The Eric Metaxas Show - John Zmirak and Jenna Ellis

Episode Date: June 1, 2020

John Zmirak and Jenna Ellis are both on hand to discuss what has transpired over the weekend regarding the tragic death of George Floyd and the demonstrations, both peaceful and violent, that followed.

Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Please keep your arms and legs inside the car at all times. This is your final warning. Now here's your host, Mr. Thrill Ride himself. Eric Mataxis. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Holy cow. Wow.

Chris Heim's and Albin, my posse, my crew. Blue. I'm so down. I've got a crew. I want to talk to you. And then we're going to bring in John Zmirak. I also want to say that today we'll be speaking with Heather McDonald, who has a lot to say on this issue, and also with Jenna Ellis, who has a lot to say on this issue. By this issue, I mean what is happening in the country right now. It's just horrendous stuff. We should, unless Chris, you or Albin, have something you want to say, I will just pull in John Zmirak.

Let John do the talking on this one. No, I made a New Year's resolution for 2020 that this year would in fact be the worst year ever and everything's working out pretty great. Isn't it true? Yeah, it's it's dark stuff. It's dark. It's dark stuff. It's evil what is happening. There's all kinds of horrible, horrible things happening in this country and a lot of confusion about how to see it, how to deal with it.

whenever I'm confused, I turn to John Smirak. John Smirak, welcome to the program. Thank you, Eric. I have no one to turn to, sadly. Oh, now cut that out. You've got the saints. I know God is too busy for Catholics, but you've got the saints. In all seriousness, John, this is what I wanted to talk to you about is it seems to me

that in the last day or two, some of the things that some of us are concerned, have been shown to be true. In other words, white Antifa people imported from wherever, whether paid by George Soros or self-funded by their rich parents, but they are instigating violence and they are using a horrible tragedy as an excuse to foment arson, vandalism, theft, and all kinds of other things. Martin Luther King Jr. was not on board with that. So, you know, when we think about the horrors that people suffered before the Civil Rights Act, it's just an amazing thing that we have to be this savvy.

We have to actually be thinking, oh, there are people who are looking for any excuse to do terrible things who don't seem to want to solve the problem. They seem to be thriving on the chaos, on the vandalism, and they seem to be using the horrible death, the killing of a black man by the cops as an excuse to do horrible things that are harming all Americans, including many, many blacks.

So that's my initial take on it. Yeah, I'm writing an article today where I compare Antifa to the Klan, which was a political gang of masked terrorists who used street violence to impose political power, to grab political power, impose their will on the government despite the voters, and burn down black neighborhoods.

So the difference is that the Klan didn't pretend to be caring about people in the black neighborhoods, Antifa pretends to. I saw a statistic somewhere that 70% of radical left-wing activists live with their parents. So these people are living in gated communities, going and trashing black neighborhoods, pretending that they're advancing social justice, slamming back a few white claws and going back to mom's basement. These are the scum of the earth.

Did you see the video? There was a video, I believe it was here in New York, I believe, of a white guy dressed up in full Antifa gear. In other words, like the dude is obviously, you know, mentally troubled. And he has dedicated his life. to, you know, he's dressed up in a black ninja suit and a mask and everything. And he had a hammer in his backpack. And he is taking apart the sidewalk while the cops are standing there.

And finally, a bunch of blacks involved in what was a peaceful protest tackled him and gave him to the cops because they realized he is not helping them. they're giving the white guy who's committing acts of vandalism to the cops because they realize he is not on our side. It's one of the strangest things that I've ever seen where this is actually happening. You have people protesting, which is people's right, but nobody has a right to commit vandalism, arson. And so I think that the actual narrative is at least beginning to get out. Let's remember how twisted narratives get. Do you remember the Laramie Project and the Matthew Shepard was made out to be a martyr of homophobia? Yeah.

And it turns out he died in a drug deal gone bad that the guy who killed him had slept with him in the past and had sold him drugs in the past. No, you never heard part two. I actually never heard that. Yeah. No, it's completely documented. The whole thing was turned into a gay martyrdom narrative when it was a gay martyrdom narrative. when it was a drug deal between two homosexuals that went ugly. Maybe 10 years down the road, we'll find out the truth.

In the case of George Floyd, it is quite clearly an example of the state abusing a citizen. The way Andrew Cuomo abused the elderly citizens of New York when he dumped COVID patients in their nursing homes and five other blue state governors. Well, in the blue state of Minnesota, in the blue city of Minneapolis, Minneapolis, a rogue cop whom Amy Klobuchar, when she was D.A. refused to go after multiple times because he has a long track record of being a rogue cop. Okay, now hang on.

