Mega Edition: Montage Reaction, Some Civil War Stuff, and Equipping the Persecuted

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harrison. Woo, we got a lot to talk about today, don't we?

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Needless to say, I was in New York for four days and those who were praying for me, I got like this nut -shaped cartilage thing on my

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Achilles and I might need to have it surgically removed. It's been rough because I can't run. I used to love to run, but one of my income streams comes from driving and I wouldn't be able to drive if I had the surgery.

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So I was up in New York for that. I was also visiting family. I appreciate your prayers. I trust

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God, he'll provide, but just want to throw that out there. Needless to say, though, I noticed there was, if you're on Twitter, you know what

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I'm talking about. The Twitter mob was out in force over the last few days and calling me a white supremacist.

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I think, I think they want, I mean, I could be wrong about this, but did you catch that Bernie Sanders, one of his campaign managers was caught on camera advocating for work re -education camps for people in this country that need to be reprogrammed?

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I have a feeling the woke crowd, they may want me to become part of that work education camp, right?

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Maybe I'll share a cell with Doug Wilson, right? Maybe that would be nice, but hey, wait, is that slavery, a work education?

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No, it can't be because the woke crowd isn't upset about it. People who are Christian that support Bernie Sanders, they're not in trouble for that, so that must not be slavery.

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Anyway, I digress, but needless to say, yeah, I took a hit from the

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Twitter mob, and it's because of this montage that I put out there. I put out a montage about Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and if you haven't seen that, you need to go watch it.

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I know there's many new subscribers in the last few days, probably because of the video, but if you haven't seen it, go watch it.

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If you know people in the SBC, send it to them. You can send it in the raw footage form, or you can send it with my commentary.

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I don't really care, but it's interesting because it shows, it proves that standpoint epistemology, critical race theory, liberation theology, they're all being taught on some level at this school, and no one wants to deal with that.

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I predicted this about three and a half hours before I dropped the video last Saturday, and I had the screenshot.

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I said, no one's gonna wanna deal with this content. What they'll do is they'll do an ad hominem. They'll attack my character.

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They'll say I'm sexist, or they'll say I'm racist, and sure enough, that morning, the racist thing got started.

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John's a racist. That's what motivated him to make this montage. Now, that's ridiculous.

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Anyone who knows me knows that's ridiculous. It's laughable, it's absurd, but it works on Twitter, and a side note about Twitter real quick.

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Twitter, it's, number one, terrible place to have a conversation about anything.

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You're limited in what you can say. It's public. Anyone can jump in, and a rabbit trail can form. Any of the other social media platforms are better for a discussion, but the other thing about Twitter is there's more leftists on Twitter for some reason, and I think it's the talk show radio dynamic.

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The reason people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck are popular is because people listen to them as they're working.

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They're for the working class person, and radio is what resonates with them, and I think it's the same in this dynamic.

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If you look at YouTube, if you look at all the various places this montage has been posted, it's well over 8 ,000 views already.

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Now, compare that. Get a sense of proportion. I wanna say this to conservatives who are depressed on Twitter. If you look at Twitter, what are there, 300, 500, 600 people upset at me, people that never would've liked me anyway, never would've been fans, and now some of them are going after Doug Wilson and John MacArthur.

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They never would've been fans of those guys. Compare that to the thousands of people, the working class people who, they don't have time to have an argument on Twitter that's probably on a third grade level and is all moral posturing and verse juice signaling.

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They're listening because they can pop a YouTube video on while they're plowing or while they're doing whatever their blue collar job is, so all that to say, don't get discouraged that there's a

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Twitter mob and they're very angry and very loud. Yeah, they have no sense of humor. We realize this. I went back and forth with a few of them.

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There's no point with most of them. You cannot have an actual nuanced discussion.

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It's just gonna be name calling. You're a white supremacist, and now it's gotten to the point where I saw

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Danny Akin doubled down, said Walter Strickland's teaching is good. He's doing good work on Twitter, and I noticed some people told me this, but some

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SBC trustees are saying that you can't trust that montage to people who posted it because, well, it came from someone who's a white supremacist.

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Two things, number one, this is whataboutism, all right, because there's the same crowd that hates whataboutism when it's used to defend

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Trump. They will use it at the drop of a hat when they don't wanna deal with something inconvenient.

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They'll say, well, what about the fact that he's a white supremacist? Well, what if I am? I'm not. I'll tell you real quick.

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My experience with white supremacy is very narrow. I met a guy in Michigan last year who was a white supremacist.

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It was like the first time I'd met someone really out there white supremacist. I corrected him on the spot. There was a guy who was saved out of the alt -right.

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He had some white supremacist leanings. Told him he needed to confess them. He repented. He's a Christian. Praise God. When I was in New York, I'm not gonna go through the story, but there was a group of men that I worked with, and some of them had some definitely racially insensitive views.

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That's kind of the extent of my experience with actual white supremacy. And I hated it every time

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I saw it. It's absolutely disgusting. I grew up in a multicultural church. I love the people that I grew up with.

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They love me. Anyone who knows me knows that's an absolutely ridiculous charge to level against me, but it was leveled, all right?

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It's whataboutism, all right? Number two, it's standpoint epistemology, which is what I was warning about in the montage of those at Southeastern who were promoting this stuff.

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Standpoint epistemology, and this is rudimentary. I'm gonna have a professor come and talk about this soon, but basically says that your social group has its own truth, and it cannot be questioned, and you take that.

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So that's why there's a black experience, right? And there's a white experience, and there's whatever your social group is.

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Your level of oppression plays into it. Intersectionality makes it more complicated, but you have this experience you bring to things, and that's what determines truth.

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So if people say that I'm a white supremacist, what they're saying is that my editing skills in a montage were motivated by white supremacy, and so you can't trust it because those particular edits are white supremacist.

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No one has made an argument for this. No one's going to the videos, watching them, seeing where I took the clips from, and then making an argument that, well,

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I could see how someone who has white supremacy would take that out. And it's an absurd argument.

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It's ridiculous. And standpoint epistemology, we may be too late with some of these guys. I mean, I saw this from the seminary level, but it's horrible.

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It's a horrible anti -biblical understanding of truth. It's postmodern, and this is what we've come down to now.

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And so they're using whataboutism, they're using standpoint epistemology, and there's part of me that's like, who cares? It's just the

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Twitter mob. But I also thought, this is a good teaching opportunity, I think. Number one,

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I think, to be encouraged, to see, guys, I'm not backing down. I would be satisfied being canceled and scrubbing toilets.

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I'd be satisfied being the face of the movement. I don't care. What I care about is that this heresy, and I'm willing to call it that, some of these guys have been given way too much benefit of the doubt.

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They're no good, some of them. This heresy, though, that's being promoted needs to end.

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And that's where I'm at. I care about the church, I care about the word of God, I care about truth. And so that's what motivates me to do what

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I'm doing. And right now, we have a situation in which there's a supply and a demand issue.

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I think if there was a really good, godly man's man, who ran for office, we may not have a

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Trump, because that guy might've gotten the position. But we don't really have that. We have that there is a demand issue, because there's not enough of supply of really godly men who have a backbone, who are willing to stand up against this stuff.

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And to Tom Askell's credit, he retweeted my video. I don't know if he, maybe he wouldn't do that now,

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I don't know, but we've never had a discussion about white supremacy or slavery or any of that stuff.

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But Tom Askell sees that there's some truth in this montage, and it needs to be answered.

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He's concerned. That's a man who's gonna do that. I really do think it is, because he's got a platform.

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And people are already trying to put me around his neck as a weight and say, well, if you endorse John, and he's a white supremacist, you're a white supremacist.

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And the things they're saying about him are frankly disgusting. It's slander, it's lying.

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But it'll work on a lot of conservatives. A lot of conservatives of platforms are deathly afraid to be called names by the left.

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And Trump was not. And I think that's why Trump is where he's at. And in the

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SBC, there's a similar dynamic going on. There just isn't a Trump. And we don't want a Trump, right? But we do want a

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Christian man who's willing to stand up and say, I don't care if I'm called sexist or racist, you can try to cancel me. I'm gonna stand upon the word of God and I trust him.

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And it's one of the reasons I respect Robert Oscar Lopez, to be honest with you. He could have stayed where he was at, drawing a paycheck and settled down and not said anything, and he didn't.

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Because he knew that the word of God should not be compromised. And he doesn't know what he's gonna be doing for work.

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And I think we're gonna see the Lord provide. And that's the exciting part of all this. And you need to be encouraged.

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When people persecute you and it's unjust, scripture says to rejoice. And that's what we ought to do.

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We ought to rejoice. And that's hard for us sometimes. I mean, for me, at first I was like, come on guys, really, you're gonna go that direction?

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I kind of knew they would, but I was like, ah, come on. And as things progressed, I just started having fun with it.

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You can look at my Twitter, some of the things I said that were jokes. And then I just didn't take them seriously, which makes them more mad.

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And then I think just thanking God, I actually took a walk and I just said, Lord, thank you, thank you for this, that people are lying about me.

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And it's because I'm trying to take a stand for the truth here. And it's because I love Christ. And so I love the word.

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And those are the things that you wanna be persecuted for, if you're gonna be persecuted, right? So this is a teaching opportunity though.

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And one of the reasons I wanna talk about this is because social justice warriors do not make distinctions.

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They have a very hard time with that. And even if you don't care,

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I'm gonna get into a little bit. Now, I can't say everything I wanna say, but I'm starting the process at least of putting out some material on the monument debate, the history debate.

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It's not just gonna be the Confederate stuff. It's because I'm seeing it now. I live in Virginia. I'm seeing attacks on Jefferson and Washington.

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And the low -hanging fruit is going first, but it's gonna affect everything in American history. If the

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South is in stage four cancer, as far as getting rid of icons, heroes, et cetera, the greater population of the

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United States is in about stage two. The founding fathers are being canceled. We're just at the beginning of it.

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So not everyone's aware yet. But I think we need to start the discussion of this because you may not care about the

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Southern monuments. Maybe you live in Minnesota, but you need to gear up for the debate that is coming your way.

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I remember Mark Dever. This was, I think, a year and a half ago now. Well, maybe it was two years ago now.

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It was at the T4G two years ago. He said from the stage in front of everyone, he said, and I thought, isn't anyone gonna call him on this?

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He goes, you know, George Washington, that guy probably wasn't a Christian. And the reason he said he wasn't, now that's not, that's okay.

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You can talk about that, whether Washington was a Christian or not. I happen to think he probably was. And there's arguments people on both sides use.

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But that's neither here nor there. The reason Mark Dever said he probably wasn't a Christian was because, well, he owned slaves.

