The David Knight Show - Fri Episode #2251: War Powers Clock Has 8 Days Left — Congress Will Ignore It Like Everything Else

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

──────────────────────────────────────── [00:12:05] Trump's War Powers Clock Has 8 Days Left — Knight Doesn't Expect C...ongress to Act Trump has been in undeclared war with Iran for 52 days — the War Powers Act 60-day limit expires in 8 days and Knight says Congress will ignore it as they've ignored every other constitutional requirement. ──────────────────────────────────────── [00:15:19] New Epstein Lawsuit: Former Miss Switzerland Says Trump Assaulted Her at an Epstein-Organized Beauty Contest A Miss Switzerland finalist says Trump sexually assaulted her at an Epstein-organized beauty contest in 1992 — she is suing and says Trump told her "stay quiet and I'll take care of you." ──────────────────────────────────────── [00:21:14] Melania Partners With Palantir, OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft to "Empower Children With Technology" Melania announced Palantir, OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft will advance her mission to empower children through technology — Knight: surveillance state takeover using the educational system as the entry point. ──────────────────────────────────────── [00:22:58] Trump Family Fortune Nearly Doubled Since January — Oil Bets Placed 15 Minutes Before Trump Announcements Trump's net worth jumped from $1.4 billion to $6.5 billion since taking office — traders placed a $430 million crude oil bet 15 minutes before Trump announced a ceasefire extension, the third such trade this month. ──────────────────────────────────────── [00:24:55] Tether Froze $344 Million in Stable Coins for Illicit Activity — Knight: This Is Why You Avoid Stable Coin Tether froze $344 million flagged for illicit activity — Knight: stable coin has all the surveillance and account-freeze capability of a CBDC, just laundered through private companies. ──────────────────────────────────────── [00:32:00] House Freedom Caucus Blocked FISA Again — Republicans Now Pushing Three-Year Extension With Zero Reforms After stopping an 18-month extension, Republicans returned with a three-year FISA version with no warrant requirement — a congressman revealed two classified secret FISA interpretations he cannot describe. ──────────────────────────────────────── [01:41:23] Pebble CEO: It Takes 29 Years on Average to Bring a US Mine Online — China Does It in Five Pebble sits on the world's largest undeveloped copper deposit in Alaska — its CEO says the US is second worst in permitting and the Trump EPA is supporting the Biden-era veto that blocked the project. ──────────────────────────────────────── [01:43:13] By 2040 There Will Be a 10-Million-Ton Global Copper Deficit — China Controls Half the World's Processing S&P Global found a 10-million-ton copper deficit by 2040 — China processes half the world's copper and controls the full supply chain while the US averages 29 years from discovery to production. ──────────────────────────────────────── [01:57:06] Chinese Government Is "Chuckling" at America's 29-Year Mining Process — Building Faster Every Year China has no environmental process, no litigation, no delay — it builds processing plants on demand and is already positioned to dominate the copper deficit everyone else is just now noticing. ──────────────────────────────────────── [02:00:32] Senate Voted 50-49 to Revoke Biden's 220,000-Acre Mining Lockup in Minnesota — Goes to Trump's Desk The Senate used the Congressional Review Act to revoke a Biden land set-aside blocking the Twin Metals copper mine in Minnesota — it now goes to Trump to sign. ──────────────────────────────────────── Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code “KNIGHT” For high quality made in America products go to HomeSteadProducts.shop and use promo code “Knight” for 10% off your purchases Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:30 of deceit. Telling the truth is a revolutionary act. It's the David Knight Show. As the clock strikes 13, it's Friday the 24th of August, year of our Lord, 2006. Well, we're going to take a look at some news besides the war, but of course, the time is running out on Donald Trump, according to the law. Which laws are we going to obey? You know, there is this law that was put And, of course, they've already ignored the Constitution requirements for having a war. They've ignored God's law, moral law. There is another law that they probably will wind up ignoring as well. And that is that he can only, you know, go unilaterally into war for 60 days and before he gets congressional approval.
Starting point is 00:01:27 So we're going to talk about that as well as some other strange and entertaining news. First, then we've got a couple of great interviews coming up for you. We'll be right back. Well, copyright law. Copyright law in Japan is very strictly enforced. And of course, here in America, it is as well, but not as strictly as in Japan. Here in America, they use it frequently for censorship purposes. I pointed out the very first censorship that InfoWars got was the report that I did about the creation of the Federal Reserve on the 100th anniversary. And it used a few clips from It's a wonderful life because there were bank runs.
Starting point is 00:02:41 There was a banker character that was patterned after J.P. Morgan and some other things. But there was a lot of commentary in it as well. And those clips were part of fair use, as well as the fact that the movie itself had been on YouTube for several years. I had over a million views. That's where I got the clips, by the way. And so it is an interesting case that happened here in Japan. A man is being sent to jail for publishing movie spoilers. He described a Godzilla movie in too much detail.
Starting point is 00:03:13 Now, when I saw that, I thought, how much detail could there possibly be in a Godzilla movie? And I remember this one scene. I thought it was a horrible movie. I don't remember anything about it except one scene. It was called One Crazy Summer. Maybe you've seen it. And there was one scene in it, and I'll set it up. There's a character in it, and he's, they've got this big business meeting.
Starting point is 00:03:38 It's kind of a party. and they have a big real estate project that is coming up, and they've got some Japanese investors that are there. And so they have a really big model city that they have set up to show what the project's going to look like. Well, this guy goes back into a trailer, and he finds this Godzilla costume. He puts it on, he's playing around with it.
Starting point is 00:03:58 Then he realizes he's got to be back to the party. There's something he's got to do. I don't really remember the movie that well to remember why he had to go back, but he couldn't get the costume off. So he goes back to the party. and that's where it picks up with this clip. There's a guy sitting in a wheelchair. He's got a cigar, and he's done with it, and he flicks it.
Starting point is 00:04:17 And the cigar goes inside the open mouth of the Godzilla costume and sets it on fire. Now the Godzilla character is smoking out of the mouth. He comes running out of the bushes. Now he's going through the model city. He's stomping. Looks like the real thing to me. And the Japanese guest is very impressed and very happy with that. He thought they did that in his honor.
Starting point is 00:05:12 So the question is, you know, these Godzilla movies are so much alike. How do you do a spoiler on that? Well, his offense was running a website that published detail, spoiler-heavy write-ups of popular films. So the two films that they singled out were Godzilla minus one, Another one that covered the Overlord anime adaptation, which I think about that either. So are they certain he wasn't talking about the previous Godzilla movie when he gave the spoiler-ridden thing that got him 18 months in jail? Yeah, it's crazy.
Starting point is 00:05:46 The Japanese law prohibits creating a, quote, new work by making creative modifications to the original while preserving its essential characteristics. So obviously, this is very subjective. anybody that does a movie review, the court could sit there and say, you gave too many details. You know, how are we supposed to know why that is? By the way, I looked at this and I thought, Roger Ebert wouldn't last a day in Japan. He was, of course, Siskel and Ebert, the two guys that did thumbs up. Back in the day when I used to follow movie reviews because of the store that we had, Roger Ebert won a Pulitzer Prize, but I've never seen a film critic that was a movie.
Starting point is 00:06:31 worse than Roger Ebert in terms of giving the whole plot line away. I mean, he just, everything that he, every review he did was a spoiler. When you mentioned this before, I had thought that he was jailed for releasing spoilers about an upcoming movie, Godzilla movie. But this, I didn't realize it was one that had already come out that has been out for a long time. Anyone could get this information. Anyway, in case you haven't seen the movie already.
Starting point is 00:06:58 What counts as preserving essential characteristics is exactly the kind of vague standard that gives prosecutors a wide latitude to decide which writers get charged and which ones don't. A key part of this, of course, is the fact that he made money, made a good bit of money. In 2023, ad revenue reportedly brought him in $239,000. Maybe we should start doing movie reviews. Rist the jail time here. monetization is the hook that copyright enforcement loves. But the logic cuts further than anybody involved seems willing to admit.
Starting point is 00:07:35 Most professional entertainment journalism runs ads. Most reviewers and recaps describe the plot. The question is not whether his site was tasteful, but whether or not the Japanese state should be deciding how much of a description is too much, then generally people that disagree with them. So again, the reality, however, is that we've been jailing people for an unconstitutional UN war on drugs for smoking weeds. I'm not saying it's a good idea.
Starting point is 00:08:07 I'm just saying prohibition is a horrible idea. And so that's been reschedule, as I pointed out yesterday, by Donald Trump. Actually, it wasn't Donald Trump. It was announced by his attorney general, Todd Blanche. Yes. Before we move on from the copyright thing in Japan, I was just going to comment that one thing I'd seen with all these new tweets from Japan with the new translation feature that they added to Twitter is Japan has a weird obsession, fascination,
Starting point is 00:08:40 or too much respect. They have a weird aversion to piracy in any form. Like they have this too much respect for the copyright laws. I guess I've lost a lot of respect. You and I've lost a lot of respect between what we've seen in terms of censorship and the fact that they have gone so far overboard. And I've seen so many abuses of copyright, especially go back and look, and Lance and I were talking about this earlier,
Starting point is 00:09:12 go back and look at the life story of John Fogarty of CCR, Credence Clearwater Revival. And you'll see an unbelievable abuse of copyright. but yeah somebody bought his catalog and then sued him whenever we would sing or write a new song I'm sorry you sound too much like yourself you know copyright infringement but what are you going to say Lance just that it seems from what I've been seeing in these conversations that they view piracy is is bad or even worse than shoplifting and uh yeah it's very foreign to the American mind yeah well one of the things you were saying was a lot of times
Starting point is 00:09:54 people will try something and then buy it in order to have a copy of it themselves. That was really kind of the paradigm of music until YouTube became the greatest violator of copyrights ever. You know, that was the other thing that bothered me about the, it's a wonderful lie. It used to be a situation. Everyone could hear music for free on the radio, right? And that would kind of, what your appetite, if you liked that song, you'd go out and buy a copy of it. And so the real issue to me is whether or not you can, if you've got access to where you're going to be able to play that right away with a streaming service or with YouTube or something like that, you have no incentive to go out and buy it. And so that's really what has changed the landscape for people, I think.
Starting point is 00:10:40 But I'm sure the big studios are still making money, you know, as they go through this stuff. Yeah, it was a conversation about things that were made in Japan that weren't available in the U.S. video game. And someone put up a meme of, give us, stop pirating our game. Then the person responds, then sell it to me. And then the angry Japanese face is no. And the Japanese comments were like, what's the problem with this? If we aren't ready to sell it to you, then you can't see it. You can't play it.
Starting point is 00:11:08 You can't do anything with it. Yeah, different cultures, I guess. Anyway, going back to this marijuana thing, this was done by an announcement on Twitter. Now, why didn't we think of that 100 years ago with alcohol prohibition, right? I mean, they went to all the trouble of passing a constitutional amendment to get rid of alcohol prohibition. And they passed a constitutional amendment to have alcohol prohibition. The 18th created prohibition, the 21st ended it for alcohol. Why did you have to have a constitutional amendment to start prohibition and to end prohibition?
Starting point is 00:11:44 Now it's just done by the wave of a pen by the acting attorney general. And he announces it on social media. Isn't that nice? You know, I guess we've got warp speed prohibition. Just do it without any process, right? I wish we could prohibit things like the warp speed vaccine. Unfortunately, we can't prohibit that. They absolutely will not prohibit that, but they'll prohibit these other issues.
Starting point is 00:12:08 Moving it from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 3. So it does at least acknowledge the federal government has been exaggerating marijuana's dangers, ignoring its potential benefits for half a century, says Reason Magazine. seen. And it, talk about half a century, it's been longer than that. It's going back to Reefer Madness. And we had Jeff Session, and who was Trump's first attorney general, was probably, he was very heavily involved with a big case of Reefer Madness. I've never seen anybody more obsessed with it. I thought that Jeff Sessions was going to be a good attorney general, frankly, because he had come after Panera, Leon Panetta. I'm sorry, not Panera,
Starting point is 00:12:48 but Panetta, Leon Panetta, Lion Leon Panetta, who was saying, you know, he's engaging him and saying, you're not going to put troops in Syria, are you? Not without getting our approval, right? He goes, well, we'll let you know what we decide. We'll talk to the UN, we'll talk to NATO.
