Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/5/25 Brandt Burleson on How He Helped Israel Propagandize American Christians

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

Scott interviews Brandt Burleson about how he stumbled into his former job at an Israeli consulate, what they had him doing, why they were interested in him and what he thinks of all that now. Discussed on the show: Creative Chaos: Inside the CIA’s Covert War to Topple the Syrian Government by William Van Wagenen “The Alawite women taken as sex slaves in Syria” (The Spectator) “Inside Syria’s state-backed cover-up of Alawite women’s kidnappings” (The Cradle) Brandt Burleson holds a MA in International Affairs from American University. He worked as the Strategic Outreach Director for the Consulate General of Israel to the Southwest United States for over eight years. Before that, he planned business and policy programs for Asia Society Texas Center. He now publishes regularly at The Libertarian Institute. Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app:  https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott’s work: Check out The Libertarian Institute:  https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott’s other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott’s books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people what's going on in this country. Because the babies are making this. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, you guys, introducing Brant Berluson. He is formerly the Strategic Outreach Director for the Israeli Consulate in Houston. What an interesting former job to have, especially preceding his new job as a regular writer for the Libertarian Institute. where he has written a bunch of really great stuff. And it's the only reason I put off interviewing you

is because I wanted to get through a few here so we can really talk about all of this. But you made a big splash here, Brent, with I helped Israel propagandize American Christians. So, wow, what an incredible story that you tell here. So first of all, who are you? Where are you from? How in the world did you get a job?

propagandizing Americans for the Israeli consulate in Houston, American Christians, for the Israeli consulate in Houston. Yeah, that's a good question. So I grew up here in Texas. My father was a pastor, but, you know, I was always kind of more interested in politics and things. So I went to college not trying to follow in those footsteps really at all, but, you know, majoring in international affairs. I went on to get my master's degree in international affairs.

And I had actually had a really hard time trying to find a position in that field. And eventually I applied for a position at LinkedIn and didn't even say which consulate was for. It was just to be an administrative assistant at a consulate. And I was like, okay, this might be a chance to get into that world. And then I realized it was with Israel when I showed up. And I ended up not getting that job, but during the interview, just making conversation the consul general at the time aton had asked me oh well um you know what did your parents do when you were growing up and i mentioned that my father was a pastor and he said

so you kind of grew up in uh you know the the christian world so to speak you probably know a little more about denominations than most people i didn't really know i was asking this time and i said yeah you know probably a little most and most people and he said well we might be opening a job in a few months, that would be kind of more of interfaiths outreach position. Would you be interested in doing that if we did? And like I said, I had all this student loan debt. I was really eager to get a job in this kind of position. So I said yes, you know, foolishly at the time thinking, oh, I'm going to be like promoting tourism to holy sites. That's probably pretty innocuous. I didn't know anything about the world of Christian Zionism or how weird that really gets. And, you know, you know,

know, I thought I could do this for maybe a year and then used this as a stepping stone to something else, not understanding exactly what I was going to be doing or how that would probably affect me getting a position in the kind of place I would like to later on. You know, if I came across my resume and saw that position, I would probably have assumed I was some kind of John Hagey fanatic as well. So that's how it all started. And then I realized pretty quickly that it was a lot stranger than I thought was going to be. I'd been looking

for other positions after about the first month of being there. And like you said, my title was strategic outreach director, but it really should have been Christian Zionism and interfaith director. Because it wasn't just outreach work. It was outreach work with the

intended consequence of utilizing theology and this case like Christian theology from a certain brand of that to influence political policy. And that was really pretty explicit, even if it wasn't always exactly like clear. And we always would kind of steer away from the conflict perspective of, you know, a lot of these people that you're appealing to are really rooting for you or on your side, essentially, because they see Israel as a vehicle to bring about the end of the world.

So I would tell them that explicitly. And there was some discomfort with that, with a lot of the people involved. But over time, I kind of came to see that there was a lot of short-term thinking that was guiding this. And it was deemed, oh, well, we just need support. So it doesn't really matter where it's coming from. And there was little, if any, thought given to the long-term implications of that kind of a support and that kind of an orientation to your outreach with a, you know, so-called ally that I think really complicated this thing

and really makes a lot of this, the current conflict, more intractable in a way. Because, you know, when you're fighting a war that's a holy war, it becomes eternal in a sense. in people's psychology no longer becomes with sober assessment of what's in America's or Israel's interests, but it becomes, you know, a kind of a doomsday project. It's really not a hyperbolic way of saying it. Yeah, okay, so there's a lot there. First of all, can you clarify for me?