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Couldn't be a Christian if he owned slaves. Now I have to ask, all right? Now think about this for a minute with me.

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And if you have to pause this and pause it and think about it, does that disqualify someone from being a

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Christian, owning slaves? Does that disqualify someone from being a Christian? Think of all the folks in the

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Bible, biblical characters in the Old Testament, biblical characters in the New Testament, who would be disqualified if that truly was a disqualification.

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And yet they were not. They were heroes of the faith. They were commended in many instances by apostles.

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So you need to be careful when making such grandiose statements like that. I think some people have good motivations.

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They haven't thought through it. They have good motivations. In their mind, they come up with an image of like, it's like a Southern slaveholder whipping someone and that's horrible.

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Anyone who would do that and advocate it can't be a Christian. I would say, yeah, that's true. Like if you think that's morally right to abuse someone, then yeah, you're probably not a

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Christian or at least you can't do that for long. You need to repent at some point, right? But you can be an error.

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Corinthians were an error. You can be an error for a long period of time, but you're gonna have to repent eventually. But slavery in and of itself though is not a disqualification for being a

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Christian. And I know I may sound like I'm a broken record right now, but it's important to realize that before I get started with the discussion that I'm about to commence here.

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So here are the things that I got in trouble for. Here are the things that were used, I should say, to try to get me in trouble, to create a diversion so people wouldn't look at that montage.

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Number one, I dressed up in a Confederate uniform when I was 12 years old and it wasn't actually a

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Confederate uniform. People were saying it was, it wasn't. At the Virginia Military Institute, they wear the same uniforms today.

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They wear the same uniforms back then. And I happened to have, I'm gonna just tell you the story. I happened to have a guy in my church

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I really looked up to who went to VMI. And we had just seen him in this parade.

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He had dressed up in his VMI uniform and it was just awesome. I just remember thinking like, man,

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I wanna go to VMI. I just wanna be a soldier, you know? And I didn't have a thought about who was right in the

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Civil War at that time. I just, I was just, I just liked heroes and guns and fighting.

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I was a typical boy. And my parents and I, well, my brothers went to the

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Battle of Newmarket and there's a display in there the

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National Park Service had put up where you could play dress up. So it was for kids and you could put on a

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VMI uniform. Not, it's not a Confederate uniform, it's a VMI uniform. But you could stand in front of, to get your picture taken, that's where the pictures were, in front of this

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Confederate Naval Jack. And it's because during the war, they took kids from VMI to go fight in the

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Battle of Newmarket. And they're commended as heroes, they're local heroes. Well, that was when I was 12.

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So we're talking 18 years ago that this picture was taken. I'm sure that display is not there anymore, but it happened to be on my

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Facebook. And so I think I know the person who did the deep dive on me, who tried to find all these things to create this narrative.

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And it's actually someone I feel very sorry for. Another person who doesn't, their life is small,

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I think. They don't have a great sense of humor. But anyway, this was released as, look, he must be a white supremacist.

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Now, I just, you know, I'm gonna put this out there. How many of you, when you were a kid, dressed up?

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I mean, I dressed up as a pirate, right? Which is actually, it's actually worse. Like you're actually, by definition, someone who's stealing and robbing and raping.

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But for some reason, we're okay with that. But I dressed up as a pirate. I dressed up with every uniform.

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I've dressed up as Yankees. I've dressed up as Confederates. I've dressed up as Revolutionary War soldiers.

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I've dressed up as World War II soldiers. You know, you name it, I had the uniform. I had my coon skin cap.

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I loved hats. I loved uniforms. That's who I was as a kid. And of course, those pictures, you know, they're just skipped over, none of that stuff.

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And so how many of those pictures do you have of yourself? When you were a kid?

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I mean, they're coming for Confederate monuments today, but it's not, they could come for the

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Union monument soon, guys. I don't think you realize this. Some of you, at least.

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I don't think you realize they could come for the Revolutionary War monuments. Are you gonna get in trouble because you dressed up as a reenactor or dressed up as a kid?

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That's one of the reasons I wanna talk about this, because I know this doesn't just apply to me. This is gonna apply to you guys.

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People are gonna try to cancel you because of things you did that were innocuous, that you weren't trying to harm or offend anyone.

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You didn't even think about it. Maybe you're just trying to honor your ancestors and not the negative aspects, but just the positive aspects.

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Not gonna be allowed to do it anymore in the minds of the minority, but they're growing on Twitter and on the left.

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The other thing is I had a blog, and this was from my late teens. I had started, this was when

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I was, I don't know, 16, 17. I started a blog that was dedicated to Southern history, specifically

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Confederate history. It's because I was getting, at that point in my life, I was getting very interested in history. And here's the thing.

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I actually had seven blogs at the time. I know, I was one of these guys where I felt like I had,

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I was OCD about organizational stuff, and I couldn't just have one blog where I put all my writings.

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I had to have seven of them where I put different topics. So I had one on vacations. I had one on, like two on guitar.

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One, like this is how crazy I was. I had one for worship guitar and one for country music guitar. And I would put videos and like tabs

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I made and stuff. I had a blog for worldview. I can't even remember all of them, but I had all these different blogs. Well, one of them was called

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The Rising Seed. And I had, and it's after a quote by Jefferson Davis. He said, truth crushed to the earth is still truth, and like a seed, it will rise again.

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And what he was talking about was the truth that secession is a constitutional right. Okay, you can disagree with that.

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I'm fine with that. I'm gonna talk about that in a minute. But this is my reasoning.

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I just want you to hear what I was thinking when I was 17 years old. I really,

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I had an internship in Albany. I was interested in politics. I lived in New York at the time.

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And I actually, I was very close to going to Liberty Law School. I was, I really, I had some issues at my college.

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I went to school, went to college early. And I had ADF got involved. And I just really, I knew there was a difference between some states and others.

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I was born in California, raised in New York, had a lot of family in Ohio and Mississippi. And I knew there was a difference in Ohio, and there was a difference in Mississippi from California and New York.

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And I just thought, man, I really wish, like this is my, this was like my dream. If like Mississippi, let's say, could secede from the

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Union, or Ohio, whatever, and create a place in which babies could be safe.

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No abortions in Mississippi anymore, right? Because they're gonna take a stand.

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And some of that you see is already starting to happen. But at the time, it wasn't. And I thought that would be my dream.

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And the other thing I was concerned about was, I think the Department of Education and the public school system is, they're moving this country in a terrible direction.

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I think school should be, there should be parental involvement, it should be local. The more local, the better. And so my dream was,

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I wanna become a lawyer, I wanna become a constitutional lawyer, I wanna eliminate the Department of Education, and I want to outlaw abortion.

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And I think that a way to do it is to either nullification, or if the federal government threatens a state, you secede.

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But here's the problem with that, obviously. And I think I was more idealistic back then. I'm not on the same,

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I mean, I guess I believe that same principle, but I realize all the things that stand in the way of that. People are naturally conditioned to think that's not an option, because of the way they view the

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Civil War. So if you think that secession is unconstitutional, it's illegal, you can't do it, it's wrong, you'll never do it, you'll never stand up for the unborn babies in your state, because you think it's wrong to do that, it's illegal.

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And so this was the thing that bothered me. And so I thought, well, somehow, someone needs to show people that secession, and I come to this conviction through some of my own study.

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I mean, I went to, look, a very liberal college, so I knew well the Marxist line and all of this stuff.

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But I'd done some of my own study, and I had come to the conclusion that no, secession is justifiable.

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And I need to now convince people, though, that the Civil War does not disqualify a state from taking that and going that direction.

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I wanted to protect the right of secession, and I knew re -educating people on that topic would be necessary.

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Now, one of the things, when you're talking about the Civil War, is people think it was all about slavery, right?

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Most people. Where I grew up in New York, everyone thought that, just about. And so that's the barrier, really the moral barrier people have in their head for, well, secession can't be right, because that means slavery.

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The two are integrated. And so, on some of the articles that I had written at the time,

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I had tried to show that not only is secession constitutional, and it doesn't really have anything to do with this moral question of slavery, but even at the time, in context, the war itself was not really about slavery.

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Now, having said that, I recognize the slavery debate, meaning the political debate over slavery, and the extension is the word used at the time, but really it was more the enumeration of slaves being proportionately put into the

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Western Territory. That was a huge debate that led to the Lower South seceding. That was a big part of it.

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The tariff had something to do with it as well. But I don't shy away from that at all. I know that was a big part of the reason for secession.

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But the reason for the war itself, and the reason for the Upper South's secession too, was not that.

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And so I tried to argue for this. Well, anyway, you're not allowed to hold that view anymore. That blog doesn't exist.

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I think I deleted it and a bunch of others a couple years ago. That's why I know the guy who did this. That's why I think I know who it is.

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They did it a couple years ago. They would have had to to find those screenshots. And so what they tried to do was show, they tried to paint me as somehow being a supporter of slavery, which means

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I'm a white supremacist. And so if you take the picture of me, the blog, you can paint me in such horrible ways.

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And then there was the tweet. This is the tweet that was heard around the world. And this is what I said. Some people were getting on to me.

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And this is where people, I don't even know, there's probably like 400, that's probably liberal, maybe 300 people that were really angry about this.

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I said, I defend the biblical position on slavery because someone was asking me about that. I said, I'm glad Chateau's slavery, which was often justified by ethnic superiority and rested on man capture, is gone in the

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U .S. It's a rabbit trail to think that the moral question about that is what inspired the

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North to invade the South. And then I said, I think it's dangerous to go after slavery as a sin in and of itself.

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Now remember, remember, I'm stopping. Remember what I just said a few moments ago about the patriarchs and about Philemon and the teaching on slavery and a pagan system that Paul gave us.

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Remember that. There's biblical instruction on this. So that's what

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I'm thinking. I'm thinking I'm reasoning with a Christian here. I think it was someone who called himself a Christian, but so I said,

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I think it's dangerous to go after slavery, dangerous to go after slavery as a sin in and of itself and paint men like Lee, Washington, and Edwards as sinners simply because they participated, assuming they obeyed

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God's regulations, concerning the practice. We have to go back to scripture. Now I'm gonna spend a good portion of this video explaining this to you, explaining why

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I said exactly what I said in this tweet, but I don't back down from any of that. I do think we have to go back to scripture and scripture gives instruction.

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Paul has given us instruction on for slaves and for masters in a pagan slave system.

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I mean, think about that for a minute. Look, people will talk about American slavery being race -based, that's the word they usually use, and based on man capture.

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Those are usually the two things that are used to say, well, anyone who participated is just evil. And look at the

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Roman system with me for a moment. The Roman system was based on citizenship from Rome. You couldn't be a slave and be a citizen of Rome.

