

It was just local churches that we liked with friends. So - And did you hear the gospel as a child?

Like, would you say the gospel was preached as a child or like you literally never heard the gospel until you became an adult? Great question, great question.

I think I had heard it. The United Methodist church I was at, so it's slightly more questionable. I don't remember though, cause

I was pretty young, but we definitely heard the gospel of the churches we were at when I was younger, for sure.

Got it. So when I say I didn't hear it, I didn't hear it, you know what I mean? I grew up Armenian Orthodox and I did not hear it cause the services were in Armenian.

Right, right. It was, you know, it was Eastern Orthodox vibes. And, but I remember when I was getting in trouble, the, we called them the

Terhair, our priest sat me down and like shared the gospel with me. And I remember being like, no, like I rejected that at a very, very early age because of the church trauma and just wanting to be a knuckle.

It was a social thing. We had this thing called ACU, Armenian Christian Youth Organization, and we would go on trips and play sports.

And so that was like my connection to the Armenian church and then, not Armenian, Armenian. Don't want you to think

I'm a, you know, a heretic. And then we, so when

I, then as like 15, 16 started hearing it, it would take, man, it took probably 20 times for me to hear the gospel and be softened to it.

It took a lot. And I'm glad I did. So you came to faith as an adult, 20s.

And then when did you kind of get into ministry? Yeah, definitely. So when

I moved to Vermont, it was to do ministry. So I had been going to a church for a few years in New York.

And, you know, people kept telling me, including my pastor, you know, I think God has a calling for you, this or that. And so I just took a shot.

I actually quit my job, you know, and took a pastoral residency in Vermont. And my wife is from Vermont.

So that's kind of the connection to Vermont. And I did that. And it turns out that the pastor

I was sitting under had decided to actually leave that church pretty much right away. As soon as I got there.

So I worked with him for like three or four months. And then the church asked me to stay and preach there, which

I did for about a year while they looked for a new pastor. And then I planted a church through that church, which was a non -denominational kind of local congregational church, which

I pastored with another guy for, man, I don't know the exact number, but probably two or three years,

I would say. And then unfortunately that church plant did not survive. And then

I moved to New Hampshire and that's where I'm at right now. Got it. So did you go to college? What was your like line of work?

What did you do for work and stuff like that? So I didn't go to college for anything like theology related or anything like that.

But I went to college for government and politics, which the only reason I did that is because I didn't know what I wanted to do. And it sounded easy.

That makes sense. That's actually helpful. It makes sense to kind of better. And you were, I'm assuming always kind of more, is it fair to call you conservative, conservative

Republican leaning? Yeah, no, that's fair. I would say that. So, you know, not always actually

I was, well, you know, when I was in college, I dabbled with a little bit of that rage against the machine type stuff.

You know what I mean? Like that kind of anarchy sort of socialist type stuff. But quickly abandoned that, you know, and then

I became a libertarian for a long time, I would say, a pretty long time. And actually what's funny is

I was reading a lot of Christian, like people that took the law of God seriously, the

Presbyterians, through my libertarianism. There's actually a website called lourockwell .com that this guy

Gary North writes for often. He's this Presbyterian, this hardcore law of God kind of Presbyterian. I used to read his stuff and loved it as a libertarian before I was a

Christian. And then when I became a Christian, I found out that this guy is a Christian that I used to love and read all the time.

But I abandoned libertarianism because even though there was a lot of overlap, I couldn't hold onto it if I was taking the law of God seriously.

So I wasn't always conservative -ish, but along those lines, I see more freedom, less government, that kind of thing.

Got it. Yeah. Yeah. All right, cool. So let's jump in here.

My first question I think might be the most important. Why aren't you on Gab yet?

I don't even know what that is. Is that like the new parlor? Is that the new parlor? It's like the new parlor, how dare you, sir?

But it's a social media site. It's a social media. I don't know. Should I really be on it? You're trolling me, right? I don't know if you're being serious or not.

Well, I really like it, but I didn't expect you to be on it. So sort of trolling a little bit. Let me just say, AD, I've, there's been a few of your videos that I've watched.

I think I saw a video of yours to responding to the Phil Vischer video.

Yeah, yeah. And I thought, and I don't know if you saw my comment. I saw that I think about a year ago, and I was just looking up like responses to it.

And I saw your video and you were like, let me know if you guys want me to do a part two of it. And I responded like, this was good.

I'd love to see a part two. And then I, so just, I just say to have to say,

I think you've said some good things that's definitely made me think over the years. And that was one of them.

That was my first introduction to you. So I hadn't, I saw that, and I hadn't seen anything else until recently. Okay, cool.

Well, I appreciate you telling me that. I'm glad you found some of that helpful. Yeah, no, so actually a lot of people have kind of pointed me your way over the years.

And you have a pretty big following, obviously, and a lot of people really like you. Do you know why people have,

I'm just curious. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to cut you off. Why people have pointed to you? Well, so most of the ones that I remember, and this could be just that I remember these, is that they wanted me to respond to something you had done or analyze an interview or something like that.

A lot of people, when you had Eric Mason on, a lot of people wanted me to respond to that. So this is recently with the

Eric Mason stuff? Yeah, much more recently than I remember, but it could be that more people said it in the past. I just didn't pick up on it.

And it's no offense to you, my circles are different than yours. I'm not big on hip hop, so I just didn't know who you were.

You know what I mean? But a lot of people really do like you. And I went through some of my old comments and people wanted me to respond to some of your stuff.

So yeah, I probably just missed your comment. So sorry about that. It's all good, your channel is booming, bro.

And clearly you have an audience that you speak to that values what you're doing.

So I could imagine, I mean, it's helpful comments, I'm sure, as you're experiencing the influx. It's a channel where they could be overwhelming.

Yeah, and I think people understand, it's not my full -time gig, so anyway, whatever. So I sent you a list of some of the things that I wanted to talk about, and I'm definitely glad to cover most or all of them or anything else that you'd like to as well.

But what I was hoping to start was one of your favorite quotations, at least I think it is, is this

Augustine quotation. It's actually not an Augustine quotation. People keep telling me that, I was gonna ask you about that.

It's not an Augustine quotation. So it's been attributed, falsely attributed to Augustine through history, and then

I think it was post -Reformation in the middle of a bunch of roaring happening within the,

I believe within the Protestant Reformation. And I dug it up a while ago, and so I remember,

I remember learning that, I would say a couple weeks ago, after the Marcus Pittman interview, yes.

And I'm trying to pull up your list of stuff that we're gonna go over, so forgive me. Yeah, that's fine, and I'll just wait for you to do that. But yeah, so I wanted to ask about that because whoever said it,

I kind of wanna agree with it when I hear it. But what I was wondering was, you can quote it, because I don't have it memorized, but how do you determine the difference between the essentials, the non -essentials?

Like what's your, how do you do that? Yeah, well, let's get the quote right first before we unpack that.

So I believe it's in unity, essentials in unity in the essentials. Unity in the essentials.

What is the quote? In essentials, unity, in non -essentials, liberty, in all things, charity.

And it still comes up as Augustine, which is really, which is really funny. I don't know, just say it's Augustine, I'm cool with it. Yeah, we're just going with Augustine.

So in unity, essential, so what, yeah, but the question is, what do I think the essentials of the Christian faith is? Like what is the, what's the doctrine?

Yeah, like how do you determine which is which? Like, you know, liberty in the non -essentials, that's a pretty important thing because that's a lot, a lot of what you talk about is having to do with some of that stuff.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's a great question. And just, again, background for me, get safe, seek a friendly church, start going to a church plant, been at the same church for 17 years.

Our church has been everything, dude. We've been super charismatic, tongues, flags, to super duper reformed.

One of our pastors rewrote Dick, like literally kind of low -key kind of plagiarized Driscoll's doctrine book. And we went through that thing.

Which was probably plagiarized. Which was probably, and so we go through this whole thing and I signed this covenant.

And so I've been all across the spectrum, like all across the theological spectrum. I would say I've never went to the deep end of like progressive

Christianity, where you just start questioning of Jesus rose and that kind of stuff. But across the spectrum theologically,

I've been all over the place. So to me, the essentials, and I think most, I feel like most people, if we're talking a

Sean McDowell, if we're talking, right, like respected apologists, I think the essentials to me would be what does scripture clear on in places like first Corinthians chapter 15,

Ephesians chapter two. What are the early creeds? The Nacian Creed, the Apostles Creed.

And first Corinthians chapter 15, I'm sure as you know, was one of the earliest creeds. Paul said, as I've heard this, I've passed this down to you.

So people think it's a, you know, a lot of things in first Corinthians they think Paul made up, but they really, he's passing down stuff or he's quoting stuff.

And so that's the first creed. So I would say the creeds in the Bible, and then I would say the early church father creeds, specifically

I could point to the probably the Nacian Creed, the Apostles Creed. So I think on those things, I would say, hey, these are the essential doctrines.

If we're talking Jesus, the Godhead, Jesus is God and man, fully God, fully man,

Jesus came, lived a perfect life, rose literally bodily, it wasn't a metaphor, it wasn't an idea, it wasn't to paint any kind of image, right, the virgin birth, the scriptures are the inspired word of God.

Jesus is the only way, salvation by grace through faith, so on and so forth.

So I would say, I think we all kind of know what those essentials of the faith are. And so when I say essentials and unity, that means, hey man, if you are,

I'm assuming Presbyterian reformed, if somebody is Armenian, if somebody is charismatic, if somebody is whatever, and I'll even say

Ethiopian Orthodox, right, like I'll even say some folks outside of the Protestant tradition, I say we can have unity in the essentials because my

Ethiopian Orthodox brothers and sisters, my Armenian Orthodox brothers and sisters, even some of, even Catholics watch my channel, we could have unity in those essentials and then in the non -essentials, we could have liberty and we could say, man, dude, tell me about the theomany, like I'm studying the theomany after talking to Marcus Pitman and the post -war position,

I like the idea of the post -war, like I wanna learn, I don't have a firm eschatological position because again,

I've been everything, when I got saved, it was under the rapture, left behind series, probably a little bit before you came to faith, the left behind, that stuff.

So I don't have like a firm position on that, I don't, so I have liberty in the essentials, I have some ideas, but I'm certain on the essentials,

I'm certain Jesus literally rose from the grave, that is not up for debate, progressive Christian starts coloring us out the lines,

I say, whoa, that's not Christianity anymore and I have done that in certain circles where I'm talking to a progressive

Christian and all of a sudden they start, what, is it resurrection, is it a metaphor? Nah, bro, it's literal, that really happened, we believe that, that's off the table.

So that's what I mean by in the essentials, unity and non -essentials, liberty and all things charity. Right, right, okay, cool, no, that's fine and I would tend to agree with that.

So when you're talking about the liberty piece though, because you've often used this quotation in context where maybe you think someone's being too critical or maybe too aggressive, maybe some of,

I don't know how many of my videos you watch, probably not that many, but sometimes I can be known to sort of draw some pretty stark lines,

I've said some things about certain people that people think are pretty aggressive and it seems to me that sometimes you bring up this liberty thing in context like that.

Do you know what I'm trying to say? Can you rephrase the question? Like, I think I'm following, I think I'm tracking. Sure, sure, what

I'm trying to say is, so when you talk about liberty, what does that actually look like, liberty in the essentials?

Like, what do you - You mean unity in the essentials, liberty in the non -essentials. I'm sorry, liberty in the non -essentials, what does that liberty look like?

Does that mean, what does it mean? So you hold a, I'm assuming you hold to the five points of Calvinist, Calvin, five points of Calvin?

Yeah, yeah, I do. You hold to the five, okay. I don't. I don't think you're immature.

I don't think you are radical. I don't think you have a shallow faith. I don't think, right?

I don't look at you as less than because we disagree on one of the points of Calvin.

I don't like limited atonement. I don't think you are less than if you think, if you believe in double predestination, right?

So that's what I would say, is I would say, I don't, bro, I don't do that. If somebody says, hey, you know, tongues, they're all about tongues, they're all about this,

I would say, okay, cool. Like, I don't think you have to speak in tongues to be saved, but if you want to speak in tongues, man,

I think there's some confines with scripture, if our scripture would describe that, and maybe your position would be different. Maybe, I don't know if you're a cessationist or not.

So that's what I would mean. Like, I could fellowship with a Calvinist, and I do, by the way, in real life. I have friends that are Calvinist. I have friends that are super charismatic.

I have friends all over the spectrum. So, but okay, that's fine. So then that makes sense. So you can have friends that are not, that are not, that are

Calvinist, let's say. But certainly you would think that as a Calvinist, I would be saying things about God that weren't true.

I'd be lying about God, right? If you were saying things about - Yeah, since I'm a

Calvinist, and you're not a Calvinist, so you think when I say Calvinist things, I'm actually telling an untruth about God, I'm lying about him, right?

No, I don't, I don't. I think you have a different perspective on things that have been debated for thousands and thousands of years, and continue to be debated by the smartest scholars who are actually experts in this field, and went and did master level and dissertations on this stuff.

So I don't think you're intentionally lying, and I don't think you're being deceptive. And I would just say, I don't know, right?

Some of these things are hard for me to get behind, double predestination. There's a French guy that came out recently talking about everything is predestined.

Some of that stuff is really hard to get behind. I would reject some of that, but I don't think you're lying on God. I would just say, man,

I think that's an incomplete view that I think we won't really know until we get to heaven, and I'm not trying to make it a cop -out.

I'm really not trying to give you a cop -out. Hey, man, I don't know. I think there was limited atonement, double predestination, that stuff is tough.

I'm not gonna say A .D. is a liar. He's lying on God because of a secondary non -essential issue.

Got it. Let me ask you this, Ruslan. Do you think that the Bible is clear in the things that it teaches us?

I think the Bible's clear on the essentials. I think the Bible's clear on the law of God. I think the Bible is clear on a lot of things.

And then I think there are things where there's disagreement on. With church history, right? With church history, there's things that the church fathers have disagreed on.

There's things in the Bible that they, Acts 15, they disagreed on what did the

Gentiles act like initially, and they had to have a whole council for it. So I think we see that in Scripture. We see that after Scripture.

We see that all throughout church history, up until the Reformation. And I think we're gonna, unfortunately, continue seeing that.

In America, I'm sure you probably know this, we have 40 ,000 different Protestant denominations worldwide.

And in America, we have over 300 active ones. Okay, so I don't think they're all lying on God and intentionally being deceptive.

I think some of them are an error, and I think some of them not. And so I try to keep a light theology in terms of the essentials.

And then on these other things, man, I'm always learning. I'm trying to understand. I'm trying to gain knowledge. Okay, got it, got it.

So, and I'm gonna rephrase your answer. It sounds like you say that the Bible's clear on the essential doctrines, but it's unclear on the doctrines that are not essential.

The Bible is clear on what it requires someone to come to faith to Jesus on salvation. The Bible is inspired.

However, there's language barriers. There's traditional barriers. There's all kinds of things that we have to work. There's our own biases.

I think that we need to work through and go look to the Greek and look at what the original Greek says. Look at these different things, right?

And so we get split hairs on any issue, AD. There's people that think that I've taken the mark of the beast because I don't celebrate on the literal

Sabbath. I think you would probably laugh at that, right? But they're firm in their convictions and they'll point you to this thing and that thing and the

Catholic church changing the Sabbath, but then the word. And when they gathered on the first day of every month, well, that word in the

Greek originally is Sabbath and it's not week. So we get split hairs on so many different things.

So to say that the Bible is absolutely objectively clear so that everybody that can read the Bible has perfect theology on just the

Bible self -interpreting itself. Yeah, I probably would not agree with that statement. Okay, got it.

No, thank you for answering, I appreciate that. So one of the things I noticed in your list of essentials, you didn't mention errant ideas about race or racism.

Do you consider racism or racist theologies or ideas essentials or non -essentials?

So thank you, just because I didn't say an essential doesn't mean that I don't believe it's something that's an essential, okay? So I think us being in created in the

Imago Dei is an essential. I think you have to believe that man's created with dignity. Man is created in the image of God.

Man has value, man has worth, yes. So I would say if we're looking at it through the Imago Dei, yes, I would say that's an essential doctrine.

And I think that bleeds over to racism, partiality, other areas, right?

Prejudice, judgment, all these different things. Genderism or whatever the, women being subservient historically and now they're kind of Jesus pulling them up and making them more equal.

Yes, yes, yes. So to answer your question, through the lens of the Imago Dei, not like objectively on the lens of racism, but through the

Imago Dei, that is how we look at equality of people. All right, great, great, excellent.

By the way, if you have a question for me, you can jump right in. I have a line of questions here. If you want me to keep going, I certainly will. Yeah, I do have some questions, but I mean,

I think we're flowing. I think I'm doing okay. Yeah, no, I think we're doing good. So let me - I think we're doing okay. Yeah, no,

I think we're doing good too. So let me tell you about a guy. There's a man who, he's a pastor and he's got a small congregation, that kind of thing.

Great preacher, very charismatic, not in the theological sense, but people like him, very engaging and all of that kind of thing.

And he's got his doctrine down. He believes in the Trinity. He's got Jesus Christ was crucified, dead and buried, rose on the third day.

All the essentials in that regard down, right? But he's a racist. Is that where you're going with this? But he's a white supremacist?

No, no, not at all. Not at all. So what I'm going with, what I'm going with this is essentially, he believes in the

Imago Dei and all that kind of stuff. But he regularly says things about blackness that are very suspect.

Like he attributes violence and theft to blackness, right? He doesn't do it all the time and he teaches very well all the time, most of the time.

But he'll often cite statistics. Chicago, there's so many murders in D .C.

I saw a statistic the other day that said that D .C. had more murders three to one to COVID deaths, stuff like that.