Because Texas is a big state, and there are a lot of different sects of Protestant Christians. So you don't have to say, like, the name of the church or whatever, but can you give us a little bit more specific background on your upbringing in terms of your relationship with Christian Zionism because, and as you talk about in your article, I think, as well, that there's sort of a broader Christian Zionism, and then there's pre-millennialist dispensationalism in which I was instructed by a guy the other night that not all pre-millennialist dispensationalists think that you have to support Israel to force Jesus to come back. That's even a subset of them. And I don't know enough about the religious part, but he said that he was not a Zionist,

but he was a pre-millennialist dispensationalist. So there's one. So, but anyway, I just wonder if you can give us a little bit more of your background so then, so we can understand the appeal of you to the Israeli consulate and why you are, I guess my understanding is, well, versed enough in this New Testament stuff that you can go out and, you can go out. tell the rubs whatever they need to be told in their language. But without you actually being a true believer, because that probably make it more difficult for you to lie. I don't know.

Yeah, that's a good question. So I grew up attending a church that was in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which is a pretty moderate to progressive thing during, in the 80s, depending on how you looked at it, was either the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC or the conservative resurgence, depending on who you asked. But the CBF split off from the SBC largely over issues like local church autonomy. And a lot of CBF churches will ordain women pastors. The SBC doesn't do that. The SBC is a Southern Baptist Convention. That's the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. I think

they still have something like 15 million members. has declined slightly, but it's still far and away the largest Protestant denomination, especially in the region that the consulate focused on, which for Houston was Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and then we had Kansas for a while and that eventually got moved to a different consulate's jurisdiction. So, yeah, I did not come from the, like, I wasn't going to church. I didn't really, like, conservative, fundamentalist evangelical church or anything like that. So I didn't grow up with this Christian Zionism thing.

We didn't have Israeli flags in the sanctuary. We didn't even have American flags in the sanctuary. You know, I went to a smaller church. It wasn't a giant megachurch or anything like that. But, you know, growing up in central Texas, I grew up in mostly in Waco, that evangelical conservative culture was kind of just everywhere around me, even if I was. isn't directly participating in it. Like if I went to church with friends sometimes

after going to their house or whatever, like sometimes, I mean, I've been in a few of those services and that always felt very kind of alien to me. And then when I started doing the job, though, a lot of, I think the reason I got hired, like my background in international affairs isn't even in the Middle East. It's in South Asia and Southeast Asia.

I was hired because I could speak Christianese, not because I don't know of any Hebrew or Arabic at all. So that's sort of why I was brought on. And part of that also, I think, was when I first started, they said explicitly, the evangelicals are really already doing everything we kind of want to do. So we want you to try to appeal to more mainline Protestant denominations instead and kind of expand this out.

And eventually we started reaching out of the Catholic Church and then we decided to do other, you know, non-Christian faiths in addition to that, eventually. But,

and I think, if I had to guess, I would think that the, and this is one thing I want to highlight, like behind the scenes, there is a, there's are definitely factions within the Israeli government apparatus here on,

uh, who's willing to kind of embrace this, this sort of, faith-based outreach enthusiastically and who isn't. And I think that first cons to general officer of Dender, I do not think he was

comfortable with it at all. I think he met me and he goes, okay, this is somebody who has a background in IR, so that's a little beneficial. They know the Christian world some, but it's not somebody who who, you know, is rooting for Armageddon.

And I think that if I had to guess, he thought, I read that he was told by the ministry that he had to fill this position and he met me and thought, okay, this is probably the least bad choice I can go with. If I had to guess, I'd say that's why I was hired. Yeah. Okay, so it's interesting because it seems like you would have on one hand, you know, sort of just a common assumption among certainly Texas Protestant Christians,

maybe not certainly. I think you'd have sort of a presumption among Texas Protestant Christians that, yeah, of course, we're pro-Israel and with various degrees. of religious commitment to that same idea up and down the line. But I would think that your job at the same time would still have to be like herding cats, right? Because there's got to be, what, 10,000 churches in Texas?