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The Roman system was, a lot of the slaves that they got were from conquests.

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Rome would literally go out. They were capturing people. This was war, but they would capture people and sell them into slavery, the non -Romans.

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And look, I don't remember, correct me if I'm wrong, you can send me the picture if there is something like this, but I don't remember gladiatorial arenas in Alabama, right?

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Rome had them, Rome had them. Incredibly abusive system. And that doesn't mean it was always abusive, but sex slavery was also a big part of it.

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There were slaves that, it was very common practice. If you look through any of, on like the book of 1

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Corinthians or even Ephesians, a lot of the commentaries will talk about the culture being men typically had a wife and then they had a slave for sex.

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They had sex slaves. That was absolutely wrong. But they actually had, at least in the

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South, when that kind of thing happened, it was absolutely wrong. It was a damnable offense, but it wasn't something that was condoned by the whole, like a whole population didn't say, oh yeah, like that's your sex slave.

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In Rome, they did. In Rome, boys were even part of that. So I'm not gonna go into too much detail on this, but if you really do some digging and you really compare the two systems, you'll realize that the

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Roman slave system is at least as bad, okay? And Paul gave instructions for slave owners in that system.

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He gave instructions for them of how to be godly, to treat your slave in a kind way, not to abuse them, to, you know, practice

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Christian charity. And so the question really is, did Lee, did Edwards, did Washington exercise those things?

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Did they follow what scripture says about this? That's really the question we should be asking. You can't ask that question anymore.

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Can't ask that question. I'll ask you this. Do we ask that question about prison guards, right?

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Prison system really isn't biblical. There's no way for restitution. It's, you know, it's slavery, really.

27:23

I mean, a lot of people are saying this now. And then finally, you know, the 13th amendment is now viewed as, that's the, you know, because you can be a slave in prison.

27:32

That's fine. Well, yeah. Yeah, you can. And you can make license plates and you can do all sorts of things and your labor belongs to the government.

27:42

And that's not really a righteous system. If you steal something, you should be able to make, you should be able to recompense that.

27:49

My grandfather -in -law is a prison guard, or was, he retired. I am not willing to say that my grandfather -in -law was sinning because he was a prison guard.

27:57

Were there times he probably sinned as a prison guard? Yeah. I'm not gonna say because he was a prison guard, he's partaking in this evil system.

28:05

I've known some social workers who are Christians. I am not prepared to say, because listen, so the welfare system in this country, especially on the national level, it is not biblical.

28:16

It is not, you know, if a man doesn't work, he shouldn't eat. And we have a system that is based on not working.

28:23

It is the opposite of that verse. It is a wrong system. And it behaves a lot like slavery, to be honest with you. There's generational welfare and people who live in it, the conditions that they live in and the conditions that they're giving their children, in some, there's some circumstances in which it's almost worse.

28:39

They don't even have the dignity of work. And there's obviously situations in American slavery that were far worse too and far more abusive.

28:46

I'm not saying that welfare is worse than slavery, I'm not making, because I know someone's gonna take that out of context. I'm just saying it is a wrong system.

28:56

I'm not prepared to say though, that those who are social workers, that are Christians are in sin. I could go on,

29:02

I could go on. I'm not prepared to say that someone who shops at Walmart is in sin. Yeah, there's sweat shop labor that goes in in foreign countries.

29:09

It's basically slave labor, guys. It's on that level. The conditions are on that level. I'm not prepared to say that, well, that's a sin for them to go and shop there.

29:21

We have to be biblical people. And we're not accustomed to thinking about the things I just mentioned in that way.

29:28

We're not accustomed to thinking, well, okay, I participate in the American tax system. I pay taxes. Some of that goes to Planned Parenthood.

29:34

I guess I'm a sinner, right? No, you're not necessarily a sinner because someone else in the system, because it's an evil system, you can work to abolish that system or to reform that system, and you can still be a salt and light in that system.

29:48

That's the example that we're given from Paul. That's the New Testament example of how to deal with these things. And I'm not prepared to say that the

29:54

Bible was not sufficient for men in the 17th and 18th century and 19th century.

30:00

It is sufficient, and it was sufficient for them back then. It gave them guidance in the situation that they found themselves in, just like it does for us today.

30:09

And I'm afraid a lot of these woke folks have not thought too deeply into this subject. They are very quick to condemn someone like Jonathan Edwards, and they haven't bothered.

30:19

I've read everything Edwards has said about slavery. I'm not prepared to condemn the man.

30:24

I really am not. Was he perfect? No. But the question is, the burden of proof is on them.

30:35

Can you prove that they were disregarding the biblical commands on this? All right, so hopefully that's opened your mind a little bit for the rest of what

30:45

I'm gonna share with you. All right, I am back. Sorry about that. This is gonna be a long episode,

30:50

I can tell already, because there's just, and I can't cover everything I wanna cover, but if you need to listen to this in bits, then go for it.

30:57

We were talking about cancel culture and MLK days this weekend, and thinking about this, Southern Baptists love

31:03

MLK now. I mean, I talked about this last year. Seminaries are promoting him. Send Network is doing a day of service in honor of him.

31:09

And MLK had some real problems, right? Rape, running around on his wife, plagiarism, bad theology.

31:15

But Southern Baptists don't really seem to care about those things as much as far as platforming. They'll still platform him.

31:21

But I don't think that we should take down MLK signs, right? Because we're honoring him for his civil rights contributions, for the

31:28

I Have a Dream speech, which is a great speech. And that's how we think of him. But that same grace that I'm extending to MLK, and most

31:36

Americans do, is not extended to someone like Jonathan Edwards, who there's no evidence he abused his slaves, but because he participated in this wicked system, he should be canceled.

31:48

And I just, I don't go along with that. MLK, civil rights leader icon that Southern Baptists now are looking to, he didn't go after Confederate or Southern symbols, or a general

32:00

American symbol. He wasn't going after Washington and Jefferson. Up from slavery,

32:08

Booker T. Washington, there we go. That's a great book, by the way, you should read it. But Booker T. Washington actually thought that putting up these

32:17

Confederate monuments was a symbol of reconciliation. And so if they can be okay with these things,

32:23

I don't know why we can't. I do know why, but I'm making a point. The attack on these symbols,

32:32

Southern symbols and now broadening out to American symbols and figures, has really started since the civil rights movement, like after it ended.

32:40

Now, I know some of you think it's still going on, et cetera, et cetera, but after segregation was actually ended, you had even

32:47

Hollywood, which has really left. You had Dukes of Hazzard, and you had in the music industry, all sorts of artists like Lynyrd Skynyrd, who would use the flag and symbols, and Bill Clinton used it with Al Gore in their campaign in the early 90s.

33:00

But something happened in 1989, critical race theory got started. And in a decade in the 90s and 2000s, when actually race relations were getting better, somehow those symbols became under fire.

33:12

Now, why is that? It's not like new information got dug up from the 1860s, interpreting these differently.

33:19

There was a different interpretive paradigm that was brought to bear. And I don't think it's a coincidence, it's at the time that critical race theory is getting going.

33:26

We were told that we gotta take the flag down because it offends people, but it'll be in the museum. Well, now they're being taken out of museums.

33:33

We're still gonna honor the troops. Well, now the monuments are going. Well, it's just gonna be the Confederate ones. Nope, now they're targeting

33:39

Jefferson, and Washington, and Christopher Columbus, and Joan of Arc even, and John Wayne, and William McKinley, and the list goes on.

33:51

No one is escaping this. And it's an acid that we just gotta be ready for it because Americans who have had no racist inclinations are beaten up for things that were acceptable five minutes ago.

34:02

And I won't back down on this. I determined to call sin what God calls sin and not call sin what he doesn't.

34:08

And if honoring something good is called sin, you can count me out. And if that cancels me, that's fine. But I've seen hundreds of these monuments and they all pretty much say the same thing to those who fought for honor, for duty, for honestly, a lot of qualities that are in short supply today.

34:23

It was, I'll use my grandfather. So I have four of them who fought for the South. I also have a few that fought for the

34:29

North. And I honor both. But the ones that fought for the South were poor as dirt. They weren't part of the 25 % of families who owned slaves in the

34:37

South. They were attacked and so they defended themselves. In fact, the churches were burned by Sherman's army.

34:44

So we had trouble tracing our genealogies back because that's where they kept genealogies at the time. And they were descendant from, well, in Jamestown.

34:52

And I'm not embarrassed to tell you this. My ancestors, they weren't slaves per se, but they were about the next best, the next thing closest to it.

35:02

They were indentured servants. And my family's been, on that side, has been poor as dirt until really the 20th century.

35:11

And some of them got up into the middle class. My parents were the first to get degrees. And so when

35:18

I look at those, that's what I think of. I think of them defending their land. I even think of black

35:24

Confederates, to be honest with you. And I know Frederick Douglass has been quoted as talking about the conditions of slavery and how bad they are.

35:30

They don't like to quote Frederick Douglass, though, on when he talks about black Confederates. I'll let you do the research on that.

35:38

So I'm not gonna back down. And I'm gonna defend Americans who want to defend their history, whether it's

35:44

Revolutionary War, Founding Period, Civil War, either side. Look, the

35:50

World War II vets are going. I'm just waiting. Segregated Army, they're gonna go after the World War II vets at some point after they're gone.

35:58

It's gonna take a little while. But I'm just saying this acid does not discriminate.

36:04

It will eat everything at some point. Now, I think most people know, the people that know me know this.

36:10

I hate white supremacy. In fact, the first person I blocked, I blocked like three people over this, the first person was a actual white supremacist on Twitter.

36:17

There's a few of them around. And I hate it. I just hate it. I've seen some racism in various little pockets.

36:25

I just talked about that earlier. And I hate it every time I see it. And I need to say this very loud and clear.

36:31

American slavery was as, even as Dabney says, who I don't agree with everything that Robert Louis Dabney says, but it was an iniquitous traffic.

36:40

The slave trade was iniquitous. It was evil, it was wrong. It was based on some bad assumptions that even were used to justify it.

36:46

And it should never have happened. I'm glad it's over with. And I can very clearly articulate why.

36:52

I don't know if the woke crowd completely can, but I can talk about why biblically the

36:57

American slave system as a whole did not match up with biblical characteristics. I mean, when you have laws prohibiting slaves from reading because they're afraid that that's gonna start a slave insurrection, if they can read some of the more violent abolitionist literature that was sent down South, well, that's wrong.

37:14

They can't read their Bible. And I'm glad people like Stonewall Jackson went against that. He had a black

37:19

Sunday school and the state did not bother the church. So the church was able to do that, but that was wrong.

