10Nov23 Veterans Day on the Cusp of World War 3
Summary
➡ The speaker expresses their frustration at lack of care for veterans, accuses political figures of insincerity and self-interest, criticizes the actions of the U.S. in the Middle East, and voices concern for the negative impacts of wars on civilians and the potential influx of refugees into Western nations due to ongoing conflict. The speaker also criticizes leaders like Trump, Biden, and Netanyahu, accusing them of self-interest and of being untrustworthy.
➡ Connor Boyak, author of the Tuttle Twins series, offers an innovative approach to children’s education, focusing on concepts such as entrepreneurship and personal freedom. He has sold over 5 million copies and even adapted it into a free cartoon series, and suggests that his books serve as a supplementary text to public education. Boyak also runs Libertus Institute, which has influenced over 100 laws in Utah, highlighting the importance of state-level governance.
➡ The given text emphasizes the need for citizens to foster relationships with politicians and implement strategies like gathering friends at home for discussions, organizing meetings, and taking politicians to lunch, thereby exercising influence over local political decisions. The speaker advocates for leveraging these connections to enact changes, citing their success in passing a law allowing minors to set up lemonade stands without permits and working towards legalizing car sales directly to consumers, bypassing dealerships.
➡ The text describes how Elon Musk was able to overcome restrictive laws against car manufacturers selling directly to consumers due to his resources. However, individuals with less financial power often abandon their ideas because they cannot navigate the legislative process. The solution proposed is a regulatory sandbox: a legal framework that allows entrepreneurs to operate under temporary exemption from certain laws or regulations that may hinder innovation. This construct aims to foster entrepreneurship, innovation, and equality of opportunity. State interposition and state nullification, which involve the state defending its citizens from certain federal laws or ignoring those laws altogether, respectively, are also discussed as possible ways to combat overreaching federal regulations.
➡ The text encompasses various societal issues, focusing on state sovereignty exemplified by the non-enforcement of marijuana laws. It critiques the phrase “taxed enough already” due to a lack of clear direction and highlights concerns about technological advancements potentially eroding freedom. It emphasizes the importance of a philosophical basis in society to guide and limit these activities. It discusses the Tuttle twins books as a resource for instilling these values in children, looking at tools as potent yet potentially dangerous depending on who wields them. The text mentions further books, including ‘Mediocrity’ and ‘Children of the Collective.’
➡ The text discusses a report from the Reagan administration titled “A Nation At Risk”, which stated that American education is threatened by mediocrity. The author believes the state of education has worsened over the past 40 years, citing a study that found only 13% of 8th graders in America are proficient in civics and American history. The author argues the declining quality in education is leading to an electorate that is historically illiterate and disengaged, furthering political polarization. He urges parents to consider alternative forms of education, as he believes the current system is failing students and society.
➡ The speaker criticises the authoritarian model of the current American education system, dating back to the influence of figures like Horace Mann and his Prussian model, as being designed to homogenize cultural differences and create a compliant populace. The speaker argues for the need to reject this design and rebuild a system that fosters critical and independent thinking. The importance of financially independent family units and extended families are highlighted as key lines of resistance against this omnipotent state. Additionally, the speaker promotes the establishment of voluntary, problem-solving, mediating institutions as a way to strengthen social fabric and challenge the welfare-state model.
➡️ The text discusses the decline of mutual aid societies in America due to the emergence of the welfare state. It emphasizes the need for a strong society that can self-care and provide support, instead of completely relying on the government. It also critics the current system where the majority of Americans are directly financially supported by the state, causing a dependency. The text also mentioned the negative impacts of government handouts like universal basic income and advocated for rebuilding the social fabric of society.
➡ The Civil Rights Corps activist group has successfully sued Los Angeles over its previously longstanding bail system, arguing it was unconstitutional. As a result, Los Angeles adopted a zero-bail schedule, thereby releasing certain defendants without them seeing a judge, which is anticipated to increase repeat offenses. This change questions the purpose of bail which has been around since pre-Magna Carta times and used to guard against frivolous detainment and ensure court appearance by requiring a third-party financial guarantee.
➡ The text discusses the issues with the bail system, describing how people are often detained because of high bail amount, their record of re-offense, and the lack of faith in their appearance in court. It also points out that people charged with minor crimes often face unfair bail conditions. The influence and regulation of the bail industry along with the accusation of systemic racism within it are discussed. The text advocates for a balance of factors, including the nature of crime and defendant’s previous record, in setting bail amounts. It also mentions the changes in bail systems in different states, including New Jersey’s move towards a hybrid system. The text concludes by questioning the efficiency of alternatives to cash bail.
➡ The discussion revolves around the issue of reform for speedy trials and bail trends in America, emphasizing the detrimental impacts of prolonged pretrial detention on civil rights and the criminal justice system. The interviewee criticizes arguments favoring arbitrary preventative detention without granting bail and argues the value of establishing a speedier trial system, similar to the model used in the 1980s, to reduce overcrowded prisons and unnecessary pretrial incarcerations. Their stance leans towards restoring judicial discretion and the bail system as a means of counterbalancing each case’s unique circumstances.
➡ The text discusses U.S.’s relationship with various Muslim nations and compares immigration and refugee policies of U.S. and Canada. It also touches upon the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, mentioning Israel’s alleged plans to displace Palestinians and Canada’s possible role in it while condemning the lack of open discourse. It further delves into Netanyahu’s religious posturing, the rise of far-right parties in Israel, American indifference towards global wars, and Sergeant York’s struggle between religion and patriotism during World War I.
➡ The text discusses the perceived deterioration of the justice system, advocating for an understanding of its foundation before dismantling it; it ends with a break on the David Knight Show and information on how to stay updated using the APS Radio app.
➡ The text originates from a war-time discussion highlighting the involvement of the U.S. in World War I due to political agenda, rather than any real need, leading to negative consequences for many. This is followed by a commentary on a current event involving a high school student’s successful lawsuit against a school for coercing students into practicing transcendental meditation without parental consent, thus infringing on individual religious rights.
➡ The writer discusses the concept of SEL (Social Emotional Learning) being used in schools, and laments a perceived rise in pressure and propaganda led by establishments. They note an increasing prominence of conflict and suggest the need for discernment and principle. They preview some forthcoming interviews with notable people, focusing on politics, faith, and justice, before closing with a rally to resist manipulation and deception, urging mutual support.
➡ This text primarily points out the necessity of applying critical thinking to religious faith, particularly Christianity. The author emphasizes the importance of evidence-based faith, arguing that the burden of proof lies on both believers and skeptics when positing causes for the universe. He further stresses teaching this to the younger generation and equates ‘faith’ with a well-reasoned inference based on empirical evidence, rather than blind belief.
➡ The text discusses the importance of teaching children how to critically think about faith and live it out, emphasizing that faith statements, like God’s existence or Jesus being the only way to God, are objective truths rather than subjective opinions. The author suggests that acknowledging these objective truths requires effort and rigorous inward self-examination, distinguishing it from easy, lazy truths based solely on personal feelings. Christianity is acknowledged as a difficult worldview to live out due to the demands it imposes on believers, drawing a distinction between internal and external truths in a society that tends to prioritize subjectivity. The role of God within believers is highlighted, suggesting God isn’t just fighting battles but residing in us. The text also underscores the necessity of differentiating between subjective and objective claims and testing these claims to assert their truth, citing objective claims as worthy of discussion and exploration in a society that is increasingly disinclined to delve into objective truths.
➡ The text discusses the importance of corroborating religious beliefs with hard evidence instead of relying solely on feelings to prove their validity. It raises criticism over subjective faith experiences, advocating for an examination of objective, measurable evidence alongside personal experiences. The text also emphasizes the necessity of teaching younger generations the reasons behind their faith, equipping them to handle skepticism and societal changes.
➡ The text explores eyewitness reliability in the context of gospel accounts, asserting that these accounts should not be dismissed but tested. The writer argues that the witnesses didn’t start out with their beliefs about Jesus but arrived at them through observation, much like a bank employee would come to believe a known person is a bank robber after witnessing the act. The narrator highlights the importance of considering four aspects to gauge their reliability: their presence during the event, potential corroboration, consistency of their narrative, and an examination for bias. The writer also discusses the concepts of free agency and love, stating that God has provided people with free will as a prerequisite for genuine love and a guideline through the scriptures to not misuse this freedom.
➡ The passage involves an interview with Jay Warner Wallace, discussing his approach to Christianity, emphasizing integrative reasoning and faith rather than blind faith. He highlights the importance of humility in counteracting pride, especially in the current societal emphasis on self-promotion. He mentions his organization, Cold Case Christianity, which offers a free training course. The text ends with invitations to other guests who promote homeschooling and state-level activism in Utah.
Transcript
I’ve had enough of war. But we’re going to talk about it and we’re going to talk about it on this Veterans Day. And we’re going to talk about the story of Sergeant York and how it applies today. We’ll be right back. Stay with us. Om. Well, with the combination of the holiday and the fact that we are on the verge of a lot of wars which have not been debated, not been discussed, really, and there’s not a lot of public support for them, but we’re going to be drugged into this as well.
And it reminds me as we look at what happened with World War I, and I talked about this on Thursday. I look at Woodrow Wilson, the games that he played, even arresting somebody who did a movie about the spirit of 76, the American Revolution. No, we don’t want to show the British as bad guys because I want to get everybody roped into World War I. And so we’re looking at wars left and right everywhere, Europe with Russia, escalating things in China, as you all know, in the Middle East.
And I don’t believe that Tucker is right about this. I don’t believe that Ukraine is going away, no matter how absurd and how crooked it is. You have Zelensky as a couple of days ago saying, well, I’m going to cancel the elections. And he was mocked by Babylon B. Rightfully so. Zelensky cancels elections to focus on fighting for democracy. We must suspend democracy to save democracy, said Zelensky, according to Babylon B.
Of course, he didn’t say that, but we see that all the time. And they tell you that they’ve got to suspend free speech in order to protect free speech and so forth. So same thing. If we allow democracy to get in the way of fighting for democRacy, we might lose our democracy and our billions of sweet, sweet American dollars and my super yacht in Dubai. Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah, it’s time to cancel elections so I may remain president indefinitely.
This is who we’re giving this money to. And that was satire. But the reality is, he said, I believe now is not the right time for elections. My personal attitude and call is to take care of our country, just as on February the 24th, to defend it, to destroy the occupier, to fight for the freedom of Ukraine, which is now being gained in the battles for Ukraine. I think everyone who helps glory to all those who are fighting and working for Ukraine, a dictator, Stalin esque, like Putin, quite frankly, no difference.
I mean, do you want to spend your blood and treasure supporting Zelensky or Putin? Either one of them? I don’t. Virtually all these wars we get involved in doesn’t have a good guy on whose side to fight, because for eight years before Putin invaded, this guy was shelling his own countrymen. He was elected in 2019 on a platform of peace. So I can understand why he wouldn’t want to run again.
Besides the failure of his war and the corruption of his administration. He said it would absolutely be irresponsible to hold elections in Ukraine. Well, I think it would be absolutely irresponsible for us to give them another penny. And yet that is what is in the cards. And we have Republicans and Democrats fighting over that. The Democrats are very upset about the fact that they have decoupled these. They want to fund all these wars.
And I guess they’re worried that there’s going to be enough Republicans to oppose this, even though the new speaker, now the D speaker, wants a war in Ukraine. I guess they’re concerned that they won’t have the votes if they decouple them, but they kind of have come up with a priority. The number one priority for the Democrats is war in Ukraine. Number two, war in Israel. Ukraine takes a preference over that.
For the Republicans, the number one priority is Israel, and the number two priority is Ukraine. So where does the US come in all this? Well, if it even makes their lists, we’re dead last. That’s where we come in. They don’t even care about our border. They don’t care about anything about the US. And as Mike Shedlock of MishTalk. com said, if the US has a goal in Ukraine or in Israel, what the hell is it? Please let me know.
Well, we know what the goal is. The goal is to make these things last as long as possible, to use up as many weapons as possible, to give away as many weapons as possible to both sides if possible, to have a broader continuing war. We can kill our own soldiers just so that we can test how these things are working and so forth. And hopefully, with any luck, it won’t get out of control.
Or maybe that’s what they want, is to have it get out of control. He says the US has already given Ukraine 75 billion. Biden wants another 100 billion for Ukraine and Israel. So what exactly is the mission? I like to know, except that we were just told from Tucker that Biden and Ukraine are the biggest problems that we’ve got and they’re both going away. Isn’t that good? Yeah.
Again, he doesn’t. The worst things in our lifetime, he said, looking over 911, looking over the pan demo side or the pandemic or whatever you want to call it, ignoring even Afghanistan and Iraq. No, Ukraine and Biden were even worse than that, says Tucker, and they’re about to go away. Well, I’m afraid that he’s wrong, as usual, Mike Shedlock says, it seems to me that if we’re going to give foreign nations hundreds of billions of dollars, we ought to have some defined goals and a method of how to achieve it.
And of course, there’s a lot of talk and fight about the money, and I wonder why that is. Because the money doesn’t really even matter, does it? Does the money matter? We just print more of it. Who cares? It’s going exponential in terms of the amount of debt. Does anybody care? We’ve got a magic printing press. We just do this forever. There’s no consequences for that. And we don’t really have to worry about any of these wars ever coming to our shore, do we? Well, we do.
Now. I don’t think those days are necessarily going to continue, but I know that the people who are pushing into these wars, people like Lindsey Graham, people like Nuki Haley and all the rest of them, they don’t care if it comes to this war because they think that they’re going to be protected. They’ve taken civil defense measures for themselves. They’ve got their underground bunkers and so forth. But the plan is for them to shelter in these things and let the rest of us die.
Goes back to Raven Rock, the book about that, and nothing has changed. And we don’t have any civil defense infrastructure in this country, no civil defense drills. We don’t worry about that. Russia does, but the Americans don’t. There’s a combination of hubris and kind of hatred of the American people by the elites in our own country that is involved here. So what is the real price? Well, forget about the money for a moment and just think about the cost in human lives.
And it’s not just the people who meet a violent death. It’s what happens to the soldiers that we send off to fight in the wars. And he didn’t expect that seven times. Seven times over the course of the last six years, dude, the VA has continued to let me down. I just want some continuity and care with mental health providers. These doctors keep quitting, they keep switching. And then the one doctor that I really liked who talked me off of ledge the last time, refused.
I had a split because they fell in a network and then they came back in a network. So I went the last two years dealing with my own demons myself and trying to hold it together, and then come to find out it’s like late May. And he denied taking my case back. April Twelveth. And I’m just finding out, dude, and now I got to go back to some new doctor and then I got to open Pandora’s box again because we’re going to want to know everything.
And then I’m going to have to live through working through that for a month. I just want Some continuity. I care, dude. I’m so tired of it. I just want to be able to talk to the same person and have the same individual manage my goddamn meds, off all my medications. Two years I’ve been doing on my own, man. I’m just white knuckling. I’m gripping. Jesus. I’m tired of it.
It’s not a lot to ask. I just want to be able to talk to the same person and not continue to have to retell these stories that torment me. I get it now. I really do. I just want some continuity of care. Government failed his veteran. You get the idea. You get the idea. You know, these people who sit in Congress and talk about how many hundreds of billions of dollars are going to go to this country or that country to start this or that war and then send our soldiers to fight in it.
They never care about any of that stuff. They’ve never seen their friends blown up. They’ve never shot people close range or the other things that are haunting these soldiers, we’re supposed to honor our veterans. I am so sick and tired of people like Sean Hannity. Thank you for your service. Thank you for your service. And then every war he’s like Nukey Haley. He wants to send somebody to go fight this war.
He’s never done any of this stuff. Thank you for your service. Give me a break. He’s not grateful for what they’ve done. He doesn’t respect them as human beings. The people who send this out, who take this so lightly. And so the Senate Democrats block the GOP over who’s going to get the money first and how much money they’re going to get. And that’s the level on which they deal with everything, the financial aspect of it, with their magic money machine.
And so as we see things gradually escalating, 46 Americans have now been injured. They say nobody has died. These were people who were enforced bases in Syria. White when did we put boots on the ground? Who approved that? When did we talk about that? We fought that all through the Trump administration. Did Biden put them in? Did Trump put them in secretly? There was no debate. They just did it.
And as all of that is happening, you see one of our Reaper drones. Here’s what this looks like. The MQ Nine Reaper drone cost about 30 $32,000,000. 01 of these was shot down. They show the footage. The Pentagon hasn’t talked about it as of yet, but I got shot down on Wednesday when the news first came out. And as this story from Zero Hedge said, well, if confirmed is accurate, this could draw the US deeper into what could develop into a broader regional conflict.
The Pentagon has had aerial assets flying over Gaza, the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Further, US warships have been seeking to intercept ratcheting drone and missile attacks from the Hooties, with one such intercept having occurred the opening weeks of the Gaza War. And yet draw us further. Mean we want to be drawn further in, don’t we? They want full blown Middle east war. They’ve been talking about this for a long time.
