The Eric Metaxas Show - J.D. Vance (Encore)

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

We bring you an encore presentation of our interview with the Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance. 

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's LegacyPMinvestments.com. On Monday, President Trump nominated J.D. Vance as his vice president. In honor of the nomination, here is a special encore presentation of Eric's conversation with the Ohio senator from a few years ago. Welcome to the Eric Metaxus show. Did you ever see the movie The Blobs?

starring Steve McQueen. The blood-curdling prep of The Blub. Well, way back when, Eric had a small part in that film, but they had to cut his scene because the blob was supposed to eat him. But he kept spitting him out. Oh, the whole thing was just a disaster. Anyway, here's the guy who's not always that easy to digest. Eric Pataxis.

Hey there, folks. I'm going to be playing the role of Eric Mataxis. I'm the best we could do on short notice. Fortunately for you, we have, I think, an exciting guest. His name is J.D. Vance, and he's sitting right here. J.D., welcome. Thanks for having me. I never thought to ask you this.

I didn't plan to ask you this, but my first question is, what does J.D. stand for? I could have looked it up, but I'd rather ask you. Not Jack Daniels, James David. The joke is that it was Jack Daniels, but just James David. Family name. When did you – well, I want to – let me introduce you to you, send me properly. You're known mostly for having written what is nothing less than a spectacular book, a memoir called Hillbilly Elegy, which was then turned into a movie. Yeah.

So not many young people write books about their lives, and certainly not many young people have books that they've written about their lives turned into movies on Netflix. So it's kind of an interesting thing that your life is really public. Nonetheless, I'm sure tons of people in my audience aren't familiar with it. So there's a reason it was a bestseller, and it's not just because you're a good writer. It's because your story, which you did not plot or invent, is an amazing story. So for my audience, would you tell my audience the guts of that story? Yeah, so I guess the summary is I was raised by my grandparents and they were working class people. My grandfather worked at a steel mill.

And if you back up a little bit, my grandparents grew up in southeast Kentucky coal country, right? So the sort of the deep poverty you think, you know, John F. Kennedy is showing up on the cabins of people who were extremely poor back in the 1960s. That's where they came from. And they moved to southwestern Ohio in the 1950s because that was sort of the land of opportunity. And the story of my family sort of mirrors the story of the town that I grew up in, which is, you know, relative prosperity in the 50s and 60s, and then something sort of started to decline. My mom got into drugs, was unable to take care of me for a long time in my childhood, which is why my grandparents figure so prominently in my life. And, you know, we were hillbillies. We were hillbilly migrants to southwestern Ohio.

And, you know, my grandmother loved a cuss. She had a lot of guns. And she also had a lot of love and a lot of discipline. and those things were, I think, very important for me being able to live a good life. And so the story is sort of on the one hand, I went on to the Marine Corps, I went to Ohio State, I went to Yale Law School. I sort of found myself in a rarefied world that nobody in my family had ever dreamed of. But then on the other hand, it's like, well, you know, what happened to the town that I grew up in?

Why is it that places like Middletown were, you know, places of opportunity in the 50s? And then by the time that I was a kid in the 1990s, it was like everybody was just saying, get out of this town. And I kind of always resented that, right? I did get out of the town. I didn't end up going to school somewhere else, but I hated that I was told that I had to do that. And while the book isn't a political book, it sort of starts to think hard about, you know, what did we do to these small towns? What do we do to the families that lived in them? What happened to the people who were sort of left behind by globalization? I think that's probably why the book did pretty well is because it came out in 2016 and there was this guy running against globalization by the name of Donald Trump.

