The David Knight Show - Fri Episode #2294: — AI Fabricates History, Christian Zionism Was a Con Man's Invention, and FDR Killed Free Speech

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

── Interview 1: Dr. Richard Restak — The 21st Century Brain ──────────────────────────────────────────[00:02:34]AI Puts Government Surveillance on Steroids — Eight Brain-Threatening Forces Now ConvergingRestak identifies surveillance, AI, memory alteration, and existential anxiety as interconnected threats; the brain is being degraded by the same forces it must use to solve them.────────────────────────────────────────[00:13:38]DARPA Funds Memory Erasure Programs — Sora Can Now Fabricate You Into Historical EventsMemory is a reconstruction, not a recording, and can be manipulated; AI video tools can now insert fabricated or real people into historical footage indistinguishably.────────────────────────────────────────[00:51:31]The Real AI Customer Is Government — Tech Bubble Collapse Won't Stop Surveillance FundingEven if AI fails commercially, governments will prop it up; Restak: unholy alliance between someone who sees only dollars and a government that sees only power over populations. ──────────────────────────────────────── ── Interview 2: Pastor Chuck Baldwin — Liberty Fellowship Montana ──────────────────────────────────────────[00:56:11]The False Romans 13 Doctrine Turned the Church Into a Slave of the StateMisreading of the first two verses produced pastors who surrendered all resistance; COVID proved it — churches locked down without a fight, many reopened without admitting they were wrong.────────────────────────────────────────[01:07:00]Romans 13 Also Commands Government to Be Good — Resistance to Evil Authority Is Biblically RequiredVerse 3 says rulers must be a terror to evil; if government commands evil, there is no Christian duty to comply.────────────────────────────────────────[01:13:42]Scofield Was a Convicted Con Man Who Never Earned His Degrees — His Bible Launched Christian ZionismThe rapture originated with a trance-channeler in Glasgow in 1830; Scofield, a convicted fraudster, gave himself fake credentials and embedded the doctrine into a study Bible. ──────────────────────────────────────── ── Interview 3: David Beito — FDR: A Political Life ──────────────────────────────────────────[01:38:36]FDR Silenced Anti-New Deal Radio Hosts With IRS Audits and Sponsor Pressure — All QuietlyBoake Carter was removed via IRS probes and sponsor pressure; by end of 1938 every anti-New Deal voice was off major networks — none of it was ever made public.────────────────────────────────────────[01:46:57]The Black Committee Seized Millions of Private Telegrams Without Warrants — The Pre-Digital Surveillance StateSenator Hugo Black compelled Western Union to hand over millions of telegrams; staffers read 10,000 per day targeting political opponents in what Beito calls the Black Inquisition.────────────────────────────────────────[02:19:38]FDR's Court-Packing Scheme Collapsed When His Own Senate Majority Leader Died of ExhaustionDemocrats led by Burton Wheeler defeated the plan; the majority leader died with the congressional record in hand; Roosevelt did not attend the funeral. ──────────────────────────────────────── 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: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

of deceit. Telling the truth is a revolutionary act. It's the David Knight Show. All right. And joining us now is Dr. Richard Restak, MD. And he is a neuroscientist as well. And he has written a lot of books on the brain. And now this is one kind of the nexus of our brain and artificial intelligence. So I wanted to get him on because we, as you know, we talk about AI and its impact on society quite a bit. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Restick. Well, I'm happy to be here. Thank you, David. You've written so many books and a best-selling author, and of course, people can find this on Amazon. You've written so many books. What is different about the brain?

What is different about this one? And why did you write this book? I wrote this book to announce and to discuss the dangers that are lurking, so to speak, in the 21st century and are unique to the 21st century, but are having an effect on the brain and a negative one. So that we really are imperiled by eight different factors, one of which is the global warming. We have new diseases that are present in the 21st century that are increasing, starting with COVID and moving forward. We have problems, of course, with the global warming, which we'll talk about in more detail. And then the internet, the effect of the internet, the effect of AI, memory, the alteration,

the attempt to alter memory, almost to alter our memories of what the past was like. This is an ongoing enterprise by various governments in the world, including our own. We also have surveillance, the seventh, the surveillance, becoming increasingly a surveillance society. It's almost impossible to not be revealing things about yourself because there's surveillance cameras everywhere. I can give you several examples of that just in my own personal life. And then finally, the eighth one is anxiety. All of these things are creating what I call it existential anxiety. People are being given information, but it's being molded according to the thoughts and the inclinations of people in power.

For instance, let's take today's right out of today's New York Times on page A7. There's an article called, the air in New Delhi is life-threatening. And it tells the tale of the New York Times reporters who have spread themselves throughout New Delhi from 6 a.m. until late in the evening of a certain day recently. and they measured the particulate matter in the air, and it was anywhere from 10 times to 30 times, as great as would be considered minimally normal. Now, on top of that, you have the statement that they state

that the government is actually trying to hide this kind of insight to the populace by spraying water and other things like that. that they're doing this around the measuring stations. They're also losing data from measuring stations during the worst bounce of pollution. So there you have the molding of the facts, either denying them altogether or trying to improve them. So people say, oh, well, they measured it down at such and such a measuring station, and it was really not a lot of high. Well, of course, they were spreading water and other things to try to reduce this.

So we've got a capitalist society here in the United States, which has a vested interest in pushing forward certain scientific points of view. So science is being put sort of in the back seat. And there's politicians and other people, all of whom share one thing, capitalistic enterprises in which they're part of or which they are advancing. And a kind of crony capitalism where they can get protection and subsidies as well. And the control is being taken away from us because, as I was just reporting earlier today, they're working very hard to make sure that state and local governments can't enact any control on artificial intelligence. And that came up in the context of talking about how the manufacturers of tasers, also big manufacturers of police body cams, how they want to work.

led that to artificial intelligence. And the question is, you know, what could possibly go wrong with that? If they identify you, they misidentify you as a dangerous criminal and warn the police about how dangerous you are, they could get people killed. Well, not only that, but all of these efforts set up a sense of anxiety and fear. Let me just tell you what happened to me in one morning, called a cab to go to medical appointment and we've started going down the road. I said to the driver

you're not going the most efficient or the quickest way. He said, I know that. He said, but I don't want to go that way because there's speed cameras. I said, well, you know, you're driving very sensibly and you're not speeding and I'm in no hurry so what's the problem?

He said, well, they take pictures of everybody that goes by those cameras because they want to see who's in those photos, in those cars. So I asked them to give me a reference for that and he got said of didn't say anything else for the rest of the trip so when i got down to the medical building but got in the elevator it said in this facility there is surveillance both obvious and hidden that's interesting and the third santa claus was watching you now this is

all one morning and then when i got up to sign in um i signed the board with an electronic like pen, and I didn't see no signature, I saw it. I said, well, it didn't take. She said, oh, it took. But we don't allow it to go on the screen so it could be seen. I said, why is that? She said, well, somebody behind you might see the thing and then remember it and use your signature to forge something somewhere. Well, first of all, there was a sign that said stand

10 feet back, and secondly, there's nobody else behind me. So there's three examples just drawn at random. that we're becoming an increasingly surveilled society, which is creating a sense of paranoia and a sense of fear. So the brain has to adjust to these type of things, David, and it's very hard to do. And I think that is calculated. You know, they've been, they want to do this,

even to the extent, when you talk about these cameras taking everybody's picture, the flock network that is out there, this corporation that is saying, well, we can do whatever we want because it's in public space and, you know, we're not government so we can collect this information, and yet they collect it in order to sell it to the government. So it's just one level indirect, but they not only grab your license plate, but they also do a complete profile of your car and all of its idiosyncrasies. Does it have a dent here?

Does it have a scrape there? What about a bumper sticker? So it creates a model of your car. And so they almost have like, you know, biometric identification of your cars as well as of you. And this is now made possible because of the advances of AI. But this has been something that has been concerning me. I look at things kind of from a libertarian perspective. And this has been concerning me for a long time.

The idea that government is using technology many different ways, internet, social media, things like that, to monitor and to manipulate us all the time. And to me, artificial intelligence just puts this on steroids. And so I think there is something to be anxious about if we're going to look at this. We should be concerned about it. Maybe not anxious, but we should be concerned about the goals of people who are putting this kind of stuff together. So, yeah. Well, there's that.

And then there's, if you can manage to change the present, you can manipulate the future. Of course, the real way to get it is to get control of past. As is Warwell pointed out. Yes. You control of the past, you, you know, you can. control the president and by the implication control the future. And we're seeing alterations of materials, even government documents, government films, documentaries, things like that are being altered in ways that are not visible,

not I should say detectable, not detectable to the ordinary person. So they get ideas about what the past was like, which are wrong, and don't show you, as I mentioned in the book, if you were at a dance in 1850 before the Civil War, and it's a film we're watching, let's just say we're watching a film about 1850, and we're seeing people ballroom dancing, all that. Then one of them pulls the sign and pulls out a cell phone.

And you say, wait a minute, we didn't have cell phones then. Well, you know, there were a lot of things that were going on. now that we're not going on in the past. And it's not to our advantage to try to pretend that they were. They weren't. We have to understand the past, understand the future. And we're not only creating situations that are false, but we're also, like in 1984, Orwell created a character called Commander Ogilvie.

He was a war hero. He got all sorts of medals. and it was all the proletts, we're all told to honor him and so forth. Well, he never existed. He actually was made up entirely. And that's one of the things that the narrator is doing in the job of work, is filling in photographs,

inserting old movie into historical events that happened, wartime scenarios, etc. And when reading it, we'll say, wow, this is some man. Well, he was a complete fabrication. We're just about at that point with Sora out, the AI out, which could take you and had you, you know, to say, let's get David Knight and have him leading some sort of a parade or whatever. And, you know, suddenly people would say, well, gosh, I saw him with my own eyes. So what's happening is that the actual seeing is believing is being turned on its head.

So that's no longer true. You're talking about a completely evaporated character out of Orwell. Just recently they had Tilly Norwood, who was a completely fabricated AI personality. And the person who came up with it has got agents representing her. They got her out there as an actress. Yeah. I mean, it's like, so I've created an AI actress, which will do a lot of different roles for you. She probably does their own stunts as well, I imagine.

People in SAG, the screen actors, Gill and they're furious about this. And I said, any agent that represents this AI character, it's not going to do any business with us. But we're already at that point. It truly is interesting. And one of ways of neutralizing it is to create the situation that exists right now between you and me. You're laughing and I'm laughing because it seems funny. And it is funny. But it's a very serious purpose behind all this.

It's all the matter to try to alter people's perceptions so that they begin to doubt the variety of what they're seeing. That's right. Yes. And I've talked for the longest time. about how the whole idea for the internet was created by DARPA psychologists. And I've been concerned that it was all about psychological manipulation from the get-go with all of this. But as a physician and as a neuroscientist, I'd be interested in your take on, you know, what is currently going on. Because besides manipulating the past by changing information about the past or, you know, memory-holing it or writing a new alternative history of it,

they're also concerned and there's been projects that have been put out by DARPA and I don't know if they've been successful or not but they you know they're putting out requests for people to come up with things to manipulate people's memories so you've got a soldier they say it who's got bad PTSD let's get rid of that memory let's give them different memories what do you see in terms of someone who studies the brain and neuroscience what do you see about that what do you take as I think is the the state of the art with that? Well, my last book was called the complete book of memory. It had to do with memory. I studied memory in great detail. And, of course, you have to do away with the concept that memory is like a videotape or something that you just store in your brain. And when you get it, you want to get it, you just bring it out like you bring out a videotape.

It's not like that. It's a reconstruction. Each time you think back to a certain event, you alter that memory. so that you have memory one, memory two, memory three, on and on and all. That's the nature of memory. And memory can be manipulated. It's always, you know, in the courtroom, they're always trying to avoid the contamination of the witness. An example of that would be, well, which car went through the red light?

