The Daily Signal - Religious Freedom Part 3: SPLC Uses 'Terrorist Tactics' to Silence Dissent

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

This is the third in a three-part series on the movement for religious freedom in the U.S. legal system today. Check out the first part about how Christians who refuse to take a COVID-19 vaccine face "medical death row" hereand the second part about the "rise of global censorship" here. Mike Farris, general counsel with the National Religious Broadcasters and the founder of Patrick Henry College, says the far-left smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center needs to be "buried down deep." "It's not that they're left-wing," Farris told "The Daily Signal Podcast" in an interview at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in February. "They hate the principle that you're allowed to differ, and that is un-American." Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, March 20th. I'm Tyler O'Neill. I sat down with Mike Ferris. He is one of the most interesting guys I've ever met. He is currently the General Counsel at the National Religious Broadcasting. He's a co-founder of Patrick Henry College. He was the president of the Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom for five years. And in 1993, he won the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Virginia, even though he lost the general election. Ferris and I sat down and he is just this very salt-of-the-earth guy. Talked about a story. He regaled me about his friendship with someone on the other side of the aisle. who would go on and on condemning Republicans. And at some point, Mike Ferris turned him and said,

you know I'm a Republican, right? And the guy's, oh, you're not one of those Republicans. Mike Ferris, he's been a lawyer in the religious freedom space. And by the way, this is the third in my three-part series on the Movement for Religious Freedom in the U.S. legal system today. Ferris has been a lawyer in the religious freedom space for decades. He remembers a time when it was essentially him and two other guys. There were only three people representing Christians, specifically conservative Christians in the religious freedom space across the entire country.

And now there are large firms that are representing people because on the one hand, we've had a flowering of religious freedom, many really strong cases at the Supreme Court establishing this fundamental right. and really enabling people to use religious freedom, to call their employers to account, to make sure that the government and that employers are honoring this right. The landscape is also changed in that the left is pushing ever more radically this ideology that's constraining certain traditional beliefs. These are beliefs held by Christians, Jews, some Muslims. We've seen in Maryland situations where Muslims are arguing for the religious freedom to opt their children out of LGBT lessons. So this movement has changed. Mike Ferris and I talked about the history of it. And he also talked a lot about a topic.

I focus on a lot, the Southern Poverty Law Center. I wrote a book about why this organization can't be trusted. And Mike Ferris really delved into the way he sees the. SPLC use what he calls terrorist tactics to silence dissent. He calls the organization un-American. And he told me that if there comes a defamation lawsuit that shows the SPLC violating people's rights by defaming them, that they need to be buried down deep because of just how destructive their advocacy is. And he makes a clear point. It's not that they're left wing. We can have good disagreements with a lot of people on the other side of the aisle.

But he said, they hate the principle that you're allowed to differ. And I think that's the main thing. He hits the nail on the head there. And we talked about he himself has been defamed in his own personal life as well as representing the Alliance Defending Freedom, which the SPLC calls an anti-LGBQ hate group. He goes into great detail explaining why the accusation that the SPLC makes that ADF has supported, quote unquote, forced sterilization in France. Ferris calls this a flat lie and he explains exactly why. And he said, he told me that if a case comes up clearly, he would be the first one to file a lawsuit. And I think that's a very interesting statement because we have a lawsuit that has made it to the discussion.

phase against the SPLC for defamation, the case of DA King with the Dustin Inman Society, which I've written about numerous times before. So I think we're in for very interesting times ahead of us. And Ferris just assault to the earth guy, one who's not afraid to speak the truth as he sees it, who's achieved a great deal in conservative circles and in these circles in general. And he spoke from his heart about how it's important for Baptists to defend the religious freedom of Buddhists. If you can't defend the religious freedom of Buddhists, you can't defend the religious freedom of Baptists. So listen to my interview with Mike Ferris right after this. For over 35 years, the Heritage Foundation Job Bank has been helping conservatives at all professional levels find employment in key positions in Washington, D.C. and across the country.

We can help you connect with positions in the administration on Capitol Hill, in public policy organizations, and in the private sector. To learn more about the Heritage Foundation Job Bank, go to heritage.org slash job dash bank. This is Tyler O'Neill, a managing editor at The Daily Signal. I am honored to be joined by Mike Ferris. He's General Counsel at National Religious Broadcasters, former president of Alliance Defending Freedom, and founder of Patrick Henry College. It's great to have you with me. Always a pleasure to be with you, Tyler.

