The Eric Metaxas Show - #10 - John Zmirak and Todd Chatman

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

Eric Metaxas begins the episode with Todd Chatman from Christian Solidarity International, who shares the stunning reality that slavery is still happening today in Sudan and explains how CSI has already freed more than 120,000 people. Todd describes how every $250 gift directly rescues an enslaved person and provides the essentials needed to start a new life. In the second half, John Zmirak joins Eric for a sobering look at America’s cultural decline and asks whether we are drifting toward a soft totalitarian state. Zmirak explains how ideology, propaganda, and weaponized compassion are reshaping society and why Christians must recover discernment before freedoms vanish. The episode connects global injustice with domestic cultural decay in one urgent conversation. Christian Solidarity International: ⁠⁠https://csi-usa.org/metaxas/⁠⁠⏱️ Sponsors:MyPillow — Save BIG with code ERIC: ⁠https://www.mypillow.com/⁠ten Boom Coffee— Save 10% with code ERIC: ⁠https://tenboom.coffee/⁠TIMESTAMPS⁠0:00⁠ Intro⁠0:51⁠ Todd Chatman On Sudan Slavery⁠22:25⁠ John Zmirak Joins Show⁠25:03⁠ Tribalism And Golden Mean⁠29:27⁠ Racism, Tribalism, White Demonization⁠34:57⁠ Immigration, Diversity And Chaos⁠49:20⁠ Young Men, Resentment And FuentesFollow the show: ⁠https://ericmetaxas.com/

Hey there folks, exciting news. As you probably know, if you've been following me for any number of years, at this time of year, in the words of Bugs Bunny, at this joyous time of year, we bring you loads of Christmas cheer. What is the Christmas cheer? Well, we get to do something, I say it every time. It's almost unbelievable. It's almost unbelievable.

And because people misuse and overuse the word literally, it has come to be meaningless. So listen carefully. We have the opportunity to literally free slaves. That's the headline, folks. That's what we get to do each year at this time of year, at this happy time of year. We get to do something that seems unbelievable. How do we do it? Well, I'm going to tell you right now, we work with Christian Solidarity International.

And right now I have as my... my guest, Todd Chapman, who comes on here every year to tell us about this. So Todd Chapman, every time you come on this program is to talk about this just extraordinary opportunity. Ladies and gentlemen, you know I'm not blown smoke. This is a big deal. Todd, welcome back. Hey, thanks, Eric.

Always love to be on with you. And I always love to invite your listeners into what God is doing through CSI. It's a well-kept secret, but such a profound need in every year your listeners. and now your viewers on the on YouTube in your podcast channel make a huge difference. Well, every year people really go crazy for this because they see that this is real, that you can literally free slaves. And I guess what I want to explain and what I want you to explain, help my audience, who doesn't know about this, understand what we are talking about,

that there's no, there's no hyperbole. but at first you have to deal with the darkness. You have to say that there is slavery existing today in parts of Africa. We have radical Muslims who believe slavery is a good thing and we can subjugate our Christian enemies. And this is happening in Sudan. I mean, tell that story for those who don't understand how this happened and what it is that CSI is enabling us to do. Yeah, sure. So first of all, CSI, Christian Solidarity International.

has been in existence since 1977. And it's really a human and religious rights organization. And we have spent our entire history of battling for the freedom and battling against oppression for people because of religious reasons. And a big part of what we do also is free slaves from Sudan, northern Sudan.

These slaves were taken captive back last century during a Sudanese civil war, late 80s, early 90s. And we're talking about hundreds of of largely women and children who are allowed to be taken captive by Arab slave, you know, masters. And they've been held in captivity ever since. And most of the world doesn't even know that this ever happened. I mean, it's, you know, it's long since been forgotten, except by CSI and the people that support us. And so every year, since 1995, thanks to donations from generous

people, we have been able to affect the freedom of these Sudanese slaves and bring them back into freedom in South Sudan, oftentimes reuniting them with their families, putting their back in the community from which they were abducted decades ago, and giving them a new start in life, and we do that all in the name of Jesus. And so since 1995, we've been able to deliver about 120,000 slaves, let that number sink in, 120,000 people freed from brutal captivity. And now, even more every year as people give. We're able to free more slaves every year. And one of the things that we're really excited about for years,

we endeavored to negotiate freedom, not just for these captive men and women, and many of them are women, but also to free the children that they, you know, have had while they've been enslaved. And that was a non-starter for a lot of years, but over the last couple of years, we've actually been able to begin to bring mothers

and their children out of captivity now as well, which is just absolutely so thrilling, because can you imagine a child being born into slavery and then having to be, you know, separated from his or her mother because she steps into freedom. That's such an anguish on the mom and it leaves an orphan child. But thankfully, thanks to God's grace, we've been able to bring mothers and now their children home together. Again, to explain the historical background, folks. So this happened mostly in the 90s, okay? and the UN stepped in and ended this civil war.

In the civil war in Sudan, the radical Muslims were taking slave captives. So the UN, which as you know, I think is worthless, they ended that war, but they did not restore these enslaved people to freedom. Did not do that. So for 30 plus years, slavery exists. and it falls to folks like you who are listening and CSI to do something about that.

We've been doing something about that for many years on this program. CSI's been doing this since 1995, as Todd just said, going into this area, making relationships with these Falani herdsmen to basically barter with them. And so I should say there's going to be a banner, a CSI banner, actually there is a CSI banner at eric mataxis.com. Folks, you got to learn to spell my name. It's just going to open up all kinds of possibilities for you. Ericmetaxis.com, m-E-T-A-X-A-S.