I never heard this because most of this stuff is so painful. I'm half trying not to pay attention. You're telling me that this cop had previous offenses as a rogue cop. Right. And Amy Klobuchar refused to process. him on two, I think, at least two separate occasions. In fact, she has a long track record of not going after Roe of Cucks. So let's, all these things are Democrat incompetency and malfeasance, creating the circumstances that lead to a nationwide riot. Of course, there's nothing

spontaneous about this riot. What spontaneous is that black people might have marched in the streets and a couple of people might have smashed windows because that kind of thing happens. with public demonstrations. Okay. What was not spontaneous was a nationwide network of radical activists with sophisticated calm equipment of the kind used by ISIS. Laura Logan reported that on Fox News. Can you say that again, sophisticated what?

Communications technology. They have like headpieces that they can communicate with each other that costs like $800 dollars a piece. Laura Logan reported that on Fox News that some of these Antifa people have like Secret Service style earpieces. They have expensive equipment. We see, we just saw in another city of Texas. There are piles of bricks and piles of gasoline conveniently located near shopping areas. Who's setting that up? That is not the black community setting up bricks and gasoline to see their own neighborhoods burned down by white kids who live in mom's basement. So there is on the one hand a nationwide infection of Democrat incompetence.

There is also a far-left radical conspiracy to use violence. Add to that the fact that the Democrats are desperate, that everything they throw at the wall to try to destroy Donald Trump seems to be failing. First impeachment failed. Then they insisted on locking down the economy. not just for two weeks or three weeks to flatten the curve, indefinitely, because they wanted to crash the economy. I wrote a piece at stream.org called, and pardon me, look up the title,

Democrats admit their 2020 strategy. Lock us up and starve us till we join them. And I compare what the Democrats are doing the U.S. economy to what the terrorists did to Patty Hurst. Beat them down till they join you. And I have in their quotes from Politico, reporting on high-level Obama and Biden advisors, panicking when they hear that the economy might have an explosion of growth. Hang on. We're going to be right back, folks. Tough stuff. We're talking to John Samarach. Don't go away.

Hey, folks, welcome back to The Air from Taxi Show. We're trying to process what's happening in America. Today is Monday, the 1st of June 2020. Really hard to watch what we're seeing on our screens. John, you are. just saying that, well, it's a combination of things, right? In other words, the first time I saw this, I was in Canada. I'm sorry, not Canada. I was in Australia. And I was giving a speech at a church. And somehow the people who had sponsored the speech ran afoul of the angry gay activists who decided to threaten the people coming into the church. And I saw the cops do nothing. And I said, this is amazing. What is happening here? In other words, it was clearly one of those things where you know it's nuts. It doesn't make any sense. There was no hate speech. There was no,

it was just a lot of nonsense. But the key piece was that the cops had been told by the government to let this happen. And so the people, a lot of them older people trying to come into the church in this church in Australia, were were being threatened physically. And I thought, this is exactly what the cops are there for to preserve law and order, not to take sides to preserve law and order. And it seems to me that what is happening right now is that people are saying, well, yes, in most cases, but in this case, we have this justified anger because of this horrible death. And so we're going to let it go. And I would say, you're not doing anyone, any service by relaxing law and order, and you're not actually

helping the situation by letting anybody vent. And by the way, as we've just said, I think most of the people venting don't really care about real justice. They just see an opportunity to do some things. The people who do care, mostly protesting peacefully. They're not setting fire to historic churches in downtown Washington, D.C., and destroying the Wendy's and destroying low-income housing projects in black neighborhoods. This is a leftist attempt. Right, but this is the issue is the narrative telling us, no, no, no, no, no. This is legitimate grievance at systemic injustice and systemic racism.

And, you know, it's one thing for people to protest. That's one thing. But when they start trashing homes, businesses, lighting things on fire, lighting cop cars on fire, which we pay for, right? It seems to me that obviously that's when the cops step in. I mean, when you think about Martin Luther King Jr.'s people never, ever did anything of this kind. You know who did Eric? Treated them like crap.