37:26

Some of the laws governing it were absolutely wrong. The whole way that it started really with tribal warfare and African tribes enslaving and selling to the

37:37

Muslims. And I did a whole episode on this. So you can go check out my episode on reparations if you want, where I crunch numbers and so forth.

37:43

But the 5 % on the transatlantic slave trade that came to the United States, many of them did happen to get into good

37:53

Christian environments where they could learn the principles of God's word. And they were clothed and they were fed.

38:01

That doesn't apply to all the slaves at all. And for those who are getting upset at me right now, this is one of the sources

38:07

I'd recommend to you. Read this book, Time on the Cross, Vogel and Engerman. Engerman is a

38:13

Nobel laureate. And they go through the economics of slavery. They say that according to the slave narratives, which were done by the

38:20

Works Projects Administration in the 1930s, about 60 to 80 % of slaves had nothing negative to say about their masters.

38:27

Some of them look forward to seeing them in heaven. There's a good percentage though, and I'm willing to say 20%.

38:33

There's a good, at least 20%, I would say, that had very negative experiences, I'm sure. And it was horrible.

38:39

And I think for that reason, it was a horrible institution. And I think the way it was justified was horrible.

38:44

I think the racial element that was used to justify it. And when people say it was race -based, not exactly, it was more geography -based.

38:52

That's where the supply was and there was a demand. Because you had Native Americans who owned slaves. There was a lot of, if you go watch that episode on reparations,

39:00

I talk about a lot of black slave owners in the United States. The first person to make the jump from servant, from indentured servant to slave, was owned by a black person.

39:10

One of the largest slave owners in Charleston was a black person at the start of the war. So it wasn't, it's blurry.

39:19

And history is complex like that. It's nuanced. But there was a lot of justification made that, hey, they're inferior, so we should own them, own their labor.

39:29

And that's wrong. That's absolutely wrong. The whole, the premise that, where it started is wrong.

39:37

But look, a lot of these slaves, their tribes are wiped out. Where are you gonna send them back to?

39:43

If you're someone who, let's say you have a kind heart and you have the money, you may even want to purchase a slave to keep them from going into a worse predicament.

39:52

That is a possibility. You could obey God's law and do that while working against the system. While wanting it eliminated or wanting it reformed.

39:59

That is possible. Robert E. Lee inherited his slaves. So it's not like he had much he could do and he had a financial pinch he was in.

40:09

He wanted to, he hated slavery. He wanted to get rid of them. So, history is more nuanced.

40:16

And if that's the only thing you'd take away from this, then I will have done my job. But the

40:21

Twitter mob doesn't understand that. The Twitter mob, they say that they're, they're concerned about white supremacy.

40:30

One of them gave me a death threat. They want to call me this, they want to cancel me. And the strategy is just to get folks to distance themselves from me.

40:38

It's moral posturing, it's trying to create a diversion so people don't discuss the montage.

40:44

Really though, I think what's allowing them to do this in their minds, what justifies them, what makes them really feel better about themselves and say, well, you know,

40:51

I believe all this Marxism stuff, but look at him, he believes in slavery. It makes them feel good, right?

40:57

They get off on it. It's like they're, it really does something for them. They have an interpretive paradigm that is shaped,

41:07

I think because a lot of historians today are too keyed into secondary sources. And most of all of them are written by Marxists at this point.

41:15

And they're trying to interpret the Bible from an oppressed perspective. And history really started to be interpreted that way.

41:23

It's been interpreted that way for the last 50 years, most of the popular secondary sources. So if you're not a history buff, and you don't care about the

41:31

Twitter war, you may want to skip ahead on this video because I'm about to get into more detail. But if you do care about civil war stuff,

41:39

I'm gonna talk about it. I'm gonna explain some of the thinking that I have. And this is the beginning.

41:45

I'm gonna bring some more material like this if you guys like it. But if you don't like it, just skip ahead and go to the video at the end of this, which is an interview with Jud Saul on equipping the persecuted in Nigeria.

41:59

Our Christian brothers and sisters are getting persecuted in Nigeria. And you'll wanna check that out. But let's talk about civil war stuff.

42:07

So there's two paradigms, essentially. There is the lost cause paradigm or narrative. And then there's, you never hear people talk about this in history departments anymore, but there is the slave power narrative.

42:19

And both of them, there are two different kind of views of what happened in that conflict, what that conflict was about.

42:25

And I've read from both. You have to read the slave power stuff, really, if you're gonna go into history because that's primarily what you're gonna be told.

42:33

You have to do extra work if you want to get to know some of the stuff from lost cause, canon of lost cause literature.

42:40

And I'll do another episode on this. So I'm not gonna get into the details on what those sources are and what they mean and why they're vilified by many modern historians.

42:49

All I have to say is my goal is to be as balanced as possible. And what you want is a paradigm that makes sense of all the facts and information you have available.

42:58

If you're just reading from one side or you're reading, you only have certain facts and you don't have all of them, then you can come up with an erroneous paradigm, which is really what's happened, unfortunately,

43:09

I think, in the field of Civil War study. So just to give you a few examples of things that I think people who have bought into the slave power narrative without really knowing it have a hard time making sense of are things like Jefferson Davis, for instance.

43:24

He's a horrible villain, right? Well, why would he petition the Congress of the United States, unsuccessfully, by the way, to allow slaves to patent their inventions?

43:37

Well, there's a reason for that. There's a reason for it. And it's because his brother had a slave who actually invented something and could not patent it because he was a slave.

43:46

And Jefferson Davis said, that's absolutely wrong. He should be able to do it. Jefferson Davis lived with some of his slaves after the war.

43:51

They took him in. They cared for him. There's a lot I could say about him that you'd be surprised. You'd say, I never knew that about him.

43:58

Well, part of the reason you never knew it is because it does not fit the narrative. It creates a problem.

44:06

It throws a wrench into that narrative. Well, I guess he didn't really hate blacks too much. So why was he the president of the

44:12

Confederacy, right? He was also, well, I'm not gonna go on about Davis, but Lee, Lee hated slavery, right?

44:19

And Lee's been a hard one for them because it's pretty documented how he hated slavery. There's even a story, a famous one after the war, where he kneels down beside a black man taking communion when the congregation is kind of aghast that this black man came and took communion.

44:34

It's an integrated church. And Lee, he said that the ground is level at the foot of the cross.

44:40

And he creates this example and puts his arm around this guy. And it's hard to vilify that man, but they're trying.

44:46

They're trying to find, like there's one source that they go to. It's an abolitionist source, which was just discounted for years until recently.

44:53

Now they're saying, well, no, I think there's one source that said that Lee was brutal to his slaves. That's the right one.

44:59

That's the one we should look at. Yeah, okay. When there's many sources that say the opposite about the man.

45:06

Stonewall Jackson, I just mentioned his Sunday school. He did not like slavery at all. So why did they fight for the

45:12

Confederacy? What's that about, right? If it was all about slavery. You have a lot of slaves themselves, who the way they viewed the institution was more providential.

45:23

Booker T. Washington's a good example of this, actually. He didn't like slavery, but hey, thank you,

45:29

Lord, for taking me here, for teaching me Christianity in a country that I can actually learn it. I'm thankful that it ended.

45:35

But if you read his account, after they were freed, they go up to the master's house and they share tears with him because they've taken care of his kids and he's taken care of them.

45:45

And there's this relationship they have. It doesn't fit the narrative.

45:52

And this isn't justifying slavery. If you think that what I'm saying right now is justifying slavery, just telling you facts, then you have bought a false narrative, so hook, line, and sinker, that you don't know where right and left are, and up and down, because you have to grapple with these things.

46:10

Yeah, grapple with the abuse stuff. Grapple with the Frederick Douglass stuff, too. Put that into the mix. But you have to look at all of it.

46:18

What about Jack Henson's One Man War? You can read that book. The slaves, he freed the slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation that he had.

46:25

They begged him not to free them. Why is that? Why is that? Were they all just brutal beasts in the

46:31

South? There's a lot of abolitionist literature that says that, that tries to talk about that that's the only experience that existed.

46:40

Yeah, that experience existed in some places. That wasn't the entire picture, all right?

46:45

And you can't say that a Christian was not able to exist in that environment and follow sufficiently the word of God.

46:54

I just refuse to believe that. So what inspired the vast majority of those without slaves to fight on the front lines of the army?

47:04

What inspired them? I talked about that a few minutes ago. How do tariffs play a role in this? Have you read all the debates in Congress, especially between Calhoun and Clay and Webster on tariffs and on what was called at the time the expansion of slavery?

47:19

The political question. It's different than the moral question. It was about representation. What about the

47:25

Confederate Constitution? What about a lot of the changes the Confederate Constitution makes? They got rid of earmarks and pork barrel spending and limited, severely limited crony capitalism.

47:40

And there's all sorts of things in the Confederate Constitution that show you the motive was a lot more than just, we wanna have our slaves in the

47:47

Western territories, we wanna bring them there. Why does the Confederate Constitution outlaw the slave trade? It does, did you know that?

47:54

How does that fit into the paradigm? It doesn't make it illegal in the states, but the states in the Confederacy, they could have abolished it on their own.

48:01

But the slave trade, that was abolished. Why is that? Why do we go to, why don't we go to ethnogenesis?

48:09

Tim Roth, Poet Laureate of the Confederacy. Why don't we go to his poem? It doesn't talk about slavery.

48:14

It talks about Christianity as being a motivation for the formation of the South, the Confederacy. What about Patrick Claiborne's cornerstone speech?

48:22

Everyone wants to go to Alexander Stevens' cornerstone speech, which there was one reporter there and Alexander Stevens later denied that he said what the reporter said he said.

48:31

Claiborne's speech isn't contested and doesn't talk about slavery. It talks about constitutional government.

48:38

Why don't we go to that? Why isn't that in the mix at least? Why don't we talk about the North's motivation for invading the

48:45

South, for mobilizing troops? Lincoln said in his first inaugural, he had no intention of freeing the slaves.

48:53

The moral tariff was passed by, or not moral tariff, sorry. There was an act that was passed by both houses of Congress.

49:03

Lincoln could have signed it. That would have permanently made sure that slavery remained legal in the

49:09

South. I mean, the Southern states could have vetoed a measure. They had enough votes, more than enough. They could veto a measure today to get rid of slavery.

49:17

That wasn't the North's motivation though. Three independent accounts claim Lincoln said in a cabinet meeting that he wanted to mobilize the troops because he didn't know where he'd get revenue from.

49:29

Preserving the union was the battle cry until the Emancipation Proclamation. We don't talk about that stuff.