If you go there, you see the banner, you click on the banner, the CSI banner, everything is there. So, Todd, tell us what we're saying, and I say this all the time, folks, whatever you give, whatever God puts on your heart to free literal slaves, to free the captives, literally, not metaphorically, literally. It's $250 to free a slave and to put that person, set that person up in a life of freedom. And we'll talk about what that means. Whatever part of 250 you can do, obviously,

if you can do 250, that's amazing. If you can do multiples of 250, many people listen to this program can do that. I want to encourage you to do that. But whatever you can do, we're asking you, I'm asking you shamelessly to do it. God bless you when you send $50 or $100 or whatever you can do. You can also do it monthly.

If you say, well, I can't give a lump sum right now, but our family would like to do $25 a month or $100 a month, whatever you can do. It's huge. So Todd, talk to us about what is it if somebody puts in $250 and says, I want to do this. What is that? what is possible when they do that?

What starts, what goes into motion at that point? Because on the one hand, it's to free a slave, but what does that mean? And then what's involved in setting them up in a life of freedom? Yeah. Yeah.

So the vast majority of that $250 gift actually goes for setting them up to step into a new life where they have the opportunity to have that be successful. So it's things that they need for survival. I mean, they have nothing. They have the clothes that they are wearing. It was, And they actually literally walk.

We call them freedom marches. They actually walk into freedom in South Sudan. So they have nothing. So they come into our freedom camps. We document them. We take their photo. We capture as much information as we can. Their name,

if they know where they're from. But a lot of them don't because they were taken captive. Oftentimes when they were, you know, little children. They don't remember. But we try to get that basic information. And then we provide them with everything that they'll need to get a new start in life. So it's food. It's shelter. We give them a tarp or a tent, so they have some place to sleep.

We set them up with fishing supplies and a water container so that they can gather water and drink and cook with that. One of the most important and precious things we give them is we give them a she goat, which they can use not only for milk, but they can also breed that goat and begin to sell the offspring. So you've got a little bit of microenterpress. Are you trying to tell my audience that a male goat, cannot give milk. We're not going to allow you to treat the kind of hatred. Excuse me on this program. Sorry. I had to go there. Typically, a she goat gives milk. So if you give $250, folks, do you understand what a big deal this is?

We're not just enabling CSI to use their relationships to rescue these people from slavery, but also then to set them up in a life of freedom because that's necessary. where they are. And so you're talking about that. I want to, I want to give a phone number because there are people that prefer to call. Folks, if you want to call, you'll get all this information. If you call the folks at CSI, well, they can reprise what we've been talking about here. But every $250 goes to free a slave and to set them up in a life of freedom. So if you give $50, you're obviously contributing to that. If you give $250, you're doing the whole thing. If you give $1,000, That's four human beings that are rescued from slavery and set up in a life for freedom.

It rarely gets this clear in life when you can do something this simple and clear and there's no strings attached. You're literally freeing a person. So the phone number I mentioned the website is Ericmataxis.com. You'll see the banner. The phone number is 888-253-3522. 888-253-3522. There are people you're thinking,

what can I get them for Christmas because they need nothing. Well, imagine if you say to somebody, you know, you print this whole thing out that you're going to get from CSI and you say, we have freed a human being from slavery, literally, in your name, grandpa,

that's our gift to you. The whole family can do that. The kids can chip in. And I always say, this is such a beautiful idea, such a radical idea. You should get your kids involved, your family involved, to say, pitch in, you know, give part of your allowance to pitch in.

This is real. This is not make believe. You get to be part of the modern day abolitionist movement. It's almost unbelievable, but this is real. So, Todd, what have we not yet covered? No, I think we've covered it all. I just want to reinforce, you know, not only is this real and profound and beautiful. This is actually the foundation of the Bible, right?

I mean, if you look at the scripture from Genesis all the way to Revelation, it's all about God as deliverer, you know, how he freed his people from the bond of bondage in Egypt, then on down through scripture. And ultimately, how we know when we accept Christ as our Lord and Savior, that's about deliverance, not deliverance so much from physical bondage, but spiritual bondage. So, you know, if you've never even contemplated giving to set a captive free, I would encourage you to do that. I really believe that this is part of our spiritual.

development as we deepen our walk with Jesus. And it's, it's so incredibly profound. And Eric, it's such a heavy thing on my heart today because there are more people enslaved globally today than at any point in human history. In all different ways. You've got these slaves in Sudan. We do a lot of work in liberating people that are in Pakistan, trapped, enslaved, making bricks. You've got child slavery in various forms, sex, you know, trafficking and things like that. It's all on the rise. And so I just think this is something that God's people need to step into with boldness, with authority, and using the resources God has given us to set captives free in the name of Jesus. So I hope a bunch of your listeners are going to join in.

We'd love to see 100 captives set free. We've got a freedom liberation coming up early next year. And if we had 100 people give $250, that's, yeah, that would be 100 slaves that we could free. But, you know, we know from in the past, Eric, your listeners have been so generous and thousands have been freed. So I just can't wait to see what God does through your listeners. Well, this is this is such a big deal. I never really know how adequately to state it.