And they're not, they're usually not that, like, hierarchically organized, right? Like you're saying, they split that, you know? It was actually way easier doing outreach to the, different archdiocese and the Catholic Church because I mean it was very obvious like here's the person that you talk to here's the person in charge of this region and it's not like well there's you know there's five different mega churches and this minor city um most of them are non-denominational but some might be baptist but and then like some are padding their numbers a little bit to seem bigger than that like with the protestant churches it was always not clear like who's the most

influential. Well, it kind of depends on if you're going off, you know, some of these churches are essentially like franchises where there's a lot of relatively small megachurches under the same name, like operating in multiple cities versus some where it's like, okay, 60,000 people go to this church every week. And then even with the, a lot of the megachurch folks, you had people like Joe Osteen, who's, this is the biggest church in the country. We did, we did try to cultivate that relationship quite a bit. I met with him once with the CG for like 15 minutes. Joe Osteen is probably the least bad of all these televangelist folks in the sense that

he's not really that political at all. He doesn't try to grab onto these hot button divisive social issues. It's more of a vibe-based thing. I mean, say what you about the prosperity gospel, but compared to someone like Kenneth Copeland, who we were working with, like Joe Osteen is not a, that shouldn't be considered like a harmful or dangerous force in terms of Christian Zionism because he really didn't want to do much public with us at all.

But other people made it in a completely different story. But yeah, it was completely like hurting cats because some of these people were super receptive, they would respond immediately. Some of the things, like things who just get lost in the shuffle because, you know, there's hundreds of people who work at this church. sometimes it was like extremely difficult to get meetings sometimes it was it really just depended

but for us the for the priority that I was always told was like the size of the church and how influential a person is is pretty much always going to be the most important thing for okay so now what was it that you said was the proper title for your role rather than outreach coordinator well instead of strategic outreach director it should have been Christian Zionism and interfaith director. But like I think, and even that's playing it mildly. Like I would, I would describe what I did.

And I did in the article, I described it as like, I essentially see what I did now as kind of betraying my own country to run a religious-based sci-off on behalf of a foreign government that intentionally exploited people's theological beliefs to get them to support an unquestioning view of these. Israeli government and to target the leadership specifically so that they would influence the congregations. And this was very politically tied. For example, there's a lot of these sort of pastors luncheons that happen and kind of Christian nationalists, they're really conservative

fundamentalist networks where there's these lunch meetings that happen with all these different pastors in the city and they're kind of tracking how their congregation is. tend to vote, how many members of the congregations are registered to vote and putting out these sort of voter guides that are encouraging, and we would, I encourage them to vote a certain way, and we would, like, I would go to these luncheons. I would, I was, one of my contacts was David Welch. He passed away this summer, but he ran the U.S. Passers Council and the Houston area of the Pastors Council. And so I was invited to these things at his behest, and then sometimes we would have the Council General come

and give a briefing to all these different pastors on things that were going on in Israel and why they needed to support Israel. And like they would, my, it's like one of my bosses explicitly said, like use the phrase faith-based diplomacy. So it was not, it was not shy about this at all. And it wasn't just, oh, you should go see the place, you know, Jerusalem where it's written about in the Bible.

It was, it was, you have, like, I would work in, verses like Genesis 12, 3, and their remarks constantly. That's a verse that says, well, bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. And I was told about two remarks. It was never, hey, toned down on those stuff. It was always more scripture, like, appeal to that more. Because I actually, like, I tried so hard to do, like,

cut together events that were a little more creative or interesting. Like, I wanted to do a kind of water conservation event, once with the Christian group who dug wells and put them in contact with, since Israel is a desert, it actually is like miles ahead and a lot of water conservation and sustainable agriculture technologies. And I thought, oh, there could be a, and there's just never go off the ground. Because the only thing, like, my boss was really want to ask to focus on was these little pep rallies for Israel.