You know who did Eric? The clan. In the South, the clan would commit acts of violence and the cops would turn the other way. And the local authorities would say, well, well, come on. They're outraged because of a white woman. walking down the street was harassed by some black people, and they didn't say black people. I know there is a very close similarity. Law enforcement authorities allowing the mob to rage because they are on the same political

side as the mob. That is exactly what allowed the Nazis to take power. Eric, you know that the police in Germany would let the brown shirts beat people up, but then they would arrest the communists for the same crime. They would selectively prosecute the left. And Hitler, Hitler should have been put up against a wall and shot after the beer hall put. He had violated the law and committed treason. And if he had been a communist, he would have been put up against the wall.

But because the authorities sympathized, they thought, well, he has legitimate grievances. Look at what happened in the war. We were stabbed in the back. So he got two years in prison with a typewriter and a personal secretary. And what we got out of it was mine comes. What we're looking for is equal justice under the law. That's the thing. And I think what really makes this evil to me is that if you care about race relations in America, and if you care about race, and if you care about black people being treated fairly, all of this seems to undermine that.

In other words, if you really care about that, which I certainly do, there's something so cynical here. There are people that are using this to actually make things worse. And we don't have a media, it seems to me, that is willing to speak to that narrative. In other words, they simply aren't willing to talk about that. They're buying in to the Antifa narrative. What do you make of the fact that the Attorney General Barr very recently said that Antifa are domestic terrorists? That's an amazing thing.

I'm not sure what to make of that or how that's going to play out. Well, we have to take that seriously. the image I have for what's going on is Antifa is using George Floyd as a battering ram to break down buildings that can go in and steal stuff and burn things. They do not care about this man. He was an innocent citizen whose civil rights were violated the way police have done in many cities, unfortunately, over the course of time. My initial reaction and my ongoing reaction to what happened to Mr. Floyd is,

this is an outrage. How dare the state treat a citizen that way? It was a libertarian reaction. Anybody with an ounce of conscience. His color means nothing. Has to feel that. His color means nothing. And it's not true that cops are more violent to black defendants than they are to white defendants. And it's not true that white cops are more violent than non-white cops. Ask Heather McDonald about that. The statistics are just simply not there. This is part of a false narrative that flows from a deeper narrative that is anti-American. Look, let me finish this point. How are we surprised that people are talking about blowing up the Washington monument

and burning down the church James Madison attended when the Pulitzer Committee gave its highest prize to the 1619 project? Yeah. A dishonest piece of propaganda that has already been discredited by seriously. liberal historians at Ivy League schools. What it claimed was America was settled on slavery. The American Revolution was fought to defend slavery. The whole American project is based on racism and slavery. It was a lie from start to finish.

Now they're planning on teaching in schools because it has the imprimatur of the New York Times and the Pulitzer Committee. When your elites are this depraved and corrupt, you get chaos in the streets. Well, that's exactly right. And you and I, we know more about this. than anybody because we were at Yale in the 80s. Now imagine it's almost 40 years ago. We saw this

happening then. We saw the seeds of this being sewn then. They'd been sowed well before that. But we really saw this kind of thing happening. And some of us, I, not you, were indoctrinated. We drank that Kool-Aid, and it took some time for us to be disabused of these notions. But there are many people today who don't understand that you can be a conservative, you can be a white evangelical, you can be a Trump supporter, and you can still hate racism with everything in you. We've now brought into a narrative where people say, no, no, no, you have nothing to say on this issue, unless you agree with us down the line, unless you're effectively a cultural Marxist that wants to burn it all down and rage is the order of the day. I actually remember,

John, one thing that I can say is that when I was at Yale, because I bought into this, I remember feeling the feelings of what some of these riders feel. This justified anger at the elite, justified anger at George Bush, Sr., who was the vice president at that time, justified anger at the rich. I remember buying into that. And I remember the feeling of rage and anger because it was justified. Somebody was telling me, it feels good, doesn't it? And you're right. And that's why when I look at these young people, I know what's going on with them. They bought into something. They think they're doing good. And they end up acting like, you know, malists. They are the elites now, though. I mean, all the TV networks and the Ivy League schools and the multi-million dollar donors,

are all on the radical left. You know what, Eric? I'm feeling that rage towards elites right now, okay? I'm feeling that right now and I hope I'm not deluded, but I think it's justified.

I wrote on Twitter last night the most deserving targets for looters would be Ivy League schools, but I hope they're not damaged because the architecture is irreplaceable. Of course I agree with you. Of course I agree with you, but the point is that we can say things like that,

but the reality is, is that we do believe in law and order. We do believe in due process. These people don't. They think the whole system is rotten. They think it's a patriarchal evil system founded on slavery. If you believe that, you do want to burn the whole thing down. They don't want to work within the system.