49:35

If you rely on the secession ordinances from the lower South and the cornerstone speech by Alexander Stevens alone, and you don't take into account other metrics, you won't have a full paradigm.

49:46

You'll come up with a very imbalanced one. I can explain all those things by the way. But someone who's just slave power narrative and that's it, they have a hard time explaining, and I could have gone on, but just some of the things that I brought up.

49:58

I think there's a big failure to make distinctions in this debate. There's a distinction between the moral question of slavery and the political question of slavery.

50:07

I'm gonna talk about that. There's a distinction between immediate and progressive emancipation. Two different visions for how to end slavery.

50:15

We don't talk about that. There's a distinction between the motive for secession and the motive for the war itself.

50:21

When people say the war was all about slavery, usually they try to point you to some secession document.

50:28

Well, see, it says that they're fighting for slavery. And it's like, well, that's their secession document.

50:34

And then the Northern states in the South or the border states in the Upper South, they did not talk about slavery in their secession documents by and large.

50:44

The Southern ones did. But if you take one of those documents, you think you can prove that that's what the war was about.

50:50

No, they could have done something. Let's say the South did something absolutely horrendous. We want racist slavery perpetually.

50:57

North didn't have to invade them. Why did the North invade, right? Why were millions of people dying?

51:04

In fact, a million after the war died because Sherman decimated the population and the infrastructure.

51:11

And so you had slaves dying because they were starving to death. If there was a way to free the slaves, that was probably the worst way to do it.

51:21

Race relations were poisoned in the South after the war. The way reconstruction was handled. So there's all these different things to look at.

51:29

What are the motive? We talked about this a little bit. The motive for the government versus the motive for the soldiers. Government can declare war and say one thing, but the soldiers fight for something else.

51:39

So all these complexities, they're lost on the woke crowd. They don't even wanna bring them up.

51:44

All they see is, oh, you have a uniform, you have a flag. Oh, you must be racist. And if they really decided to think through these things, logically, systematically, without their wokeness, interpreting everything,

52:00

I think they'd come to very different conclusions about things. Even if they just compared apples to apples and tried to look at systems today that are abusive and how

52:08

Christians are to interact in them, they wouldn't come to the conclusions they're coming to. Let's talk about each of these questions as briefly as I can.

52:16

This is gonna be a long video. The political question. The political question of slavery was not really about the elimination of slavery.

52:25

Southern states could have vetoed that, like I said. It was really over whether Southern influence and free black labor would expand

52:32

West. So as, and if you know what the Turner thesis is, if you're a historian, you'll know about this, that as the

52:40

United States expanded West, the question was, is it gonna be a free state or a slave state? And what that really meant was, is it going to side with the

52:47

South politically or side with the Northeastern industrial area? And the Midwest was up for grabs for a long time, but eventually it settled, it sort of sided with the

52:56

Northeast. And there's reasons for that. But the American system, which was infrastructure projects paid for by the tariff, which was really, which was how the general government got most of their revenue, which hurt

53:08

Southerners. Cotton was, you know, king, and that was the way that the economy worked.

53:16

Southerners didn't like that. And if it became a free state, that wasn't, when you hear free state, you think, well, they just didn't allow slavery.

53:22

It wasn't that they didn't allow slavery. It was meant for free whites to live there. They didn't want blacks there.

53:28

And it was meant to be an area that would side with the North economically and vote for, you know, infrastructure projects funded by the tariff.

53:38

The agrarian South didn't want that. So there's a lot more impact in this idea of free state versus slave state.

53:45

It's not just this moral question of like, they just want slaves and they want, they don't want slaves.

53:51

The other side, that's not, that's a distortion. And I can prove that to you easily. The GOP House Committee on Emancipation in 1862 said that the entire country should be occupied by white races alone.

54:05

That's a Republican Party, guys. When I hear this whole, like, oh, the Democrats were the slavery party, the Democrats are horrible, and modern

54:11

Democrats are the same. Realize, guys, when you do that kind of thing, Republicans were the party that oversaw the elimination of the

54:20

Native Americans. And they're the party that wanted white races alone in this country. That's why

54:25

Lincoln wanted to send all the slaves back. That's why Liberia was formed. H.

54:32

Ford Douglas said, he's a black man in Illinois, I believe, he said that Lincoln would kick blacks out of the

54:39

Illinois schools if they were, if they tried to join, and he'd do it in the name of anti -slavery.

54:45

How does that fit in your paradigm, in your understanding of the war, to kick blacks out of schools in the name of anti -slavery?

54:53

Because anti -slavery also meant anti -black. There were black codes in the

55:00

North, as I mentioned. Lincoln wanted to forbid the expansion, which is the distribution of slaves, because he wanted to keep the

55:08

Western territories from the troublesome presence of free Negroes. That is a direct quote from Abraham Lincoln. The troublesome presence of free

55:15

Negroes. This is the great emancipator, guys. So I'm waiting, we'll see if Lincoln gets canceled.

55:23

He probably will. That's the political question. The South, Jefferson Davis says, in The Rise and Fall of the

55:32

Confederacy, he says slavery was never the cause of the conflict, but the occasion for the conflict. And the reason he says that is, he says, because this idea of the expansion, the slave states expanding slavery, he said it wasn't really about expansion, it was about proportion.

55:46

It was, could the rich Southerners, because they were the ones that owned the slaves, it was a minority of the population, could they bring their slaves into these areas and have influence in those areas?

55:59

It wouldn't have increased the amount of slaves at all, actually. It would have just increased the influence that rich Southerners could have had in these areas.

56:07

Now, you could be against that all day long. I'm okay with that. I'm okay if you're against that, but just, you gotta know what the debate was actually over.

56:13

That's a political question. That's not a moral question. Both sides aren't, it's not like they're on equal footing.

56:20

They're on, like the North is, you know, has all this virtue in this. The moral question was really more of a religious question, and that was the question, is slavery a sin in and of itself?

56:31

And this plays really more into the denominational debates. I'm gonna do an episode on that at some point. There's a good, there's a book you can read that talks about some of this right here.

56:42

Oh, by the way, now that I picked it up, I had marked down the Davis quote that I wanted to read. He says, let's see, the question was merely whether the slaveholder should be permitted to go with his slaves into territory, the common property of all.

56:54

So it was a constitutional question, because if you prohibited that, you're not abiding by what the Constitution allows.

57:01

Into which the non -slaveholder could go with his property of any sort. There was no proposal nor desire on the part of the

57:07

Southern states to reopen the slave trade, which they had been foremost in suppressing. Or to add to the number of slaves, it was a question of the distribution or dispersion of slaves, rather than the extension of slavery.

57:22

And while I have this book, there was another quote that I was gonna read to you earlier about conditions in the South. Foreign observers who would have been, you would think more neutral on this question, they said a lot about the conditions in the

57:32

South. Because the debate back then was not about the status of slaves, which is what people say.

57:38

Now, how dare you have a slave, because they can't vote, they don't have political mobility. But back then, the accusation was, well, it's a big brothel down there.

57:47

That's what the liberator said. It's beatings and it's horrible, and that's all it is.

57:54

Well, this is J .S. Buckingham in the Slave States of America, 1842,

58:01

English fellow. He said, from all I could perceive or learn, the condition of the domestic servants or slaves of the household was quite as comfortable as that of servants in the middle ranks of life in England.

58:10

They are generally well -fed, well -dressed, attentive, orderly, respectful, and easy to be governed, but more by kindness than by severity.

58:20

And a lot of the Southerners actually had, I'm gonna, while I have this,

58:25

I'm gonna talk about this real quick. Their view on racism was probably, for some of them at least, some of the leaders, was probably not what you would perceive.

58:37

Josiah Knott, Luis Aguizaz wrote Types of Mankind in 1854.

58:44

And there were these Philadelphia race scientists. Samuel George Morton was one of them.

58:49

He wrote Crania America. And they got into this thing called phrenology, where basically the size of your skull will determine how intelligent you are.

58:56

The Nazis loved this kind of stuff. And their critics were actually, their chief critics were

59:04

Southerners. Henley Thornwell, James Henley Thornwell said, the Negro is one blood with ourselves.

59:10

This is a very prominent Confederate and Presbyterian theologian associated with Stonewall Jackson, actually.

59:18

The Negro is one blood with ourselves. That he has sinned as we have, and that he has an equal interest with us in the great redemption.

59:26

Science, falsely so -called, may attempt to exclude him from the brotherhood of humanity, but the instinctive impulses of our nature combined with the plainest declarations of the word of God lead us to recognize in his form and liniments, his moral, religious, and intellectual nature, the same humanity in which we all glory as the image of God.

59:44

We are not ashamed to call him our brother. And I can give you many more examples from this book,

59:49

Sacred Conviction, South's Fight for Biblical Authority, of other theologians at the time who took issue with this theory emanating from Philadelphia, that they were inferior.

01:00:01

Were most Americans at the time white supremacists? Yeah, they were. Yeah, they were. But something was starting in the

01:00:09

South before the war. Something was happening. And it wasn't just the South, but the

01:00:14

South is where you saw this stand on the Bible that, look, this is what the Bible says about these people, and what these scientists are saying is wrong.

01:00:22

And you can take issue with the men that, the men that were the critics of this.

01:00:30

I'm not the one that's saying this, but that's a book you can look at. But anyways, the moral question of slavery, getting back to that, was over condition, not status.

01:00:40

Because in the North, they thought they were, whites were superior. It was the condition. How dare you beat these people?

01:00:46

How dare you rape these people? And that was the perception many of them had, who had never, a lot of them never had traveled

01:00:51

South. So racial hierarchy was not the question. And the South was evolving on this topic, though, at the time.

01:01:00

And I think you have to take that into account. I'm gonna kind of table that.

01:01:07

What I will say is this. You can make very good arguments against many labor systems by the abuse within them.

01:01:14

You can say that, well, the factory system's wrong, because look at the abuse of it. You can even say the institution of marriage is wrong.

01:01:21

Look at the high divorce rate. Look at all the beatings, the husbands that beat their wives. No one should ever get married. And of course, we'd say that's absurd.

01:01:27

There's husbands that love their wives. And you can also apply that, though, to this situation.

01:01:33

Although American slavery was horrible, it's based on horrific assumptions, and it needed to be done away with, and I'm glad it was, it's still possible for there to be good slave masters.

01:01:47

So immediate versus progressive emancipation, that's the other distinction here. One of the consequences of freeing the slaves in an environment that was wrecked by a war was that one million people died, and one third of Mississippi blacks died.

01:02:03

Put that into perspective. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people who died. And so could there have been a better way of doing this?