And as you saw in the, you know, these candidates are just as eager to go to war with Iran as Biden is. It is a bipartisan insanity. Biden. A phone call with Netanyahu earlier this week. It was reported that they wanted to implement a three day pause in the fighting. Biden’s request appears to be rejected given the fact that the call took place on Monday. And Israel has affirmed that there will be no truce until the hostages held by Hamas are released, according to a proposal discussed between the US, Israel, Cutter and Hamas.
And Cutter, rather, Hamas would release ten to 15 hostages and use the three day pause to verify the identities of all of the hostages and to deliver a list of names of the people it’s holding. However, Netanyahu has said there will not be a ceasefire without the return of the kidnapped. Well, how do you return the hostages while the bombs are still dropping? Which is what Red Cross said.
Israelis said, well, we don’t care. You go in there and you get these people out or you’re not a legitimate organization. And as all of this is happening, there have been, it’s difficult in the fog of war to understand what is true and what is not true, the fog of war makes it difficult for the combatants to identify civilians and non combatants. It really does. I mean, there might be some malicious actions, but I think for the most part, we should understand that that is always something that’s going to be happening.
It’s one of the reasons why you should be reluctant to get involved in wars, especially for us. We were not attacked. And if we’re going to go in there and try to figure out who the good guys and the bad guys are. From the very beginning, I started by showing Netanyahu poisoned his own people. Poisoned his own people. I don’t see anybody as a good guy there that we need to get involved with.
And so when you talk about Israel killing Jews and the various. Kibitsum, I think is the pro of it, but they said they couldn’t distinguish Israeli civilians from the terrorists that were there, so they just shot and killed everybody. There was evidence of that. Now, that may be true or may not be true, but now surfaced information has shown that the Apache helicopters who came in and were firing at the music festival, this is some of the footage here.
And they released this immediately to show how effective they were at taking out the terrorists. But as people looked very closely at this footage, they said, wait a minute, that’s not just terrorists. You’ve got civilians there as well. And now Israel has admitted that the Apache helicopters did fire on Israelis at that music festival. Friendly fire, collateral damage. Understand that our governments, whenever we go to war, our governments don’t just hold the lives of the soldiers as expendable.
They really hold our lives as expendable as well. We would like to think that the warriors are there to defend us, but they have their own objectives. And so when you see, as I said before, that the US doesn’t even have any civil defense infrastructure for civilians, you need to understand that this plan has always been to save themselves. They have permanent interest. They don’t really care what happens to us.
They don’t care what happens to our country. They don’t care what happens at our border. They don’t care if they financially bankrupt us. And of course, they’ve been actively poisoning us over the last several years, all of our leaders everywhere. Why would anybody follow them into any war at this point in time? There’s absolutely no question. If you understand what happened the last three years, there’s no question that none of these people Trump, Biden, Netanyahu, none of them are worth fighting for.
They cannot be trusted. They’re backstabbing murderers of their own people. Why would you fight for these people? They’ve got their own agenda. And this is just the next level of murder of their own populations. And so when you look at Netanyahu saying he has plans to control Gaza indefinitely, that’s what his plan is. He wants this liberated. He wants the land. And of course, where they going to put the Palestinians? Well, he’s got a plan for that as well.
He’s going to dump them on Western nations. Canada was discussed in their paper. That was leaked and it was reported by Rachel Marsden at RT. But others reported, I mentioned it last week, I think it was Edward Griffin was the first place I saw. They began talking about how they’re going to push them into Egypt and how they wanted the US to lean on Egypt because Egypt didn’t want them there.
And then they said, well, this, of course, would be just a temporary measure. It would be a staging area to transport them somewhere else. We’d send them to Canada. Various other nations were mentioned, including the United States. We’ve got two and a half million people. They’ve got to get out of there and send somewhere. They don’t want them anywhere around there. So they want to export their problem.
And they put this document out as a trial balloon to see what people would say. Netanyahu’s office said, these are my initial thoughts. Said it won’t be considered until the war is over, envisions the refugees heading to Egypt first. But because Egypt has previously refused to absorb Gaza residents, it may ultimately just end up being used as a staging ground for their mass relocation to other countries. The proposal is for Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates to at least provide financial support.
Even though they will not take them. They will not take them. We would be foolish enough to take them. And of course, Trudeau despises Canada and would like the chaos, the ethnic conflict and the potential civil war that would come with this. He’s already done this with Syrian refugees. And if you look at what happened with that, going back to 2019, actually going back to 2017, when Trump was saying, well, we’re not going to take people in from these Muslim countries.
And again, it wasn’t a Muslim ban, it was five Muslim countries that we were at war with and we continued at war with them. Throughout the Trump administration, we had either Cold War or hot war that was going on with seven nations. And Trump just said, okay, well, you know, for war with these nations, if that’s the nature of our relationship, we are not going to let these people into the United States.
Because we’re at war with them. And five of them were Muslim countries, Islamic countries. There are 50 Islamic countries, and so it was only 10% of them. Nevertheless, they portrayed it as that. And so Justin Trudeau wanted to virtue signal about it. In 2017, January, as Trump was taking office, he said to those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.
I’m so sick and tired of hearing that. That’s not true, actually. By 2019, however, Canada had welcomed nearly 60,000 Syrian refugees. Images abound of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau handing out winter jackets to arriving families at Toronto’s Pearson airport. You’re safe at home now, he said. And those pictures initially were back in 2015. But by 2019, four years later, some of the provinces had ditched all aid for immigration and for the refugee programs, and only 24% of males and 8% of female refugees from Syria had found employment.
So what do you do with these people? Same problem you always see. And this is why the second generation is filled with anger, resentment, and then breeds chaos, conflict, terror. That happens in the second generation. So it goes without saying, says Rachel Marzin, that Israel never bothered asking the Palestinians if they want to be displaced to the other side of the planet. Clearly, no one in Israel has asked Canadians how they feel about it, either, the possibility of serving as a dumping ground for their ethnic cleansing efforts in Gaza, because if they had, they would realize that Canada is already full.
So who gave them that idea? Did they come up with it on their own? Or is it something in the Trudeau government actually suggesting that it’s a realistic scenario? There’s been no debate about any such possibility because we don’t do debates anymore and typically don’t even have any parliamentary debates. It’s just whatever the dictator in chief wants to do in our Western nations now. So unless some official dares to stick his neck out and commit political suicide over this idea, Canadian officials need to tell the Israeli intelligence ministry that came up with this plan to shove it, said Rachel.
And the question is, who is buying all this talk about Amalek? This article from Ariel Gold on Antiwar. com says, who’s drinking the Netanyahu Amalek Kool Aid? You know, he said, well, you must remember what Amalek has done to you. And it’s like, I heard that, and I said, this is the craziest thing I’ve heard. These people are not Amalek. And of course, he is about as much of a believer and religious as Donald Trump is.
He’s notorious for his secular life and his corruption, but he is a shrewd politician. He’s smarter than Trump. I mean, at least he did some research or had somebody do some research to come up with a name and a phrase. Trump is like, oh, yeah, that’s my favorite, second favorite book or my favorite book. Second one is the one that I wrote. Are you an Old Testament or New Testament guy? Well, both, I guess.
The victims of Hamasa’s vile October the 7th attack come from what is referred to as the Gaza envelope. He says, heavy with kibbetsim. That’s the plural of kibbets. Its residents are known for being secular and left leaning. One person, Yotam Kipnis, said in eulogizing his father, he said, we will not stay silent while the cannons war, and we won’t forget that dad loved peace. Do not write my father’s name on a missile.
He would not have wanted that. Another man, Tom Godot, whose son lived and died in one of the kibitzes, blamed Kibutzim. Sorry, blamed the Netanyahu administration. He said the fingers that pulled the trigger and murdered, the hands that held the knives that stabbed and beheaded and slashed were the loyal and determined emissaries of the accursed, messianic and corrupt government of Israel. So, Ariel Gold said, it’s not the families of those murdered on October 7 that Netanyahu is invoking Amalek to, but the ideological descendants of Kach, a religious nationalist party founded in 1971 by Brooklyn born Rabbi Mer Kahana, who argued for the immediate transfer of the Arabs, who he referred to as dogs.
In 1984, the one time his party secured a single seat in the Knesset, Kahane introduced legislation to ban all Jewish gentile marriages and sexual relations and to revoke the Israeli citizenship of all nonJews. His party was so violently racist, it was prohibited from running in Israel’s next election. It was banned entirely in 1994, and it was defined as a terrorist organization by the US State Department. Well, of course, I know many of you will say, well, people who speak up now at a PTA meeting are now considered to be terrorists by this organization.
So nevertheless, in 2019, he had a follower who formed the Jewish Power Party. It’s ideologically the same as that party. They merged with other far right fundamentalist parties to form the third largest share of Israel’s parliamentary seats. And so this is who Netanyahu is pretending that he is religious to. But it’s also the Christians, like John Hagee, who in 2008 referred to Hitler as a hunter, quote Unquote, sent by God to help the Jews reach the Promised land.
I showed pictures of the Israeli ambassador at his church and the church waving Israeli flags. They were able to raise $25 million in a single night. An organization that he is part of boasts a membership of over 10 million people, Christians united for Israel. So they were the ones that he was talking to as well. But I mentioned Sergeant York, and I keep thinking about World War I because nobody in America really wants to get involved in these wars except the people at the top.
And they were relentless in their pursuit of doing this, whether it’s Ukraine or whether it’s the Middle east wars. People in America don’t want that. People in America did not want to get involved in World War I, either. And if you’ve ever seen or you know the story of Sergeant York, supposedly they did a fairly accurate job of it with Gary Cooper when they filmed it. Alvin York, who was here in Tennessee, they got a huge statue of him at the state Capitol.
And he was someone who was a real Hellraiser in his early days. When he’s 27 years old, he became a Christian. And World War I began, and he got drafted in, I think. But anyway, he entered into the army in 1931, and he really did not want to participate. He was going to get a conscientious objector status and wanted to get out. And the way they show it in the movie, and of course, the movie was done during World War II, during wartime.
And so it was a bit of a propaganda film itself. But at the center of it, which was something that really happened, was his struggle, trying to decide whether he was going to do it. And at first he said, no, the Bible, the book, he said, the book is against killing, and I’m not going to do it. And so in the movie, there’s a good scene where he goes into his commanding officer’s office, and he has an aide there who says, let me handle this, I’ll talk to hiM.
And so he decides that he’s going to argue the point with him, with the Bible and everything that he says. York has got an answer for it, doesn’t agree with it. And then the commander goes over and pulls off a book, and he hands it to him and he goes, well, what is this? He said, well, that’s a book about the history of the United States. George Washington, all these other people, he goes, they put all that stuff down a book because he was up in the hills and he did not have a formal education.
This is very early in the 20th century. I think it’s 1918. At this point in time, he said, they started talking to him, not about religion, but about politics and about history and about his country. I don’t know what to think about that. It confuses me. And he goes, well, he said, if I was in the hills, I could set this down. I could work this out. He says, well, why don’t you take leave? Why don’t you take it off for ten days and think about this? Take that book with you.
Read it, and when you come back, if you haven’t changed your mind, I’ll write your discharge papers for you. Whatever. They were going to give him a promotion, and he didn’t want the promotion. He didn’t want to fight. And he struggles with that in the movie. And then he gets to the point where it says, render to Caesar what is due to Caesar. And that’s the thing that changes his mind.
And regardless of what you think about how he came down on that, I want you to think about it. That if somebody had invaded Tennessee, would he have been struggling with this? It would have been clear, wouldn’t it? The reason it wasn’t clear was because in spite of the book about American history that was given to him by his commanding officer, it didn’t have anything to do with America.
World War I didn’t. There was no reason for us to go over there and to send the Yanks over there. We didn’t have a dog in that fight. We didn’t need to be there. We were sent by a politician who had globalist designs, Woodrow Wilson, a politician who despised his own country, who loved the bankers, who set up the central bank, and who set up the income tax and changed the basis of our taxation to be predatory on Americans and try to create this World League after the war.
First attempt at a global government with an American. But if he’d actually looked at the history of America, he would have seen what George Washington and the people said about not getting involved in foreign entanglements. And so that’s a big part of it. But the key thing is he would have known exactly. There would have been no question and no conflict with his Christian principles. If it had been Tennessee that was invaded, or even America, he wouldn’t had to think about that twice.
And of course, they did the movie about him, because it was truly. He was an amazing marksman. And as he and his organization, his group, he had about 16 or 17 soldiers, and they had to take out a German machine gun position. Several of them got killed. But he wound up kind of taking point and he single handedly brought back as captives 130 prisoners, and he was pretending that he was calling to other people and he just had a pistol and a gun.
It truly was an amazing story in terms of that, but it is, I think, tragic how he was bamboozled. It worked out great for Sergeant York, but it didn’t work out great for a lot of Americans and a lot of British and a lot of French and a lot of Germans. It didn’t work out great for them. It was a rich man fight and a poor man’s war, and it always is.
And so on this Veterans Day, we should stop and think about that and reflect on that today. This is a recording, so I will not be responding to any comments there, but I hope that you all enjoy the community. We are going to play for the rest of the program. We’ve got some of our best of interviews. The reason that I’m taking Veterans Day off is to do some work for the program and especially some music stuff.
As I said before, I’m trying to get some Christmas music together for the show, as well as some other projects and some other things I need to do. And Quite frankly, I just need a little bit of rest. I hope you enjoy the rest of the program. We’ve got some great interviews. And before we leave, I just want to say one last thing here, because there was an interesting story that I didn’t get to yesterday should say from your perspective, I’m doing this on Thursday.
But earlier today in my frame of mind, I did not get to this story, and I really wanted to talk about it. It’s $150,000 settlement that was given to a student. She transferred into a high school in Chicago, public school system as a junior, so she would have been years old. Maybe she had been at a charter school. She wanted to go to one of the other schools that had better sports for volleyball and basketball.
That was her motivation. And when she got there, they were encouraging, actually coercing students to participate in a transcendental meditation program. And it had a lot of things like initiation rites. They would do them in darkened rooms, give them a mantra and that type of thing. And the key thing for her that set it off was when they said, don’t tell your parents. Don’t tell your parents the mantra word.
Don’t tell your parents what we’re doing. She said they were expected to meditate for 15 minutes during two class periods every school day as part of a quiet time program in place of instruction time. It targeted high needs students, they said, but a 2016 Smithsonian article talked about the fact this was coming from the David Lynch foundation, one of these Holly weirdo directors, David lynch, one of the weirdest ones out there.
And he wanted to spread transcendental meditation to urban schools in Chicago and New York, and his institution was funding it. They had about 6800. Quote Unquote subjects is the way they referred to them. Quote, the quiet Time program serves urban schools that have high rates of youth, behavior challenges, teacher turnover, and academic achievement gaps, read a quiet time brochure. San Francisco is doing it as well, they said.
By introducing meditation to the entire school community, students, teachers, and principals alike, this innovative program has effectively restored a positive culture of academics and well being in a high need school community. Now, the reason I wanted to talk about this was because she had discernment number one. Number two, it violated her principles. And when we talk about war and peace, we need to think about what our principles really are on so many issues and in reality, what was happening here.
Of course, they were pushing a religion on these kids, and they were doing it surreptitiously through their program. The instructor would pull three to five students at a time out of class, take them to a darkened classroom to purportedly teach them how to meditate, the quote unquote proper way. She said. As I go into the classroom, the setting was very uncomfortable for me. The lights were off in the classroom.
There was a picture of a man, and at the moment, I didn’t know what religion it was. I just knew that it wasn’t my religion. I’m a Christian, she said. There were candles and chairs in the room, and a woman with a headdress gave students a mantra that they were not supposed to repeat to their parents, to their coaches, or to their peers, she said. That gave me a red flag.
I’m not comfortable not being able to share this with my parents. They never gave me consent to give to my parents. I was a minor at the time. I never signed anything to give them permission to put their religion on me. And so much of what happens in our schools today is done like this. It might be something that is subtle, and it might be openly done, like secular humanism.
That’s been a big part of the religion in the schools for a long time. Some people have discernment about that. Others don’t. When you get into things like meditation and Hindu religion and other things like that, at one point in time, when our sons were maybe about first grade or so, we took them to martial arts. We had a great martial arts teacher. It was very good. And it was close to where we were, and we had it set up so that we were taking private lessons with them.
And so it was the four of us, but it was really for them, so they could do spin kicks and all this other kind of stuff. And it was a lot of fun to watch them do it. And this guy was pretty amazing. He was a stunt double for Bruce Willis. Looks a little bit like Bruce Willis, but it was amazing what this guy could do. He has lay down all four of us, and he didn’t get a running start.
He was just standing there, and he just jumped over all four of us and landed on this wood dance floor type of thing, which made a lot of noise when you step on it and didn’t make a sound. With his role, I mean, he was pretty amazing. But one day, he told us to come to an evening class and observe it because they wanted to step it up with the boys.
And in that class, they started talking about the QI, the force, in a sense, right. And how they could project this. It wasn’t a real hit on somebody’s chest, but it came out on the back, the handprint came out on the person’s back. And at that point, I started thinking, well, this is kind of getting a bit like an occult religion, and I think we’re done with it.