They have no patience for that. They don't believe in the system anyway. This is all one big ad for two things. Reelecting Donald Trump preserving the Second Amendment. Anybody out there who's not bailing himself with the Second Amendment rights. Get to that gun range, get that permit. I'm getting my air of 15th.

I want people to go to the YouTube channel for the Eric McAxas show. Watch my interviews with Bob Woodson. Bob Woodson talks about this. Others do. But I want to point people to him. We'll be right back with John Smirik. And we have Jenna Ellis and Heather McDonald coming up. Christian bestselling author and speaker, Richard E.

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That's existence of Godbook.com. Hey, folks. Welcome to the Eric Matackson Show. We're talking about some tough stuff. Before we get back to the tough stuff, the painful stuff, let me say some good things. We have raised enough money. We means you, folks. If you went to Metaxistock.com or called the number, the prison fellowship angel tree program to send kids to camp and to send their families care packages.

Many of these folks are in tough urban areas, and this is going to bless them big time. Our goal was to raise enough to bless 130 kids, and we have hit 260. I was an English major, but I could do the math in my head. We doubled it. You doubled it. I want to say, God bless you. Thank you. We'll have more on that later, but I just had to share some good news about what's happening in America,

and in this case, thanks to you. John's Merrick, let's go back to George Floyd. George Floyd was a Christian. It seems to me that he is being used. by very, very cynical people, very nasty people who claimed to care about him, but actually, if they cared about him, they wouldn't be doing these things. Can I give you a historical comparison? I'll bet you could.

Jesus was an innocent man killed by the state, and his followers were grieved and outraged, and they organized, and they spread their movement. But sometimes even the best movements can go astray. And in 19th century Russia, we have a piece at the stream by my good friend Michael Brown about this. In 19th century Russia, on Good Friday, Christians would go beat up the Jews in revenge for the death of Jesus. That's a comparable example of an innocent man killed by the state, his horrible unjust death, being wet, by hateful mobs to attack other completely innocent people. What Antifa and other terrorist groups are doing now,

burning down neighborhood businesses, destroying small businesses, many of them black or Latino or Asian-owned, it is as unjust as the pogroms that were conducted against Jews in 19th century Russia. John, have you written about that for the stream or you said Michael Brown? Brown, who's a Christian of Jewish origin, right? He's one of our best writers, Michael Brown, great evangelist, great writer. I know, no, I know Michael. He wrote a great piece about it at screen.org, and I'll send it to you so you can share it.

Or put it on Twitter, I will, I'll retweet it, because that's, that's an important thing. In other words, I think to frame this, we have to frame this, right? In other words, we have to understand that people do incredibly evil things. in the name of something good. And that's when it becomes, to my mind, demonic, because it's so cynical and so upside down and wicked. I don't know that anybody with a soul that does not weep for George Floyd.

When you see that, I can't even look at it. It's one of the most horrible things. It happened in America. And I would say in the same way that I, when I was talking about at some point about the Abu Ghraib situation, the book should be thrown at these people like the book has never been thrown before. When you commit treasonous acts in the military and you behave the way some of those people acted in that prison, when you as a cop use the authority that's been given to you by the people to behave in this way,

you should really pay the ultimate price for that, whatever it is. I say that strongly. why? Because those cops besmirch every single cop that goes out there and risks his life or her life to do what is right. It's just, it's evil. It's an evil thing. And you comparing it to Jesus's death, I think it's apt. In other words, nobody was more innocent than Jesus. And yet in his name, as you said, many times through history, but most specifically in the 19th century, You have people beating up Jews in the name of Jesus, the Jew. It's so sick.

There are many examples of this. But this is a similar thing. I don't know that the people committing this violence ever thought, what would George Floyd want me to do? Because he was completely an actual Christian. This is a horrendous besmirching of a good man's name. Imagine if you had a terrorist brigade name itself after Martin Luther King. what a travesty that would be.