Well, it's interesting because just a little while ago, people weren't thinking. thinking in these terms. This is what I find so interesting about the advent of Trump is that suddenly he, his appearance on the scene, forced people to think differently. And there was kind of a, I don't know what you call it, a threshing, a dividing. Something happened where people began to see things along those kinds of lines. And obviously he did in this generation what Reagan did a few decades ago, suddenly the Rust Belt, you know, the Reagan Democrats, they suddenly appeared. And those are the people, you know, now I guess Trump was saying that these are the forgotten man, you know, but that's, they've always been there, basically. Just that we only periodically visit them and their problem. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. I mean, I remember, you know, living with my mammal, that's what I called my grandmother on McKinley Street in Middletown, Ohio. And I remember, like, how cutely, aware she was. She was not an educated woman. She didn't even graduate from high school,

but she was just like very aware of the thing, the fact that things weren't going well, right? So a lot of the houses in the neighborhood were being moved on to Section 8, which means sort of, you know, welfare recipients moving in. You know, she sort of saw this connection between, okay, well, this family used to be relatively intact, but then the dad lost his job at the steel mill because the steel mill had employed 10,000 people, now only employs 2,000 people. So then the parents start fighting a lot. Well, then all of those. a sudden the dad isn't around anymore. And he sort of, this, this weird connection between what was going on and the town at large

was affecting families like mine. And I think that's just, it's kind of sad, right? I mean, these places are, you know, very patriotic people live there. On my block in McKinley Street, two kids graduated from the Middletown High School class of 2003, me and this kid named Nicholas, both of us enlisted in the Marine Corps that year. That was in the middle, like the Iraq War had started in April. we graduated in June of 03. So sort of salt of the earth people who built the country,

but at the same time, I think the country has sort of left them behind in a certain way. And importantly, it's a question, not just an economic thing, right? It's not just that these factory jobs disappeared. It's that the people who were leaving the country started to almost dislike people like my mail, right? That is the point. Yeah, and that's the horror. Because as you're talking, you say patriotic, patriotic. And I'm thinking I was raised in a working class, patriotic home where nobody had gone to college.

And it was only when I went to Yale undergraduate, I discovered that there's this class of cultural elites who sneer at patriotism and at the people who were patriotic. And it was a revelation to me. And it must have been the more a revelation to you. I remember at a seminar that I did at Yale Law School. And this person was otherwise a very friendly person. We were talking about foreign policy. And I mentioned in the seminar that I had served four years in the Marine Corps. And she looked at me and she said, well, you were in the Marine Corps, but you're just so nice.

Right. So the implication here is that we're all just a bunch of barbarians. But what is stunning. It's not surprising. But depending on who you're sharing this with, and I don't mean to interrupt, but I want to underscore that I, too, when I went to college, discovered these circles where serving the military was a dirty word. They may as well have called you baby killer. And it's a huge disconnect.

And if you don't want to be engaged ideologically 24-7, you just ignore it and try to get good grades and move on. But it's a stunning thing. And this has been, this is the legacy of the 60s. I mean, it goes back to the 60s. But it's just an amazing thing. how many Americans, most of whom voted for Trump, I'm sure, and voted for Reagan, they think, are you kidding? I served my country, and that's anything but great.

Yeah. Well, it's kind of crazy, actually, because, you know, I think about, so it's not just the fact that a lot of these elites aren't patriotic, right? It's the condescension that comes along with it, right? So it's one thing to not be patriotic yourself. Of course, I am patriotic. I disagree with that sentiment. But if you think about like, they assume that the people who were patriotic had been had by this giant conspiracy, right? That like if you loved your country, it was fundamentally some powerful evil interest had made you as a working class person love your country. And they just used it, right? They used your patriotism against you. And the idea that like, you know, my mamma, even though she didn't graduate from high school, would sit around and read books about

like General Patton and feel a sense of pride of what her older brother and her father did World War II. Like, it's just, I hate it that people assume that patriotism is skin deep, right? It's not just pick up trugs. It's not just Fourth of July parades, right? It's like knowing that you came from a group of people who did something powerful and morally upstanding, that's a, I mean, that's the basic, that is the fuel on which a society functions, right? You want people to love their country.