Folks, seriously, think about this for a second. You know, if you give to some corporation, they say we're doing this, we're doing that. This is real clear. CSI works lean and mean. $250, freeze a human being and sets that person up in a life of freedom. We've been doing this every single year. many of you can do multiples of that. I just want to encourage you at this time of you. You've been blessed to be a blessing. This is something that there's no mitigating factor. There's no yeah, but this is an amazing, clear opportunity to live out your faith. And I say this in two ways. Number one, this is a witness to your family, to your kids, that you're living out your faith. You don't just talk about it. You're not just like going off on, well, let me tell you about the theology, the atonement. Let me show you. show you that I actually believe that God has blessed me to be a blessing. And what blessing I have,

I want to use for God's purposes. I don't think any of us can argue that freeing slaves is God's purposes. This is God's purposes. And he relies on his church to do it. And I also would say, this can be a witness to people in your circle, whether it's family or friends who do not believe or who maybe they think your faith is kind of phony religiosity that's not for them. And you say, well, think what you want, but I want you to know that in your name, my family has freed a slave. We have done this as a gift to you or to your family. Our family wants to give this gift because we don't think there's anything we could ever give you that would be better than you're knowing that in your name, we have done this beautiful thing. Folks, this is an opportunity.

I just want to say it again. It's an opportunity for your whole family. It's an opportunity you to show your kids. you actually live out what you believe. This is not just words. This is not just about getting saved. This is about living your faith out in a way that honors God, blesses God's heart.

And it's a way to show those, as I said, in your family who maybe aren't on the same page as you, that your faith is real. It's beautiful. You care about strangers and you use your money to bless strangers. Why would you do a thing like that? Well, because you really believe that, God is real and God calls us to bless those that are struggling, just as we would want to be

blessed and touched and rescued if we were in that position. So the phone number is 888-253-3522, 888-253-3522. And it's easier probably just to go online, ericmetaxis.com. You'll see the banner, the CSI banner, Eric Mataxis.com. And I want to say, Todd, Chapman, that you and I have also talked about the fact that there's certain people say, oh, wait a minute. If I, if we're buying a slave out of freedom, doesn't that incentivize, you know, the people who own the slaves? You're creating this market. And we've made clear that's not what CSI does.

CSI has figured out a way around this to avoid what that would look like, to avoid reward. supporting slavers, slave owners by paying them money. So what you do is a barter. Talk about the barter that you do. Yeah, so many of these slaveholders, slave owners are actually cattle farmers. And there is a vaccine that they need to keep their cattle healthy. And these cattle, they're their most prized possessions. I mean, that's how they survive.

And so we have procured doses of this. It's called Navidium. And it's a vaccine that they have a very big. very hard time getting. And so basically we say, hey, we'll give you this vaccine you need for your cattle, but you need to set your slave or slaves free. And so it's no cash. And yeah, it's a common question we get. Yeah, aren't you creating a market for this? And we're really not because we're not paying them financially. And the fact stands over 120,000 slaves have been freed by CSI. And by the CSI is the only organization involved in freeing these slaves. And so if it were creating a problem of,

you know, more slaves being taken, number one, we would know about it. And number two, we wouldn't be party to that. So, yeah, set that concern aside. It's a legitimate question. But we've thought that through. And, you know, again, since 1995, this is the way we've been doing it. And hundreds, over 100,000 people saved. It's incredible. So, folks, we want to hit this hard. We want to hit this hard. We want to hit this. hard. So I'm asking you, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know how you could not be involved in this

because we're not even asking for a specific amount. When I say $250 frees a slave and sets that person up in a life of freedom, I'm not saying you can either give 250 or nothing. Whatever you can give. If your family says we want to pitch in and we want to do $50,

whatever it is, you are helping CSI do this. And as Todd just said, CSI is the only organization that does this. this is the only organization that does this that cares about enslaved people in Sudan. Think about this, folks. This is it. This is it.

And if enough people gave, we could wipe this out forever. But we're not there yet. So when you give, again, what's involved to free a slave, that person, obviously, number one, we have to have boots on the ground. CSI has these relationships there, where they go to these. Falani herdsmen, tribesmen, they have a relationship there. That's already established, right? You can't do that. I can't do that.

CSI has already done that over the years. And they go to these people. And so after this person is freed, they are transported to their home village. It's a long walk. I'm sure they're happy to make it. I'm sure it's almost unbelievable that they get to do this after years of enslavement. And then they're set up with farming tools and seed to begin to have a garden, a she goat to provide milk and on and on. All of this stuff is because of the $250 per person.

So we're just asking you to be involved in this. And folks, let me put it a different way. I'm telling you this is an amazing opportunity at Christmas time when we celebrate so much. And when we waste so much money on so much stuff that we don't need in our wealthy nation, we're blessed to be a blessing. We get to do something that matters eternally, that's beautiful. And I just, I would say that I think most folks would want to be able to do this or want to be able to say, hey, I did it. And every year, there's a number of folks, they do this every year.

They say, we're going to do it again and again and again and again. I want to say again that you can also do it monthly, if it's easier for you to say, you know what, we're going to set aside $10 a month, $25 a month as a family. You can do that. When you go to the website, Ericmetaxis.com, you click on the banner. You can see that monthly giving is possible. However you want to do it, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful opportunity, literally to set the captives free.

And you know that when you do this kind of stuff, you get blessed. There's no way around it. God blesses you. you will be blessed just by doing it. So the website again, Ericmetaxis.com, you'll see the banner. Or you can call 888-2533522.

888-253-3522. There is just no better way to celebrate Christmas, to celebrate the Savior's birth by doing something like this, which touches God's heart. So I just want to encourage you folks out there. Do not miss this.