This is similar, just as Christian anti-Semitism was an appalling profanation of the name of Jesus Christ. We need right now, people are saying, why didn't Donald Trump act sooner? I think he avoided a political trap. He allowed these blue state governors and mayors to do their constitutional duty of maintaining law and order in their cities, and they refuse to do it. He let these blue state voters see what they voted for. How do you like it? How do you like

what the Democrats have to offer you? And if he steps in now with federal authority, they'll have to be careful because I tell you what the radical left is open for. They're hoping that Trump will act like Spiro Agnew, who will be angry and cracked down and that at least one nonviolent protester will get shot by at least one federal soldier or national guardsman. And then his name can be dragged through the mud and used as the pretext, or I don't know, burning down the National Cathedral or blowing up the Lincoln Memorial. And they think they're going to win the election based on this. And the fact that they did this to St. John's Church, I've been into that church.

Talk about historic. It is so, so grievous. We're going to go to another break. We'll be back again with John Zmirak. Folks, don't go away. Hey, folks. It's here from Taxis Show. We are talking about what is happening across America.

Today is Monday, the 1st of June 2020. John Zmirak, you live in Dallas. Let's talk about what's going on in your city. I just live in downtown Dallas, right on Main Street, near that the historic store, Neiman Marcus. Now downtown Dallas was a ghost town in the 1990s. It was full of nothing but homeless people abandoned office buildings. Only one major business and one major hotel stuck around trying to keep downtown Dallas alive. That was Neiman Marcus, the department store, and the Adolphus Hotel. They gave people jobs. They kept hope alive for the neighborhood. They kept their doors open.

and they probably lost money. But they stayed open until downtown Dallas was restored. We had public-private partnership. Downtown started to come alive. Again, I lived there until the beagles got me evicted two years ago. And the building I lived in was the entire, I drove down there yesterday. The entire block, the windows were trashed. Neiman Marcus, the plate glass windows were smashed in.

The protesters, the rioters. we're trying to break in and steal couture clothes. There were a couple of other high-end stores. Plate glass windows smashed, couture dresses. Okay, John, we just have to do this. We have to contrast this. And I want people to hear this. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian.

It wasn't a perfect man, but he was a Christian. And what he did for racial justice in America was the perfect antithesis of what is happening right now. idea of the people in those marches that he led doing things like this is impossible to imagine. They were people who heard him say, if you cannot turn the other cheek, if you cannot behave like radical Christians in the face of this evil, get off the bus, we cannot use you. To go into stores and to steal and to pretend that somehow this has something to do with George Floyd is wrong. It's simply wrong, but we have to think of Dr. King

because we haven't had a lot of leaders with that voice in the black community. When you think of Alice Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, you do not think of people who have the moral authority of Dr. King and who are leading people in a peaceful way to achieve peaceful ends. You just don't think of the idea of looting and stealing things like that.

I mean, that's what guilty people do. do. That's not what good people do. You don't think of Jesus. You think of Simon Magis and maybe Barabbas. These people are yelling, crucify him, give us Barabbas, the terrorist. It's amazing. I guess I just wonder if the mainstream media will be willing to brave this and admit that the people doing this are doing wrong and not just wrong by the standards of American law, but wrong by moral standards. They are harming the causes that Americans say we care about. We care about racism. We care about police abusing their authority. We care about these

things. And this is precisely the wrong way to deal with it. It just gives oxygen to these kinds of fires literally and figuratively. Face the facts. They're lying about it. They're lying about this. They're saying that white supremacists are doing this, that Russian agents are doing this. The fingerprints of the left are all over this. Joe Biden's campaign staff are posting bail for rioters in Minneapolis. The mayor of New York's daughter was in one of the violent protests. The daughter of Elon Omar was telling rioters how to avoid getting arrested. This is a coordinated revolutionary attack by the radical left with our media, our media are just as tame and just as obedient to the radical left as the German newspapers were the Nazis before Hitler took

power. They split, they put their finger in the wind. They said the wind is blowing that way. We're going that way too. When the New York Times publishes the 1619 project, which says that America is based on slavery. And the American Revolution was based on slavery. That is putting gasoline on the fire. Well, it's also an evil lie. I mean, hundreds of thousands of white Americans died in the civil war. I mean, it's not as though we still have slavery. Hundreds of thousands of rights act. Hundreds of thousands of black Americans served in a our military. The New York Times is saying they were fools, they were collaborators, they were stooges, they shouldn't have been fighting for this evil, wicked country. Well, who should they

have been fighting for? What countries were enacting racial justice in the 1920s? I mean, racism is an evil that it's going to take a long time to deal with. Slavery existed from the fall of man, basically, until the first real legal action. taken against it was when it was outlawed in New England states. Abolitionism started in Pennsylvania and spread to England. And then the Anglo-American movement of abolitionism was the first abolitionism in the world. And then that spread to France and that spread to Brazil and Cuba. The end of slavery began with the Declaration of Independence.

