The Eric Metaxas Show - Austin Ruse

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

"The Catholic Case for Trump" is front and center in Eric's interview with Austin Ruse, who presents his strongly-held belief that Catholics should re-elect the president because he's "the only moral choice."

Matt Texas show. I hate to spread rumors, but someone told me that Eric's stood in front of a microwave too many times, and now he's got feathers sprouting from his neck. Some kind of mutation, I guess. Eric's very embarrassed about it. The doc told him there's nothing medical science can offer him. Except maybe telling him to wear turtlenex. Anyway, thought you should know.

And now here's your chicken man of the airwaves. Eric Metaxis. Hey there, folks. First of all, we're going to talk about Biden's speech last night. We've got a couple of announcements. I don't know if you guys saw what I saw. But imagine how low the bar was set. for Joe Biden.

If he didn't screw up, that was like a sigh of relief. So he gave, I thought, a particularly middling kind of speech. It was cliche, heaped on cliche, no substance. And he did screw up in the, like right in the beginning. I put all this stuff on Twitter. Right in the beginning of the speech, he said, and I quote, and I quote, he said, I'm not going to be able to quote it now that I know. But it was like within the first 60 seconds and it was so bizarre, it was this.

He said this. He said, the current president has cloaked American darkness for too long. the current president has cloaked American darkness for too long. Evidently, I'm the only person who picked up on that, but it was obviously. Yeah, it sounds like a good thing, actually. Yeah. It's cloaked American darkness for too long, but he said that. And by the way, people don't know this, but the title of last night's speech was On Beyond Corn Pop.

It's taking off that there's a Dr. Seuss book, On Beyond Zebra. This was on beyond corn pop. Anyway, the speech was... Was he a special guest last night? The ghost of cornhop was haunting that room. And if you didn't watch it, most people didn't watch it. But to show that he's fit and up for the job, he must have like some B12 shots or something like that.

But he tumbled into the room in a Jack Lillane Unitarred and popped up to the podium. And I just thought, you know what? It's good to see that he, could do that. But Jack LaLane was incredibly fit and wearing the Jack Laine Unitar and I guess somebody on the staff probably told him instead of going with the standard jacket and tie and stuff. But anyway, Biden's speech, I thought, was very short on substance. And it was really like watching somebody, is he going to make it? Is he going to make it to the end of the speech without something terrible

happening? And all he had to do is read the teleprompter and he made, he made a few mistakes. But there were no policy. He promises the world. This is what they're doing now. They just promised we're going to give you this and this and this. They don't tell you how they're going to pay for it because there is no way to pay for it. And then they're being really, really crazy by blaming Trump for COVID and saying that the U.S. response is the worst of all the developed nation.

I mean, this is complete nonsense. I mean, I have to say, there are a couple things you're saying that are just, they rise to the level of lies. They're just not true. And also, they keep repeating the lie that he said that there were good people on both sides, implying the neo-Nazis. And that is one of several things that they have said over and over. I've noticed some people who don't like me do this with me. Like, they say that I said something.

I think, well, no, I didn't say that. Or if I said it, I explained exactly what I meant, but no one cares. They just do it. So it's kind of a bummer. I think that they're grasping at straw, I think. they are grasping at straws and it's looking very, very ugly, I guess. I don't know. I wanted to bring up that you said that Jesus was whiteish.

I said he was pale. Yeah. And I keep saying that I like the way that I said it, I was like going for a joke and but people like, nobody cares. Nobody jokes today. You can't. By the way, do you see who's behind me? If you're watching this on video, you can see behind me.

is the star of my new book, Donald and the fake news. I just want to say that, Alvin, just because you've got a box set, doesn't mean I'm not right behind you. This is the third in the series. You got... I know. Mine was released this week from Simon & Schuster.

Yours is next week. Next week is the big launch. Oh, it's going to be big. I guess I don't want to forget to mention that coming up is our friend Austin Ruse. He's going to talk about Trump and the Christian faith and Trump and Catholics. He has a new book out.

In our two, we're talking about modern art with Michelle Kami. She is a genius when it comes to the subject of what's happened to art. If you wonder why modern art tends to be ugly and stuff. So we're talking to her. We've had her on the program before. We also should not forget to tell everyone, please sign up for the newsletter. My newsletter, you go to Eric Mataxis.com.