He's great in every area. He loves his wife, loves his children. He sets up food for the poor, all that stuff.

He also, so he says some of this stuff, but he also, he was attending the Charlottesville rally and he did hold a tiki torch.

But, and he doesn't, and he said many times, he doesn't agree with everything that they say, but he does agree with some of their grievances.

Could you have unity with someone like that? I think a lot of evangelicals right now do have unity with someone like that.

I think that that's already here. I mean, we can play around that, but there are people already that adhere and throw out false statistics and be hyperbolic about things that aren't really the truth about an issue.

Right, so I think some of that's already here. So can I have unity with someone that has -

Yeah, I'm not asking about them. I'm asking you though. Yeah, so one, I think it's already here. Can I have unity with someone that has some covert racism in their heart?

I can, yes, I challenge them regularly. We have people in my life that are like, ah man, that's kind of questionable, and we unpack these ideas.

What I'm not saying is that they're racist and they're intentionally being racist. I'm saying that people can have biases, have subtle biases, subconscious biases, and not know their own racial partiality, if you will.

So I think we're already dealing with some of that. So - Would you disagree? Hold on, hold on. Let's back up. Would you disagree?

Yes. Okay. Yeah, I would. So, but just to - Sure, I'll answer in just a second, but so just to make sure you're clear.

So we do have liberty, in your view, to attend a rally like the

Tiki Torch Rally in Charlottesville and to say that blackness is this negative thing that attributes, it's attributable to violent tendencies and stealings.

So we have the liberty to do that kind of thing, in your view, to believe those and teach those things. That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying historically, the church has, okay, if we're gonna be honest, the church has. Sure. And I'm saying, and I think there's questionable things happening right now with something as simple as the church getting behind the birder conspiracy with Barack Obama, right?

Like that was a flat out lie and the church perpetuated that lie. A lot of Christians did, right? Which, and I would say there was some racial undertones there and that was not cool.

That was not okay. That was not truthful. That was not honorable. That wasn't okay. And so I think that's already happened.

Do we dismiss all those people as heretics? Do we dismiss all those people as a, no, I have to deal with these people.

These people are in my church. These people are everywhere. I think we, so how do we have these conversations is the question, not do

I have fellowship? Are they gonna be in my personal circle? Probably not. Are they going to go to a church that's around here?

Yeah, I talk to people regularly about this kind of stuff, AD. Well, I'm not saying you shouldn't talk to them, but you said that Christians don't have the liberty to believe and teach those things, but yet you would have fellowship with them.

So they actually do have the liberty in your view, even if you think they're wrong. Because I think you're wrong on not being a

Calvinist, but I agree, we have unity in the essentials. You don't have to be a Calvinist to be my friend or to be at my church, right?

But so I guess that's what I'm asking. Like, so you're saying we actually do have the liberty to be in error on some of that stuff.

People are in error. And I'm not saying that's a good liberty. People already are there. Is it good?

No. Is it beneficial? No. Right? Are Armenians who have a

God, absolute free will of view of God, is that good? No, I would say they're wrong on quite a few things, being able to lose your salvation.

I would say they're wrong on that, right? So I think there's degrees to this, right? I think you're using a hyperbolic example of white supremacy.

And is it okay to fellowship with somebody in white supremacy and do what we didn't have church discipline for the person that's a white supremacist, and then we're gonna take that, we're gonna apply it to every other thing, whether it's voting

Democrat, whether it's voting, being quote unquote woke. I understand your logic. I'm saying we're already here.

It's already tolerated and we're already dealing with it. Right, no, I understand. And it's not that a covert of an op on my side.

I absolutely don't think that there's liberty for a Christian pastor to preach racism from the pulpit at all.

I can't imagine why there would be. But it happens and you don't rebuke it, right? When I'm sure we can track down information.

Okay, let me point to a really practical example. Sure. Let me point to a really practical example. When Jerry Falwell went on the news, right?

And this is kind of in the fundamentalist crowd. And he went on the news and he goes, God's judgment for homosexuality.

9 -11 was God's judgment for homosexuality, right? Was that a true statement? Yeah, so I think that I wouldn't have said that God is judging a specific thing in a specific way.

However, absolutely it is true that God uses calamities like that to judge rampant immorality of which homosexuality is one of them.

So depends on how he said it. So Jerry Falwell was right to you? Right, so what

I was gonna say was it depends on exactly how he said it, but absolutely I wouldn't shy away from that. The Bible tells us that God judges countries for those kinds of things.

So you would align yourself with Jerry Falwell. So now let's move away from hypotheticals.

Let's move away from hypotheticals. What does that have to do with racism, Ruslan? Because I think it's homophobic and I don't mean homophobic in the sense of like, we need to protect the gays.

I mean, like you're literally going against somebody and then you're also blaming 9 -11 on a catastrophe and God's causing 9 -11.

I think, can God use it in his passive role? Yes, but I think you're going into some really dark murky territory to attribute that kind of stuff.

And I think that stuff should be called out. And I think that stuff should be talked about whether it's full on embracing of racism or misrepresenting races and creating hyperbolic straw man arguments about things that just aren't accurate.

I think that is also false. And we don't see that. See, we don't see that accountability from people within the right, within the religious right circles.

We don't see a ton of that. So when someone misspeaks on the other side, you're quick to make a video about it.

But when someone does something very questionable, I don't see AAD making videos about it.

Right, so here's the problem, Rahsaan. So you said that you don't hear me calling out racists against blacks on my channel.

And I said, name one, I'll be glad to. And then you went to a, what you call the homophobic statement, which

I don't understand how it's homophobic, but that's a side issue. What does that have to do with racism? I'd be glad to call out a racist pastor.

Name one and I'll call them out. We got to tell me what he says too. You want me to name you some? Okay, how about the Westboro - Well, just show me some.

Westboro Baptist, do you think what they do is cool? What do they do? They line up in front of funerals and they hold the -

No. Okay, so would you call them out? Yeah, yeah, the Westboro -

Have you called them out? No, because my channel is about social justice. So you have a specific niche that you run in and anything outside that, any injustice that happens outside of your niche of social justice, you don't speak about.

I mean - It's a great tactic. Like it's a great tactic to punch up as a YouTuber, to make videos, to do all this kind of stuff.

It's a good tactic to build a platform, but is it reflective of a just approach to call out falsehood when you see it?

Ruslan, is your point that I have a channel on social justice and that means that I'm for other kinds of injustice?

Is that your point? No, I didn't say that. I'm saying - I'm saying Proverbs says that false scales are an abomination to God.

So if you're going to be the guy that's anti -social justice, be consistent and call out when there is actual injustice happening as well, unless you have an agenda and you're trying to propagate something to force your view on people.

Ruslan, this is an impossible standard because there's an injustice that has happened in the world. Hold on, hold on,

Ruslan. because I call out people on the left all the time. It's not an impossible standard. Okay, Ruslan, I got to organize this a little bit because you switched the game here a little bit.

So what you've now said is that I don't call out people on the right, which is untrue. Like you're inconsistent. However, what you started off with, which is what

I want to focus on, and then once we finish that, we can move to the next one, is that if an injustice happens that I don't talk about, then

I'm inconsistent. Ruslan, there are injustices that have happened in the world that you don't talk about.

And I'm sure that we could point out a bunch. That doesn't mean you're inconsistent. It just means you have a certain topic and you have a certain time that you can,

I can't address every topic and neither can you. That would be an unfair standard for me to hold you to, Ruslan. So why would you hold me to that standard?

So this is what I'm saying. When something comes out and it's fun for AD to dunk on the leftist wokest from, you know,

Wokestan, you're quick to make a video about that. When something comes out in opposite of that, when something comes out that is so outside of what your spiel is, you don't do that, right?

So I think that's a bit inconsistent. So when something is misleading, I don't think you have an accurate just go. And I get it.

Again, from a YouTube building standpoint, I think that works. I think it's a good strategy from YouTube.

I don't think it's reflective of somebody that should have just scales and be down the line when we're talking about highly sensitive issues.

So I'm saying to you, I've been consistent in these things. I've spoken out against the left consistently. This is on my channel.

You can go verify it. There's multiple videos about AOC and the dumb things she said. There's multiple videos about Nick Cannon and the stupid things he said about white people.

I've done this consistently. You do one thing and one thing really well, props to you, great YouTube strategy.

I think it's smart. I don't think it's reflective of someone that's actually concerned with justice. That's what

I'm telling you. Right, so this whole thing started with, you know, you said that I don't call out white racists against blacks.

I asked you to name some that I could call out. I'd be glad to do it. And then you said that I don't call out all injustice.

The reality is that if there were white racists that were saying things about blacks in the

Christian church which is what my channel is about. It's about racism in the Christian church, the social justice movement in the Christian church.

If there were things like that, I would call them out. So I don't know what the point is, but yeah, my channel isn't an all topics channel.

It's not a biblical justice channel. It's a channel to dunk on social justice warriors. Yeah, right?

Well, that's a big part of my channel, yeah. If something is a falsehood, do we not have a responsibility to call it out?

If this is now in the realm of your niche is you primarily do social justice stuff. You dunk on the social justice warrior.

Yeah, that's my channel. So what I'm saying is when something comes out that's incongruent with that, when something comes out that's inconsistent with that, you have zero responsibility to make any kind of course corrections.

But like what? Give me an example. Here's an example. The Vody controversy that just came out, okay?

What's the Vody controversy? Okay, so you don't know. That's what I'm saying. Let me explain. Ruslan, how can I comment on something that I don't know?

80, because this is your wheelhouse, my brother. You live in the wheelhouse of dunking on a social justice warrior. One of the faces who created a lot of the straw man arguments against the social justice warrior has just came out to the point where Neil, the other guy, is saying he looks like he plagiarized a lot of stuff from his book.

Who's Neil? You don't know who Neil Shenvey is? It's interesting because you have a whole video about Neil Shenvey. Yeah, I know who Neil Shenvey is. So Neil Shenvey just came out and agreed that the guy who wrote

Fault Lines, Vody, has misspoken, misattributed quotes, and plagiarized.

This is on Twitter. This is public information. Everybody's talking about it. You don't have a desire to post correct. You don't have a story.

This is everywhere. Everyone's talking about it. Okay, maybe it's not everywhere. I'm being hyperbolic. Ruslan, let me just say this to you. This is the first time

I've heard of this. Okay, so are you gonna make a video about it? Are you gonna make a video about it? I have to. Well, I'll make a video about it if it's worthy of a video.

As long as you make a video about it and you hold people to the same scales of plagiarism, of misquoting things, of creating strawmans, and adding words to stuff that's not true.

As long as you do that, bro, respect. As long as you're consistent, respect. If Vody Bauckham was plagiarizing people, absolutely.

Okay, he plagiarized an atheist. It's pretty much confirmed by multiple sources, including Neil, including Neil Shenvey. You guys can go on Twitter, look at it.

Okay, all right, you heard it here first. Ruslan says that Vody Bauckham plagiarized an atheist. Which atheist?

You want me to pull up the whole article right now? Well, I don't know. I mean, you seem to know a lot about this. I know nothing about this.

Okay, so what I'm saying is, how about you educate yourself, do a little bit of research, and then you can know, too.

I'll pull it up for you. If you really want me to pull it up for you, I can pull it up for you. Hey, Ruslan, I have a question for you. What's your question, boss?

Do you do a video every single time that an injustice happens? If we're talking injustices connected to what our niches are, right?

So let's just say - What's your niche? Let's talk about that. Faith -related things, right? Faith -related things, and something is touching on a faith -related thing.

So let's just come out, and let's just say LeBron James comes out and says something crazy about white

Jesus, and all white people and white Jesus. Yes, I would do a video about that. And I have done videos when

LeBron James has misspoken about stuff and has been out of pocket. I can guarantee you that I would love to dunk on LeBron James saying something stupid.

However, I'd never even heard of that. So the thing is, I'm not out there hunting. This is the thing.

Like, you think I'm out there hunting things to find about people? I don't. If I don't know about it, how can

I do a video? What a weird standard, Ruslan. Do you admit that this is a weird standard? How do you come up with your videos?

I'm just curious. I mean, I have a list going, so whenever I run out of time,

I got a list. But if people bring things to my attention and other things, I don't. I'm not spending tons of time researching.

I respect you, Ruslan. That's why I have notes in front of me. Normally, I don't even have any notes in front of me.

So this is the thing, like, Ruslan, I just, I don't know what kind of a point you're trying to score here, but it's like, yeah,

I don't do videos on everything. I mean, I guess that's, is that bad on me? If you have a specific,

I've already explained it. You want me to explain it a different way? Or do you want to move on? I think I made a pretty clear point.

If your thing is to dunk on this, something comes out that's incongruent, with, we're gonna talk about my plat video, right?

You provided some information, and I of course corrected it, and I said, hey, it appears at this timestamp that he was a member of the

SBC. I corrected that, even though it wasn't in the interest of what I was saying, right? So I'm saying, there's just scales there.

I'm saying, I don't see that from you, A .D. I see a one -sided, let me find the easiest stuff to dunk on, and then consistently just bag on the same thing over and over again.

How many of my videos have you seen, do you think? Well, I didn't watch all 12 you've made on me, so kudos to you, that's a lot of time, man.

I don't know how you're able to pump so much content out. So I didn't watch all 12 that you made on me.

I've watched a couple of those. I watched your Phil Fisher video. I'd say I probably watched,

I've scrolled through your feed, like I've scrolled through your entire feed, and looked at all the topics you cover. I'd say

I probably watched maybe a dozen or so. How many videos of mine have you watched? Three. Okay, so I've watched more of your content than you have of my content, is that fair?

Okay. Yeah, probably. If you've watched 12, then yes. Cool, so if you've only watched three of my videos, why is there what appears to be this consistent attack, and what

I would say is a misrepresentation of what it is that I actually believe. So whether it's, you've called me woke, you've called me leftist, no, you've called me a woke church avatar, which is good.

You've called me a leftist. You've watched three videos. I think it was a liberal. I don't typically use the word leftist.

It must have been liberal. Okay, you've called me a liberal, you've called me a woke avatar. What are some other things you've called me? I don't remember.

You don't remember? Okay, so you just say a lot of stuff. There's a lot though, there's a lot. Okay, there's a lot of stuff you've said. Okay, respect. So you've created attacks about me.

Sure. Having watched three videos. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, mostly I got that from the

Marcus video too, all that stuff. Right. Yeah. So you watched three videos? Yeah, that's right.

And you think the way, specifically you've spoken about me, a fellow brother in Christ, or at least I think, you think

I'm saved, right? I mean, listen, I have no knowledge that would say that you would not be saved.

Okay. You're baptized, right? Yeah. You're a member of a church? Yes. Yes, I'm a member of the same church.

It's just funny. Yes, I've baptized, been a member of the same church for a while, yep. Okay, so I'll treat you with the respect a brother deserves, yeah.

Okay, so if I'm saved, and I'm a brother in the faith, right? Why would you then make 12 videos about me, repeatedly miscategorizing me and name calling?

Well, I don't know what making 12 videos has to do with it, but - Call me a liberal, call me a liberal. Sure. Call me a woke avatar.

Sure. Call me a bee rabbit. I think Malibu's Most Wanted is a much better joke. Calling me a bee rabbit, and miscategorizing my actual positions, right?

Well, because - Go ahead. I don't think it is a miscategorizing, that's why. Well, of course, you don't think it's a miscategorization, but if you think it's a, if you would have thought that and had the courtesy to reach out or watch more of my content, you would know that I'm actually not a liberal,

I'm not a socialist, I'm not a woke avatar, had you actually sat with more of my content. Why would you say you're not a liberal?

Why would I say I'm not? Because if you go down to policies, you go over policies, I'm substantially more conservative than you are policy. Oh, I see the problem here.

So yeah, I'm not even talking about politics, I'm talking about theologically. Okay, so how do you think I'm a liberal theologically?

Right, because - If I hold to a biblical sex ethic, I hold to a conservative view of scripture, I hold to a conservative, you must join the local church, you should be baptized, salvation by grace through faith.

These are all conservative theological positions. How in the world am I a liberal or a progressive Christian? Right, because in the things that you would call non -essentials, you tend to fall on the liberal side of many of them.

I tend to, on what? Give me an example. Like female elders, for example. I don't believe in female elders.

So, okay, so let me ask you this. So you're wrong, I don't believe in female elders. Our church doesn't have female elders. Okay, so maybe

I should have say, so what do you believe like a woman should preach or exercise authority over a man? No, I don't believe a woman should exercise authority over a man.

Okay, got it. So I was misinformed about that. You were misinformed about that. So to be clear, our church does not have female elders.

I don't think a woman can hold the position of an elder in a church. I don't think a woman can hold the position of a senior pastor of a church.

So you were wrong about something because you hadn't sat and actually asked me or did the research. Not saying you have to ask me about every single theological position, but this is where I think charity is extended, right?

Like I see misrepresentation on your channel, I reach out to you and I left a comment right away. Hey man, when you said this and this and this, this wasn't really indicative.

The whole sushi bit, when I said, because I didn't watch it all of it, but you said Ruslan thought

UBI was a bad idea because he couldn't get sushi. No, that's actually not what I said at all. I used a real life illustration and then

I said sushi. Oh, right. So you're creating these falsehoods and it's fine and it's be rapid, but I wouldn't do that to you.

That's what I'm saying. Like if I came on here and I started name calling you, I started saying you look like a tall hobbit and you definition of Schmiegel from the hobbit.

And I started doing all these things. It wouldn't be fair. And then I called you my favorite anti -racist racist, right? It wouldn't be fair to say those things to you because they wouldn't represent you.