Starting point is 00:13:03 We'll let you know what we decide. He goes, well, you've been a congressman. That's not how that works. You know, and he was kind of weak in terms of, he's kind of like, whining about it, but it was still, he exposed the fact that Lion Leon was going to do whatever he wanted, and he was absolutely contemptuous of the Constitution and of congressional approval for their war. So I thought he was going to be
Starting point is 00:13:31 a better Attorney General than he was. Turns out that he didn't have all that much respect for the law when he became Attorney General. It was just whatever he wanted. If it was something that he wanted, then he would follow the longer procedure. But if not, he'd forget about it. Well, we have some new Epstein news. It turns out that there is a woman who was a Swiss finalist in the Miss Switzerland beauty contest. And she received a personal invitation from Donald Trump to come participate in a beauty contest, a beauty contest that was organized, she says, by Jeffrey Epstein.
Starting point is 00:14:08 She was brutally sexually assaulted, she says. And 33 years later, she was 22 when she came. 33 years later, she is filing a lawsuit. She says she wants to force Trump to testify. She said that he said to her, stay quiet and I'll take care of you. So there's going to be a lot of information coming out about that, I bet. Beatrice, K-E-U-L. Cool?
Starting point is 00:14:37 Anyway, she wasn't cool with what he did. So we'll see what happens with that. Meanwhile, as I pointed out yesterday, the House Oversight Committee, Republicans are split over whether or not to give a pardon to Galane Maxwell. And this is truly amazing. You know, we're looking at the amount of money that they spent against, the Republicans spent against Thomas Massey, for example. You've got all these Zionist billionaires who have lined up, you know,
Starting point is 00:15:07 big bucks to his primary opponent. And even the GOP, House has their congressional fund has kicked in lots of money to oppose Thomas Massey. These people, meanwhile, are playing footsie with Epstein. I look at this and it's like, I don't know, I don't think even with all that money, they're going to defeat Thomas Massey in his district. People know who this guy is. And he may wind up being the only Republican left after the midterms in Congress.
Starting point is 00:15:42 Wouldn't that be something? So, yeah, they said, well, we don't really know. There's some people who want to do it. Think it'd be really a good idea. But, yeah, you think that'd be a good idea? Israel, meanwhile, is having a gigantic pride festival. Never had one this big there before. But, of course, they've have had pride festivals.
Starting point is 00:16:03 They've had LGBT areas, big areas in Tel Aviv. They've been actually one of the pioneers of all of this LGBT debauchery and degeneracy. The Middle East largest ever LGBT pride festival we held in Israel at the Dead Sea for four days beginning June the 1st. And so the point was not lost on a lot of Christians who believed that that was, you know, the area Sodom and Gomoror, that that had something to do with the unusual nature of the Dead Sea. And many people said, here we are, you know, recreating this right here the site of Sodom and Gamoire, or very near it. One person who was putting it together, the producer,
Starting point is 00:16:48 Aaron Cohen said, this is not just another festival. It's the biggest thing we've done here. And so this is being organized by Aaron Cohen. I thought it was being organized by Nathan from the Edward G. Robinson character from Cecil Bita Mill. It's a 10 commandments. I wonder if they're going to have a golden calf out there.
Starting point is 00:17:07 But anyway, it is a golden calf proverbially. preferably anyway. He said, so we choose to grow. We're going to take an investment of millions of dollars, purchase entire hotels for four days and build a city from scratch in the middle of the desert to celebrate debauchery. How did that work out for the original Israelites, right?
Starting point is 00:17:29 But as one pastor pointed out, Tom Askell, a Southern Baptist pastor, he connected with Mike Huckabee on social media, And he said, it's events like this one that lead Christians to neglect celebrating the modern state of Israel, he said. I'm not interested in celebrating any aspect of the modern state of Israel. It has absolutely nothing to do with Israel. He says, Ambassador Huckabee. Yeah, you want to say something?
Starting point is 00:17:58 Go ahead. I mean, you want to talk about similarities between Sodom and Gn Mora? They're the ones raining down the fire and brimstone on people just because they happen to want the land. That's right. Them doing this pride parade doesn't change the other things that they've done, whether they do it or not. That's right. So Tom Askell says, investor Huckabee, wickedness like this is why Christians take issue
Starting point is 00:18:24 with any thought of standing shoulder to shoulder with and celebrating the modern state of Israel. That's right. And, of course, you know, you see so many pastors out there say, they don't need any forgiveness. This is like Paula White and this Hagey guy in San Antonio. These are spiritual advisors, quote, unquote, to Donald Trump. They say, they don't need any forgiveness. They're descendants of Abraham.
Starting point is 00:18:49 Well, the reality, folks, is that God doesn't have grandchildren. It's just that simple. You will make that relationship yourself or you won't have it. and of course when Jesus was there being confronted by the Jews of his day, the Jewish leaders of his day, they were coming after him. They said, well, Abraham is our father. And he says, no, your father is the devil. And clearly that is the case in many of these instances here.
Starting point is 00:19:21 Meanwhile, Melania Trump is pushing AI on kids again. This time she wants to partner with Palantir, of course. Palantir is a pal of mine. As this person tweets out this speech of hers, he comments, he says, this is Frankie Stokes. He says, bragging about empowering America's children by partnering with Palantir, OpenAI, and others to usher kids into an AI surveillance state takeover using the educational system to do it. And we need to put that educational system in air quotes. I am proud that America's best technology companies, including meta, Palantir, OpenAI, Adobe, Zoom Communications, X, and Microsoft had the chance to advance our mission to empower children with technology and education. It's almost like a rerun of Green Acres.
Starting point is 00:20:23 Every time I hear her talk, it's like Ava Gabor, you know. The stores! Anyway, Trump is now worth $6.5 billion up from $1.4 billion since taking office. He's more than quadrupled his wealth. Don Jr. and Eric each jumped from $40 to $50 million to $300 to $400 million, mostly through crypto. The broader Trump family fortune has nearly doubled to around $10 billion. This is, I think, without a doubt, the most corrupt administration. in the 20th century and 21st century that we've ever seen.
Starting point is 00:21:01 Meanwhile, we had yet another manipulation of the commodity and stock markets by Donald Trump or people around him. Traders placed a series of bets worth $430 million on a drop in crude oil prices just 15 minutes before Trump announced in Iran ceasefire extension. Traders placed a series of bets on the drop just 15 minutes. before. It is the third time just this month and the fourth time in total, because remember, there was one back about Venezuela. What was the timing going to be of the raid? It turns out that just today they have charged a special forces soldier for making money off of that Venezuela
Starting point is 00:21:50 bet. We still don't know who did these others. What I'm surprised at with this is that they actually investigated the one with Venezuela. I figured there'd be no investigation because I figured everybody would think that it was a Trump family. They didn't want to find out. But I guess, is this all the money that was bet? Or is this just the scapegoat? Well, no, this I think was, he bet like $33,000 on that. And he made, he made over $400,000 on it. So I don't know if he's the only one that was betting. Because I've heard, you know, much bigger numbers than $400,000. that doesn't seem like the sort of thing. Well, the bigger numbers were on the first one of these Iran oil things, right?
Starting point is 00:22:34 There was a big bet place in the stock market and a big bet place in the oil market. I forget which one was bigger. But there was one that was nearly a billion dollars. And that was with the Iran War stuff. Yeah, sure, it's not the special forces guys betting a billion dollars at a time. That's right. Yeah, he had about $33,000 to put into it. and he made a little over $400,000.
Starting point is 00:22:57 So that was the fourth one that happened. And they have charged him. The soldier has been charged with, he made a little over $400,000. They charged him with unlawful use of confidential government information, commodities fraud. This is wire fraud, and unlawful monetary transactions.
Starting point is 00:23:21 I mean, they don't really stack the charges up on you if they got it out for you. do have it out for this guy. So they've released his name, which is really not important. But he placed bets on that. So again, it could be somebody in the military that placed these bets on these other markets, except the amount of money, as Lance was pointing out, was much higher on these bets around the Iran War. Meanwhile, Tether has frozen $344 million of stable coins that have been flagged for illicit activity. This is one of the reasons why you don't want to go near stable coin.
Starting point is 00:24:01 You don't want to go near a coin, even if it is backed by gold. These stable coins are for the most part backed by treasury bills. But you don't want to go around any of this stuff because the reason that they're pushing this is because it has all of the surveillance control and all the ability to freeze the account just like a central bank digital currency. and so be aware of that. These things, they're a trap, as Admiral Akbar says. Well, meanwhile, gold demand is anchored in a mispriced risk as China is buying much of it
Starting point is 00:24:37 and showing that it actually is an opportunity. It's a dip and it's on sale, folks. That's the reality of what is happening with gold right now. China is taking advantage of it. And as we were saying yesterday with Tony Ardibor, it is pretty clear that all the fundamentals that have been there driving gold in the past are all still there and much more fundamentally in favor of gold going up and the dollar going down in the long term.
Starting point is 00:25:07 Well, Thomas Massey, as I said before, he's getting massive amount of money spent against him by the GOP itself. And so he had the nearly $100,000 of his key, campaign funding of his opponent has come through the Republican Jewish Coalition Pack. That's not including the amount of money that's been given by the Jewish billionaires, simply because he doesn't have anything in particular about saying, well, we're going to continue foreign aid to everybody but Israel. No, he wants to get rid of it for everybody.
Starting point is 00:25:44 That's the same reason they came after Pat Buchanan. And you got people like Mark Levin bragging about the fact, and we canceled Pat Buchanan. And we can do that. We'll do it again. You know, don't, you know, give us our money. We don't care if you go bankrupt, but you better give us our money. You know, you can't stop it for everybody.
Starting point is 00:26:04 If you want to stop it for the other people, fine. Maybe stop it for us, we will cut you off. And that's what they're looking at here. So, as I said before, will Massey be the only one in the GOP left? He said they have wasted $10 million in my race already. He said, imagine if they'd used that in Virginia where they just had an election about redistricting. He said maybe we could have stopped that in Virginia. But that's not the thing that is actually their focus.
Starting point is 00:26:35 Their real reality is that they want to suck up to Trump and to Israel, whatever they say. And, of course, Massey is speaking out about FISA as well. they were able to stop it at the last minute, a coalition of conservatives of the House Freedom Caucus, and they were able to stop the re-extension of FISA. Trump wanted it extended without any reform at all. He'd called for it to be completely shut down when it was targeting him.
Starting point is 00:27:07 But he and the people who worked for him are all about lawfare now and all about the surveillance state. And so they're back at it again. That was just a couple of days ago, and now they're pushing this whole thing again. They want to bring it up and extend it out to three years. Today, we're introducing a brand new bill that's long needed. Unfortunately, it's needed because there have been so many erosions of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy.
Starting point is 00:27:38 You know, there's a robust discussion right now about the FISA 702 program, but really that's just the tip of the iceberg. in terms of infringement on the Fourth Amendment. There are so many other laws and Supreme Court decisions that have impinged on your right to privacy. For instance, the Bank Secrecy Act, the Right to Financial Privacy Act, the Patriot Act, all of these have great sounding names,
Starting point is 00:28:04 but all of them created so-called loopholes in the Constitution. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, not a euphemism, but misnamed because it's got foreign in it. It's used to go after Americans secret applications of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I've been in a skiff last week where I saw two secret rulings, interpretations of FISA law of how the government has created additional loopholes to spy on you that I'm not even allowed to tell you. These are classified as top secret. And finally, the third party doctrine.