And to ask a witness. And he said, oh, it was a red car went through the red light. Well, wouldn't surprise you to know that it wasn't a red light, could have a stop sign, Mr. Witness. Of course, his credibility is gone. Yeah. Because he took the suggestion that it was a red light. Instead, it would be very easy to do

because you don't necessarily have that image, that intersection in your mind. So that's why there's protections, even in the courtroom, against leading the witness, they call it. In other words, providing information that's either not true at all or half true. So we've got that coin This didn't start

in the 21st century. That that started, you know, as long as we've had corridors. This is more an emphasis now on altering memory. So people will not get up there and under Krause examination they'll do pretty well because their whole memories but altered. They've changed

by various mechanisms, suggestion, repeating information, which is false. Of course, which is the missing information. There's a cartoon about A week ago, by Ramirez, in which he's a Pulitzer Prize winner, he has three doctors in an operating room in a laboratory. One of them is looking into a microscope, and he looks up and he says, this is the most dangerous pathogen we have ever encountered. And the second doctor says, well, is it bubonic plague?

Is it smallpox? And then the one that he says, no, it's misinformation and disinformation. That's right. And we've got to be very careful because many times the people who will tell us about that are the people who want to be the ones who define what the information is for us. And they will ask those leading questions. And we're talking about leading questions and manipulating people. There's been a lot of reports about artificial intelligence, kind of people who have a particular psychosis or something. and they get involved with the AI, and it starts to confirm the things that they want, because that's what it is set up to do in terms of bias. I want to be empathetic and sympathetic to people, and so it starts doing that and leading them further and further down a particular rabbit hole.

There's been situations of people got into severe mental distress, some suicides of some young children and other things like that. Speak to that aspect of it and the real danger of that. That is really kind of, I think, speaks to the psychological aspect and potential of artificial intelligence. And that could be weaponized. Right now, it's just kind of happening out of their business model, right? But that could definitely be weaponized against people. Well, I talk about that in my book in the chapter on the Internet.

There are famous examples of people who have suicided right on the Internet that live feed. and they've been manipulated at doing that by other people who've encouraged them said this would be a sign of strength, this would be a sign of that you're not afraid to die if necessary. And there's cases of it that actually led to the suicide. One of them is the most grisly I have in my book

about a person who was talked into pouring gasoline over themselves and setting a match, all on open feed, internet, And while this fire is burning, you can hear everybody in the background's cheering. We did it. We did it. We got him to do it. Wow.

That's amazing. So there's something about the Internet and about that actually brings out sadistic, criminal, psychopathic trends. And we don't know why. Is it the fact that you don't necessarily, can't be identified? But it's something that is going to be influencing. It has influence the Internet greatly, and it will continue to do so until we understand it. I think that's one of the things that's so dangerous about the things that we saw with lockdown and other aspects of it. There's an atomization here in so many different ways the government and tech companies are trying to make sure that we're not in person with each other.

You know, many cases, like, for example, in this interview, we couldn't do this interview if we both had, if one of both of us to travel. We're able to do this because we can do it over Zoom or whatever. But just taking ordinary things that you would normally do in terms of interacting with people in school or in church or in your community or whatever, taking that away and putting a screen between the two of you. It really does change the way people interact with each other. I remember Errol Morris, the film director, was able to get people to say all kinds of things. He got a murderer to confess. He got Robert McNamara to confess about the false flag of the Vietnam War. He got people to say all kinds of stuff because there was that distance between him and them.

He could have interviewed them in person, but what he did was he put an Interatron, which is what he called it. It was basically a teleprompter that he had set up so he could do two-way communication at the time. And once he had that distance there, then it completely changed the dynamics that he would have versus with some. somebody person to person. And that's what we're talking about here, isn't it? Yeah, we're talking about that. And of course, there's the interpretations of this, and it continues. Like, you're interviewing me, we're discussing. I feel like it's a discussion. If I were to say something that later I regretted, I could probably say, oh, well, that wasn't me. That was my avatar. Or my agent, right? I got an AI agent that's out there doing stuff. Publicist. That's right. It's great.

We also see, though, as a doctor, you're seeing people have noticed actual physical changes that can be observed in people's brains. I'm thinking of the story about the London taxi drivers who would do the knowledge. And they would find that as they memorized all these factual details and drew on that all the time in order to take people to, you know, this very complicated city with this complicated streets, that they had a particular part of their brain that was larger than the, the, typical person. And then they found that once they stopped doing that, it started to shrink again. And we're starting to see that happening with people in a lot of different areas of their life, that kind of atrophy. And it's physically observable, isn't it? Well, it is. You have to learn. You have to use the things that you have learned to do. Like I mentioned in my memory book, there's all kinds of memory exercises that you can do.

I do them every day. And they're very easy, and they help you to continue with your, with your memory, and keep it sharp. Give us some examples. I'm sure everybody would love to know that. I would all like to have a better memory. What kind of things can we do to exercise? Well, think about the fact that you never had to learn pictures. When you were an infant, a young child, a picture was something that you could, you know,

may not know what you're looking at, but you could see it without an intermediary. Whereas language is something that you have to hear from other people. It's something that's sort of added. on to the brain. Okay? So as a result, the most best way of remembering something

is to make a image for it. For instance, I have a little dog called a Skipperkey. Skipper key is a Belgian dog. He's a nice little fellow. But it was embarrassing to me

when walking the street. People would say, what kind of a dog is that? And it could come up with a name because it was such so complicated. And I thought, that's skipper key. I didn't speak any Dutch or anything. So then I got this image of a small boat with a large captain with a beard

holding a big key. So it was skipper key. And I remember forever. So I had the picture. Once I have the picture, it's easy to do. Another way, an easy way to do it. And you can do that with all kinds of times, all the time.

I was going upstairs before I came down to the office. And I wanted to get my wallet, and I wanted to get my cell phone. So I just had an image of a wallet in the form of a cell phone, and I was walking up the stairs, talking into the wallet cell phone. So I got up, and I knew I had these two elements to get. It would be very easy to get one and forget the other. So you have these images all the time. And the quickest, you know, this is sort of off the topic of the book, but if you want to have a firepower mental,

memory for a load of things, that's up to 10 things, and get 10 areas that you are familiar with, that you see every day, and then you can put on those images the thing you're trying to remember. So if I'm trying to remember a loaf of bread, milk, maybe batteries, I have a regular way of doing that. like I remember the library that's near my home, the coffee shop, liquor store, Georgetown University of Medical School where I went, Georgetown University, Cafe Milano, which is a place in Washington, everybody gathers, and then Keybridge, Iwo Jeeva Memorial, and Reagan Airport. So that bread would be, for instance, the loaf of bread, I would look in the window of the library instead of seeing books. I'd see bread, loaves of bread. And when I get down to the liquor store, instead of it being filled with liquor, it would all be milk bottles. So that's how that they get to it.

So I have those 10, so I can get 10 items together, not any problems at all. That's great. Yeah, you know, it's interesting you talk about the importance of a visualization. It's one of the things that I do in terms of preparing for the show, I have a lot of articles that I go through. And it's really when I highlight things or when I write them down, that's when I can remember them. If I don't do that, if I were just to read these things, I wouldn't remember them. But if I interact with it and write it down, that helps me to remember it. So that is a kind of visualization there, I guess, as well.

It truly is interesting. And what you said earlier about memory, not being something that is stored in a place as somebody coming from a computer science background. That was a very different thing. When you construct your memory, how do you reconstruct that? I mean, that that that as opens up a whole new area of questions as well. In other words, if every time somebody brings up a subject, I mean, there isn't something that's stored initially to reference that and then rebuild from that. Yeah, there's that. There's the interconnections. Like, you know, somebody listening to us might say, well, gee, this is called the 12.

21st century of brain, but I haven't heard that much about the brain. Well, let me just link that up so that these things make sense. We have a new version, or I should say, a new understanding of the brain called the connectomic brain, in which there's all kinds of interactions in the brain of parts of the brain, which you don't, we're just learning about. I use the metaphor of a bowl of spaghetti. You pull out one of the strains of spaghetti, and you never have any idea what, it's connected to, how many other strains of spaghetti this is connected to.

So if you think of the brain as being kind of set to make connections, that's its natural processing. So it gets back to these things that we were talking about earlier, you know, global warming and memory and surveillance and all that. How are we going to solve all those? Well, somehow or other, those things are connected with each other. that's the take-home message to this book. And the basic goal is to try to figure out what it is that connects these things,

what it is that would allow us to, by solving one of them, solve the other. And I mentioned at the end of the book, experts so far have done it. So it's useful, as Hayek said, to get ordinary people to give, When I say ordinary, I mean non-specialized people to give their ideas. Gee, I wonder what such and such would happen. What would happen about global warming? For a while there was, in fact, there's still experiments going on on the effect of sulfur that would help the CO2 problem. And, you know, shooting sulfur up into the atmosphere.

Of course, the reason for that was the volcano in 1980-something, in which, you know, after that volcano in Hawaii, it was noted that the air was clearer and it was less pollution. So that's something to think about. Is there some way of using that particular sulfur experiment to decrease global warming? War, for instance, we don't think of war as a cause of global warming, but it is. Oh, yeah. Thermonuclear warning. up. Yeah, it's been put up since the Ukraine war and the Gaza war, then, you know, tremendous

amount that's going to overcome and exceed the benefit of any of these things like, you know, non-gaziline engines, but, you know, using electrical and things like that. Absolutely. Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, shooting up rockets in order to put satellites up, you know. How many cars and lifetime use? of cars from people, would that be equivalent to? And you start talking about all the missiles that are being shot. And then you get to the explosives as well. It is really interesting how they focus us on their objectives for their ways to control

us. The manipulation's been going on for quite some time. And so, yeah, that is pretty amazing. And I guess that's my, you know, when you look at this stuff, it really does look like science fiction. and I'm almost inclined to write it off when I first see it, when DARPA is saying, well, we need to find some way that we can, you know, erase memories and people and insert new memories into them.

I'm going back to Total Recall, right? So it sounds like something from a Philip K. Dick novel, but they're really working on that. And I guess one of the most striking things that we saw, we reported on a couple of weeks ago. And it was a company that was bragging about how they could read your mind more accurately and quickly than their competitors, because there's a lot of different companies that are doing this.

And how they could, it was called Brain IT, was the name of the company. And so they had a way that they would do MRI, and they could essentially train it on your brain in a much shorter period of time of the other people, and they could get much better results. Our producers just pull this up. So what they do is they show you an image,

and you're looking at that image, and then it's reading your mind and reconstructing what you're looking at, which I thought was absolutely amazing and terrifying at the same time. How is this going to be used? I guess that's the real issue. When we start talking about all these different things, I think that is the real case that it's difficult for people to understand just how far and how quickly the technology has progressed.

And then to say, and how do we control this from it being used for bad purposes? Well, that's a specifically 21st century problem. Yes. Because all of these things have either originated in the 21st century, where they have, in fact, further developed and become increasingly threatening. And bear in mind, we have to solve these problems because they're not something that's going to go away. And then the most important thing to remember, David,

is that all of these things harm the brain. and the brain is the thinking processor that's going to save us, it's going to figure out what the problems, what the solutions to the problems are. So we know now that wildfire smoke, for instance, it creates dementia. It enhances the likelihood of somebody coming to medic. So as the brain is affected negatively, increasingly,

over longer and longer periods of time, our ability to solve these problems is going to decrease. So we've got to do it now. We've got to get serious about it. And this business of people getting up saying the global warming is fiction and all that is really very disturbing. Yeah, well, you know, the example that you gave earlier of the fact that the Indian government was manipulating the temperature at some of the stations there, that kind of works both ways. They have put some of these temperature stations on the airport tarmacs. And in the UK, they have a lot of the temperature stations that they've got there.

They're just extrapolating the data. They don't have real temperature measurement stations there. So it all really gets back, I think, to the scientific method. And that's really where we have to hold people's feet to the fire. We're talking about something like that. We can have an absolute standard of what truth is. And that truth is going to be being able to measure something accurately and being able to reproduce that.

And then I think a good yardstick for that is when somebody is trying to hide their data, that's the clue right there that they're not doing science. Because if they're doing science and they've come to the right conclusion, they don't have a problem with somebody looking at their data. And so I've got a question here for you from a person in the audience asking you know about doctors James Giordano and Charles Morgan, their work with military. I'm not familiar with those names. I don't know if you know anything about that or not.

The Giordano says, for me, or what particular thing are they asking about them? I don't know. It just says they're work with the military. I guess it would have to do with something, but you haven't heard of it. I'm not sure. I could say, Dear Dono did this or did that not. Sure, I understand. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the things that we have been anxious about.