You want them to feel some connectedness to the past. And it's so bizarre that our elites think of that as a bad thing and not as something to nurture. Well, it's astonishing, but it is obviously, it's kind of like, you know, economic trickle-down theory. It's cultural trickle-down theory. That's right. There was a point where only the academics and others held these views, but the long march to the institutions have made these ideas trickle-down, trickle-down, until suddenly you have Marxism erupting in our own streets. I am talking to J.D. Vance. We'll be right back with J.D. Vance. On Monday, President Trump nominated J.D. Vance as his vice president. In honor of the nomination, here is a special encore presentation of Eric's conversation with the Ohio senator from a few years ago. Okay, I have never seen a discount this huge from Balance of Nature, and this discount is for a very limited time, so today is the day to order it. Look, if you've listened to me for any length of time, you've heard me rave about Balance of Nature's amazing fruits and veggie supplements.

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Oh, no. I could say that. No, that's right. No, I declared July 1st of last year, and we've been put together what appears to be a pretty credible campaign. I think we're going to win this thing. But it's quite a journey running for political office, especially his first time as an outsider. Okay, if you don't win, I'm moving to Norway. I'm just going to be very clear. There's so much to talk about here. We've been talking about some of it. How do you get to a place in America where the cultural elites sneer at patriotism? As I was saying, I saw this for the first. time myself in college. And I was kind of shocked that, you know, the cognoscenti, they say that, you know, we kind of sneer at Norman Rockwell. We sneer at patriotic poems like the midnight ride of Paul Revere. They had kind of bought into, you know, the 20th century modernist and then postmodernist series of lies. And they don't really have anything to replace it with. I mean, And what comes right in is cultural Marxism, which we're dealing with right now. And it's taken these decades for it to come down.

But the only good part of it for me is that it's so bad that many people are waking up. That's right. Some people are waking up to the extent that they're running for the Senate. And other people are waking up to the fact that they probably should vote for somebody who understands where the average Americans are coming from. Yeah, well, I think that nobody naturally hates their own country and hates their own family and hates their own civilization, right? It's an explicit propaganda effort.

And this is what I always try to remind people. In some ways, it's stark and it's depressing, but to your point, we've got to wake up from this nightmare first before we can ever hope to address it. The left has very intentionally decided that it wants to control every institution in the country. It started with the universities. It's the media. It's some of our biggest corporations.

Okay, we see this happening with social media censorship. What is that, if not left-wing control of the technology company? But if that's true, then the standard Republican fare of, I'm going to go to Washington, pass a couple of good laws, doesn't make any sense, right? We actually have to try to deinstitutionalize the left if we want to have a civilization. And that's a, that's rather a big project. Yes, it is. That's the problem, right? I mean, this show was ripped off of YouTube and you think, okay, we'll go to YouTube B.

Well, there is no B. There's just YouTube, and there's just that that's the issue right now. Yeah. So now I'm interviewing you as a senatorial candidate. So what do we do about this, J.D? Well, I think that we have to recognize that so many of the problems that exist in this country, from the deindustrialization of places like Middletown to Eric Metaxus being censored off YouTube, they are not the consequence of any economic law of nature.

They are the consequence of our decisions. We let this happen. It was not written into some divine code that the universities had to become left-wing. the left wing tried to take over the universities, and then they created public policy privileges for themselves that entrenched them in their position. So you just have to go through each one of these things. I'm not saying it's easy.

It takes a lot of willpower and a lot of courage, but look, just take the censorship issue, okay? We have, going back to, even before the U.S. Constitution in English common law, we have a solution for a monopolist controlling what people do on their platforms based on their political viewpoints. It's called Common Carrier Regulations. You could not, 100 years ago in this country, say, Eric Metaxus, you can't come on my railroad because you're a conservative or because you're a white man or whatever identifier they're going to use.

You should not be able to do that if you're a monopolist, whether it's Google or YouTube or anything else. And we have to remember this is not just the political. This is not just censoring people like you who have ideas that are interesting for the political politics and the culture. This is active propaganda. I'd encourage you your listeners. I encourage you to pick up your phone and Google. Can men become pregnant? And the very first...