01:02:12

There were progressive emancipation plans. And this is the argument, one of the arguments that I think is a good one, actually, is that the

01:02:21

South was already going in a direction, a moral direction, to get rid of the institution of slavery, but it's like they inherited this, and they weren't sure exactly how to deal with it or what to do.

01:02:33

But let me tell you why I think that. Many inherited their slaves. Some purchased slaves that were already in the

01:02:41

United States. It's not like they're coming off straight from a boat or something, because that was supposedly ended.

01:02:47

It was Northeasterners who were engaging in this trade, by the way, and they brought the slaves over. And after 1808, the founding fathers said no more of that, but there was still smuggling going on into New York, into Boston.

01:02:58

These are some of the chief slave harbors. In the South, though, the Confederate Constitution outlawed that practice, and a lot of the slaves that were sold were slaves that, they didn't come directly from the

01:03:12

Sub -Saharan Africa at that time. The population had exploded. I mean, they were doing so well.

01:03:18

The families were growing so fast that the slaves were being sold from in, inside of the

01:03:26

South itself. And so, there was 106 antislavery societies in the

01:03:34

South, where there was only 24 in the North in the 1830s. This was before the radical abolitionists got going, who wanted immediate emancipation, and by revolution, if necessary.

01:03:44

The Virginia legislature got close to emancipation in 1832, but it wasn't practical.

01:03:51

And that was part of their issue, was the practicality of it, the economics of it. A lot of money was paid to primarily

01:03:58

Northeastern merchants, and how are we going to, we can't just, there has to be some kind of a compensation, and on a state level, it was just, couldn't really do it in Virginia.

01:04:14

Sims has said that in the 1850s, border states would soon emancipate their slaves.

01:04:19

He predicted it was gonna happen, and the reason for that was because manufacturing, automated manufacturing, the

01:04:25

Industrial Revolution was starting, and it was more lucrative. There was a case, the

01:04:31

Somerset case in 1772 in England, was used in the Southern courts many times to give slaves due process.

01:04:39

They could sue, they could, well, they could, they could take their masters to trial in certain situations and that was becoming more prevalent as you got closer to the war.

01:04:52

And so, slaveholders, by the way, there were some court cases, and you can look at,

01:04:58

Marshall DeRosa has written a few books on this, but there's court cases in which Southern judges said that you couldn't own the person, you only own their labor, and when there was a violation of certain civil rights of a slave, and you may laugh at that and say, well, how can they have civil rights to their slave?

01:05:14

Well, there were certain, you shouldn't be raped and murdered and there's things like that. There were situations in court where the judge said that that was a violation of their civil rights.

01:05:29

So this kind of thing was increasing. There was a movement to reform the system among clerics in the 1840s, and I'm gonna talk about that more in another video.

01:05:37

The Northern abolitionists challenged this, though, because they vilified, there was no distinction made. It's kind of like the woke guys today.

01:05:43

It's just, it's all bad, it's all evil, it must be done away with now, and we're not gonna compensate and we're not gonna integrate them into our society in the

01:05:51

North or the West. That was not an option for them.

01:05:57

Eugene Genovese has done some good work on this, by the way, Mind of the Master Class would be one of the books you could read on this.

01:06:05

North over South, another book you can read to see how the South was demonized and why they were demonized.

01:06:12

And, but anyways, by the end of the war, there was a growing call to emancipate slaves from military service.

01:06:21

And at the end of the war, that actually did take place. And Lee integrated his army. The North didn't have integrated units, the

01:06:27

South actually did. Lee integrated his army. We think of, I think, Nathan Bedford Forrest Calvary were slaves that he had freed.

01:06:34

And many of his slaves actually went back to live with him and to share crop from him after the war.

01:06:39

He was actually known to be a good overseer and a good landlord, which is, you know, it's another thing that doesn't fit the narrative.

01:06:52

Now you contrast this with Lincoln's funeral, right? Like no blacks were kept out of Lincoln's funeral.

01:06:59

They could not get into the funeral. And this isn't like saying the South is so much better than the

01:07:05

North. They're just so, no, I wouldn't make that case. What I'm saying is history is complicated. And you're gonna find, if you go back into the record, you're gonna find instances of abuse and you're gonna find instances where it was actually, there wasn't abuse, where you had a master doing what the

01:07:21

Lord had said he should do. It's not as cut and dry politically the way that you probably think it is.

01:07:28

And that's why I think history is fascinating and interesting because it's not this black and white thing.

01:07:36

Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, thought the Western territories could be used to progressively get rid of the institution of slavery.

01:07:43

And John Randolph actually had freed his slaves and sent them West. And part of the reason for this was there's a lot of open space and they would be free from bigotry.

01:07:54

They could buy their freedom, perhaps, as many slaves did, and they could settle down, they could have their own land and they could start their own communities.

01:08:01

And this was seen to be a good thing. Unfortunately though, when the Western territories were viewed by the

01:08:08

North as areas that could not be made slave states, that made this plan impossible.

01:08:14

It was a containment strategy, contain the slaves in the South and then figure out what to do with them.

01:08:20

When can one of them ship back to Africa, but don't let them leave those areas. So, by the way, the

01:08:28

Underground Railroad ended in Canada, just so you know, it did not end in the North and that's the reason for it. Other distinctions that need to be made, immediate emancipation without compensation or integration.

01:08:42

When, there was a lot of complicity in the North, I said that, they were the ones that are bringing the slaves in. There's a good book right here,

01:08:48

I have it, called, it's actually called Complicity, how the North promoted, prolonged, and profited from slavery and you can read this book if you wanna know more about that.

01:08:57

It's by Anne Farrow, is one of the authors. And compensation would have been in order because if you've paid a lot of money for a workforce and now you're gonna just eat that and you paid it to folks up North and now they're the ones telling you you must get rid of this workforce, then it's gonna impoverish you, it's not gonna be good for them, they probably don't have the skills yet to take care of themselves in that way.

01:09:29

They've been trained to do it, they've been trained in whatever their skills were for slavery, many of them. And so, there was no plan for that.

01:09:38

And the complicity of the North added insult to injury. They said, how dare you lecture us on morality when you're the ones profiting from this?

01:09:46

William Seward wanted slaves, in Lincoln's cabinet, wanted slaves free but then shipped back for white supremacist reasons.

01:09:54

So he wanted to free the slaves, that's great, and then ship them back because we don't want them in our country. That was William Seward. Lincoln agreed with this plan and there's a famous quote by Lincoln where someone asked him, well, what do you do once the slaves are freed?

01:10:07

And Lincoln says, well, they can root hog or die. That was a view.

01:10:16

Ralph Waldo Emerson thought that the Africans would go extinct like the dodo.

01:10:23

And in the North, their population was actually barely growing at the time. But in the South, it was exploding.

01:10:28

And so, this was a problem for Northerners who didn't want them in the country. Another distinction that needs to be made, the motive for secession versus the motive for war.

01:10:38

So the question for the war is not why did the South secede but why did the

01:10:44

North invade? If you really wanna know what the war was about, why did the North mobilize troops, not why did the

01:10:49

South secede? And I talked about this. There's a difference between the upper South and lower

01:10:54

South motivations. The upper South seceded once Lincoln mobilized troops, that we're not gonna live in a country in which you just invade when you don't like something, when someone leaves and secedes.

01:11:05

The lower South, as I said, the tariff was part of it, but also that debate over expanding into Western territories.

01:11:14

And here's an analogy. You can secede and not have a war. And it's kinda like, even if it's a bad argument, let's say.

01:11:23

Let's say there's a divorce that takes place. A wife leaves a husband. Doesn't mean the husband needs to go kill the wife, even if her reasons were bad, right?

01:11:31

You can have secession without war. That's very possible. What was the war about?

01:11:38

What was the war about? Was it slavery? The Corwin Amendment, as I referenced that earlier, suggests no, because Lincoln was prepared to sign a law enshrining slavery in the

01:11:50

Constitution as an amendment. His first inaugural, he said he wasn't gonna interfere. But then he said, where would

01:11:56

I get the revenues? Where would I get the revenues? Three independent accounts talk about that. It was a war of unification.

01:12:02

It was to preserve the Union. And people like to, on the woke side, like to equate

01:12:08

Confederates with Nazis. If you read Mein Kampf, and look, I've had a World War II class.

01:12:13

I've had a Holocaust class. I've read Mein Kampf. If you look at Hitler's, one of his justifications for uniting

01:12:19

Germany under the Weimar Republic, he points to Lincoln. He says it was necessary in the

01:12:25

United States to do it, and the states did not have rights. Hitler. That doesn't mean

01:12:31

Lincoln needs to bear Hitler. Karl Marx wrote a letter to Lincoln congratulating him, saying that he was starting the revolution for the people, and a lot of 48ers, they called them, ended up becoming

01:12:43

Union generals and so forth. And so Karl Marx liked Lincoln on a certain level.

01:12:49

That doesn't mean Lincoln liked Marx or liked Hitler or anything like that. But it does, it is another thing that does not fit the narrative.

01:12:59

And you have to make sense of this. If you really want to have a narrative that makes sense, you have to make sense of all the facts.

01:13:13

So the war was justified, I think, on the basis, halfway through the war, it started to be justified on the basis of this moral crusade against slavery, and that's all we know about today.

01:13:22

But as I said before, that's not, Davis doesn't, the Southerners did not understand it to be that.

01:13:29

They believed it was a conflict over Southern independence. They could govern themselves, and so they ought to have been able to govern themselves.

01:13:38

And they thought that they had a constitutional justification for doing it. And if you look at William Rawls' book, this is called

01:13:44

A View of the Constitution, standard curriculum at West Point, all the soldiers on both sides would have been familiar with this.

01:13:51

It talks about secession and it being a right, standard curriculum, a right, under the

01:13:57

Constitution. If you look at, and that was pretty much Jefferson Davis' argument in Rise and Fall of the

01:14:03

Confederacy, which you can also look at. But if you're gonna read any book on this, this is the book that I would suggest.

01:14:09

It's called Is Davis a Traitor? And it's by Albert Taylor Bledsoe. And this book is, it's just an airtight case, guys.

01:14:20

I'm open to talking to people about it, but when you start to factor in all of the facts that point to secession being a constitutional right, and just a few of them would be like the ratification agreements that New York and Virginia had where they said, we can secede.

01:14:35

If we want to secede, we can secede. We will affirm the Constitution if we're allowed that. That was a ratification agreement.

01:14:41

If you look at even the 10th Amendment, I mean, the United States national government does not have the right to kick a state out.