This is beautiful. It's a beautiful. I thank God, CSI exists. If they didn't exist, if they weren't doing this, we could not do it. But they can't do it. We pitch in. So every year I come to you and I ask you, do your part, do what you can. You know what you can do. We ask you to do it. Todd, thanks for coming on. Thanks for explaining this and for enabling us to just do something beautiful for God. So folks, God bless you as you give. Ericmetaxis.com. You'll see the banner. Thank you. During the horrors of the Holocaust, Corey Ten Boom and her Dutch family, as told in her classic book, The Hiding Place, risked everything to shelter Jewish neighbors in their home. They were betrayed and sent to concentration camps, yet Corey survived and went on to preach forgiveness and hope around the world. That same redemptive spirit lives on in Ten Boom Coffee. Working with Agro Cafe and Israeli AgTech Company, Ten Boom Coffee helps farmers around the world increase their harvests by 60% improving both the quality of their beans and the quality of their lives.

So every cup you pour becomes part of a legacy, one that stands for courage, kindness, and redemption. Visit 10 boomcoffee.com. That's 10 boomcoffee.com. Taste the goodness that changes lives. Use the code Eric and say 10%. 10Bomcoffee.com. Use the code Eric. Ladies and gentlemen, I don't mean to scare you. I know that I will scare you, but I don't mean to. I promise you, it has never been my intention to frighten you to cause just a sense of dread. But if that happens now, it happens. Why am I giving this preamble? Well, it's because my guest right now will be John Zmirak. Don't run away. John says many wonderful things. He will say many wonderful things. He may say some things that frightens some of you. If you have young children or sensitive, elderly. parents you may want to you may want to get them out of the room right now but it is always a great joy i think you can already tell uh i'm giddy giddy is a schoolgirl to bring my friend john smirak back to

the program john thank you for coming on thank you when you said school school school school girl i was reminded of uh the character of deeter and sprockets from saturday night live remember that from the 90s mike meyers who played this german guy in a turtle neck with his hair slick bat of course i do Made me as happy as a little girl. Of course, he stole that from Charles Dickens. But I want to tell you that you know we're doing this podcast and there are all kinds of people that are going to discover you and rejoice. They were not aware of your existence. It's my joy on this program to bring folks like you and even sometimes you specifically to talk about all kinds of things.

Let's start. You wrote an article. is an American Chronicles magazine? No, it's called Chronicles Magazine. It's, to my mind, the best conservative magazine in America. It's been right about pretty much everything for the last 40 years. They were right about NATO, not expanding NATO. They were right about the Iraq War.

They've been right about immigration, kind of like Pap Buchanan. They were right about everything. Nobody listened, and now they're here to close. It was the first, Chronicles was the first place to ever publish me back in 1992. I've been writing for Chronicles, I don't know, since 1992. And I've got a new piece, a couple of new pieces over there. One of them is called tribalism across we have to bear. And I think, okay, now this is a complicated subject, folks.

I want to, I want to frame it. Tribalism, right? We want to be real clear. We're going to try in this conversation. help you understand what we mean by that. In other words, what is, for example, racism, what is anti-Semitism, what is, there are all kinds of things here. And we're living at a time where we really have to understand with some real clarity so that we can have discernment, how to navigate where we are right now, because there are a lot of wicked voices out there,

confusing voices. I will never mention Candace Owens by name on this program. I certainly will never mention Nick Fuentes or Satan himself. But the fact is there are a lot of folks out there that are bringing confusion. And if you're ignorant on this stuff, it's very easy to be confused. The temptations are great, very seriously, especially with young people. So, John, you've helpfully written this article at Chronicles Magazine on tribalism. What is the gist of it? Okay.

You know what? One of my favorite books of my own that I've written is called The Bad Catholic's Guide to the Seven Deadly Sins. Now, we know the Seven Deadly Sins, Lust, Rage, Pride. Most books about them talk about the virtue and the vice and the virtue. So the vice is lust. We all, we don't need to unpack where lust is. What's the opposite of lust? The opposite of lust is not the virtue of charity.

The opposite of lust is another extreme at the opposite extreme. It's called frigidity. It's where you despise the body. Maybe you think people shouldn't even have sex in marriage. You prefer celibacy for everyone. It's a neurotic overreaction to the deadly sin. Each of the deadly sins, the opposite of it, is another extreme that's just as bad. The opposite of the sin of vanity, vanglory,

is servility where you act like a slave and you let people kick you around and you don't stand up for your legitimate rights. Every one of the deadly sins has an opposite sin. The virtue is the golden mean, the thing in the middle that takes account of human needs, human capacities, and our fallen nature. So the opposite, the virtue that stands against lust is chastity. That is the controlled proper exercise of our reproductive capacity. I kind of, I think this is an important model, a golden meme, the virtue that stands between two opposing extremes. Well, I want to just interrupt for a second. First of all, can we make John a little bit louder because I'm having a little trouble hearing him?

But John, what you're saying, this is so important and it is so rarely discussed. we have we have um i guess a tendency it's human nature right uh to rage against something all the way you know so that you know it's kind of like you don't you want to avoid the ditch on the left side of the road so you jerk swerve into the right ditch and it happens all the time and what you just said uh is a classic example of that right there's some people that they they give themselves over to lust. And then there are other people who go so far on the other direction that they deny God's beautiful view of the body and the proper use of sexuality. And they become, I don't know, aramites living on the top of a column in the desert. They deny the body. And it becomes it's this

kind of Eastern religious rejection of the material. And these kinds of heresies, you know, through the millennia, Christians have been guilty of these different heresies and stuff. And so we have to do what you do in that book. And you touch upon it on this article in Chronicles that what is God's view? What is this golden mean that does not partake of that error or the opposite error? And I want to apply this to the question of racism and tribalism, okay, that there are streams on both ends. Right now, we're dealing with one extreme when we look at people like McFerentes

who are, they're trying to encourage a vicious tribalism among young white men. They're trying to say, we want a country that's only for whites. We don't want anything to do with Jews. We don't want to help Africans, but we're going to look out for our own. That's what America first means.