Can men become pregnant? Yes. And this is the party of science, of course, that controls Google. The first result that you will get is yes, men can become pregnant. In fact, it happens more often than you think. This is an explicit effort to effectively create propaganda across every layer of our society. We have to actually do something about it. The good news is we can't.

If a man becomes pregnant, let me just say that... his wife should marry him right do the right thing marry the poor guy for crying out loud don't just leave him hanging out there this is so crazy can roosters lay eggs who's to say in these topsy turvy times when when we're dealing with this kind of stuff i mean look this gets to why we are where we are right most of us who identify as conservatives realized with the advent of trump that many in the republican party were genuine cowardly when it came to some of these hot button issues. In other words, they would fall behind like, well, I'm a free market guy. If you're a free market guy, you still have to understand that there are things called monopolies and that these harm people, and you have to have a little bit of guts to do something about it. But no one did. I mean, there's just no question that a lot of the people that I would think of as having some courage,

even they did almost nothing about this. Well, this is one of the things that was, I think, very, very good, the long-term benefits of the Trump era. And to be clear, like, you know, I was not even a Trump guy, even though most of my family was. I was not a Trump guy back in 2015. And people would say, well, you know, what changed? Why weren't you a Trump guy in 2015? Why are you a Trump guy now? And it's, I think you revealed this fact about American life, right?

That so many Republicans were not willing to fight on cultural issues, right? Sure, we'll defend lower taxes and we'll defend lower regulations. and obviously economic policy is important, but when our own voters are being de-platformed or fired from their jobs, oh, no, no, no, no, right? We can't do anything about that. Trump revealed that corruption in a way that I think, you know, again, it will outlast his first term.

If he runs again, it will outlast the second term. It is permanently changed the party for the better. That is a fact. I mean, it's an extraordinary thing because nobody could see it coming. I mean, it's this sort of thing that until Trump, you just sort of assumed that George W. would be about the best you could do, you know, that he would claim to be an evangelical Christian and to be pro-life and on and on and on.

Do almost nothing about it effectively when you look back, play patty cake with the devil, play patty cake with the communist Chinese, say that that's about opening up the markets to the Chinese. In other words, the left and the right had different reasons for doing, how can we say, horish things and continuing to keep. power, basically. That's right. Attempted to put Harriet Myers on the Supreme Court over Sam Alito. Do we remember that? Do we remember that? You know what? I can't believe. Think about where we would be right now, because Alito is either the first or the second best, the side of Clarence Thomas, on the Supreme Court. Think about where we would be right now if Harriet Myers

was on the court instead of San Alito. Thank God for religious conservatives. That was the first time my life, by the way. I was, I believe I was in the Marine Corps when he tried to appoint Harriet Myers and religious conservatives for the first time I'd ever seen them stand up and say, no, we're not having it. We made you president. This is not happening. And thank God they did. It is an amazing moment. I mean, I remember it pretty well. But I guess at some point, I want to turn to the issue of faith. Were you raised as a person of Christian faith? I know that you are now a person of Christian faith. Can you talk about that? Yeah, yeah, I love to. So I was raised, you know, non-denominational, you know, evangelical, as my mammal once said,

in eastern Kentucky, even the Episcopalians are snake handlers, right? So we were sort of charismatic Christians, loud music, speaking in tongues the whole nine yards. Well, that's where I am now. Okay. That's why I come out of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, so we may have kind of crossed paths here. So, you know, stepped away. I mean, like, I think a lot of people I went to college, Christianity wasn't fashionable, I wasn't, didn't have anything really rooting me. My Mamma had died. She was my main connection to my faith. And so for a few years, kind of went through this, like, rebellious, non-Christian phase. And then...

Did you kill some people? I know, I did. I just had a path. You know what I mean? You sin. You kill some people. No major sins. But before you go further, so were you, when you were growing up, because I don't know,

when you talk about, you know, working class, Appalachia, I mean, some of those people are very religious. and some people are not. They're good pagans, you know. But you're saying that you were raised in the church? That was a, or was a cultural issue? Yeah, it was more culturally Christian. I mean, look, like, Mamaw, we would watch Billy Graham

and we would watch TV in on Sundays. We very rarely went to church, right? Maybe once every other month, right? So that was one of the issues, actually, I think, is that we were culturally Christian. Mamal read the Bible. She prayed every day. We talked about it a lot.