And, of course, as Christians, we have one answer to it. But you talk about how this is something that has been around pretty much all of our life. I mean, there was, I grew up with anxiety about nuclear war, for example. That was on everybody's television, and that was a forefront of our mind, especially growing up in in Florida when the Cuban missile crisis was happening. They got us really afraid of that when I was in elementary school, you know. It's like, there's not going to be enough time for you to get home, you know, when the nuclear bombs started falling. And so, I mean, there's all these different ways that you can panic people. I guess part of it is how do we identify the real problems?

and how do we deal with those problems? Because there's always things that are competing for our attention and our anxiety, many of which are not real. And usually the things that you're really the most concerned about don't happen. And it may be sometimes because you have taken a precaution about it. What would you say about that about anxiety? You're starting to break up a little bit. Can you hear me clearly?

I hear you. Yes, yes. Sorry about that. It's breaking up a little bit. You're talking about traumatizing a population. You know, what do we do to guard against that type of thing? And, of course, that's going to really escalate with the ability of AI to create a narrative. Yeah, well, let's talk about it as a avenue to get into that.

Let's go back to what you brought about, the atomic weapons and the atomic war and the fears of the people that there's going to be another atomic war. I mean, you know, this is not unrealistic. There's even been a movie that's just come out that's getting all kinds of attention, as you know, and it has to do with the threat of a nuclear war. If you look at what's happening in the Europe right now, there's all kinds of suggestions that it could lead to a nuclear war. I mean, Ukraine now has announced that they're under no conditions willing to give up any land, and Stalin is, I mean, Putin is thinking what he can do to change that.

but maybe he'll attack another country. I mean, this is scary stuff. So what's happening in response to the government is to try to show that, oh, we shouldn't worry about it. We have things under control, but I don't think things are under control. And we've talked about the problems, and we're talking about problems. You have your final chapter is New Ways of Thinking. And I'd like to talk about that.

one of the things that you say is Acombe was wrong, Ackham's Razor that people are familiar with. Tell us a little bit about that. Why is Ackham wrong? Well, because he says that, you know, the entities are not to be multiplied, meaning that we can always explain things best by limiting ourselves to the minimum amount of factors,

ideally one, one cause of every fact. That's not true. It's certainly not true in the 21st century where there's all kinds of interactions between factors and causes so that Ackham was wrong in that basis. We have to think of an interconnecting pool, just as in the brain of interconnections of neurons, interconnections of these problems, and they're all related. They're all related, all eight of them that I talk about in my book. They're all related.

And if you can figure a way of influencing one, you influence all the others. I mean, who would think there would be a connection between global warming and the amount of artisan and cheese, for instance, high-end cheese. Well, there is because

chickens don't lay many eggs and there'd be all the various other things that come on in terms of making cheese. I learned that the other day. That was something

that was a surprise to me. You know, it's kind of interesting when you talk about connections so much. There was a series that was I think it was on PBS. I think the guy's name was Burke.

I can't remember his first name. I'm not sure about the last name. But he had a series. called connections. And I thought it was fascinating because what he would do is he would take a whole series of connections to show how a particular technology had evolved. So he might go from, you know, the quill to the jet engine or something like that. And it was a fascinating thread of things. It very much like what you're talking about. It really is. And I did consult his work, actually. Did you? I was writing this book because he did that connection.

He did a book called The Day of the World Changed and all this. He also did a book called Circles in which he would start with one particular event that had carried in history. And if you go around the circle, you come back to the beginning where it started, where this particular inventor invented something. What led up to it? What was the circle leading to that? So, yes, we're talking about connections, and we're talking about the inability to understand things without reference to support. reporting and accessory factors. We have that going all the time, denying things that are going to be happening. Of course, I think the fearful thing is that the government is aiding and this denial.

Because if you deny that there's a problem, then there's very little impetus to try to solve it. If there ain't no problem, don't try to solve it. They're throwing out their own chaos and uncertainty. anxiety that's out there all the time, always, I guess. So the question is, you're talking about volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. I mean, it sounds like a government policy. I think they've got bureaucracies that specialize in that. Yeah. Well, actually, that's true. Yeah, that's in your section there about new ways of thinking. And so how do we incorporate that in a new ways of thinking that help us to solve this riddle? Well, each of those factors,

is a factor that helps you to understand things and to have more control it doesn't necessarily mean it helps you to length them together that has to be done by original thinking by you have to be under those things are involved well you don't have a basic situation that doesn't change it changes all the time

so that the other thing that I want to emphasize the most is that is the role of capitalism in all of this I mean, there's all this, like the private equity, the business of people having a point of view that is going to advance them financially and that blinding them to the problems that are here. Like, for instance, we talked about global warming. Well, the rich people, very rich people, are buying multi-million dollar apartments and condominiums, which have special air filters, which will keep wildfire. spoke out and we'll try to keep the global warming effect

at bay by superpower air conditioners. Of course, they're building their own bunkers too. Yeah, the buildings that are creating all kinds of chaos and, you know, weapons of war, mass destruction. They're out there building super bunkers in various places as well. So I think they're somewhat pessimistic about what they're doing. Well, it's basically the idea is that, you know, we don't care about the ordinary person.

We're going to survive. We're going to see to our own survival. And in order to do that, we have to deny certain things that are going on will do so. Now, incidentally, all of this is not conscious thinking. They don't necessarily say, well, I'm going to deny global warming because it'll be to my advantage financially because all my investment is in the oil and gas industry. They don't do it that way. They come up with pseudo logic, things that seem to make sense to them.

But if they didn't have a financial thrust in the matter, they would look out upon it quite differently. That's right. We can always find a justification for what it was, what it is that we really want. Everybody should understand that if you're a parent this time of year at Christmas time, you can always understand that people will come up with a justification for what they want. And that's as true of government as it is of corporations out there. and it's really dangerous when the two of them connect with each other. I think that's one of the things, you know,

you talk about connections and the importance of it and how we can try to connect these different factors each of us individually, but I think it's the human connection that is out there, that is going to be essential for all of this. It's going to be our collective work on all this. What do you think about that? Would you agree with that? Well, I'd agree with it,

but there's so many things that are taking place now that are causing the shisms, in splitting people into factors and belief systems and political points of view. And that's very dangerous because then you can't get together any kind of unity, even in the face of an emergency. Well, I think we've always had these factions and things like that. You know, the founders of the country warned about factions and political parties. But I think what makes it unique is that when you're interacting with people on a personal basis,

you interact with them a little bit differently than if you've got that separation between you, the technology is giving us now. Because now you're interacting with something that's abstract, it's not with another person. And there's also the body language that you're not picking up on. But it makes it easier for you to be harder on people when there's that distance there, I think. That's why I think, you know, the personal connection I think is really vital to making these connections and coming up with an understanding of what's going on. we talk about the hidden factors that are out there, hidden unrelated topics.

Other people, as you pointed out earlier, just talking to ordinary people about what it is that you see with different things. I think that is the genius of the collective free market out there, that there's so many observers who are looking at things and thinking about them. And it's kind of their collective decision that is kind of guiding things along, as opposed to having a central planner who's doing that. what do you think about that you you've got a in your final chapter a new way of thinking you have what you call it sensible solution uh what does that really involve i'm sorry i can hear what you said

you have a sensible solution what what do you think a sensible solution to uh the kind of stress and chaos and anxiety that we have manipulation that we have what is a solution to that well i think the wikipedia is a good example of that they have they have people from all walks of life, all levels of education, free to contribute to whatever topic they may want to do that. It may be helpful. I mentioned earlier about the effect of global warming on the making of cheese. There might be somebody who makes cheese that's going to come up with some idea. You know, we don't know that.

We don't know that that may not be where it comes to original idea about what to do about global warming. and you put it on what I'd like to think and I hope it will be developed a kind of Wikipedia where the ordinary person can feel free to put forth their ideas about it. Now, you say, well, we already have that. We have the Internet. No, we don't. The Internet is a commercial situation. It's all done for making money and grab attention and all that.

And there's no criticism of it. There's no pure review, if you will. And the Wikipedia, I mean, you know, people can write in and say, well, that particular contribution is bonkers and then give an example why it is. That was a very good idea. And after that, you begin to get things coming together in unpredictable ways that they help us solve these eight problems. You know, the problem is it seems like whenever you wind up having a form or a place

where things can be, and that's true of the Internet. It's also true of Wikipedia. Then it becomes you have gatekeepers who are there. And we saw this in spades. throughout the COVID stuff that if somebody's got a different idea rather than debate them, the impetus is to silence them by the people who are in authority. And so that really, I think, is the key thing. And I think as part of that, we see a continuing rise in disgust and deprivation of free speech.

People are not interested in the principle of free speech. don't want to have open debate. And I see this, regardless of where people coming from on the political spectrum, there is a declining interest in debate and thinking, you know, the debate is critical to critical thinking. And so the people who are in charge, the gatekeepers, whether it's Wikipedia or the internet or, you know, any other form of information, they are weighing in on that. And they don't want things that they disagree with. And it might be because they've got an agenda or it might be because they've just got a particular prejudice about something. They want to make sure that the contrary views don't get out there.

That, I think, is a real key that's there. And again, this is part of this atomization that we have of people, feeding that tribalism in a way that we've never seen it before using technology. I would agree with everything you've just said, exactly. And I think we have to try to get beyond that. But we get back again to this business of people having their own personal financial point of view and position and pushing that basically on the fact that they look upon it as. So maybe we're talking about a capitalism problem. We've got capitalism.

That's what this country's all about. But I mean, it's certain parts of it now. We've gone to the point where people are unable to take another point of view if it's going to be financially harmful and hurt. and fulfill me. Yeah. I think that, you know, we start looking at the tech companies. I don't think that their capitalism would exist. I don't think they'd have billions of dollars if they weren't unified with the government. So there's a, there's a symbiosis there that the two of these entities feed off of each other. And I think that's right. That nexus right there is the, is a difficult thing. And so I think, you know, when I think of capitalism, I don't like to refer to

capitalism anymore because I think of it as a partnership, a public-private partnership, some kind of a economic fascism where they are working together. But I like to think of a free competitive market where the government doesn't have any role except as some kind of a referee between two parties that have a conflict or something. But yeah, that's the thing that's really driving this. You know, many people, when they talk about AI, they said, well, you know, here's a couple different outcomes. Maybe this stuff really works the way it's supposed to work and it takes everybody's jobs and we wind up with the depression. Or maybe it doesn't work at all, in which case, the big AI stock bubble that we've got burst and everybody loses their job because of that.

And I said, well, there's a third alternative. And that is that the government keeps propping it up with public funds because it feeds their surveillance and manipulation needs, their ability to surveil and to control us. And I really think that that's where this is all going to head. I don't really, you know, those other two things may happen and they may be true. But I think there is a customer out there for the AI stuff that is driving all this stuff that has been putting out these proposals for the longest time. And that's governments, governments around the world. I mean, we look at the brain project that we had a few years ago.

That was during the Obama administration. But things like the brain computer interface that Elon Musk and many other tech companies are doing out there. It's neural ink. And there's a lot of them that are doing that. That's being driven by the government wanting to connect into our minds, hack into our minds, really. And they've been funding that kind of stuff. So how do we break that?

On the Musk side, he's doing it for money. I mean, obviously, to make money. That's right. So that there's an unholy alliance, if you will, between someone who can't see anything other than the dollar. And in another side, the government can't see anything other than increasing power and surveillance over the population. Yeah, that's right. Absolutely true. Well, it's a fascinating book. It's fascinating take on this. And of course, you've written many books on the brain. The memory one, very interesting. And you do have sections about memory in this book as well. And people will be able to find this on Amazon, I guess, is the best place that they can find it, looking for the title of this. And it is, you know, it is something that I think we all need to think about how we're going to, operate the effects that

this technology is having on our brains in the 21st century, and that is the title of the book. The 21st Century Brain by Richard Restak. Thank you very much, Dr. Restak. Thank you. Appreciate you coming on. Good day. I enjoy it very much. Thank you. Very interesting conversation. Thank you. Have a good day.

Folks, we're going to take a quick break, and we will be right back. You're listening to the David Night Show. Elvis. Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles. and the sweet sounds of Motown. Find them on the oldies channel at APSRadio.com. All right, joining us now, we're honored to have Pastor Chuck Baldwin of Liberty Fellowship in Montana.