It really means America only and whites only. Now, this obviously, is really repulsive and it's easy and correct to be grossed out by it. But there is an opposite extreme. That's equally bad. And in fact, that's the opposite extreme that's been governing our culture. That is saying that white people have no right to think of themselves as members of a group with any legitimate self-interest. Unlike every other group, there's the Congressional Black Caucus.

You'll accept that. There would never be a congressional white caucus. There's all these Jewish organizations. You don't really see Gentile organizations. Only minority groups are allowed to think of themselves as having any legitimate group interests. That has sort of kicked in as a reaction to the crimes of the Nazis. The Nazis practiced a kind of ethnocentric tribalism that was so vicious. so monstrous that the Western world was kind of traumatized by it.

And in my article at Chronicles, I actually make a historical comparison. Up until like the 1980s, really, Ireland was considered one of the most puritanical countries on earth. It had very strict censorship. There was no pornography. There was no legal divorce. A very strict Catholic sexual morality. prevailed in Ireland, arguably a little too strict. It was something of a pure tentacle country.

My mother's Irish Catholic. She told me she never stopped feeling guilty about sex even in marriage. It still felt sinful to her even though she was married to my copy. And that kind of mentality where sex is just fundamentally dirty. I used to joke growing up with an Irish mother, sexual intercourse like killing is almost always wrong acceptance narrow special circumstances such as self-defense and marriage that comes for pause for laughter yes now that kind of attitude where did that come from in ireland it turns i did some research it turns out ireland used to be kind of a libertine country it used to have a lot of children born out of wedlock It used to be kind of loosey-goosey when it came to sexual morality. But for the potato famine, the problem was the Irish population in 1848 was bigger than it is now.

They had like 8 million people on that tiny island and they were all living on potatoes because they didn't have much else because the English were taking it. When the potatoes went bad, when the blight hit the potatoes, a quarter of the population died for starvation. and another quarter fled to America and Canada. Half the population went down by half, and half of that were dead. In a reaction to that, having seen so many people starved to death before their eyes, the Catholic Church and the authorities in Ireland imposed rigid, severe sexual morality in order to keep the population from growing too quickly.

And they managed to batter it into people's heads to where they felt guilty about sex even with their, even with their spouses. That trauma of the potato famine, that horror of seeing people star to death before your eyes, cannibalism, people eating grass, that produced a violent phobic overreaction in the favor of, in the direction of sexual puritanism. Well, likewise, in my article of chronicles, our experience of liberty, the death camps of the Nazi war crimes trials, of all the evidence of the Holocaust, made us in the West phobic about the very idea of patriotism, the idea of controlling immigration, the idea of the majority group having any claims at all. And currently, there's a very good book about this called The Unprotected Class, the Civil Rights Act does not protect white males. My employer could call me in tomorrow and say, yeah, we're firing you because we have too many white guys here.

And I have no protection. White males are carved out as an unprotected class under civil rights laws. Affirmative action, quotas, all these things. White men have been a kind of scapegoat. Why? Well, white men ran the death camps. Well, Americans didn't. My father served under General Patton fighting the Germans. Why should my dad and I be scapegoated for the crimes of a foreign country a lifetime ago? But it's there. It's there. Tribalism is the tendency to group together with people who look like you and are similar to you and to think, you know, we have interests in common. This is part of man's human nature, like sexuality, like aggression,

like acquisiveness, all the drives God put into us. Like them, it's tainted by the fall of man. But that doesn't mean we can rip it out. You can no more rip out the impulse of tribalism than you can rip out sexual violence. You can't fully repress these things. And when you try to, people become neurotic. They react.

They become excessive. I mean, Bill Clinton in the 90s was giving talks where he was boasting about the fact that immigration was going to make white people a minority in America. And isn't that great? Now, I don't think it's the worst thing in the world, but I don't see why it should be a government policy and why it should be okay to brag about that. You wouldn't brag about... Well, I would, I just want to interject, to my mind, talking at all about the color of people's skin, I find stupid. In other words, the question is, what is your call? culture, right? I mean, if you are somebody who has come to America in the last 20 or 30 years

from Africa, you are culturally, dramatically different from inner city black people. It's like completely different cultures. So the color of somebody's skin, in a way, this is, this is, of course, the legacy of slavery in America. But it's a strange thing. I mean, it's a strange thing that somebody my parents came from Greece and Germany. We were not here, you know, during slavery times, whatever. It kind of becomes crazy just to group people, even to group people, just according to the color of their skin. So when you're talking about tribalism, I want to say, I want to take it to this issue of patriotism for a moment. It's healthy to be proud to be an American. It's healthy. If you live in Greece to say, I am proud to be Greek. I am proud to be of Greek ethnicity. There's nothing

wrong with being proud of who you are, of the wonderful accomplishments. The problem is, of course, John, when any of these things is taken to an extreme, and when any group begins to demonize those who are not part of your group. And so there is a golden mean. It's something, it's one thing to be proud. It's another thing to make an idol of your ethnicity or to make an idol of your tribal identification. Or to demonize one particular group because of its ethnicity. And that's the thing. Whites have been demonized in academia and in the culture. Demonize. Whiteness is called a disease. There's a president of a state university in California, one of the state universities. I forget his name. He's president of the university. He talks about the need to eliminate whiteness.