But we weren't actually part of a couple. community of believers. And I think it was one of the reasons why it was easier for me to fall away from it. See, now that's interesting. I would argue with you about that. Because I think a lot of people, I know, because I think there's a much truth in what you're saying. But I think I've seen both sides of it. Sure. Because I think that people who read the Bible and pray, that's, you know, to be part of a communion and to understand sacraments or whatever. It's like I would be the first to say, That's not unimportant. Of course.

But a lot of people who get that sort of don't read the Bible and don't have any actual sense of what it is to live out that faith, other than I do these things. And then I vote for Biden, right? I hang on a second. We're going to go to a break. Talking to J.D. Vance. And I just heard he's running for the United States Senate. Stay tuned. For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless provider.

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Neutrametics.com use the code Eric for 15% off. Again, Nutrametics, N-U-T-R-A-M-E-D-I-X.com. Nutrametics.com use the code Eric for 15% off. On Monday, President Trump nominated J.D. Vance as his vice. Vice President, in honor of the nomination, here is a special encore presentation of Eric's conversation with the Ohio Senator from a few years ago. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to U.S. senatorial candidate, J.D. Vance.

J.D., we're talking about faith and all this stuff. And I used to work for Chuck Colson. He was one of my heroes, and then I had the privilege of getting him and working for him. And he did something, he started something called evangelicals and Catholics together. And he took a lot of heat from, you're a Catholic and I'm an evangelical. He took a lot of heat from reformed Protestants who basically said, no, no, no, no, no, you can't break bread with those, you know, what, cultists. It's a satanic cult and the Pope is the Antichrist. And it's interesting, because I think part of when we're talking about working class Americans,

we're talking about people of faith who don't, they don't live in that rarefied world where they're concerned about the Westminster Confession versus, you know, they just know there are godless bureaucrats who are devotedly secular, who don't understand the founders, don't understand religious liberty, sneer at religious liberty. It's now in scare quotes in the New York Times. and we all need to kind of band together for a common vision of what it is to be a freedom-loving American, as the founders were. They were not enforcing their faith, but they knew that without faith, you can't really have virtue and self-government,

that somehow these things have to work together. Well, and they also, you know, there were, of course, even though there was no federal establishment of religion, there were multiple state establishments of religion at the time of the founding generation. I think they recognized that if you ban all mention of faith from the public square, you erect a new faith in the public square, right? It's just secularism, it's progressivism, it's wokeism, whatever name you want to put on it. I think our founders were very smart, actually, about having a society that, no, you didn't get put to death, right, for not having a particular faith, and that's a good thing.

But that doesn't mean you can't talk about Jesus at a public school either. Well, this is, and this is what's so interesting. I think that most people in America get this. Yes. But I know that the cultural elites, not only don't they get it, they're horrified at the idea of it, basically. They don't speak that language. And it's why they sneer at Walmart voters

and at people dealing with addictions who aren't people of color. They don't have categories for this. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the interesting things that I think ultimately brought me back to my faith, right? It's sort of becoming a husband, a father, thinking about these big issues that I think Christianity is particularly good at dealing with. with. But it was also just recognizing the more time that I spent with elites, they like to think that they're all rational, that they have no religion. And then the more you realize it's like, actually, you guys have all of the things that you hate about religion you have in your own worldview. You just have none of the moral grounding, the tradition, you know, the rituals, and that's made you all insane.

Well, it is fascinating, isn't it? Because when you use terms like religion, we can't have no establishment of religion in the Constitution, people don't understand what you just said that any understanding of the fundamentals is effectively a religion. And so if you're a secularist, you do have a religion, but because you don't label it, you don't say I'm a congregationalist or I'm a this or that. They act as though, I'm neutral. But you really cannot be neutral when you're dealing with questions of the human person, when you're dealing with questions of sexuality and marriage. These are things that there really is no neutral ground. But let's be honest, they've been rather successful in putting forward the lie that they are neutral on that. Yeah, that's exactly right.