So you wanted to talk about the panel this morning. We had at NRB. There's a lot of hope, I think, in that room. And I was really struck by that. Indeed, we had four principal, conservative Christian legal organizations were represented. ADF is the biggest by a good measure, but others are significant as well.

Liberty Council. Matt Staver and First Liberty. Kelly Shackleford wasn't there, but one of his senior lawyers, Jeremy Dice was there, and Brad Dacus from Pacific Justice Institute was there. And they're all longtime, good guy, faithful players, important members of the movement. And one of the reactions that I had was I was probably among the first three full-time Christian lawyers doing this kind of work. Wow.

It was John Whitehead, me, and William Ball in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We weren't connected. We knew each other, but we weren't, you know, didn't work for the same firm or anything. Whitehead and I explored doing that, but we ended up doing our own things. And the ACLU was big of those days. And, you know, we were alone. Now, there were some people starting to do this kind of stuff part-time. Jim Smart and Mike Whitehead from Kansas City

started doing this kind of stuff part-time. And they did a very important early case in the Supreme Court called Woodmar v. Vincent, saying that colleges could not restrict student groups on the basis of their religious faith. Very important free speech, freedom of association case. And so Jim and Mike were around doing important stuff, but, you know, I knew them all by first name. And, you know, it was really a handful of people, if you throw the part-timers in,

and to have four good-sized legal organizations on the field doing this. And then there's still, you know, an army of part-timers out there. I mean, ADF alone has 4,000 part-timers. Yeah. And, you know, the others have hundreds at least. You know, some of them may have 1,000. I don't know. But, you know, their volunteer part-time group is not in.

significant as well. But collectively, it's so much bigger than it was, that's a source of encouragement for me, having been on this movement full-time since basically January of 1980. And the other thing that... Just a couple years. Just a couple of years, yeah. And before that, I was Calvin Coolidge's personal lawyer, and I dated Thomas Jefferson's sister in high school. Those are jokes. Those are jokes. T. Right-hand man at the march on San Juan Hill, too, right? Yeah, I was there. I was a quartermaster.

But anyhow, it just does my heart good to see that even though we're still a fraction of the size of the ACLU. Collectively, I estimate that those four groups together are probably about 40 percent the size of the ACLU. When you look at it from a budgetary perspective. And there are, of course, a bunch of other big legal groups in the Southern Property Law Center and, you know, lots of more, you know, various LGBT organizations. And, you know, so they've got a big left-wing coalition as well. But when I started, you know, we were zero percent of the ACLU. Yeah, like zero-zero one or something. Yeah, yeah.

Rounding area, you have to go really deep into the rounding to actually have a digit. And it was, you know, that's encouraging to me and to see, you know, the Blackstone Fellowship that ADF does is not the only program, but it's one of the more mature programs. We've been around for 23 years, I think, and it's trained about the last several years, about 200 students a year. So the number of people that are coming into the fray is really, encouraging to somebody who was here when it was almost nobody. And my heart's thrilled by that.

Yeah. I think along those lines, you know, I've seen this growth. And even just in the last few years, I think these organizations are bigger. But I also get the sense that they're more needed, not necessarily, you know, that because back in the 80s, you know, they're, they're why. a push to marginalize, I think, conservative Christians even then. And those who would agree with us and those who would, you know, and this is often, you know, religious liberty is such a big tent notion we're defending, you know, Sikhs who want to wear turbans in the military. And this is all part of that. But I think right now the movement to demonize particularly conservative Christians in some cases, you know, forcing Muslims to, to have their students, their kids, inculcated with these ideas that they find objectionable. I think that's gotten more aggressive, too. Yeah, there's several things that have changed, and you've hit some important elements of that already. And I, you know, affirm all those things.