Imagine if you were talking about eliminating blackness or eliminating latino, latinicity. You're allowed to use rhetoric about white people that if we were used about any other group, would be immediately labeled as genocidal. You're allowed to talk about whites the way the Hutus talked about the Tutsis in Rwanda before the genocide. Yeah. And the reaction to that is that a lot of young white men are sick of being told that they're the demons, being told that they are subject to discrimination. Nobody else is.

They don't have civil rights under the Civil Rights Act. So they are gathering in angry online tribes behind people like Nick Twentes. Nick Fuentes is taking a legitimate impulse of tribalism to a nasty, vicious extreme. And in fact, he's saying, stop demonizing white people. Can we all just get together and agree to demonize the Jews instead? I mean, come on. I think I can bring together left and right. Most Americans, this is something we can unify around.

Let's bash the Jews. It's ugly and it's infectious. and we're seeing it more and more on the right. What I don't want to see in reaction to the foulness of Nick Twente and the increasing recklessness of Tucker Carlson, we can talk about that later, I don't want to see the conservative movement go back to the Paul Ryan, Lindsay Graham, Mike Pence,

neoconservatism, which says that ethnicity, means nothing, tribes mean nothing, America means nothing, except a bunch of political principles that are in the Constitution and the Declaration. America is just an ideology. It's just a propositional nation like the Soviet Union. It is a thing you are. Hang on. So now you're going to have to explain this carefully because to some extent I would agree with that proposition. So where do we differ? Where do you differ from that idea? Because to me, I'll give it, I mean, just as an example, my father comes from Greece, my mother comes from Germany, they come to America. They buy into the ideas here. And suddenly, they become as American as George Washington, period. So how is that

different from buying into an ideology? Are you saying it's because they're buying into a set of cultural values and not just a political ideology? Is that the distinction? A very wide set of cultural values inherited from England, you could take the American political ideology and planted somewhere else that wasn't settled by people from England, and it wouldn't succeed. We know that because when all those countries in Latin America rebelled against Spain after like 1805, they all established American-style constitutions. They all looked to the Declaration of Independence. They all said they wanted Democratic republics with separation of powers.

None of them succeeded. They all became dictatorships. Why? Their culture was Spanish culture, which is different from English culture. Excuse me. I'm going to because I'm writing this book on the revolution, I'm thinking a lot about what you're talking about. I would argue, and as you know, you're a Catholic and I'm a pro-Catholic, non-Catholic. So I can talk about this, I hope, with clarity.

but it does seem that out of the Reformation, some things happened, which led to the British Constitution, which led to people believing in certain rights. That basically comes out of the Protestant Revolution. This is not to say that everything about the Protestant Revolution was good, but the culture, John Adams writes an essay in 1765. I'm writing a whole chapter on it in my book about where he's criticizing what he calls the canon and the feudal law.

And so he's lumping in a way of seeing things and, you know, basically saying, yeah, the Catholic Church is all about top-down control just like this monarch tyrant. And we need to stand against that. And I agree that to some degree, the Catholic Church, especially after the Renaissance, in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church, was actually pushing against the government. There was a tension between church and state, and the church actually supported decentralized power, subsidiarity. All those things kind of went away during the Renaissance.

During the Renaissance, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church both went totally in for all power to the government. We support the government. The government supports us. In England, and only in England, the reformation was really complicated and confused the government created this kind of patchwork anglican church which is sort of either catholic dressed up as protestant or protestant dressed up as catholic created this kind of mishmash religion as the anglican church and low church protestants

the puritans were rebelling against it so what you had was a constant tension between the high church Anglicans, the low church puritans. The Puritan ethic is the one that came to America. Very bottom up, very decentralized, very individual, very much the individual conscience, local government, little white churches, white building, little white congregational churches, where people would go hear sermons and then crack it before militias, the militias, the colonial militias that first they protected the settlers from the Indians and the French and the Spanish, then they made the American Revolution. Those militias were based at local churches. I wrote a whole book about this called No Second Amendment, No First, about the intimate connection between religious

freedom and gun rights. And in America, and only in America, the English Puritan heritage of resistance to the government, suspicion of big government. That was a very distinctly Anglo-Protestant thing that when you tried it in Mexico, when you tried it in Bolivia, didn't work. It didn't work. You still don't have a functioning democracy in Mexico. Realize that? Mexico is now controlled by drug cartels. The government is run by drug cartels. They just assassinated a mayor last week. Mexico still hasn't been able to do this after a moment.

almost 200 years. So what is distinctly American is very difficult to export. This is why I said we're not going to be able to create democracy in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And right now, we're having trouble with maintaining it here. We brought in so many people from Somalia and put them in places like Minnesota explicitly in order to increase diversity. The government said these places are not diverse enough, meaning too many white people. We don't like that. We're going to bring in tribesmen from the desert in Somalia and put them in snowy Minnesota. It'll be great. Well, now we know they just had a mayor election in Minneapolis. And in order to prevail, the white Democratic candidate had to look at the tribal divisions in Somalia.