I mean, that's one of the, I think, the great evils of modern liberalism is this pre-tend, of neutrality when it's not. And then we get this, right? Like if you're not allowed to say a prayer before a public school session, then you're not neutral. You're explicitly anti-Christian, right? Because the things that people do to replace that, they will be religious in nature.

They just won't be a prayer, right? It'll sort of look in it. It'll look slightly different. And yeah, this is, I think it's one of the, by the way, the things that conservatives have really woken up about in the past, in the past 10 years, is there is new neutrality, right? We actually need to choose fights in some of these cultural battles. We need to be on the side of good.

We can't just be neutral and expect to be left alone. The fight is coming to us whether we want it to or not. And again, this is the great irony of Donald Trump. The idea that here you have a thrice-married, philandering New York, because I know New York, a real estate developer who effectively shows the church what courage looks like. I mean, it's an astonishing thing that he was willing to stick his neck out. And even if it had been transactional in the sense that he said, well, they elected me, I want to please the people who elected me, this is important to them. Even if it were only that, it would be spectacular.

It would be the free market in politics, in action. But I think it was more than that. I think that he identified, I don't know how far back this goes with him, but that somehow he identified with people like the folks that you grew up with. Yeah, you know, I won't try to psychoanalyze the president, but I definitely. don't think it was purely transactional, right? There was clearly some affinity there, and I think you see that even today, right? Trump knows instinctively, I'm sure you talk to the president, I talk to the president, Trump knows instinctively that the people who are most courageous on behalf of his agenda and what he was trying to do in Washington are very often evangelical Christians,

right? Or conservative Catholics. I mean, it really is fascinating to me that a guy who, from the outside appearance was not a very religious guy, got Christianity and its role in American politics better than anybody. Well, what I think stunned him, and I was there, there was a meeting in New York in the summer of 2016 with a lot of evangelical leaders, and Trump was there. And I remember him sort of registering his astonishment at the acceptance and the love in the room for him.

And if you really are a Christian, you understand what that's called. That's called grace. It's called grace. It's the antithesis of Phariseeism or legalism. We will be back to define those terms with J.D. Vance. Don't go away. On Monday, President Trump nominated J.D. Vance as his vice president. In honor of the nomination, here is a special encore presentation of Eric's conversation with the Ohio senator from a few years ago.

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the premium MyPillows with all new Giza Fabric, just $25. Orders over $75 will receive free shipping, too. The amazing offer will not last long. Go to MyPillow.com. Use promo code Eric or call 800-9783057. That's promo code Eric. 8900-9783057.com promo code Eric. Or go to MyPillow.com and use promo code Eric. When you get the blues, come on get rhythm. When you get the blues, get a rock and roll feeling. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegie. I have to ask you, J.D. Can I call you J.D.?

Please. Can I call you J.B? Call me whatever you want. You. What made you think that you ought to write. write a memoir. I mean, it's an amazing thing. Your story is amazing in and of itself. Yeah. But the idea that you'd go to Iraq, that you'd serve your country, that you'd go to Yale law school, my goodness, and then decide to write a book telling this story. How did that happen?

I mean, were you a big reader growing up? At what point do you decide to do what I, speaking from experience, know, is a big deal. Yeah. I've always loved to read and write. I mean, I read the Bible sort of all the way through when I was 13 or 14, just because I was really, you know, really wanted to know what it actually said. I had a professor in law school who was politically moderate by my standards, by the standards of Yale Law School, I think it's sort of a radical right winger. And she encouraged me to turn what was then a paper into a book. And the more that it became a book, the more that it started to incorporate, you know, stories

about my past and my family and at law school? At law school. Are you able to, can you share the next? name of this non-communist Yale Law School. Yeah, who's faced a number of, you know, cancel pressure campaigns in the past few years. And one of her great sins, of course,

is that she was a mentor to me. But, you know, if somebody can promote a white nationalist bigot like J.D. Vans, they have no place at Yale Law School. Let's, let's be honest. Yeah, that's obvious. So it became a book from there. And, you know, the more that it became a book,