You have to look at this stuff and understand what is happening with it. I think a lot of people don’t understand that about the meditation stuff, about mushrooms, a lot of things. But beyond all of that, beyond what you think about the religion or the meditation or any of this stuff, the issue is that this was subversive. It was against the parents, and it was a religion that was being pushed on her.
So she took it to court. They settled. She got paid $150,000, and she’s not the only student. There is at least two more. One of them is a Muslim and the other one is a Christian. So two Christians and a Muslim push back on it. Now, this was not only meditation based, but it was also Sel, social emotional learning, which is another one of these things, like diversity, equity, inclusivity, CRT, other things.
But the SEL, the social emotional learning is something that is one of their tactics that they’re using against kids as well. The district settled with her because they didn’t want to take it to a jury. I think they should have taken it to a jury because this allows them to deny that they had any liability. They get off with a lot less money. But anyway, they made their point with it.
And there’s other students who are doing it. My reason for talking about that is I think that it’s very important for us to have not only discernment, but the character to stick to our principles. And I think there’s a lot of pressure that is happening right now, especially not so much on the Ukraine side. The ham fisted propaganda was very obvious. It was coming from the establishment. We knew what their agenda was.
But as we see these pictures of what is happening in Israel and with Hamas and the rest of the stuff in know, there’s really not any good guys on this side, and we see a lot of violence. And the push is to try to get people to take one side or the other. But we don’t need to get drawn into this. There are no good actors there, and we need to have that discernment to understand that, and we need to be able to stick to this or we’re going to get drawn into that same situation one way or the other.
So coming up, we have three interviews that I think are some of our best of. We have Jay Warner Wallace, if you remember, Cole Case Christianity, he was a cold case detective and a reluctant Christian trying to disprove it to his wife. He applied the cold case stuff to the cold case of the Bible, and he became a Christian. Connor Boyak, we also have that interview. He is the guy who does the Tuttle Twin books, as well as the importance, the key part of that interview is we talked about the importance of working at the state level.
If you’re going to get involved in politics and try to make some changes, the further down you go, the more effective it is. And he talks about his experience of how ineffective it was for him working at the federal level. And he has a think tank in Utah, Libertas, as well. And then the final one that we have is Jeffrey Clayton, who talks about the importance of bail, the bail system as not the pagan God, but bail to counteract what the Soros district attorneys are doing.
And that is just to turn people out in the streets, or the alternative to keep them locked up forever, as we saw with the January 6 people. So the interviews will be coming up. Have a good weekend. Hope you have a good Veterans Day. And let’s honor the veterans by not creating more veterans of foreign wars. The common man. They created Common Core to dumb down our children.
They created common past to track and control us. Their Commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the Communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary, but each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It’s time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide. Please share the information and links you’ll find@thedavidnightshow. com. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. If you can’t support us financially, please keep us in your prayers. Thedavidnikeshow. com if you like the Eagles on a dark desert highway, the cars and Huey Lewis in the news. They say the hot rock. You’ll love the classic hits channel at APS Radio.
Download our app or listen now@apsRadio. com. Welcome back. And joining us now is Jay Warner Wallace. I said at the beginning of the program, everybody loves a great detective story. Well, this is the greatest detective story ever told. And he is a cold case homicide detective and he is still doing consultations. But he is also a senior fellow now at the Coulson center for Christian Worldview. His cases have been featured more than any other detective on NBC’s dateline.
His work has also appeared on Fox News, on True crime, many others. He’s been awarded the Police and Fire Medal of Valor for Sustained Superiority Award for his continuing work on cold case homicides and the Cops West Award after solving a 1979 murder. He also has a weekly podcast. You can find him on YouTube as well. Mr. Wallace, are all those listed under Cole case? Christianity is where they’ll find that, right? Yeah, you can find me under J.
Warner Wallace on all the social media stuff. But yeah, for sure, that’s. Yes. And I listened to his book years ago, really enjoyed the approach. And as I also said, anybody who wants to have critical thinking, who wants to look at the information that is presented to us, most of us are doing some kind of a cold case investigation because we’re not right there on the scene evaluating it.
So we have to look at the credibility of the witnesses, of the journalists who are reporting this to us. So this is something that applies to everybody. But I’ve said many times, we talk about whether or not there is a God. The arguments for intelligent design, DNA, things like Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, all those are very convincing. Even before we had things like DNA creation spoke to us, we knew there was a know.
You look at a building, you know that somebody built that building, that type of thing. I wanted to get you on, though, because you looked at this from the standpoint of are the witnesses and the text, is it credible in the Bible? Tell us a little bit about how you evaluate that. Yeah, let’s face it. We could make a case for God’s existence, and sometimes I’m asked to do that.
But that case you would make, you could make. Actually, without even opening your scriptures, you could make that just from science. You can make it from the features of the universe. But even if you did that, you wouldn’t necessarily be making a case for the God of the Bible. Because if you’re a theist and some, if you’re a Muslim or if you’re any strand of theism that this case you would make for God’s existence might also apply to your case for your belief system.
But Christianity is different in that, unlike other worldviews that talk about God, Christianity makes a claim. It’s not just a claim about the nature of God. It’s a claim about a series of events that occurred in the first century. In other words, it’s not that our scripture is a set of proverbial claims like the wise wisdom statements of Baha’Allah and the Baha’I faith. It’s not like that. Baha’Allah doesn’t make any claims about what happens in history.
The New Testament Gospels do. And because they’re making claims about an event known as the Resurrection of Jesus that’s set in a specific time in history on a specific location on planet Earth, well, now we’ve got a claim that we could actually investigate. And that’s the beauty of Christianity, is that it is confirmable or is verifiable or falsifiable based on our investigation of the claims made, the historic claims made in the Gospels.
Now, it’s much like when a crime occurs 40, 50 years ago. And if I decide to reopen that case, how do I know? I’ve got cases that go back as far as 1972. How do you know in a case like that, where you don’t have access anymore to the eyewitnesses because they’re dead, or you don’t even have access to the detectives who wrote the first reports when they talked to the eyewitnesses, because often they’re dead now, too.
Well, what do you do with that if you have no access to the witnesses and no access to the report writers? Well, this is the problem we have with the Gospels, and I think you could apply the same approach. What are the areas of eyewitness reliability? And do the Gospel authors pass the test when measured that way. Now, I’ll tell you, this is the only way I knew to examine the Christian worldview because I happened to be a detective when I first got saved.
I was 35 and I’d been working as I was already a senior detective in my agency, and I was applying these techniques to cases. And so it wasn’t like I was thinking, well, let me do something kind of unique or novel here. I thought that everybody who was going to examine these claims about history would want to examine them this way. I didn’t know any other way to examine them.
So that’s really the system I took when I first encountered Christianity. That’s what I think is so interesting about it, and especially because it is an exercise in critical thought. As you said, the Bible is very rooted in a particular time and place and historical aspects. When you look at Luke, it’s very clear this happened when this person was ruling and that type of thing. And so these are things that we can investigate.
And when somebody makes a claim, we’re seeing this happening all the time. Somebody makes a claim about climate change or about man’s contribution to climate change, how do we evaluate that? The burden of proof is on the person who’s making the claim, right? Yeah, it is. And I’ll tell you that everyone’s making a claim. So here’s what I would say. This is often leveraged against us, right? They’ll say, look, you claim there’s a God, we don’t see God, we have no evidence for God.
They would argue that if you’re claiming that there’s something that exists when it’s not obvious to the rest of us, well, that burden then is on you. But that’s not exactly how this works in criminal cases. You have an effect. A dead body, okay? That’s what I work. I work dead bodies. And then you have to figure out what is the most reasonable cause for that stuff you have in the crime scene.
That’s how this works. Now, if I’m going to suggest that there’s a crime scene here, it’s called the universe, and we are in that universe. And the question is, how did everything in the universe come to be the way it is today? Now, I’m going to posit a cause. I’m going to posit that that cause is God, a supernatural being outside of spacetime and matter. If you think that you can get all the stuff in the universe without God, then you have to posit a cause.
Also. You’re going to say, everything here is a cause of spacetime matter, physics, and chemistry. Okay, great. But we both have a burden now. I have a burden to show you why God is the best and most reasonable explanation. You have a burden to show me why spacetime matter, physics, and chemistry are the most reasonable explanation. We both share a burden because we’re trying to explain the cause for what we see in the scene.
So I don’t like when people try to. This is why it’s so important to be, like you said, this enterprise of critical thinking is so important because we have to kind of think, well, how do I think about things critically and including my own faith? And if you don’t think that that’s important now, you probably haven’t given your kids yet the glowing rectangle called a smartphone, because it turns out that once your kids have that, and sadly, I see parents giving these things to their kids when their kids are, like, ten years old.
Well, you’ve just introduced your child to a world that is demanding evidence and thinks it has evidence for their beliefs. And so they’re adopting views that they think are based on science, based on this kind of research, based on a kind of thinking that they don’t see in us as believers if we aren’t applying the same approach to our faith. They think that on our side, we have people who just have wishful thinking, and on the other side, it’s based on data and facts.
Well, that’s not necessarily the case. I want us on this side to be able to say, no. My faith is grounded in facts. Matter of fact, this whole word hope that’s used in the New Testament is not the kind of word that we use out in our English language. Hope kind of means like wishful thinking. I’m in Los Angeles County. I’m close to Los Angeles county is one county away, and I worked in Los Angeles county my entire career, and we’ve got all kinds of sporting teams.
So when I say, are the Rams going to win on Sunday? Well, I hope so. That word kind of means, well, I don’t know, but maybe. Okay, well, that’s different than the kind of hope that’s used in scripture. In Scripture, the word hope is really a level of certainty which is much higher, a level of confidence which is much higher, because it’s based in something that can be known.
So when we say we have hope in God, it’s because we know enough to know that our hope, that our trust, is confidently placed. So I think that that’s the difference. And we need Christians to realize that difference and to help communicate that to the next generation or get ready. The tide is going to swing, and it already has started to swing against us. And it’s because we don’t take the same approach the world takes.
We kind of like the ones who are hoping this is true and they’re the ones who know what’s true according to kids. Well, we have to kind of help our kids to see that we know what’s true as well. That’s right. Saul falls into what Christians call apologetics. I think a lot of people look at this and they, apologetics? What are we apologizing for? Because that’s another word that’s changed meanings.
Just like you talk about hope, right? Apologetics used to mean that it was a defense, and it was that way from ancient times up until about the middle of the 18 hundreds. And then it became, well, an acknowledgment that I’ve done something wrong, I’m at fault. And that really is kind of the way that most Christians approach when they talk about apologetics. Usually they apologize now for being a Christian instead of having a rigorous defense of it.
So we need to move back to the definition of apologetics that preceded the apology that’s out there, I think. Yeah, I’ll tell you, I think every one of us who claims to be a Christian believer, and I say this to juries all the time, we tell jurors that we are going to tell them everything they need to know, but we cannot communicate everything that could be known because we don’t even know everything that could be known.
In other words, you’re going to have to render a verdict, even though you’re probably going to have a few open questions. This is true for every juror who’s ever sat on a jury. They’ve had to render a verdict. But if you asked them, they probably would have said, I wish I’d had the answer to this question, though. And often we know that someone did it because they haven’t confessed to it.
We don’t know exactly how they did it. That’s an open question. Yet you can still render a verdict and determine truth even though you have open questions. The same thing is happening for us as Christian believers. There’s an evidence trail, and like in a suspect in a case, in a jury trial, that evidence trail seems to be pointing directly. It’s leading right to that defendant at the end of the table.
Now, it turns out it’s not leading to his right 2ft or to his left 2ft. It’s pointing right at him, but it stops just short of him. So the question is, am I reasonable in taking the step across what I call the open questions? You’re going to have to take a step from the end of the evidence trail across your unanswered questions to render a verdict. The same thing is true with Christianity.
There’s more than enough evidence that points to the reliability of scripture, to the existence of God, to the resurrection of Jesus. But I can’t answer every question you want, and so you’re going to have to take a step from the end of that evidence trail. But by the way, that evidence trail does not just points right to this conclusion. It doesn’t point a foot to the right or a foot to the left.
You’re going to have to step across the end of the evidence trail to make a reason inference. Now, we call that a step of faith, but it’s not blind. Now, here’s the sad thing about it. Most of us can make a better case for why we think the Rams are going to succeed in the NFC west than we can for why Christianity is. Is. In other words, there’s something already that you are.
I never call myself a Christian apologist. I’m a Christian casemaker. I make a case for Christianity. But I think every Christian ought to be a Christian case maker. It’s about turning us in that direction. But you’re already able to make a case for something really well, I don’t know what it is. It’s probably Some hobby. If you’re a woodworker, you know which tools you make a case for, which tools you ought to use, what kinds of cuts you ought to do.
If you’re somebody who’s got other hobies, a collection, you know what to collect, what’s not of value? What is of value. You’re geeked out on something already. The question is, are we that prepared to share our faith? Do we know enough about what’s true? And this is something we don’t have to teach our kids. They’ll catch it. They’ll catch it if we just are somebody who is. I mean, I talked about this all the time with my boys growing up, and my boys already know what I’m going to say on any number of topics.
They already know how I’m going to think about it, and I didn’t teach them, really. Hey, guys, when this comes up, I want you to think this way. They just watch me do it, and because they watch, they caught it. And so I think this is something we can do for our children, even if not having to be all that intentional. Let’s just live our faith differently. Let’s just think about our faith differently and verbalize that.
And it turns out our kids are going to catch that anyway. That’s right. That’s exactly what we see talked about, really, in Deuteronomy six. When you’re going about your life, you’re walking in life, going down the road, you talk to your kids about it, and that’s exactly true. Things are coming up all the time. Whenever you look at what is happening in the culture, what is happening in the news, every bit of it really reflects back to the ultimate question about God and his existence and his interaction with us.
I think one of the big things that we have, though, that is a real obstacle, is not whether or not in terms of critical thinking. So we have a generation that doesn’t even want to do any critical thinking. They don’t even believe that there is such a thing as truth. We call that postmodernism because during modernism, you had a lot of people who would make arguments using evolution, or initially it was archaeology against Christianity.
Now they don’t bother to do that. They just say that there is no truth, or I’ve got a truth, you’ve got a truth. Everything is subjective. How do you handle something like that? Well, I always tell people that everyone believes there is a truth. If you think there is no truth, you believe that that is true. So you believe the least one truth, that there is no truth.
But it’s kind of self defeating. But the reality of it is, it’s how do we ground truth? So you’re right, if all truth is just a matter of my personal opinion. In other words, if I’m trying to determine something is true, all I have to do is look inwardly. Well, that’s really fast. It’s the lazy way to find truth doesn’t require any research. I just make a decision, and how I feel determines what the truth is on this matter.
But that doesn’t require any effort at all because you have immediate access to your feelings. We have to help people to realize that there are two forms of truth. There are subjective truth claims and there are objective truth claims. And there’s a difference between those two. And we all agree that there are differences. We just haven’t thought about it carefully. This is why I write a book like Cold case Christianity.
I’m trying to figure out how do I help people to see this is not a matter of my personal opinion. I’m not a Christian because I like it better than other things. I don’t even like it sometimes. This is a hard worldview to live, right? It makes demands on me that are against my fallen nature. It prompts me, it encourages me, it kicks me in the rear to do things that I wouldn’t otherwise do to hopefully be a better person.
And that’s not an easy project because we aren’t good by nature. We are pretty desperately fallen by nature. So this is a hard worldview to maintain because you have to surrender constantly. You have to surrender your will to the will of God living in you. Think about this, of all the theistic worldviews out there, ours is the one in which God does not just fight alongside you. If you join the team, God does not just fight your battles.
God resides in you. Very different, very different claim. And so that just means we have to get out of the way and let God. Is God alive in us? Is Jesus alive in us? And that’s a very different kind of claim. So for me, I’m helping young people to say, okay, look, if you are the determiner of the truth, like you say, for example, chocolate chip cookies are the best dessert.
Okay, well, that’s a subjective claim because you as the subject are making it true. Now, a different kind of claim, isoniazid is the cure for tuberculosis. Okay? That’s a claim that I don’t determine it, I don’t make it true by believing it, because if that was the case, I could say I’d rather take Nyquil. Nyquil is now the cure for TB. Now it turns out Nyquil isn’t the cure for TB because the subject doesn’t get to determine it.
That’s determined by the object known as isoniazid. Is it the cure? So that’s an objective claim about reality. It’s not subjective like chocolate chip cookies are the best dessert. It’s objective that isoniazid is the cure for tuberculosis. And we have to make the determination which claims in the world around us are just a matter of opinion, subjective, determined by subjects, even in groups of subjects, or are they objective? So the claim God exists, it might be a false claim, but it’s not a subjective claim.
I cannot make God exist by changing my mind. I cannot keep God from existing by changing my mind. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s grounded in the object known as God. Now there are false objective claims. As a matter of fact, once you determine that a claim is objective rather than subjective, the only thing left to do is determine if it’s true or false. And by the way, it’s stupid for us to get online and battle with people over subjective opinions.
Who cares? But we ought to be getting online and arguing with people about, or at least encouraging people to look at the truth when it’s an objective. If someone’s taking your family is taking a Nyquil to cure their tUberculosis, I would hope you would stop them and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s not a matter of opinion. That’s actually not going to work because there’s an objective truth about isoniazid.
