The Eric Metaxas Show - John Zmirak (Encore Continued)

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

John Zmirak joins Eric to discuss his book "No Second Amendment, No First" in a special Socrates in the Studio conversation.  go to socratesinthecityplus.com for more. 

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Easy there. Go-go, go, go, go. No, go, go. Folks, welcome to hour two. Yes, it's our two. And I right now have the joyous being with Joel Berry. He's the managing editor of the Babylon B, which is a fake newspaper. It's not true. It's parody.

It's parody, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, hey, Snopes, it's parody. It's Joe Barry, welcome. Oh, thanks for having me. It's good to be back. Look, now what you said there, that was serious. That was real. That was real.

That was genuine. So look, that was genuine, that was genuine excitement and emotion that you felt for me right there. You're the managing editor of the Babylon B, but what we're going to talk about right now is something that I've only just heard about. Why don't I let you explain it? Megan Basham, whom we love is involved in this, but what is this? What are we talking about right now? Yeah, so this is a new, a new project that I've been working on with Megan Basham, with another pastor friend of my name, Stephen Whitlow.

We've been kind of working on this for a little over a year now. And this started with a conversation I had with Stephen about a year ago. He's a local pastor. He's been pastoring a church for about a decade here in Ohio. Excuse me. Hold on a second. I know Stephen Whitlow. I have spoken at his church.

Ladies and gentlemen, he's one of the good guys. He's in Ohio. The big deal, Stephen Whitlow. I didn't know he was involved with this, although now it kind of makes sense to me. But he is absolutely one of the good guys. Obviously, Megan Basham is one of the good guys. So you guys are working on a project called Clear Truth Media. Is that the title?

Yes. And so it's going to go live on July 1st. And what it is is what we did, we collected the best and brightest that we could. It's a collection of writers, podcasters, pastors, teachers, cultural critics, all who, have kind of united behind this, this cause to build something new in, in the Christian media space. And there's a desperate need for it. What, what kind of happened was a year ago, Stephen and I were talking. We were catching up on what's happened over the last 10 years. And as I think a lot of Christians have had similar conversations like, okay, how many of our friends are still Christian?

Oh, none of them. Okay. Remember this pastor that went woke? Remember this magazine that went woke? we've all kind of watched as evangelicalism has just been completely blown up in the last eight years. We see what- Christianity today. Christianity today went to hell. I hope nobody bothers to read Christianity today anymore under the quote-unquote leadership of Russell Moore. Heartbreaking, but true. The gospel coalition has gone very, very wobbly.

Their view of my book, Let it to the American Church, is almost comedic. They basically, they had to say a couple of things. nice things, but then they got to the main point, I wasn't tough enough on all of the Christian nationalists trying to take over the American church. That was, that was like, okay, that's like saying to Hitler, like, no, saying to Germans, like, yeah, yeah, Hitler's bad, but what about those Bolsheviks? You're like, Hitler has crushed them. They're in prison. You really want to talk about the Bolshevik, like, they're the problem. So the gospel coalition, when they reviewed my book, And that's when I thought, wow, what happened to the gospel coalition?

I used to think that they were, you know, on the same page, that they were the kind of Christians that I would agree with, like actual Christians. So is clear truth media, which, you know, in case you didn't know, it's already July. So you're telling me that the website is up, but you're telling me, I guess my question is clear truth media, this is kind of an alternative to the now broken gospel coalition. In a sense, yeah, what happened was during this conversation Stephen and I had, we kind of were asking ourselves, what do Christians who are conservative, who still believe the Bible, who still care about, you know, saving America, what do they have? There's really nothing for them out there anymore. And what we kind of laughed about was they have the Babylon B. You're like American evangelicals, the Babylon B kind of became this de facto hub for Christians.

who still cared about truth and still believed in standing up against the spirit of the age and the lives of the culture from our media and from politicians. The Babylon Bee kind of became that new hub of fellowship for so many Christians. And we thought, well, that's kind of funny that the Babylon Bee ended up being that through our, you know, just telling funny jokes and fake news. But we feel like we need something more than that. We need something more substantive. We need a place where Christians can go and get good.

good content, good cultural critique, good Bible studies and sermons that they can trust that they know aren't going to be woke, that they aren't going to be carrying the water for, you know, the regime. And we put a lot of guardrails in place. One of the big things that we're focused on, you know, moving forward is guarding against leftward drift. We don't want to become another gospel coalition. We don't want to become another Christianity today. And so we have accountability in place.

We want to constantly be reevaluating and examining ourselves to make sure, okay, wokeness, okay, wokeness is gone. What is the new lie that we're facing now? You know, what is the new lie that the spirit of the age is telling us? And how do we need to be addressing this? So we want to be nimble. We want to be, you know, constantly pivoting where we need to, to basically speak clear truth in a culture that's hostile to the truth.