and side with one tribe of Somalians against another tribe of Somalians in order to defeat his opponent who was from Somalia and was giving speeches in the Somali language, campaign commercials in Somalia. When you import massive diversity to your country, it is a recipe for chaos. Look at England. England they brought in thousands and thousands of young men from Pakistan who don't think rape is. is that big a deal? And so there's a rape epidemic in England. The police dealt with the Pakistani-standing rape epidemic by refusing to enforce the law,

pretending it wasn't happening, threatening the parents of the girls who've been raped, accusing them of racism. In one case, they actually tried to prosecute the father for rescuing his daughter from Pakistani rapists. Now, England is not a safe place for young women to walk the street because of Pakistani rape gangs they imported

on purpose. Why? Because we need more diversity. Our diversity is our strength. Two plus two is five. Diversity is not strength. It's not. It can be neutral. It's usually a real challenge. Usually, when you have a country with a wide diversity of cultures, you need a dictatorship to hold it together. Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, but one of the reasons we were able to have ordered liberty in a is because most of the people came from England or assimilated not just to the American ideology, but to the Anglo culture of private property, small government, self-help. Mind your own. Again, we have to be clear, this is a culture.

And the reason, I mean, you've just clarified that by referring to what's going on in England today. If it had something to do with, you know, English blood, then they would be living this out wonderfully today. Of course, they're not. They have themselves been infected by these lies about diversity. And I think we have to also mention that, you know, in America we say e pluribus unum. That's the idea. Like, pluribus is great. As long as you get some unum. And if you don't have unum, then the pluribus is a bad thing. So Iplerbizum is a really complex, important idea that there is something beautiful about many different types of people coming together under these cultural and political values, living them out, teaching them to their children.

It can be done. It must be done. We have ceased to do it in the decades since you and I have been growing up. And it's caused us many of the problems we have right now. That's right. We are overdosed on immigration. Truman people are from too many different places all at the same time, too fast to be assimilated. I mean, right now, Zahram Kewame Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York, was elected mostly by foreign-born Hodos. Something like 40% of New Yorkers were born outside the United States. And if you look at the polls, his majority. The majority came from foreign-born voters. If only people born in America could have voted for New York mayor, Cuomo would have won.

That has its own problems. But Zoran Khawame Mamdani, a Marxist Muslim, is going to be mayor of New York because the New York you and I grew up in is gone. It has been ethnically cleansed. All the people who voted for Giuliani moved to Islip in Mineola, got out of New York City, and had been replaced. by foreigners from the third world, high percentage of whom are on welfare and government assistance, who benefit from affirmative action, again, the government discriminates in favor of these foreigners against white males like you and me, because we are second-class citizens because somehow the Holocaust was our fault. This is the madness of our mainstream

political culture that is driving people to crackpot vicious extremes. like Nick Fuente's synchance. Well, that's what's so interesting to me is that if you're a young man, let's say, who sees the lunacy and it's offensive to you, you're constantly being told that, you know, being a boy or being a young man, you're bad, you're toxic, you can naturally resent that. And if somebody tells you, you know what, I agree with you, you're not toxic. and we need to stand up for ourselves.

You can see how people get sucked into that in the same way that Hitler was able to identify actual problems. That's the first step, right? You find people and you say, you're unhappy, right? You're being mistreated, right? And the fact is, yes, they are. And then you say, well, I've got a solution. And of course, the solution is as bad as the problem.

You lead them, these young men, to hate women. instead of thinking of women the way God wants us to think of women, were created equal in God's image. God calls us to marriage, to love each other. That division, which is satanic, is exacerbated, is underscored. And that's what folks like Fuentes do. They say, they're the problem, women are the problem, or you're white, blacks are the problem, or you're somehow Gentile Jews are the problem.

But you can see how young men, particularly since we're talking about Nick Fuentes, they get sucked into this. Because they look around, they look at the DEI lunacy that has demonized them as white, for example, or as young men. And they go, you know what? That's wrong. They're correct to say that that's wrong. But the solution that Fuentes provides is satanic. It really is fascinating to me. It's satanic, but so is the status quo.

And it is just as satanic. Well, that's the point. It's like you've got a satanic problem. And then you say, and this gets back to what you said at the beginning of the show. It's like, yeah, we've got the satanic problem. And then the solution is the opposite extreme, which is equally satanic. So the devil wins. He doesn't care, you know, if you fall to the left or fall to the right. As long as you fall, he's happy. God wants us to have his view of things, which really requires a biblical worldview. And there are a lot of young people, including young people who think of themselves as Christians who don't have a really profoundly biblical worldview. It's a very surface view of what it means to be a Christian. We have a lot of churches that don't have a biblical worldview. My own church, the Catholic Church, is constantly bashing the Trump administration for just enforcing our immigration laws. It's pretending that it's somehow inhumane to send somebody back to their home country when

they've overstayed their visa. There's one bishop of Fort Worth down here in Texas, Bishop Zyte's. he compares deporting an illegal immigrant to aborting a baby. Now, what does that say? That says that if you're Guatemalan and you're here illegal and I send you back to Guatemala, Guatemala is like a medical waste dumpster where we put aborted babies? What? I mean, that's racist.

That's offensive to say that sending people home to the village where they were born where their cousins live is like murdering babies. babies, but we have bishops saying things like that. There was one bishop then, I think in West Virginia, compared ICE officers to Nazi, to Nazi extermination SS officers. He compared our brave people trying to enforce our immigration laws to Nazis rounding up Jews. Look, let's just call us what it is. It's fashionable leftism, and we have to reject it, folks.