On the education front, I was litigating cases in the late 70s, early 80s on this. Late 70s, that was part-time. That's why HSLDD exists. I mean, I actually started doing public school cases originally. And what I would describe it was going on in those days in the public schools, I call it the great religion of hodgepodge. And that if you could get kids to believe that everything is relative, you tear down the idea that there is the truth.

you know, even the concept of the existence of absolute truth is undermined by that. But the idea of Jesus being the truth is really, you know, the target. But it was very subtle, you know, and it looks like pluralism, but they were not serious about pluralism. Pluralism was a transitional phase from one orthodoxy to another orthodoxy. And I would say today, there's no pretending about there's not an absolute truth. There is absolute truth that the public schools are teaching. They're just the opposite of what I believe.

I think the men without chess, the way Lewis describes it in the abolition of man, just hits the nail right on the head. It's like relativism is a weapon to force their own orthodoxy. Indeed, there is a passage about education in a scriptural. tape letters I just listened to in the last couple of weeks. I do books on tape mostly. And it just describes the educational system of today perfectly from 1945. I mean, he just nailed it from 1945. So this has been going on a long time, but it is in your face. We will teach you what's right and wrong. You know, Christianity is wrong. The woke agenda is the truth.

There's lots of different names on it, but you can call it by a variety of names. But it's just the oppressor-oppressed agenda, that the oppressors are the white Christians, and the oppressed are the, you know, the marginalized people. And we're going to split this country apart. America used to be, we basically agreed on most of the core elements, free speech being a good example. Almost every American believed, I mean, disagree with everything you say, but I'll defend it. to the death, you're right to say it. No longer. No longer. And that's why people like Barry Weiss are out there fighting for free speech. Yeah. It's, the left has given way to that more than the right.

But there are some on the right that are wrong on this issue as well. I just wrote a op-ed piece about a piece of legislation in Florida that's a conservative Republican legislator. I'm sure is a great guy and does the right stuff almost all the time. He wants to open the door on defamation in a way that would just kill free speech. And it would take away the right of a jury trial on the question of whether a defamatory statement was true or false. And that just helps the big guy. If the big guy is the guy getting defamed, he's helped by that. If the big guy is the big media out of group that defames you, the big guy wins in that scenario.

Either way, it's quick, you don't get any discovery. You know, it really truncates your rights in the defamation case. It's just a terrible idea. And so conservatives need to defend free speech for everybody because more often than not, our heads are on the chopping block. But, you know, I've said this in the religious freedom context for a long time. It's true in both contexts. If I don't defend the right of boo, as Baptists, Baptists, aren't going to have rights.

And we just have to stand for the principle that the government doesn't have jurisdiction over the heart, soul, and mind of man. And that's the core principle of the First Amendment. And, you know, Congress shall make no law was there for a purpose. It was describing an area of law that government does not have jurisdiction.

That's the key. And if we give them jurisdiction over somebody we don't like, we've ceded the core point. And we can't do that. We have to balance that with. I think there's a good growing movement on the right to emphasize that our rights come from God, not government. But, you know, it's one thing that doesn't mean we don't believe that atheists have rights or that, you know, people who have a different notion of God. It's just we ground our rights in something bigger than our own government.

Right. In fact, I wrote a book called The History of Religious Freedom that starts with the Bible translators in 1550 and goes to the adoption of the American Bill of Rights. And the core of it is that, in fact, there was a famous Harvard historian written in the 1930s who said of the early English and Virginia Baptists that they were the only group that consistently stood for religious freedom for everybody because it was a matter of their theology. They thought that the relationship between God and man

was nothing to do with the government. And they stood for the rights of everybody, and they got it right because their theology drove them to that. And it's our theology, it's our conservatism, that makes us stand up for the rights of everybody. And, you know, I believe in the rights of Buddhists because I am a Christian, not in spite of the fact that I am a Christian. but because I am a Christian.

And I've spent time in India. ADF has a branch there. And I've talked directly to people who've been beaten by the police for praying, one guy's beaten in the police, for praying for his uncle's healing on his grandmother's balcony. And I saw him, but I looked at the bruises myself.

He had been beaten seven days earlier. We were actually afraid that the police were going to come radar meeting that we were having. And so they don't reciprocate. but we do the right thing. The one thing that any of the Obama's ever said that I think is true is Michelle Obama famously quoted is, when they go low, we go high.