We're sending it out once a week. There's stuff in there that we just don't get, you just won't get on this program. And also our YouTube, Albin, I'm going to let you make the announcement. How many subscribers do we have on the YouTube channel? We right now, at this moment, we have 90,000, 90,000 subscribers. That's a lot. We have as many people watching us on YouTube maybe as listening on the radio.

That's kind of amazing, actually. Yeah, and I will say there's still. a lot of people that aren't subscribed that watch the videos, I would say, you know, about a quarter of the people who watch the videos, it shows that they're not subscribers. So if you're watching the videos, make sure you subscribe so you can get notifications.

Please subscribe to our YouTube channel, the Eric Mataxis show. Not the Eric Mataxis channel, because there's one of those, and I'd love to get subscribed to that too, but the Eric Mattaxas show. All of this stuff is on there. And please subscribe to the newsletter. We keep saying this. Everyone I know,

like I ask all my friends, Are you subscribe to my newsletter? They go, no, no, no, is that maybe? No, is that South Coast in the City? No, I don't know. Yeah, does that cost $20 a month? No, it's free, folks. It's free.

Just click, click. In fact, at this point, I would pay people just so that I don't have to have those conversations with my friends anymore. But, okay, as we're heading into the weekend, I've got to share good news about food for the poor. You know we've been doing this huge campaign with Food for the Poor. And a lot of you folks out there have been generous. And I want to say again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Couldn't be a better cause. These are children that are literally starving in places like Guatemala and Haiti, principally those countries right now. The Salem Network, that's me and Larry Elder and Sebastian Gorka and Hugh Hewitt and Mike Gallagher and Dennis Prager, we've raised a half a million dollars. And you, my listeners, have raised over $100,000. And we've got far less stations than those guys. So I just want to say really, really thank you.

I guess I want to say that all kinds of people are donating, and I keep saying it's a good way to get your kids involved. One of our listeners, Sarah, she's a 16-year-old. She wanted to share with us why she donated to Food for the Poor. Here's Sarah, 16 years old. I just wanted to say, I really admire your work with Food for the Poor each year. And I'm 16 years old. I live at home, so I don't really make a whole lot of money.

But I have an envelope that I keep on my nightstand, and each time I do get some money, I put a little bit away throughout the year, maybe like a dollar or two. And it's for food for the poor. And so this year I saved up $80 to give, and I'm not saying any of this to brag. I just wanted to encourage your listeners who probably make more money than I do. And so if you can just spare a little bit, that would be good. Bye. I just, that thrills me.

Folks, here's the phone number. You can go to Metaxistock.com and give, please, folks, this weekend, please give Metaxistock. com where the phone number is 844-863 Hope, 844-8663 Hope. Go there, 844-8663 Hope. We'll be right back with Austin Ruth. Folks, I got some embarrassing news to share with you, but you know what? This is just the kind of a show where I don't care. I'm willing to lay my heart, you know, on the line.

Here's the issue. Mike Lindell with my pillow. You may notice that I have a bobble hell of him near me. He's here to remind all of us that when you go to mypillow.com, you get whopping discounts if you use the code Eric. Now, there are a lot of people who haven't done that, and we have your names here. And Chris Heim's Ann Albin pointed out to me

that there's like three pages of you whose first name is Eric. You, you're so, I mean, that's humiliating for me that even though your name is Eric, you're still not willing to use the code Eric. I mean, if you don't want to use it because it's my name, use it because it's your name. But the point is that I see who you are,

and I just feel humiliated by this. Please go to go to mypillar.com. It's okay, Mike. It's going to be okay. Go to mypillar.com. Use the code Eric. You're going to get whopping savings and really high quality. products. Did I mention that? Thank you.