Okay, so if you have to sum it up, first of all, the website is cleartruthmedia.com. Yes. Yep. It's very important in future interviews to mention that over and over. Let me give you a little tip. As an old pro, you want to say cleartruthmedia.com, cleartruthmedia.com. Folks, check it out, cleartruthmedia.com. So at cleartruthmedia.com, this is aimed, Joel Berry, you're one of the founders of this.

This is aimed at cleartruthmedia.com, yes. ClearToothMedia.com. They're aimed at Christians who are looking for truth about the issues with regard to the faith and all this stuff that they might have found 10 years ago or 20 years ago. I don't know, whenever they started the gospel coalition. Yes. Yeah, we want Christians to know that they're not alone. And I feel like so many Bible-believing Christians today feel like they're alone because

they're gassed by the media. They're gassed by, you know, what we call big. Eva, you know, the evangelical establishment. And we want to provide encouragement and exhortation for the church that, you know, the majority church that still, you know, believes the fundamentals of God's word and believes that it really actually should have an impact in the world today, in how we conduct our politics. We're not, you know, we're not like David French, where we kind of like lock our

orthodoxy in a little ivory tower over here. And it doesn't have anything to say about, about the way we conduct. ourselves in the world. We believe in activism. We believe in being patriotic Americans. We believe that we've been given an incredible birthright through the Christian founding of this nation, that it is our responsibility as Christians, you know, who are called to be salt and light to protect and fight for. And there are too many Christians, too many evangelicals and leadership are, they find that icky. They're embarrassed to talk about that. They're embarrassed to speak that way. And we know that most of the church, the layperson is not. And we want to serve those people.

We want to give them something, somewhere to go and a place to fellowship and connect with other believers and hopefully be emboldened. You know, the church, you know, a lot of, honestly, a lot of what Clear Truth Media is, it's an answer to your book, Eric, the letter to the American church and calling the church to stand up and be bold. I got tired of, you know, going from church to church. the pro-life activist for a while. It was like pulling teeth to get pastors to do any kind of activism in the pro-life movement. They were so skittish and so scared to do it.

Well, the church needs to be emboldened. The church needs to start standing up. This is our job as followers of Christ to speak up against injustice, to speak up against evil, to speak truth in the fog of lies that we're all swimming in. And so I think that, you know, the church is primed for that. The church is ready. And we just kind of want to give one more tool for the church to, you know, hopefully embolden everybody.

I love it. Ladies and gentlemen, Stephen Whitlow, Joel Berry, Megan Basham, three heroes, thrilled that you guys have created this. Go to cleartruthmedia.com. Folks, just check it out, cleartruthmedia.com. It is important that we know what's going on. And let me put in a plug for my new book, religionist Christianity, where I talk about this stuff, we're in a war. We need to understand

what is at stake in how the church has been failing and how we need to be a part of church, a part of the church not failing on these issues. Joel Berry, God bless you. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Eric. 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. You've heard their cost. customers rave about how much they love Balance of Nature and how good it makes them feel. If you've been on the fence about ordering, today is the day you jump the fence.

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is now being threatened by people who are participating in things that we have never before seen in America. Let me illustrate the point. Five years ago, Bernie Sanders would go to Mount Rushmore and talk about how patriotic socialism is. Now, he's on board with all the people who say, oh, this is stolen from the Indians, it should be blown up. We shouldn't have these things. America should never have been founded. Why do you think they tore down statues? I defended all historical statues.

If we really did steal Mount Rushmore from the Indians, I think we should give it back. Yeah, if they actually carve that themselves. And they have video photos. It's like the Elgin marbles, you know. We should give it back. The Brits should give it back. But you're saying that even in five years, you've seen, in other words, people who... Why were they tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus and Abraham Lincoln?

They tore down one Frederick Douglass statue, I think, by mistake. I was defending Confederate statues because I was saying we should not be sandblasting our history. If you want, put up a statue of an abolitionist across from the Confederate statue and have plaques explaining it. What these people want is to demonize the past, to stuff it all down the memory hole, to demonize everything that came before them. The way the communists demonized everything that came before the Russian Revolution, the way Hitler demonized everything that happened in Germany, since basically the end of the dark age. As he said, Christianity,

the coming of Christianity to Germany was a mistake. We need to go back. We need to go back before all these historic crimes to like the primeval forest. What does that do? Orwell in 1984 wrote, He who controls the past controls the future. Because you can tell people what everything means.