Starting point is 00:28:39 This is very troublesome. It's been expanded. It was a ruling. It's based on a ruling of the Supreme Court that allowed it was a six to three ruling. I think it was a bad ruling. But it's been expanded in its interpretation to include things like doctor's appointment records, bank records, phone records, who have you texted, all the metadata, flock cameras, for instance, now. And if you think about collecting information on bank records, That means you can get your gun records. And this was done. This is not something I've imagined. This is something that I learned about, thanks to whistleblowers on the Judiciary Committee. What the DOJ did is they asked Bank of America and Bank of America complied for all of the records of anybody who was here inside of a certain radius of Washington, D.C. on January 6th, they asked them for all of their bank purchase records for gun stores as well.
Starting point is 00:29:41 It's completely illegal, but imagine instead of doing a query with one person that you turn AI loose on these databases now. There's virtually nothing the government can't know about you without a warrant if you believe that these infringements are legitimate and they are not. That is why we've created this bill called the Surveillance Accountability Act. This was conceived by Naomi Brockwell of the Ludlow Institute. We've been working on it for years. It's got the right provisions in it so that it doesn't impede legitimate law enforcement activity. And it's long needed. It closes these loopholes that I've explained to you.
Starting point is 00:30:24 And more importantly, it creates a private right of action. You know, you can sue state employees of the government, but it's almost impossible to sue federal government employees if they infringe on your constitutional rights. So we put that, that's the second half of this bill. It gives you the right to sue the government, the government employee. And this is one of the most frustrating things I've run into since I've been in Congress. No accountability. I'll tell you what, we'll have accountability if when somebody goes to work, it's not just fun and games.
Starting point is 00:30:57 If they infringe on your rights, on your constitutional rights, they could be privately and personally sued for that. You know, the fundamental thing, if I was in Congress, the thing that I would push for, because I think it goes back, to the middle of the 20th century when you look at this. And that is the Supreme Court decision that said, well, AT&T, you know, of course, AT&T is going to do whatever the federal government wanted them to do, because they had a government-granted monopoly on long-distance service. And so they said, you know, those are your records. And if we want to get David's phone records, since that belongs to you,
Starting point is 00:31:38 you can just give it to us. and the Supreme Court went with that fiction. Now, it'd be very easy to fix that. And if they did that, that would undercut so much of this stuff. I mean, we're talking about going in and getting records from all of these different businesses, all different types of things, just go in, and they just intimidate the people who are there, strong-armed them. And if it's a large corporation, they're probably doing business with the federal government.
Starting point is 00:32:04 And so they're not going to want to damage that relationship. So what they really need to do, and they have this in terms of medical records, for example. There's all kinds of prohibitions in terms of doctors and hospitals giving out somebody's medical records. You could make the same argument, well, hey, you were doing business voluntarily with this hospital or with this doctor, and anything that they know about you, that's really their information. If they want to hand over this information that belongs to that doctor in that hospital, they can do it. No, we have prohibitions against that. There ought to be prohibitions against all of this sharing by corporations with the government
Starting point is 00:32:42 because it all violates your privacy. That's the bottom line, I think, with all of it. But it's a good point that he made in terms of how dishonest these different bills are. We've got a privacy bill, they call it, which violates your privacy. You've got a Bank Secrecy Act because there's not going to be any secrecy with the banks. You've got the Patriot Act and so forth. Everything that they do is a lie. You want to say something, Lance?
Starting point is 00:33:07 I was just going to say at the time, when are they going to say that attorney client privilege is something that an attorney could just sell? That's right. That's right. Yeah. Or just give it away, right? You know, hey, you know, I know you'd like to please the government. So you want to give us all that information from your client that we gave you? Yeah, it'd be like if Zuckerberg started a lawyer service where, sure, you can get free lawyer, free legal representation.
Starting point is 00:33:35 You just have to give up all your attorney-client privilege. Yeah, that's right. It really is. It's all based on that. That is the, all this stuff really is the fruit of that poisonous decision about the phone company owning your data. Well, the House Freedom Caucus members say they are unsatisfied of the current language being discussed. The bill includes language that a section by section summary argued complements existing law by restarting, I'm sorry, restating existing four. Amendment protections for Americans whose communications may be swept up as they speak with foreign
Starting point is 00:34:10 targets. It also requires queries of Americans to be reviewed by the Civil Liberties Protection Officer at the office of the Director of National Intelligence on a monthly basis. Let me just say, that is nothing but a head fake. You know, the whole idea of even having, it's very similar to what they did with the FISA court itself, which is nothing but a Star Chamber. Anytime you've got a situation where they can surveil you, start investigating you, and you don't even know it. They don't have to get a warrant for any of this kind of stuff. And that's what's happening with these secret courts. We do not want secret courts. When you look at these no-fly list, things like that, the fact that the government can set these
Starting point is 00:34:55 things up, you know, that was the very first report that I did when I went to Info Wars. It was a guy who was flying to see his wife who was in the military, and she was in Japan. And he was flying on a military plane. And he was somebody who was part of his work had been vetted by the TSA because he worked in an airport. He had been vetted for gun carry and other things like that. And he's flying to see her in Japan.
Starting point is 00:35:22 He gets to Hawaii. He changes planes there. He gets on the plane. It's about to take off. And all of a sudden, they stop the plane. federal agents come on and say, you come with us. You can't fly. You're on the no-fly list.
Starting point is 00:35:35 They stranded him in Hawaii. We don't have an airplane to get out of it. What's he going to do, catch a freighter or something to try to get out of Hawaii? Fortunately for him, he was able to get to some media outlets like ours and he was able to get some publicity. And some people in the military helped him out. But he could never, I talked to him after he came back stateside. He was never able to find. out why he was put on that list or how to get off of it. This is why we have so much of the due
Starting point is 00:36:06 process aspects that are in the Bill of Rights to know what you were charged with, to be able to confront your accusers, to have an open and a fair trial. Everything the government does, whenever they're talking about being national security, it's always hidden, it's always secret. And we can see the fruit of that kind of activity when we look at the bioweapon atrocities that were being done by our own government against American people, Lyme disease and other things I talked about yesterday. So the section by section outline says the bill would renew Section 702 for three years, which is longer than they had originally talked about. They'd originally talked about one and a half years.
Starting point is 00:36:48 Then the House Freedom Caucus stops it. So then they put together another bill and they extend it to three. three years, double the amount of time that the original one was going to be there. And so no reforms, because Trump doesn't want any reforms. He wants a police state. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said he was satisfied that the bill did not include a warrant requirement, something he said would grind the process to a halt. Let me just say, we don't want to have warp speed due process, right?
Starting point is 00:37:24 the whole point of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to have a process, which, yes, of course, that's going to slow down what the government does. That is by design, just like it's going to slow things down if we've got to actually have a debate and discussion about whether or not we're going to go to war. We should pause and think about some of these things. But everybody, oh, let's just grease it through. We heard the same thing from Mike Johnson, the traitor of the house. He was out there saying, I played the clip where he said, Warrants, we can't do warrants. We don't need no stinking badges, right? Think how long this would take us. Whether they're talking about the actions of Trump's Gestapo ICE or whether they're talking about FISA, they don't want to have any warrants. That's too much work. That would slow things down.
Starting point is 00:38:13 We've got to do this at warp speed. And, of course, warp speed is how so many people were injured and killed because we didn't take the time to do any tests. So I talked about this briefly yesterday, but James Tolerico, I got another clip I wanted to play for you. He is really doubling down. I don't know how he thinks this is going to help him in Texas. And I look at this guy who was out there twisting and perverting the Bible saying that God is non-binary. And as I said, when I played the clip, the other clip yesterday, I said, well, you know, they're all about people's preferred pronouns.
Starting point is 00:38:51 Maybe you ought to go with God's preferred pronouns. God's preferred pronouns are he and him, but he doesn't care about that. So here's what he had to say when he was on with Jake Tapper. National Republican Senate Committee is already highlighting comments that you've made. You better believe they will. For example, they're highlighting this. God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. There isn't any in between.
Starting point is 00:39:22 It's non-binary. What is your response? response to them using that and explain what you were talking about? Well, I understand that that comment is a little provocative. I said it on the House floor when the extremists in the Republican legislature were picking on school kids who were different. But I don't think it's controversial. That's false as well. Most Christians would acknowledge that God is beyond gender. In fact, the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Galatians said that in Christ, there is neither male nor female.
Starting point is 00:39:58 And so if someone's got a problem with that statement, they shouldn't take it up with me. They should take it up with the Apostle Paul. Well, yeah, God's going to take that up with you. That is such a juvenile understanding of what was being said there. What he was talking about was the differences between different people. He said, God is not a respect to a person. He doesn't care if you're Jewish or Gentile. He doesn't care for you're male or female.
Starting point is 00:40:22 He doesn't care if you're a slave or free. God is not a slave, right? He wasn't talking about, if you look at the context, it's amazing how he took that out of context. He's going to a seminary. I looked up this seminary. It's the Presbyterian Church of America. This is the liberal mainline Presbyterian Church.
Starting point is 00:40:41 They've split twice since then. They had a split, the early part of the 20th century. They created the people who split off from it, created the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And then you had another split in the middle of the 20th century. century, again, away from the PCA, is they kept going to the left. Other people said, no, no, we're not going to go that direction. So they created PC USA, I think, is what it is. I'm not Presbyterian, but it's amazing. It all began, interestingly enough, the reason they had these splits in the early 20th century was because the Presbyterian seminaries were saying,
Starting point is 00:41:13 we can't trust God's word, right? It's not infallible. And so that's the path they went down. And now they're going out there and grabbing little bits and pieces, pulling them out. This is the worst contextual violation I've ever seen, the kind of nonsense that he's putting out there. It absolutely is nonsense. But he's also said that posting the Ten Commandments is violence. It's hateful. Maybe it's because he is so intent on violating the Ten Commandments that he sees it as violence. but he is storing up wrath.
Starting point is 00:41:51 There's no question about that. He and the Democrats. But again, this is the only thing that really keeps the Republican Party in business at all, I think, is this insanity that's coming from the Democrats. So he says, I don't think it's controversial, theological to say this. Well, again, that reflects on the seminary that he's going to. As I said earlier, Trump has only eight days left to make up his mind about Iran. And supposedly, they're then going to get serious about the law.
Starting point is 00:42:25 They've never been serious about the Constitution and declaring war because they decided that they didn't want to go with the Constitution and say that Congress would declare war. They created the War Powers Act. And that lets the president do whatever he wants to for 60 days. But that time is nearly up. And I don't expect that they're going to do anything. to call him back in line with that as well. Meanwhile, in London, when we look at the real threat to our countries, is really the open border.
Starting point is 00:42:57 And it's something that Trump doesn't really care to do anything about anymore. When you look at the bringing in people as refugees, he's actually doubled that. They've done a lot in terms of confrontation with people. I think what you see, the so-called immigration enforcement, that Trump is doing, I think, is over the top. And it is far beyond a proportional response to what people have done. There are orderly ways to do this. There are simple ways to do it.
Starting point is 00:43:28 They have decided, like in everything else, Trump wants to be as confrontational as possible. He wants to lay the foundation for police surveillance state. He wants to lay the foundation for IDs and so forth. And so that's where we are right now. But if you look at what is happening in London, this is a warning sign to people. London landlords have been caught advertising their flats for rent, advertising Muslim only. Or they put things like this, for two Muslim boys or for two Muslim girls,
Starting point is 00:44:00 or suitable for Punjabi boy. Now, think about if you were to run an ad to rent something here in America or in London, and you're put in their whites only. Would that fly? That would probably make international news for sure, much more so than this did. As many people are pointing out, and of course, this is really what is given the wind and the sales to the Reform Party in the UK. They said it is disgusting and anti-British.
Starting point is 00:44:33 There would be a national outrage of the table's return if it was whites only, and they're absolutely right about that. It is the two-tier system that they have set up in the UK. Well, they also pointed out the name Muhammad has also been the same. the most popular boys name in England and Wales for two consecutive years, with over 5,000 boys given that name in 2024 alone. So they should have no problem finding renters, I guess. That's the reality of where we are today. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. You're listening to the David Knight Show.