Hey there, folks. Welcome back to The Irkman Taxes Show. I have on now a friend, Austin Ruse, who's written many books, but the new book is called The Catholic Case for Trump. Austin Ruse, welcome him back to the program. Nice to see you. You obviously are a Catholic, otherwise you'd have no business writing a book like the Catholic case for Trump. So what is the Catholic case for Trump? There's so many people out there. who seem, in my mind, to be kind of fuzzy Catholics, cafeteria Catholic. So I don't even know, they're the kind of people

that don't seem to think this stuff through. So is your book really for people who are more serious about their Catholic faith? It is for people who are serious about the faith, no question about that. But it is so that they are prepared to answer all of the charges that they will hear from their,

what I call generic Catholic friends. There are dissenting Catholics, you know, cafeteria Catholics, but then there are a whole lot of generic Catholics, people who haven't practiced the faith in like, you know, 20 years or whatever, haven't been in confession in 30 years. And what we are hearing from a lot of people from those areas is that we can't vote for somebody who is against the church on immigration, who's against the church on the environment, who's, you know, a racist, has a checkered past. So the book answers all of these charges. You could say that the book is both a sword and a shield. The sword makes very clear that we've never had a more pro-life president than this one, even if he doesn't believe it. He has been the most pro-life president that we've had in history, also on religious freedom. And the shield shows that he has not violated any of the teachings of the church on things like immigration and on the environment. I mean, we hear all the time from the Catholic. Catholic left, well, you know, the Pope believes in catastrophic man-made global warming. Therefore, if you don't believe in that, then you're outside the church.

And this is false. Even in the Pope's writings, he said, you don't have to believe this. Well, he's not speaking at the ex-cathedral. He's just opining, which he should do less of, since his opinions are really not that swell. But I guess my question is, there are many, it seems to me that the Catholic Church in the United States, the leadership has been hugely confusing to Catholics in the pew. In other words, they've sent out very many mixed messages. They have propped up people like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, who are Catholics, I would say in name only because they have been very, very aggressive

pushing forward, let's say, abortion. Mario Cuomo made that possible. And speaking of Cuomo, another a Catholic, the governor of New York, not only does he not believe in the Catholic teaching, but I mean, he lives with his girlfriend. I mean, it's a very, I would think that it would be very confusing for Catholics to make sense of what's going on and why the bishops don't come down harder on these people who stray from the teachings of the church. Well, two things. What you won't find is any bishop who says that the church's teaching on abortion is wrong. Sadly, what you will find is that there are no bishops who are willing to punish public dissenters from the faith, as you mentioned, Cuomo, and Biden. So that's the mixed message. The Catholic Church has never

changed his teaching on abortion, for instance. The Catholic Church has never changed her teaching on marriage and family or Ambrang Stem Cell Research or any of the sort of hot button. issues that we deal with these days. But what you find, and precisely as you say, the mixed message is that they do not, the hierarchy does not then punish the public dissenters from the faith like Cuomo and Biden. That is a problem, and we certainly wish that they would do more of that. But the church is four square on all of the hot button issues, and always has been and never will change. Well, that's the thing that I have admired about the Catholic Church. I'm not myself Catholic, but the idea that the fundamental teaching does not change. But

obviously through the years and through the centuries, there have been terrible Catholic leaders, including popes, who have themselves dissented privately from the teaching, or the Catholic bishops today seem to dissent in many ways from the Magisterium, or at least in their communications. And it is so confusing to your average Catholic, who may not be very sophisticated theologically, but to see the bishops coming out in such ways that would lead the average Catholic voter to think maybe I'm supposed to lean Democrat. Well, there certainly is a lot of that, and that's the fuzzling of the issue, that they will say that, golly, you know, poverty is more important than abortion, for instance, and the

implication being you should support Joe Biden. But that's one of the reasons I wrote the book. to answer all of those kind of implications. This man, Trump, had an incredibly successful economic record up until COVID hit. We had the lowest unemployment in history. We had the lowest unemployment for blacks in history, for women for Hispanics, and then COVID hit. So when a Catholic leftist comes at you and says, you know what, he doesn't really care about the poor, all you need to do is to know that the unemployment rate was so, gosh darn, low until COVID hit. So that's that's the that's the shield aspect of this book. I cite chapter and

verse about his economic successes, which we can hold up against the charges of the left that he's that he doesn't care about his fellow man, that he doesn't care about the stranger. You know, with regard to immigration, for instance, we still welcome more strangers than any kind by far than any country in the world. And then Trump hasn't moved to change that. It's it's also interesting to me that, you know, for 50 years, the Democrats have talked about eradicating poverty, have talked about the urban poor. But enough time has passed that we can see the sad failure of Democrat policies. It is tragic because billions have been spent by the American taxpayers who genuinely want to help the poor. I don't know anybody that doesn't want to help the