I start talking to my family a lot. started asking for stories about things that happened even before I was born, even before my mom was born. And it just became this sort of family investigation almost. Like I learned things, you know, Mammon and Papal left eastern Kentucky when she was 13 and he was 16. She was pregnant at the time. The baby that she had died six months or sorry, six days after she gave birth to it. We never knew that stuff, right? So you just learned this incredible family story that took my parents, my grandparents from Kentucky to Ohio.

And yeah, I'd also say, you know, just being honest, there was definitely something, you know, I was at Yale Law School. I felt connected to my home, but I realized these elites weren't really totally on board with what was going on in law school, or back home. I think it was a good opportunity to just force myself to reckon with the two worlds and how different they were, right? Because think about it. A kid like me, nobody in my family had gone to college. Here I am at Yale Law School. It was a good thing. It was, you know, hopefully it was a good book, but certainly was good for me and my family.

I think to have to have been written. It's always fascinating to me that, you know, when I think of Yale Law School, you know, unfortunately I think of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and it seems to be able to get through Yale as an undergraduate or particularly at the law school, and to not drink that Kool-Aid is exceedingly rare. Were you – did you have a moment where you – woke up or did you in other words for for for me i kind of i kind of did drift along with the zeitgeist

for some years i think before i had my awakening and my came to christian faith so something like that happened you do you remember was it was there a moment or yeah definitely was like i think i drink the kool-aid a little bit luckily i didn't fully drink it so i was still always you know i think firmly planted in where i came from but you know i think one thing in particular i remember talking with a couple of classmates about work-life balance, right? This idea that they're obsessed with in Ivy League professional schools. And, you know, a couple of young women were talking about how they really wanted to have a family, but it was so much more important to go and work at a law firm and work 90 hours in a cubicle drafting briefs for corporations. And it sort of hit me

like the worldview that dominates here is anti-family and it's making people miserable. Right? And I'd never sort of drawn that connection, right? You think of like feminism, right? Fimism is his idea. that women need to be equal and happy, and of course, who disagrees with legal equality or women being happy, when you start to realize that actual in application, what it's doing is taking a lot of talented young people and turning them against their own basic desire for family and tradition and community. And it's like, wait a second, right? This whole ideology that I've been sold, these people don't, they don't have it all figured out. They have no idea what's going on.

And they're about to lose the country, by the way, as evidence, of course by what's happened politically over the past four or five years. Like that, I think, was my awakening when I realized that these people who sold themselves as having it all figured out, they didn't know what they were doing. Well, yeah, and that's an understatement. And it's almost funny. I mean, it's tragic comedy because we're seeing now, as we were saying earlier, the kind of outworking of that worldview.

It kind of trips along through the decades. And then suddenly it blooms into full-blown. you know, Marxist communism in our streets and violence and selective application of the law. And you think that can't happen in America. And here it is happening now, leading to folks like you running for the Senate. And for all kinds of people, as I speak around the country, tons of people are getting involved in things that they just thought, I don't need to bother with that. I don't need to homeschool my kids.

And I think people are saying, if I don't get involved now, if I don't get involved now, if I don't it's serious, it's over. We've been fiddling while Rome burned, and here we are. It's this bad now. We're at the edge of the abyss. Yeah, that's exactly right. And of course, I think what's happened the past couple of years has really driven that home, right? Who would have thought that you might have to vaccinate a five-year-old with what is effectively an experimental vaccine that appears to have some negative health consequences for five-year-olds? You might have to vaccinate five-year-olds to send them to school. Who would have thought that we would still, too, Two years later, be having children wear cloth masks.

Who would have thought that people would be fired from their job for donating $25 to a conservative political cause? This stuff is happening in our country right now. And this is, again, five years ago, Eric, if you and I were sitting here and you told me what was happening right now, I would have said you're a crazy conspiracy theorist. Well, sure. And here we are. Well, listen, I have lost many friends who think that I am a crazy conspiracy theorist. And it is heartbreaking, frankly.