That's actually the right principle. And it doesn't mean we don't fight. We fight about the ideals and the principles. And we fight hard for those things and do it for everybody. So we were talking about the history of religious freedom and the need for all these firms rising up. How do you see, you know, the movement on the other side? You know, it's bizarre because I think a lot of people get the wrong notion

that conservative Christians really just don't like people who identify as LGBT or whatever, how many acronyms they want to add. But that's not it at all. We have our beliefs and we believe that we are sinful as well, not that we're somehow higher or holier or mightier than, people who are struggling with these things? The only way I can best respond to your question is tell you a story. I have to confess my vice on your program to be able to tell you the story, though.

So here we go, here's my vice. I play too much bridge on the Internet. The average age of an Internet bridge player is dead. So you beat everybody. Yeah, because I'm only 72. I am one of the young punks in this group. But anyhow, there was this. guy that I was playing bridge and I'll I will not even say what his screen name was because he's

probably still out there but I'll make up a screen name and I'll call him Dave Jr. That's not even close. Okay Dave Jr. Okay. And so that was his screen name and I was the kind of the hero of all these little old ladies on the bridge group because I just had a policy of never criticizing anybody. It's very competitive, playing duplicate bridge. And people get mad, but I just, you can't hear me on the thing. I yell at my screen. I say, you idiot, what are you doing? But I never, ever type that.

You know, I always type encouraging things and, you know, thank you partner. We'll get them next time. And as a consequence of being nice all the time, at least as far as they know, I'm very popular with these little old ladies. And Dave Jr. didn't like that. And he started ragging on me. and the little lasers beat the tar out of him. And I was sending him private message to say,

look, I know you're just joking. I don't know if he was around, but I was trying to make peace with Dave Jr. I figured out at some point in time that Dave Jr. was gay. And he found out I was going to argue a case in the California Court of Appeals for homeschooling, and he lives in Los Angeles. And he asked me if I would go to dinner with him.

I said, sure. You know, and we went to dinner, and we were joking around, having a great time. And I was genuinely, his friend, he said to me, you know, Republicans this, Republican that. I said, Dave, surely by now you figured out that I'm a Republican. He says, yes, I know, but you're not one of those kind of Republicans. And he had no idea how deeply, I co-wrote with Bob Marshall, the Virginia Marriage Amendment that was voted him by the people. I mean, he had no idea how deeply I was

involved. But he knew I liked him and I was his friend, and I wanted Dave, the day he had a problem and he wanted to know a real Christian who would talk to him and be his friend. I wanted to be that friend. That's not atypical. I'm not unusual in that regard. That's the heart of every Christian leader that at least I know well who's been involved in this movement. I've never heard anybody castigate individuals behind closed doors or make fun of them. You know, we think they're doing the wrong thing. And if anything, it'd be, we feel sorry for them in certain ways. ways. But we want to, we want their best and their highest, but it doesn't mean we want to change our legal system and change our rights and throw our moral system into disarray. That being

kind and loving doesn't mean giving up your principles. And that's the best way I can explain my view on that whole thing. Yeah. No, I think that's helpful. How do you see the growth of this movement? I mean, I would, I would peg it to Obergefeld, but I think there were times before where, because Jack Phillips's case is before a burgherfowl, where do you think that they're coming from and what is the best way to respond? Again, a story to illustrate where they're coming from. I was at the first international religious freedom ministerium, they called it, at the State Department under in the Trump years. Pompeo, Sam Brownback. And when it came time to do questions or statements from them at law.

large, you know, you go up and say whatever you want in the microphone, I got up. And I said, you know, the State Department wants to stand for religious liberty. The first thing we need to do is take down the rainbow flags we were flying at the embassies all over the world. Because the Christians in that country see that and they go, they can't be for religious liberty if they're flying the rainbow flag. Because the point of the rainbow flag is to crush Christianity. And this lesbian Episcopal priest from Philadelphia came up to me in the break. And we had a cordial, professional conversation. Didn't agree at all. But she said, all we want is to be celebrated by everybody. That's all they want. That's all we want.

And imagine what they would say if somebody were to celebrate a Christian in that way. Yeah. And to put a Christian flag on the embassy. Yeah, that's what they want. They want to be celebrated by everybody. Why? Because in their soul, they know that they feel the pangs of sin. They know that what they're doing deep down someplace, at least at some point in their life, consciousness can become seared.