The question is always how. And the Democrats have insisted that they know how they've spent billions to, trillions to do it. And in fact, have failed so miserably that I think your average voter and your average voter in urban communities who are suffering from poverty have finally woken up to the failure of the Democrats and said, I don't think this is the way forward because we haven't moved a millimeter in 50 years, if anything, we've moved backwards. I wrote about this in depth in my book, Fake Science, now three years ago. The poverty rate among African Americans was falling like a stone up until 1964, 65,

when the Great Society programs and the War on Poverty was introduced. At that point, the poverty rate flatline and has never gone down again. It's roughly stayed at 14%. And what we saw at the combination of the war on poverty and the sexual revolution has done something that Jim Crow wasn't able to do, that slavery wasn't able to do, and that has utterly destroyed the African-American family. We are called racist for pointing that out, you know, that there's a problem with fatherlessness in the black community. But, you know, Donald Trump cares deeply about this. I saw a Rasmussen poll just this week that shows that he has 36% approval rating among African-Americans.

and I would bet dollars to donuts that he is going to get more African-American votes this time than he got last time. And I suspect more than George Bush got. And the same with Hispanics. I think that they see something that white liberals don't see, and that is the failure of white liberals in the big cities. And of course, it's a great irony when you think that at the same time that, you know, the great society was launched by Johnson and the Civil Rights Act was signed. by Johnson, you had Moynihan, an Irish Catholic, come out and rather bravely talk about the fact of the breakdown of the black family as being at the heart of the trouble in those communities. He was told to shut up, and anyone bringing that up has been told to shut up ever since. He was called a racist.

Yeah, I mean, it's an extraordinary thing because we now know that that's true, that that is the major issue. And as you've said, and as I've been saying, that I think that people are finally waking up to this because we have enough data now. We can look and say, show us any examples of success along this model that you have been proposing and spending like drunken sailors on. You know, when Moynihan issued that report, and he was in the Department of Labor at the time, I think Assistant Secretary, the black illegitimate, illegitimacy rate at that time was only 25%. it's now 70%. And the white illegitimacy right now is edging up to 50%. So it is an utter disaster for family formation and introduces all kinds of pathologies that UC played out in the inner city and also in the white community as well. There's a remarkable campaign ad by an African-American woman who's running for Congress in Baltimore, which you might have seen. Elegant black woman, red dress, high heels

walking through the slums of Baltimore, pointing out the utter failure of the left in the cities. And I'm just convinced that, like you said, I don't think that they really care about the poor. And I honestly think that Donald Trump cares about the poor and wants to help them. I have to say that I think that is true. And I think finally people are waking up to that. Folks, I'm talking to the author of the Catholic case for Trump, Austin Ruse, RUSE. We'll be right back. your mind.

Take a chance. I'm still free. Take a chance on me. If you need me, let me know. I'm going to be around. If you got no place. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Austin Ruse, the author of the Catholic case for Trump.

Austin Ruse is the president of the Center for Family and Human Rights, a research institute based in New York and Washington, D.C., focused exclusively on international social and legal. So, Austin, you're not just opining yourself. You base the Catholic case for Trump, your new book, on statistics. Talk a little bit about that, because you do know that policy matters. You might not like the guy, but we have to think about policies. The policies of the left have been disastrous, and I think are going to be going dramatically farther in those directions, almost because they feel they've got a double. down, they've got nowhere else to go. Well, you know, because of the work that I do in my day job, which is running this NGO in New York and Washington, we work closely with dozens of delegations from around the world and negotiating hard law treaties and also soft law resolutions at the UN. And what I know from my personal experience is that Donald Trump is pro-life in a granular way.

You know, and I talk about this in my book, that traditionally, GOP presidents, they come in and the first thing they do is they defund UNFPA, the UN population agency, and they re-institute Mexico City policy, and they promise to nominate strict constructionists. And then they're pretty much done. You know, they might appoint some pro-lifers here and there, but generally they're surrounded by guys who don't really care about us. And what Donald Trump has done is he came in and he did all those things, but with regard to Mexico City policy, for instance, this is the policy that says we cannot spend taxpayer money on abortion groups overseas.