Like, so it, we just kind of took, like, the model for the Nettoner Israel at Cornerstone church, so John Hegey's church. He's the leader of Christians United for Israel or Kufi. And we would just do that kind of model at all these different places instead of doing something that would actually, you know, potentially, I think, form of deeper, a more rewarding, more defensible kind of activity to do. Yeah. So, well, I know a little bit about John Hage, but the first thing I ever learned about

John Hage was that he was the minister. of an old gentleman named Ricky Ware on 5.50 a.m. in San Antonio, which I'm from Austin, but I used to listen to 550 a lot. They had Carl Wigglesworth on there and a few other guys who were really great guys. And Ricky Ware, he was just a good old boy, man. He'd have loved him. And he was very reasonable about everything. Even after September 11th, he was saying, well, now terrorism is a crime. These people ought to be arrested and put in prison. You don't just go around killing people. And, you know, he's a good-hearted guy. But if somebody said, Israel, you go, oh, well, now it says in the Bible, you got to do whatever Israel says.

You got to bless Israel. Oh, I don't want to hear it. No more of that. Go to commercial. Right. Like, that is it. And it was no different than arguing about the Virgin Mary or something. Like, he's just not going to hear it.

Right? Like, this is, is there or is there not a Holy Ghost? We're not doing that on the radio today. There is, too. it says in the Bible, that's all I need to know. And here we're talking about a real nation state here on earth right now and here and now with a very important political and military relationship with the United States of America and all these very real world things.

And to Ricky, he just did not want to hear that. And the reason why is because he went to the Cornerstone Church. And John Hagee told him his soul was on the line, that America's soul was on the line. I mean, it's funny because after September 11th, Jerry, Falwell said, oh, this is because we allow homosexuality and this and that. We're cursed by God for all of these sins. It was like, yeah, but I, we're not, that's not counteracted by how blessed we are for blessing Israel, or, or I guess, no, the Oslo Accord is what brought on September 11th or,

you know, the sin of trying to negotiate for their fat. So anyway, I'm, I'm just interested in, you know, I think that's super important because you're highlighting, like, once you have attached it to something as important as someone's identity as their religious beliefs, it becomes kind of off topic to criticize or even to question. Like, it puts up a blinder in people's head where they like, well, I just can't go there. And when it's connected, like, if we're just talking about having a religious debate about whether there's a God or not, okay, fine, maybe some people don't want to be part of that. But when this is affecting, you know, we have $4 billion going on there every year,

and that's on a year when there's not a war going on. Now it's even more. And we're like compromising a lot of soft power and goodwill that people have towards the United States by constantly providing diplomatic cover for this. It becomes a real strategic vulnerability that's distorting in U.S. foreign policy. and I would argue, like, this is not really in Israel's long-term interest either, like this. And, like, I would see that in one of the articles

I wrote to you for you all, you know, I mentioned this quote that a diplomat gave when I explained, like, hey, they support you because they see this as a vehicle to the end times, and he said, these people give me the creeps. And then the next thing he says is, what happens when they go back to thinking their God doesn't like us again?

So that kind of highlighted for me, he's like, okay, so you are, like, aware that, like, you're kind of playing with fire here. Like, you don't really, you're not in control of this. You might have some influence over it, but this could, like, this is a force that you're playing with here that just depending on how a situation might go, people could completely turn on you.

Like, people have utilized. Not playing with it. Cynically exploiting, right? That's the whole thing is this is going to piss people off when they realize, hey, I never did get raptured. I just helped kill all these kids for nothing. And none of the magic promises came true. And, you know, they start looking at, oh, I get it.

My congressman just takes a lot of money from these guys. And, you know, once the blinders fall away, that's where the real resentment comes in, right? It's not just playing with fire like, oh, these Christians just want to see Jesus come back and kill all the Jews. It's like, you are literally deceiving and cynically deceiving these people and exploiting their most sincere faith in order to get what you want out of them. yeah well that's likely to lead to some backlash for sure yeah and it's it's it's it's really tragic because i think this is kind of playing out on a lot of kind of debates on the right right now at least and i think that there's going to be a lot of idiots who kind of had bought into this idea that where they just think is real jewish and then so they connect a bunch of their

Jewish-American neighbors to this foreign nation state who might not even have a favorable disposition towards this government in the first place, and it is creating and helping to fuel this real serious rise in anti-Semitism that is actually frightening. And I think it's almost like Israel will cynically exploit that as well as to underline the idea, well, this is why this state is so important because we need to, you know, be a refuge for in case this stuff explodes, but they're actively doing it, and it's pushing towards people to escalate it in the first place.