Starting point is 00:45:56 If you like the Eagles, on a dark desert highway, the cars, and Hewley Lewis in the News, you'll love the classic hits channel. at APS Radio. Download our app or listen now at APSRadio.com. Well, we have a couple of interviews that are coming up. The first one we're going to run is an interview that I cut earlier this week. It's a book that was written, not necessarily for somebody who's a seminary student that knows everything like Tala Rico does, but I think it could benefit from this book. The key part, the key purpose of this book was to try to build interest in people.
Starting point is 00:46:37 You know, a lot of people get very mechanical in terms of reading the Bible or they don't understand the context. And so what our guest did was try to come up with a way to approach the Bible that is going to help you to establish a relationship. And something that you'd actually read and not just sit on the shelf and, you know, be in awe of it like Trump uses the Bible when he goes to the thing. He takes a Bible and he holds it up. He doesn't open it up, but he just holds it up in the air. But before we do, and then after that, we've got an interview coming up with an individual who is trying to get permit to do a large copper mine in Alaska. And we're going to talk about the obstacles to that and how the Trump administration is actually working against what it wants to do in terms of manufacturing. Yes, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with manufacturing, especially with mining and things like that.
Starting point is 00:47:32 But anything that whenever you do something, whenever you build something, whenever you mine something, there's going to be some risk that there might be some pollution or something like that. But there's also an opportunity for you to do it the right way. And yet we have seen the pendulum swing too far, I think, to one side. So we're going to talk to him about the struggle that he's going through. And I think it's a very interesting commentary on where this country is and the problems that we're seeing. But before we do, I just... just want to mention some of the people who have supported the broadcast.
Starting point is 00:48:06 It's a short list. It won't take too long. And thank them for supporting us. We're still not quite up to 75%, or three quarters on the gas gauge. But I just wanted to thank some of the people who have contributed on Zell and on Cash App. On Zell, we have Michael P. Actually, we've got two Michael P's, a different last name, of course. One of them said, well, this is for the Mark Levine impersonation. you did. And I don't really do Mark Levin well, unless I'm really in a nasty mood. I've got to
Starting point is 00:48:39 have the right kind of approach because it just comes across as such a nasty person. He used to always, I would hear him on the Rush Limbaugh show back in the day when I'd be in the car. And Rush always called him the great one. And I used to say even back then, I said, yeah, but the way you spell that is G-R-A-T-E. Because I always found Mark Levin to be very grating in terms of his whining the way he speaks, but especially what he had to say. So again, Michael P. And there's two different Michael P's. Raymond G.
Starting point is 00:49:15 Susan L. Thank you, Susan. Brandon M. Scott L. Darrell L. And Darrell is a new contributor. I've not seen his name before. And Sally D.
Starting point is 00:49:27 And then we have one contributor who has given us some money on Cash App is a very generous contribution. Dave B. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. So without any further delay, we're going to go to our interviews. Defending the American Dream. You're listening to the David Knight Show. If you like the Eagles, on a dark desert highway,
Starting point is 00:52:29 the cars, and Huey Lewis in the news, love the classic hits channel at APS Radio. Download our app or listen now at APSRadio.com. Well, joining us now is Tim Mulgrew, and he's the author of a book, The Story of Us. It's really about helping people to read the Bible, to find it in a way that is open and engaging. We've got a lot of people who are looking with interest, and I've heard a lot of celebrity
Starting point is 00:52:59 stories about people like Tim Allen. I'm going through the whole Bible, you know, and it truly is amazing, he says. But, you know, how do we do that? I've tried in the past. I've tried the annual Bible reading thing. and it got to be very mechanical and it really was counterproductive. There's different ways to look at it. So we're going to talk to Tim about his suggestions.
Starting point is 00:53:19 We have a lot of people, as I said, they're looking at this. We've got Bible sales are jumping. And yet we don't see that reflected in society. We don't see that reflected in our lives in many cases. And so we're going to talk to him about what his suggestions are. Thank you for joining us, Tim. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Starting point is 00:53:37 You know, it was always important to talk about this. You talk about the fact that sometimes we look at the Bible as an idol. What do you mean by that? Well, it's interesting because in the book, I say, you know, how many people have actually thrown an old worn out Bible in the trash? We kind of feel funny about that. Even non-believers feel funny about throwing a Bible in the trash. What it basically means is we elevate the book itself to be more than,
Starting point is 00:54:10 and just bound paper put together in a nice envelope for our convenience. Yeah. And so before we ever get started, let me jump in here for a second. It's like, what that reminds me of is Trump, you know, when he walks in, he walks in, in he just holds a Bible. I was like, look, I got this thing, you know, and it's like, it's like a relic, you know. Right. I've got the holy hand grenade here.
Starting point is 00:54:32 Yeah. Instead of like, well, open it up and read it. What does it say? My whole thing is that it's better to understand what the Bible says than to, you know, simply read it or as most people just own it. Yeah. But we make the Bible, the book itself, to be an idol. And then we basically are harming our chances of ever understanding it because we're thinking too highly, not of what the Bible is, but the book itself. Now, your title, The Book of Us, well, I look at that, I had a question about that as well, because, you know, Jesus said, well, you look, you search the scriptures because then you think you have eternal life and yet they testify of me.
Starting point is 00:55:17 And that is one of the reasons, one of the things that I look at, what does this tell me about Christ? But it's really, what does it tell me about Christ and his relationship with me? And so how do you see that? So the book of us, it's kind of a play on words like the book of Acts, the book of Romans. So generally I'm looking at the book, the Bible, as a whole book. And trying to discover in there the human nature. In other words, you know, why did God think it was so important to capture all of these different events through history and all these different people, preserve them for thousands of years, for me to read today.
Starting point is 00:56:01 Yeah, that's right. So when you go through and in the latter half of my book, I write each of the 66 books of the Bible. There's a summary there that talks about what the human nature, the human behavior is. God basically wrote the Bible to us for us. He doesn't need a Bible himself to tell him how to be God. So it's clearly written for us.
Starting point is 00:56:28 but, you know, if we can't find the relevance, then really it's just anecdotal history of something that happened to people a couple thousand years ago and why should I care now, right? Yes, yes. So the idea is to find ourselves in it. That's right. And when I look at it, you know, that is a key thing. If you see yourself in that, look at how that person reacted that. Am I like that, you know, that type of thing? Well, we are our own favorite subject, right?
Starting point is 00:56:55 That's right. That's right. It's kind of funny because we look at it and I've often thought about the Bible. You know, when there's so few physical descriptions of anyone or anything, right? There's a couple of vague descriptions. It's like, you know, David has got as ruddy, you know, whatever that means. You have red hair. Does he have like a reddish complexion or something? What does that exactly mean? It's a little bit ambiguous. But, and he might talk about Saul being really tall or something like that. But that's the first thing that humans will do. do is focus on the appearance, right? You'll get a big description of the setting that's there. You'll get a description of what that person looks like, what they're wearing. And yet, that's not the way God puts this together. We see people unfold in terms of the way that they interact with each other and with them. Right. Yeah. Right. If it was intended to be a historical account, they would have given us a lot more information. But they give us enough to turn our
Starting point is 00:57:56 imaginations on. And the idea then is to picture yourself in that scene. I always tell people when I'm teaching class that every time you hear Israelites or the Pharisees or any of the what we think of as villains in the Bible, you're supposed to put your name there because there's a lesson to be learned. And the lesson is more important to learn what happens to you and your behavior versus what happened to somebody thousands of years ago that you can't relate to. Yeah, that's a good point here. You talk about it not really being set up in a long timeline. And, of course, that's something that can be very difficult to do if you try to read it in
Starting point is 00:58:37 chronological order because the books are not even laid out in the Bible in a chronological order. So, like, you know, so what is the, you know, this prophet, when did he live, you know, was this, were they in captivity or was, you know, who was the king and what was it like in the times that he was writing. That can become kind of challenging actually to try to put it into a timeline, but that's not really the point. You point out that it's written in a circular Eastern style. What do you mean by that? So Western style writing is what you're referring to. That's what we're accustomed to. It's basically what I would call it data dump. Fact, fact, fact, fact, you put the facts in your head and then you're supposed to figure out when to use them. But remember that
Starting point is 00:59:22 the Bible is written to be timeless. Eastern-style writing is more, you're supposed to experience what you're reading. Put yourself in that scene because we remember experiences and we can apply experiences in our day-to-day walk without remembering what particular passage it was from. We learn and pick up the lesson behind it and that's a usable thing. That's what makes the Bible alive. Yeah, that's right. It also makes it very relevant to us. That's right. And I think a big part of that, too, is when we look at this, you know, when we talk about a daily Bible reading plan, you know, and that's fine. But I tend to think of that as something that you do kind of at the start. Maybe if you didn't grow up in a church or
Starting point is 01:00:08 something and you don't have this kind of a background, you're trying to get what we call when we do homeschooling or classical education, we call that kind of the grammar stage, right? You're just accumulating facts and, you know, you're like multiplying, memorizing the multiplication tables or something like that. It's hard. It's not necessarily very interesting, just accumulating facts. But it's necessary to have some of that, because without that, you can't start putting the bigger picture together, right? And so typically when they'll talk about classical education, I'll talk about grammar, then they'll talk about a logic stage, and then they'll talk about a rhetoric stage. And so at each of these stages, you're starting to
Starting point is 01:00:45 put this together. But it's not simply an academic exercise when we are Christians. You know, things are happening in our life all the time. And God is teaching us through those things that happen in our life. And so it's kind of a mixture of the academic and the experience. And a lot of times, I remember when I was very young, I would read the Psalms and it's like, this is the most boring stuff. I didn't like it at all. But now, you know, you go back as you're older and you've experienced these things that David was writing about or whoever was writing that particular psalm. And it's like, yeah, yeah, that happened to me too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's, of course, what we find is that, you know, Solomon said there's nothing new under the sun, and that still
Starting point is 01:01:25 holds true today, when you can understand and see the experience that the Bible is talking about and relate to the message rather than getting hung up on the details. So you're describing what I call milk, bread, and meat. Most Christians don't ever really get past the milk phase. They read the Bible through in a year. I remember, read the Bible through in 82 was a big thing, you know, back in 1982. And there's always these gimmicks to get us to read the Bible. Well, it's interesting that a Christian should need a gimmick to read the very word that God has for them. But we do. You know, we're human and we have lots and lots of interest in life. But you're right. it's a good idea to go through the Bible, cover to cover, as a lot of people say.
Starting point is 01:02:20 But, you know, the problem with a program that has a beginning and an end is that's how we also tend to read, right? I started this, the book of Romans, so I need to finish the book of Romans. And so my goal is to finish the book, not to understand the book, right? Yeah, that's right. So you start with a passage and then you finish that passage and you go on to the next passage, but you don't have any idea what that passage means. So why go to another passage? It's just a passage like the passage you were on, right?
Starting point is 01:02:53 In other words, we're always in a hurry to finish. That's really what Western style is, has a beginning and an end. Whereas scripture doesn't have a beginning or an end. It always speaks to us. So the whole idea is to stop those habitual programs and say, I want to know what God has to say to me. That's what I'm interested in. That's why I'm reading the Bible.
Starting point is 01:03:15 Not because it's a duty or an obligation. I'm a Christian, so I have to say, yes, I've read the Bible 15 times. What good is it to read it if you don't understand it, right? That's right. If you picked up a novel, you would read it the same way, right? You'd be interested in the characters and the story and how it develops. And, you know, Hollywood teaches us to fall in love with the character so that we feel emotions as the story plays out.
Starting point is 01:03:40 And yeah, they kind of spoon-feed the whole thinking process to us, but we fall in love with different things that we can identify with. But we don't read our Bibles that way. We like a textbook, and nobody likes textbooks. That's right, yeah. And I'll read, I guess one of the things that I've found is I'll go through it and there'll be something that, wow, what does that mean? You know, really strange.