It generally had to do with a small part of the foreign aid budget for family planning. He expanded it to the entire health budget of the U.S. government overseas. He appointed a guy named Bremburg. Do you know this guy, Bremberg, his first name is escaping me. He was the head of the... Oh, no. He was the head of the Domestic Policy Council. Andrew Bremberg educated at Lave Maria College in Florida.

Florida and the Catholic University Law School, headed the domestic policy council. His lieutenant on health care was Katie Tolento, who was under attack when she was appointed because she wrote essays against contraception, if you can imagine. That's how solid a Catholic she is. And they would stay up late at night following the negotiations of the G7, because even in the G7, the left wanted to put abortion policy. And they would stay up all night long following the negotiations in foreign capitals and they'd be emailing us. Do we want this language? Do we not want that language? And they would get abortion language out of there. That's how granular the guy has been. George Bush didn't fight on the phrase reproductive health in UN policy. Reproductive health is synonymous with

abortion. It appears in hundreds of UN documents. Donald Trump sent out a directive that they are never going to allow reproductive health to appear in another document and they'll die trying to get it out. And people don't know this. That's how granular he is. Well, that's why, you know, when you question earlier whether he believes in the pro-life thinking or doesn't, I mean, I think at this point in his life, he does. But as you say, even if he didn't, he is certainly the most pro-life president that we've ever had. And I think that in many ways the Trump presidency has made those of us who are conservatives look with newly jaundiced eyes at previous Republicans

and wonder what it was we ever saw in a Mitt Romney or a John McCain or even to some extent in a George W. Bush, of whom I was a big fan. But you realize that they were not willing to take on the radical left, certainly not the radical social left, in the way this president has dared to do. Let me give you a great example. Nikki Haley was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

And I saw kind of up close the Romney approach to our issues. You know, she's pro-life, but she came to the UN and did other things. Even though the abortion issue is like the number one hot topic of the UN has been for 25 years, she worked on Israel and the Muslims. And she didn't do anything for the life issues because she's pro-life. She's already done that. Therefore, she doesn't have to do it anymore. And that is my attitude.

That's the way I view George Bush and Mitt Romney and McCain and all these guys. They'll do a little bit and then they'll go do things that they really want to do. My view on Trump in the beginning when he was a pig and a poke was that I didn't think he cared one way or the other. A. B, he didn't care about the opinion of the New York Times and the Washington Post and Washington elites. See, therefore, he would do what we want as pro-lifers because we brought him there. So maybe he has become a true believer. I don't know. but I think in the beginning, he never thought about it at all, except as a talking point thing. And I think he really appreciates pro-life help.

And he's willing to do really weird pro-life things like defund Planned Parenthood that George Bush wasn't even able to, willing to say, because George Bush was surrounded by pro-abortion people who loved, you know, Planned Parenthood. And Trump is not. So a whole lot of things have gone into the fact that he's so pro-life. Well, it's interesting to me as well that when you look at various administrations, you don't see so many devout Christians, whether Catholic or evangelical. But in this administration, everywhere you look from Ben Carson to Betsy DeVos to Bill Barr and on and on and on, it's almost funny. And go down lower.

You know, Roger Severino, you know, the head of civil rights at HHS. Eric Hargan, whose name you may not know, he's the deputy, he's the number two man at HHS, faithful Catholic pro-lifer to his bones. There were major people, you know, this guy, Brian Hook in the State Department, who's an old friend of mine who ended up running Iran policy, true blue Catholic pro-lifer. He has appointed pro-lifers and believing Christians all over this administration, and he's turned them loose. And you have to wonder why he did that. I'm, I'm, I'm fascinated. Oh, we're going to be right back talking to Austin Ruse, R Us.

The book is The Catholic Case for Trump. Grab a copy. You sheltered me off. Keep me warm. Hey, folks, I'm talking to Austin Ruse. Is it Ruse or Ruse? Ruse. Ruse.