But at some point in their life, they knew it was morally wrong. And all of this is a defensive mechanism to drown out the remnant of that message. They don't want a reminder that it's morally wrong. We know it, but they don't want to hear it. And, you know, of those four groups, the lawyers who spoke today, three of them are hate groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. I don't know why First Liberty hasn't made it on there yet. It's because they only do religious freedom cases,

and so the rest of us do cases that are free speech, and family values. And, you know, I wrote amicus brief when I was still at the college, co-authored it for ADF on a Bergerfeld. And when I was at CWA, a lawyer who's now at ADF, Jordan Lawrence, he and I co-wrote an amicus brief that was actually used by the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas. And so these groups take, you know, First Liberty, excuse me, Liberty Council and Pacific Justice Institute and ADF work on right to life, marriage, family,

traditional values, and free speech, whereas First Liberty only does free exercise of religion or in religion cases, establishment clause and free exercise. And, you know, that's fine, that's good. You know, I'm glad that they specialize, but, you know, that's why they say they're the biggest firm in the country that only does religious freedom work. That's true. it doesn't mean that the other groups aren't bigger than them by a long margin. It's just, you know, you take away, and that's how it works.

And they're an excellent group, and I'm glad, you know, they do what the NRA does. The NRA works on one thing. Fine. That's what God's called them to do. Go do it and go do it well. And people should give money to them because they do it well. And people should give money to all those organizations because they all do it well. when I think, you know, you talk about defamation, my immediate thought, and this is because I've been covering the Southern Poverty Law Center for a while, I've covered defamation lawsuits against them. I think if there was ever a case for overturning New York Times v. Sullivan, or at least all the precedents that have kind of gumbed it up, because we want strong protections for free speech, but we also want defamation law to make sense. And right now, you know, you're considered a problem.

public figure under the precedence of New York Times v. Sullivan, if you've been published somewhere, I would be considered a public figure, even though I'm not employed by any government, I've never helped write laws. And if you actually look at New York Times v. Sullivan, maybe that was decided rightly. But our laws now are calcified. Now, we don't want, we do want jury trials. We want all of the protections for people, and we want it to be fair. But, I mean, do you, what sort of change would you see there, and do you think it's wise for groups to be suing the Southern Poverty Law Center for defamation? Most of the defamation cases that have gone awry against the Southern Poverty Law Center have been on the basis that what they were saying was opinion rather than fact, because it's only statements

of fact that can be the basis of a defamation successful lawsuit. And if they call somebody a hate group, that's an opinion. That's their legal defense. And it's been successful. I mean, that conclusion is, but there's a subtlety and correct defamation law that exists in the books. You can find it. And that is that if you're saying, if the statement of opinion is premised on false underlying facts, and it's obvious that you're using false underlying facts to reach that conclusion. You can reach the actual statement. Exactly.

Exactly. And I think that carefully delineating that, it's kind of like an abortion distortion that the regular rules of law got thrown out the window on abortion-related things for such a long time. And there's a bit of that going on here. If we apply the defamation standards correctly and consistently and didn't give left-wingers an extra pass, I think that, for example, they said that ADF wanted to, support the forced sterilization in France. Puff! We wrote a brief

in the European Court of Human Rights supporting the law of France we support, say it more precisely, supporting France's right to make laws on the subject. Our argument was the subject matter

is within the competent they call it the competence of the state, and it was within the margin of appreciation of human rights, meaning there are areas that states get some freedom to rule, and there shouldn't be one international standard for that. And so we were arguing the margin of appreciation doctrine, saying that the subject of LGBT rights falls within the margin of appreciation. That's it. That's what we said.

The word sterilization does not appear in our brief, You know, ever. We never talked about it. And so somebody claims that the French law could be interpreted to force sterilization if they wanted, you know, certain rights. And we were not talking about the details of the French law, nor were we advocating that French law should be written in a particular way. It was the law that was on the books. And we were just saying, this is Francis Joyce's choice. not the international community's choice.

So it's a lie. It's a flat lie. Now, there are a lot of times, I've been defamed many times in my life. And most of the time I have decided that I just let it slide. My favorite of all time is, you know who Lyndon LaRouche was? Yes, oh yes, I know.