If I said you were a covert white supremacist, it wouldn't represent you. If I said, you're a Puerto Rican man, you have dignity.

I think you're a brother in the faith. I wouldn't make a video like that about you. How was that charitable? How was that not slander, my friend?

Right, so, okay. So I apologize for being mistaken about your beliefs on female elders.

I watched a video that you did by, with Julie something or other, Schaefer. She was not an elder at our church.

I didn't say she was, but in that video. How'd you watch the video? How'd you get to the end of the video? We talked about, we don't believe senior pastors and we don't believe women could be elders in the church.

We believe, you see what I'm saying? How'd you finish the video? You wouldn't know. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Do you believe that women can be pastors?

I believe women can preach. I think that that title of pastor is going to go down to the semantics.

So I view the position of pastor as the word elder, right? Like I take a more reformed position on that, right?

Elder, pastor, interchangeable. There's some people that have youth pastors that aren't elders, right?

Certain churches, certain camps. So they can have pastors that aren't elders. So I think it comes down to the definition. I would say in my case, based on the elder pastor wordage,

I would say no, a woman cannot be an elder overseer pastor based on that word. If we're talking about a woman youth pastor, a woman's woman, a woman's worship pastor, that's a different definition.

Ruslan, you just got done saying to me that you don't believe that women should teach or exercise authority over a man.

And then you, hold on, hold on. I did not say women can't teach. I'd never said that. I said a woman can't.

I said do not exercise authority over a man. I think a woman can teach and not exercise. I think a woman can write a book.

I think a woman can lead worship. I think a woman could do announcements. That doesn't mean she's exercising authority over a man. I asked you if a woman could teach or exercise authority over a man.

You said no. I said she cannot exercise authority over a man. That was my word. Okay, got it.

So, okay. So the point is, you do think a woman could teach.

Hold on, stop, stop. I didn't now, I didn't. See, now you're playing a word game here.

No, you didn't. What you did on your Marcus Pittman video, you have. You've historically misrepresented me and you've slandered me.

No, I have not. Yes, you have. So here's the reality. If I'm giving you a position and I'm saying this is my position, ask me what

I think about the position and you're now changing it and you're creating a straw man and you're name -calling and you're giving me labels that I don't identify with, how is that not misrepresentation and slander,

AD? For name -calling you? For name -calling me and calling me labels that I don't identify as a liberal.

I don't identify as a leftist or a woke avatar. I didn't say you identified as a liberal. That would be slander. I said you are a liberal.

I didn't say you identified as a liberal. I'm saying, AD, I'm not. That's a misrepresentation. Just like you're not a white supremacist, right?

And even if I would say you had white, I would never say you had a white supremacy tendencies or you were a covert white supremacist. You probably would say

I have covert Marxist tendencies or some nonsense. I didn't say that. Okay, I'm saying you would. Because Marcus Pittman did and you agree with Marcus Pittman, right?

No, in fact, in the video, I said that I wouldn't have gone down the Marxist road with you.

Okay. But you definitely believe some things that are more socialist than you ought. Like what?

So, but no, no, no. Let's not go any further here. You just made a claim. You gotta back the claim up and ask me if I believe what you think.

I believe. I will, but - I come from actual communism, Leninism. I come, that's so disrespectful to say to somebody that comes from that, brother.

Like you think it's fun and games to call somebody a socialist and a communist. It's not, bro. Like we've lost people because of communism.

It's not lit. I don't, I'm not for communism. I don't even like the idea of democratic socialism. I've made videos about that.

So you're misrepresenting me because you don't know. You don't know what you don't know. So I'm here to help you understand. Right, okay.

So let's back up to when you said, when I asked you if you believe if people could, or women should teach or exercise authority over men, then you're saying, this is your claim, that you kind of answered my question by only answering the second half of the question.

Can a woman - Hold on. Teach without exercising authority over man to you, AD? I'm just curious. Not when they're preaching, definitely not.

So if a woman is preaching at a woman's ministry, she is, she's out of line. She's out of pocket to you.

If a woman is preaching at a women's ministry, yeah, she shouldn't be preaching. She shouldn't be preaching at all.

She can teach women, but she shouldn't be preaching at all. But the point is though, but this is all secondary stuff here, because I just want to make sure

I've got the score here right. So you answered half of my question, then said, I'm misrepresenting you by saying you believe that women could be in these church leadership roles, elders, and stuff like that.

AD, you know there's a middle ground to this position though, right? Like, you know, it's not one or the other. You know, there's a lot of people that don't believe women could be elders and head pastors that believe women can teach.

Like, there's a middle ground there. You understand that, right? Like, you don't have to be one or the other extreme. It's very binary the way you're presenting this argument, which again, a lot of what you present is very binary.

You're either - Well, the Bible's very binary. You're either, so again, would you identify as a fundamentalist as everything is black and white to you?

I wouldn't identify as a fundamentalist, but I don't have a problem with someone calling me a fundamentalist. But you are a fundamentalist because everything, you have an answer for everything.

You have certainty on every single doctrinal position under the sun. So Ruslan, what's happened here is very interesting. I don't take offense to this, by the way.

So don't hear me saying that I'm upset with you, but you literally just did the thing to me that you said

I shouldn't do to you. So in other words, I know you don't identify as a liberal, but I think you're a liberal. No, hold on.

And you took offense to that. And then now, a few minutes later, you've turned around on me, knowing I don't identify as a fundamentalist, called me a fundamentalist.

And I don't take offense to it, which is why I do it to you. I don't think it's a problem. So AD, I apologize.

If you don't identify as a fundamentalist, if that's not a title that you wanna wear over yourself, then I would say, man, my bad.

I did not mean to label you something that you do not identify as. That's my bad. I shouldn't have said that. Fair enough. I don't take offense to it.

And if I ever made a video, if I've ever said that publicly about you, if there's ever a comment floating around, AD is a bad fundamentalist, covert white supremacist,

I would take that down in a heartbeat, because I've misrepresented you, and that's not charitable. Okay, got it. So I think we're good there.

I think we're good there. So the point is, I do understand. But are you acknowledging, but can you just stop for a second? Can you acknowledge that you've misrepresented me and slandered me by calling me a socialist or calling me a liberal when

I'm telling you that's not what I am? And if you actually listened to my position, you wouldn't understand that that's not what I am.

So no, I won't admit that I slandered you. However, so I will admit that you don't identify as those things.

If I ever said that you identified as those things, then yeah, that would be a misrepresentation, a slander, a lie, just a straight up lie.

But the thing is, I didn't say that you identified as those things. I just said that you just are those things. We're playing a semantics game, but nevertheless -

We're not playing a semantics game. I'm saying I don't appreciate those labels being thrown at me. I don't like those labels. I am not those labels. I can understand that.

And I'm saying that's not fair. It's not charitable. It's not honest. It's a misrepresentation. It is a lie. It is the very definition of slander to me.

And I take that very seriously, as should you, considering it's one of the commandments, one of the 10 commandments. I know you love the law of God.

Yeah, I absolutely do. So I wonder, so here's the thing. So now let's go back to what you wanted to talk about and then we can move on.

So what was the thing that you wanted me to defend? What thing I wanted to defend? Remember I stopped you and I said, hey, let's go back to this other thing.

Maybe you don't remember anyway, that's fine. If you think about it, that's okay. So what would you say about someone who teaches from the pulpit that it's okay to be covetous?

It's okay to lack forgiveness? Would you say that that person is, is that an essential or a non -essential?

It's okay to be covetous? It's okay to be covetous, you know, engage in covetousness, lacking forgiveness.

That's also okay. Would you say that that's an essential or a non -essential? I would say they're in error.

And I would say, if I had heard it, I would probably unpack it with them. Why do you feel this way?

Okay, so non -essential then? Liberty? What do you, are you saying, can you have

Christians on platforms that are in error? And am I allowed to fellowship with them and have dialogue with them?

Is that what, is that the question? Well, I'm using, sort of, yeah, like - Because if you go over multiple examples, I mean, just get to the question.

Do I think that people can be in error and we can still welcome them in as brothers, even though they're in error? And I'm telling you, yes, we can.

And we can unpack those things and we can talk about those ideas. So non -essential in the sense, like we can have liberty there.

We can hash it out. When I say non -essential, I don't mean unimportant. I mean that liberty to disagree on some of that stuff is what you're saying?

I think we have liberty to disagree on a number of topics that should be hashed out and should be talked about as long as we aren't slandering and misrepresenting people's actual positions, which is my actual issue with you,

AD. Got it, so - I think you've misrepresented me and what my position is, and that's my actual issue.

I don't have a problem with you attacking ideas or mocking ideas. I think that's fair game.

I think you should, if you think ideas are stupid. But when you're attributing false ideas to people that don't hold those values,

I think that's misrepresentative and slanderous. I don't think it's indicative of the fruit of the spirit. I don't think it's indicative of how

Christ would have you speak, who told us that we will give an account for every word. It comes out of our mouth. Yeah, oh,

I understand. But again, I mean, you haven't answered the question. I really want an answer to it, so -

I answered the question to you, AD. I answered it five different ways. So, can somebody be an error? You're an error to me,

AD. You're an error to me based on the way you make videos, that the vast majority of your videos are about other brothers in the faith.

The vast majority of your videos are more about what you're against than what you're for, that you barely teach from the Bible on your platform.

I understand it's a social justice. I'm gonna dunk on social justice. I think you're an error, AD. I really do, but I would not remove fellowship from you.

I would bring it to you, and I would hope that, hey, man, can we find some common ground on these issues? Right, okay.

So, I'm exhibiting the very thing you're asking me of. Like, I'm literally doing, I'm literally trying to be here and be charitable and communicate with you, because I genuinely care about you as a brother in the faith.

I understand that you're trying to be charitable here, but the reality is that I really have a hard time thinking that you've answered my question, but I'll go with it.

So, essentially, yes, people can be an error, and any error that some - I think you're an error, and I'm here with you right now, and we could fellowship, and if I was in Vermont, we would probably go grab dinner.

If you were in California, I would invite you to have breakfast with us. So, the issues that I'm wrong about are some of these non -essential issues that we have liberty on, we can have unity around.

Yeah, yeah, but what I'm saying with you is, I think you're actually coloring outside of the lines of Christian conduct, and I think that's been brought to you before.

I think that's brought to you multiple times before, outside of your comments section. That's been brought to you before. So, if we're talking about, hey,

South Side Rabbi, right? KB and Amin, they came on your platform, or if you did on their platform, I don't know which one was, and they said, hey, man, you gotta stop misrepresenting us, calling us a social justice warrior, right?

That really happened. That was something that was brought to you. And I said, no, I wouldn't stop. Okay, you said you wouldn't stop, but so those brothers brought that to you, they felt they were misrepresented and slandered.

That happened, okay? And then there was a situation where someone, I believe somebody in your local church came from an

SBC. You guys aren't an SBC, but some of this SBC person had this thing. Do you really wanna go here? Yeah, because I actually, I'm genuinely wanting to know.

So somebody comes, and then they persuade your elder to ask you or position you to step down, and you never finished the rest of the story.

And then the only two videos I've seen you preaching afterwards, which, by the way, Leviticus 17, was it Leviticus 17, Leviticus 27, you did a really good exegesis on that.

And I was like, man, that's so dope. He's actually doing exegesis, and helping me understand why he believes what he believes, and you're kinda dunking on atheists a little bit.

Post that video. So now we have your own elder being confronted and pulled by somebody to the side, saying, hey,

AD is reckless with his mouth. He's talking bad about brothers in the faith. That's not okay, okay?

So then that happens, and then you have your situation with Kirk Kennedy. You made, I don't know, 25 videos about him.

You guys went back and forth. Apparently, you guys reconciled. So I'm saying, this is brought to you multiple times, AD. Multiple people bring it to you.

And I'm bringing it to you. You've misrepresented me. I feel like you've slandered me, right? So maybe it's not everybody else,

AD. Maybe it's not the SBC, and the Gospel Coalition, and Timothy Keller, and John Piper, and all these other brothers. Maybe it's you, man.

Maybe it's you that needs to do some self -examination. Hey, Ruslan, can you stop for a second? You've been talking for a long time, and you've been saying a lot of things.

So let me ask you a question, Ruslan, since you seem to know a lot about me. You didn't answer the question, though. Have you ever thought that maybe it's you?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think about myself and the conduct that I, what I engage in on YouTube.

Every single day. Out of pocket with the way you speak of, by name. Again, the difference between mocking ideas, and mocking theologies, or whatever, but you're now attacking people by name.

Brothers that have, Timothy Keller, I mean, you said that that was one of the people that brought you to the Lord. Now he's too woke, right,

John Piper? Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's absolutely too woke. So everybody is woke. Everybody, that's the most weird, like I'm the last tribe.

We're the only people that are really saved. Everybody else is wrong vibe. Just very, comes off very weird, man.

Yeah, it's, what's funny is like, it's amazing how many false things that you can say in a short amount of time.

I have a big, Ruslan, Ruslan, I have one of the biggest tense you could possibly have in the

Christian faith, and I get flack for it. I think that if you're a baptized believer, and not excommunicated, then I owe you the courtesy of treating you like a brother in the faith.

Okay, but how do you extend it? Well, obviously, baptize in the name of the Trinity. That's the key here. Okay, so you're against the oneness people.

But here's the thing, though, so, what? So help me understand the church, help me understand the church thing.

Right, so the whole situation with my church, when I was confronted by the other elder, what do you think happened after that?

Like, how do you think we handled that? You stepped down, right, to my knowledge. You stepped down, you said the rest of the story would come out.

I was trying to do some video. I did step down, but how do you think that was handled?

I mean, because you seem to know a lot about it, and so, you know - I don't, I'm asking you. I'm saying, here is a situation, your own elder confronted you on something inside of your own church that you were pastoring, and then you had to step down for it.

You chose to step down for it. So if somebody - You said you weren't on church discipline. I want to be clear, you said you weren't on church discipline. But I'm saying that happened, and then there's this pattern of people who keep confronting you,

AD, who keep confronting you, and you just kind of nonchalantly brush it off and think that it's okay.

Ruslan, do you think that if somebody - Ruslan, do you think if somebody confronts you about a sin, that that automatically means you've sinned?

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, I think you have sinned. I think if we pull up the definition of slander, I think you've misrepresented me.

That's what I'm telling you. Right, okay, got it. So do you want me to answer the question about what happened at the church?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm genuinely curious about the church thing. So what happened at the church was my elder confronted me about my tone, and he said that it was wrong to criticize other believers online, no matter what, even if the gospel was a threat, whatever.

Basically, you've criticized other believers online, right, Ruslan? I've maybe done a video on Kenneth Copeland.

I've done a handful of videos. Other professed, people that profess Christ. I genuinely try not to criticize people by name and dunk on people by name.

Like, if you look at the vast majority, I think I did one video on Bethel, one video on Kenneth Copeland, a handful of videos, by and large,

I've made people on my platform. I've done maybe two videos, yes. You've done it, okay, got it. So you've done two videos of criticizing other believers by name.

So he said that you can't criticize other believers no matter what. Like, it's a sin no matter what, which

I think is completely preposterous. He said that in terms of, like, you can't criticize

Kenneth Copeland, you can't criticize, I don't know, Joel Osteen, like Creflo Dollar, like he said, anyone that claims the title of Christ, or did he say people with coloring within the lines of essential orthodoxy?

So he was talking about people that profess faith, you know, people that have orthodoxy, I guess. But the thing is, obviously, that's in the eye of the, there's obviously some nuance there and some wiggle room.

But the point is, though, that this is all nonsense anyway. There's specific people that you talked about that he was talking about.

Like, were there specific names where he said, hey, nah, these guys are solid Bible teachers. You're attacking solid

Bible teachers. This is inappropriate because he's a solid man of God. And there were specific names, not a hypothetical, and you can't ever say anything negative about a

Christian ever. Was there specific people that they found that this is inconsistent, you shouldn't speak about people this way?

So here's the deal. So I don't remember the details. I think there were some specific names that especially concerned him, but he gave a blanket statement.

This is all irrelevant, though, because here's how it was handled, Ruslan. We couldn't figure it out between us because it's obviously preposterous to say it's a sin to criticize other brothers by name.

That's a ridiculous standard. The Bible does not, Jesus didn't meet that standard. Paul didn't meet that standard, all of that. So I said, I don't agree with you.

What's that? I've heard your explanation. Go ahead, I'm sorry. I didn't agree with him, so we couldn't figure it out. So what we did was what the

Bible says to do. We brought every family, every male leader in the church, not just leader in the church, just every male member of the church.

How big was the church? What's that? How big was the church? It was small. It was probably six, seven families, something like that.

Okay, so like a couple dozen people, like 50 people. Yeah, something like that, right.

So anyway, the point is, so there was like six guys in the room. So it was people in the church, and then a non -member male that we both respected, an ex -pastor in the area, right?

We both respected him, and they were gonna mediate this dispute with us. And so then what happened after that is that every single person to the man said,

AD is in the right, you're wrong, Chris, you're wrong. That's what his name was, Chris. And so Chris said,

I don't care if I'm wrong, I'm gonna step down. I can't do ministry with AD anymore. So what

I said was, I don't want the church to blow up over this. So why don't I just stop being a pastor since you can't do ministry with me, even though everybody disagrees with you,

I don't want, I think this was a mistake in hindsight, Ruslan, so I made a mistake here, I shouldn't have done this, but I did that out of, you know,

I want the church to move forward. That's how it happened. Okay, and so how did the church come out?

So people confronted me. Did you leave the church? And then everyone agreed with me, and that's how it was handled. Okay, did you leave the church?

So I didn't leave the church, I stayed with the church, I was planning on staying there, but unfortunately the elder decided to quit anyway, a week later.