Starting point is 01:04:03 And that's been the time when I really would, would get something that would really hit me deeply. Because I'd sit there and I'd focus on it for several days. I'd be just stop right there. As you point out, don't just keep reading, you know, stop and figure, well, what was that about? And if you dig deep on that, and if you look at it, and I would do different things like, you know, read different translations. And sometimes I'd get, you know, different commentaries or whatever, but you pray about it. And after a while, you start to see it.
Starting point is 01:04:33 And you start to see it in your own life as well. It really is kind of interesting to stop on one particular thing that you don't understand and focus on that. I think that's a very rewarding thing. It is. Without getting too granular on a particular passage, you have to keep it in context as well. And you talk about that as well. Talk about context a bit.
Starting point is 01:04:55 That's important. We, you know, we, in fact, I have a couple more books in progress here, and I was just writing about that earlier today, we tend to love our legalism. And legalism goes through and it picks out certain pieces of scripture and says, there's a rule. We need to enforce that rule, right? But it's completely out of context. When you roll up to the 30,000 foot level and you look at what's being talked about,
Starting point is 01:05:23 it's not a rule at all. It's never intended. We drive people away from Christianity because they say, I don't want to have to follow a list of do's and don'ts and a bunch of rule books and all that stuff. But that's not at all what Scripture is. And that's the point I think most Christians are missing because we drill down. We find one little statement and we hang our head on it without understanding in context what the writer was talking about. That's right.
Starting point is 01:05:50 Yeah. And that happens all over Scripture. That's right. As some people said, a text without a context is simply a pretext for what you're reading into it. And I think that's really true. And, you know, we look at it, many times we'll look at it if we say, you know, what is this telling me I've got to do right now? And it's not really about that.
Starting point is 01:06:11 It's really about your relationship with God. It's not about a list of things to do to be approved by God. That's how Christianity is different from every other religion. Every other religion is like, well, you do this, this and this. And then you get this at the end as a result. Christ's message is you can't do that. I'm going to give you some standards here that are impossible to meet. Now, there's going to be some things that if you do them, your life is going to be better.
Starting point is 01:06:36 You're going to get blessings instead of curses in this life and just natural reaping what you sow, good or bad. And so there's that aspect of it. But ultimately, our approval with God is based on what Christ has done. That's the Christian message. Right. But we would rather earn our way into heaven. way we have control over it, right? Nobody likes charity.
Starting point is 01:07:02 The Bible says, if you approach this on your own terms, you won't make it. That's right. Because God is the one in charge. Yet, isn't it funny that we're still trying to do things to earn our way, even though the Bible tells us it's impossible. That's right. That's our human tendency. So, you know, my book is really about understanding what our.
Starting point is 01:07:28 our human behaviors are, what our tendencies are, and we are the same as they were thousands of years ago. This is a pattern. It's recognizable. So if we can recognize it and we can control our behavior rather than trying to control scripture, we'll probably get a lot more out of scripture than we ever, ever did before. That's right. Yes. You're talking about memorizing scripture without understanding it. And again, this is another one of these things like grammar school level. You know, it's one of the things that we would do with our kids when they're very young. You'd get them to memorize certain Bible passages. And there's a value to that, just like you need to be able to memorize the multiplication table or you're not going to be able to do
Starting point is 01:08:13 a higher level math. Same thing is true with that. And, you know, part of it is, you know, hiding God's word in your heart so that it comes back at times. And it will do that. It will come back so that you understand it at that point in time when it's actually something that you're going through. Yeah. Well, the problem is that we start to take pride in the fact that we've memorized all of these different things. But if we don't understand the message, how do we know when to pull them out and use them? That's right. That's right.
Starting point is 01:08:44 My word is a light into my path and a lamp into my feet. Okay, well, I'm having an argument with my spouse. How does that come in handy? Right? We don't, we're not understanding the message that's there. And to me, it's more important to understand the way to be than what to do right and wrong, right? That's right. Yes.
Starting point is 01:09:08 So, you know, when you talk about textbook human behavior, what do you mean about that throughout the Old Testament? So it works a lot like medicine. In medicine, they gather a whole bunch of people that have the same symptoms. And then they try these different medical. to figure out, hey, anytime we see this group of people and we give them this, it works. And that's kind of how medicine works. It's trial and error. You talk about human behavior.
Starting point is 01:09:34 Our human behavior basically is entirely predictable. When you look at how the Israelites behaved towards God in the earliest of days, I mean, straight out of God pulling them away from the Egyptians. they're hanging out waiting for Moses to come down the hill and where they do they make a golden calf why because they want something tangible to worship and that's that's the struggle we have we have we need to look touch and feel having a god that we can't touch with our hands is difficult for us to actually truly commit our entire lives to so we have this tendency to create things that's like making your Bible an idol we can even make God an idol
Starting point is 01:10:22 You can make your family an idol. It's not that the Bible and the family and these things are bad things. It's that they are getting in the way of a true, pure relationship with God. And so anything that does that is an idol. But we've been taught to think that it's a golden calf or a piece of wood or a stone or something you put on their dashboard or these types of things, but that's not it at all. It's anything. Good things.
Starting point is 01:10:51 Most of the time, people's good things are an idol. And it just prevents you from having a true relationship with God. What is it that God wants? When we talk about restoration, what are we being restored to? We know what we're being restored from, but what is it we're being restored to? Well, if you go in the early pages of Genesis, God walked in the cool of the morning with Adam and Eve. They hung out together. They talked.
Starting point is 01:11:21 Could you imagine walking and talking with God all day, all night, you know, hearing everything he has to say? This is what God wants to restore us, too, the ability to have that kind of a relationship with him. Yes. But that's not what we do. We walk down the aisle. We say the sinner's prayer. We convince ourselves that we're saved. We read our Bible.
Starting point is 01:11:43 We go to church on Sundays. And then we're waiting to die, basically, before we'll get to use. are Christianity. And that's not the message of the Bible at all. The message is reconciliation and restoration today so that you can have the relationship now. And scripture is all about the relationship with God, not the inheritance that comes at the end of the road. Yes, yes. It's kind of like the lady, the woman at the well, right? The Samaritan woman at the well. And Jesus said, if you knew who you were talking to, you ask me. It's like you're missing out on something. really important here. And immediately, you know, when he tells her some things about her past,
Starting point is 01:12:26 and it amazes her, and it's like, whoa, you're a prophet. Okay, let's talk about religion now. And so she starts talking about, you know, where is you Jews worship God in Jerusalem, but Samaritan's worship in Mount Garrison and whatever. And so let's talk about something different. Let's make this a little bit distance, right? It's a little bit too personal and up close when she does And I think we can wind up doing that as well. You know, we can, whoa, this is, I'm looking at all the different mistakes that you're talking about. We see this as a reading through it.
Starting point is 01:12:59 And, of course, time is compressed quite a bit when you're reading the story. But, you know, you see these amazing things happen and people are walking really well with God. And then all of a sudden, they just go into different directions like, how in the world could they do that? And then you look at your own life, you'd say, how did I do that? You know? That's exactly right.
Starting point is 01:13:18 We fall through the same things. Well, we don't like pointing the finger our direction, did we? That's right. And that's kind of why we're resistant to reading the Bible that way, because it really does make us point the finger at ourselves. It's so much better. When you read through the first part of Romans, Paul starts off and he talks about all the bad things non-believers do and how they behave.
Starting point is 01:13:44 But as soon as you get to chapter two, he says, now I'm talking to you people who are believers. And the crime is bigger. Why? Because you know better. They don't know better. You do. And yet you still choose to behave this way. So we don't like that. We're happy to point our finger and other people and say, you know, look at all the bad things these other people do. That's why we love the Pharisees and the Israelites and all that in scripture, because it's somebody else. Yeah. That's why I say, replace that with your own name and see how that reads. And it's close to home.
Starting point is 01:14:23 That's right. It's not challenged by it. You're never going to break down the walls that are separating your relationship with God. God is there. We're the ones that opt to stay away from him. Like you said, the woman at the well, well, I don't like the idea that you know all the husbands I've had, but let's talk about what the Jews do, right? Yeah. It's just the same thing.
Starting point is 01:14:47 That's a human behavior, you see, that you just picked up. And that's exactly what we do. Yeah. Yeah, let's argue doctrine. And we can push us off a little bit further out than my personal life here. That's right. A little bit too close and personal to talk about that. That's right.
Starting point is 01:15:03 Well, we hate to think it, but we do love our sin. Mm-hmm. Because we have the power in us to never sin again and to live the rest of our life perfectly because that's the power of the Holy Spirit. We just don't want to. It's very unpopular to think that way, but we choose to sin, and we choose the sins we like.
Starting point is 01:15:28 They're not forced on us. That's right. That's right. Yeah, it wouldn't be a temptation if it wasn't something we liked. That's right. Pleasurable. That's right. You talk about, as we're talking about sin,
Starting point is 01:15:39 you talk about the age of abandonment. What do you mean by that? So as we approach the end times, which of course everybody thinks is tomorrow, they've been thinking that for 2,000 years, there's these different phases where we see God less and less. If we look at kind of our society today, and you relate it back to like the 1950s, you know, when married couples slept in separate beds and, you know, there's all of this. these different levels of morality, and you say, where has all the morality gone? What we see is that God is really giving us that free will, he promised us. He's really allowing us to decide what we think we want in our lives. Because we're not choosing to follow him voluntarily, he's saying,
Starting point is 01:16:38 okay, if you think you know better, then let's see you go out and try. And what that's supposed to do is drive us back to him to say, I tried it and I failed. You know, please forget about forgiveness because that's just something we throw around. I want to be reconciled again. I don't want my own will. That's what the age of abandonment is about. It's about people who are becoming a little too high and mighty, if you will, thinking that we don't need God. Our whole premise as humans is to find anything that is not God. We don't like answering to anybody, much less somebody we can't see, touch and feel. So God is like one of those parents who their children are bound and determined to do something that the parent knows is bad for them, but the parent is going to say,
Starting point is 01:17:32 okay, if that's what you really think you want, I'm going to let you do that, and we'll see how it works out. And that's kind of the age that we're in now. And you can find in scripture that as the end time approaches, this is really easily identifiable in those passages. Yes. And that's where we are now. Well, I often think of the prodigal son story, right, about the guy who goes out and lives this spendthrift life. And the father gives him his inheritance, lets him go, and, you know, winds up learning the lesson that is there. And I've often heard that offered out as a, you know, an example to people are not Christians, but not too many people want to talk about it from the standpoint of the fact that he's already his father, you know, when this happens. And so this is kind of,
Starting point is 01:18:24 he's talking about it. It's like, well, I'm going to go off on my own and try this. And yet the message is that God is long-suffering, and you're going to be long-suffering until you return to him. So it's a good example about how I think, you know, the father does not disown him, and he's ready to accept him, but the guy's got to come to the end of himself and realize that that's really what he needs. Right, right, that his father wasn't his enemy. He was really his best friend. That's right.
Starting point is 01:18:55 Which is the message that we have with God. We like to call on God when things in our world get too big for us. But we don't really like to call on him for the things we have under control. And I always say, and I said it in the book several times that, you know, we're made in the image of God. And so we misuse that much the way Lucifer did, where we create and become gods of our own little worlds. We pick and choose who's there, who's not, what happens, what doesn't happen. And then any time it gets a little bit bigger than us, well, then we turn to the big guns, right? But we don't do that on a daily regular basis.
Starting point is 01:19:35 We're not in a constant state of prayer, as Scripture tells us. We are a call on him one we need him. And the rest of the thing, I'll take care of it. And we often say that, well, I don't want to bother God with all the little details, as if he couldn't handle them, right? That's right, yeah. I'll save the big stuff for him. I'll wait until I really screw it up, and then I'll bring him in.
Starting point is 01:19:57 and then I can blame him when it goes wrong. Yeah. And then you're missing out on a lot of stuff because God does inherit those little small details in our life if we actually involve him in that. So, yeah, absolutely. And he can use, God wastes absolutely nothing. And if we understand that when we read scripture and we understand that when we experience a relationship with him, you know that nothing is wasted. Even bad things are used for good, right? That's right.