All right. Okay, Lyndon LaRouche's paper posted an art. article about me about 1994 or five right after I'd run for lieutenant governor of virginia and they accused me Ollie North George Bush the elder and a woman who I know named baroness cox from England who works on religious liberty issues the four of it or the three of us of Americans Arley North and George Bush and I worked for Baronel's Cox and we were British spies And I was going to sue them for defamation. And I had my jury argument ready against you.

They've accused me of betraying my family. They've accused me of betraying my country. They've accused me of betraying my faith. I want you to know, ladies and gentlemen, the jury, it's all a bloody lie. I just decided, you know, it was actually probably helping me to have those people saying that stuff.

And to some degree, Southern poverty, the Law Center is such a joke that anybody within the conservative movement thinks it's a feather in your hat that they're attacking you. And many of the people in the middle are starting to say, this is just partisan nonsense. I think in the long run, their original mission was actually pretty good. They did good work. Yeah. They got guys off the death row were falsely accused of rape. Yeah. And fighting the Klan. good stuff. They did really good work. But they lost their way because they figured out, this is a great way to raise funds from, you know, northern liberals. And they've been very successful

at fundraising. So it's with no mistake that their founder is in the Hall of Fame for fundraisers. I just, I agree with you. I think a lot of conservatives know that it's, you know, that they're just a scam. But I see. Biden using them on, you know, for domestic terror things. I see the FBI citing them going after radical traditional Catholics. I'm just, I think, and that's one of the reasons I believe in constantly pushing the message from the rooftops. It's not to say that they're not dangerous and shouldn't be fought back against. And, you know, if we get the right case for defamation, I'm going to be the first one to sue them.

where it's so clear it's a statement of fact and it's false. You know, I won't hesitate. I won't send the demand letter. I will file the lawsuit. And those things do add up and they can. Have you seen the DA King case? No, I haven't. Oh, I need to send that to you.

They have a case that's reached the discovery phase now. Okay, good. That's survived the motion to dismiss. Okay. That's excellent. They deserve to go down and they do hurt people. And I think that if they apply the defamation law correct, they're going to get buried someday.

When they get buried, they need to be buried deep. Because they hate the principle that you're allowed to differ. That's what's wrong with them. It's not that they're left wing. They hate the principle that you're allowed to differ. And that is un-American. And, you know, but I'm so pro-free speech. Let them say what they want.

But the moment they defame somebody, the moment they commit crimes, which I think they... They have done some very questionable things along the way, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn someday that they had it in them to actually violate the criminal law at times. I'm not saying they have yet, but that's the trajectory that I would expect from people

who still care about stuff. They don't care about rights, don't care about America. They care about using the progressive ideology to raise a ton of money to spend it on themselves. And bury their opponents. Nobody can... I mean, I think they're trying to make disagreement with their ideology unthinkable. Right.

Oh, yeah. They are. But they're using it by terrorist tactics. You know, terrorist tactics wrapped in a little bit of velvet. And, yeah, I mean, Apple uses them for their Apple Smile program. All kinds of companies use them. Yeah. Yeah.

And, yeah, Amazon Smile, I'm sorry. Yeah. But, you know, that's friendly turf for them. very friendly turf for them. And I think that we need to not let them get away with this stuff, but just on a personal level, I've learned to just shrug it off as much as I can

and let God defend my reputation. I've not ever sued anybody for defamation yet, but give me the right circumstances. And if Lyndon and LaRouche actually republished that song within the statute of limitations... You got your speech ready. Thank you so much. Mike for joining me. Is there anything else you'd like to mention or flag for our audience?

The thing I'd like to mention is that I've been a great, I've been a grandfather for 24 years. And five days before Christmas they said, you know, you've been a pretty good grandfather, but now you're a great-grandfather. That's, you know, Thomas Jefferson, all that joking aside, I'm an old bugger. Congratulations. Thank you. And it's, you know, and because of having 30 grandchildren and now one great-grandchildren, and now one great grandchild.

I want to leave America a free country. You're here. Well, thanks again so much. And that was Mike Ferris. Again, this is Tyler O'Neill with the Daily Signal podcast. If you liked what you heard here, please feel free to leave us a five-star rating and review. We read all of your feedback.

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