But at the end of the day, well, at the end of the day, you realize what can I do? I have to speak the truth. I have to do the best I can. And you're right. It's nothing less than stunning that we are here. I mean, when you talk about forcing anyone, much less young people, to get vaccines that are, in fact, not quite vaccines, not fully vetted and on and on and on. and then to have the establishment, including to some extent, folks like Donald Trump, whom in every other way I admire.

But it's just, it's truly, it's a bizarre moment. And we have to mark it as such. We'll be right back with J.D. Vance. Don't go away. Folks, welcome back. I want to highlight some of our friends on the program. Do we still have friends on the program? I thought they broke up.

We've got a lot of friends. And I want to highlight some websites because I just, I always want to provide a resource to people. Because people always say, where can I go? Where can I look? That's part of what we try to do on this show is to steer people in the right direction. For example, everywhere I go, I meet homeschoolers. They are the most mature, socially mature, educated, bright. young people that I ever meet. And so everywhere I go, I get the opportunity. I say it, you should

homeschool your kids. Get them out of these satanic Marxist indoctrination camps that we call the public education system. Get them either in quality Christ-centered K-12 education or in homeschooling. People say, how do I do that? Well, I'm here to tell you, the folks at the Herzog Foundation are here to help you. There's no catch. The folks of the Hertzok Foundation are good people. We know them. And they exist to help people do quality price-centered K-12 education. They have a ton of resources.

Somebody who homeschools our kids. And by me, I mean my wife. No, I do a little bit. But, yeah, we're always looking for great places to kind of augment and sort of pump up our curriculum at home. So this is a really great place. I'm just telling you, folks, it's important. It's important. And people need to do it.

And they say, but I don't know how. And go to Herzog Foundation.com. Please look them up. They're just delightful and they're there to help. Also want to mention our friends at Americans for Prosperity Foundation. They have taken hundreds of concerned citizens to the border, to see the border for themselves. Imagine something Kamala Harris has never, ever done. done, visited the stinking border. Yeah. I believe she's been through the Taco Bell

Drive through several times. That's a run. They used to say run to the border. You know what? I take it back. I take it back. Yeah, she's been through the Taco Bell Drive Thru. But other than that, she's ever been to the border. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation has taken hundreds of concerned citizens, all of whom are more qualified to be vice president than Kamala Harris. They've taken them into the border and they have turned them as a result of this into informed activists. That's what we need in America is for us not just to be citizens, but to be informed activist citizens who care about freedom, who care about the things that matter to preserving our freedoms, like, oh yeah, having a border. So Americans for prosperity,

you know, help us understand what we need to have a border. For example, more border agents, more walls. Remember walls? Remember Trump talking about the wall? More technology? That's makes Americans for prosperity unique. They do the tough work of organizing and mobilizing everyday Americans. Yeah. Having a border is pretty important. It's sort of like wearing a belt. You know, if you don't have a call on, things get ugly pretty quickly, you know. Call me crazy, but a border is important. So you can learn more at secureborder, secure America.com. That's secureborder, secure america.com. Before we go, I want to remind people, please visit Socrates in the city on YouTube or visit Socrates in the city.

You can go to Socrates and city.com. Tons of resources to feed your mind at Socrates in the city. Amazing conversations. Socrates in the city. Please check it out. Share it on social media. Just tremendous conversations. And then before we go, a letter to the American church, that website, letter to the American

church, is loaded with all kinds of stuff. If your church hasn't done a screening, you can sign up, you can get the study guide, you can get the book. It's being part of a movement to save this country, folks. I think you know if you're listening to this program, we got to get busy. Please visit Letter to the Americanchurch.com. You can watch the film there, actually. Letter to the Americanchurch.com. And if you want to buy any of my books, go to ericmetaxis.com.

Erichmetaxis.com. Sign up for the newsletter. Just lots of great resources. God bless you. God bless America.