01:14:49

But that right is reserved to the states and to the people. If you look at the

01:14:54

Articles of Confederation, all the states, the colonies that became states, they seceded from the Articles of Confederation.

01:15:00

And in the Articles of Confederation, it says it's a perpetual binding document. It's perpetual, but they seceded from it.

01:15:07

Great Britain, by the way, made 13 separate peace treaties with the states. I don't know if you knew that.

01:15:13

And I can go on, but there is justification there. At least there was at the time.

01:15:19

Now, we're downstream from that. But the men at that time thought that this is the principle that the war is over, self -government.

01:15:28

And they thought, we're just fighting for the same thing that those in 1776 fought for. They were seceding from Great Britain.

01:15:34

Why can't we do that? And in 1776, and I'm waiting for this to happen, I know from my own studies on this, in the

01:15:42

Hudson Valley region where I grew up, it's interesting, where I grew up, on the bottom of the hill, there's actually, there's a place where the

01:15:50

British had fired on this old house. And there's a little sign there saying British cannonball had gone through the house. And there's also a little marker saying that there were slaves at that house.

01:15:59

There were slaves in New York at the time. And when the

01:16:05

British came into New York, an order was given, General Howe gave the order to, he wanted to offer emancipation to slaves in return for fighting for the

01:16:20

British army. And this was one of the things that made the Hudson Valley light up and say, we are not going to take this.

01:16:26

Because there was a question, would the people outside of New York, would they side with the British or would they side with the colonists?

01:16:33

And they ended up siding with the colonists. And that was a part of it. In South Carolina, there was integrated units of British and slaves.

01:16:40

And you just had patriots fighting them. You know, this is the kind of thing though, if the woke crowd gets ahold of that information, they're gonna start wanting to cancel people that fought in the

01:16:51

Revolutionary War. Because wait, the British wanted to free the slaves. And look, the colonists were afraid of that. And you know, all that to say, that's what they thought they were fighting for.

01:17:03

At least that's how they justified it. So the question is, probably in a lot of your minds, where did you find out about this?

01:17:10

Why didn't I learn it? And I've given you a couple of sources. But the reason you probably didn't learn about this in school is because there is a field of books, a range called the

01:17:20

Lost Cause Narrative. And those books are, they're forbidden. You don't read those books. Anything that paints the

01:17:26

South in any positive light is not acceptable to the modern historical historians.

01:17:32

And so they end up being left out. And what happens is a narrow range of primary sources gets used to forward the narrative that's already in effect.

01:17:46

And so I've hopefully put you on a path where you can look at some of the books that I've referenced. I mean, there's a lot more if you private message me if you wanna know more.

01:17:54

But I've tried to be broad. I mean, I've had to learn both sides because that's just, you just automatically learn the one side, the slave power narrative.

01:18:01

And then I've had to go and read, do extra work and read other sources. And I try to come up with a paradigm that makes sense of all the facts.

01:18:09

And that's why history is really fun because that process never really ends as you find out more.

01:18:16

The big moral question though that I got into in all this is how do we live in a pagan, an evil, a horrible system?

01:18:27

And is it possible to be sinless in that system, to participate in some way without sinning?

01:18:33

And I think it is. I think Paul gives us an example of that. And it's not just in the pagan slave system of the

01:18:39

Roman Empire. I think that's what folks 200 years ago should have been applying and some did.

01:18:45

But it's living in the Roman Empire in general, you would have been offended at many things.

01:18:51

And so is Paul a revolutionary? Does he think you should just overturn all the hierarchies, overturn the system, have a revolution?

01:18:56

No, he's not. Jesus wasn't. They worked within the system to purify

01:19:01

Saul and Lye. And that's more progressive, guys. That's more gentle. It's more, it takes time.

01:19:09

And people who want to have a revolution, a violent revolution, and that's justified for slavery, are you gonna do it for abortion too?

01:19:18

Are we gonna do it for the prison system and welfare reform and whatever you pick the issue?

01:19:25

I don't think that's how the scripture approaches these things. And so I think it's dangerous to say we are kinder than God.

01:19:31

I think God has given us a sufficient word. It was sufficient for those 200 years ago. It's sufficient for us today, whether it's the prison system,

01:19:38

Christian being a member of Congress, welfare. You can be a citizen, I think, and even though some of your tax money might go to Planned Parenthood, you can still live within this country and you're sinless in that.

01:19:49

I will say this, I think we're worse now than we were. I think it's just the pornography stats.

01:19:55

I mean, I don't have to go into those, but how many pastors are hooked to that? You're being a slave, a spiritual slave to porn.

01:20:01

I think there's more spiritual slaves to this kind of stuff than there were perhaps 200 years ago.

01:20:07

And some of that's conditioning and some of that's the technology we have, perhaps. Proverbs says the borrower is slave to the lender.

01:20:14

How much debt do we have in this country on a national, state and local and just even a personal level? That's slavery, civil slavery, socialism, redistributing wealth, stealing from one person, giving to another.

01:20:28

If you think that those in American slavery were bad masters, wait till you see the national government become the master of everyone.

01:20:37

We're going that way, guys. We're going that way. We just had, I mean, it was a gift that we have

01:20:43

Bernie Sanders campaign manager say what he said. The war was justified in people's minds, some people's minds to end slavery, but what about abortion?

01:20:54

What about abortion? What about some of these other evil things? If you don't think that we should have a revolution over abortion, but you do think that you should over slavery, you need to think through some things.

01:21:06

And if you're someone who is okay with socialism, but you're very angry about something that ended 150 years ago,

01:21:13

I think it's gonna be hard to take you seriously. We have at our door right now, at our doorstep is a form of slavery that you're not gonna want to mess with.

01:21:26

It's worse than I think, the only thing that I think helps us understand is when you hear stories from people who escaped truly socialist countries and how horrible they were.

01:21:37

And we're not listening to those stories as much as perhaps we should. But if you won't cancel the

01:21:43

Democrats over abortion, I probably won't take you that seriously if you have a problem with some of my views. All that to say though,

01:21:52

Twitter is a little corner on the internet. The Twitter mob is in that little corner. And guys, those who support this program,

01:22:01

I hope that people from that, even that group will watch this and maybe reconsider some things, but don't let that stuff get to you, really don't.

01:22:09

God is in control and I just wanted to say that. So last but not least,

01:22:15

I grew up in a multi -ethnic church and by the way, I should say, oh, I'm not gonna say it.

01:22:21

Yeah, I'll say it, okay. Most of the folks, the professors at Southeastern, they go to very white churches, because I lived there.

01:22:28

I went to a lot of the churches in the area, which is fine, it's absolutely fine. But they're all big on this model, this multi -ethnic church model.

01:22:35

And I grew up in that. We didn't do social justice, it was just preach the gospel, but we had people from Africa and people from Latin America and people from Asia and it was just great.

01:22:44

The potlucks, all kinds of food, every cuisine. So all that to say,

01:22:49

I grew up in that environment. I love people from all over the world. Red, yellow, black and white, different accents and everything.

01:22:56

It makes for a lot of good flavor. And one of the things that disturbs me is the persecution going on overseas.

01:23:02

Like today, we're not talking about something 150 years ago, we're talking about like today, right now in Africa, Muslims are brutally killing

01:23:08

Christians and some big ministries are not stepping up. And Judd Saul has started a ministry and I recorded this last week with him and they're doing some good work.

01:23:18

I've given to them, I plan to give more and I hope you'll consider giving more. So here we go. Today, I am joined by Judd Saul.

01:23:24

Judd is no stranger to this program because Judd is the director of Enemies Within the Church.

01:23:29

We've worked together on several things, but Judd also has started a new ministry which

01:23:35

I've been very intrigued by. I've actually been riding with Judd and I've heard him take phone calls from people in Nigeria.

01:23:43

And his ministry is called Equipping the Persecuted and the mission is to equip the persecuted church in Nigeria.

01:23:50

And I'm looking forward to hearing from you, Judd, how this is gonna be done.

01:23:55

Let's first play the promo for the ministry, Equipping the Persecuted. Here we go. which he sustained a gunshot.

01:24:26

We ran for our lives. It took the grace of God for some of us to be alive. IDP, Internally Displaced Persons.

01:24:36

In Nigeria, there are over 2 million displaced persons. After their towns and villages are attacked,

01:24:42

Boko Haram seizes their farms, land and property. If they try to return, they are killed.

01:24:48

This is an ancestral place, because to our people is very, very, very devastating.

01:24:56

The Nigerian government relocates the IDPs and puts them into IDP camps. There are over 100

01:25:02

IDP camps across Nigeria. Boko Haram is continuing to grow with very little opposition from the

01:25:09

Nigerian government. Their main target, Christians. This is the story of one of those camps.

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This camp is located in the southern part of Plateau State, Nigeria. Life was not easy for us here.

01:25:23

We didn't have food to eat. We didn't have clothes to wear. There are over 1 ,000 persons at this camp.

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500 of them are children. Many of them have lost their parents at the hands of Boko Haram.

01:25:34

They cannot go to school. We plead to our brothers to come to our aid. They rarely have one meal a day.

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Help us come to our aid as brothers keep us. There is not much hope.

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You can change that. Equipping the Persecuted is a ministry that takes direct action, trains teachers, and sends aid directly to the

01:25:56

IDP camps. We provide them with education, a biblical curriculum, and supplies to give them a chance to rebuild their community.

01:26:04

Equipping the Persecuted believes that no good deed is done without the presentation of the gospel.

01:26:10

For just $45 per month, you can educate and feed a child. You can give our fellow

01:26:15

Christian brothers and sisters a chance to rebuild and thrive. That is only $1 .50

01:26:21

per day. We are Christians, and the Bible admonishes us to be brothers keep us.

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Please go to www .equippingthepersecuted .com and help make a difference in the lives of the persecuted.

01:26:35

You can sacrifice one latte a day to change the life of a persecuted Christian forever.

01:26:44

So Jud, we just watched the promo video for your ministry. Tell us a little more about it.

01:26:53

Well, I've been going to Nigeria working with another mission for several years. And what

01:27:00

I noticed is that there weren't a lot of missions that were working directly with persecuted

01:27:06

Christians. You have a lot of ministries there that are out there sharing the gospel, doing really amazing works.

01:27:13

But to me, what I found is there seemed to be a lack of support for persecuted

01:27:18

Christians. And not just a lack of support for persecuted Christians, but it's one thing to deliver aid.

01:27:26

It's one thing to, on occasion, deliver aid and share the gospel, which is really important.

01:27:36

But one of the ministry needs that I saw that was lacking was that there wasn't anybody that was really training

01:27:46

Nigerians on personal security and awareness and helping them come up with emergency plans for when persecution comes.