Well, that’s true for all of us going forward. The kinds of conversations we ought to be having with our young people are about those objective claims about reality. God exists. That’s an objective claim. Like it or it might not be true, but it’s objective. What’s left to do? Determine if it’s true or false. Jesus is the way, the only way to God. That’s an objective. That’s not an opinion.
I can’t make it so by changing my mind. I can’t keep it from being so by changing my mind. It’s an objective claim about reality. It might be false, but we ought to be talking about those things with our students to make sure they know the difference between subjective and objective claims and how to determine, yeah, we want to investigate this to see, does God exist? Is the Bible.
Why would I write a book like Cold Case Christianity? I’m writing it because I think that Christianity is demonstrably true. It’s an objective claim. Christianity is true is something that our kids need to know, is a matter of opinion because, yeah, you’re right. We are getting Lazier and Lazier, and because of that, we are no longer looking outward. If I said I could either earn a doctorate and become an anesthesiologist by simply wanting it and trusting my own opinions about the medications, or do I need to go to school to learn what is objectively true about those medications? Well, which of those two kinds of doctors do you want? Yes, I think in the end it’s much easier.
I can become a doctor tomorrow if I can just will it, but I’m going to take ten years to do it if there’s objective truths that I need to learn. So you can see kind of why young people are more inclined to just look for those truths that are grounded internally because they’re immediately accessible, they’re easy to grab, and I’m just a matter of opinion. So that’s where I think we’re at in a culture, and we just need to help our students to see the difference between those two kinds of truths.
Yes, that is exactly right. And that is a key thing that affects all aspects of our life. As you point out. It’s the easy path to take to say, well, we’re not going to even debate the truth anymore. We’re just going to go with what I feel like. And that’s an important thing, because when we talk about the difference with Christianity is that God is not there necessarily even fighting your battles for you, but he’s there in you, working in you.
And so there is a spiritual aspect of it. And how do we balance that feeling that we have, the directions that we are trying to go? We have to balance that against some objective standard. I think that’s we don’t want to have simply a rational knowledge of God. I know about God and that type of thing. We’re not looking at the Bible from that standpoint, but we are looking at it from the standpoint.
As you mentioned before, we need to question as to whether or not what we believe is actually true. And we shouldn’t be afraid to question that because the Bible can stand on its own if we examine it. So that’s one of the things we see. Many religions will say, well, just pray about this, that this book is true or whatever, and then you get kind of a subjective feeling about that.
But again, that’s one of the things that I like about what you do with cold case Christianity. You look at it and you say, well, because this is rooted in factual, historical claims, we can evaluate this, and that actually builds our faith. It doesn’t become just an intellectual exercise, but you have to have the two things go together. You can fall off on one side or the other of that horse, can’t you? No, you just said it perfectly.
Because when I was growing up, I was not surrounded by believers. I’m in Los Angeles County. I don’t know if that’s just the way it was back in those days. I didn’t know a lot of Christians. I was never asked by a friend to go to church, that kind of thing. BuT my dad, who was a very committed atheist, just like me. He was a cop just like I was.
First I reopened as a cold case detective, a couple of his cases. So I definitely knew what he was going through, and I had his view. For the most part, I would go to church with my wife if she wanted to go to church for Christmas or Easter, but I was completely disconnected and thought it was all just rubbish. Okay, so that’s fine. That’s my dad now. When he remarried, he remarried a woman who quickly became a Mormon, and they had six children together.
So all my brothers and sisters are raised LDs. And you’re absolutely right. I think all of us as humans, we do have a high appreciation for evidence. We do. The question is, what are we accepting as evidence? And for a lot of us, I talk about this in the book. There’s two forms of evidence, direct evidence and indirect evidence. Direct evidence is simply eyewitness testimony. Indirect evidence is everything else.
DNA is indirect evidence. By the way, indirect evidence is also known as that ugly word, circumstantial evidence. But indirect evidence is everything you think is really hard evidence. There’s no such category as hard evidence. There’s just eyewitness statements and everything else. Everything else includes DNA, fingerprints, blood spatter, gunshot residue, whatever material evidence you want to compare. That’s all indirect evidence. Now, most people, when they’re thinking about their theistic worldview, they are evidentialists.
But what they’re accepting as evidence is an experience, a personal. It’s a direct evidence. I directly saw this happen in my life, and I can’t imagine that being a coincidence. So therefore, that served as me as evidence that my theistic worldview is true. And everyone, if you’re a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Baha’I, a Mormon, everyone does this. Okay, now, I hope that we’re not doing that, too, because if you were encountering somebody who’s a Mormon who says, yeah, this is true, because I had this experience, would you consider that evIdence? Look, we’ve had experiences, too.
I get that. But we have to measure our experiences against the evidence and the claims of the book. I’m not doubting that my Mormon family has had experiences. My question is, did they really indicate that Mormonism is true? You can attest experiences can come from any number. Sometimes I’ve seen even Christians say what seems to me like a coincidence as an evidence that God exists, that Christianity is true, we can do better than that.
If you find yourself sharing your faith in pretty much the same way a Mormon would share theirs, you’re probably not doing it right, because it turns out you don’t believe that Mormonism is true. Yet here you are sharing your faith in the exact same way. I had an experience that demonstrated that, or I was raised in the faith. These are the most popular ways that people express their belief.
We can do better. We could say, you know what? I had this experience, and then I started to investigate to see if Christianity might be the best explanation for it. And here’s what I discovered about Christianity. All of these details about the objective life of Jesus of Nazareth in the first century and how he rose from the dead. Look, you can do the same thing with the Book of Mormon.
You will find no corroboration for the Book of Mormon. Remember, the Book of Mormon actually describes 1000 years of history on the North American continent, of which there is not a single bit of verifiable confirmation on any of it. Now, you got to think about that for a second. I have a realistic view of corroborative evidence. As a detective, corroborative evidence just gives you a small percentage of what the eyewitness says occurred.
It’s not a video. You don’t have videos from the first century. So the question then becomes, I don’t expect to get a huge percentage of the testimony corroborated, but I expect to get something corroborated. And when I see that there’s nothing corroborated in the Holy Book, I’m suspicious. You ought to be also. So I think we have to help our students to realize that, hey, we believe this is true, but not because we want it to be true, because here’s what’s happening and you know this, David, the times are changing, and it’s not going to be easy to live as a young Christian in a culture that now not only rejects Christians, but rejects the teaching of the master.
And trust me, when they reject the teaching of your Jesus, they are rejecting your Jesus. And the teaching of Jesus is no longer acceptable in a culture that has changed their views on gender identity, on marriage, on the sanctity of life, on those things that Jesus taught clearly about. If you’re going to say, well, Paul didn’t understand what we understand today, what do you think that book is? Do you think that book is the word of God? You think that God doesn’t? If there’s going to be a new revelation about how we ought to live, then let’s look for the new revelation.
But it’s going to be from God, and I don’t see it. The last spokespeople for God are still recorded in scripture. And until God, I don’t think God’s changed his mind about any of that stuff. So I think it’s important for us to teach our kids that this is true. And I’ll tell you, give one last story about that. My son David is an anesthesiologist, and he’s a pediatric anesthesiologist.
And when he was in his biochemistry undergrad work, he will tell you that he wasn’t probably living like a Christian. But he said, because he knew from all the stuff we had studied as a young man, I was a youth pastor. I was his youth pastor, and we always talked about the science behind our beliefs. And he knew in a DNA lab he was working, he said, I knew even if I wasn’t living it, I knew it was true because I knew there was no way to explain the stuff I was working, unless, of course, there was a mind behind the code.
And he knew that he was stuck with God. Right. If that’s all we do for our kids, is to make them really uncomfortable in the season of their running, because that’s coming probably for a lot of our kids, and I’m fine if my kids run. I want them to be really uncomfortable while they’re doing it. It doesn’t need to be from my nagging. It just needs to be from what they know is true.
That’s right. And I don’t remember the guy’s name. He’s a country and Western star. He said, yeah, I grew up in a Christian family. He said, it didn’t keep me from sinning, kept me from enjoying it. Yeah, exactly. You know what I think in some ways, and he might be doing more sarcastically. Right. But the reality of it is that we ought not get comfortable with our misbehavior.
Right. And so if that’s all you could do for your kids is make them uncomfortable with their misbehavior, you’re probably doing a good job for your kids. Right. Well, you mentioned the archaeology stuff, and I think that was one of the key things. And you look at the Book of Mormon, it came out at a time when one of the major criticisms of the Bible was, this stuff is all made up.
There’s no such thing as a Hittite tribe and all the rest of this stuff. Right. And then they started looking and doing archaeology, and they started finding all this stuff. I remember taking my kids to the British Museum, and we saw the big relief up there about Sennacherib and the story about how he attacked Jerusalem and other things like that. They had a large chip, actually, it was a small part of one of the columns there, the Temple of Diana in Ephesus.
And yet they found these things by following the biblical record. They would say, well, it says, we know where this thing is. And it says that it’s over here. So we would follow it that way. And so they were able to find these things and corroborate that. But let’s talk a little bit about the reliability of the witnesses. What is it that makes these witnesses reliable? Yeah. So I think that when we look at eyewitness testimony, it’s an important part of our case.
It is our case. People will say, what evidence do you have for the resurrection? And when I hear that, it exposes, for me at least, that they clearly don’t trust that what the gospels record is true. They want some other source. But could you imagine to have four ancient sources that describe the same event? That’s not bad. Of course, if you don’t trust any of them, well, the question then becomes, well, why don’t you trust them? So I think that the biggest work for me, and I was one of those guys.
Okay, yeah, you have some ancient records, but they’re all Christian records. Well, hold on. Think about this for a second. It’s not as though these are. That’s not a fair argument to leverage against the Gospels. Let me give you an example of that. Let’s say, and I use this in the book, cold Case Christianity. Let’s say I’m working a bank robbery. And in this particular robbery, a guy walk into the bank and he walks up to the teller and he’s got a quiet demand note robbery.
Right? And as he walked up, he wasn’t making a big scene. He was just getting in line. And as he was in line, there’s a woman behind the other side of the office who’s behind a desk, who’s the assistant manager, and she happens to recognize this guy right away from high school. And she’s like, oh, I want to talk to this guy when he gets done with the teller because he was a great guy, all star athlete, top grade.
I want to see what he made of himself, what happened in his life. Well, now this dude isn’t doing a bank robbery. And she looks at her coworker’s face, and it’s clear this guy’s doing a robbery in real time. And she is shocked because she knew this guy. Just call him Robert Smith. She knew Robert Smith in high school. And now when the whole thing is done and I come to the bank to do the interviews, should I interview her about Robert Smith? Well, no, she’s biased.
She thinks Robert Smith is a bank robber. You can’t trust anything she says. She’s a. That’s not. That’s a stupid approach, right? Because you’re going to say, well, no, hang on. She didn’t start off thinking that Robert Smith was a bank robber. She arrived at that decision because she saw it. It was after it happened that she’s like, now I’m in, he’s a bank robber. The same thing happens with the Gospels.
It’s not as though these people, especially Matthew, this guy named Levi, who is not even liked by anybody. He is a tax collector. This dude is not looking for the Messiah. He’s not a disciple of John the Baptist. He’s not part of the original group that got jumped into with Jesus. He’s a guy who was on the outside looking in. But after watching that stuff for three years, he’s like, dude, I’m in now.
I’m a Christian now can I interview Matthew? Well, he didn’t start off believing that Jesus was the Christ, but he ended up there. And it’s why on the basis of observation, just like the lady in the bank. So we have to at least ask the. That’s. That’s. First of all, don’t throw out the Gospels as though they can’t be trusted. Let’s test the Gospels. I don’t trust eyewitnesses.
I test them. Now, if they pass the test, I trust them. And there’s a four part test, right? This is what we do in our jury instructions in California. It’s 13 questions that we allow jurors to ask when they are considering eyewitness reliability on the stand. And those 13 questions fall into four categories. Were they really there to see what they said they saw? The person who’s testified, too, can they be corroborated in some way? And like I said before, I have a reasonable expectation about corroborative evidence.
Three, have they changed their story over time, or have they been honest and accurate? And four, do they possess a bias? Those four categories are really what we look at to see if an eyewitness is reliable. Now, as I did that, it took the better part of a year when I was first examining Christianity. I have a Bible here in my shelf that I bought, a pew Bible.
I walked into a church, this pastor, I’d have been avoiding it for many years. I hadn’t been to this church for any other reason, and I really had never stepped foot in an evangelical church for anything other than like a wedding or maybe a funeral. I don’t remember if I had attended a funeral, so I never really had no idea what was going to expect. My family growing up were kind of like cultural Catholics, like holiday Catholics.
So I knew what a Mass looked like, and I thought it was nonsense. To be honest with you. As an atheist, I was never comfortable. But when I walked into this church, this pastor seemed decidedly regular, just like a regular guy. And he said that Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived. And that provoked me. It provoked me to buy a pew Bible, one of those ones they sell for pews, just a cheap $6 $7 Bible.
And I started to read the Gospels and I applied those four aspects of eyewitness reliability to the Gospel authors. Do they pass the test? I think they are written early enough in history to have been written by people who were present and in front of people who were present to fact check them. I don’t think that they’re written in the second century. I think they are very early in history.
And in the book I try to make a case for why they are early. And trust me, that’s one of the objections your kids are going to hear. If they’re in a Bible class in a secular university, they’re going to come out thinking these things were written in the third century and that is not true. Two, that they can be corroborated in any number of internal and external evidences, of which archaeology is just one, there are many other ways you could corroborate the claims of the Scriptures, and I go through those in the book.
Three, I don’t think they’ve changed over time. I don’t think the story, the miraculous story of Jesus is an exaggeration, a collection of additions over time where they added all the supernatural stuff. Don’t believe that. I can show why that’s the case in the book as well. And finally, I don’t think they possessed an ulterior motive because there are only three motives for any misbehavior. I talk about those in the book and they don’t possess those motives.
So again, can you find a way? And this is what’s so beautiful about our faith system, David, you know that there is enough reason to reject the scriptures if you so choose to do it, because God is gracious and he’s not going to bully you into your faith. As a matter of fact, it wouldn’t be genuine unless you had the freedom to reject it. And God has given us that dangerous free agency.
Why? Because God is love. Not God can love. God creates love. No, it says that God is love because he’s Triune in nature, has been in an eternal love relationship from the beginning of time, in the triune nature of God, and he is love. If he’s going to create a world, he’s going to create a world where love is possible, because that’s what a loving God would do.
But the problem with a world where love is possible is that it has to be a love with a dangerous prerequisite called free agency. You cannot love if you’re not free to hate. That’s the problem. Now what gracious God does is he creates a world in which there is free agency and then provides you with a book with all of the guidelines so you will not abuse your free agency.
Now, you can choose not to read the book, but then when you abuse your free agency and do something despicable that’s not on God. It is logically impossible to create a world in which love can emerge without first creating a world in which we have free agency. We’re not just robots. When your doll says, I love you, doesn’t really love you, it’s just programmed to say that. So it turns out if you want beings who can really, truly, freely love, you have to create the dangerous world we live in.
And that’s what God does. But he’s given us the guidelines so we don’t abuse our free agency. So he’s done everything you would expect a loving God to do. Parents do the same thing. And so I think in the end, I have to look at that world I’m living in and say, yeah, I’ve got a Bible that I can choose to reject because I have free agency, that dangerous prerequisite.
But when I do that, that’s not on God, that’s on me and my rebellious nature and what I like that you do. A lot of times people look at external sources, and again, there’s external sources that do help to corroborate this. When we look at archaeology or other things like that, but you really look at the Bible itself corroborating itself, because we can fall in the trap if we’re so reliant on external things of what they used to call higher criticism, we’re going to take something and we’re going to from an elevated position of science or whatever, we’re going to take a look at the Bible.
And of course, many prominent scientists were very active Christians. They had no problem with the critical thinking of it. And they would look at it as God says in Isaiah, come, let us reason together. Right? And that is the key thing. We don’t check our reason at the door. But there still is an aspect of faith, as you pointed out, it’s not a blind faith. It is a confident expectation going back to hope, as you talked about before.
And so I think that is the key thing. And I think it’s very important what you do in cold case Christianity in terms of looking at the evidence that we have that is within the Bible, within the New Testament specifically, and how that corroborates from a rational point of view, from the types of things that you would do as a detective who, as you said in a cold case, all the evidence that you’re going to have has already been collected by people who are no longer around, the witnesses are no longer around.
And that really is what we all have to do in terms of investigating this. We all have to do a cold case Christianity. I think. I think you’re right. I think if we can help our kids to do it, I don’t want to suggest in any way that my superior intellectual ability leads me to this conclusion. Look, it’s all God, top down. Part of it is. That’s why the first chapter of our book talks about the first skill that any detective has to have, and that is to enter the room with your hands empty.
Do not make up your mind before you get there. Surrender your prideful nature. Because we all think, I already know. And if we do that, we’re going to end up with a case where you already arrive at the conclusion you started with and you ignored everything in between because you came in thinking you, don’t be a know it all is what I call it. Don’t be a know it all.