Crazy. Hey, guys, Scott here. You know, you've probably noticed when I'm interviewing somebody or somebody's interviewing me, that I've got this great bust of Dr. Ron Paul in the background on my bookshelf here. Well, you can get one like that, too. They're available again from the great artist, Rick Casale.

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setting up a business working on any kind of online project like that. Check out expanddesigns.com. So, and look, I mean, this is the thing. It's your words, not mine. And it's, it's, It's impressive, and I know you use them, you know, very deliberately. What you're doing here was this SIOP. You're sent here basically to manipulate these people. So I wonder if you get it. Well, I have like one anecdote that's not about you at all, but just a thing that I saw that I think is funny.

And it goes to show a little bit about how this works. But, and you can comment on this. And then I just want to hear some anecdotes and things. But a few months back, I think before the Charlie Kirk thing, Candice Owens was doing a thing where someone had sent her some video. She'd been covering it. The more she talked about it,

the more people sent her some video. And what it was was, and she even had one email about it with the deal in it. We'll pay you in Bitcoin if you do this. The pastors were all getting from some firm representing the Israelis, some interests representing the Israelis. And what it was was, we want you to tell your

your flock your Sunday morning audience to stay away from Candice Owen and Tucker Carson which I have to think that like the secretary was a fan and just sabotaged them or whatever

and so spelled both names wrong Owen instead of Owens and Carson instead of Carlson and then she had video of at least I don't know four or five of these different Sunday morning, Protestant preachers saying, there's a terrible anti-Semitism of brewing in this country. You got to stay away from that Candice Owen and Tucker Carson.

They're bad, bad people. And then she showed the email where they said, we will pay you in Bitcoin. If you will do this, that obviously is the same one they all got. And I don't know how many fell for it. But again, like we were talking about, there's, I tried to Google it, but nobody knew. but how many Protestant churches there are in Texas, more, you know, as many as there are public schools or something, right? 10,000 or I was tracking hundreds, if not thousands of them.

So, yeah. Yeah. But if you're organized, if you have secretaries and you have money, you have Bitcoin wallet, especially if you're on America's taxpayer dole in the first place, you have essentially unlimited funds to do this, then you can do this. So I just wonder, like, how typical is that in your experience? something like that. Ooh, we got to marginalize.

We've got to cancel Tucker. Here's how we'll do it. We'll tell all the preachers to tell all their people to hate them, this kind of thing, and or whatever other anecdotes you want to enlighten us with here. I mean, it's hard to know where to start because I've got so many on it. So like...

Go ahead, man. You've got a little while. One of the things I put into a speech once that they wanted was to compare the BDS movement to Crystal Nod. So you're essentially then again, like, associating someone who opposes maybe some actions of the Israeli government with, you know, the worst criminals in the like history of the planet. And it is reinforcing this idea that anyone who criticizes this actions, any actions of the Israeli government is an anti-Semite. And when you do that again, like, yeah, you're eroding the weight that that, that,

term ought to carry and making it meaningless and it yeah so that that's a huge problem um like we we were tracking um all the uh anti bDS legislation in our region i put together a whole database of like here's the links to this specific text of each bill here's how this one different this is different from this one like there was a um it i think it was in austin actually it was either austin or san Antonio there was a special ed teacher who was fired from her job because you refuse to sign the like Israel loyalty that you're required to sign if you're doing any kind of contract with the state government, which in this case counted just being a teacher. So I mean, that's just a blatant violation of our, you know, First Amendment rights,

I would say, regardless of how you feel about specific conflict in question. But yeah, like there were just so many instances where I mean you saw it when Ted Cruz was doing his interview with Tucker Carlson where he's even flat out saying you know I don't know how many people

living around but we just need to topple this government and we need to do this because Israel wants us too and we got to stay on the right side of God because do it like and this is a this is a U.S. senator coming from one of the largest states in the country who was running for president at one point.

I mean, he's not an inconsequential figure. At one of the Nauton or Israel events we did, Mike Pompeo was there. I went to an event before where Mike Huck could be was speaking and DFW that was put together by Michael Evans, who runs the Friends of Zion Museum, and the Jerusalem prayer team before he got kicked off of Facebook.