You can find the website at Liberty FellowshipMT for Montana.com. Also, Chuck Baldwin Live.com. Thank you for joining us, sir. David, it's great to be with you. Thank you. It's been a long time since we've talked because of time. and scheduling and things like that. You're only able to do interviews in the afternoon.

I wasn't able to do that at InfoWars, but we're able to do that here. So I wanted to get you back on with what is happening now. You've got a book that you're selling at your website. We'll get into that in a little bit. But last time I interviewed you, we talked about another book that you and your son had done, Romans 13. And it seems like people did not understand

Romans 13, or I don't think that we would have gone through what we went through in 2020 with lockdown churches and all the rest of stuff. I remember when we talked, you know, the standard line was, you do whatever the government says unless they start infringing on your religious freedom. And I said at the time, I don't believe that they're going to stand up for their religious freedom if they take that tact. And of course, we saw when the lockdown happened under the, Trump that they didn't. Tell us a little bit about your opinion about what happened with that and the aftermath of it. Well, I think what we saw was exactly the open demonstration of what you and I had discussed. Yeah. That is that the false interpretation of Romans 13, and you alluded to

the book that my attorney son and I wrote, Romans 13, the true meaning of submission. And we took all of the verses in, well, not all, but the vast majority of the verses in both Testaments, old and new, to show that nowhere does God command his people to submit to evil authority. And, you know, that doctrine of submission to civil authority per the first couple of verses of Romans chapter 13 has made sheepish servants of the state out of what should have been and once were courageous, bold men of God, unafraid to speak truth to power, and to resist the attempts of those in authority to make slaves out of God's people.

I agree. We are servants to only one, and that's Jesus Christ. That's right. So I think that the doctrine, the false doctrine of Romans 13, as it has been taught in the, not a part of the 20th century and then the 21st century, has produced exactly everything that we saw demonstrated during the COVID tyranny, and I think the evidence of that still continues today. But, you know, before, you know, it was always about something that they consider to be non-biblical.

You know, like if you are talking about abortion, if you are talking about the, intrusion of our Fourth Amendment liberties and invasion of our privacy and the Second Amendment and all of these these issues, constitutional issues, these Romans 13 preachers and Christians would say, well, you know, God's called me to preach the gospel and I'm not going to preach, I'm not going to get involved in all these, quote, political things. And when they tell me I can't preach the gospel, then I'll show, you know, some resistance. And they would, they would poo-hoo any attempt to stand for basic fundamental God-given liberties, and they use Romans 13 as a cop-out. Well, then COVID came along, and guess what? They said, you can't meet in your church services.

You can't preach. You can't assemble. You can't observe your resurrection day services. You can't see. He has observed the birth of Christ. I mean, all these are, you know, these are not constitutional issues. These are, you know, basic fundamental biblical issues. And pastors just rolled over. Yeah. Shut their churches, didn't have, you know, their meetings.

They shut down their operations entirely. And they prove that they are truly, you know, nothing more than slaves of the state. So I think that was a great wake-up call to the condition of the church. I agree. And a big part of that is that they want to, at all cost, avoid any kind of political controversy. You don't do that, and I appreciate that. You speak to what people are living in their daily life, and you say, this is how we think the biblical principles apply here. And I think that is something is sadly missing in most of the church. Now, we had a lot of people, there were a few churches that never closed, and I interviewed some of those pastors. There were some churches that closed for a while, then kind of came to their senses or whatever, and we opened up.

And some of them talked about the fact that they got it wrong, that they interpreted that wrong, and they would never do it again. But there were some very big churches that did not go back, even though they opened up and even though they had fights. they never went back and corrected their commentaries or their statements on their website or what they told people about Romans 13. And I think that's very important, yeah. I mean, we can all make mistakes. We can all make mistakes, but we need to be public about it. And the way I look at it, a lot of the people who shut down for four or five months and then opened up and then got into big fights with the government over it, they just kind of ignored what had happened those first four or five months.

I think that's kind of like a pastor who's been caught an adulterous affair, just kind of say, well, let's forget about that. That will move on, you know. Yeah, it's hard for, I don't know why, but we've reached a point in our history were, I don't know, somehow it's a sign of weakness or something if you acknowledge that you were wrong in what you taught from the pulpit. I mean, I've run into this with the Zionist issue and big, big time. That's, you know, but, you know, for example, there was John MacArthur, who recently passed away,

a pastor of a large church in Southern California, and well-known writer and broadcaster. He was a man that, for decades, throughout his career, he was. impugn pastors around the country who would resist governmental usurpation of their power to intrude upon the freedom of speech and freedom of religion and so forth on even the freedom of assembly in certain cases. And he would castigate them as being disobedient to Romans 13. And he was one of the most important. foremost advocates of the false doctrine of Romans 13 in the country. And because of his influence, he impacted a lot of fellow pastors.

Then when COVID hit and his church was hit personally there in California, you know how California was about everything. Oh, yeah. And so he actually reversed his position on that issue, and he challenged the authority of the state of California to close his church and so forth, and he actually was willing to go to court to fight it. So I admire him for doing that. But to your point, he never won time during all of that period of contest between him and the state of California. He never one time public got up and said, you know, I was wrong in the past. You know, all these other issues that men of God were, you know, were fighting a long time before I fought this issue.

Yeah. You know, they were fighting issues of freedom and faith for a long time, and some of them were paying a very heavy price for resisting. And he never took their side. He always condemned them for violating Romans 13. Now, he's doing the same thing. And he's resisting the, you know, the... I remember when that happened. He shut down from what was at March until about July or whatever,

and then they opened up. I think the final straw was when they said, all right, all right, you can get together, but you can't sing. It's like, okay, we're done with this nonsense. But like you said, he didn't go back and change his commentaries or anything. And a year later, you had Todd Freel, who was also fairly well known on YouTube. and other places, and very connected to MacArthur,

as they were getting ready to roll out the vaccine mandates in September, he said in August, again, you know, the Romans 13 line, and he said, and look, John MacArthur says this, this, this. And I played the clip, and I said, yeah, but that's not what John McCarthy's been doing for the last year. Maybe you need to take a link of the difference between what he said in his former commentaries and what he's actually doing today. And I thought that was what Todd Freel said, I call him pinwheel Freel, because he said, if government tells you to wear pinwheels on your head, you wear pinwheels on your head.

And it's like, yeah, but you don't have to become a pin cushion for a poisonous Kool-Aid injection. That's the insanity of all this stuff. But, yeah, I think when I look at it, let me get your take on this. I look at it as from a political sphere when they become a. when they're installed in their office, government employees swear to uphold the Constitution. And so their authority comes from the Constitution, and it comes from their fealty to it. And if they are in rebellion to the Constitution, they don't have any authority. And I see Romans 13 in the same way that, you know, Romans 13, he talks about authority coming from God.

He's established these governments. Well, how do we know if it's a legitimate government? but we can take a look at what they're doing. And if what they're doing is in rebellion to God, then they don't have authority. It's just like if they were rebelling against the Constitution. What do you think? Is that a way to think?

Well, yeah, of course. I mean, in our book, we make that very clear that Romans 13 was not giving a blank check to civil authority to run roughshod over the, God-given liberties of the people. In fact, that same passage in Romans chapter 13 that talks in the early verses about submitting to the higher power, and you keep reading, and they always stop at verse 2.

But when you keep reading it, like, for example, in verse 3, for rulers, civil rulers, are not a terror to good works, but to evil. That's right. Will thou then be afraid the power to do that, which is good, that's out praising the same. For he is a verse, verse four, he is the minister of God to be for good. That's right. So at the same time that Romans 13 tells us to admit to government, it's telling government that government has the responsibility.

to be good, righteous, and just in their implementation of law. And if they are not good, righteous, and just in their implementation of law, there is no implication in the duty of the Christian to submit to that evil. I mean, so that's like saying, okay, if the government commands you to do such and such, which is obviously evil, unjust, you know, et cetera, you have no moral authority to submit to that. In fact, you have a moral authority to resist that. I agree.

So that's a part of the entire passage. So it's a twofold. You know, it's a responsibility on government to be good and righteous and just. And when government is good, righteous and just, then you should have the support of the people. But when government is not good, righteous and just, you should not have. of support of the people. So that is clearly defined in Romans chapter 13 as well, but I just choose to skip over those verses. Yes, yes, I absolutely agree. What we're talking about, uh, civil government, we just had the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima. I'm curious to get your take on this and if you

think that fits in. And, uh, what I look, we talk about frequently is a just war theory, which was something that's been put out by many Christians trying to restrain the evil of war as much as possible and trying to restrain the way that it's conducted and the conditions under which it has fought. How do you view Hiroshima? Oh, I think it was one of the greatest tragedies in U.S. history. I agree. It is a everlasting blight on the reputation. of a nation that was supposed to be the city on the hill the nation that set the standard of good government honesty and government righteousness in government that is a protector of humanity a protector of life a protector of freedom everything that America was valid on the the goodness of government of government and

the righteousness and the accountability of government to we the people, and the restraint on government by the Constitution, and the rule of law over the will of man, and all these principles upon which America was founded. When we dropped those bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, atomic bombs, by the way, we're the only nation in the history of the world that was ever used in the atomic. bomb. What a reputation. And on a civilian target as well. That's the key thing, isn't it? The civilians. And they're done a civilian target. And I think that's the key thing, isn't it? The fact that, and that was really kind of a hallmark, a turning point, I think, in World War II, of attacking civilians.

And both sides did it. There was a bombing of London. Then they retaliated with Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it's really heinous. It's something that I think, Western civilization kind of went straight down the tubes with that. We haven't recovered since then. No, in fact, I think we're still seeing it being played out today in the genocide in Gaza. Yes, exactly. And the way that the American government is supporting the wanton slaughter, genocide, ethnic cleansing, all of the above, emitted by Israel with America's total support. We're supplying the weapons, the bombs, the missiles, the munitions, with the intelligence, You know, CIA and the Sada are working hand in hand to implement all of this, all this atrocity.

And, you know, all of that, I think, is just a continuation of what happened at the end of World War II with the dropping of those two of atomic bombs. That's right. We lost our way. It did more than just kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian Japanese people. it seared the conscience of the American government. That's a good way put it. Where the American government felt like, well, we have the right. We are morally superior to anyone else in the world. We can define goodness and righteousness as we want to.

We are the exceptional nation, and we have the power to do it. And so we can do anything we want. And so we are seeing that today in 2025, which is just a continuation of the false war doctrine, the unjust war doctrine of the end of World War II. I absolutely agree. Yeah, many times the excuse is made by the Pentagon and others that, well, that allowed us to end the war early. But if they had used that against military forces, I think it would have had the same effect. The key thing is that the targeting of civilians, which is what we're seeing in Gaza now,

and the idea that we don't start wars. Now we start wars preemptively. And that was in the beginning of World War II, that was something that was a day of infamy when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Now, of course, we know that FDR stood down and invited that in many different ways. Nevertheless, for them to initiate war, that has still been. everybody understands that, you know, there's always an argument as to who began the war. We see that argument playing out between Israel and Gaza.

We see that argument playing out between Russia and Ukraine. So everybody understands that that is unjust. And what I'm concerned about when I look at what's happening with Israel and with much of this other stuff that Christians are cheering, is that even atheists and pagans understand instinctively the right and wrong about starting wars, the right and wrong about targeting civilians and sustaining this when there's no threat to you. And it is really amazing to me to see Christians who are cheering this type of thing. But of course, that is coming out of what I think is about theology. And you've got a book that addresses that.

The Incredible Schofield and His Book, I think you have on your website. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, that is the most thoroughly documented and fully researched biography of Cyrus Schofield ever written. And when you were talking about what you just said, the whole impetus behind that is built-fielism, also called dispensationalism, also called Christian Zionism. And it was started not by Schofield, but by a man named John Darby, who was a generation in front of Goldfield, but they overlapped in the latter years of Darby's life. And a Darby disciple, by the way, the idea of a rapture, a pre-second coming resurrection of Christian people. That concept was never taught in church history from the time of Jesus all the way up until the mid-1800s.