I've always said Ruse. Are you sure? Okay, the book is titled, The Catholic Case for Trump. I know that's correctly pronounced. It's the Catholic case for Trump by Austin Roos, R U.S.E. Austin, clearly because you write about policy in the book and you're a policy expert, this book would be appropriate really for anybody because if you care about these kinds of things, I know most evangelicals care about the same things that you all do,

that it would be a good book for them as well. Yeah, it's the social conservative case for Trump. So speaking of which, you know, when you talk about him surrounding himself by so many people of sincere faith and turning them loose, that's fascinating because we all know that four years ago, many of my conservative friends were insisting that Trump was a New York liberal that he didn't believe anything. He certainly didn't believe any of the stuff that I believed and that just watch. Well, the way he stood, for example, behind Kavanaugh, struck me as heroic. I have to say that I think that previous Republican leaders would not have pushed all the way to the end. At some point, they would have said, oh, it's a losing battle and let's go to somebody more moderate or something like that.

And I think that for some reason, he has an innate sense of the animus on the left toward people of faith. When Feinstein accused Amy Barrett Cohen of what did you say, the dogma lives loud. within you or something like that. I thought to myself, how is it possible that an octogenarian senator doesn't understand the heart of freedom of religion? It's just a bizarre, it's just a bizarre moment. And Trump seems instinctively to surround himself by people who do get this. Let me tell you about somebody whose name you will have never heard of, and that is Bethany Cosma. Bethany Cosma is a young mother, three children, husband.

They live near us in Northern Virginia. She was appointed to run the women's office in the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. A couple of years before that, she worked with my wife on school board issues in Fairfax County, which, as you know, has gone completely LGBT crazy. and she gave a talk at a school board meeting against the impending transgender policy. So she was appointed to this job. She came under a global attack. And that's not a senior position.

It's an important position, but it's not a senior position. She came under a sustained global attack because of a single speech that she made on the transgender issue. They said that she was an anti-LGB violent extremist. Swear to you, they said that. And so she came into this. job and she was under relentless attack by people at USAID for a long time. They went to the, she was one of their chief negotiators at the UN. She still is. She's fighting for life, faith, and family at USAID, and she has never been cut loose. Never been cut loose. You mean that Trump has

kept her right where she is doing what she's doing. That's right. That's right. You know, you look at, you look at the head of presidential personnel right now, faithful Catholic. You look at the President's General Counsel, Pat Cipollone, Faithful Catholic, used to work for the Knights of Columbus, which, as you know, Kamala Harris says, is not acceptable in governmental service. That's what she said to a federal judge. Well, listen, let's go to Kamala Harris, Joe Biden ticket. Yeah. One thing that someone said to me just last night, and it struck me as amazing that I had not really thought of this, that the so-called Equality Act, that was passed by Nancy Pelosi's Congress and is ready to be signed by a president. Joe Biden said on day one of a Biden presidency, he will sign that act. That alone, I mean, that alone, literally that alone, ought to be enough for anyone of any kind of traditional faith in America.

and I mean Jew, Catholic, Protestant, evangelical, a Muslim, it will effectively force people of faith in institutions of faith to hire people that disagree utterly with everything that that institution believes in. So if you're in a pro-life organization and somebody comes out as transgender or somebody comes out, whatever it is, the government will force you. That's on day one of a Biden presidency. When I really got that, I thought that is about as clear as it gets. That should send chills down the spine of any American, of any faith, not just Catholic faith or evangelical faith. Let me just say this about that, as Richard Nixon used to say.

Trump is a squish on LGBT issues, even though he's a little bit of a squish, he's a New Yorker still, he says he's going to veto that act. Even though he's a little bit of a squish on these issues, he said no transgender is in the military. He said we're not going to, and government money is not going to pay for transgender surgery for those in the military. So even though he's a little bit of a squish on these issues,

you know, he's got ambassador Rick Rennell running around pressuring governments to change their laws on uncertain homosexual sex acts. I like Rick Rennell. I've defended him in. the past. I disagree with him on this. Even all of that, Trump has been willing to defend religious freedom when it comes to this particular issue. He directed the embassies to stop flying the rainbow flag, for instance. So, you know, he's a little bit of a squish on this issue, but even here he has done darn well. And you're exactly right. Joe Biden said that the