He's a former messianic Jew turned evangelical. He's very close to Netanyahu. These people are not at all in the audience. You mentioned Ron Dermer. Ron Dermer, who was. Oh, yeah, yeah. I want to put together a briefing for pastors when Dermer came over here

that was at the Consulate General's private residence. people came all the way from Dallas passers to see him talk. And so, I mean, just the fact that they would hire someone to do this job full time, I think, I think says a lot about how they see it as a valuable thing. That's crucial. And I mean, I wasn't getting paid six figures or anything, but like if you look at the geofencing networks that they're shopping out 24, Like, that was quite a lot more money than I was making over the years.

And that's just for one project. Yeah, now hold that thought. I want to, I want to, we'll wrap up with that. But I wanted to ask you, in all your experience with all these pastors, I mean, I know you can't read minds and all that, but then again, there's probably various degrees of familiarity these guys had or at least assumed with you and whatever. How many of these guys believe their own B.S.?

here, and how many of them are essentially just like you doing a jab? Oh, I'm inclined to think the vast majority of them are sincere. There's probably, I mean, maybe it's like 1% or 2% or charlatans. Maybe I'm way off on that, but I got this sense that everyone is pretty sincere about it. Because a lot of, I mean, some of the people who would, want to talk to me, weren't even at giant megachurches. So they're not even making, you know, that much money off, off all this. But, like, I don't know.

Like, I couldn't do this. It destroyed my faith. It destroyed, like, a lot of, like, respect or anything I felt for myself. Like, I'm not the hero. And I'm kind of just kind of exposing now slash confessing. Hey, here's the things we did. And I think people need to be aware of this because it has seen having serious. consequences for the foreign policy

of this nation. But with that being said, like, I don't know that anyone could do easily do this for this long without it, just eventually breaking them. Like, uh, yeah. So I am inclined to think most people

are, are sincere about it. I wonder if, because this is, you know, whatever, I'm looking at it from the outside. But I do remember the, even if it wasn't always explicitly stated this way on the Sunday morning TV churches

and whatever. Oftentimes it was certainly by types like John Hagee and some others. But it was still like overall the spirit of the thing in the wind and the understanding overall at the time was it's the millennium

and we're going to war in the Middle East. Get it? Bible. Ten times. Jesus Islam. Islam. which is Satan, et cetera, forces of light versus forces of darkness. Old general, what's his name, said, my God is bigger than your God and all this idiot stuff, right? When he doesn't understand.

Every here is worships the Jews God, including the Muslims. But anyway, so there was a promise. See, here is what it was. wasn't in the wind, it was in the left behind series at Walmart. Yeah, is what it was.

Yeah, a lot of that got more than from you. Yeah, like all the background conspiracy stuff about the New World Order and the one world government and the United Nations, that's all gets folded into the end times,

Book of Daniel, Book of Revelation and stuff. And then again, in the war. So, in other words, though, to boil it down, a lot of people supported the war not because go,

USA, but they supported the war because they thought it was their religious duty to support the war to help to bring on the apocalypse and to be raptured up to heaven in their bodies and all of this stuff. But now that we're having this conversation in the future long after that, it seems to me like the obvious question is, well, hey, whatever happened to all of that? Because either it never happened at all or all these people got left behind with the rest of us and weren't doing it right. And so like, what is the deal then? And if it was me, my minister owes me an explanation that we killed all these people

and then ISIS took over who got al-Shara's in Damascus right now. And none of your magic that you promised came true. So what gives? Which at what part is my sincere faith in the Savior supposed to deviate from your teachings, Mr. Minister? Because obviously you're full of it, right? Like, there's got to be a comeuppance here. And I wonder whether...

Yeah, you would travel around whether you get confronted with the spirit of that. They're like, oh, yeah. Well, okay, the rapture never did happen, but we still think it might or what? You know what I mean? Is anybody mad? Anyway, you're saying, I think a lot of that,

I mean, it's not just limited to this specific, you know, conflict or country. Like, there's been people predicting that end of the world based on some verse of their interpretation of things for since 2,000 years. Like, you go all the back to the next one, though. Like, the millennium flipping over made it very widespread. He even had the influence of the Mayan calendar.