Yes. So for over 1800 years, there was never a doctrine called the rapture or dispercialism or futuritism or futurism or call what you will. And yet now that is pretty much taken over, that's pretty much taken over in terms of American Christianity. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was dominant. Yeah, but the history of it is there was a prophecy conference in Glasgow, Gotland, and I think the year was 1830. And there was a woman who had self-identified transchanneler,

Margaret Bentonnell, I believe, was the name. And she spoke in this conference, and, you know, this whole trans-channeling stuff. that's the mind. And she went into a trance on stage, and she started to babble forth this two-stage return of Christ with the so-called rapture being stage number one. And that was the first time that I can find in my research where in church history, that doctrine was taught. and really even taught. It wasn't a pastor getting up and exalming the scriptures. It was this demonic

transchannelor that went into a trance and, you know, said that this is what she was shown by the spirits and all this kind of stuff. So the whole beginning of the rapture was demonic, in my view. Well, anyway, it was picked up by the founder of the Plymouth Brother, and by the name of John Darby. he became the champion of this doctrine. He had a man that disciples, B.I. Schofield, who was young at the time. And Schofield was a con man. He was a fraud.

He was a thief. He spent six months in jail for fraud. He was a deserter of his family. He walked out on his wife. Now, we're talking, you know, this is the mid-1800s. There was no social security. There was no welfare. Right.

There were no benefits. I mean, he just left his two little girls and his wife. He, you know, gave himself a lawyer title. He never went to law school. He was never a lawyer, but he put a law degree behind his name, and he started working in law. After his so-called conversion, and then he got on to his religious kick,

he gave himself a theological degree that he never earned. He never went to college. But, you know, if you look at the Schofield Bible, it'll say, Fierre Scy, Schofield, D.D., well, that's just a degree that he gave himself. I mean, this man was a fraud's fraud.

He was a con man's con man. I mean, he's, you know, he would have made, P.T. Barnum, jealous. Well, the Wizard of Oz, right? Yeah, and this is the guy that founded what we now know is Christian Zionism or Schofield Futurisms.

And the thing that, the genius of it, the thing that made it survive, they say, why, how did this sweep the country and become bogg, you know, and seminaries and Bible colleges and churches all across the United States, the genius of it was

I got to explain this to you just a minute to help you understand how this became so popular it didn't become popular because of the doctrine it didn't become popular because of what was being said in the Bible until the time of Scolfield

Bible dollars you go back into the post-Reformation days like Adam Clark and Albert Barnes and Matthew Henry and John Gill and all these James and Fawcett and Brown, you name it. All these commentators, whenever they would study the scripture, they would write their commentaries in a separate book. They would not put their words on the same page as the words of God because they had such a holy reverence for the words of God. that they felt it would be sacrilege for them to put their words, their commentaries,

in the same page as the scripture. So therefore, they would write their books in a separate, and that complete separate volume. So if you wanted to read the Matthew Henry Commentaries, for example, the classic foremost commentary of all time, you would have you would have to have your open Bible on one side of the desk and then your open Matthew Henry commentary on the other side of the desk and look back and forth and that's how you had to study and learn so what Schofield did he ignored that and he put his his comments on the same page as the Bible so whenever you open the Bible

you had the scripture verses and his commentary on the same page. Well, this was a breakthrough in that it was such a convenience for people. You didn't have to carry two books around. You had to look back and forth. You could just open the Bible, and you had the commentary and the Bible on the same page. So it was a marketing tool. Yeah.

And we said that today. I walk into a Bible store, and they've got a different, they got a Bible for different professions. let's say, right, you know, or for men or for women or whatever, and they dress up the cover and they'll have stuff in there about the profession or this or that, and they'll try to tie it into whatever section of the Bible that they're in, but it's all about marketing. All right, right, and if you all got that from Skopold. He's the one that started that, and that's why it became so popular. It wasn't because of what he wrote.

It was because of the marketing tool in the way that the book was published. And, of course, it was financed by Oxford Press. Oxford Press was owned by Zionists. The Zionist agenda was promoted in Schofield's. Schofield was an uneducated man. He never finished any kind of formal education. He was intelligent. He was articulate.

He knew how to talk. He knew how to read. He did teach himself and all that kind of thing. But he did not know. theology in any shape, manner, form. The only thing he knew was what he was taught by Darby. And he simply regurgitated the Darbyism, which became Skullinism.

During the time of Darby, he was a contemporary of the great preacher, maybe the greatest Baptist preacher of all time, Charles Spurgeon, London, Neon. And whenever he started hearing the, the, doctrines of Darby and this split resurrection theory of a priest's second coming rapture and tribunal tribulation and all this stuff. Carl Spurgeon publicly repudiated Darbyism and he warned the church that if they follow this it was going to lead disaster.

But when Skullford came along and published his Bible, that sealed the deal. and then the seminaries and the Bible colleges started picking it up and then the pastor started picking it up. And today, 80% of evangelicals buy into Christian Zionism. It's a monster. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, when you look at this, Christ told us that the way we'll know false teachers

and false doctrine is by their fruit. And I would say the fruit has been really, really bad of this. And that's one of the things I've told people that said, look, you know, everybody's got their complex. complicated eschatology charts and everything. It's like, let's just take a look at what you're, the result of what this teaching is getting you to do. It's getting you to cheer the starvation and murder of children. And maybe you should go back and take a second look because your eschatology should not be trumping.

The obvious principles are laid out in the Bible for us. Yeah, the legacy of C.I. Schofield is the genocide in Gaza. Yeah. It really is. The slaughter, everything that is happening in America's support for it. And let's face it, let's be real. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why America is supporting this genocide in Gaza. They support anything Israel does. and of course we know about the Israel lobby, A-PAC, and, you know, dozens of other lobby groups representing Israel are literally buying the U.S. Congress, members of both parties.

I mean, that stranglehold is starting to crack a little bit because of the utter grotesqueness of the slaughter of the innocence. Gaza. Yes. And I think it was a becoming, I think that along with the, the appearance of Ted Cruz on with Tucker Carlson, I've got a lot of issues with Tucker Carlson, but he kind of laid that out. It's just like, why? Can you explain that?

Can you defend that? And, of course, he couldn't. Yeah. And I think a lot of people saw that and started scratching their head and saying, wait a minute, maybe there's something really wrong here, and there is. There is something really wrong. Yeah. Yeah.

That wasn't, that wasn't an interview, David. That was a snuff film. I mean, Tucker just slaughtered Senator Cruz. Maybe it looks like the idiot that he is. But, you know, aside from the stranglehold of the APEC lobby on Congress in the White House, which is massive. I'm not diminishing that at all. I mean, it's ungodly the way our Congress is being bought.

by a foreign government via the Israel lobby. I mean, it's unconstitutional. It's illegal. It's a moral. It's an American. It's everything bad in the world, you know, that's happening through APEC and the Israel lobby. Remember when Trump said Israel used to own Congress, and he said rightfully so?

They do. They do own Congress. Yeah, we know that. They do own Congress. Yeah. But the reason that that's able to be secure. This is my point is that that couldn't work if the evangelical churches of the country were not supporting it. I agree.

Because they're providing the moral and spiritual cover for this. You know, if the great notable preachers of the day, the ones who have the giant platforms and are speaking to hundreds of thousands of people and have the ear, of so many folks in our country, if they would stand up and preach the truth about Israel, about the new covenant, about, you know, what is right and wrong in the eyes of God under the new covenant, and the truth about biblical Israel expose a Christian's ironism for the falsehood that it is, and really speak truth to power, they would be able to negate the power of the the lobby, and they have the power to change the course of the country.

I'm talking about the pulpits of America, the pastors. This has always been the case. I agree. But because they're providing cover morally and spiritually for what Israel is doing, there's no incentive for anyone to change course. You know, for the longest time... So I really put the blame for this at the feet of the pulpits. I agree.

For the longest time, I've looked at a lot of these churches. very left-wing churches that'll have their rainbow celebrations, you know, where it's basically a worship service for LGBT. And I look at that and it's like, you know, that is, you know, what does it matter with these people? And people on the right will look at that and just shake their head and say, you know, they have, they're not worshiping Christ. They're worshiping something else that is against Christ. And yet the conservatives do the same thing. We've got a lot of churches like Hagey's church, where it's just basically a worship service for a political entity, a foreign government, Israel.

And I see that as being an exact correlation to what's happening with the progressive leftist churches and what they're doing with LGBT or with CRT or whatever, you know, DEI, that type of thing. They have their leftist ideology and they worship it and the right is doing that as well. And as people are trying to speak against abortion, against child mutilation, and these other things, we've got people who are looking at the vast majority of Christians who are applauding what's going on in Israel because of their eschatology. And they're shaking their heads and saying, you know, you say that you stand for innocent life, but you don't stand for innocent life at all. And so it's a reproach, it's a hypocrisy that has seen, I've seen Caitlin John Stombe.

many people who are not Christians just shaking their heads and saying, you Christians, what's the matter with you? And I look at it and I think, what a reproach it is to the body of Christ? What a reproach it is to the name of the Lord Jesus Christ for them to do this kind of stuff? And everybody sees it. I've seen one essay after another from people who are opposed to this war and saying, what's the matter with these Christians? It reminds me of what happened in Corinth, where Paul was saying,

you Christians in this church, you are embracing sexual practices that even the pagans don't embrace. And that's basically what I see happening here. They've got a moral sense of what a justified war is that Christians have surrendered because of their eschatology or whatever reasons. No, you're exactly right. I have several videos that are making the grounds on social media. A lot of people have picked up these videos and are reposting them, and some of them are reaching hundreds of thousands and even millions of people. And I'm making that very point. I'm saying that what's happening in evangelicalism today is that the pastors who are promoting Christian Zionism and their unreserved support for this godless state of Israel is driving people away from the gospel.

Absolutely. Absolutely. We're supposed to be preaching the gospel, reaching people for Christ with the gospel, showing people the love of Christ, showing people the grace of God, showing people that what Jesus did on the cross, you know, has brought us together as one body in Christ, as neither June or Gentile, Bon, or Free, we're all one in Christ. Everyone is equal at the cross.

And yet the doctrine of Christian Zionism is separating people into Catholic, systems and it's separating people away from the gospel of Christ. And what you're saying is it's making people sick to their stomachs. Yeah. When they see the way that Christian scientists and its pastors are supporting the awful, awful atrocities that are going on every minute of the day over there, and they're seeing the videos of it now with social media. When we're seeing it every day in front of our very eyes,

life alive time, you know, and we are seeing it. And they're looking at the churches and they're hearing what they're saying, and they're saying themselves that that's Christianity, I don't want it. That's right. And it's a statistical fact that there are more people leaving even in the evangelical churches today than any time in our nation's history. Yeah, that's right. And that started in the year 2000 with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. when Bush launched all that. It started then, but now then it's come to a tsunami. Yes.

It's a tsunami of people that are leaving churches, and it's driving people away from the gospel. So it's more here at stake than just the secular, more here than just the political. And it's not just... This is also impacting the spiritual fiber and fabric of America. I agree. And it's not just the people on the outside. This is something that's been a problem within the church as well. People become so attached to the rapture and the prophecies and all the rest of the stuff

that they'll break fellowship with you as a Christian if you disagree with them on this. And it's become the most important thing to them. And you have to say, but wait a minute, the most important thing is the Lord Jesus Christ. You know, he said, you search the scriptures, you think you have eternal life in them. But they testify of me. That should be your hermeneutic. That should be the view that you approach the text with. What does this tell me about Christ?

And especially even revelation. It's the revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's not what's going to happen to Israel, but that's the way it's read. It's amazing to me, but it's a real problem. That's why I'd like to, I'm going to have to get your book, The Incredible Schofield and his book, and that's available at your websites. And I know that you had to go, I think we've gone over the amount of time that you've allotted here. So I'll wrap this up pretty quickly again.

People can find Liberty Fellowshipmt.com. That's where you can find the book. That's where you can find Pastor Baldwin. And also on Chuck Baldwin Live.com. Thank you so much for joining us. Always interesting and important to talk to you. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you, David, very much.

Thank you. Well, that's it for today's show. Thank you for joining us. And if you would like to support us, you can go to David Knight. News, and you can see how you can donate to the program. we no longer have any funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, never got a sent from them in the first place.