He stepped down anyway, and so the church dissolved? That's right. Okay, so do you not see any correlation of maybe not a broad general, you can't ever talk about Christians, I know that's how you interpreted that, but do you not see any correlation of you going against solid, godly, faithful Bible teachers?

There's a correlation, but this is a thing. Hey, AD, this is not indicative of how an elder of a church should speak online. Outside of tone, no, no, no, this is not okay.

You don't see any correlation there that this was what happened? Right, there is, of course there's a correlation, because that's what his complaint was, but the reality is that these people aren't, these aren't gods we're talking about here.

These aren't sacred cows that cannot be criticized. This is totally fair game, and if you watch the videos that I was doing at the time, they were super respectful in general.

So the reality is that he just didn't like that I was criticizing his heroes, and I think that that's often the reality here.

You don't like that I'm criticizing you, Ruslan, and I can understand that. I don't like when people criticize me, but it doesn't mean that -

Have you gotten more disrespectful since then? Like, has your content intensified in your level of disrespect? My content has changed, but I wouldn't characterize it as more disrespectful.

That's a very weasel -y thing to kind of slip in there, buddy. You're like the Christian Crowder. Like, that's kind of like your shtick.

I've never watched an episode of Crowder, so I don't know. Yeah, which you're a lot like him. From what I understand of Crowder, I would take high offense to that.

Why would you? I mean, it's literally like the same kind of humor, and it's like the jokes, and the mockery, and all that kind of stuff.

It's the same vibes. It works from a YouTube thing. I get it, AD. Like, it works from a YouTube thing. I think it's wise, it's true.

Again, I'm just saying, man, it's very difficult to say that this is indicative of how an elder of a church should carry themselves online, the way you speak about people.

Why? Because you're misrepresenting, and you're slandering people. I'm not misrepresenting. Okay, so -

Did you misrepresent Kirk Kennedy? Did you slander him? Yeah, so the things

I said about him were, there was a lot of truth there, but I called him a liar, which went a step above, which

I said, I think I said, literally, nobody should trust him in anything, or something like that, and that was unfair.

I'm sorry? So you crossed the line? Yeah, I crossed the line with Kirk Kennedy. And then you took down all 20 videos, right?

I love how you throw the number in there. What are you trying to say, Bruce? Are you trying to say I'm obsessed? I'm saying, bro, there's 12 videos about me. That's mad impressive.

Respect to you as a content creator. What I've noticed about - As a Christian elder, I'm kind of like, bro, like, ah.

I've noticed people, you and others, from this kind of more social justice -y perspective, they really have this laser focus on the number of videos that people produce about them.

I've heard this a number of times. I'm strictly speaking as a content creator. The number of videos is irrelevant. I'm saying, you've made a lot of videos about a lot of people.

Those 20 vanished. You crossed the line. You just agreed to cross the line, right? With Kirk Kennedy?

Yeah, not with everything, but yeah, definitely that last video crossed the line. Have you ever crossed the line before that? Any other times you say, man,

I definitely crossed the line? Yeah, there was one other time I said something. There's only one?

So just one other time you've crossed the line? What are you asking me? In a video?

Yes, in a video. What are you talking about? We're on YouTube talking about YouTube stuff, yes. Right, but the way you ask questions,

Ruslan, to be honest, it's very weasel -y. And even the way you answer the questions is quite weasel -y sometimes as well. So you're like slipping, you're like, hold on, hold on.

You're like slipping something at the end. It's like, so you've gotten more disrespectful over time, right? And I'm like, no,

I haven't gotten more disrespectful. No, I think your content has intensified. When I saw you walk through - It definitely has intensified. When I saw you walk through Leviticus, I was like, man,

I legitimately learned something from you. That was really dope. And you talked about the debate between the two sides. I thought I don't teach from the Bible, Ruslan.

Didn't you say that like 15 minutes ago? You have four videos that I've seen you reference the Bible and exegete scripture. I've seen four.

Four out of 12, that's pretty good odds right there, buddy. I'm not talking about the videos about me. I'm saying just scrolling up your timeline.

I saw the video on Matthew 18, I think, and the video on Leviticus, and I just kept looking. I didn't see a ton of Bible study stuff. So, I mean, it's just interesting as an elder -

So Ruslan, let me make sure I understand your point. Your point is because I don't have a Bible verse in the title, then that means

I don't preach from the Bible or teach from the Bible? How often do you preach from the Bible? Maybe I'm ignorant. Help me understand, how often do you preach from the

Bible? In many, many videos. I mean, definitely most. I don't want to say like 90 % or 80%.

51 % of your videos, you exegete scripture. Yeah, at least, yeah. Okay, respect. Exegete scripture though.

See, this is the thing about your questions though, Ruslan. They're kind of weaselly. Like, do I practice exegesis in those?

Am I in the Greek? No, I don't - The way you would on a Sunday. Do you teach through the Bible? The way you did when you were an elder at a church? Do you teach through the

Bible on your YouTube channel? No, because my channel is not preaching. Do you understand the difference between preaching and a YouTube channel,

Ruslan? Fair enough, you have a channel. You have a channel about social justice, fair enough. That's your niche on YouTube. I understand it's a good content strategy.

I'm not trying to be weaselly. I'm genuinely saying, AD, you do this well in this regard.

I'm saying I think this is incongruent as a follower of Jesus to be on YouTube making a ministry that's primarily against stuff and against other

Christians. I think that's very incongruent. And I'm saying specifically with me, I can't speak for anybody else. Specifically with me, you've misrepresented me.

I don't appreciate it. I'm not a liberal. I'm not a woke avatar, so on and so forth. I don't think that's a reasonable assessment of me.

And I know you would say, well, that's what you are regardless of what you think you are. Okay, but, and I'm saying, hey, but you've crossed the line before.

You've crossed the line before. This has been brought to you before. And you're kind of just brushing it off, my brother. Like you're really just like, meh.

Okay, let me ask you a question, Ruslan. Why would you characterize me apologizing and repenting to Kirk Kennedy and then asking him, hey, you know, maybe you want me to take these videos down and then doing that.

Why would you characterize that as brushing it off? You said you never asked him to take those videos down. You said you just did it on your own.

True, true. That's true. Did you just lie? Was that a lie? We did talk about that. Okay, so did you ask him or did you do it on your own? But I didn't ask him to take them down.

I misspoke there. Okay, you misspoke. Okay, fair enough. So now stop for a second. I know you think you got me.

I don't, I don't think I got you. I want you to tell me. I'm giving you the definitive doubt in this conversation.

My conversation with you is, I think there's some blind spots you're exhibiting and it's maybe a little tough for you to see, as do

I, right? You're saying I'm being weaselly. Okay, I'm sitting here trying to like watch my own tone. So I'm not weaselly. I'm listening to you.

It's not about the tone, brother. Okay, whatever, about the way I'm navigating these questions. You think I'm not answering them. So let's get, so what was your question?

Do I think you - No, no, no. I said, why would you characterize me apologizing to Kurt, taking down the videos that were the offending videos, or just,

I think I just took all the videos down, if I'm not mistaken, but definitely the offending video. How would you, why would you characterize that as brushing off the confrontation?

I'm saying how many times, I'm saying in our exchange, and I didn't mean generally, I'm saying in our exchange, there's a pattern

I'm pointing to of you consistently misrepresenting brothers. And I'm saying, I'm telling you, hey, you could ask me and we can go through on if you think

I'm a liberal or not, right? Or whatever phrase you've came up for me, right? Sure.

And I'm saying the way you're coming off now is you're brushing it off. You're brushing it off. And you don't seem to really care to hear me on this.

The Kurt Kennedy thing is like, hey man, here's a pattern of this behavior with you. Right, right. Well, that's because I don't agree with you.

And I agreed with Kurt. So it's not that I'm brushing you off. I heard what you said. So you agree with Kurt that you've misrepresented him and you crossed the line with him, but you don't agree that you misrepresented me and you've crossed the line with me.

Right, Kurt, or Kurt. I'm Ruslan. Right, Ruslan. Nice to meet you. Because I asked you if you believed if women should teach an exercise authority of the man, and you answered half the question and then say, hey, that proves

I'm not a liberal. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't agree. We're not gonna do that. We're not gonna do that. I said there's a binary position.

You take the position that women can't ever teach. And if they're ever teaching, if they're ever preaching in any capacity, that's outside of the lines for you.

I'm saying there's a middle ground where a woman cannot be an elder or a head pastor, but still teach. And I don't think every time a woman teaches, she's exhibiting authority over men.

This is not a wildly uncommon position, though you might see it as binary. I think there's a middle ground.

It's a liberal position. I think the liberal position, AD, let's be clear, is the egalitarian position.

That's more liberal. Yeah, that's, no, I mean, I would say that's liberal. I think this is a more centrist position on that. If you wanna say

I take a centrist traditional position or a complementarian position, I do. I just think women can teach women's ministry and women can teach conferences and women can write books and women can run businesses.

I think that's okay as well. Can they preach on Sunday? Can a woman preach on a Sunday? Yeah, you know, to the men and the women.

Yeah, she has the covering of her elders. I think so, sure. Right, that's a liberal position, not as liberal as you could be, but it's a liberal position.

But let me ask you this. So hold on, hold on. You can't say that your position is the only right position and anything outside of this position is all liberal.

You're kind of moving the goalpost. So anything that AD doesn't believe is liberal, that's kind of wild, my man, because I don't think most people,

I think most people would look at my position and say my position is more conservative when we're talking about the broader spectrum of Christianity.

So yeah, when you frame it like that, which was very skilled and but very weasel -y again, of course, of course.

You're giving me a lot of credit, AD. I just wanna tell you, I don't think I'm that weasel -y or that orthodox right now. The way you framed it was that if someone doesn't agree with me, then it's not correct.

No, no, no, no, I'm saying let's pull back and let's get away from the little reform circles that we come from and the Protestant, and let's just pull back in globally and say out of all the denominations, out of all the

Christians, out of all the types of different Christians, if we say, do you guys think Ruslan holds a conservative or liberal position?

In my opinion, I think most people are gonna say Ruslan holds a more conservative theology because he doesn't believe a woman could be a pastor. Right, but that's not how

I'm judging, though. What I'm judging is by - Okay, you're judging based on your bias. So whatever your bias is - No, what I'm judging by is based on when

Paul says a woman should not teach or exercise authority over a man, and he doesn't add, unless she has a covering of the elders as well.

So that's what I'm saying. So it's not about what my opinion is or my preferences are. I think it's definitely what your - It's about what the

Bible says. I think it's definitely what your preferences is, but that's okay, let's move on. Next question. I'm sure you do, but I quoted the

Bible on purpose. I think a lot of this is your preferences. And then you take your preferences and you create straw men and dunk on people.

And I think that's cool. And this is why I think you're a liberal, because when I, it was funny, even in that Julie Schrader thing, at one point -

Shecker, Julie Shecker. Shecker, Julie Shecker. Yes. She's an author, by the way. She's dope.

Shout out to her. At one point, you read the Bible, and I think it might've even been that exact section where Paul says a woman shall not teach or exercise authority over a man.

I don't allow a woman to teach. And you said, that's a fundamentalist position. It's like, that's actually just the scripture though.

I think scripture has to interpret scripture. If we see other examples of scripture, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of, I mean, watch the whole video -

We don't have to. Let's talk about that. I don't want to go down the whole rabbit hole - We don't have to. Women in the scriptures, potentially being deacons and all these other things.

We don't have to do that. But like, I do think you read one verse and you form an entire theology on one verse. And I think there's other verses that show women leading, that show women being around the disciples, maybe even being disciples,

Jesus revealing himself to women. And you would say, no, it was that one verse. I formed my entire theology on that one verse. I'm saying,

I don't know if that couldn't dry. That's what you think I'm doing? I don't think it's that couldn't dry, AD. Next question. Hey, how much time do you have, by the way?

I'm sorry. I got time, bro. Today, I got time. Okay, cool. All right, cool. So we can move on from there.

By the way, AD, do you think anybody is going to walk away, like my people are going to walk away, liking your positions more, your people are going to like away more?

Cause I don't think, I don't think, I don't know if anyone's going to get one over here. Like you think

I'm, yeah, I don't know. I don't know about our people, but I definitely don't think we're going to win each other over. Sure. Respect. Okay.

So what's the next question? What else do you want to talk about? So, so yeah. So I guess, you know, what I wanted to ask you, cause you kind of said that my conduct in what

I do is a, I don't remember exactly what you said, but like of a church elder, that's that's not, not indicative of a church elder, which

I'm not anymore, but that's fine. Not aligned with the fruit of the spirit. Not aligned with the fruit of the spirit. What, what do you base that on?

Galatians chapter five. Let no unwholesome talk come out of your mouth, but that which is affirming and right.

I mean, do you want me to read some Bible verses to you? No. I know. I mean, we could do that.

I can go down that rabbit hole. I mean, we can talk about your mouth. If you want to talk about your mouth, I think, you know, That's what I'd like to talk about actually.

I think you know where you fall short, AD. And I think you're, I think you're trying to like, like laugh it off, but I think, you know, you have an issue with your mouth.

This has been brought to you before. And I think, you know that, and you, you know, you could, you could brush it off.

And that's your right to do with whatever you want to do with your YouTube channel. I understand. I think, I think my opinion,

AD, I think you can make your channel better and impact more people with the same ideas.

Cause I don't think there's a necessity to your ideas by using different tactics, by using more charitable tactics. And you might say, no,

I'm wrong. That's just, that's just my opinion. Like, I don't think it has to be what is AD against. I think you could say, this is what

I'm for. And this is why, let me give you good examples. Okay. I think you could actually do that very well.

Well, my question though, so, so, so I'm glad, I'm glad to talk about Bible verses if you want to, but my question is how am

I not obeying those verses? I guess, you know, so I know the verses, I know the fruit of the spirit,

Ruslan, come on. But how, how does my conduct contradict that? I guess is what my question would be then.

Are we, are we held accountable for our words? Yes. Okay. So if I, if I come on my channel and I say,

AD, he is a covert asymptomatic white supremacist and he has these values and so on and so forth.

Right. And I, and I, and I just, and I just completely attribute a bunch of things where you say, that's not what

I represent. Right. I am not a white supremacist. And there are, even though there are folks that I would disagree with, if that would make that argument based on some of your ideology, they would say that you exhibit covert white supremacist ideology.

I would say they're wrong. I would actually come to your defense in that regard. I would say, I don't think AD is on that. I think AD really believes what he believes.

Right. Got it. So what I'm saying is if I did that to you, I think that would be a misrepresentation of you.

In the same way, when you call me a Marxist or a neo -Marxist or a liberal or a socialist,

I think it's a misrepresentation and it's a falsehood. And that's one of the 10 commandments. It's a falsehood. Valid, valid. So what you're -

I wouldn't do that to you. And I would say, hey brother, don't do that to me. Or at least reach out to me. And, and, and like, we got some dialogue.

Like I'm very easy to get ahold of. So would be, so, okay. So the conduct that you would say that is unbecoming of the fruit of the spirit would be labeling people.

I'm sorry? Falsehood. Sure. The false, the falsehood. So labeling someone, something that they're not owning.

So I'm not a covert white supremacist. And to sort of call me one would be a, contradicting the fruit of spirit.

And then if so, I'm doing it to you. I'm doing it to you. I don't think you are that. I don't think you are that. Great, great. Okay, fair, fair.

So, so, so for me to call you a liberal and you're not a liberal, that's the conduct that's unbecoming of the fruit of the spirit.

Or a Marxist. You've said more, but you, you, you know, avatar for the, for the woke church. Avatar for the woke church, right.

The name calling, so on and so forth. Yes. Got it, got it. I think Malibu's most wanted is a much better joke than B Rabbit.

B Rabbit, I mean, B Rabbit is Eminem. That's, that's, that's a freaking icon. So, okay. So then would you say that Eric Mason is in, in step with the fruit of the spirit?

Is his conduct in line with the fruit of the spirit? Is his conduct in line? Pastor Eric Mason. Sometimes not, sometimes, yeah.

Sometimes it is. And the times where I thought it wasn't, I did my best to push back on some of the stuff in our interview. Okay. And has he stopped doing the things that he's, that he's done that are out of step with that?

Has he stopped doing? Yeah, you know, the things that are out of step with the fruit of the spirit. Okay, so, so, so Eric Mason came on my channel and he clarified a few things.

He doesn't believe that all white, white people are racist. Sure. He doesn't believe that white people are incapable of righteous action with regards to fixing racism.

He, he called white people his brothers and sisters in the faith. Okay. Well, that's good. He, he, he denied the conclusions of CRT.

Okay. These are statements he made in our conversation. So has he stayed in line with that?

I think he has. Yeah, I think he has. Okay. I think he has. I don't know. I don't watch his content on the regular, but I think he has.

Would you, would you say that people that say that, you know, people that they don't know are, are engaged in white supremacy and whiteness and all this stuff, that those people just in general are out of step with the fruit of the spirit?

Rephrase that question. I'm sorry. People who don't know that. You know, white supremacy, like the people, they're saying people that they don't know are white supremacists, you know, this whole idea of whiteness and, and, and, you know, you might be like this asymptomatic.

Is that out of step with the fruit of the spirit? I think if Eric Mason were to make a sermon and call you out by name, right?

And make a sermon, call you out by name and say, hey, these are white supremacists. I would say that is out of step with the fruit of the spirit.

Yes. If Eric Mason, by the way, I'm not an Eric Mason apologist. I had him on my channel. Do you understand why I have guys like Eric Mason on my channel, guys like Chris, Chris Bouchard?

I think so, yeah. Why do you think I have him on my channel? I'm just curious. And I'll tell you what. Well, probably the same reason you have, you're, you're, you're having a conversation with me.