Starting point is 01:20:24 That's right. Yeah, that's one of the things Karen really. taught me, you know, she'll call on gun for the smallest thing. I need a parking space over here. I can't find my keys or whatever. And then you see God right away. You know, when you turn to God, one of my favorite passages is this guy who's a king and he gets, something happens to his foot. And the Bible just kind of summarizes that he went to a doctor. So he died. You didn't ask God. So he died. He'd rather go to a doctor and get a solution there rather than that. and then going to ask God.
Starting point is 01:20:58 And that's one of the things we say all the time is that we hear people say, not only as you pointed out, well, that's, I don't want to bother God with all the small details. He's got too much in his hands. Or we'll say, well, I guess there's nothing left now to do, but to pray about it. That's right. The last resort, okay, this is my Hail Mary that is coming in at this point. And it's like, that's, that's, that's the prodigal son.
Starting point is 01:21:24 I came, I've come to the end of myself. now I've got to turn back to God. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, you know, you talked about the age of abandonment. And, of course, we were told that people will become in the last days, people become lovers of themselves. And that's really what we're looking at here.
Starting point is 01:21:39 But there's something that's a little bit hopeful. And some of the stats that you've got here, there's in your email. You talk about the fact that we have, and I just saw an article about this as well. There are a lot more young men that are very very. investigating and looking into the Bible, you know, curious about it, then there are women, which is kind of interesting at this point. I think always in the past we have seen when there was a time of revival, it would kind of be mentioned that, you know, God would turn the hearts of the fathers towards their
Starting point is 01:22:12 children. I always looked at that and I thought, well, I wonder if that is a sign of revival, or maybe as to the extent that always in the past, it was kind of assumed that the women would be thinking about the welfare of their children. now that's not happening as much as it is men. So I don't know. How do you read that? Do you see that as a hopeful thing, the fact that we've got a lot more men?
Starting point is 01:22:35 I mean, it's good when anybody of any sex is looking for God, but it's something that is unusual in our time. We have not usually seen this in the past. Yeah, and I think that what society has done is really erased men as, as, as, and as anything important. And men have lost their identity, and they've lost their honor and their respect and their hard work ethics and all those types of things.
Starting point is 01:23:07 And we've been neutralized, if you will. And I think what we see is more men are seeking truth because they're starting to pay attention. You know, as the politics and all that start ebbing and flowing, you know, pro this, anti that. The question is, well, what's real anymore? That's what we really need to know. What's real?
Starting point is 01:23:31 What can I hang my hat on? That's right. And men who've lost their identity want a true identity. They don't want to create a fake one. And I think a lot of that drives their desire to say, well, let's try this God thing, because I haven't tried that. So, you know, you see this resurgence, and particularly in the college. and all that, which is very interesting because, you know, they always say if you want to indoctrinate a society, you start very young.
Starting point is 01:24:02 You know, I remember in elementary school they were teaching us how smoking was bad, even though, you know, in fifth grade, I never thought about smoking. But it was an indoctrination. They're trying to stop it before it happens, right? And so now you see these young men who have gone through, and they don't even know which bathroom to use anymore. and now all of a sudden they're in college and they're like, hey, I need to grow up now and, you know, be somebody. I need to think about raising a family and getting a career or all this, but I don't even know who I am anymore. And society has kind of eliminated the male as being something good. It's been looked at as a bad thing for such a long time that nobody wants to be one anymore.
Starting point is 01:24:45 I agree. But, you know, short of surgery, you don't have a whole lot of choice, right? You are what God made you. So can we make something of ourselves and can it be the best that we can be? And the answer, of course, is yes. It's just going to take a different way of thinking instead of jumping on the bandwagon with the world. We need to do what God does go anti-world. My ways are not your ways.
Starting point is 01:25:10 My thoughts are not your thoughts. And basically restore the dignity of being male. It's not that it's superior. but it is equally important at least, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, basically what the world has done, I think, and it is a kind of adversity, you know, people turning to God out of adversity.
Starting point is 01:25:31 Of course, that can be a lot of different things. It can be your health, economics, it can be society in general. But in this particular case, I think there's a tremendous amount of adversity because society has decided that they're going to take away the role of man and give it to women.
Starting point is 01:25:47 And so, So now what do I do, right? I can't get into this college because they won't even let me in. They're going to give preference to a woman with this or whatever or into a job. And so it creates a real system of adversity. As you point out, people are looking for the meaning in their life. You know, where can I find meaning in this? And whatever kind of adversity we're going through, whether it's individually or, you know, collectively
Starting point is 01:26:12 or a group of people that are suffering from this adversity, it is something that is always, that's the kind of thing that actually can be a real blessing in disguise. Right, right. Well, once we start to recognize that God's structure in the Bible talks about the man being responsible for the head of his household, and society is reversing that. Why? Because society always is looking for the anti-God way of doing things.
Starting point is 01:26:42 That's right. Because that's, again, our human nature. Our human nature is to stand on our own two feet. and we don't need anybody, and we certainly don't need a God. And so these are the kinds of things. Well, if God's principle is to make the male the head of the household, let's undo that. Let's emasculate the male and, you know, take that out of the equation because that's anti-God. And anything that's anti-God is seen as good, because in the end times, good is bad and bad is good, right?
Starting point is 01:27:10 Well, do that and see that. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. So who did you say this book is for? of you were going to encapsulate this. You know, there's a lot of what I said earlier about label Christians, people who have done the minimum requirements to be a Christian, but they aren't really advancing in their Christianity. So first and foremost, most of it is because they don't understand who they are and
Starting point is 01:27:44 who their God is. And so, understanding and learning how to read scripture the way it's designed to be read helps that kind of person. Then you have stagnant Christians, people who have reached a plateau, either because they've found a level of satisfaction
Starting point is 01:28:03 in their Christianity and they don't really want more, or they've hit the ceiling because, you know, what they've been taught all along is so lightweight milk level and they're really looking for where is the bread, where is the meat in this relationship? Is this really all there is? I found myself in that situation in the early days of my Christianity. I started in my teen years, so I wasn't raised in a Christian home by any means. But I was disillusioned because, you know, they said, all you got to do is walk down
Starting point is 01:28:43 the aisle and invite Jesus into your heart and, you know, then come to church on that day. It's like, wow, is that really all there is to this deal? That seems a little too easy, right? And if it's too good to be true, it probably is. So when you're looking to go deeper and you're looking to understand and you want to figure yourself out and you want to figure out this God thing and you want Christianity to mean something, then the book really speaks to that level as well. But actually, you know, there's a big section in the book that talks about the Bible itself, the history of it, how it's written, how it's designed, where it comes from, and it gives you a solid understanding of the book.
Starting point is 01:29:32 And that alone would cause even a non-believer to say, wow, if all of this is true, there's really something substantive here. This is really something I should try to investigate. Actually, my wife and I, we have a few children who aren't Christians, effectively more than are than are, and encouraging them to read this book, if for no as a reason, to understand what it is they're choosing to not believe in. And so this section that talks about the Bible,
Starting point is 01:30:06 and it's all historical fact, And it's non-religious historical fact. You know, it's archives and histories and these types of things. But written in a way that anybody can understand. So it's not heavy theological. None of my books really are because really what I want to do is talk to the average person, right, in a way that they can understand and appreciate and identify. So in that sense, you know, even a non-believer could read this and say,
Starting point is 01:30:33 well, I had no idea when I read this junk before in my life that it actually was talking about me. And like I said before, me, that's our favorite subject, right? Of course, we want to read all about ourselves. So if we can learn how to do that and see ourselves in Scripture, really the book is for so many different audiences, but for different reasons. Yes. Yeah, you know, it definitely is a history book,
Starting point is 01:31:01 but there's so many other aspects to it as well. You know, when you get into science and you start looking at different things, whether it's astronomy or whether it's microbiology or all these other things, and you start seeing intelligent design, either in the universe. We just had one of the astronauts who came back. And he's an atheist. And he just felt like it was a religious experience for him just to see creation. And, of course, we're told that, you know, day after day and night after night,
Starting point is 01:31:28 it pours out speech, but it doesn't, you know, you don't hear it in words, but you see it that is there. And you know that there is a creator that is behind all of this stuff. And so when you look at it from that standpoint, I found over the years as I would get involved in science or different things like that. It just kept, it's like layers of an onion that kept going back. I remember going to SeaWorld with the kids. And we're looking at the penguins swimming. And they have an observation thing where you're below the water level and you can see them swimming in the water.
Starting point is 01:32:03 And they're actually flying. I thought, yeah, they're actually. flying is just that they're going through a thicker fluid than air is, right? Because, you know, normally you've got to have the, you know, flight is about having a big engine that's going to pull you through the air quickly enough that it's going to increase the effective viscosity of the fluids. So these are, you know, they're flying, but they're flying in the water. And then I thought about that. And I thought, you know, now why would Moses group together the things that fly, the things that swim at the same time? He wasn't an engineer. He wasn't. He wasn't.
Starting point is 01:32:38 wasn't interested in aerodynamics, knew nothing about the science of aerodynamics or fluids or anything of that. So you constantly see these types of things as they come back. If you've read the Bible and you've looked at some of the stuff, it'll come back to you. And it's like, oh, so that's why, you know, God created the things that fly and the things that are now, he classifies them, as a matter of fact, you know. On this day, I create the things that are moving in this way. And on that I create the things that are moving in that way. And it's like, so why would you do that? It's kind of strange classification until you look at it, and then it makes sense.
Starting point is 01:33:16 And so there's things like that that just keep coming back. And when I look at this and you're talking about our relationship with God, and what does it say about us? It made me think to him about the Westminster Confession, which again goes back several hundred years. A lot of people use that. What is the chief end of man? It's to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. Right, right. Well, Solomon came up with the same thing.
Starting point is 01:33:41 Solomon had all the money in the world, all the wisdom in the world, wine, women, and song, all those things. If the head rock music back then, he'd have had that too. He had basically everything. And how does he sum the whole thing up? Yeah. All he says in the end is ultimately all of that was just grasping at the wind. And the only thing of any value whatsoever is just to have a relationship and a respect for God. That's right. Yeah, that's right.
Starting point is 01:34:09 If we can't learn a lesson from the one person who truly did have everything, everything a man ever dreams of, he had it all. Yeah. And yet in the end, he says, it's all worthless. And that's true, because where is all that wealth today? Where is all that gold and silver and all? Nobody knows it evaporated. It went to, you know, different kingdoms, different people.
Starting point is 01:34:33 Who knows we might even be wearing it a ring on our finger? We don't really even know because it wasn't. about the stuff. The stuff was worthless. It was about the relationship with God. That is really the chief end to man. It's actually the chief beginning of man, because once we understand that and we can relate to God, we can actually really live. We live with a lot of fear in our lives, but if we understand that God's in control, what is it we're afraid of? That's right. That's right. And we're not really understanding that, are we? That's right. Try to remind people, with that all the time because I cover the news and the news is just fear-based actually,
Starting point is 01:35:12 you know, you don't see too much that's good news anymore, but there is a good news, but that's pretty much limited to Christ and to God and, you know, glorifying him. In a way, that is enjoying him. It's praising him and glorifying him. So that really is almost redundant there in a sense. Except that as humans, we don't want to hear the good news, do we? That's right. We seem to be drawn to the bad news.
Starting point is 01:35:38 Why is that? You know, that's that another one of those human behaviors. It's anti-God behavior. That's right. Well, it's like, good news. We prefer the bad news. That's right. It's what you were talking about with a, you know,
Starting point is 01:35:51 immediately they get delivered out of Egypt and right away they're building an idol, a golden calf or whatever. And then later on, as you pointed out, they want something that is tangible, that's physical, that they can focus on that's right there. So what do they ask for a king, right? Rather than having God, which. You know, God is not someone that they can look at right there.