But again, as we said when we're talking about the loss of public funding for these various entities, that if people want to support programs that they like, they need to do that on their own. And so we appreciate the many, many people who have supported us. We thank you for that. We make it available for everybody to listen to, but just to understand that we are dependent on the donations. And we thank you so much for joining us. May you have a good day.

You're listening to the David Knight Show. Hear News Now at APSRadioNews.com. Or get the APS Radio app and never miss another story. Welcome back. And I want to begin with a couple of statements from people about this book. The book is FDR, a new political life. The author is David Beto. And this is the first one that's here is from Hillsdale College.

It's Burton Folsom. He says the book, FDR, A New Political Life, is the most illuminating one volume history of FDR ever written. American historians have come to recognize that Roosevelt's New Deal did not end the Great Depression but prolonged it. David Beto carefully explains why so many FDR programs and power grabs were so counterproductive. to go from the older FDR histories to David Bado's wonderful new work is to make a historic leak from the dark ages. Also, another author, David McCallis says when it comes to race and Western influence, FDR's vision of the world order was muddled by delusional phenomena. He was not a man of empire or genocide like his wartime allies, Churchill and Stalin, but he was a dreadfully old-fashioned Victorian quack, an amateur for, phrenologist who believed that repopulating the Pacific Rim with certain choice

cross-breeding would create a better world for all. David Beto takes us further than his predecessors along the breadcrumb path into Franklin Roosevelt's thick forested interior. And again, many wonderful stellar reviews. And I've got to say, even though I wasn't able to read the entire book, what I read of it really does match with this. I'll give you one more. This is from Jim Beauvard, who we've interviewed on this show many times.

He said historian David Beto, who previously exposed how President Franklin Roosevelt ravaged Americans constitutional rights, is back with a new book, vividly exposing his personal perfidy from the dawn of Woodrow Wilson administration to 1945, the betrayal at Yalta and beyond. With volleys of research, Beto demolishes Roosevelt's reputation as one of the quote-unquote great presidents. And so I look at FDR, like Lincoln, these are presidents who come in at a time of great societal upheaval and change and war, and they have an active role in redefining our society. I think we're in a time like that right now.

This is a guy who ran as a peace candidate, but then turned to war. He was there at the center of the fight between gold and fiat currency. He was presided over rapid expansion of Leviathan and Federal. government with very creative excuses to override the constitution. He instituted surveillance, and there was a free speech revolt against him. He also weaponized the FCC. And we can see, you know, we've talked about what was going on with the FCC. We pointed out that why should broadcast media have its content controlled when they don't control the press? Well, you can look to FDR for that. So joining us now is David Beto. Thank you so much for joining us. This

excellent book here that you have. Thank you so much. You know, it's interesting, you brought up the, I mean, if you don't mind. Oh, go ahead, I'm sorry. The FCC issue. And it brought to mind the contrast

between FDR and Trump. You know, Trump makes these wild threats about involving the FCC. He goes public with it. He tries to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air, which really wasn't worth the effort, frankly. No. And he succeeds short-term,

but now Kimball is back on the air. So Trump looks silly. What FDR did is he did it behind the scenes. He did it carefully. He would never make a public statement like that. He went to the sponsors of, for example, there was a leading anti-New Deal radio commentator called, named Boke Harder, in 1938,

one of the top-rated commentators in the country on CBS. And so how did Roosevelt get him off the air? He did opening an IRS, investigation, an immigration investigation, because Carter was from Canada. And then finally, he went to the executives, or he went to the sponsors, including Marjorie Maryweather Post, who sold, well, at least she was the original owner of Marilago. And she used her influence, and Carter was forced off the air. And by the end of 1938, all anti-New Deal commentators,

the main networks were off the air. And despite the fact that most newspapers were hostile to FDR, he did it all quietly. He did it all behind the scenes with a scalpel where, you know, Trump used the blunt edge of the sword. In many ways, we should be thankful for that. Yeah. That Trump is like a bull in a China shop so often.

And sometimes when he doesn't need to get his way, he doesn't get his way because he's so, I don't know, obvious about it. Yeah, maybe his real thing is more about getting Americans divided and fighting each other than it is about the actual reform. But what FDR did is something that we've seen a pattern of people in government typically doing, and that is working behind the scenes, quietly sending out messages to make sure that this group or that group is shadow banned or canceled.

And you can use your own judgment in terms of doing this because you're a private corporation and you can do that. But of course, he kind of did that with in terms of telegrams and things like that before, not the social media side, of course, but actual physical telegrams. FDR had his involvement with that as well. And they see the early trends of the surveillance states. The technology has changed, but the nature of men and power hasn't really changed that much. Talk a little bit about the black inquisition and things that were involved in that.

Okay. Well, the Black Committee was a Senate committee. He was headed by Senator Hugo Black, who later ended up on the U.S. Supreme Court, despite his clan background. And Black was an attack dog for the New Deal. He was really Roosevelt's main ally, I would say, in the Congress. He was the to-go-to guy. Well, Roosevelt wanted an investigation of anti-New Deal. organizations. And Black was more than happy to cooperate in this. So Black would call in these witnesses

and they would, you know, sometimes successfully hold them off. He would bring in leading anti-New Deal figures. And so Black got the bright idea, or someone got the broad idea. Well, why don't I get their private telegrams? Telegrams were the emails texts of the time. They were over half of long-distance communication. People would say things in telegrams that they wouldn't say in letters, but they would say now in an email or a text. And there were thousands of them.

They were instantaneous, virtually instantaneous. So Black goes to Western Union and the other telegraph companies and said, I want copies of all telegrams sent to and from members of Congress. and he had other people as well for like a six months period. And Western Union's response was, are you kidding? You know, our customers would hate that.

And Black goes to the FCC, gets approval. And of course, FDR would have had a hand in this. Although, again, he didn't really have to order Black to do anything because Black was serving the new deal. And got FCC approval. So, again, it's FCC because- The telegraph companies were ordered. to provide that was one example

all it's you know millions of telegrams but then they expanded the black expanded the investigation to include other cities targeted individuals and so forth so he went in there with his staffers into Western Union and they had to keep copies of

of the telegrams right that was sort of part of their requirement and he he's they got big bonds full of these telegrams that was a government that was a government staffers went through them Sorry, that was a government requirement to keep the copies in the first place? Yes.

Okay. Well, I think the telegraph companies probably maybe would have kept their own copies anyway. I don't know. But they were required to keep copies of all telegrams. And they went through millions. And I couldn't believe this when I saw it. But yes, that was true. They went through about 10,000 a day over a very long period of time.

And the committee staffers had instructions to, don't look at anything of a personal nature. just to look at material related to lobbying. What would be lobbying? Well, the committee had a specific definition. Indirect or direct lobbying. Indirect lobbying would be any attempt to influence public opinion. So our conversation would be an example of that. So any attempt to influence public opinion would be considered lobbying.

So they went through, copied selectively, and then ambushed witnesses, because this was all secret. None of the witnesses knew they were doing this. None of them knew. And eventually came out because Western Union informed, started to inform people who were being targeted. And one of them

sued, very prominent law firm in Chicago still there. Silas Strawn was his name. And Strawn was a heavyweight. And in one in federal district court by that time, Black had done his damage. And he said, well,

we're done with our investigation. However, this was a very good precedent for the future. Now, of course, Black could use the telegrams that he'd gotten his illegal booty, but he couldn't do any more of this kind of search, nor could official future congressional committees. Very important precedent, but it's not very well known, but as a federal court judge. Yeah, we usually think about, you know, what's going on with FISA and everything, and, you know, that came after World War too because with the creation of the CIA and NSA, they started getting information from the phone company, getting pin information. Who did they call and that type of thing, which they could infer a lot from.

But actually this predates all of that. Were they using this as, you said, they were questioning people. Did they use this information as a perjury trap for people? You know, ask them a question that I knew the answer to? I suspect that that kind of thing went on. I haven't come across it. I have reason to believe from just reading some of Roosevelt's comments that he was, you know, this information was shared with him, but I can't prove it. But I think it was used for all sorts of nefarious reasons.

See, historians have kind of looked in the wrong place. They've looked at people like Jagger Hoover, who, again, there's a lot of things he did too. But the mass surveillance, this is a better example of mass surveillance, but people haven't looked at it. In fact, I hadn't even heard of the black committee until about 12 years ago when I was doing research and I came across it. I said, what's this thing? The black committee? What's that? Is that describing the nature of the committee? Yeah. No, it was a Senate committee. It was forgotten. Not by a lot of conservatives, though. conservatives would be bringing it up in the 1950s, and that's part of the reason why McCarthyism came about, because they were pissed. And they thought, well, you guys are now complained about civil liberties.

What about the black committee? That's a parallel to today as well, isn't it? You know, when you're suffering injustice like that, you feel entitled to propagate it against your enemies again. You know, so wait, you guys did it to us. So what about that? Let's do it again. I love the title that you got here. trials, probably Trump's going to do sedition trials, I would guess. Right? That's right. The same thing the

J6 people were convicted of. Stupid law that should have been repealed. Exactly. Or at least severely limited. I like the way that you've got it here in the, in your book, the Black Inquisition. You know, that really does get your attention as you're looking at it. It's like, it was like, oh, okay, you go. Yeah. The Black Inquisition. And then there was a pushback against that. Part of it was William Randolph Hearst was, of course, targeted that because I guess I could say, well, anything that he says is going to be influencing public opinion, obviously. So let's get all of his telegrams. And so he actually, you have a chapter here, the right and the left free speech coalition. So there's a pushback with that. He joined with the ACLU left as William Randolph Hearst pushing back. Tell us a bit about that. Yeah, well, the Black Committee had gotten a treasure trove of Hearst-related telegrams. But they did a very stupid thing. They did a public subpoena. None of this was subpoenaed, by the way. But they did a public subpoena of one and only one telegram that they probably already had.

And this telegram was where Hearst was accusing this prominent member of Congress, a committee chair, of being in League with the Communists. It was kind of a hyperpolic telegram. And I guess what the Black Committee, what Black thought was, people will just see that as so over the top, this will be good PR for us. But instead, what happened is other members of Congress, like a guy named McCormack, who is future speaker of the House, a guy named Emmanuel Seller, these are new dealers. They say this is uncalled for. This is the tactics. Mussolini. So it actually backfired on Roosevelt. Even many of his own New Deal supporters were against this. And this is very interesting and very discouraging in some ways,

because during this period, you had a lot of civil libertarians on the left, who were willing, even though they liked Roosevelt, who were willing to push back against him. And that is not as true today, maybe that will change now, but it's not, it certainly hasn't been true today. Well, today we're so much more partisan and tribal, and we don't seem to care about principles, we don't seem to care about the rule of law, and that's true of both sides, isn't it? Well, yeah, people at the time give you a sense of the difference. H.L. Mencken was an in-your-face kind of anti-new dealer, civil libertarian, you know, I don't know, agnostic. He only needed everybody, but he was friends with everybody.

He had correspondence that span the political spectrum. He was respected. He was liked as an individual. Could talk to people. I don't think there are as many people who fit in that category today. That's right. Yeah, he was real clever wit. I mentioned frequently his thing.

A year ago, if I had a gold coin and a flask of whiskey, the whiskey was illegal and the coin was legal this year. The gold coin is illegal and the flask of whiskey is legal. So, yeah, he was always... I haven't heard that one, but that's... always pointing out the absurdity of FDR, yeah. So I think one of the very telling things about FDR was the war and peace issue. And you got in here part of his speech, which truly is amazing that he makes, when he's running as a candidate, as a peace candidate, he says, I've seen war.

I've seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I've seen men coughing out their gasped lungs. I've seen the dead in the mud. I've seen cities destroyed. I've seen 200 limping exhausted men come out of the survivors of the regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I've seen the agony of mothers and wives.

I hate war. And you write, as he so often did, FDR exaggerated. His exposure to the fighting in World War I was limited and sanitized. the Navy had sent him on a guided inspection of American naval and marine bases in Europe, the main impression conveyed by his contemporaneous diary account was that of a sightseer. So talk a little bit about that, how he ran as a peace candidate, and then he flipped, pushing us into war. Well, FDR was playing both sides of the street.