You have to at least know. That’s why the hardest part, I think, David, about our worldview is that it begins with the thing that. Let’s put it this way. I just wrote a book called the Truth and True Crime. It comes out next year, and I’ve examined in it the nature of humans, biblical anthropology, and I also look at it in terms of what new studies show. I’m impressed by the fact that by the last 35 years, sociological studies and researchers have discovered that there’s one human attribute above all human attributes that will change your life for the better and contribute to human flourishing.
It’ll make you a better employer, a better employee. It’ll make you a far better student. You’ll be able to determine truth from air. Far better. You’ll have deeper, more connected relationships. You’ll have better mental health, better well being, and better physical health. You’ll live longer if you adopt this attitude. What is that weird attitude? It’s this thing that researchers, secular researchers, not Christians, call humility. Oh, what a surprise.
Well, it turns out that’s an ancient attribute which is all over the pages of Scripture, is that every problem isn’t us being prideful and thinking we know when. If we could just now here’s the problem with our worldview. It begins with an act of humility, that first act that says, you know what? I am exactly what scripture describes. I’m not all that great, and there is a God, and I’m not him.
That first act of bending your knee leads to a life predicated on humility. And everything you adopt from Scripture will be an act of humility. So I think in the end, that’s the problem we have. And it’s hard in a culture which is all about me, me, everyone’s social media profile, who’s got more likes, who’s got more views? What does your bio say about you? Are you important? Do you have a little check by your name? ThiS is a world we’re living in right now where just the opposite of humility is advanced.
We have to help our kids to see that humility is still important. Yeah, that’s true. When we look at politics, we talk about a lot here on this program. People get really scared when they see politicians who secular press, and they get really scared when they see a politician talking about God. And I said, well, you need to understand this person really is a Christian, that they understand they’re going to be accountable to God and that they are not God.
You ought to be concerned about the politicians who think they’ll never answer to God and are proud enough to think that they need to rule the world. That’s what really should put fear into people’s heart. Pride is a very dangerous thing. It’s something that seems to drive most of people in public life, and most of us, if we’re honest about it as well. It’s a constant fight against pride, regardless of who we are, but especially for the politicians that are constantly promoting themselves.
Such an excellent book. Thank you so much for coming on, Jay Warner Wallace, and tell us where people can find your podcast, your website, the books that you’ve got as well. Yeah, we’re at coldcasechristianity. com. And if you want, we are offering a great package with this new book. We have just the 10th anniversary we’re publishing right now, and we want people to get better trained as casemakers.
We’ve got an entirely free ten and a half hour training course that’s available with the book, and you can find that@coldcasechristianitybook. com okay, great. Coldcasechristianitybook. com. Thank you so much for what you do. It’s been a fascinating talk with your interview with you, and I really enjoyed the book when I read it years ago. Thank you so much. Great to have you. Thank you, David. I appreciate you having me.
I appreciate it so much. Thank you. Have a good day. We’ll be right back, folks. SA in a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. You’re listening to the David Knight show. Whether you’re feeling like the blues or bluegrass, APS Radio has you covered. Check out a wide variety of channels on our app@apsRadio. com. Hey, parents, kids like us have a problem, and it’s one that you can help solve.
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And I’m really excited to talk to him. I’ve had a lot of people ask me about or tell me I should know who the Tuttle twins are. We don’t have young kids or grandkids, so I didn’t know it yet, but a great series for homeschoolers and of course, he’s also involved with the Libertas Institute, and they’ve done a lot at the state level in Utah. So I want to talk to him about that as well.
So homeschooling topics. And he’s got other books that he’s written besides the children’s books. So joining us now is Connor Boyak. Thank you for joining us, Connor. Thanks for having me. It’s great to have you on those two kids there. There. It says in your bio that you’ve got homeschooled two kids. Were those your kids that are in that video? That’s correct. Yeah, I thought so. They were very cute.
Really enjoyed that. Good salespeople. What’s that? They’re good at sales. They help promote. Well, it’s a good example of what you’ve been able to create with homeschooling. Tell us a little bit first about the Tuttle twin books. So these are children’s books that teach the ideas of human flourishing, what healthy societies look like. We’re talking entrepreneurship, sound money, property rights, personal freedom, the dangers of socialism and central planning and so forth.
And so these are story based books that allow kids to access these often adult level complex ideas. People often ask me what age they’re for. My go to answer is our children’s series. We have toddler books. We have books for teens, but we’re best known for our children’s series. So my answer to them is they’re about for age five to ten and members of Congress. So that’s kind of the running gag.
We sold over 5 million copies. We have a cartoon now, all kinds of stuff, and it’s heavily of interest with homeschoolers. I should also note we have a huge contingent of our audience where their kids go to public school, private school, charter school. And for those families, the homeschool families are using it more as, like curriculum, like, hey, we’re going to learn American history or we’re going to learn economics.
For the public schoolers, private schoolers, their parents are recognizing that their children are not getting these ideas in the school. And so it’s a supplement. I might almost even say it’s a counteragent because they know that not only are the kids not getting it in school, they’re getting opposite type of ideas, victim mentality and entitlement mentality and so forth. So they’re of broad appeal to families and really trying to fill this void that’s been in the marketplace for resources that can help parents talk to their kids about real world ideas and what that means for them.
We were homeschooling our kids about 15 to 25 years ago or whatever, and so we would go down and we would look at, we’d go to Barnes and noble and take a look at what your first grader needs to know or your second grader needs to know, and we would do a lot of counter programming just like you talked about. They’d say, well, this is what we’re teaching the kids.
And it’s like, they need to understand what this is. We’re not going to just ignore it. We need to define this for them and counter it. And then we also just kind of kept an eye out for where they needed to be. But I think that’s a real important thing. But I think the most important thing is to have a positive vision. We don’t want to just be negative, but we do want to say, now, this is reality here, and have it in mind.
The other stuff that they’re being taught, it’s great to see that there’s this type of resource. And you said a cartoon. Is that what the Tuttle Twins show is, a cartoon? That’s correct. So we partnered with Angel Studios. They’re best known for doing the chosen or sound of freedom. And so we partnered with them. We already have a season and a half, complete and out, free to watch, no cost, no sign up.
You just go to Angel Studios on your favorite app platform, your Apple TV, your Roku, your phone, whatever, and it’s funny, these cartoons, the whole writing team, it’s me and a bunch of. So they come up with funny jokes and really make this an entertaining show for the whole family, where we then kind of sprinkle in these ideas of freedom, but just have a lot of fun. So that’s a blast.
And we hope that we turn it into the new Simpsons, where there’s, like, 30 seasons, but enriching content, not this dumbed down, stupid stuff, but, like, really informative, enriching content, but also super fun for the whole family. That’s really good. Yeah, I was just saying, I noticed somebody say, you can’t win the culture wars if you don’t have a culture. We have to produce content. And so that’s what’s really important with the Tuttle twins, with your Tuttle twins show and the rest of this stuff, we’ve lost this ability, again, to define what culture really should look like in a positive vision of politics, economics, and just what society looks like.
That’s really, really important. Let’s talk a little bit about libertos. Tell us what is going on with the think tank there. And you’ve had a lot of effects on laws. Your bio says that you’ve had about 100 laws that have been changed there in Utah. And I think that’s important because of the focus on what is happening at the state level, because I think that federal government is gone, and I think we need to make changes at our state and local level.
We saw this especially in the last few years. The things that really mattered were having good local officials. They could make things much worse or much better throughout this lockdown and all the rest of this stuff. So tell us a little bit about what is going on at the state level. I think it’s a tragedy of our civic system where everyone’s attention is drawn to the level of government that they can impact the least.
Yes, everyone is so focused on the federal issues, national crises, congressional stupidity. And I’m not saying don’t pay attention. I’m not saying you need to completely shut it off. But everyone’s energy is so focused on talking about and complaining about what’s happening at the national level where the average person has statistically zero influence. Yes. The contrast to that is when you focus on a state and local level, you can have a disproportionately high impact.
So I cut my teeth politically working on Mike Lee’s campaign when he first ran for the US Senate from Utah in 2009 and ten. So I was one of like five or six people on his early campaign. There were a dozen other candidates. We got Mike through the primary, and he got elected, and we remained good friends and talked often. But here’s a guy who has wanted to go support the Constitution and limited government and restrain government largesses.
And I love Mike, but he and everyone who believes like him have been woefully unsuccessful because the system is stacked against you. Meanwhile. So Mike’s up in Congress doing his thing. Meanwhile, I work here in the state Capitol level. And as you pointed out, we’ve changed in the same amount of time, less time than Mike Lee has been in office. Not to pick on him, but just to use that story as an example.
We’ve changed, like, over 100 laws. We’ve gotten a ton of amazing legal reforms passed to protect people’s freedoms and so forth. And it’s not that hard. I’m not an attorney by training. I’m not an economist. I used to build websites for a living, and I launched this nonprofit and kind of pivoted and kind of changed my career trajectory. But I have no formal training. In this. If I can do it, anybody else can do it.
And it’s amazing. Like, think of your city council. You go to city council meetings, who’s there? Maybe a couple of Boy Scouts, maybe the Miss whatever pageant queen, maybe a few developers trying to get zoning approvals and stuff, and nobody else. More importantly, there’s no journalists anymore because the whole newspaper model has been blown up. And these guys can’t afford to have people sitting in city council meetings to play the watchdog role, which means that no one’s paying attention.
These people are getting away with a lot. And if you just show up, if you just ask questions, if you just show them that you’re watching, you can have a big impact. And so I spend a lot of my time inviting people, pleading with people, turn down the national news, pay attention a lot less. It’s, I think, really designed just to get this class warfare, constant battle and distraction going on.
I’ll recommend a resource to your audience. So you mentioned Libertus Institute, which is our organization in Utah. We work across the country on a lot of stuff, but primarily in Utah. There’s a group in, I believe, every single state from a conservative libertarian perspective, working on state level policy. Here’s where your viewers can find out about that. The organization I’ll point you to is called State Policy Network.
And their website, very simply is spn. org state Policy Network. And they’ve got a map there directory that you can click on. Find your map, find the group working in your state. Subscribe to their newsletter, their email, follow them on social media, go to their events, donate and support them. These are the people working in the trenches in your state. And it’s very easy for people to go get involved and be a part of it.
That’s so important, and that is really good. The state Policynetworkspn. org. Now, you pronounce it differently than I thought it would be. Libertas. You pronounce it libertas. So when I started this organization, I went to a linguist and I said, how would the Romans have pronounced? It’s Latin. It’s a dead language. I said, well, there’s two schools of thought. There’s the Germanic, like Libertas, which, to be fair, is what 95% of Americans pronounce it as.
And then there’s the think of, like, the Italian. The romantic language is libertas. And I was like, oh, that sounds sexy. I want to do that. We say Libertus, and everyone else says libertas. But I’m a libertarian, so I don’t care how you pronounce it, you do whatever you want. That’s great. So tell us when you go to the state level. I know from the standpoint of what I’ve seen, when we were homeschooling our kids, we were in North Carolina.
And I know there was a constant battle, especially at the very beginning from the teachers union to try to shut it down. And this very powerful union with a lot of connections to state government was shut down by letter writing campaign, by grassroots organizations. I know that they look at this stuff by the pound and you’re not necessarily going to change these people’s minds about with an argument, but they’re looking at the quantity of responses that they get and that does have a big impact on them.
What have you found to be most effective in terms of working at the state level? You said going to the meetings and that type of thing. But give us an idea of what this looks like when you get involved in this. So here’s how the average person, any of your viewers, can be impactful. A little pro tip that few people do. And if anyone wants to get involved, make a difference without a lot of time.
Here are a couple of ideas that have a huge leverage in terms of your time versus your impact. Number one, gather ten or 15 friends at your home for a little cottage meeting. Have some dessert and invite your local state senator or state representative or mayor or city councilman to come speak to your group. Super easy. These people love to talk about themselves, by the way, so they will take you up on the offer.
Food attracts everybody. And more importantly, what’s happening here is you are fostering a relationship with that politician to show them two things. Number one, you’re creating value for them by giving them an audience of people to talk to and get support from. But number two, you’re showing them that you are a connector. You’re an organizer, right? The worst thing that you can do in politics is go up and say, I don’t like this tax or I don’t like this law.
You’re one person with an opinion. They’re not going to pay attention to you. By contrast, if you start an organ, let’s say you have your cottage meeting and you call it Connor’s cottage meeting on Mondays, right? And that’s the name of your group. And I go up to the CapitoL or City hall and say, hey, I represent an association, a cottage meeting group where a lot of us get together and blah, blah, blah.
We’re really concerned about this and this is something that we’re paying attention to, and we’d like you to vote against it. You’ve shifted it from I to we. It’s not, I think this, it’s we think this. They don’t know if there’s 1000 people in your group or five, and they don’t need to know. The point is that it’s like those animals that when a predator approaches, they puff up and get really big so as to signal that they’re dangerous.
That’s what you need to do. If you’re the average person, you need to puff up a bit and show them that you mean business. So do a cottage meeting. Super simple. Do it once a year, do it once a quarter, and invite different local politicians or people and rotate them through. Okay? Number two, take a politician to lunch. Don’t do it during their busy season. So if it’s the legislature is in session, then maybe wait a while because everyone’s got to eat and you got to think through how can you create value for them.
So if I were to do this, I would find my state representative on the website. I would see what bills he’s been running or what he’s been working on, and I would email him or text him and I would say, hey, I really love this bill that you were working on. Super important. I’ve been talking with some friends of mine and some stakeholders. I’ve got some ideas for how you can actually improve this or something else related you can do or whatever.
Could I take you to lunch? And very often they will say yes. Now they will say yes even more if you are known as a connector. So if you do step one and then step two, if you the cottage meeting, the networking, and then you start making those requests, you’ll be very more successful. This doesn’t take a ton of time, hardly any time. But this all boils down to relationships.
That is what drives this business. This is why lobbyists are so successful. You need to foster relationships. When you just show up to the Capitol or to City hall and you raise your fist and say, I don’t like this, they all know that you’re just going to speak your mind and go back to sleep and you’re not going to be there every week, you’re not going to be watchdogging them, whatever, right? But if you have relationships, when I text a legislator like, hey, I got questions about that vote you just made, or, hey, are you going to work on that bill? They know that I’m out there not only watching them, but talking to a ton of people because they know I’m a connector, that I’m not going away and that I have a lot of relationships that can be helpful to them or harmful to them.
So the average citizen, you want to get involved, you got to start developing some relationships. And these are just a few of the very easy, low cost, low time ways that I think the average citizen could start to do it. That’s really good. And of course that is a key thing because you’re not just connecting to politicians, but you’re also making connections with the people that are going to be meeting with you.
And having that community doesn’t just magnify you to the politicians, but that’s a real value to all of us in the future, depending on what is going to come down the pike from Washington. We really need to have those local communities that’s so important in so many different ways. Tell us a little bit about what you have focused on. These hundred laws that you got changed. What have you focused on there? I know you’re Conservative, libertarian focus.
What types of things have you guys been able to get through there? I’ll give you a small and silly example and then I’ll give you a more weighty and Substantive one. So the small and silly example, a few years ago we saw some headlines across the country where little kids lemonade stands were getting shut down for not having a business license or a food handler’s permit. And one of the stories, it was a four year old girl selling 50 cent cups of lemonade along the path of like a five K near her home.
And MOm was Sitting there, obviously, she was only four. And the food safety, whoever showed up and, oh, you don’t have a permit, costs $85. That’s 170 cups of lemonade just to break even on a permission slip, let alone the rest of your expenses. So we saw these headlines. We’re like, this is ridiculous. We go up to our legislature, we came up with a model bill and it passed, I think unanimously or close to unanimously, which now says that if you are under 18 in Utah, you do not need any license, any permit.
You don’t have to collect and remit sales taxes like a literal free market for minors, to encourage them to be entrepreneurs. Let’s let them wait until they’re 18 before the crushing weight of the state comes upon them and all its taxes and regulations. But at least while they’re minors, now they’re free. We’ve helped a few other states pass similar laws, but Utah’s remains the gold standards. That’s a silly example.
That’s great. That’s a really fundamental thing. And that’s such a great idea. And what legislator is going to want to go out there and be the Scrooge that says, no, got to have a license from these miners. That’s a great idea. Yeah, that’s exactly. Okay, so here’s the other example. Let’s say I’m Elon Musk, and I have a car company, Tesla, and I want to do something different where I don’t want to have car dealerships.
I want to sell my cars directly to individuals, a direct to consumer model. However, in a whole bunch of states, including my own of Utah, it was illegal. It was literally against the law to sell cars. For a corporation to sell a car directly or a manufacturer to sell a car directly to a person, because the car dealers are very politically connected. And over the years, they’ve gotten all these laws passed saying that you have to go through car dealers and you have to do it this way and you have to pass these inspections.
So I’m Elon Musk, and I’m thinking, well, what do I do? Well, I’ve got a lot of money, so I can hire lobbyists and I can hire lawyers, and I can go sue and I can go lobby to get the laws changed. That’s what Elon and his buddies were able. They had the resources to muscle through the political process. Like in Utah, for example. They had to go to the state Supreme Court, and they were battling until they finally got it fixed, which is ridiculous.