And we have to reject it firmly because it is doing tremendous harm. just generally speaking, to everyone who lives in this country is doing harm. And when people, it's much more horrifying to me when spiritual leaders buy into this, into this lunacy. I don't get it. But it's a fact. So if your pastor talks about immigration control as if it were a Nazi war crime or slavery, I'd say find another church or,

or at least cut off your financial support. Well, hey, I have been saying this for three and a half years, that if you're going to a church that's getting this stuff wrong, you need to get out of that church. You need to take God's money, God's tithe, and give it to somebody who is speaking truth on these issues. And when you see these issues as, well, it's not that important. We believe in evangelism at our church. You're being very, very badly fooled folks because you cannot evangelize people if you don't

understand this stuff. I mean, evangelize them to what? That's kind of, that's another story. Well, Donald Trump has been doing a very good, very responsible statesman-like job of trying to enforce our legitimate just immigration laws without in any way stirring up ethnic hatred or resentment. He's done a good job being an honest broker in the Middle East, trying to help Israel maintained security without being excessive or unfair to the Arabs in the area.

We are going to look back at Donald Trump and we're going to be nostalgic for him. When he's out of office, we're going to wish we had him because I don't see anybody on the right stepping forward who's going to be the kind of leader that Trump is. I'm kind of hopeful. I'd like to see

Tom Tillis run or Tulsi Gabbard. I'm not sure what I think of Vance. I don't know who Tom Tillis is. Not Tom Tillis. Who's the guy from Missouri? Who's the who's the mayor? Who's the Senate? You're thinking of the singing the singer Mel Tillis? No. Not Tom Tillis.

I keep hoping Stephen Miller will run. Oh, you know, I wanted him for Pope, but I will settle for him as president. I got to tell you. Well, because he brings this kind of crazy fire that we need. Josh. And Josh Hawley. Josh Hawley. Oh, Josh Hawley.

Josh Hawley is a friend. I've interviewed him at Socrates. He would be in the city. We should. Josh. Josh Hawley is phenomenal. Let's be clear, ladies and gentlemen. Josh Hawley, Senator Josh Hawley, Missouri Senator,

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. He's amazing. He wrote a spectacular book about manhood. He gets this stuff like crazy. He's very brave. He's a U.S. Senator. He's young. By the way that,

and he, his book contract was canceled by his publisher because he questioned the theft of the 2020 election. He had a finder to the publisher. He was somebody who spoke up about the election steal in 2020. He's a genuine populist, really cares about the common man. He's real solid Christian, genuine conservative. We need people like Josh Hawley to be, to be the leaders on the right. I can't think of anybody better than Josh Hawley.

I mean, I like a lot of the folks out there, whether it's J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, blah, blah, blah. But let me tell you, nobody beats Josh Hawley in my mind because of what we're talking about. You need a kind of fire that I think, I'm not going to say that none of those other folks has it. But Donald Trump has set the bar very, very high in terms of courage and willingness, you know, to take the lumps. So again, so my piece over at Chronicles is. is called tribalism across we have to bear. And I've got another piece where I answer Robert George. He's a Princeton philosopher, Catholic,

and he's been weighing in on all this Nick Fuente stuff. And what he is saying is we must just embrace abstract principles of equality. And that's all that we're here to conserve. We're just here to conserve the political ideology of America. And I would say, no, there's a lot more that has to be conserved, the culture, the people, the prosperity of American citizens, we can't turn conservatism

into a dry, abstract ideology like communism that only cares about abstract philosophical principles. You know, John, I didn't expect to bring this up, but I'm not kidding. By the way, I love Robbie George. I interviewed him recently for Socrates in the city. But on this issue,

I pretty much write about exactly what you're talking about in my book, if you can keep it. We have to love our country. What does that mean? Lincoln understood this. I mean, he wrote about it himself. But what does it mean to love your country? And your country and your fellow Americans. You have to love your fellow Americans enough not to send their jobs overseas to be done by cheap labor abroad. You have to love your fellow Americans enough not to get them into stupid wars, not to replace them with immigrants from other countries with different incompatible cultures who want to build mosques and impose Sharia law. You have to love, concretely love your neighbor, not just love some abstract principles that all human beings are interchangeable units. So if some Afghan comes over and manages to get citizenship, right there, he's every

bit as American as descendants of Thomas Jefferson. No. Well, this is what's so interesting is that I just think of my mom and dad, my dad, especially, when they became American citizens, they loved America. Right. Loved America. Taught me to love America. That's a big deal.

That's a big deal that they understood that what a privilege we get to live in this fantastic country, this wonderful country. You know, so when obviously this is not to say we can't have any immigration, but you have to have only the kind of immigration where you're able to control it and the people who come in are able to assimilate. you bring in so many people who do not assimilate, you destroy everything for everybody. Now look at the great state of Minnesota, which is now basically a colony of Somalia. Great. Great job. I got to tell you, we've had Mike Lindell on the program. By the way, is a good opportunity for me to remind everybody who listens to this program, folks, please support this program by going to mypillow.com or mystore.com if you want to get my books. but go to MyPillow.com. Please use the code, Eric.

Please support Mike Lindell. Talk about an American hero. Talk about somebody who's been vilified and attacked. Mypillow.com. Use the code Eric. John Zmirich, I'm told we're out of time. I'm glad to have you on. And I know that some people have been frightened.

But folks, I want to be clear. That was not my intention. John, thank you very much. Thank you, Eric. God bless. This Christmas, as we celebrate the super centennial coming up, Super Centennial 250th, there's no way, better no way to support it than by supporting my friend, an American hero, Mike Lindell. He's one of the main sponsors on this program.

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