For example, in the 1930s, he'd been the guy that suggests, well, maybe we need neutrality laws. And then later, he pushed for repeal of the Neutrality Act, saying, I wish I'd never signed it. He never mentioned that he was the guy that helped to inspire it in the first place. So he was a rabid interventionist when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Wilson. He was constantly trying to imitate his cousin, Theodore, and get some sort of incident, possibly. So he was a hawk. But then in the 30s, he sort of realizes there's all this anti-war feeling, and he appeals to that. He actually applauds the Munich Agreement.

But then after that, he becomes much more of an interventionist. and certainly aligns himself with Winston Churchill and so forth. But a lot of this is done quietly. So he's sort of playing both sides of the street. And he is in trouble in the 1940 election. His opponent, Wendell Wilkie, who was kind of an interventionist too, but starts talking like an America firster during the last part of the campaign, is making inroads.

So FDR is worried about this. So very shortly before the election, he gives this speech. He'd never given a speech this strong where he says, I've said this before, and I'll say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war, full stop, right? And Wendellke heard that on the radio, and he said, that hypocritical son of a bitch just lost me the election. and whether or not that was true or not, FDR was, that was a clear motivation. His son went up to him and said, Dad, why did you say that? You've never said anything like that before.

And he said, basically, well, I had to win, you know, for the good of the country, that kind of thing. So, just amoral, an amoral figure, maybe worse, in so many ways. A very cynical, jaded man, I think, who had great charm. Yes. But I never really cared for him. I'm going to confess. Did you ever see that movie Sunrise at Campobello? No, I never saw that.

Oh, it was a movie made in the 50s starring Ralph Bellamy, playing FDR in his battle against polio. And I just, you know, Bellamy captured an FDR in some ways. It was supposed to be a sympathetic portrayal. But there was just this charm, which always seemed a little bit phony to me. Yeah. and very calculating, but very effective. Yeah, he seemed that way to me as well, but I always kind of just dismissed that as, you know,

when you look at movies at the time, you know, people came across as very stiff and pretentious and, you know, putting on airs. And that's kind of the way that a lot of people would come across, even in the movies at that time. They wouldn't come across as, you know, genuine or... And so I kind of just put it up to the zeit guy, of the time, if you will. But yeah, it's interesting. And you begin with his rise to power.

Talk a little bit about that. Where this guy come from? How do you get there? He had a big advantage in that he was born into comfortable circumstances, not super wealth, but wealth. He was a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt and very distant, like seventh cousin, but the family had contacts with each other. And so far. forth. And he went, he did the typical trajectory of someone in that class. He went to Groton, a very exclusive private school. And he, he went to Harvard. He got a Columbia, his law degree from Columbia. He had very mediocre grades. He was not a good student. But he, he was a gladhander. People liked him. He made his impact socially. And then it was, some people approached him.

and said, Mr. Roosevelt, we'd like you to run for Congress, or not for Congress, for a state legislature in New York. You know, Theodore was president at the time. They happened to be Democrats. I guess they thought that that was a brilliant move. Now, I say that if the Republicans had approached Franklin, he probably would have run as a Republican. In fact, he had supported his cousin very openly when his cousin ran for re-election. It was his first vote was for Theodore. But the Democrats asked him. It was a good Democratic year, 1908. So he ran as a Democrat and he was able to win. And from there, he just impressed people. He got the attention of a guy named Josephus Daniels, who was Secretary of the Navy, quite a racist, southern racist type. But Daniels was charmed by Roosevelt. He had a very apt comment. He said he was just like an actor. He had that. He had it, right? And someone had said it was a case of love at first sight, you know, when Daniel saw him.

And I don't think anything went on, but he made him Assistant Secretary of Navy. And from there, Roosevelt was imitating his cousin, either intentionally or by chance. Theodore had been in the legislature. Theodore had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy. and then Theodore was vice presidential candidate as Roosevelt was in 1920. So, very similarity,

a lot of parallels between them. One difference, though, Franklin did not volunteer to fight in World War I. He was in his late 30s, he could have. His cousin, Theodore said, you have to get into the infantry. Not just the Navy. You have to get

into the infantry. You have to get in the fight. And Roosevelt came back and said, well, my boss, some essential. And maybe his boss did say that. But Theodore had a similar, you know, a similar boss. He didn't have to go in. But Franklin was not the man the theater was. Right. And so he did not, he did not serve in the military. So at that point, he was able-bodied, at that point he was able-bodied and could have. Yeah, that was before his bout of polio, which was 19. How old was he? right here, 1921.

So it was about how old when that happened? He was about 39, quite a young man. And there's an interesting story there. Now, a lot of people say, can't you say something good about Roosevelt? I will say that, you know, he showed great determination. Of course, he had a lot of help. He had a lot of doctors. He had a lot of, you know, leisure time.

He had a lot of support. but he showed great courage and overcoming that. Part of the story that I was surprised by is who did he blame for the polio? He blamed a Republican center. And the story on this is really fascinating. I begin my book with it. There was an investigation. Well, there was something called the Newport scandal, the Newport sex scandal.

Do you recall reading that? Yeah, no, I skipped over to the Black Inquisition. Well, it's good stuff. What happened was Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy, and there was a guy at one of the naval bases in Newport who was investigating whether there were same-sex relationships going on in the Navy, thought this was, you know, a major scandal and so forth. And even did his own private investigations where this guy would find people to go in and they would actually have sex, right, with these men, right? to try to entrap them. So Roosevelt found out about this. The investigation was basically had no funding.

The Secretary of War had refused to back it. I mean, the Attorney General refused to back it. And Roosevelt stepped in single-handedly and set up a investigative unit headed by him called Section A in the Department of Navy, which investigated this issue of same-sex. relationships in the Navy. And they would send out investigators who, again, would entrap people by having sex with them. And Roosevelt, I think, quite clearly knew what was going on.

A local journalist in Newport pushed back on this and accused Roosevelt of doing this. And Roosevelt basically responded, said, well, you know, isn't it important to, you know, to find what's going on here? Why are we so worried about procedure? And it was actually controversially. You would think this period was very anti-gay, and it was. But people in Congress and the press thought this was abhorrent.

These tactics were beyond the pale. And that's one of the things that we've lost. He did his best to cover it up. and it weakened it put so much tension on him that he said that it had lowered his resistance and made him more susceptible to the outbreak of polio, which may have been true, actually, because it was a lot of it was contaminated water,

but again, if your immunity, you know, if you had low resistance and so forth. So he blamed this senator till his dying day for causing his polio. Well, you know, you should talk about that. Because of this report investigation, which almost derailed his career, almost destroyed him. And he was lucky. It's the tactic that's involved there.

And everybody did. And you would think this would be a period where they would say, oh, they're gay, we need to root them out. They may have thought that, but this is beyond the pale. And, of course, these people that had been destroyed, many of them were innocent, you know, they didn't get any benefits, right? They didn't get military funerals. they were destroyed and Roosevelt is able to ride through it

partly because other things go on that divert public attention but the New York Times as a matter of fact has a big story where it calls his behavior they blame him for it the Times blames him in this article and basically

you know comes to conclusion he's unfit for office but he's able to escape this somehow because of other things going on. And it's forgotten. And most people today don't even know about it. But it's quite an important story in his life.

Well, it reveals his character, which we then saw later when he's coming after politically. Roosevelt was quite clear that he wasn't worried about the means. It was the end. Get something done. This is a view towards civil liberties. These people need to be shut up. Yes. And I think some way to shut them up.

That was a real hallmark. That was a real hallmark of everything that he did. You know, he doesn't care. I think he was always kind of a default interventionist. And I think a lot, you know, I mean, I think he did have an ideology. And I think he had been a Wilsonian interventionist. He was a great admirer of Wilson, right? He defended Wilson when he ran for president in 1920, even though much of the public was sick of Wilson.

He defended the worst aspect, the most repressive aspects of Wilsonianism. think that was his default position. That's the best way I could, I could explain it. I think the relationship with Churchill made a difference, but I think you see even signs of that before that, where he's trying to do it. His focus is on the North Atlantic. By 1941, he is desperately trying to provoke an incident in the North Atlantic. And he builds up minor incidents. or, you know, into cause celebs and is trying to get into the war. It's clear he wants to do that by 1941,

by any means that he can't. And, but the public is hostile to the idea. Well, overwhelmingly, the public is, you know, does not want to get in another foreign war. They remember World War I. They do not want to do that again. But he's able to get aid to Britain through Lend-Leese, which was very open-ended,

But again, selling this is, well, of course, we won't have to go in. You know, we can help the British, right? Give them the tools and they will finish the fight, as people used to say. And that kind of thing. Kind of where we are right now with Ukraine, right? Kind of where we are right now with Ukraine, I guess. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we can just give them the weapons and we won't really get involved.

But the Germans aren't taking the bait to the extent that he wants. wants them to. So he kind of shifts to the Pacific, right? And there's massive sanctions against the Japanese that preceded Pearl Harbor. And of course, what do you have about Pearl Harbor? What's your take on Pearl Harbor? Did he engineer that to and keep things secret there in a kind of subversive way? What is your opinion about Pearl Harbor? Yeah, again, he is, his focus is the North Atlantic, but he eventually comes to the conclusion. Well, you know, if we're going to go to war at Japan, that's fine with me. And, you know, maybe we can get into the European war as well.

I don't think, I think that that's part of what he's pushing. And really since, you know, there were opportunities to have peace agreement with Japan. The Japanese prime minister offers to meet with Roosevelt in the middle of the Pacific to have a summit. So let's hash this out. Roosevelt doesn't take the opportunity. At one point, the Japanese actually say that they were willing to evacuate China. He doesn't take the opportunity. So they're sort of a distraction.

Now, okay, Pearl Harbor, did Roosevelt know about it? I don't think he did. And my argument for that is, I think the best evidence is that they did know that Japanese would attack. They thought the attack would probably be somewhere like the Philippines. maybe in Singapore, somewhere like that. They did not think it would be Pearl Harbor. Very few people thought that. Almost nobody thought that.

And part of the reason they didn't think that is they didn't think the Japanese were capable. They didn't think they were good pilots. They didn't think that they could pull something out like that. And even the commanders on the ground, and Roosevelt did short change them. Short and Kimmel there at the Pacific. They wanted observation planes, but Roosevelt diverted all resources to the North Atlantic. They wanted, you know, if they had had those observation planes, for example, it might have made all the difference. He shortchanged them.

But even they thought that the main danger from the Japanese was sabotage. That's one of the reasons why they put the planes in the middle of the field in many cases. It made them more vulnerable to attack, but theoretically less vulnerable to sabotage. So what is Roosevelt's first reaction after the attack? Well, it's from a butler who saw him, and Roosevelt's response was, I will go down in disgrace. He thinks, my God, I didn't expect this. I'm going to be in trouble because of this.

So I don't think they knew that the attack was going to be at Pearl Harbor. partly because they underestimated the Japanese. I think Roosevelt was reckless, however, that he knew an attack was going to come. I think he could have done much more to warn naval commanders throughout the Pacific than an attack was going to come. There were clues that it could have come at Pearl Harbor, naming the time of day. They did know the time of the day when the Japanese were going to, in the embassy, had been ordered American embassy to destroy their codes, and that was at 730. a.m., which would have been a very good time

for an attack on Pearl Harbor, and they didn't put two and two together. So I think it's more incompetence, but I don't buy the theory that it's been put forward by people like Stinnett, who makes this argument that you know,

that we knew that the Japanese fleet was on the way and so forth. I don't see the evidence for that. We did break one of the codes, but we didn't break the crucial, you know, naval code, broke the diplomatic code. So we knew a lot of what was going on. Roosevelt knew a lot about it.