01:27:54

So in the United States of America, you're director of Enemies Within the Church, and you're trying to, you're doing the same thing, except the battle is more physical in Nigeria.

01:28:05

People are actually getting destroyed by weapons. And that's

01:28:12

Boko Haram then? Yeah, Boko Haram, which is now made a, they've tied their affiliation to ISIS now.

01:28:20

So Boko Haram is essentially now an ISIS chapter that's in Nigeria. Tell me a little bit about what you've seen, maybe incorporate some of the things in the news that those who are in the

01:28:33

United States who don't pay attention to international news might not know about what's going on in Nigeria. Well, it seems like every week there's an attack on Christians, whether it's one or two

01:28:45

Christians or up to 200 Christians are murdered. It seems to be almost like every month.

01:28:52

What Boko Haram does is they find smaller, isolated kind of villages that are outside of big cities.

01:29:03

They're a little more vulnerable, and those are the easiest to attack. So imagine you're in a town of, let's say 30 ,000 people, but let's say you know that small town that has about four or 500 people that's just about 10 miles away.

01:29:17

The smaller towns that are kind of outlying those areas, those are the ones that are being targeted and picked off by Boko Haram.

01:29:24

And usually what they go after first is they usually attack the churches first.

01:29:29

They find the pastor and they kill the pastor in front of the village, or they'll kill the pastor first and then kidnap a bunch of people or whatever most carnage they think they can get away with at the time.

01:29:44

And you've seen this firsthand. I know you've shown me some pictures of children with knife wounds and gunshot wounds in,

01:29:52

I think, refugee camps, if I'm not mistaken, right? So throughout

01:29:58

Nigeria, there's what they call internal displacement camps. And what happens is after the

01:30:04

Muslims raid a town and they kill about half their people, there's all these people that have escaped that are now displaced.

01:30:12

Well, they cannot go back to their town because the Muslims have taken control of their town and essentially squatting and they've stolen all their property.

01:30:20

And if they try to go back, they get killed. So what the Nigerian government does instead of protecting them, they will go and put them into internal displacement camps and say, okay, here's a section of land.

01:30:32

Here's a few things. Here you go. And then there's really no support after a camp is really established.

01:30:41

And what's happened is that a lot of missions that were working with some of these camps have all pulled out.

01:30:48

They've pulled out because of conflict with government or some people think it's too dangerous. And a lot of our

01:30:55

Christian brothers and sisters are just left hung out to dry. I wanted to ask you about the response, if there is any, from the government of Nigeria, because the obvious thing,

01:31:04

I think, that most Christians are gonna ask first from the Western world especially is, okay, well, why do they need us to go provide security or to train them in defense or any of that?

01:31:17

Why not the government? What's the government doing about this? Not a whole lot.

01:31:23

And there's a reason because are they intimidated themselves then or? They lack resources.

01:31:29

There's a lot of factors at play. Nigeria is one of the most corrupt countries in Africa as far as corruption goes.

01:31:37

And that goes all the way from the citizen to the police to the government.

01:31:42

And it's very hard to know who you can trust and what they can do. And essentially it's a wild west where a lot of people and government officials are out for themselves.

01:31:52

And unfortunately, that's just the reality of what the situation is out there. You can't take American ideals and try to place it in Nigeria because it's a completely different culture.

01:32:04

Yeah, that's helpful for us to realize the need because the things that we're accustomed to, they don't have there.

01:32:10

They don't have security. And so what can Christians do through your ministry to help their

01:32:16

Nigerian brothers and sisters specifically? Is it food? Is it training? What is it that they need that you can provide?

01:32:24

It's all the above. But one of the things that what I found that we've been able to do with our ministry due to our contacts on the ground is that we work with people that have been locals,

01:32:38

Christians, dedicated people that wanna change the heart of their country and they wanna change it for the Lord.

01:32:45

And we've been working with them. And what that's given us an ability to do is when an emergency situation arises, we're actually able to directly affect change and be able to help the situation immediately when something happens with finances, resources, whether it's food, whether it's trying to get somebody to the hospital.

01:33:11

We recently raised enough money and we actually, there was a pastor whose wife was kidnapped by Boko Haram and then she was killed.

01:33:22

Boko Haram, and they paid ransom to get her back, but they kept the ransom and they killed her anyway. And they left this woman's body out in the desert or in the wilderness.

01:33:33

And people tried recovering the body and three people were killed trying to recover the body. And what we did was is we financed the operation to recover her body.

01:33:45

And that pastor just buried his wife on December 26th.

01:33:52

And we sent them, we were able to send the family a little bit of a gift for Christmas for his kids. And these are the kinds of things that we can do direct.

01:34:01

Long -term, what we wanna do is be able to teach Nigerians basic security, security awareness, how to gather intelligence to prevent attacks from happening to their villages.

01:34:14

The other thing we wanna do is be able to help sustain and provide long -term aid that can help get these

01:34:23

Christians out of their IDP, IDB, IDB camp situations. Sorry, I'm gonna have to edit that,

01:34:31

John. No, no, it's perfect. I wanna leave it in there. We wanna get the Christians out of the

01:34:37

IDP camps. And so what we're looking to do now is help them build some sort of sustained economy or business that they can actually have enough money to feed themselves, but also try to help get them out of that situation where they're just stuck.

01:34:51

I seriously went to an IDP camp just this last year, and it was for a thousand

01:34:57

Christians. Their village was decimated. 500 people killed, children, men, women, elderly.

01:35:06

And the government gave them a plot of land and they literally gave them a stack of tin and lumber that couldn't build one house.

01:35:19

And that was it. Say, hey, here's a stack of tin, here's a little bit of lumber, and here you go for a thousand people.

01:35:27

Wow. And people are like, well, we get a lot of questions like, well, why don't you give them guns?

01:35:34

Why can't you do that? If I were in the gun running business, we'd be put in prison. The thing is, we can only do what we can do legally and try to do as much as we can legally, but try to give them something that they don't have.

01:35:48

And I can speak, vouch for you personally, just because I've seen,

01:35:53

I've been in the car, like I said, with you when you've received calls from folks over in Nigeria asking for support.

01:36:00

I've heard you take those. I've seen some of the pictures you've sent me that are just in the film, the footage, that's just horrific.

01:36:08

I know that you and your family, even down to your youngest child were out at a gas station doing a bake sale to help people in Nigeria.

01:36:19

So you're not in this for the money. I can see that just from knowing you personally. And I've even, we've had discussions about connecting you with security personnel that I know to try to get over there to advise.

01:36:32

And so I respect what you're doing. I lament that there's not other bigger ministries in the area doing anything about this, but I praise

01:36:46

God that you're involved. Where can people go if they want to support what you're doing? They can go to equippingthepersecuted .com.

01:36:56

And I'll just say this, the needs are endless. I mean, the needs are completely endless, but we are making a dent where we can.

01:37:03

And I went around, last time I was in Nigeria, and this is what really, really helped, inspired me to launch the ministry, is

01:37:14

I went and I asked, I asked all these Nigerians, I said, has anybody taught any of you basic security awareness?

01:37:23

Have they taught you any kind of, any type of self -defense skills? And they all looked at me and they said, no, we've never been taught this and we need it.

01:37:33

And they taught it very badly. And one pastor, very Christian pastor told me, he goes, he goes, the

01:37:41

Muslims have come here and we've welcomed them.

01:37:48

We've given them our hand. Then we've given them our other hand. Now we've given them our legs.

01:37:57

And all we have left is our heads. Kind of puts things in perspective and makes me personally upset that, and you appreciate this, that we're wasting so much time, it seems like, trying to combat the social justice movement, which is really getting us off track in the

01:38:19

United States and in the Western world in general, when we should be looking at situations like this and putting our resources there.

01:38:25

And I'm speaking to the big ministries. We're trying to keep, we're trying to keep them accountable.

01:38:32

We're trying to keep them doctrinally pure so that they're strong enough to go help people like our brothers and sisters in Nigeria.

01:38:39

And well, there's a gap there right now. Resources are going into other places. And so people like yourself,

01:38:45

Judd, are to be commended for doing this. So I would encourage you all to go to the website.

01:38:51

It's gonna be in the info section. You're on social media too, I assume. Yep, yep.

01:38:57

Equipping the persecuted on Facebook. And my name's Judd Saul. Try to friend me on Facebook.

01:39:04

If you guys want more information, I'd love to tell you more about it. The thing is, we've just started this ministry and everything that has been, that we've brought in has immediately gone right out to helping situations.

01:39:18

One of the IDP camps that we were working with couldn't afford fertilizer to plant their crops.

01:39:24

So we sent $2 ,000 out there to help buy fertilizer for their crops. So they've had a successful season.

01:39:30

These are the kind of things that we do on the aid side. Because like I said, a lot of organizations have forgotten these people.

01:39:39

And we've just seen a gap where our brothers and sisters aren't being taken care of out there.

01:39:45

Yeah, and I know, we haven't discussed this during this interview because I think I've just assumed it.

01:39:50

But for those listening, this is an Orthodox Christian organization. I know that,

01:39:58

Judd, you understand the gospel. You're helping people who are actual believers over there.

01:40:05

This isn't, we're not spreading the false gospel. This isn't social gospel work.

01:40:11

In a sense, the gospel is going with this aid. Because I understand you as a person.

01:40:17

And so I just want people to know that going into it. This isn't just sending people drinks and food and without Christ.

01:40:25

Christ is in this. The root, the people that are the backbone of our network in Nigeria risk their lives every day to share the gospel with Muslims.

01:40:43

And these are the people that we are supporting. And even in the IDP camps, they have a love for their fellow man, and they still want to present the gospel to the

01:40:55

Muslim people. By helping our persecuted brothers and sisters helps advance the gospel.

01:41:01

Amen. And we firmly believe with our ministry that no good deed is done without the presentation of the gospel.

01:41:09

We just don't hand them food or fertilizer and say, oh, here you go. We let them know that this is provided to you because this is a representation of God's love.

01:41:19

And this is a representation of what Jesus would do. And as Christians, we are supposed to take care of our brothers and sisters.

01:41:28

Well, you've heard the need, you've heard the call. If you're giving to one of these big organizations, donating maybe on a yearly basis, maybe you've been doing it for your whole life, and they're not, let's say they're promoting social justice stuff, targeting the

01:41:46

American church, they're not involved in real ministry anymore, maybe consider giving to an organization like Judd's Instead, which is providing real resources to real

01:41:55

Christians who are trying to share the real gospel as it goes forward across the world.

01:42:00

So this is a mission effort. This is a charity effort. And Judd, thank you so much for sharing with us.