Now, imagine, by contrast, that I’m poor Connor, middle class tradesman who has a business idea. I’m sitting at my kitchen table scribbling this idea on the back of a napkin, and I’m like, this is awesome. I pull up Google, I start researching. Lo and behold, my awesome idea is against the law. There’s some 35 year old arcane law on the books that prevents me from doing what I want.
I have no huge life savings. I don’t know any lobbyists and lawyers. I have no network, no connections, no leverage. I AbaNDoN MY IDEA AND MOVE ON. My American dream goes poof because of my inability to muscle through the process. What we innovated, what we got passed in Utah, and we’ve helped dozens of other states work on this as well, is a concept called a regulatory sandbox. What this is, let’s use this tradesman.
WE’LL CALL HIM BOB. SO BOB’S GOT THIS BUSINESS IDEA. Bob can now apply to the state to come into the regulatory sandbox, and he can pinpoint a law or a regulation that stands in his way. And he can say, that’s preventing me from launching this business. The regulators will talk. They’ll have an opportunity to review his request to be shielded from that regulation or law for two years so that he can do R and D, or he can go to market and start to prove and collect data like, hey, there’s no consumer harm, there’s no lawsuits, there’s no nothing.
Can we get rid of this regulation? RIGHT? Because everything’s okay. And so it’s a way to develop real world data, like a pilot program almost under a lower regulated environment. The chief problem that we’ve seen over the last decade is we’ll go up to the Capitol and think of, like, food trucks, that we passed the country’s first and only food truck freedom law to knock down all these local regulations and zoning crap and stuff that gets in their way.
And so we go up to the Capitol and we say, hey, guys, the world will be so much better if we allow these micro entrepreneurs to just operate where they want and not have all these city restrictions and so forth. And then the city lobbyists go out there and they say, oh, no, local control. We need to allow our cities to ban food trucks and to say that they can’t operate within half a mile of a restaurant because competition is horrible.
Whatever. You’re a legislator. You’re trapped in the middle of the free market. Guys with their talking points and the incumbent industry protectionists with their talking points, and both sides are claiming the sky will fall or it will be great. Well, with a regulatory sandbox, now, the legislators don’t have to say permanent yes or no to either side. They can say, well, let’s give it a try and see how it works, and put these people in a sandbox, watch them for a year or two, gather some data, and then at the conclusion, they can say, should we amend that regulation or law? Should we fully repeal it? And we have Some data to inform that process.
So we led Utah to become the first state to have a regulatory sandbox. Any business, any industry, any size. And now we’ve helped a number of other states pass these programs as well to promote entrepreneurship and innovation, level the playing field. So it’s not just the Elon Musk that can muscle their way through. Now the little guy has a shot to launch their American dream. Yeah, that’s very important.
Of course, the people who got there already, they always want to soft the lower rungs of the ladder of success, such you can’t get started with it. That’s a great approach. Let’s talk A little bit about what do we do about what is looming over the horizon. We’ve got so many things that we see being pushed from the international level down to the national level in the Biden administration.
All of these regulations trying to take away appliances, just basic conveniences that we have taken for granted for a very long time. And now, since we took them for granted, the federal government is looking to take them away. And so there’s this big push. Most of the stuff is now coming on the basis of climate. They want to take cars, they want to take appliances, and on and on.
Is there anything that you’re working on there in Utah to address that type of confiscatory regulations? A lot of it coming from the EPA, but anything that’s coming from the federal level. I know here in Tennessee, where I live, they have told the government when it comes to a lot of the regulations about transgender type of things, they said, well, we’re willing to forego $2 billion worth of bribery in order to do things the way that we think they ought to be done.
And that really is the way that the federal government usually insinuates itself into the process. Since they don’t have the direct legal authority because of the 10th Amendment, they will bribe local and state governments to do what they want with money. So, how do we tackle this looming monster that’s being pushed down on top of us? Oh, man, you are hitting all the buttons. Such a challenge. By the way, in Tennessee, I would encourage you to look up the Beacon center.
They are the think tank there in Tennessee. They do an awesome job. I will. Thank you. They would be great to connect with. Now, what you’re talking about is so tough because there are so many disincentives for people to engage in the process. I think of the rote. Like, there’s this meme floating around the Internet right now. How often do men think about the Roman Empire? And everyone’s kind of joking about it right now? I think about it quite often.
And in particular, the aspect of bread and circuses, where they would often feed the citizenry, have gladiators and all these big spectacles designed to distract the populace from what was happening politically. A distracted society is a disengaged society. In particular, with the federal regulations that you’re talking about. I am a big believer in state interposition and state nullification. What are those things? Yes, state interposition. Is the state coming in between you and the federal government to say, no, we’re shielding Connor from that gun control law that Connor passed, or people like Connor, not just a single individual, but the state interposes itself and passes a conflicting law to say, no, we’re not going to enforce this.
We’re going to protect you. And our attorney general will go sue the government or the federal government on your behalf so the state can interpose itself to be this protecting shield. Even better than that is state nullification. There’s a fantastic book written about a decade or so ago by Tom woods called nullification that gets into the American history of what this is. This is basically when a state gives the middle finger to the feds and the feds pass some law.
Let’s say it’s an EPA thing, and imagine Tennessee, the legislature getting together and passing a resolution and saying in this state that EPA regulation is null and void. We will not enforce it, we will not tolerate it, we will not allow any federal officials to enforce it within our state, and it is the state asserting itself. Here’s our chief problem. Ever since the Civil War, the Union of States has changed from a voluntary union into this serfdom like subservient status, where state legislatures see themselves as subunits of the federal government.
Yes, we now have a national government where it controls and regulates the states. The states do not assert their own authority. They do not stand up under the 10th Amendment that you pointed out and the 9th Amendment to say that these are our rights. We did not delegate this to you. There’s so many fantastic stories here, especially from, like the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions with Jefferson and Madison when they were basically giving the middle finger to John Adams and the Federalist Party and trying to undermine what they were doing by getting state legislatures to say, we are not going to comply.
There are modern examples. Think of medical marijuana. Federal law still says that cannabis is illegal. And most states have given the middle finger to the feds, and the feds have just decided to not enforce it. And they’ve had their attorney general memos and their things, but it’s still on the books, and that’s the power of what the states can do. By contrast, here’s another example that I’m sure your audience.
Well, that one before we leave marijuana, that was excellent, because I love that one because the left are the ones who’ve been doing the nullification, and they’re the first ones to scream racism. This is about slavery. Or know when you start nullifying. And so that really nullifies the left as well when you use this example, because this is schedule one drug, and they say there’s absolutely no use for it.
As you pointed out, more than half of the states either have a medical exemption or recreational exemption. Jeff Sessions, that was a key issue with him, but he wouldn’t touch it because he knew that he didn’t have the constitutional authority for that. So that’s an excellent example. Yeah, go ahead. Here’s an unfortunate one, by contrast. So medical marijuana is kind of a winning one in terms of state sovereignty.
States standing up for themselves. Here’s a losing R1 ID. When Congress over a decade ago passed the ReAl ID act, this national driver’s license, national ID, there was a huge uproar, massive uproar across the country. State legislatures were passing resolutions, were passing laws. They were standing up and nullifying. They were giving a middle finger to the feds. And so the feds retreated and, you know, we lost the battle.
And what did they do? You mentioned it a moment ago. They bribed the states into compliance over the next decade, not wholesale, but piecemeal. They would attach financial incentives to particular aspects of the Real ID act even though it was no longer being passed or enforced. And they would bribe the states into compliance. And the states, eager for money, these politicians, wanting more money for their programs, would say, okay, yeah, we’ll do that.
Okay, yeah, we’ll do that. You fast forward a decade, and now I travel the airport all the time. My driver’s license has this stupid yellow star at the top. Now that means real ID compliant. My state over a decade ago stood up and said no, and now I have a driver’s license from my state that is real ID compliant. Isn’t it interesting that they did the yellow star? It seems like there’s some point in history where that was used.
It’s a white star inside of a yellow circle, I guess. No, it was described to me when I changed. We moved here. It was described to me because we did that about two years ago. It was described to me as a yellow star. They described it the same way. And I thought, I don’t really want a yellow star. Watchful. These people are persistent. They are patient. They have the long view in mind.
And so we, like, think of the Tea Party, right? Tarp and the bank bailouts, and everyone’s like, all these conservatives erupt. The Tea Party is a huge thing. There’s Tea Party patriots, Tea Party nonprofits, Tea Party everything. And two or three years later, nothing. That’s right. They went back to sleep. They went back to work and family and everything. Like we people on the right focus on that actually improves our society, but they disengage politically, these elitists, these leftists, everybody knows they just have to wait out the storm, let everyone get really in an uproar, pass their resolutions against real ID, and then we’ll just work on this incrementally over time and still get what we want.
So we are playing a losing game by not engaging and being watchful and being persistent when the other side absolutely is. That’s right. Yeah. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And of course, you also have to have a goal. And I think that was always a problem to me for the Tea Party. Taxed enough already. Okay, so what do you want to do? You want to cut spending or cut taxes? Or what do you want to do? Which taxes do you want to cut? Which spending do you want to cut? There was just nothing there and you had everybody jumping on board with that to make money, the people who are organizing it.
And I think the people also looked at this and said, well, there’s not really anything here. And it kind of fell away. But you’re right, the good example is the real ID thing because people just went to sleep. And now we’ve got the TSA out there doing facial scans, taking it to the next level. What do we do about the TSA? Because here’s my concern. A key thing that we saw, especially in the last few years, what was it that helped us to survive this lockdown? And that was mobility, and it was cash and it was being outside of the system.
They now want to take away our cash. They want to take away our mobility if they’re able to take away our cars and make us dependent on renting our rides, renting a vehicle by the ride, not even leasing a vehicle. If they’re able to do that, if they’re able to take away our cash, they really have got us and there’s not really anything we can do. What do you think we should do about, and what are you working on in terms of that in Utah? This is such a challenge, what you’re pointing out, because I’ll use your last example just as a direct response.
This rent your vehicle. Like imagine a world two decades from now, which I don’t think is a far off fantasy. Probably sooner, yeah, probably sooner where I can have my car drop me off. It’s self driving car, fully autonomous. It drops me off at work rather than sitting here. It’s right outside my office window, right here outside a frame, rather than sitting there for 8 hours. I can monetize that vehicle and I can have it go basically play Uber and earn revenue for other people who will pay it.
And I just say, hey, you just need to be back here at 05:00 to pick me up. Well, all of a sudden you no longer need parking lots. If you have a society where there’s very few people who are just owning their car and sitting there, you can at least substantially reduce the size of parking lots because you don’t need just all these big empty spaces that can do tremendous things.
So I am someone who loves technology and sees a huge upside to improving society when implemented the right way. Things like AI, I think it can bless humanity in a whole ton of ways. But these things like self driving cars, or I’m a big fan of bitcoin, but then you got CDBCs on the other side, this kind know dark version of what’s going on, or self driving cars or Tesla robots that they’re building right now, Neuralink.
All these things can do so much good and make our lives so much more convenient, enjoyable, productive. But we have to have a philosophical base in our society of human freedom and flourishing to inform and guide and limit all those activities to keep them constrained. Otherwise, I’m worried that these amazing technologies, while they have their positive side, are going to emerge with the dystopian side, with these kind of elitists in control.
So I’m not one to say, well, because our philosophical base is not there and we don’t have a society that believes these things, let’s shut all this technology down and make sure that we don’t have this Orwellian future. I am one to say, look, the toothpaste is out of the tube. These things are going to happen anyways. Let’s focus on strengthening that philosophical base so that the innovators and the regulators and the politicians and everybody else approach this and handle everything the right way so we can have the positive outcomes while minimizing the negative ones.
And that’s where the Tuttle twins comes in, because you got to set up those values, those bases. And it’s because we’ve had families atrophy, and schools and churches have atrophied, and we don’t have those types of values that are being put out there. As you point out, all this stuff is tools, and a very powerful tool can be a really good thing or can be a really bad thing depending on who is wielding it.
And so we have to shape the people who are going to be wielding it, which is going to be our kids and the future generations. That’s why it is so important taking that approach. And I’m glad that you have put that resource out there. People need to take a look at that more people need to be doing that type of thing as well, because that’s really where the battle is.
The battle is really for the spirit and the soul and the heart, and the battle for the future is the battle for the soul and the heart of our children. And so that’s the key thing. Talk to me a little bit about your books. You’ve got a couple of different books, mediocrity, children of the collective. Maybe there’s some other ones here. Tell us a little bit about mediocrity.
So that was a fun one. I’ll share the story this way. In April of this year, it was the 40th anniversary of a report that the Reagan administration put out April 26, 1983. They titled it a Nation at Risk. It was the conclusion of an 18 month study that a team that called themselves the National Commission on Excellence in Education. Their study went across the country. They were on a listening tour, talking to teachers, parents, reviewing textbooks, curriculum, everything else, trying to understand what’s going on, trying to assess education in America.
They write this report, a nation at risk. And in that report they said, and I quote, that America’s educational foundations are being threatened by a rising tide of mediocrity, and that if a foreign government had attempted to impose upon America the very mediocre educational performance that now exists, we might have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we’ve allowed this to happen to ourselves. 1983 When I share this story, when I’m out speaking, I’ll ask audiences, raise of hands.
Who here in this audience believes that education in America has substantially improved in the last 40 years? Today, maybe I’m an intimidating person and people are scared of raising their hand in general, but no one has raised their hand ever because we all know that education has gotten worse. If they said in 1983 that it was meDiocre, this rising tide of mediocrity, what words would you use to describe what it is today? I might choose some four letter words that might not be too family friendly.
Consider this data point. I got so much I can share here, but I’ll just share this. A few weeks ago, a couple of months ago now, the NApe scores came out. These are the kind of statistical assessments that all the standardized testing that they do for kids, and they do it fourth grade and 8th grade and 12th grade. And they’ve been doing this for decades to track academic progress.
Not that I’m a fan of standardized tests, but they’re at least one useful way to kind of have your finger on the pulse. Well, the data that came out just a couple of months ago, this particular data point is from 8th graders across America, and it found that only 13% of them are proficient in civics in American history. One, three, not 30, 1313 percent proficiency. I mean, that’s like, way worse than a failing grade.
So now fast forward 20 years, 40 years, 60 years. These kids who have been educated, so called, in a system of sub mediocrity, are now voters. But they’re ignorant, they’re historically illiterate, they’re civically disengaged. They’re distracted by the bread and circuses. They know nothing about their history. You know the quote, those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. So they’re much more likely to support the authoritarian thugs and the socialist crazy people who are repeating every doomsday failed thing from the past.
And yet today’s electorate doesn’t know any better. It’s the whole fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. These kids are not learning history. They’re not learning these basics about our society. 13% is abysmal. It is not mediocre. It is way worse. So one might say in response, well, yeah, COVID, all this learning loss. No, this has been a down and downward trend for a very long time.
Pre COVID. Absolutely. So my plea to parents out there is not necessarily to homeschool, although I’m a big fan of homeschooling, it’s just do something else. It could be a private school, a micro school. It could be a home school. It could be a home school co op. There’s so many options today, but why would you want to send your children not only to an intellectually sub mediocre system, even if you think, oh, well, I live in a good community, and how many libs of TikTok videos have we seen now from conservative communities where the schools are teaching garbage and parents don’t realize it until it’s too late, so do something else.
Wake up. Don’t think, well, I went to public school and I turned out fine, right? It is a different world, and you need to pay attention. You need to be intentional and take action to save your kids. I’ll end with this. The pastor, Vadi Bakham, has this quote I love where he says, can we as Christians, in his case, this religious quote, can we as Christians really be surprised when we send our children to Caesar’s schools, and then they return home as right.
And so we have to realize if we’re surrendering our children to certain people, then it’s those people’s values and worldview and things that are being put into our kids. We need to wake up and be more intentional and rescue our children from this sub mediocre system. That’s right. Yeah. It was a real blessing, I think, in disguise. As the schools went to Zoom classes, parents could finally see what was happening in their child’s classroom.
They always had this when I talked know for decades, oh, it’s not happening in my kids classroom, even if it’s happening in the same school. Same school. Know, and all the rest of this stuff. But it seems know. You talk about the Reagan administration, and I remember that report that you talked about, and I remember Charlote Isabee goes to Washington to help to shut down the Department of Education, which was created during the 1980 campaign as Jimmy Carter created it.
And Ronald Reagan was going to get rid of it. And yet they didn’t do that. She got out of it and she wrote the book deliberately dumbing us down. Now they were able to dumb us down, but now they’re going into a kind of a deprave mode. Let’s take the kids even deeper. Let’s take them subterranean. And that’s what they’re doing with the social engineering that we see.
And I think it’s very key that the Obama administration, the Biden administration, have been using the power, the purse to incentivize this. But now it’s gotten to the point where when you talk about people getting active locally, showing up and talking to people, not just criticizing, but also making relationships with people, but when you have these school board meetings, it’s kind of interesting how over the last couple of years now, since the COVID stuff, how the school board meetings have become of national interest, the Department of Justice is taking an interest in this.