He was reading a lot of Japanese mail. And maybe they could have put two and two together, but I think it was sort of racism in some sense. They just didn't think the Japanese could pull something like this off. You know, they found out, didn't they? Well, talk a little bit about you got your... I'd be happy to talk with people about it, but I don't buy that that he knew that it was going to have.

happen at Pearl Harbor. Sure. Well, talk about fear and emergency. Okay. Well, when Roosevelt ran in 1940, 1932, he pledged to maintain sound money. Now, I didn't exactly say, well, gold, but Hoover didn't either. But he also gave a speech right before the election, a little known speech called the covenant speech, where he would talk about, you know, gold contracts, the covenant, right? He said he would uphold the covenant. You know, basically I will uphold, you know, the use of gold, right? Then very shortly after the election, he makes a decision to go off the gold standard. He calls in his secretary of the treasury, who's much more, actually secretary of state,

who's much more conservative than him on financial issues, Cordell Hall. And he says, Cordell, congratulate me. We're going off the gold standard tomorrow. and he pulls out some money and it was a money that was issued by the whatever, the Federal Reserve Bank of Tennessee, I guess. He said, this is from Tennessee, your own

state, Cornell. And what makes this money good? It's only good because we say it's good. And again, that is what he did. Then he does a lot of crazy things after that. He does a program

to purchase gold and he sets the well, no, not to purchase gold, but to set the price of gold. So he says he has this gold buying program. And how does he determine the price? He determines it from things like, he says, well, I think the price should be

19 cents today because it's a lucky number. You know, he would say things like that. And Roosevelt was very superstitious. He had lucky shoes. He had lucky hats. So this is not as strange as you might seem. And it was just a crazy, crazy town. But what saved us in terms of financially in the 30s was we had massive gold imports from both Europe and the Soviet Union.

Your people are taking their gold for obvious reasons out of those places and bringing it to the United States. So we have a tremendous gold inflow to the United States through those sort of happy, not happy, tragic accidents, I guess you could say, both from Russia and from, because Stalin is buying a lot of American goods using gold. That's part of it. And, of course, the gold is coming in from Germany because Jews and others are taking their gold out. Yeah, it's interesting.

You know, when you look at how he was reacting, how he had his lucky shoes and all the rest of the stuff and how arbitrary things were, that sounds very familiar to you. in a disturbing way, doesn't it? You know, kind of erratic and arbitrary capricious, what he's doing with these things. We're starting to see a lot of that. Capricious is a good word. Yeah. Parallels of Trump, but there are big differences, too. Yeah.

But, you know, I think there are, there, there's, there's some parallels that you control. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So talk a little bit about the end of prohibition. That's, that's one of the things everybody, you know, Happy Days is here again. And how much of that was, did he build that up for his campaign and how much of that was really an initiative of his? Or was it just that people had had it with alcohol prohibition at that point? He got ahead of that.

Was he opposed on that by the Republicans? Or what was the situation with the prohibition? I don't discuss prohibition a lot. But Roosevelt was a straddler. He wasn't going to take controversial positions. He was also a straggler on trade issues and tariff issues. So he was not a leader of the anti-prohibition forces. There were Democrats who were.

The more conservative Democrats, interestingly, tended to be the more anti-prohibition. And there was a big element in the party. And people were sick and tired of the prohibition laws by 1932. The Republicans chose to kind of avoid the issue. So Roosevelt and getting the nomination, it certainly was a popular position, but he also recognized that this is a popular position. And he came out for repeal of the constitutional amendment bringing in prohibition. He took a very strong stand. I think there were other motivations, though.

One was it's a great tax source. And as a matter of fact, during the early new deal, even though they're talking about income taxes, most of the tax collections are from excise taxes. People like things like cosmetics, cigarettes, alcohol. Yeah. That's where the bulk of the revenue is raised. So Roosevelt is raising the tax top rate to, I don't know, eventually it gets, you know, well over 90%. but it's going way, way up. He makes a big deal about this,

but that means that the wealthy find ways to find tax shelters, they don't pay it. So where does the actual money come? It comes from the nickels and dimes, the people going to movies. There's a tax on movie tickets. It comes from the nickels and dimes of working class people.

But Roosevelt is very clever and never acknowledging that. And, of course, the excise taxes on liquor as well. Yeah, it's always... Maybe in the back of his mind, too. And he uses that revenue source in a major way. It's always soak the rich, and then it's always the poor middle class to pay all the taxes. That's another thing that never seems.

Oh, the stark example of that, yes. Another thing never stops. And, of course, the revenues, you know, that's what they called the people that were coming after the stills in the mountains and everything, because that was really what they wanted. They wanted the money that was there. So talk a little bit about the Supreme Court packing issue as well and his fight to, essentially just completely rewrite the Constitution when we look at what happened with the New Deal. Should be called the New Constitution.

Well, Roosevelt proposes, he keeps us quiet again, but then in 1937, he's all puffed up. Because the 1936 election was one of the more spectacular landslides in American history, partly because Roosevelt was very effective in using New Deal money, targeted money. And I could talk about that as well. how he was able to win such a big majority. But he thought, I'm going to get a third new deal, right? He wanted to be more radical. He wanted to do more.

But he thought, what good will that do if the Supreme Court, which has been striking down, measures like the AAA and the National Recovery Administration, what good will all my effort be unless I get a sympathetic court? Okay, well, he decides, he proposes to increase the size of the court and he gives a speech where he basically says they're overextended. They're old. They're tired. I want to help them. You know, they've got a big workload. Well, he gives his speech and he wants to increase the size of the court.

And he obviously thinks he can pull it off because I don't know, you're talking about something like, gee whiz, the Republican. looking's down to like 16, 20 senators? I mean, he's got an overwhelming majority. You would think that he could pull this off easily. And he's so disingenuous. And it's so obvious what he's doing that there is a big movement against court packing led by a new dealer, Senator Burton Wheeler,

who'd been an ally of Roosevelt and turns against him. And Wheeler is the ideal guy to lead this effort. the Republicans are very smart. They lay back and let the Democrats take leadership, and they do. Now, the campaign is very grueling, and it becomes clear during the campaign that Roosevelt is essentially won, because one of the justices on the court is switched sides, and it's clear that he's probably going to get all of its New Deal programs sustained. But he keeps pushing on. I guess it becomes a matter of principle for him.

He keeps pushing on. He pushes, pushes, pushes. The majority leader of the Senate is exhausted. He is in bad shape, and he ends up having a heart attack and is found with a copy of the congressional record in his hand. His name is Joe Robinson. And Roosevelt doesn't go to Robinson's funeral. Wow.

And there's a lot of controversy about that. Why don't you go to the guy's funeral? Probably because he was pissed off that Robinson wasn't doing a better job. anybody says, well, he would understand, you know, he had to fight for the, and it hurts Roosevelt, no end, and Roosevelt is defeated. So in a lot of ways, that is an example of a left-right coalition. There are many examples, but that's one. He's defeated by Democrats. Could you imagine that happening under Biden? I would find it difficult to imagine that. Or Franklender Trump in the opposite direction. That's right. But it did happen then, which says something positive.

about Americans during that period. Americans in Congress include it. That's right. Much higher level of character in a lot of ways. And I've mentioned many times about the fact, you know, we have our war on drugs that's been going on for over half a century, but we had the 18th and the 21st Amendment, which said that they had enough respect for the Constitution

that everybody had, they had a constitutional amendment to stop in order to start it and then stop the alcohol prohibition, because they knew that they didn't have that power in the Constitution. But today, you know, we don't care about that. We just do whatever we wish. I think it's kind of interesting. Everybody agreed on that. We have to have a constitutional amendment.

That's right. It's one of the biggest arguments against the war on drugs, I think, is the fact that we have those two amendments that are there. But when you go back and you look at this particular case with the Supreme Court, the fact that he's got the votes, but he still wants to press on with this thing because it's a matter of personal prestige and power, I think. The same type of thing that we see with Trump. And yet, does he take the kind of vengeance against people who go against him

and kind of a vendetta that we see Trump taking against Republicans, let's say? He doesn't attend the guy's funeral or whatever, but, you know, he gives him the cold shoulder. But did he really go after people like Trump will go after somebody like Thomas Massey who opposes him on his agenda? Yeah. He keeps a secret. And this is what's interesting. There is an investigation under another loyalist. In fact, he'd been offered the position on the Supreme Court before black but wanted to stay in Congress.

His name was Senator Sherman Mitten. And if you search his name, the thing that usually comes up is there's a bridge named after him. But now maybe that'll change. But Minton was a very young guy. He was already in the Senate leadership, first term. And he was very tight with Roosevelt. And Mitten starts his own investigation. Basically succeeds Black's, the Black Committee.

It's the same committee. But Black is now in the U.S. Supreme Court. And so Mitten heads this investigation. They can't search telegrams anymore, but one of the things they do do is they use, Mitton gets permission to look at the IRS tax, tax, records of people he targets, for example. He gets that. But Minton gets very frustrated because there's a lot of putback, pushback. People are very upset about his methods. And he's, he lacks Black's subtlety. Black had some subtlety. Minton is just charging forward. And so Mitten gives

this speech. He said, well, we need a law against these big newspapers, because most of the press was against Roosevelt. So he said, let's make it a felony. to publish anything known to be untrue, fake news, basically. The fact they used that term, I think. False news or fake news. And he proposes this bill. And what is the reaction to the bill? Almost universal opposition sets in almost from the beginning.

As it is setting in, Roosevelt is asked about the Mitten Bill. at a news conference. And I think Roosevelt was the guy that had the idea. I think he put it Minton up to it. I can't prove that, but I think it's true. Because Mitten was not the kind of guy to go off on his own. And he reflects what Roosevelt thought of the press. He was asked about this.

And he said, well, you know, if we had such a bill, we wouldn't even have enough room in the federal prison system to hold all the prisoners. And it gets a little laugh, right? Yeah. And then he moves on to a new topic, and I wish they'd done follow-ups. They didn't. He says, you boys asked for it, you know.

That's what he says. You boys asked for it, you know, I mean, you reporters, you know, people, you asked for this. And then he moves on to the next topic. And he drops it, right? Because Mitten ends up dropping it. And it discredits his investigation, and his investigation is pretty much shut. down after that so fdr's those two years after the 1936 election are a low point for ftr there's pushback against him he loses core packing the mitten committee collapses and he is he puts all of his attention

on court packing and as a result he isn't able to get his radical new deal program in 1938 37 38 that he wanted because he focused was almost entirely on court packing and then later after really is too late on these investigations. You know, it's kind of interesting when we look at this period of time, you know, when all the institutions were being reconsidered, reinvented, if you will, and he's fighting against the constitutional pattern that had been accepted, that he was getting pushed back, even from his own party against some of this stuff,

because as we talked about, people understood the principles. He had a lot of people who did not share his idea that the end justifies the means. And we don't see that today. We're in a much more dangerous situation, I think, when we look at that. That's why it's good to go back and look at history. You look at the radical change that was accomplished during the FDR period of time. And you look at the fact that now we have people on both sides have become unhinged from or have detached themselves from basic principles about free speech, the rule of law, and having a due process to investigate things like that. I think we're in a very dangerous time right now.

I think this book helps get people to understand that if we look at the context, the historical context of this. Yeah, and we're seeing a lot of people on the right who were talking about free speech and local control, states rights. Yeah, turn down a dime. That's right. This is very discouraging to see this. Yeah. Now they want to come after their idea of fake news, you know. Now they've got their own fake news vendettas that they want to come after.

So it is. There is so much here. I mean, we could do several interviews with this. This is an excellent book. It is a very important presidency to understand the context of the times in which we live in our government. And I really highly recommend this book, FDR, A Political Life by David Beto. And you spell your name as B-E-I-T-O. Is that correct?

That's right. Yeah. So it's not spelled like the Texas politician candidate. Oh, please, no. And a lot of people will call him Beto O'Rourke, but I think it's Beto, actually. Oh, yeah. I believe that's the way his name is pronounced. Yeah.

I hate telling people that even if it isn't true. But I think it is true. I think it is true. Yeah, I used to always call him Robert Francis O'Rourke or whatever his original name was. I said he's a trans-Hispanic. He identifies as Hispanic, even though he's not hispanic. I think he's a husband now. Let's keep it that way.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we don't want to. to resurrect him with any attention, I guess. But an excellent book, and thank you so much for joining us. And there is much to learn in terms of politics and history. It's a very seminal presidency, unfortunately, for many of us who'd like to see government that follows the Constitution. FDR's presidency was an unmitigated disaster.

And it bears looking at it and see if we see any repetition in current events. as a warning, as a harbinger of what's coming, because as we were talking about earlier, you know, this whole stuff of secretly getting information on his enemies, we saw that immediately after World War II ended. We saw that immediately being transferred over to the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, all these people, that using the income tax, to spy on people, these same tactics used over and over again. Thank you very much. David Beto, the book is FDR, A Political Life. Thank you, folks, for joining us. Have a good day. They created common core to dumb down our children.

They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man is simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Your most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.

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