Okay. Which is? Which is you like to play yourself as I'll, I'll hear anybody out.

And then, you know, that kind of thing. We don't have unity in the essentials and, and liberty in the non -essentials. You think

I play myself as that? Oh, you noticed my weasel tactic that time, didn't you?

I got it. I got it. So you think it's a tactic. You think it's a tactic. You don't think that's genuinely my heart, my intent?

No, no, no. I said what I was saying was a tactic. That was a weasel tactic that I used. So you don't really mean that?

Mean what? That I play myself as someone that. No, I, I, I, no, I, I, I do mean that, but I tried to slip it in there.

That's what the tactic was. You know, you've done that a few times in this and I thought you would understand that that was a joke. But no, I do think you do that intentionally.

I think that you fall on certain issues, certain places that you don't necessarily show all your cards all the time.

That's what I think. But I mean, obviously you don't have proof of that. I would really love an example of that. Cause I feel like I'm pretty straightforward with showing my card.

Let me, let me give you my, my reasoning for that. Okay. This is, this is my reasoning. And maybe, maybe you think

I'm wrong and maybe you think whatever. If there is any precedent of there being racism, structural racism, systemic racism, if there's any precedent of that, and we know through history that there is, we know that through stuff like redlining that there is, we know through stuff like Jim Crow that there is, if there's any precedent that, and there are brothers who are saying, hey, here's what's happening.

Here is how we should address this injustice, biblical justice. And then they're getting dismissed and they're getting otherwise and they're getting attacked, right?

I'm saying if that, if that's, if there's any precedent to Timothy Keller, Matt Chandler, David Platt, Eric Mason, Chris Broussard, Lecrae, if there's any precedent to what they're saying,

I'm saying, hey, let's hear them out because I think the burden on proof is on the people that are the anti -anti -racist.

The burden on proof is, prove to me how there are no pathways, prove to me how there is no connection that what they're saying has impacted, right?

And that's how it goes into the semantics of how you define systemic racism and how you define the word racism, how you define the word

Marxism. So my heart, just so we're clear, is I'm looking at this, at the spectrum of this community that I was a part of at one point loosely, the reformed community.

You came to the faith, apparently through Timothy Keller. And I'm seeing men that have been faithful to the gospel, faithful to the essential, faithful to church planting, faithful to verse -by -verse

Bible teaching, faithful to all of these things, faithful to their wives, faithful to their families, faithful to all these different things.

And I'm repeatedly seeing them drag through the mud and be dunked on. And a lot of times people not willing to have discourse like this and talk through and hash it out.

And so my heart is, hey, Eric Mason has a book coming out. I'm gonna have him on. I've been to Epiphany.

I've seen the work. I know people that got saved through that church. I've seen the fruit, right? I think he's doing good work. Are there some things

I disagree with him? For sure, probably. Depending on what you bring on, yeah. If he thinks, and again, that's why I ask. So all white people aren't racist.

He says white people are more than sisters. I don't agree with the conclusions of CRT. I mean, so that's my heart with that.

Just so we're clear. If there's any precedent to this position having any validity of truth, I don't think it's very

Christ -like to dismiss it and create a binary. They're all wrong. They're all wokesists. They're coming to kill us.

They've identified Marxist ideologies. They're covert Marxists and they're gonna destroy America.

They're gonna destroy the church and they're gonna destroy everything we love. I don't think that's a fair attack. And to be fair, that's what it seems like.

I'm not saying that's what it is. I'm saying that's what it seems like the energy has been from the reform community to these men that I hold in high esteem, even though I don't even align with all their theology,

AD. So you think that people that brought these grievances of racism and systemic racism and stuff like that, that they need to, like you said that the burden is on the anti -anti -racist, which

I guess means the conservatives like my friends to say that these things don't exist.

Why would that be the case? So if David Platt feels like white privilege is a thing and feels like he's a part of the problem and he wants to talk about justice through a biblical lens, which

I think he did, the stuff I've heard, I'm not gonna sit here and talk, like I've heard all of his sermons on biblical justice, but the stuff that I've heard,

I don't see what the need to vilify him as, right?

To say, oh, well, this is really a Trojan horse for full -blown liberalism in the church.

Next, they're gonna affirm LGBTQ trans. Next, they're gonna say the Bible is not inspired. Next, they're gonna say it's okay for whatever the thing is that we're afraid of, right?

So I don't think that's right. If David Platt sees his whiteness as an issue, and maybe he was covertly racist, maybe he didn't understand -

I think a lot of these guys were, to be honest. Okay, so if they then take the burden and say, I wanna do that, I wanna work through that,

I don't understand what's the point of dunking on a Matt Chandler, if that's what he said, would you like to know the point?

I would like to, I think I know the point, but yes, I would like to know the point. Go ahead. Okay, so the point is that if Matt Chandler or David Platt or whoever you wanna bring up thinks that they're a racist and that they're participating in these evil systems and stuff like that, that's fine.

I don't have a problem with anyone believing whatever nonsense they want to believe about themselves. Or maybe it's true, like you said.

I think a lot of these guys probably were racist and they have guilty consciences. Where it becomes a problem and when

I have to step in, well, I don't have to, but I've chosen to, is when you start twisting the

Bible to try to twist people's arms to join you. So here's an example. So David Platt preached a sermon on Amos chapter five, which is one of my favorite

Bible passages, let justice roll down like waters, righteousness like an ever flowing stream. I think I might have seen your video on this.

And he exegeted it actually pretty decently. I mean, he went through it and it was all really good.

And then he shifts gears and he starts talking about income inequalities, wealth inequalities, criminal justice inequalities, and things like that.

And so he made it seem by couching it in Bible verses where he did a pretty good job and then he shifted gears.

He made it seem like Amos was talking about the fact that people don't have the same money. People don't have the same wealth or the same housing or whatever.

And that's not what Amos was talking about, obviously, but that's what he made it seem like. And the reality is that even if David Platt is not a covert

Marxist, what he's putting forward as an injustice is the inequality itself, is the money problem,

I don't have as much as you, that kind of thing in itself, which the Bible never calls it injustice. And so for him to sit there and pretend like the

Bible does call those things injustice, which Tim Keller does, he does it more explicitly and all this kind of stuff, that's a big problem for me, because I actually take when you slander my

Lord a lot more seriously than when you slander me. You could say whatever you want to about me, but when you start lying about God and saying that he's unjust when he's just, he's the one who gave people more or less and stuff like that.

So when you shake your fist at the sky and call God unfair or unjust, that really pisses me off. And so that's why

I get on YouTube. And at the time I would make these very calm, like, hey guys, let's talk this out kind of thing.

And then over time I got more aggressive because I realized that they would refuse to even hear anything.

They wouldn't want to have the conversation, they weren't listening. And then what you typically get is, well, you're racist.

It's like, come on, dude. Like, is that how this is gonna go? So I took a different approach and I said, okay, if this needs to be more of a bar fight, then it'll be more of a bar fight.

So that's what really grinds my gears. Like you could sit here and say, hey, AD doesn't teach from the

Bible. And I know that's not true and whatever, I can laugh that off, no big deal. But when you say

God is a certain way that he is not, I take that very seriously. It doesn't mean that I think you're an unbeliever, but I take that way more seriously than I take you misrepresenting me.

So let me, that's actually very helpful. So what it sounds like you're saying is when the justice of the

Bible is conflated with equal outcome of individuals, that that is not fair because God made the wealthy and the poor, right?

The poor will always be among you. Am I kind of tracking along correctly? Yeah, that's good enough,

I think, yeah. So, and when we say equal outcome, because I think there's a fair critique and we can go down like what is a fair critique and what isn't a fair critique.

I think there's a fair critique in saying everybody, like we shouldn't have equal outcome of individuals, right?

I think most people would say, yeah, like we shouldn't have, right?

In communist Russia, which is why I get so annoyed when people call me a Marxist or communist, we literally had equal outcome of everybody.

Everybody more or less lived in the same kind of apartment. Unless you were in the party. Unless, yeah, unless you were hanging with a, what's his name?

Yellen or whatever his name is. Stalin and yeah, no, who is the guy? Boris Yeltsin, I forgot his name.

Sorry, forgive me. So what I'm saying is we, that was not good, right?

Everybody, and granted there was no poverty. Like there was no like people on the streets and homeless people. And so we would say that's not good because everybody has more or less the same outcome.

Do you think that that is, do you think that that's what they're getting at?

Like, do you think they actually want the same outcome for every individual? Like we had in Soviet Russia? I'm really not trying to dunk or be a weasel.

I'm because this is where we can make, maybe make some progress. Maybe make some progress. Ruslan, I'm not shy about calling you a weasel, but I don't think that was weasel -y at all.

But I don't know really what they're, I don't know if that's really what their goal is. But when you cite the inequality itself as an injustice, that would logically mean that the only way to know that there wasn't an injustice is if everyone had the same, logically.

I mean, if that's the injustice, the fact that black families don't have quite as much as white families, then the way to fix that injustice, the only way you know if it was fixed is everyone had the same.

So whether or not they know this self -consciously or not, they're presenting this idea. Sure. So you just went to groups though.

You just kind of pivoted to groups. So you went white families, black families. I was talking about individual outcomes.

Yeah, or either, I mean, I'm talking about groups because that's what Platt was talking about, blacks and whites. Which by the way -

The wealth gap inequality. Which by the way, nobody has any respect for brown people. I just don't understand it. Nobody talks about us, but it's okay.

So the reality is that, yes, I think that that's the end up, that's what you end up going for if that's the injustice in itself.

Right. Yeah. So that's why we get all upset. For sure. So you would agree though, that they probably don't want that for everybody, meaning they don't want equal outcome, right?

You would agree that that's not their heart? They might not say so. I haven't talked to each of them.

But again, to cite the inequality itself as the injustice that needs to be addressed, that maybe

Amos was even talking about, is simply a recipe for going down that road to everyone having the same stuff.

It's a slippery slope from your perspective. I mean, I don't know if it's a slippery, I think it's taking a step off the cliff already because the

Bible knows none of this. Like the Bible doesn't talk about any of this stuff. So they've already jumped off the cliff away from the scripture.

Got it. So the Bible does talk about caring for the poor and that being a very important aspect.

We see that all throughout the Old Testament, right? So we would agree that we should care for the widow, care for the orphan, care for the alien, all these different things.

We agree on that. I would argue that if you're a Christian and your life doesn't have examples of you caring for the poor and giving for the poor and stuff like that, then you really need to take a good look in the mirror.

You're probably not an actual Christian. Yeah. Okay. I probably agree with that. Unless you're a poor

Christian and then you don't have extra to help other people. Sure. So do you think that in this spectrum,

I don't know how reformed you are, but do you think in the spectrum of predestination, is everything detailed down to the wire of someone's lot in life or do we have some degree of how our lives play out or do we have more?

Like, where are you at on that? I'm really Calvinist. Like, I did a video once that said, thank God for the slave trade in my case.

Okay. Respect. Okay. So you're being intellectually consistent there or whatever.

I'm trying. Yeah. So from your vantage point, through your Calvinistic double predestination lens, everything about everyone's life down to where they live, what skills they have, what access to information, the type of education they have is calculated to the detail by God.

But yes, by God. But that doesn't mean that there couldn't be an injustice there because the thing is that people do sins all the time.

So in the video, thank God for the slave trade, I recognize that that was an evil sin and the people that engaged in man stealing and trading in the man -stolen slaves should have been given the death penalty.

That's a death penalty offense. But at the same time, God was working out his good purposes in all of it down to the minute detail.

Yes. Okay. Okay. So if my position is, hey, there's actually a ton in scripture on how to build wealth.

There's a ton in scripture on how to steward our money. Yeah. There's a ton in scripture on, hey, if you not work, then you ought not eat.

There's a ton in there about sowing and reaping. I think Matthew 25, the parable of the talents is one of the best business passages, right?

Even though it's not about business, I think there's a lot we can glean from there. So if I'm looking at all these different passages and I see that, hey, people can actually progress in life.

People could actually build wealth in life. And as a Christian, this is why I don't like being called a liberal or a leftist or a

Marxist. A lot of what I'm talking about on my channel is genuinely trying to help people go from being in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, hating their job to, in a

God honorable way, transition and getting to a place where they can not live paycheck to paycheck, where they can get out of debt, where they can build wealth, right?

So I'm just telling you that's my lens in terms of how I'm coming at this.

It's a lot of proverbs. It's very practical. Oh, absolutely. So with that, if we then see systems, and we don't gotta get in the details of these systems, but if we see things historically, and there have been things,

I think we would agree redlining and Jim Crow have prevented certain groups from the access to build wealth by preventing home ownership, which is the number one way you build wealth.

Speaking out against that and trying to influence people to not do that, whether in the private sector, whether through the social lens, whether it's like, hey,

I'm speaking to my own congregation because I know there's people that deal with this in their heart and they're in positions of power, whether they're real estate agents or whatever, right?

I'm just using real estate as an example, not like as a literal thing that's happening. So do you see where I'm going with that?

Isn't there a precedent to say, hey, there's a disparity and not every disparity is racism, right?

Because we already know Nigerians make more than some white people in a lot of places, right? So there's a disparity here with descendants of slaves in America, and that's actually connected to bad policy, but also things that we would say were intentionally done to prevent them from building wealth.

Shouldn't we say and do something about that? My position, AD, just to be clear, I think we do that person to person and through technology and through social media and through helping people learn how to get out of debt and individually building wealth, understanding how money works.

That's my position, right? So other people, they wanna go into politics. Other people, they wanna go and protest, right?

Why do you think that's incongruent with a Christian like David Platt, Matt Chandler, whoever, saying, hey, you know what?

This subtle racism that we might have in our heart, this covert subconscious thing may be you preventing image bearers of God from opportunity even if you don't know it.

Why do you think that's bad to speak out on that? It's not bad to speak out on that. So the reality is that I believe that the

Bible applies to every area of life, probably even more than you do. And I'm grateful that you do in the areas of business and stuff like that.

And I absolutely think that it applies to government and how we do political policies and finances and all that kind of stuff.

And so I don't think that that's a problem. It becomes a problem though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Help me understand this part. How does it become a problem? This is good.

It becomes a problem when the policies that are advocated for go against the law of God.

And so I'll give you an example and I'm not saying that you agree with this or you don't. I have no idea whether you agree with this or not.

But one solution that's often brought up is reparations, right? Reparations is a solution that some people bring to the table, more so today than yesterday.

Every day, more people are on board with reparations. That is a possible solution that people propose, but it actually breaks and overturns a fundamental piece of God's law where God says that the son shall not pay for the sins of the father.

Every man pays for his own sin and all of that. So when Christians start advocating that and saying, well, you know, this is

God's heart for politics, that's not only is it a lie, but it'll actually cause more strife because sinning, you can't sin your way out of sin, right?

I agree that blacks were sinned against in the past, but you can't out sin the sin.

So you can't sin your way to get back from the sin. Doesn't work that way. Let me ask you a question. Is it possible that maybe you're misunderstanding how reparations would work?

By the way, if you watch my Chris Broussard interview, I tell him flat out, I think how we do this is through the private market and through people, educating other people and helping people, not through the government.

So just hear me out. Sure, if someone wanted to set up a private reparations fund to just give money to any black.

Yeah, yeah, that's not what I was getting at, but. Oh, okay, sorry, go ahead. Reparations, from my understanding, and again, just to be clear,

I don't think this is how it's gonna happen or if it will ever happen, but from my understanding, it's saying, hey, there are entities and institutions who have benefited from reparations that are around today, banks that are around today,

Fortune 500 companies that are around today, mortgages, I mean, just recently, Wells Fargo settled $165 billion because of some of the junk mortgages.

Many would say they kind of pried upon black people with the 2008 mortgage crisis, right?

I think they engaged in usury in a lot of that, so that's a sin, yeah. Yeah, so they just settled for that, right?

But let's just say that historically, there's institutions, and there are, Fortune 500 companies, and there are, that have benefited and their wealth has amassed based on the free labor and based on some of this discrimination.

And so, from my understanding, reparations is not a take from white people, give to black people.

It's, hey, these institutions have multi -generationally benefited and also multi -generationally hurt black people.

Does that kind of change? Because that's a lot of what's being proposed, and it's not all of it is direct cash payments.

Tax white people, give it to black people. That's a very simplistic view of the argument for reparations. By the way, which

I'm saying, I don't even think that's how we get into these situations. You're right, I get it. I don't think it helps at all, because, again, the people who own these companies now,

Wells Fargo, whatever it is, there are people that had nothing to do with the actual crime that you're alleging, you know, in slavery or in the redlining, whatever.

But they benefited from it, did they not? I mean, it depends on what you mean by benefit.

So, you know, different stockholders and stuff like that. So if I own Wells Fargo stock, which I never would, but if I did, did

I benefit from the evil that they did, you know, a hundred years ago? I don't think so, because I just bought the stock.

You know what I mean? Today. Yeah. I'm talking about these are publicly traded companies with stockholders, right?

That aren't individuals, you know, like family dynasties, right? So let me give you a really practical example.

A hundred years ago, here, I believe in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles, there was the black family that came out

West, bought Beachfront Resort, right? They were doing really well for themselves.

And then the city claimed eminent domain on them, right? This is in the 1920s. And so now there's a big debate on giving the descendants of that family, that property back, which the city unjustly claimed eminent domain on.

Is that something that you think is just completely outside the bounds of restitution?

I mean, I have to look at the case. So when they do eminent domain, usually they pay like a nominal fee for it.

So, you know, and obviously it's not what it's really worth because the government loves stealing. But, so, you know,

I could see maybe a case there where, you know, you give back the property or whatever it is that you took. It's a case by case basis.