And you got to look at this and say, why is this so important to them? And why is it not important enough for us to just do this completely differently? It seems like these people are pushing on this institution. That’s not going to change, but they keep pushing on it. And that seems to be really the way that they want to run this through. What do we do to wake people up to get them to try something different, as you’re pointing out? Well, I think of the Reagan quote, as you point out, he was supposed to repeal the Department of Education.
That didn’t happen. But he himself said that the closest thing to eternal life on Earth is a temporary government program. Right? And here we are with this Department of Education and all the billions of dollars that they’ve spent. And can anyone point to a single statistic and a single educational outcome that has measurably improved as a direct even. I’m not even asking for causation. Let’s even just go to correlation.
Do you have any correlated data to suggest that education outcomes in government schools has improved in the past 40? No, you don’t. No one does. These guys have just been spending all this money while they oversee the decline and the dumbing down, the deliberate dumbing down of the American education system. I think of a public school teacher. His name is John Taylor Gato passed away a few years ago.
He was a public school teacher in the state of New York for, gosh, almost 30 years. And he was someone who would work within the system. He hated the system of which he was a part he really struggled with, but he was working from within because he loved kids. He wanted to inspire them and connect with them. His classes got rave reviews. His students loved him. They kept in touch for a long time.
He would buck the trend. He would take the kids on impromptu field trips and just go to the park and get them outdoors. And he’s this guy that loved kids. So then he gets awarded later in his profession, New York City Teacher of the Year. And then the following year, he gets awarded New York State Teacher of the Year. Keep in mind, these awards, these Teacher of the Year from the establishment, the PTAS, the teachers unions, and so forth.
He wins New York State Teacher of the Year. And in the very same year that he wins this award, he writes an op ed in the Wall Street Journal titled I Quit. I think, in which he goes on to say, if anyone knows of a profession where I can help kids without also hurting them, please let me know. He quits his profession, he starts writing books, and goes on a speaking tour in his last years of life.
Amazing guy, but it shows what we’re up against, this system. I had a teacher, not a teacher, a parent. A few months back, I was speaking to a parents group, and this woman in the Q A after raised her hand, said, look, critical race theory, social emotional learning, garbage books in the libraries, all this pet litter boxes in the classroom now, and all these not for pets, for the furries, right? And so she’s ratling off all these problems.
She says, the school system is so broken. I said, whoa, whoa, hang on, hang on. I’m going to respectfully disagree with you. I do not believe the school system is broken. I believe it has been perfected based on a flawed design. When you go back to its originators, its creators, you go back to like Horace Mann. Here’s a guy who brought over the Prussian education system, first commissioner of education in the country, Massachusetts.
He’s this Fabian, socialist, secular humanist guy and a collectivist. He wanted to take children from their different religions and cultures and values and family traditions and homogenize them into one single American culture. That was his dream behind his common school. So he brings over this Prussian model to America, this very authoritarian model, which is the model that our government schools are now based on. He’s got this quote where he says, we who are involved in the sacred cause of education should look to parents as if they have given hostages to our cause, turning to their own children.
He talked in another quote about how men are like cast iron, children are like wax. It’s very hard to change the mind or the heart of an adult. It’s like cast iron, very firm, but children are like wax. This is exactly what all the authoritarian thugs, the despotic dictators, the Hitlers, the MAos, the Stalins, they all say similar stuff. They all go after the kids because they want to propagandize them and brainwash them.
So back to this woman, I say, I don’t think it’s broken. I think all these manifestations you’re seeing are outgrowths of a particular design that was designed with intentionality. These people did not want to create a populace of critically minded, critical thinking, independent minded, entrepreneurial individuals. They wanted to create a society of subordinate soldiers and citizens who would do what they were told and follow orders and learn their station and support the collective that was their intent.
What we’re seeing today is just an outgrowth of that. We need to discard the design and reboot the system in a way that will produce the outcomes that we want, rather than kicking against the pricks and getting frustrated that, why are kids turning out this way? And why are the schools not doing this? It’s because they were designed this way. We need to scrap the blueprints and build something better.
That’s right. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. And when we look at the different means of control, again, it’s the purse showering people with money, but then they create the standards out of their know. The Department of Education has been very, very powerful in terms of providing the money, the bribes, to do this kind of stuff, but also the know when they put out those standardized tests.
That’s a way for them to control. When you do do something different, like if you want to have some kind of an independent school or set something up, if you want to get it accredited, then they’re going to tell you what you have to teach the kids and what they have to regurgitate in order to get accredited. So the standardized tests are going to control the content, they’re going to control the textbooks and all the rest of this stuff.
But at the same time, the bread and circus thing has taken itself to the level for our kids of the furries or whatever. It’s gone to not just a banality, not just to a mediocrity or stupidity, but it’s gone to a depravity because again, it’s very much like brave new world where they want to take them into a world of sex and drugs so that they’re not a threat to them and a way for them to control the kids.
That’s what we need to be aware of. I think that’s really what we need to push back against. And when you talk about your next book, the children of the collective, I’m sure that that is what you were referring to when you talked about horse man and his approaches to that. But that has always been the issue. You’re right. Going back to the middle 18 hundreds, these socialists said, well, we can’t change society the way we want to because we can’t get to these kids early enough, so let’s get them at a very early age.
And of course, God tells us, you train up a child and the way they go should go. And when they’re old, they won’t depart from it. We’re being told this by everybody from God to Hitler has told us this stuff. Maybe we ought to pay attention to it, right? Yeah. No, I think you’re onto something here. That book, in particular, Children of the collective, was the result of a quote I read years ago from Michael Novak.
I’ve got the quote pulled up right here. The entire book is basically an expanded version analyzing why this quote is so true. Here’s what he says. Between the omnipotent state and the naked individual looms the first line of resistance against totalitarianism, the economically and politically independent family protecting the space within which free and independent individuals may receive the necessary years of nurture. So he illustrates, on the one hand, you got this omnipotent state, you’ve got naked individuals, socially naked, emotionally naked, spiritually naked, right? Physically naked in terms of their insecurity and weakness compared to the authoritarian state.
And in the middle, he’s got this first line of resistance, what I find fascinating, which is the politically economically independent family. So our families need to be independent. We need to be financially independent. Think of the Founding Fathers who would have been there had those particular individuals not had the financial station in life to just go sit in a room and debate politics for weeks on end. Right? And so being financially free is critical, not just so you can go relax on a beach.
It’s so that you can move up Hassle’s hierarchy of needs and you can actually do greater things to bless humanity, because you’re not hand to mouth working the whole time. And so what I find fascinating is he says this economically and politically independent family unit is the first line of resistance. So then you think, well, it doesn’t say it’s the line of resistance. It’s the first line. What are additional, like my skin, let’s say someone in my office sneezes or something, there’s pathogens floating around the air.
My skin, an organ, is my first line of resistance. But if that pathogen, like, if I have a cut on my skin or if I breathe it in or whatever, my body has additional mechanisms to still try and fight that pathogen, even if it gets past this first line of resistance. If the family is the first line of resistance, what are additional ones? Well, I think the extended family certainly is a really important one, beyond the nuclear family having multiple generations under one roof or in one community where you can support one another.
But beyond that, I would say, and you’re asking a lot of good questions about what can the average person do? Or what can people do? Or what’s the message? Here’s a critical one. I think when Alexis de Tocqueville was sent to this new nation to kind of survey what the heck was going on in America, he wrote the books Democracy in America. It was his survey in the early 18 Hundreds of what was going on here.
And he talked about, with a sense of awe and wonder what he called mediating institutions. He says it was so remarkable that throughout Europe, he says, whenever someone would have a problem, they would raise their hand and ask some minister of government, some public functionary, some elected or bureaucrat person, they would go to them for help to solve their problems. That that was the common thread behind problem solving in Europe.
By contrast, he said, when Americans have a problem, they form a society, they form an organization and induce people voluntarily to try to come to the aid of their fellow man. And he was blown away that there was this whole fabric, this social fabric of mediating institutions and that they were all over the place. I’ll give you a very particular example. There’s a gentleman named David Beto, B-E-I-T-O.
He wrote a book a few years ago called From Mutual Aid to the welfare state. It is a phenomenal book, highlighting how these mediating institutions were basically put out of business by the omnipotent state, by the welfare that in early America you had, whether you were Irish or you were Protestant or you were Mormon or you were Mexican or whatever, all these communities fostered mutual aid societies where they would help one another.
We’re talking life insurance, death insurance, orphan care, elderly care. And America was littered with these mutual aid societies, very economical and very. I mean, think of like the Koanis and the Rotary and all these other groups that are kind of legacy holdovers and have really just decayed because our society no longer values these things. But in early America, they were everywhere. Until the welfare state started to be passed.
They started passing these laws. Suddenly, people were like, wait a minute. My membership dues for this mutual aid society are $10 a year. This was back when inflation wasn’t nearly as, in effect, I’m paying $10 a year for this mutual aid society, but I’m paying taxes of like $18 a year, and that’s providing all these welfare benefits. Why am I still in this mutual aid society? So everyone made the rational decision.
They went out of business, literally, like, not literally, but figuratively overnight, because of the state. This is why we need not only strong families, but we need mediating institutions. We need to rebuild social fabric. You can have libertarians like me out there saying, shrink the government. Stop passing stupid laws. Let’s vote that person out of office. But if our society is not strong, then the state will be.
That’s right. If our society is weak, then the state will be strong. If we want a weak state, if we want to limit government, we need a strong society where we’re taking care of one another, where we’re supporting one another. When there are problems, we bring solutions. Rather than turning to the government for help, we’re not there. We’re a ways off from what Alexis to Tocqueville saw. But I think that has the answer as well.
To fight the collectivists, to fight these central planners, to shrink the state, we got to focus on our families. We got to rebuild social fabric. We got to strengthen our society. And then naturally, the state will grow weaker because fewer people will be turning to it. To be the source of their comfort and providing for their needs, they’ll turn to these social programs in the true sense of the word, societal programs, mediating institutions.
That’s where we need to be as a country so well. And as you’re talking about this, I’m thinking about. I’ve talked about this many times. We’ve had Charles Murray talked about the effect of the welfare state. I started to say deliberate dumbing down of America, but it was losing ground, was his book that he did. Now he’s out there pushing universal basic income. It’s amazing to see how this shift has happened.
And it’s been done in a very subversive way in the sense that. And it’s subverted not just the poor people in the inner city. I’ve talked to Jack Cashel, who’s got a book, Tenable. He was talking about how he saw this happen in the city where he was. I’ve talked to people who have been, who are my age, and they had vibrant black communities, and it was decimated.
They had businesses that were working. They had intact families. And then the welfare state comes in and everybody just starts taking the free money. And it’s a very corrupting thing. They want to do that with universal basic income. But as you’re talking about this, I’m thinking it hasn’t just taken the poor, it’s taken the middle class, the upper middle class, because the government is always there to hand you money to get you to do whatever they want you to do.
And there is so much money that just this unlimited printing press coming out of Washington that they can bribe each and every one of us if we let them. The discussion that we’re now seeing in terms of the Department of Education, well, let’s allow people who are homeschooling to get money and to come and participate in these activities. And I’ve always opposed that because I realize what a corrupting thing it is to take the money.
We have to start taking responsibility for what we want to do in our families. And it’s even corrupted the churches. The Churches used to be a part of these mediating institutions. The churches would start hospitals, the churches would start schools. They don’t do that anymore. The government does everything for everybody. And so we don’t even connect to our fellow man anymore. We’re all connected to the government, as you’re talking about earlier in the program.
Everybody’s like, well, what’s going on in Washington? And who can I vote for in Washington? Why? Because that’s where the money is flowing. So that’s the thing that I think we’ve got to get past and beyond the standardized tests, but it’s really the money that is flowing through all this stuff. And Detokville said everybody is focused on what’s the government going to do to fix the situation. We had voluntary libraries, voluntary fire departments.
We did our own schools, our own hospitals. Now everything has got to come from Washington. We’ve been trained. We’re like wild animals who used to be able to take care of themselves. And we’ve been hand fed for so long by the government that we’re dependent on it. And now the government has turned feral. And when you go to the national parks, you see the signs that says don’t feed the animals for that precise reason.
If we care about their long term health and strength as a little animal community, they need to be able to survive on their own. You’re actually harming them by supporting them. And so if the government is supporting us, it is harming us. And just like the education system is being deliberately dumbed down, I think it is also deliberate that so many of us are financially supported. Over half of Americans are directly financially supported by the state.
If you talk about government schools as well, it shoots to like 90%. Right. But excluding the schools direct payments, it’s over 50%. No wonder voters are increasingly shifting blue. No wonder many of our red states are turning purple. When people are directly connected to the state, they are much more forgiving of it and they are much more tolerant of its abuses because they don’t want the gravy train to end.
That’s right. Yeah. What we have now in the area where I live there, the Smoky Mountains, they’re very concerned about people not feeding the bears. Our federal government has essentially gone through everybody’s neighborhoods putting trash cans to give us junk. And we’ve been so acclimated to this garbage food and the trash cans, we would never be able to survive without it, it seems like. But we got to break that dependency somehow.
A great way to do it is with the next generation, with the Tuttle Twins books. And you got Tuttle twins. com, right, where people can go find that as well as, I’ll just pronounce it as libertos. com. Org. org. Okay, so Tuttle twins. com and libertos. org. It’s really been a pleasure talking to you, Connor. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Connor Boyak, doing great work there.
Thank you so much. Well, folks, that’s it for today’s. Program. Thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you tomorrow. The common man they created Common Core to dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us. Their Commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the Communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
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Thedavidnightshow. com Sometimes your day needs a little smoothing. Check out the Jazz Channel@apsRadio. com, and the APS radio app, and leave the stress behind. Well, joining us now is Jeffrey J. Clayton. He is the executive director of the AmerICAN Bail Coalition. And I wanted to talk to him about what is happening all over the country as part of what we see happening with these prosecutors who are turning criminals back out on the street, catching release.
What triggered this in particular? This has been going on for a while. It’s been going on for several years. But in LA, they recently came up with a zero bail release policy, and twelve cities in LA county have sued. And so we want to talk about that lawsuit. But we also want to talk about the broader issues involved with bail, why that has been a long term part of our government and our criminal justice system and the importance of it and the misconceptions about it.
So joining us now is Jeffrey J. Clayton, executive director of the American Bail Coalition. Thank you for joining us, sir. Thanks for having me on. Let’s talk first of all about what is happening with this lawsuit, the issue right in front of us. And then I want to get into, as I said, what is the misconceptions about bail, what is it good for and the importance of it.
But tell us a little bit about that lawsuit first. Absolutely. And really it’s sort of a combination of two lawsuits. There’s an activist legal group called the Civil Rights Corps that’s been suing small cities throughout the United States for now, going on seven years over their bail systems. And their final stop is Los Angeles. We’ve been opposing that, along with variety of cities from around the country and have won a couple of those cases, and we can talk about those later in other courts of appeals.
So what happened here was that particular group sued the judges in Los Angeles and alleged that the bail schedule was unconstitutional. And what happened was neither the city, the sheriff, or the attorney general who was named as a defendant in the case, defended the case. And so the activist group won that the bail schedule was unconstitutional. And arguments, frankly, that, you know, maybe some defense could have been put on.
But because none was put on, the judge decided to go to the zero bail schedule, which Los Angeles adopted during the pandemic pending the outcome of the case. So these judges got together and said, well, we’ve got to do something. So they set a new sort of interim process of a bail schedule that we think will be in effect for a while until we figure out what the next stop is going to be.
But in the meantime, it means things like shoplifting, some driving under influence crimes, and other crimes that now have bails are going to have zero bails automatically, which is another important problem there is that they’re not going to be seeing judges as the default. Right. The default before was bail, and then they could see a judge. Now it’s just going to be zero. They’re going to be released and not see a judge.
So it’s not like they’re kicking them to a judge to have it evaluated at that point. So that’s where we stand. And so we’re going to see the impact of this zero bail schedule when it’s enforced, not during a pandemic. And when you’re seeing crime increase. And we’ve seen the result of this, when we look at the massive looting that is shut, even big box retailers from Wall street can’t survive with the kind of looting that we have seen going on.
And that’s being facilitated by just this catch and release. You don’t have to pay bail. You don’t have to see a judge. You just immediately release the people. If there’s no penalty for organized theft, this is going to continue to escalate. Let me ask you, you said that they went back to, they had a zero bail policy as part of the COVID lockdowns and things like that. This other policy, though, that they said was unconstitutional.
How long had that been in effect prior to the change with the pandemic? Well, the bail schedule is a statute in California, dates to the early ninety s, I believe, and requires a bail schedule and has various rules on when the judges can go up and down with the whole idea that we have a uniform bail schedule. Right. That we treat people equally is the reason that we have a bail sChedule.
And now we’re saying, oh, it’s unconstitutional because people can’t afford it. Well, that’s really not why it was created. It was created to very much avoid that problem. But the big problem now is what are we going to do with all these people on zero bail when they continue to reoffend and they know those loopholes in the system, they’re going to exploit it. And that’s what we’ve seen in other places where we make the rules beforehand rather than leaving it up to judges.