Starting point is 01:36:13 So they want to replace him with a king, you know. And so he says to Samuel, they haven't rejected you. They rejected me. That's absolutely true. Even though they were warned. Yeah. What a king would do. That's right.
Starting point is 01:36:26 They said, I don't care. I want him anyway. That's right. Yeah. When I was with a libertarian party, we were doing stuff, that was one passage that they all knew. They said, so, you know, they asked for a king. And they said, so he's going to tax you. he's going to send your young men to war and all the other kind of stuff.
Starting point is 01:36:41 They say, that's what government does. But, of course, it doesn't really appeal to people. You can't really convince them any more than Samuel could convince the Israelites at that point in time. Well, I think we prefer to sit around and complain about our government, don't we? Yeah. It doesn't matter who our government is. We'll find something to complain about. That's right.
Starting point is 01:37:00 And we'll just flip one side to the other back and forth, back and forth. Good kings, bad kings, right? because that's what we do as humans. That's right. Because it's a whole lot better than relying on God. That's right. Yeah, we can lay it off on them. And if it goes bad, it's their fault.
Starting point is 01:37:16 But, of course, there won't be any punishment for them either. Well, it's wonderful talking to you about this. And again, if you are somebody who's out there looking for meaning in your life or you're going through adversity or whatever, we would recommend that you take a look at the Bible. And this is a tool. I think that'll help you to do that wisely and kind of walk alongside of you and give you some pointers and how to understand it and how to really apply it in your life. That's always a good thing.
Starting point is 01:37:48 Of course, you know, God is going to be our teacher. He has promised that. Christ promised the Holy Spirit to Christians to guide them and to teach them. But he's also told us that iron sharpens iron. And so I think this is something, this book, the book of us, I think, something that will really help to sharpen you as well. Again, Tim Mulgrew is the author, and the book is The Book of Us. Thank you so much, Tim. I really appreciate talking to you. It's very interesting. Yeah, thanks for... I love these kind of conversations. Yes, yes, very
Starting point is 01:38:22 important. A very important conversation to have, the one between you and God, and I think that's a key takeaway that you've got in your book. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. You're listening to the David Knight Show. Tell Alexa to add the APS radio skill and have access to the best channels anywhere. From country to blues, classic hits to news. APS Radio curates incredibly diverse playlist for you to enjoy. Get details at APSRadio.com.
Starting point is 01:40:30 Joining us now is the CEO of a company called Pebble. His name is John Shively. And this company is focused, I believe, on copper. At least that's what we're talking about in terms. of this interview, the need for copper. We're talking about the opposition from the Trump administration on this, which is really kind of surprising. We see Donald Trump saying we need to be completely self-sufficient in the United States.
Starting point is 01:40:54 And yet, as we've seen with rare earth and with many other minerals, if we don't have the fundamental building blocks, whether we're talking about copper or aluminum or rare earth, we're not going to be able to build anything because China is going to, if they've got a monopoly, on this, they're going to make it difficult for people domestically to manufacture with that. So we're going to talk about the issues, the general opposition to mining that is faced in the United States with Mr. Shively. So thank you for joining us. Oh, thank you, David. Layout for us a little bit, where we stand in terms of copper. Do we have a lot of copper in the United States? How are we in terms of being able to produce and manufacture that and get it online,
Starting point is 01:41:38 even if we have it in the ground. Where do we stand on that? Well, I think we have plenty of copper in this country. You know, Pebble is the largest undeveloped copper project in the world. But, you know, there's a large resolution in Arizona. There's a large copper deposit up in northern Minnesota and others. So we have the copper we need if we can develop. But I think that, you know, the thing that, you know,
Starting point is 01:42:07 the thing that people need to understand is the role that the Chinese are currently playing in mineral development and particularly mineral processing. There's a study that was done by S&P Global recently that says that by 2040, we'll have a 10 million ton deficit worldwide of copper. And the Chinese have seen this coming for some time. So, you know, they have a whole different way of doing things. You know, if they want a copper processing plant, they build it. If they need more power to run that plant, they build it.
Starting point is 01:42:45 Yeah. They have no processing or no environmental process, no litigation, none of that. And this country, it takes an average of 29 years from when you find a deposit to when you actually can be met with, mining it. We're the second worst in the world. Wow. That's regulatory hang up with that that you're talking about because as you point out in the materials you sent to me, Beijing is doing it in five years. So, you know, it takes a while to actually build something and to exploit it. The rest of that time going between five years and 29 years, the rest of that is in terms of
Starting point is 01:43:27 investigation and approval processes and that type of thing, right? And don't forget litigation, which you can add anywhere from three to ten years. Now, you pointed out in the op-ed piece that you did that was published on Fox, that Donald Trump Jr. opposed this early on. He was concerned about fishing and that sport fishing, I think it was. Tell us a little bit about the site that's there in Alaska. This is one that we're talking about. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:44:01 Actually, I didn't point it out. Fox News conveniently pointed out for me. So, well, first of all, I'm going to talk about that. I think, you know, he has a different view now maybe because of the nations and his dad's emphasis on getting critical minerals so that we can be independent of those. But we sit in a sensitive area. We've always understood that. It's in the Bristol Bay area.
Starting point is 01:44:29 That's the largest sockeye fishery in the world. And we've always known that we needed to be especially concerned about the environment. And so we went through a permitting process back starting in 2017. We got an environmental impact statement that said we can do this project without harming the fish. And then politics got involved. And the Corps of Engineers turned down our permit. But we appealed that decision and won our appeal. That got remanded back to the Corps of Engineers,
Starting point is 01:45:09 but by then the Biden administration had come in. They did nothing with it while they let the EPA come up with a decision to basic veto, not only the whole project, but close off mining at a 220,000-acre area in Alaska, of land that's owned by the state of Alaska, and was specifically gotten by the state of Alaska because they knew there was some mineral potential in that area. And, of course, you have been involved in the state of Alaska in terms of, what was your position there in terms of resources? I was Commissioner Natural Resources for about six years for the state. All right. And so the state wanted to do this, but the federal government is coming in and saying that they can't do that.
Starting point is 01:45:53 And, you know, we kind of, I jumped ahead a little bit with some of this, but, you know, we talk about the bigger picture. here, you pointed out in your stats that right now we import about half of the copper that we use, I think it's 45% or something like that. If this were to come online, that would drop us to by about 15 points. It takes us down to about a, so we go from about a half of the copper that we use being imported to about a third. And it's a huge amount of copper that is there. And of course, why is copper so important? Well, that gets in the way of all their agendas. I mean, the Trump administration is not pushing like the Biden administration did for electrical vehicles. But everything that you electrify, that's pretty much going to be copper wiring.
Starting point is 01:46:39 And so if they want to have their AI data centers that they're looking down the road, they're not going to have the material to build that unless they can get it from China. And so this is kind of the, it's kind of interesting when you look at it. It moves very quickly on these different agendas. and, you know, if that is his agenda, he hasn't really thought it through what it's going to take to make this happen in the same way that we saw with rare earth. The rare earths are not rare. It's just rare for anybody to be set up to process them. And yet they didn't wait until they had processing plants before they essentially cut that off with the trade wars and the tariffs.
Starting point is 01:47:19 Yeah, I mean, China has a whole different system than we do. I mean, they basically control the whole supply chain from getting. the concentrate either from their own country or from other countries, processing that into metal and then putting the metal into whether, you know, what now is a huge EV industry, refrigerators, solar panels, all of that. And when they want to do stuff, they do it. They currently do process about half the world's copper. In this country, we have plenty of copper. I mean, if you look at us, if you look at resolution in Arizona, if you look at Twin Metals, metals up in Minnesota, you know, the copper is there, but there's a piece of it that requires,
Starting point is 01:48:06 I think, a lot of thought and a lot of investment, and that is the processing. So mining is basically, in my mind, three steps. You blow up the rock. You take the rock with the ore and it. You process into something called concentrate. So like for us, the ore would have one person. percent minimalization, the concentrate would have about 26, and then you take the concentrate and make the metal. Well, we haven't built a new metal copper processing place in this country in
Starting point is 01:48:38 probably three or four decades. Meanwhile, China's been building them left and right. It's kind of like coal plants, you know, we don't want to use the coal anymore. We had, I remember one point in time, we were told that after the opaque coal embargo, we were told, and I saved the magazines because I thought it was ludicrous at the time even. They said, oh, we're going to be out of oil and gas by the mid-1980s. But we got 666 years of coal left. So what's the first thing they banned? Coal, you know?
Starting point is 01:49:08 Well, and of course, we've been at, quote, peak oil several times since then. And right now, I don't think we've ever reached peak oil because technology keeps getting better in that decision. Yeah, that's right. If you look, mining and the investment, I mean, you know, we've spent a billion dollars already. Resolution in Arizona has spent two billion. Neither one of us have gotten an ounce or out of the ground to process. I mean, and eventually if these big projects like Pebble Resolution, Twin Metals, can't get going, then people will stop investing in mining in the U.S.
Starting point is 01:49:51 Yeah. And then to get back to process. a little bit. The other problem that we have, and it's happened with rare earth, is we start to build something up, and then the Chinese undercut in price. So right now, for instance, for processing copper, China is paying people to take their concentrate and process it, which is basically unheard of. But because they can then take the metal and make all this other stuff, they don't care about that. Whereas if we start processing plants, they're usually, they sometimes associated with the mining companies usually, but, you know, you need to make a profit.
Starting point is 01:50:29 And those are billion, multi-billion dollar investments. And so how the country faces that issue of getting processing, because that's the only way we become independent with metals, is to be able to process it here. We mine it here and process it here. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they've got all these grandiose plans, you know, for artificial intelligence, which a lot of those planes I don't agree with, because the government's going to be using.
Starting point is 01:50:54 them for surveillance and other things like that that concern me a great deal. But they've got these big plans for AI and yet how are you going to manufacture that? How are you going to build the data centers if we can't manufacture even the copper wire and things like that? They don't really think these things through. Everybody thinks, well, it's going to be this nice, clean software environment, but, you know, there is a physical world out there that has to make that virtual world happen. And people don't really think that through. When you talk about the process, versus the mining. Are you doing the processing as well as the mining? Or is that, you know, how does that operate with your company? Well, you know, we'll do the first two steps. So for sure.
Starting point is 01:51:35 So we'll blow up the rock and we'll take that rock and make it into a concentrate. We are looking at a way to process it in Alaska. And we've got consultants investigating that right now. We think there's a different technology. Usually the processing has been and what's called smelding, which is high heat and has, you know, air quality issues. There's a processing called hydrometallurgy that uses liquids and pressure, basically, to get the metal to come out of the concentrate. So we would like to do that because we think it's important. Well, let's talk a little bit about what their concerns are,
Starting point is 01:52:23 Because, you know, when I've looked at the coal industry, for example, you know, burning coal, we can make coal power plants that are very clean. You know, they can spend extra money to have scrubbers and things like that. But they got to the point where they labeled it as something that's dirty. We don't even want to think about that. We're not even going to try to clean that process up in any way, shape, or form. We've seen it with cars that you can take a car exhaust and you can spend extra money to clean it up. And you can actually get those emissions.
Starting point is 01:52:53 down to essentially zero. But again, they drive the nail into the ground and say, no, there will be no internal combustion engines. Talk to us a little bit about the process with this. And what would you say to people to assuage their concerns about the environment and how it's going to impact the fishing stuff? What did your studies show? And how do you operate with that?
Starting point is 01:53:16 Well, the environmental impact statement basically showed that we can do the process, do the mining, make the concentrate, store the tailings, which is the big issue. It's the sort of waste that's let's over from the processing, processing concentrate that we can do that. We have made some major design changes from what have been traditional impoundment storage facilities, water processing, and things like that, because the environment's so sensitive out there.
Starting point is 01:53:50 And, you know, I was approached in 2008 to take the job as CEO. I've been in and out once and twice, in, out, and back in as CEO. But when I started, I told the two companies that were the owner companies that I didn't know at the time whether we could do this project environmentally sensitive. I had been involved in another major mining project up north of the Arctic Circle that was on native Alaska indigenous lands where we got mining company to come in and develop one of the largest zinc lead mines in the country, which changed the whole economics of that region because there were not economic opportunities. And that's part of it.