Or something like that. But restitution is biblical, right? So if there's the people that are actually robbed from and the people that actually did the robbing, okay, that's something there.

There's something there. But the problem is that most of those people are dead. Yeah. Yeah, but their descendants live on and their descendants are -

Right, but that's the exact thing that the scripture is against. That the sons pay for the sins of the father. That's the exact thing that the scripture is trying to say no to.

Right, but we're not talking about people. We're talking about institutions. That's why I asked you, does it make it different for you when it's an institution, a corporation?

Yeah, the institutions are just groups of people though. So it's like, yes, there's a legal fiction of the institution, but it's just a group of people.

And so based on that, you would be completely against someone getting property back that their great grandfather bought and then had taken from them through eminent domain.

You would be against that. Well, it depends on who owns the property. There's a lot that goes into this. Without knowing the details, it's very hard to know what to do.

Can we say the same thing about the reparations? Because a lot of the time we talk about reparations, it's very simplistic, take from white people, give to black people.

And then when you get into the weeds, it's not that simplistic. There's actually all kinds of different proposals of how something like that could be achieved, which again,

I'm telling you, I don't think it's gonna happen. But all of them involve the sons paying for the sins of the father. Okay, so that's just your hardline position and there's no nuance for you on that.

Well, it's not my hardline position, it's the Bible's hardline position. Okay, you would view the scripture as a hardline positions that there's no way that generationally anything could be restituted?

Not in the name of justice, but someone could do that as they felt bad or whatever, they could do whatever they want.

I'm all for freedom, but in the name of justice, I don't know about that. You're all for freedom, what does that mean?

Like you're all for? So if there was a person that owned an institution that did something bad, whatever, and they just decided, okay, we're just gonna give this to, they could give it to whoever they want, they give it to aliens for all

I know. I mean, I don't care what they give it to you, but I'm just saying as a matter of justice, it's very different. Got it, and so because of that, you hold that position so strongly that anyone who writes a biblical argument for reparations or restitution like Tabati did, anyone that breaks it down on,

I think they did Gospel Coalition, Tabati, right? Did a whole thing on that. You would say, even though they did an argument, maybe they exegesis some scripture different than you and you guys disagree on some of the verses and how they're using it.

You would still take this real strong hardline position that they're a woke avatar and they want woke cookies and we should kind of dunk on them whenever we get, or you.

Well, so this is the thing. So the way you kind of frame it there is that I just say, oh, you're woke, shut up,

Davidi. It's really not how I do things. I actually will dissect. This is why I spent 12 videos talking about your video,

Ruslan, because I didn't want to just say, oh, Ruslan's just this woke idiot. I don't wanna do it. No, I took my time talking about your answers,

Marcus's questions, maybe how I would have asked the question differently, maybe how I would have answered differently.

And I took 12 videos to do that. And so that's what

I typically do. Now - That's what you do. So what I'm saying is do you think you may have came off like Ruslan is this woke idiot and portrayed me as such?

And I'll give you the two examples. I'll give you two very, very practical examples. One is the sushi bit, right? And again, I didn't watch all 12 videos, the sushi bit.

Like I couldn't get any further because I'm like, come on, bro. That's literally not what I was saying. I wasn't saying I couldn't have sushi so then

I became anti -UBI. So you're being funny and facetious but it's also miscategorizing me. And then the second bit is that when he talked about church discipline and you basically were like,

I cannot even comprehend the idea of church discipline. It's outside my realm of understanding.

Yeah, I remember that. But my church has walked friends through church discipline. Like I've - Sure. Just real quick story. I had two really close childhood friends.

Hopefully you're not watching this right now. We went to high school together. I love these brothers. They came to faith and within about a year or two of each other, they one day both called me.

Separate days. And we're like, yeah, I'm leaving my wife. And I was like, no, you cannot do that.

And they were like, no, I am. And I walked out 1 Corinthians chapter five with them.

And our church disciplined and excommunicated them. Good. And just so you know,

I was the guy that you're too conservative, you're taking the Bible too literally in my friend circle because I was like,

I'm not going there. I can't tolerate this kind of stuff. So what I'm saying is AD, so then when you present me as this dude that's like, oh, he's just so shallow.

Like just pat him on his head. He doesn't really under, he can't even comprehend church discipline. Like, do you see how that's one misrepresentative, but then you also see how that can be hurtful.

And I'm not saying like my feelings or whatever, but I'm just saying like, bro, like that's not even my reality. Like we really walk this out like multiple times.

This is just two examples I'm giving you, but multiple times this cost me friendships. This cost me opportunity, right?

To live out the scriptures to the best of my ability. So then when I'm presented as this shallow woke avatar, be rabbit idiot, that's not very kind, my brother.

Right. Okay. I get you. So, and that's fair. So, you know, I shouldn't have said that you couldn't even fathom church discipline or however

I phrased it. I remember what you're talking about. I don't remember exactly how I phrased it, but I shouldn't have said that. Cause I didn't know that.

I was reacting to your reaction, which I thought was pretty funny. Cause it was like,

I think you went like, wow, or something like that. Like it was just like shocking to the reaction of the YouTube metrics that we just got stuck.

Like that, that sounds right to me. I don't remember perfectly, but I think that's what you said when you said, wow, like you couldn't even believe that you couldn't believe that he said that Democrats should be disciplined.

That's fair. Yeah. I don't, I don't know if we want to unpack that, that kind of worms, but what would

I find value in your perspective, AD and I'm not just saying that to like stroke your

Eagle, meaning that like, I really would love to sit and learn more about this theomany stuff. Like I'm really, really genuinely curious on how that will play out and not like be stupid and like,

Oh, so you're talking Christian Saudi Arabia. Cause you know, this sounds like the hands made tail. Like that's that, you know, when

I think of like the guys that you're running with running the government, it really scares me. I see value and utility to us, to me learning from you.

Right. Do you think that, do you think there's any inverse of that? Like, do you think that there could have been any value to you reaching out to me and having a conversation?

And maybe we should have, maybe we should have just talked offline and got to know each other before you kind of just went to dunk on me and do this 12 part.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry not to bring up like the number of videos. Cause it doesn't matter. Cause that's not, I'm not trying to do that as like a flex, right?

Hopefully you're hearing my heart, bro. Like I'm not trying to be weasely. Like I'm really just saying, man, like I think had you reached out to me and heard me out, maybe you would have learned a bit more about my actual positions.

Maybe you could have corrected me in some areas. Maybe I could have pushed back and attempted to correct you in some areas. I don't, I don't know if, you know,

I don't know if, oh, at least corrected you about my positions on some areas. Sure. Is that, is that kind of registering?

Like the, the, the, Yeah, if you're asking me if there's value in conversations, I, of course I agree that there is value in conversations.

Now, you know, I'm not going to agree that I have to do a conversation with every person that I do a video about, obviously.

Yeah. I didn't say that. I'm saying with me, I'm fairly available. I'm not Matt Chandler. I'm not David Platt. I know.

No, I'm not saying you said that, but I just want it to be clear that like, I'm not committing to always reaching out to people before I do a video about them.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying there is value in having a conversation. Absolutely. Even this conversation I believe has a lot of value.

Yeah. Yeah. So what I'm not saying is AD needs to reach out to every single person or whatever. That's, that's, that's not what

I'm saying. Yeah, definitely. I'm saying with me, I would have appreciated that. Hey, listen, I can respect that.

I can respect that. Well, you know, we've been at this for two hours, man. I thought we were just warming up, man. You get it out on me?

Yeah. Are you? Okay. No, but we can, we can go for a little longer for sure, but I just wanted to make sure that, you know,

I just wanted to thank everyone who's been listening. There's a good amount of people. Yeah. How many people are in the chat? So I don't,

I don't know how to know that, but there's 745 people watching. That's, that's, is that a lot?

All right. Hey, next time we're doing pay -per -view, AD. Listen, I'm down with that.

Listen, Ruslan, I, I, I want you to understand one thing. So I, I do hear your criticisms of me and I've heard them before and I take them.

I always take them seriously because it takes a lot for someone to actually call you and, you know, tell you, hey, this is my grievances with you.

You know what I mean? That kind of thing. So I appreciate that. I don't obviously agree with all of them, but I do agree with some of them.

I didn't think you would. I do agree with some of them and I'll definitely take them to heart. Is there anything else that you definitely want to cover?

Cause you know, I feel like we've covered a lot of ground here, man. I don't have anything. I mean,

I don't have a ton of notes for like stuff I wanted to cover. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think this is my opinion.

You tell me if you think, if you think I'm wrong here. Okay. Sure. Are you into sneakers, tennis shoes?

What? Tennis shoes, sneakers? Am I wearing sneakers? Oh no, I'm not into them. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Yeah, yeah. So, but. I was like, are you wearing sneakers?

What are you talking about, man? I'm wearing sneakers. I'm also wearing shorts, which is really nice to work in shorts, but.

I, backstory, I used to, this is a confession. Back in the day when

I was poor, we got a connect in China and we would sell fake Jordans. And I'm not proud of this.

And we would get Jordans for whatever, wholesale and sell them. And it was, it was a mess, right?

It was really bad. And I've since repented of it. And, and I, I like sneakers. I like sneaker culture.

Cool, cool, I got you. Counterfeit sneakers hurt the feet. Counterfeit sneakers are not comfortable.

Counterfeit sneakers fall apart. I've seen counterfeit Jordans fall, explode on somebody's foot while they were playing basketball.

They're not, they're not helpful, right? They're bad. And I think that when we see something as counterfeit, we know that it is not, it's not the right thing.

It's not the real deal, right? And so my question to you is, do you think that some of the critique of what we're addressing with your fears or your concerns for the wokeness and all that kind of stuff, maybe isn't the actual critique of the sneaker, but it's a critique of the counterfeit of what people are experiencing.

Meaning that if somebody's entire experience with Jordans is wearing these counterfeit fake Jordans and they hurt their feet and they're not comfortable and then they play and they, you know, the shoe explodes.

And then somebody's like, no, but Jordans are really dope. They're, they're actually really comfortable. I love this pair of Jordans. And somebody's like, well, you know,

I got, I get utility from this pair. And so now what's happening is there's like a complete dismissal of any, any

Jordan ever. And we can't rock with it. So my question to you is when I, when I look at stuff like Vaati's book, you know, with the false quotes and I, and I'll send it to you and you could look at it.

And thank you for sending me to stuff on David Platt. We can talk about David Platt if you want. Cause I think that if he lied about that, I think that was really stupid.

But when we're seeing stuff, right. And there's this information out there and it's like, holy smokes, like this isn't, like Neil has an,

Neil Shivo has an actual breakdown of CRT. And then he tells you what he thinks, what he thinks this means or whatever.

But when everything is lumped in to this, like Robin D 'Angelo, white fragility nonsense.

And then anyone who has any desire to see anything from a justice standpoint. And I would say a biblical justice standpoint.

And again, we don't need to talk about reparations cause I already told you. Sure, sure. No, I get you. Yeah. And now we're just throwing out everything. And instead of saying, hey man, what's your favorite

Jordan? I like this Jordan. I think if I find utility from this Jordan, I think, right. Flawed metaphor. Yeah. And now we're doing that with anything related to the word racism, conversations about racism, subconscious racism, systems that are still, not the most beneficial for people.

And we're just throwing it all out because of a bad experience with a counterfeit. Something that's not even the real. I don't think

Robin D 'Angelo is speaking on behalf of me. I don't think Robin D 'Angelo is speaking on behalf of anyone that I've had on this channel.

I think I've heard. She's a crazy woman, yeah. I've heard everybody reject a lot of her ideas. You know what

I mean? And I'm not trying to be facetious. Like I've heard critical race theorists reject her ideas and say, yeah, that's not what we're on.

So do you think that that's maybe some of what we're experiencing, especially when we're seeing this stuff come out and the plagiarism come out and some of these things come out that are like, ah, this isn't quite what is actually being communicated, but we're listening to the critique of it and not to the actual ideas and then picking apart the ideas of fill in the blank.

Well, it's a valid question. And I don't know if I can really answer it intelligently. You know,

I'm sure that some people are doing that, but actually this is why, you know, somebody asked me recently, somebody close to me said, you know, why didn't you mention critical race theory in your book?

I wrote a book on this topic and I didn't mention critical race theory even once, except citing a title of a

Tim Keller article that he wrote about it. You just wrote a book about like wokeness, right? Or something like that? Yeah, it's called Social Justice Pharisees, Woke Church Tactics and How to Engage Them.

And it's all about these issues, but I don't mention critical race theory because I actually don't even care, you know, really where you got this.

You know, when I hear Eric Mason say something or Thabiti or whoever, David Platt say something that I don't agree with, you know,

I have ideas of where they got it, but I don't really even care really about that. What I care about is, are they telling the truth about what the

Bible says? And the reason I care about that is because I know they've told the truth about the Bible so often.

And a lot of these guys, like you said, you know, Tim Keller was instrumental in my conversion. So I know he tells the truth on some topics, probably most topics.

But that's what I'm concerned with. I'm concerned with, does it match up with the Bible? And so, yeah, maybe some of that is happening. They're reading critiques of something or other, whatever, but that's definitely not what

I'm doing. I'm trying to go to the words themselves. And I don't mess with some of these, like I don't mess with critical race theory definitions and stuff like that.

I may have done a few videos on critical race theory in the past, but it's just not my forte. My forte is let's match this up to what the

Bible says. So yeah, I think maybe that's happening, but I don't know if I would agree with that that's what mostly is happening.

I don't really know how to answer that, to be honest. When you say woke, what does that mean? Because you kind of got into the, and by the way, your interview,

I thought, with KB and Amin was really good. It was this social justice label. I thought that was good too, yeah. What do you think woke means?

Like when you say woke, what are you meaning by that? Yeah, so when I say woke, by the way, I use that as a synonym for social justice.

And what I mean by that is just the people that are putting an undue emphasis on identity, race, gender, sexuality, when they're explaining power dynamics and inequalities and stuff like that, they're putting an overemphasis on those things.

That's what I mean by woke. What about just factoring in those things, that those things do play a factor in terms of how -

Of course they play a factor. So I don't deny that - How big of a factor do you think they, so to you, the person on a wild end of the left spectrum will say it's all about everything is racist, everything is racist, right?

And then you would say nothing, very little is racist? Because we'd say you're on the other end of the spectrum, we say very little things today are racist and have anything to do with race and these things.

Yeah, I guess I would characterize it like that. Yeah, so in the past, there were lots of racist, overtly racist things that people would do to each other, that the government was engaged in, that businesses were engaged in just overtly.

And over time, that has shifted. Now, it's unthinkable for most people to be called a racist.

It's one of the most powerful words that you, well, that's actually changing, people don't care anymore. But in recent history, that's the worst thing you could be as a racist.

So it's shifted definitely over time. I would say that probably very few of the institutions are still racist.

But you think there are some potential institutions that are still racist? I mean, maybe, I just need to see the evidence, right?

I can't just accept it. Obviously, it's possible that there are racist institutions and stuff like that out there.

I've never denied that. But the problem is when I ask for evidence, typically I get the inequalities and stuff like that.

And that's not evidence of anything except an inequality. Did KB and Amin presented some decent evidence to you? They went over a lot of the medical stuff and the name things.

Do you think that was reasonable evidence to say that there are still some remnants of race being connected to disparities?

So you'll have to forgive me. That was a couple of years ago. So the name thing and then health, what did they say?

They've done studies and they found out that folks with more ethnic names can - Oh, right. Yeah, you know that whole, they talked about that.

They talked about some other things. I think they made some fairly good points about that. Do you think any of those things were valid?

I don't know. I mean, I haven't seen the studies. But what I do know though is, I'm actually in recruiting, right?

So I've seen those name studies and stuff like that. And oftentimes what you don't hear is the follow -up studies that they do where they take the names off and they try to take off neighborhood information and stuff like that.

And what ends up happening is actually those resumes get called less because who knows why?

I don't know why, but that would not be what you would expect if people were looking at the name and it said

Shaniqua and saying, I'm not gonna call Shaniqua because her name is Shaniqua. She has an ethnic name, okay. Right, so like, what do you make of that?

I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. Yeah, I don't either. So, from your perspective, names, studies, these different things, there might be some precedent there that may not.

You don't know, you said you don't know. You said there might be some institutions today that are racist. You just need to see the evidence for them.

The majority of your audience seems to take a very hard line stance that systemic racism is completely done.

When do you think it ended? Like, when do you think this is it? We've ended systemic racism.

Well, I don't know, but the thing is the onus is not on me because this is why the people in my audience, I think, I can't speak for all of them, take a hard line the way they do is because when they ask for the evidence, they get barely anything.

They get the inequalities. They get, well, this person has more money than this family. This kind of family has less wealth or whatever.

And so it's like, okay, but the thing is there could be all kinds of factors. I wrote an article to my town in Rutland that posted a article that said that Vermont was the most racist state in the country because there's so few blacks that live here and Puerto Ricans and stuff like that.

And I wrote an article of them saying, I can think of like a hundred reasons off the top of my head why blacks or Latinos might not wanna live in Vermont.

And none of them have anything to do with racism. So it's like, how do you just assume this? And that's the problem.

So I don't know when it ended, but that's not my problem. The onus is actually not on the anti -anti -racist to prove that they're not racist or the institutions are not racist.

The onus is actually on the person making the accusation. Why do you think if we have a historical framework of systemic racism and you just acknowledge it, that there may be institutions around today, so on and so forth.

Why do you think that the burden of proof is on the people that are saying, hey, depending on how they define racism and pathways and all these different, right?

Is systemic racism, the by -product of bad laws that have now impacted people in multi -generality or is it still around today in different laws?