Yeah. Having a bail set. Yeah. The leader of the Conservative Party in Canada was questioned about that, and he said, you’ve got to be kidding. They said, well, can you prove that people on being released early without bail has anything to do? And he goes, yeah, we’ve had situations where people come out and they would be caught, released and then go back and commit another crime, be gotten caught and released, and do that several times a day.
And he said, and it’s a very small group of people that just keep repeating offenses like this. And the person says, yeah, but can you prove it? And he goes, are you serious? Were you listening to what I had to say? I mean, this is the insanity of this. Now, you point out this exact bail schedule goes back to the 90s. But of course, bail has been around.
It’s nothing new. It’s been around since the creation of our form of government. It’s always been with us. Right. Tell us a little bit about the purpose of bail and a little bit about the history of it. I mean, the right to bail dates to pre Magna Carta. There’s a lot through English history that I’m not going to get into the five nights case, Lord Coke, all that sort of thing.
But the essence of it was that the government could not imprison you, that you had to submit security for your appearance. And really, in this country, it was the right to bail by sufficient sureties, which was the original sort of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Constitution. And really what it means is a third party putting up a financial guarantee as part of the common laW. What that meant was you had arrest powers and you could go across state lines.
Supreme Court, I believe in the 19th century, called it the option to select the jailer of one’s choosing. And I believe the Supreme Court also said the bail industry is a friend to the friendless, in a way, when you need a friend and you don’t have one. And so obviously there was a divergence in the late 19th, early, actually early 20th century when the English Supreme Court said it was against public policy to have compensated sureties, in other words, bail agents that take a fee to act as your personal surety, whereas Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, of course, said, no, you can do that, and states can regulate that.
And so 46 states have said that you could have commercial sureties in the United States. And so really, it is an ancient form of our due process. It’s been around for centuries. What is new is the idea that we don’t have any bail. And again, if you don’t have a situation where you have, as you pointed out, choose your own jailer, which says that you’re going to be back for the trial and they’re going to keep an eye on you, that type of thing.
What we see is what is happening in LA and in San Francisco and the rest of these people. It is total anarchy, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s end money, Bill. And then what? Really, there’s only two options. We go to the federal system of detaining three out of four defendants using what I would consider to be an arbitrary power that we really didn’t have. Or we say, you get a zero bail.
We just release people that are completely dangerous. And so in California, for example, the measure of staying in jail, and this is how bail protects public safety, so to speak, is the measure of getting in or out of jail is putting up the security. If you don’t put up the security, you stay in jail, which means the rate of new crime is zero. So that protects public safety.
That’s what people aren’t taking into account here. And that’s their whole argument is we don’t think those people should stay in JaIl because they can’t afford it. Well, in reality, they can’t find somebody in the community to put up for them to make the guarantee. That’s what we’re talking about. And we say in our tradition, well, then we should not release them because they’re not going to come answer for the crime.
And so that’s the distinction. And those people that stay in jail have a zero new crime rate other than the crimes they commit in jail. And that should be factored into all of this. And unfortunately, it’s generally not. We just say, well, you put them on bail, they still commit new crimes. That’s true. But when they stay in jail pending trial, they don’t commit new crimes. Now at your website there, the American Bail Coalition, you address some of the facts and myths about bail.
And the first one that you address is kind of what you just tangentially touched on there, that people, poor people, are languishing in jail for the sole reason that they cannot afford a bail bond. And so what would you say in terms of that? You have a couple of points there that you point out, but tell the audience why that is not about poor people languishing in jail.
Well, judges are tasked under state and federal law with adjusting the bails based on people’s incomes, and that’s what’s supposed to happen. I think what we’ve seen and what has been a problem and where the other side has a point, so I’ll address their argument, is that we’ve had bad due process in this country when it comes to bail. In other words, you put in jail, you cannot afford it, and you’re there really because the bail was set too high arbitrarily by a bail schedule, and it needs to be adjusted.
And then you sit there for a week. In some cases. We’ve seen in some jurisdictions, people sat there for 30 days to see a judge to have a bail adjusted. Now that becomes a problem, but that’s a problem of due process, and I think that has been improved. But generally what we see is that people who are stuck in jail have multiple reasons for that, and it’s usually repeat crimes where the judges have set the bail, they’ve burned all their friends and ties to the community.
In other words, nobody believes that they’re going to show up. Nobody believes that they’re going to show up to sentencing. Nobody believes that they’re going to go to prison if they get sentenced. And so they’re not willing to put up with them. That’s generally where we see that. But I do agree that some of these lower level charges that we’ve seen sleeping on the park benches and stuff, we had a lot of arbitrariness in the system that needed to be fixed.
But on the top end, felons, repeat felons. I mean, these people are multiple time violent criminals. The average person doesn’t post bail in this country has ten prior strikes or more prior felony convictions, prior misdemeanor convictions, prior failures to show up in court. So we rarely see a first timer that can’t afford bail that’s stuck in jail. In a sense, what it is is a risk assessment on this person not showing up or committing more crimes while they’re out.
That’s one of the things that drives the amount of the bond, and as you pointed out, it should be adjusted also for their income. But it’s kind of a thing that says this is the seriousness of the crime and the risk of letting this person out. If that is judged by the judge and by the people who might produce the bail as being too much of a risk, that person stays in jail.
That’s essentially what’s going on with it, isn’t it? That is. And really, it’s not a scientific or calculated, there’s not calculator to do this. Right. You’re taking in the interests of the people who are prosecuting the victim of the crime. Under Marcy’s law in the state of California and other states has a right to be heard on bail of what they think the bail should be. So the judges have to balance all these factors.
Like you said, the crime, the prior record of failing to know all these various factors, ties to the community, whether they’re employed, whether they live in another state, all that sort of thing all goes into the calculus under various state statutes. So you’re right, and that is not a precise balance, and some people are uncomfortable with that. But that’s the process that we have in this and many other parts of our criminal.
Yes. Yes. Now, you’re with the American Bail Coalition and is the bail industry, and as part of your facts and myths here, you say, well, one of the things that has been said about this is that the bail industry is completely unregulated and takes advantage of consumers. Give your side of the story. Well, we’re regulated by departments of Insurance. We’re required to be regulated as insurance companies by the Comprehensive Crime Control Act.
And so we’re regulated heavily in all the states that we do business, there’s been lawsuits over consumer protection laws being applied, and I would just say they’re continuing to be applied in various states. And so I think the laws are enforced on bail agents. The other thing that I’ve been working on over the last seven or eight years in this role is regulating bail recovery agents. And there are still some states, like my home state of Colorado, where you could just announce that you’re a bail recovery agent, which means you’re being transferred arrest powers, and you have no regulatory oversight by the state.
So our policy has been, if you have arrest powers, you should probably be regulated by somebody. And we think state Departments of Insurance, but other states do it differently and use sort of the same bodies that regulate police officers arrest powers to impose some training and other requirements. But overall, by and large, we’re regulated fairly heavily. Other than what I would say that little area that we’re trying to improve and, of course, arrest powers, because if this person skips, they’ve got to be able to arrest this person and bring them back.
To me, it seems like a very ancient perspective of things like putting like marks of retainer on deputizing people to go get something done because people understood that that might be a more efficient way to do it rather than to have a large bureaucracy is to farm out some of these things. One of the things that the bail industry is accused of and the whole bail process is accused of.
Of course, this is an accusation that is thrown against everybody at one point at a time. If they don’t like what you’re doing, they call you racist. So this is the accusation of racism. Talk about that a little bit. Well, at least from my perspective, from the corporations of insurance that underwrite bail, we cut through all that. We allow people in whatever communities that want to become bail agents and service personal sureties to be able to do that.
And I think without that level of national underwriting, it would make it harder for there to be people to become into the bail industry other than longtime property owners in those communities. Two is largely the system, and I’m not going to get into the reasons why has disparities in it. If you just look at the raw numbers in terms of population versus the amount of criminal justice involved, individuals that are minorities.
And so we serve those communities, we allow them to get out of jail as appropriate, secure their release and go through the process. And that’s an important thing, as we know, for various reasons, they put on a better defense. They get their acts together in terms of probation and trying to argue for a better sentence. I mean, generally just things tend to work better if they’re able to secure their release and get.
Yes, yes. Let’s talk a little bit about how this has started to come about. And this is something that has been changing over the last several years. Chris Christie did one of the first movements of this when he was governor in New Jersey. He worked with Democrats to essentially did he completely remove bail at that point in time. But that was one of the first places where we saw this, wasn’t it, in New Jersey? It really was.
And that was kind of his pivot to the federal system. So to go kind of a little bit back in time is that there was bail in the federal system till the Bail Reform act of 1984, when we came up with a new idea, which is we’ll just lock up the people that we label dangerous and we’ll let everybody else out and supervise them, using federal pretrial services and the US Marshal Service to arrest them.
That was the federal model largely thought unconstitutional because we had this right to bail. But the US Supreme Court decided otherwise. And so that was the movement in New Jersey. I would think of it more as a hybrid system where we wanted to lock up more and deny bail to more people, say you’re just too dangerous to get any bail, and that we were going to not require bail on some of these people and give more summons to some of these people on the lower end, and we’d still have, like, a shrinking middle of bail in the middle.
But as the system was implemented, I think the Chief justice really just wanted to get rid of bail. And so you really have seen it largely eliminated. And we go to this system of just, you’re detained and you’re there at the will in jail period, pending some trial with no certainty of when that’s going to be, or you get released on your own recognizance. And in the case of New Jersey, there’s very little oversight and supervision when that happens.
And so you see crazy results under that, and you see an expansion of the government wanting to detain because judges can’t do bail. And so you see a lot of that and you, and you’ve seen the percentage of motions filing for detention increasing. And so it’s really a question of whether that’s a system long term. Is that better for the half billion dollars they’ve spent on it? We don’t think so.
We think you could have just done summonses and kind of targeted these repeat offenders without having to spend all this money. So I’m not sure it’s really a better system, but that’s kind of where the public policy debate lies right now, is to end cash bail. And then what, right? What do we do then? And none of the alternatives really seem to be much better than the ConstitutionAl framework we’ve been working in for 400 years.
Yeah. And just keep people in jail longer, have more overcrowded prisons. And, of course, the whole idea, you talk a great deal on your website about reform for a speedy trial. I think a lot of people who watch this program are looking at this and thinking about the J six people, the January Sixers, very few of them in jail for any accusation of a violent crime, for example, and yet not given a speedy trial under difficult conditions and awaiting trial for a couple of years, two or three years.
Many of these people talk a little bit about the speedy trial aspect of this. Well, you just made the argument for overturning USB Solerno, which is since 1984, in 1984, if January 6 would have happened, one, there would have been bail, so they would have had a 76% chance of getting out, not a 76% chance of staying in. So we flip flopped that since 1984. The other thing that’s been unbelievable, that a report called Freedom denied from the University of Chicago pointed out recently, is that the speedy trial time when there was bail in the federal system was 60 days, was the average felony.
That’s up to 360 days now. And so what’s happened is, and as Justice Thurgood Marshall predicted, when we take a shortcut to a conviction, there’s no pressure to do anything. And that’s what we’ve done. If the prosecution knows you’re in jail, they have every incentive to go as slow as possible and delay everything because they’ve got you and they know you’re incarcerated, you’re not going to commit a new crime.
They’ve done their job. And so that’s what we’ve seen over time, and that has had a devastating impact on civil rights and also unnecessary pretrial incarceration. If we can try them in 1984 and 60 days with all this new fangled technology, exchange of electronic discovery, all this stuff that we say should improve it, why has it gotten so long? And really, it’s just lack of incentive. If the prosecutor knew that the bail industry could come bail out 50% of them, they’d be in a Hurry to convict them.
So we’re seeing that around the country as that in South Carolina, for example, the average felony case is two years. And obviously, the bail issue becomes a lot bigger when you’re going to be sitting there for two years. And so speedy trial is the number one way to reduce pretrial, unnecessary pretrial incarceration. The other example I’ll give is Michigan, 18% of defendants pretrial cost, 82% of jail costs.
And those are people that stay 30 days and longer. So you can do all the bail reform you want, but if you’re not hitting the 82%, what are you really doing? And if you could cut that amount of time in half, you would cut the amount that they have to sit in jail pending this outcome in half. We get them onto probation, get them onto treatment, or get them in prison where they belong.
We have to get to this fork in the road. The more that we don’t focus on speedy trial and allow this to happen, we just take a shortcut to conviction, and then everybody’s arguing, oh, we need preventative detention. We need to lock more people up. Yeah, because we never get there. And we need to get there. That’s what this is all about. And that is what deters crime.
Certainty of getting caught, swiftness of punishment. And that’s basic. And that goes back 300 years. That’s right. And that’s what we need to focus on. And so the two extremes that we’ve got, and we don’t like either one of those, you either just immediately release these shoplifters, these shoplifter gangs who just turn them right back out, or you lock people up for, instead of a couple of months, you lock them up for a year or maybe two years.
Or as we saw in the case of the J Sixers, lock them up for three years, not accused of a violent crime. And I’m just curious, maybe, you know, maybe you don’t know. What was the argument for keeping these people locked up for that long time? Was it that they could not get to a. Would not give them, why would they not give them bail? Did they just not have that in the District of Columbia? Or were they saying they were too dangerous even though they were nonviolent? Do you know what the justification was for keeping those people locked up for three years? In general, there was a statutory presumption that they stay in jail just under the federal statute because of the level of the crime.
And the defendant has to rebut that presumption. That’s how heavy it is. You’ve got three out of four defendants in any federal criminal case stay in. So it didn’t surprise me at all that people charged with insurrection related crimes like this, even if they had no background, would face detention. And that’s wrong. And here’s the reality. The reason there is bail is to challenge arbitrary preventative detention. The community can say, enough, you’ve gone too far.
We’re bailing these people out. Now. That doesn’t exonerate them, but it sends a message to the government that you’ve gone too far. And that’s why that extreme, I think, is bad. The other extreme is just as arbitrary, is that we say, well, basic shoplifting. Okay, then that’s fine. Well, what if it is the 15th time? What if it is special circumstances where they used a gun or there’s something that the statute didn’t anticipate that we want judges to do? So it becomes arbitrary going both ways.
And that’s why this history of bail and securing your release has been kind of the best way to draw this balance and let judges, unfortunately, people say we need judicial discretion, and everybody loves that till they lose. But that’s the best system that we have either side. That just ends up being too arbitrary, I think give us an idea of where this issue is. Now. We saw this several years ago in New Jersey, and of course, it’s made the Democrat station, California, Illinois, Connecticut, other things like that.
What is the general situation? Is this something that is rapidly spreading or is this something that is rapidly spreading in the heavily Democratic states? Well, I would say that what happened in New York, the three time rollback by two governors of the original law, has really sort of stalled out this idea that this is some successful solution. I think we are seeing it in two places remaining, which is sort of Los Angeles, and what just happened in Illinois with the Illinois Supreme Court affirming the Safety act, which is basically a smaller version of New Jersey.
In other words, we take New Jersey and we say the list of crimes are going to be a lot smaller than what we have in New Jersey. So I think there’s been some conversations in other states, know, going more to detention policies, but know necessarily as a reason to make it more fair but to crack down on repeat criminals. So we’ve seen that in places like South Carolina, Tennessee and other particularly states in the south like Florida that are seeking to crack down more on repeat defendants.
So as you look at this, how would you say the momentum is, is the momentum swinging back in your favor then? I’d say so. I think the idea that we can just wholesale allow a bunch of people to get out of jail free card is going to be good. Public policy is sort of like saying defund the police was going to work. I mean, I just violated the basic common sense doctrine and basically it violated the whole doctrine of what I was saying of criminal deterrence.
We can’t prosecute and incarcerate everybody. We have to send the message that you are going to and convince people that we are going to get them if they commit crimes. And as soon as we lose that, and we have said, well, you don’t have to respect the police, well, then look where we are. So that’s the policies we need to go. And bail is part and parcel of that, which is you could have bail set, you could stay in jail.
We just won’t know till you get there. And that’s the message that we need to have. I think it is swinging towards your direction because people have seen what is happening in California. It is absolute, total anarchy. And well, these people are nonviolent. So let’s just let them go. People realize, are starting to realize now exactly how unworkable this is. So I think it’s very important. I think it’s one of the fundamental things in terms of due process.
We have these things that are there, things like trial by jury, habeas corpus, bail. These are tried and true. They were there for a reason. And it is very foolish to discard these things. And we do it and eventually discover why they were there. And now we can see California, why they were there all along. Thank you so much for joining us, sir. And again, it is the American Bail Coalition, and it’s very important what is happening to our justice system and how it is being ripped down at the foundation.
And I think this is just one more of the things that we need to reclaim and understand the true importance of it and why it is there. Don’t tear down the fence if you don’t understand why it was put up in the first place. So thank you so much for joining us and explaining that. Thank you. You got it was a pleasure. Thank you. We’re going to be right back, folks, to take a quick break.
And we’ll be right back. Fucking. You’re listening to the David Knight Show. Hear news now@apsRadionews. com. Or get the APS Radio app and never miss another story. .
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