Without that declaration, slavery might still exist. in our part of the world as it still exists in the Muslim world to this day. And it certainly does, and we've talked about that on this program. This is a time for Americans and certainly people of faith to adopt an attitude of humility and to say, we need to pray. We really need to pray for this nation because these are wicked forces that have been unleashed. The level of cynicism, it's a nihilistic, satanic cynicism. that basically says we're going to use something holy and tragic,

the death of an innocent man at the hands of the state. We're going to use that for what we want. There is nothing more horrible than that. As far as I'm concerned, you know, George Floyd's name, it's like Emmett Till. It's one of these things that to use that so you can loot Neiman Marcus and so you can burn things down. It is just evil.

John, we've just got seconds left. I'll give you the last word. In Austin, they burn the possessions of a homeless man. That's the kind of thing that's happening here. This is evil. This is straight out of Justiensky's novel, The Possessed. If you want to know what happens next, skip to the end of the possessed.

Wow. John, thank you so much. We're going to talk in a moment to Jenna Ellis, and after that, to Heather McDonald, folks. don't go away. Hey, folks, welcome back. Enough of that, John Zmirak. We have Jenna Ellis with the Fall Kirk Center for Faith and Liberty at Liberty University.

Also with the Trump campaign. Jenna, what's on your mind? We're going through some tough stuff right now. Yeah, absolutely, Eric. And, you know, it's so important as we look at the riots going on. And we look at, you know, everything that we've been experiencing and enduring, really, as a country over the last a couple of months. The thing that has struck me the most is how we as a society and as Americans have had this amazing

juxtaposition of having absolute tyranny on one hand from state leaders and governors with these stay-at-home orders. And then also absolute anarchy with the Antifa, you know, dominated rights that are burning churches, that are burning significant government monuments. And, you know, we're seeing that both of those systems of governments, both of those philosophies don't work. And that's why our founding fathers held up conservatism, a constitutional republic, this idea of conserving freedom, values, and liberty. So that's the group of- We call it conservatism, but it's kind of a pity we have to do that. I just think it's the American founder's vision for self-government and liberty. And we've come to a point, I mean, because I would say, Jenna, that there was a time when many in the Democratic

Party believed in what we're talking about. We may have differed on other things, but they believed in exactly what we're talking about. And it is this fragile, tightrope walk between, as you just said, on the one hand, tyranny and the other hand, anarchy. And you're right. Within a few weeks, we've seen tyrannous behavior and anarchist behavior. What could be more bizarre and what could be more clarifying? Yeah. And you know, Eric, as you said, I mean, this was something, the idea of a unanimous virtue and foundation and philosophy for America, our founders passionately disagreed on policy on how to implement the best system of government, but they unanimously agreed on our Declaration of Independence.

That's why they all signed it and they said that truth is discoverable and the reality to which we're presented. We understand that truth is reality. What is that truth? That all men are created equal. They're endowed by their government. with certain unalienable rights by God, not their government. And so then they wanted to impose a system of government

that would protect those rights that come from God, our creator. And so they all agreed on that value premise. And so whether or not we're Democrat, Republican, independent, whatever strike of life we come from, that needs to be our unanimous declaration now, that we understand that our rights are pre-political. They come from God our creator. and that the sole purpose of government is to preserve and protect those rights.

And we have limited powers to government in order to do that. So it's not tyranny. But we do have a legitimate power of government so it's not anarchy. It is an interesting thing how much work it takes to be free. This is the thing that I really never understood. I always referenced my book, If You Can Keep It. It was in the writing of that book that it really dawned on me finally of the work that it takes to be free and to maintain freedom and self-government.

In other words, if you don't want to do that work, somebody else will do it for you, and they will take your rights, whether a tyrant or a bureaucracy, or whoever has the power. And there's anarchists in the streets with hammers and, you know, weapons, and the cops standing back, they take the power away. And so somehow, in order to preserve the power that we're supposed to have to govern ourselves,

It just, it takes a lot of work and it takes understanding. It's one of the reasons, Jenna, that I always want to have you on here because I think that most Americans, and I put myself ahead of the list, we didn't really get this growing up or we didn't get it enough so that when trouble hits, we kind of see things through this frame. We're going to keep you into our second hour. Folks, I'm talking to Jenna Ellis. She's with the Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty. This is the Eric Mattaxas show. Don't go away.