Wouldn't the burden of proof be on the anti -anti -racist person who's just like violently against any degree of racism and racial conversation?

I'm not, I'm sorry if I'm making like a caricature of that person, right? But like, wouldn't the onus be on the person saying this isn't real in light of history to prove it?

No, because the allegation is a current allegation. So it's not like, because what you don't get is, hey, this bank made racist loans in the 50s.

And then what you don't get is, no, they didn't. Like you get, you usually get agreement there. Yeah, yeah, there was racist banks and racist neighborhoods and stuff like, you don't usually get disagreement on what happened in the past.

So those allegations, pretty much everybody agrees. Not all, but pretty much everybody. But the allegations for the present, those are new allegations.

And maybe you're saying, well, they're still racist today. The same institutions are still racist today.

So show me how you know that, given what we know about history and how things have gotten less racist over time.

Yeah, what about specifically what Wells Fargo openly saying they're preying on African -Americans to give them these terrible loans that then caused all these foreclosures to fall?

And granted, I agree people shouldn't take loans that they couldn't afford, but they would only give them these junky subprime loans.

And there's leaked documents that just came out. They settled for 165 billion. What'd it be?

Dollars that prove that they were intentionally targeting black people through black churches.

And they would give black churches a payoff. It was okay. So you're familiar. So I don't know the details of the

Wells Fargo case, but I do know about the subprime mortgage issue. And that was usury to the nth degree.

Totally wrong. Absolutely sinful. But the thing is like, okay, so we can be against that.

But then we also have to be against all the root causes there as well, which if you go back and you really think about things and why these companies were doing those loans, it really goes back to like government policy in general, the

Federal Reserve's policies in general. And so I'm against all that stuff. I want it to be done. And I want them to be,

I want restitution to be paid if they were stealing from people and stuff like that, which I think some of these guys were.

I mean, some of these guys were just faking documents and stuff like that to steal from people. Like it's just absolutely preposterous and ridiculous.

If that can be proven on the evidence of two or more witnesses, there needs to be restitution there. There's just no question about it. Yeah, it was proven and they did settle $465 billion.

So I'm just pointing to - Probably not enough money. Probably not enough money. So I'm just pointing you to a modern example that I think we're finding common ground here,

AD. It sounds like we're finding common ground and to say that Wells Fargo did something that was systemically racist within minds in yours lifetime of us being

Christians, let alone, right? This happened 15 years ago, right? I think we have a little bit of common ground, but I don't know if you'd like my solution.

Okay, fair enough. I probably wouldn't like your solution. I'm just saying, AD, listen, I just want to stop and just say,

I think me and you found some common ground and something that we would agree is systemically racist. Well, let me say this, you know. And I think we should give a clap for us for, we did it,

AD. We can wrap, well, it took two hours. Yeah, I have nowhere to be, my brother,

I'm here. I had other questions for you though, but go ahead. Yeah, I can only take a few more because I, you know, this is past my bedtime and I don't know if you knew that.

I'm sorry, you're on East Coast time. You're an early bird? Yeah, but that's okay, that's okay. We can spend a little more time because I've asked you a bunch of questions.

But what I will say is this, that I do think that we do agree on a bunch of stuff, but I think that there's some really foundational disagreements here with us.

We're on opposite sides on probably a lot of things. And so I don't want to like butter you up here, but.

What are some, do you want to talk about that? The first thing, one of the, probably another time. I just can't,

I can't do too much more. Are we going to charge for it next time? Let's definitely do that, yeah. We should,

I'm so serious. Listen, if you're down, I'm down, but. How much,

I think we can sell at least 300, 400 of these. Well, we still have like 700 people watching right now.

But anyway, so what I was going to say though is that when I first saw the video with you, with Marcus, I thought to myself.

Marcus Pittman. Marcus Rodgers or Marcus Pittman? Yeah, I saw you did quite a few videos with Marcus Rodgers. Yeah, yeah.

So you must be obsessed with him, I guess. I'm just kidding. No, I didn't do a video, I did videos with him, not about him.

I'm just joking, I'm just kidding. All right. That was a weasely of you, I'll use your words. That's true, that's true.

I'll give you that. So what I was going to say though, was that you seem like a guy that I could have a beer with. You know, I don't know if you drink, but we could have a, we could share an iced tea.

I'm more conservative than you in that regard. See, I just found something I'm more conservative than you on theological.

I would disagree with that, actually. It's more conservative. Do you drink? You drink alcohol?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Anyway, but my point is, so we could, I think we could share an iced tea or a coffee and have a good time.

So I'm not, I think that we're alike in a few ways. You know, you might not like this and you might not think it's a compliment, but you kind of do the voices and, you know, some of the mockery as well.

And I actually appreciate that about you. Okay, why do you appreciate that? Because it's funny. It's funny, okay, thank you, man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, thank you, because I think you have a, you know, again,

I think you're incorporating humor. I think my heart would be like, I just wouldn't do that about a person.

I would do that about an idea. So if I do like the hokumaniac Christians, the legalistic hokumaniac

Christians, right? Like I'm doing that about an idea. A group of people? A group of people along the lines of, along the lines of, to be fair, we would probably both quote this verse back to each other, right?

Galatians 5, Paul talking about just might as well just chop your junk off if it's your fault. So we would both say that.

I think the difference is that I do not like doing that about individual people.

And I really do genuinely try to add a net positive to what I put out. And again, and my heart for you,

AD, is that I think you could do the same thing and not need to just react and dunk on people.

And I'm really not trying to be facetious. And like, this is not like, this isn't like a back, what is it, like a fake compliment.

Like a backhanded compliment. Yeah, I get it. Like I really think your YouTube is growing, but just looking at some of the comments and like the way people talk about each other and just the toxicity, like you're curating a community, man, that's like, goodness gracious, like we're all gonna have to go to Thanksgiving.

Well, now that there's hopefully a pandemic, we're all gonna have to go to Thanksgiving. We're all gonna have to interact with people that we disagree with.

And if this is how people are talking in comment section, and if this is how people are mocking each other, I could imagine what the dinner with the

Democrat non -Christian uncle is gonna be like. I could imagine, and that's my concern is like, man, you're creating this culture where we're just gonna dunk on each other and laugh at each other and mock each other by name.

And then the comments are like, holy smokes, man. Thank God I have a therapist and I could afford one.

Man, it is like really nasty, man. And I know you would say, well, they're just attacking ideas. But no, man, a lot of these people are attacking me personally, bro.

Well, this is the thing. I wouldn't wanna hold you accountable for your commenters. I mean, you're obviously not looking at this, but you've got some commenters coming at me here and it's totally fine.

I don't take any offense to it. I'm not looking at that. And I would say, guys, don't insult AD directly.

Like, I don't think he's a closeted racist. I don't think that's a fair critique. Don't do that because it gets us nowhere.

I'm just saying, if you were to go to my comment section, and even if I did a video, I'm trying to think of like a recent video

I've done, like my Matt, what is it? David Platt video, my David Platt video, right?

Which by the way, I edited because of information you brought. You mentioned that, yeah. And I trimmed some stuff out.

Even in a video like that, my comment section is never like, those stupid white conservative.

You know what I mean? Like my comment section is not on the same level. And I'm just saying, man, at some point, brother, we're leaders and you're an elder.

I'm not, you know what I mean? And we, does it have to be something like that? I'm not an elder, but I still have to hold myself to the same standard.

I get it. Sure, sure, sure, yeah. As should I, but we do have some degree of accountability and responsibility to like, man, what are we curating?

Like what kind of community are we curating if everybody just wants to dunk on each other? And we're sitting here talking, and AD, like you, come on, bro.

Like me and you would probably agree on 95 % of the stuff and the stuff we don't agree on. I would probably just be more inquisitive.

I disagree with you on a couple of things, but our lives would probably look similar, right? Like, except you drink alcohol.

I don't, my brother's an alcoholic. You know what I mean? But do you see what I'm getting at? Like, I just don't know if the energy,

I don't know if, not you specifically, but this vibe of like playing heresy hunter on YouTube is like reflective of like, if Jesus was on YouTube, like really go down his path.

Like if Jesus was on YouTube, and I'm not saying he would do it the way I do it, but I'm saying like, would he do what you're doing?

Would he do what some of these other guys are doing? Who again, I have relationships with, man. Like I talked to Spencer Smith.

He's the other kind of, he's a self -proclaiming fundamentalist. He likes that label. He's the one that told me like, you're a neo -evangelical. And I was like, what is that?

He's like, that's what you are, right? And I like find value from that. He wouldn't come on my channel. I don't, I'm not going on his channel.

Thank you for having me on your channel. I find value in understanding at the very least how people think, and I think we have way more in common.

So let me just make two comments here, and then I'll let you ask a few questions just so we can wrap up. But what

I will say is this. Number one, I do think that Jesus would be doing this kind of stuff if he had a

YouTube channel. Now, I'm not saying that I'm Jesus, but what I'm trying to do is follow his example. So what I mean by that is if you look at Jesus as the pattern of his life and what he does, the example

I'm trying to follow, and I've failed at this in the past, but what I'm trying to say is you see him confront the leaders that are leading people astray very aggressively, and he engages in mockery, he engages in aggressive talk and language, and he can be pretty brutal.

But then when he deals with the people that are being led astray, the woman at the well and the people like that, you see him, the more traditional, tenderhearted, sort of like,

Jesus is always tenderhearted, so I'm not saying he wasn't with the Pharisees, but I'm saying you can see the change in how he deals with the leaders who should know better and those who are being led astray.

And so I'm trying to follow that example. What often I find is that the example that many people tend to follow is that they're aggressive with the normal people, the people in the pews.

This is why you get people in every pew get slandered by so many woke people.

They're just Trump -loving idolaters, they're racist. I hate that kind of stuff when they're slandering nameless, faceless, with nameless, faceless people in the pew.

What I'd prefer is if they would say, okay, which some of them do this as well, okay, Dr. James White, let's talk because you're this, this, that.

I'd prefer that, but that's what you not get. So that's the example I'm trying to follow. But then you made a comment about like, what's Thanksgiving dinner supposed to look like, right?

Like, we're there with our uncle that's a Democrat. You know, how's that supposed to look like? Well, here's how I hope it looks after my content, because this is who

I'm trying to encourage. I'm trying to encourage the people that are Bible -believing, conservative Christians to be bold for their faith.

And let me give you an example. Somebody reached out to me and said, I think it was over Christmas. It was like a Thanksgiving dinner situation where they confronted their family members for supporting

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and all of that kind of stuff in the election that had just happened. And he said that that conversation was very frank.

And I think that's a good thing. Leviticus 19 says you should reason frankly with your neighbor, don't hate them.

You should reason frankly with them. Anyway, so the conversation didn't go poorly, but they were very defensive, right?

A few days later, or maybe a few weeks later, that family member called him and said, you know what?

I've seen what's happened the first few weeks after this inauguration and stuff like that, everything that's going on, and you were right.

I shouldn't have supported Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. There's no excuse for it. I repent, and I'll never do anything like that again.

That's what I hope happens. And I think some people think that's impossible. It's not impossible. That's what

I want. I want those conversations to be frank. I want them to be beyond the surface level, confronting people with things that you need to confront them about, and then let

God have the chips fall where they may. And so that's a win for you. Like a win for you is someone having a frank conversation and rebuking somebody for how they voted.

Absolutely, so in Leviticus 19, where it says, love your neighbor as yourself, right before it, it says, do not hate your brother in your heart.

Reason frankly with your neighbor. And if you don't, you will incur sin because of him. So if your brother is in error, and they're promoting things they ought not to promote, and things like that, and you just don't do anything, you just, for the unity's sake, you don't say anything, the

Bible describes that as hate. So I wanna encourage people to not hate their neighbor and to have these frank conversations.

They're very uncomfortable. I hate having these conversations. Not this one, but conversations like this. Nobody wants to have this conversation, but if you actually believe that this is a brother in Christ, you owe it to them to not hate them.

The Bible says, if you don't confront them, you don't reason frankly with them over what their errors are, that's an example of hatred.

And so that's a win for me when somebody says, I'm gonna obey that scripture, and I'm gonna do what I think I need to do.

I wanna encourage people like that. Yeah, that's really interesting in that, I think the scriptures call us to go out and make disciples and win people over to the gospel and proclaim, turn and repent and all these different things.

So that's a very, the conversations we have about politics never go well. The conversations we have about Jesus tend to go better.

And so that's interesting that you would say that. And again, I - But I wouldn't wanna present a Jesus that is not

Lord over politics as well. Like I wouldn't wanna present a halfway Jesus. And so in this example, this was a

Christian, you could hold them to the standard of the Bible. So this wouldn't be like an evangelistic conversation where you're like, well, you voted

Democrat. So that means that this is not like an initial conversation. This is a conversation with a

Christian, right? This is a disciple of Christ, where you could take him to the scriptures and say, this is what you signed on for, let's start acting like it kind of thing.

Have you ever had like a good back and forth with a Christian that's voted Democrat? Do you have some of those folks in your life?

Yeah, yeah, less so recently, but yeah, I have. Okay, okay. I mean, they're like, can know the scriptures and they're not like just, okay.

Like, cause I think that might be valuable for you to have some of those conversations. I didn't vote Democrat. So I think, but I think that that may be valuable for you because I think that's really interesting.

If that's your win, man, that's - Let's not be weasely here because what

I didn't say was the win - I'm trying to wrap my brain around it. So - My win is not converting people to a political party.

You understand that I wasn't saying that, right, Ruslan? Well, your win was pushing people away from a specific way they chose to vote and making them repent for something.

That's not what I said. I said, my win was to encourage Christians to confront their brothers, people that proclaim the name of Christ with the realities of sins that they're promoting and ought not, or simple ideologies that they're promoting and they ought not.

So that's what the win was. Let's make that clear. Those descriptions as well as you do. What if a brother holds all your same theological positions and he's like,

A .D., bro, like, this is where I'm at, man. I voted Joe Biden for these reasons.

You're just full on like, nope, you're out. You need to be church disciplined. And like, it's that serious to you.

Because there's brothers that can go back and forth with you on this scripturally. I'm sure you know that. And I would encourage you to have those dudes in your life or at least seek those relationships.

It's just really, and again, this is not an endorsement of the Democratic Party or anything like that. It's just interesting that you, it almost sounds like you want the nastiness, the conversations about these things, which

I'm like, man, like it's already said and done. Like, what's the, yeah, man, I understand what you're saying.

I just don't know if that, as a Christian, the win becomes. Let's have a tense conversation about politics.

Well, Ruslan, you said that the goal of a Christian is to make disciples, which you got from Matthew 28, right?

Yep. Okay, so then Matthew 28 continues and said, make disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey everything that Christ commands.

So you have to do the whole thing. I don't think Christ commanded to vote Republican. I didn't say that. Okay. I didn't say that.

I don't think he commanded to never vote Democrat. Yeah, so he didn't say that, obviously, but he obviously did say to not condone or support or empower people that intend to do wicked evil in your lands, which is what they intend to do.

And so, yes, he didn't say you shall not vote Democrat. What if it's a pro -life

Democrat? What is a pro -life Democrat? Someone who thinks that there's a... Hold on.

What if it is a pro -life Democrat that they voted for? Right, so I would like to know from the pro -life Democrat, which of the issues counterbalances the, it should be legal for, and people should be proud of, killing babies?

No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm saying there are actual pro -life Democrats. Right, so I would ask those pro -life

Democrats. Some of these heartbeat laws recently, like the Democrat in South Carolina, there was a couple in Alabama, and there was like a real big...

I'm saying, what if it's a pro -life Democrat? They're a Democrat, but they have taken the position of being pro -life, and they vote along the lines with the pro -life, the other folks that are pro -life.

So their vote, their existence is promoting all kinds of evil.

So here's the thing about the Democratic Party that is so great, God was gracious to us in our time, that he didn't give them any redeeming qualities, with the exception of one that I could think of, is that they're for marijuana legalization, which, oh,

I get a lot of flack for saying that, that that should be legal. But I think that's a potentially redeeming quality.

But I just don't see how that would make it okay. Okay. I'm not that into marijuana, you know?

Sure, sure, sure. So I'm just saying, but you don't see how someone else could see it as okay.

Like, it is under, without no guys permissible, they weigh the sums, like, outside of AD's course, like, it is just unfathomable for you to see how someone could vote that way.

I can see how they would justify it, but I don't see how it would be a valid justification. You know what

I mean? Yeah, I think, yeah, man, I understand it. I just, I would disagree with you, and I would, you know, I would say amen. If folks prayed about it, came to their own conclusions, and that's how they decided to vote,

I don't think I'm gonna confront them and tell them to repent over that. That's, we can move on.

I think you should, though. I think you should reason frankly with your neighbor, because that's not good discipleship to - Yeah, I don't think that's what that verse is talking about, brother.

I don't think that verse is talking about voting Democrat. I don't think that's what that's talking about. I know you're connecting it, and you're weaving it, and you're connecting the

Matthew passage with do all these things, but - Yeah, it's about endorsing sinful things, and doing sinful things. I think it's a stretch, because most, you can make the same argument for the

Republican Party. Like, you really can, and a lot of people do - You could, yeah, you could, but the difference is that there are redeeming qualities for the

Republican Party, and those are shrinking very, very fast, but there are at least some.

You just said there's a couple for the Democratic Party. I said that there's one, and it's really not a big one.

Okay, okay, I have a question for you. Do you have anything else for me, because I am - No, I'm done, and let's do maybe 10, 15 minutes.

I'm sorry to cut it short, but I have to go to sleep. It's all good. I'm sorry for keeping you up so late, man. I thought we were going for the long haul.