Starting point is 01:54:32 You know, when we talk about jobs, everybody says, well, you know, we don't want the service jobs. We want the manufacturing jobs. Well, the manufacturing jobs come with some issues that you have to address. You know, one of the things that China does, as you said, they just do whatever the government wishes. they don't really care about any pollution issues. We do. That is something that we do want to do something about. And yet there are solutions that can be had to that.
Starting point is 01:54:57 It isn't like a, you know, well, we either have manufacturing and pollution everywhere or we don't have any manufacturing. That's not the trade-off. The trade-off, as I've seen over and over again, I don't know about your particular industry. I haven't looked at it. But the trade-off that I've seen over and over again is a trade-off in terms of maybe it cost us a little bit more because we've got to go through some extra steps, but it can be done
Starting point is 01:55:19 in a clean way. Yeah, I mean, you know, if you're a true environmentalist, you'd want to develop in the U.S. because we have some of the highest standards. I mean, there are other countries that are about the same, but we're right at the top of the environmental standards. But, you know, a couple things. One, these things are money-raising opportunities for the environmentalists. You know, they can only raise money by being negative. They cannot raise money by saying, oh, yeah, I think this mine is environmentally okay. We're all, they have to be opposed to it. And the other thing is they're not held to any standards of truth.
Starting point is 01:56:05 You know, if they're a pharmaceutical company, they'd be sued all the time because they do not tell the truth. And it's a problem. me, you know, if I were in the Chinese government, I'd be sitting over there sort of chuckling about, gee, this is the way the U.S. is doing it. They'll never catch up with us. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, you know, it's kind of the sort of thing that we saw with the Southern Poverty Law Center, you know. They place fast and loose with the truth, and they only raise money if they come up the problem. So, you know, for them, they're going to, they're going to fund the Kuclux Klan, so they got a problem that's out there. But I get your point.
Starting point is 01:56:41 That's exactly what is going on with it. But so tell us a little bit about what it is that you do to mitigate. You said that things have changed somewhat from the way it used to be done. I know when they were talking about the one that is the resolution one that's down in Arizona, people were talking about how it was going to create a gigantic crater. And they were concerned about that because it was in the middle of a, that was middle of a national park or something as well as an area that the, Apaches had a large attachment to as well. So how has, how has that changed? Well, I mean,
Starting point is 01:57:22 that is an issue with mining. I mean, generally there is a, you know, you're going to end up with a large crater. In the case of resolution, they're an underground mine, but you get subsidence when you take the ore out from underneath it for, we will start with an open pit mine. We'll probably, ultimately, I mean, we've got 70 to 100 years of resource that we know about now. We would end up with also a large crater, which would ultimately become a lake. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. That's typically what happens to these. It's kind of like when you got a landfill. I know in Virginia Beach, we have some relatives. They have this Mount Trashmore or something that he came up with.
Starting point is 01:58:09 You know, you've got to do something with the trash. I mean, unfortunately, it's a necessity. So, you know, once they got the landfill really large, they basically they put grass over it and all the rest of that. And they've now got a large park out there with a mountain in an area where they typically wouldn't have a mountain before. So you're talking about having it be a large lake that would be their recreational lake eventually. Yeah. So, and, you know, our tailings and foundment facility is a, this is a technical thing that I, and it's probably really don't need to spend the time on. But it's a different kind of design that both particular.
Starting point is 01:58:43 protects it from failing and also protects it from liquefying, which is one of the reasons that tailings and poundment facilities fail. And I know, as I said, we have a very sophisticated water treatment plant. But, you know, I do see that, you know, some things are changing in the country for the better in this regard. So I don't want to be all negative. First of all, there is, now is a recognition that we are going to need these metals. And, you know, whether it's for the AI. One of the things people forget about is defense. I mean, you know, jets, submarines, battleships, air carriers, I mean, tons and tons of copper and also renium, which we have. So people forget about that. But there was a sort of a positive thing last week in Washington
Starting point is 01:59:33 when the Senate confirmed a resolution coming out of the House under something called, the Congressional Review Act that revoked a 220,000 acre land set aside under the Biden administration that would have prevented the Twin Metals mine in northern Minnesota. And so that was voted. It was very close, 50-49. But in that kind of vote, it only requires a majority. You don't have to get to 60. And so that'll go to the president's desk.
Starting point is 02:00:09 And so I think people are beginning to understand this, but the opposition is huge and well organized. And there are people who think that the opposition has connections to China. I have never seen that, although we did have one instance with us where there was, it looked like interference from the Chinese in cooperation with the environmental movement. So, as I said earlier, I do know, they're very happy with how long it takes us to get a major. Yeah, well, that's the key. And, you know, this is a long-term project. That's another thing that works against you, I think. Americans don't think long-term.
Starting point is 02:00:58 We want immediate gratification. If this is something that is addressing a problem that's going to be years down the road or decades down the road, we can't really be bothered with that. Yeah, I mean, that's been, you know, I think a problem also for investment in mining because it is difficult to get going, as I said earlier, 29 years average. And, you know, everything gets litigated. That generally adds, you know, three to ten years, as I said. And then constructing a mine or the size of pebble is a three to four year. and, you know, six to eight billion dollar investment. You know, so you go out 29 years.
Starting point is 02:01:46 You spend, as we have and resolution, have billions of dollars before you even start, and then you've got to construct. And, yeah, it's not something that happens overnight. And people that are used to getting electricity by hitting a switch and think that's where it comes from, do not understand what it takes. Yeah, we used to, I used to work with a,
Starting point is 02:02:07 a group that was based on energy and was essentially opposing a lot of the climate change stuff. And they would go around and talk to people that have a public meeting or something and say, you know, what's your favorite source of energy? And said it never failed. Somebody said, electricity. That's not the source. That's the product that's produced. How do we generate that?
Starting point is 02:02:28 I don't know. You know, I just, all I know is I go to the grocery store and I buy this meat and plastic packages, you know, and that's what I eat, that type of thing. So there is no, there's a real disconnect in terms of production of anything where you're talking about food or energy or material in this country. And there's nothing that is absolutely perfect, I think. You know, so that's really the issue, the devil's in the details. And we have a lot of absolutism, I think, that comes from these different groups that we've talked about. And they don't want to consider any solutions. You know, they run into an obstacle or they see something that is on a downside, and they just want to shut it down at their reflexes to shut it down completely and preemptively.
Starting point is 02:03:13 And so I think that we need to take a closer look at some of these things and see if there's, you know, a problem. We don't want to take the approach of the Chinese take or we just, we don't care about anything. You know, that's one of the things that they have done. They don't care about pollution. They don't clean up their coal plants. They build a ton of them. And they just run them cheap and dirty. We don't necessarily want to do that, but there's a lot of money.
Starting point is 02:03:35 You know, the wealth of this country is really going to come from manufacturing, if you will. And so there is money in that they can pay to clean some of these things up in a way that we can still proceed forward with it. Well, and really, it's cheaper to get it right in the beginning. I mean, particularly in this country. So, yeah, you can get it wrong, but it's going to cost you a lot of money to get it wrong, which is a good thing. I mean, that's the way it should be. That's right. So as it stands right now, you are at what point in your stage?
Starting point is 02:04:07 I mean, you've had some preliminary approvals, I think, at some stage, but then they took it back. And it's very political in terms of the pendulum swinging back and forth. That's not true only of your project. That is true of pretty much everything in terms of manufacturing. So where does it stand right now? Well, we're in litigation. So we sued the EPA under the Biden administration. when they basically vetoed us.
Starting point is 02:04:36 We thought the Trump administration might want to withdraw the veto. They decided not to, so they have supported the EPA veto, which I'm not totally surprised about it. It has some ramifications for them in the future because the way EPA used that veto can be used against a lot of mining and energy projects that the Trump administration would like. So defending the use of the veto in a way that I think way exceeds EPA's authority, I think was a mistake for them. But for us, I think it's a good thing.
Starting point is 02:05:09 I think we will win that litigation. We have the state of Alaska on our side because we are on state land. So, you know, it's EPA taking away, you know, close to trillion dollar asset from the state. We have two indigenous organizations also suing on our behalf. So anyway, so the final brief. have been filed in that lawsuit. And I think we'll win, which will be a good thing for us. There are still oral argument, which will be held on June 25th.
Starting point is 02:05:43 After that, the judge will have everything she needs to make the decision. And then if we win, you know, our hope will be that the Trump administration decides not to appeal. And then we can get back in front of the Corps of Engineers to finalize our permit process. And we still have state permitting to do also after that. So if everything goes well for you, this pebble area here, as you point out, could cover 15% of American demand just by itself of this one site. What kind of a time frame would you estimate if everything went really well? And what kind of a time frame if it was slow that this could happen? Well.
Starting point is 02:06:27 Where you still get it through, but you got a lot of. other new things. So I mean, if things went well, you know, and we got our permits from the state and federal government, which probably take us a year and a half or so, then there will be litigation. If the courts, you know, are expeditious, and it's getting a little harder for the environmentalist to sue because of some of the Supreme Court decisions that have been made about the permitting process. And then, you know, Congress is looking at permit reform, which is very important for them to get that done. So, you know, a year and a half, two years or so for permitting a year or so to anywhere from a year to three or four years to get out of the courts and then three or four
Starting point is 02:07:17 years to build. So that's aggressive. So that's close to a decade. On the long side of it, I mean, the permitting process could be drawn out, particularly, you know, if it doesn't get done in the Trump administration and the Newsom administration or the AOC administration. You name it. They come in and, you know. They would shut down all together. That's right. Yeah, it goes into the snail darter administration. Yeah.
Starting point is 02:07:47 That's the case. And that's the thing. You know, we look at the proverbial snail daughter, daughter. that has, we've seen the pendulum swing to an absurd extreme in one direction. We don't necessarily want to go to the absurd extreme in the other direction of China, but there is a reasonable area in the middle, I think, where we can live and we can grow, and that's really what I think we're trying to achieve here. So it would be interesting to see what happens.
Starting point is 02:08:14 I had the guy on from Rare Earth USA, and he was saying, even as desperate as the American government is to make this happen and they're willing to, you know, kick in and do what they can to help the processing of rare earth minerals. They said, it's still going to take us more than five years once we get started on this thing. And so that's the key thing. We just don't plan and prepare anymore in this country like we used to. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, it's only been, well, the mining industry for, you know, probably a decade and
Starting point is 02:08:48 half or more, I've been telling people this is coming. And people were mostly not listening. Now, at least people are listening. And I always like to say that you can't solve a problem that you've not identified. So we've identified the problem. Now, solving it is not going to be easy and it is not going to be quick and it is not going to be cheap. Yeah, that's the key thing. Well, very interesting talk to you about this. Again, John Shively is former Alaska Commissioner of National Resources. He is the CEO of Pebble, and they have, they're setting on a massive supply of copper. The question is, will we be allowed to get that out of the ground and process it?
Starting point is 02:09:31 Is it a way that they say they've got a way to do it very cleanly? And so, and they got some studies to back that up. You spent, I think you said it here, $150 million on environmental studies. Yeah, just on environmental studies. We've spent over a billion dollars total, like on engineering and other, So, wow, that's pretty amazing. So, well, we'll see what happens with it. And I appreciate you trying to get in the fight and actually produce something that is getting increasingly rare. That is the rarest of the rare earth or rare minerals. It's anybody trying to produce anything. Most of the time, it's just people saying, stop. And I just want to keep my lifestyle. But I don't want to have to think about how I got that lifestyle. I think that is the key issue. We need to understand the trade. and understand that there are going to be problems with anything that we do that's real, but those problems can be addressed and can be solved.
Starting point is 02:10:27 Thank you so much for joining us, sir. Appreciate it. Thank you. We appreciate you having me on. Thank you. Thank you. The common man. They created common core to dumb down our children.
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