It was like, eh, 12 years, but that's close enough. Right. Well, I think John Hage himself, I'm pretty sure, wrote a book. I think it came out in 2014 saying that, you know, the world was about, and I think he might even give a date for it. And, like, you know, a date came and went and people just carry on. And I think some of that's not, it's like people are bought in to a lot of the belief system, but it's also being under, undergrather or whatever, by their sense of belonging to this

community. And I think also probably, you know, with a religion that deals with an afterlife, you have a certain amount of, like, death anxiety there. So I think it's a lot for people to walk away from. But, I mean, it works like any kind of, you know, This is a bit of a loaded term. I'm going to use this to offend people. But in a cult mentality, you know, when the leader says something and then it turns out

not to happen, most people still don't walk away at that point. Like, some will, but a lot of people are just going to stick around because they've kind of bought a ticket and they're along for the ride at this point. And so, like, yeah, at some point it just doesn't even matter that people said, now of this stage it's going to happen right here and then it doesn't happen and people will find a way to rationalize it people will find a way to stay in it like you have to really take out in it and the more committed you are like psychologically into that the harder it's going to be for you to go okay I've got to really ask myself why I believe

this thing or it does this make sense should I keep uh supporting this like because eventually you're going to have to go oh I've wasted X amount of my live devoting it to this idea. So are you saying that in your experience, you don't really have people feeling burned by this? It seems like it's all just as strong as ever. Usually if people feel burned by it, I think they come out pretty loudly

and tell other people about it. And a lot of times those people get ostracized from their own friends and family. based on that, but yeah, I don't, I don't think you've seen that many people, you know, coming forward. It's the same thing as like the whole Seventh-day Adventist denomination began saying, you know, the world was going to end at this day in the 19th century and, you know, came and went, and that's still a denomination that exists.

Yeah. Like, and it's not the, I mean, I'm pretty sure in the gospel of John, or maybe it's Mark, might be both, but, you know, Jesus says, you know, some of you will not see death before I return. So, like, that's kind of arguably in the book to begin with. And, you know, some people will say, well, no, he's talking about the seizure, a complete seizure of the land of Israel by the Romans and 70 AD and the Temple Fly,

and that's supposed to be that little apocalypse, and that's what he was referring to. I mean, I feel like that's a bit of a coat personally, but yeah, I just think psychologically, once someone's committed, they won't step away easily. Yeah. Well, and look, I mean, cope or not, the point is that whether it's you or anybody else,

the best that you can do in interpreting Bible prophecy is just the best that you can do. And nobody really knows. In fact, that's one of the verses. Nobody really knows the day of the time. So I guess we'll have to leave it at that. All right, well, listen, please keep writing for me.

You do such great work. I'm so happy to have you there. Oh, the geo-fencing. I'm sorry. I've wanted to cover this on the show, and I've been putting it off and putting it off. Can you please just give us a couple of minutes real quick here? Sure.

So, you know, this got uncovered and exposed recently. There was actually a far out filing for that where it was a California-based group. Is he's in a geofencing effort? And what that is, is it's digitally. setting a certain perimeter or on a physical location, in this case, churches, for a specific time, and then targeting all of the devices that are connected to the internet and that with specific messages, and in this case, support for Israel's war effort. So you have people

going to church, having their information compromised without their knowledge or consent, and, you know, they're essentially there for a worship service. They're leaving to get in their cars and then seeing this message and come up on their phones when they're, you know, check their phone after the service. And this is something that millions of dollars were going to spend on, and there's efforts to expand this across the country into Texas. And I'm sitting here reading about this thinking, okay, well, I created a database for the consulate that had

I was tracking so I put the exact numbers in there I think of that could count but hundreds and hundreds of like there's 24 sheets on this database some of them have a thousand rows so like literally thousands of individuals or organizations or churches

that I was trapping that I had email addresses for phone numbers and like I'm sitting here going okay well yeah I mean it wouldn't take a genius to go okay I could synergize this with these types of efforts, and there you go. And I kind of help help do that. So I have to live with that, which is not fun.

But, yeah, I'm not the hero and the story. I think there's a lot of- That's pretty good. You got courage. And you know what? Maybe we put all your networking skills to work on behalf of the anti-war movement, because this is what we lack is the giant office tower full of secretaries and lawyers and file cabinets that have the organizational capability to actually put the things into effect.

You know, we have just foreign policy and a few other things, but we need more and better. And so maybe we found... Well, I'm happy to help any way I can. Absolutely. All right, everybody, check out Burleson and all of these great articles. They are at Libertarian Institute.org. Really appreciate you, man. Thanks.

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