Hey, by the way, we got the Love What You Do collection coming up. You guys could go to our YouTube and check that out, and AD has his book, which you guys could check out as well.

Hopefully that's - That's some good live streaming right there. Good job. Yeah, man, you gotta - And give this video a like, and a thumbs up, and all that kind of stuff.

Go subscribe to my YouTube channel. We're almost at 100 ,000 subscribers. Even if you - Actually, there's probably a lot of people in this chat who have blocked on my

YouTube channel, so shout out to you guys. I'm here for you, though. AD, tell me this David Platt thing.

Help me understand, do you think he intentionally lied? Do you think he misspoke?

Why would he lie? You kind of, I saw your video on it that you, I don't know if you sent it, email it to me. I saw your video on it, so I'm really curious.

Why do you think he - Yeah, okay, so this is kind of, my opinion on this is evolving, you might say.

Here's what I think is going on. I think that David Platt has convinced himself that his semantic game is real.

So I think David Platt has convinced himself that the church document, even though it says that the church shall not be affiliated with any denomination, shall not and cannot be affiliated with any denomination, what

I think he's convinced himself is that means that it can't be a member, even though it doesn't say that. So he thinks, whoa, we're not a member, clearly, because of the way that the

SBC is organized. But it doesn't say that, and I think that that's become clear to him, and he's kind of digging in his heels a little bit.

So he's convinced himself, and this is how we all, this is my opinion. Allegedly, this is my opinion on what he's doing.

When we're sinning, and when you sin, Ruslan, it's not just typically, well, I don't care what God says.

It's usually you justify it. You convince yourself that this is different, you know what I mean? I didn't really have sex, there was no penetration.

It's like, that's the kind of thing a teenager does when they're trying to justify their sexual immorality. So it's like, that's what

I think is happening. So you think he is justifying lying by playing semantics?

I do, yeah, definitely. Okay, do you think any of this would have been an issue if you remove the, just the anger against the quote -unquote woke stuff he's been preaching?

Meaning like, say he takes over the church, and he's like, dude, I had this great position at the SBC, whatever he was,

Board of Missions, and he's like, man, they have such an efficient way of whatever, right? Yeah. Doing missions work, and all these different things, right?

And then he goes, and then he tries to incorporate his church into the SBC, and you just remove all the woke stuff, and do you think at that point this is an issue at all?

Yeah, so I've thought a lot about this as well, and again, this is just my opinion. I think that this would have happened eventually, but the woke stuff gives it an occasion to come out.

So I'll give you an example. A lot of churches are having problems right now, unfortunately, and this is very, very sad to see, but I think that the

COVID stuff with the closures, and how everything's been so weird lately has revealed a lot of sickness in various churches.

It's kind of like when people get divorced, right? Oftentimes people get divorced after a money issue happens. It's really not the money, it's that the money's revealing the issue, right?

So I think that this would have happened eventually, but I think it's probably happening now because of the woke stuff.

So woke stuff is a key factor for sure, I think. Okay. Yeah, yeah. What do you think the bigger issue here is?

Is it people, again, conflating, making stuff up, like they're gonna sell the building and give it to the

Muslims, sell the building to the Muslims, give it to the SBC, right? They're going to abandon traditional positions on sexuality and unborn, and people seemingly lying about this.

Like, do you not see that as an issue in regards to, this is what I mean by just scales, right?

So we can say, man, he broke his bylaws, and I'd be like, dude, if he broke his bylaws and he lied, that's stupid and dumb. I don't know why he would do that, right?

But the other side is like, people are saying they're gonna sell the building to the Muslims and give the money to the

SBC. This sounds so over the top and inflated, which again, this seems like this counterfeit attack on these ideas.

Instead of just saying, look, David Platt, I don't like that you believe that there needs to be a certain degree of equal outcome amongst groups and critiquing that and saying, and this is how this can negatively affect

Asian people or white people, right? And we can have that conversation, but instead it's like, you want Marxism and you're gonna sell the building to the

Muslims and give the money to the, do you see, you know, like that doesn't seem right. Like that doesn't seem just.

So I've talked to a number of people on the ground in McLean, the people that are unhappy.

So I've talked to a lot of those people. And so there's reasons behind what they've said, you know, and I don't know if it's true because I haven't seen all the docs, but if what they told me is true about some of these things, that there's some good reasons.

They're not just coming out of left field with that stuff. Now, what I will say is if they are lying. So you're saying there's some precedent to him selling the building to a mosque and giving away to the

D .C. What I will say is, and I gotta kind of be careful here because there's some things I can't really release right now but there is some real reasons behind the idea that they may sell the building.

I have not seen anything about selling it specifically to Muslims, except for the fact that Muslims are looking for property like that in the

D .C. area. Does that make sense? Yeah, but isn't that kind of, again, being hyperbolic and bearing false witness?

So if, okay, so what I was about to say though was that if they are lying about that and there's actually no evidence of that at all, then that's a problem, absolutely.

And what I found - But you have to have evidence to make the statement, right? Like, see what I'm saying? Like, if there are lying and there's no evidence,

I'm saying like to say anything, there should be evidence presented because then it just sounds outlandish. Right, right,

Ruslan. But the thing is like, and this is one of the things I noticed about your video is that like you assume that the criticisms have no founding and then you assumed that David Platt's criticisms were correct even though you hadn't seen the docs.

And so I'm saying, I haven't seen all of them. I've seen a lot of them. And so what I'm saying is if they don't come out with the deets, right?

They don't come out with the docs and they don't have receipts, that's a big problem to say something like that. Okay, so we agree on that.

And so you - And like I said, and I agree with you. I say, hey man, if he's lying about the SBC thing, I literally added the timestamp.

I removed that part of - Good for you, yeah. Right, so I'm saying there's a willingness where I'm saying, man, truth is truth.

If people are saying this stuff, it sounds so egregious and over the top and outlandish that yes, I'm gonna say this is stupid, like this is dumb to say that this, because he feels bad for being white or whatever thing we're gonna say, right?

He acknowledges white privilege and he thinks he's been a part of the problem. Okay, respect. He feels that way, right?

So now we're gonna say, because he feels that way, now he wants equal outcomes of groups, which again, we can argue about that.

But then to say, well, now he's going to sell the building, give it to the Muslims, abandon traditional values of marriage and also abandon traditional values of the unborn, it doesn't seem like a fair or reasonable or realistic assessment.

Address the issue. You have an issue with this. Let's talk about that. Let's address that. Did you hear them say that, that that's what it was, that he wanted more equitable outcomes so that that's why he's gonna give it to the

Muslims? Because I didn't hear any of that. No, no, no, the equitable outcomes, separate points. Sorry, I didn't mean to conflate those two.

All separate points, right? The things that you could talk about, the credible things you could say against the woke stuff is that I don't think they want equal output of everything.

I don't think they want what I grew up in, communism. I think they want equal output of groups. 13 % black people, there should be 13 % representation in CEOs.

And I would say, I don't know if that's necessary. I'm not mad that Armenians aren't at the same percentage in the NBA as black people.

I don't think that's racist, right? So the outcome of groups, I don't think is racist all the time. Now, if you wanna critique that, if we wanna talk about that, well, then we could talk about that all the time.

We talk about that, we could talk about white privilege and all that kind of stuff. But when you start talking about all these other things,

I'm saying that is so over the top. And it just, again, it sounds like you're putting sauce and exaggerating something and making something so, so hyperbolic that you're never really willing to have a reasonable conversation on the ideas.

Got it. So you're saying that you think that it's possible that they're being hyperbolic and making stuff up, but they don't really have these issues.

It's really just the woke stuff. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think they don't like that David Platt sees injustice.

You said, what is it? Class, right? You're with Amos. He said that, he said he feels like he's been a part of the problem as a white pastor.

Does he came out and talked about white privilege or was that just Matt Chandler? I don't remember. I know he's talked about things like that, but I think it was just Matt Chandler, yeah.

So we're taking these two things and then we're making them these massive things, just like folks who say, hey man,

I like Trump. I think he's the better candidate. And then you take them and you go, well, you're a white supremacist. It's the same thing, right?

I'm sure you understand, I'm sure you get that. Like it's literally the same. We're doing the same thing to both sides. You voted

Trump, therefore you're a white supremacist. You think that there's a systemic racism, injustice, and that you've been a part of the problem as a white male.

So therefore you're a Marxist who is gonna sell the building to Muslims and you are going to abandon traditional marriage and unborn values.

Yeah, that's not the logical connections that they're making. I can tell you that. So they actually do have other issues and they have evidence for these other issues.

The only one I have not seen the evidence for is the Muslim thing. But what I will say is that -

They have evidence for marriage. They're gonna change their position on marriage. They're gonna start marrying gay people. And there's evidence for they're gonna start being pro -choice.

Right, so what I think they're doing with that is noticing that David Platt also wrote a book that you probably would really like, soft peddling people voting

Democrat and insisting that you must have unity with people that promote the Democratic Party. I disagree with that.

And I think that many of the people out in the claim also disagree with that. I don't think that they're saying you must vote Republican. That's definitely not what

I'm saying. But the Democratic Party is off limits. I mean, that's a gone party. That's like voting for the Nazi party, totally gone.

No redeeming qualities whatsoever. So - Well, you said one redeeming quality. One redeeming quality, yeah.

I've heard that the Nazi social policy was pretty good too for Germans. I know, that's what I've heard. I don't know.

But anyway, the point though, is that they're not just saying, they're not just making weird jumps. They're looking at the trajectory here.

So now he's soft peddling Democrats and saying we must have unity with Democrats and how if you can't have unity with Democrats, you gotta walk.

Like, this is very weird for him to do that. His book on voting, I haven't read it, but I've seen the synopsis and I've seen his presentations on voting and stuff like that.

And they're just completely preposterous in my opinion. And so I think that that's where they're drawing some of that stuff from. So it's not just he's woke and now he's totally liberal because he's woke.

I think that they're seeing the trajectory here. So he went woke and now he's saying, well, you know, Democrats are kind of okay, you know?

And it's like, they can kind of see this slope happen in real time. Just because something's a slippery slope doesn't mean it's not actually a good argument.

There's a lot of slippery slopes out there. So last question, and then I know you gotta go as late over where you're at. Last question for you.

When did it all go left with all these people all at once? Like, and how do you think that happened? How do you think these incredible men of God, John Piper, Timothy Keller, Matt Chandler, David Platt, you know, hopefully you would give

Eric Mason some props before all this stuff, right? To body, there's a lot of these guys, man.

There's some of these guys that are seminary professors, not names that don't come to me right now. Seminary professors. And like, how do you, like, what do you think happened that everybody just went, these guys have this amazing track record and all the other things, but on this thing, you think they just completely lost their mind.

But these are brilliant men. Like, we would agree, these guys are really, hopefully you would agree they're much smarter than you and me, much more knowledgeable than you and me.

How do you think they just all just drank the woke tea and like lost their mind? Yeah, so that's a good question.

Yeah, I don't know the answer. I only started commenting on this stuff, you know, a few years ago after Trump was elected.

So I don't really know the answer. However, I have some theories. And one of my theories, well, first of all, this has always kind of been a thing.

You know, Ron Sider has always been sort of woke even before woke was a thing in Christian circles anyway.

So Ron Sider was one of these guys for a while and he's always kind of been there behind the scenes, you know, doing stuff.

And a lot of these guys really like him and have hung out with him and stuff like that. So it's always - I don't know who this is at all, so. Yeah, it's just,

I mean, you can look him up. He wrote a book called The Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. It's a socialist book trying to promote actual socialism.

But anyway, the point is that I think it's kind of always been there as an undercurrent.

What I think has happened though, and this is just my theory, and I know that probably people aren't gonna like this, but this is just what

I think. I think that many Christians have gotten really sick of always being the stick in the mud, right?

They always have to be the one that's against the thing. So it's like, oh, you gotta be against homosexual marriage. You gotta be against this and that.

I gotta be against the pronouns. And it's like, you're always that stick in the mud and they just get exhausted. And they see a lot of young people use that as an excuse for why they wanna reject

Christ. They'll say, well, you're mean to the gays. You're mean, you don't affirm this or that.

And so you're obviously evil and unjust. And so they see people use that as an excuse. In fact, Matt Chandler said that exact thing, that people see that you're mean to gays and that's why

I don't come to church. So I think a lot of these guys are seeing this racism thing because every Christian is good against racism, should be against racism anyway.

They see this as an opportunity to be not that stick in the mud. And rightfully so, you should be against racism.

But I think that they've bought a lot of too much of the propaganda. People typically often will cite

Trayvon Martin and stuff like that. And that to me was nonsense. That was a nonsense trial. Other things like this.

I feel like they wanted to find something like this that they could finally get those accolades.

They could finally get the interview on Vice. They can get the Washington Post spots, stuff like that. They finally found it and they're running with it.

Or do you think it's more of a Venn diagram? Two circles, right? There's a Venn diagram.

There's the actual woke justice, Marxist tendencies.

We're trained Marxist, right? On the one side of the circle. And then there's biblical justice.

And do you think it's possible that these men are genuinely trying to find that overlap of where's that middle where we can meet with people on biblical justice while rejecting other facets of it?

Do you think it's possible that that's actually their heart and what they're attempting to do? I think that's exactly what they're attempting to do.

But the thing is, you can't syncretize the Christian religion with any other religion. It doesn't work that way. And I don't think you should even attempt a project like that.

So you think anyone that is on the left of this full -on actual Marxist, you think that's a full -blown religion and there's no common ground we can find with anyone that leans to a more social justice perspective?

So it depends on what you mean by social justice, but I think liberalism, actual liberalism is another religion.

I think Marxism is another religion. I don't know if it would constitute as a religion. Let me give you an example.

If women are being sex trafficked and we find out that women are more likely to get raped, more likely to be sex trafficked, more likely, right?

All these horrible things that I think the math is fairly clear on. And then we say, hey man, there's this non -Christian anti -sex trafficking organization or there was,

I remember I worked with an organization called Not For Sale, right? And they're going out and they're rescuing women from sex trafficking.

And here are the stats, here are the real deal numbers. Here's how more likely a woman is to be assaulted.

This is a real thing. I don't think me aligning with an organization that aligns with my biblical values is the same as me aligning with everything feminism teaches and everything that the

Me Too movement is about. I think you could find common ground and say women shouldn't be sex trafficked.

Let's lock arms and fight this together. Yeah, definitely. So I think this is actually really helpful because we've done a lot of imaginary scenarios in this.

And so let's just imagine you found a group like that that was against sex trafficking, right? And what they were -

Not For Sale was the group I specifically, I worked with, I don't know if there's - Don't know anything about it, but let's just say that the group was like this, where it's like, they're against sex trafficking and what they think that you should do to sex traffickers, and this is their plan, this is what they wanna do.

They want to put them all on an island and chop their penises off and let them live in the island with no penises as the punishment, right?

If that's the group that you were aligning with, I would say that you shouldn't do that because that's obviously anti what the

Bible teaches on sex traffickers. Sex traffickers should be executed, in my opinion. Sure, and you think everyone that, in the world that takes a social justice position wants to put white people on an island and rob them of their rights and kill them?

But what I am saying is often, and this is the case pretty much all the time, if you use the example of these total leftists, like Marxist kind of stuff that are against racial inequalities, their whole program is, there's sin in all of it.

So they might say, yeah, I'm against racism, but they're actually often, in the program itself, they're actually undermining the gospel at every point.

So you wouldn't wanna align with an organization like that. And that's why we wouldn't align with a Black Lives Matter organization.

We would say, we don't, we don't, I don't know anyone that's given money to them. I don't know a single soul that's given, any Christian, non -Christian,

I literally don't know a single person. But they use their propaganda, though. Okay, okay, I don't know what you mean by that, use their propaganda.

Like their catchphrases and stuff. Their catchphrase, okay, fair enough. But I do know folks like Shobaraka who started his own

Christian nonprofit addressing some of the same issues with the AND campaign. Right? As long as he's doing it Christianly, according to God's law,

I'd be okay with that. Yeah, I think he is. And as I was saying, there are people like that that do that, or like an 8 Can't Wait campaign.

I don't know if you've ever looked into that. When we start talking about police reform, there are actual positions that we could have with 8Can'tWait .org

and specific laws that protect both police officers and Black people and poor people and white people and everybody with the 8

Can't Wait, right? Everybody should be able to unify against this solution. And maybe you would think that's an overreach of government, or I don't know.

But I think there are commonsensical ways that we can come together and say, let's unify on solutions. Instead of saying, ah, the argument isn't, you know, the issue and the problem really isn't as big of an issue as it is.

I'll let you go, brother. I know you gotta go. I gotta pee. Yeah, definitely. And I'll just say to this, like, in theory, that sounds great.

But the problem is that in order to unify with the solutions, we have to say, okay, so now submit to the scripture.

That's the only way we could unify. Because we have to, everything needs to be under the lordship of Christ. So the only way to unify with the solutions means everyone is gonna have to go ahead and agree with Christ on this.

And if not, then I can't be flexible because I'm more afraid of offending God than offending people.

You see what I'm saying? Yeah, and I would agree with that. I think we probably have to unpack, like, what does that mean for every single issue?

But yeah, I think generally speaking, I would agree with that. Ruslan, thank you so much for this. I appreciate it. I hope everyone enjoyed it.

We have 700 people still roughly watching the thing. And just wanted to say thank you to all of you who are watching this.

Ruslan, hopefully we can do this again sometime if you enjoyed it. And if not, just have a great vacation. I think you're going on vacation, man. We're charging for it next time.

Yes, and I gotta go pack and take photos and all that kind of stuff. All right, man. Well, God bless you. Thank you, man. Appreciate you, brother. Take care.