transgender issue is the civil rights issue of our day. He said that. And that means that they're going to force, you know, girls to compete with boys in high school and college sports is going to destroy women's sports. And Joe Biden is going to force this on the American people. So you're exactly right. On this issue alone, it ought to be a stark and easy choice for anybody of faith. Well, and to me it boils down to kind of what I would call a common sense approach. You know, those when we might say that Trump is squishy on some of these issues, part of what we mean. is he is, he's pragmatic, and he understands that even though, and this is to me the key,

even though I could have friends who are gay, right, they would know my position. I have a biblical view of sexuality, but we can still be friends. But when you start now telling people that the government is going to not simply be open-minded, but is going to force people of faith to bend, the knee to this secular religion of the LGBTQ activists, many gay people that I know would agree with us on that, that the government would be wrong to do that. We're going to be right back. I'm talking to Austin Ruse. The book is The Catholic Case for Trump. Folks, it's called The Catholic Case for Trump, a new book by my friend Austin, Roos.

And right now, we've just got a few minutes left, Austin. What do you think, you wanted to talk about John Kerry. Go ahead. Well, the last time that the Democrats nominated a dissenting Catholic, that is to say, a Catholic who publicly dissented from the teachings of the faith, specifically on abortion, Catholics, I think, were embarrassed. George Bush beat John Kerry, and he won the faithful Catholic vote. That is Catholics that actually go to Mass and go to confession. But he also won the generics. You mean actual Catholics? Actually believing and practicing Catholic. But he also won the generics. That is to say, you know, the folks who either dissent or haven't been to mass in 25 years. He won those two because I think even the generics were a little bit embarrassed about having a publicly dissenting Catholic in the Oval Office.

And fast forward to today, we have exactly the same thing. We have Joe Biden, who is willing to sacrifice unborn children up to and past the moment of birth. So I think that on the Catholic issue alone, the generic Catholics will be a little bit embarrassed about voting for a guy who can't receive communion in a number of diocese? I have to say to me, maybe I'm getting this wrong, but it seems that it's the Kennedy family that let America down. In other words, they could have stood firm on Catholic issues, but they didn't.

Obviously, Senator Ted Kennedy, in his private life and in his stance on abortion, he went along with the crowd. And that was to me kind of a, it was just a tragic moment for the whole party in the country. There was a famous meeting with the Kennedy boys and Jesuits

trying to figure out personally opposed but position, which became the Democratic Party position. You know, you look at somebody like Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a personal sinner, but I'm not aware that he was a personal sinner, but I don't believe that he was a dissenter from the faith. There's a huge difference, because we're all sinners, but not all of us are dissenters from the faith.

And but clearly, Teddy, if we're honest, who among us has not invited prostitutes to the White House? Am I right? Hey, we all school up now and again. But, well, the fact of the matter is that I've heard about that meeting. Who is at that meeting, if you don't mind telling me? Oh, I don't remember the names of the Jesuits. But it was Bobby and Teddy and it was a bunch of years. Oh, it was Hesburgh.

Oh, it was Hesberg and it was also, wasn't it Drin? Yes. I don't know this and I'm not a Catholic. I have to tell you the cynicism of the Jesuits and the pernicious effect that they have had on Catholics. It's just unbelievable. And so that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you because when we're talking about Catholics, the question is, are we talking about Catholics or Catholics? You know, true Catholics, take this stuff seriously. as you do, and even as I do, though, I'm not a serious Catholic. I'm just staggered at people who say,

well, I was baptized and I'm a lapsed Catholic or I'm a semi-lapsed Catholic. And I don't even, that's like the guy who says, I'm a pacifist, but I carry a gun. I don't get it. And it's important for us to talk about these issues. So is it your sense that Trump will win the Catholic vote in November? He will certainly win the faithful Catholic vote. I think he has a good chance of winning the generic Catholic vote. I think that he will get a higher percentage of black and Spanish votes this time. I think it's going to be close, but I think he's going to win. My wife, Kathy, whom you know, is sitting nearby, says he's going to win in a landslide, from her lips to God's ears. Well, there's so many things at play. I've never seen the desperation

and the viciousness on the side of the left. Like, I think it's just a tremendous level of desperation and anxiety that he is going to win and they're going to they're going to do everything and anything including burned down cities when he's declared the winner. I'm sorry we're out of time. I am grateful to you, Austin, for your voice in the culture and for this new book, The Catholic Case for Trump. Congratulations and thanks for your time. Thank you very much.