If you have made a blank space out of the past. And I think that's an easy sell with young people Because they think it's kind of racist or something for you to force me to study Events that happened before the universe winked into existence when I was born That's kind of racist, isn't it? Racist, by the way, is just the vague, meaningless term for anything you don't like. It used to be fascist, now it's racist. So like if a hailstorm damages your car, just talk about that man, this weather is so racist

We need to just use the, we need to help them deflate that word out of any meaning at all because it's now exclusively used as a club to beat up Christians and pro-lifers. Well, I mean, this gets... Even black Christians and black pro-lifers get called racist for being Christian and pro-life. So the word has been deflated to the point of meaninglessness. Well, it's interesting because I think there's a connection here that history, the facts of history, give us a common context. In other words, there's rules, rules of the game, where in a sense we're all equal

because we're playing by these rules. When words have certain meaning, we all know the meaning of the words and we can communicate. What the enemies of freedom want to do is basically humpty-dumpty, knock over the chess board and say,

we're no longer playing chess. There's no winners and losers. We are going to decide what the rules are. We don't want a level playing field because we might lose. We don't want anyone to know what the rules are or what the history is because we might lose. So we have to wipe out the past. We have to wipe out history. We have to destroy the meaning of words.

There's something just profoundly. nealistic about this, which makes it a grab for power. I have one more historical analogy that I think is important. You ever wonder why the Democrats act so much like Nazis all the time? I don't, but please tell me what you think about that. For instance, when Barack Obama was elected president, you and I weren't happy, but we didn't demonize half the country that supported him.

We didn't say that he had cooperated with a foreign dictated. to steal the election, we didn't try to imprison his political opponents. We didn't try to have him impeached based on fake charges. We didn't try to imprison his supporters. We regarded it as a legitimate election where we had a really bad candidate. Right, well, because we believe in the rules. We believe in the rule of law. We believe that we, we, the people, get to pick our leaders.

And if we the people chose Barack Obama, he is the president of the United States. But in 2016. Right. In 2016, when we the people narrowly chose Donald Trump, the left were absolutely flabbergasted. They were so sure that Obama had fundamentally transformed America, that he had been like the first leader in a colony after the British left, a post-colonial strong man, president for life.

They thought everything changed with Barack Obama. If you remember the religious hysteria that guilt-ridden white liberals would greet his appearance, it was like the scene in Jesus Christ Superstar. They would sing, oh, Obama, Obama, Bamma, Bamma, oh. It was a religious event. They were washed in the flop sweat. They were purified. They had been lost, but now they were found.

It was a religious experience of the most pathetic and contemptible type, ludicrous. out of pathetic, but it was really meaningful for a lot of people. The idea that Donald Trump could then be elected, that was a fundamental betrayal. To clarify, when you say at least somewhat hyperbolicly, that why do Democrats act like Nazis, the point is, until that point, they did not. In other words, the Democratic Party basically, until, very, very recently anyone

on the right would have thought of them as the principled opposition. We have many things in common. We can debate. We can differ on tax rates. We can differ on certain things, how much legislation is good.

Something changed. In 2016, when the people elected Donald Trump, the Democrats felt like they had been stabbed in the back. the way the Germans did in 1918 when they lost World War I they were sure they were going to win World War I they were sure of it the Russians had collapsed they were going to rule Europe

and then suddenly they lost the war people like Hitler but that millions of others decided this this can't be right we didn't lose fair and square there was foreign collusion we were betrayed by extremists in our midst by foreigners and aliens who who are conspiring against us because they believe in evil, wicked, extreme ideas. And they created the whole stab in the back myth that then they used to scapego Jews and socialists and liberals and Catholics and men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. That whole stab in the back myth was the result of hysterical reaction on the part of

nationalistic Germans to losing World War I. The left in America had the same reaction to losing the 2016 election. It had to be that Vladimir Putin fake the world. voting machines, or he used Facebook ads and brainwash people, or Trump colluded with Russia, they kept looking and reaching and grasping for

explanations to justify why they had been stabbed in the back. And they demonized everyone against them the same way. They even called themselves the resistance. If you call yourself the resistance, you're saying your opponents are Nazis.

Who they deserve to be, I don't know, killed or Well, I mean, again, we have to go back to the time when, you know, I was asked to speak at the 2012 prayer breakfast. The president was Barack Obama. I differed with him, obviously, politically. But I respected the office of the presidency because I respected the United States Constitution. All of that changed in 2016. When you referred to the resistance, I just remember, you know, when they started saying not my president, I thought, wait,

second. You don't need to like the president, but the beauty is every four years we have an election, we have rules that everyone abides by, you can advocate for a different candidate, that's America. That's what changed in 2016. Well, my book is all about reclaiming the original founding vision of America and the link between the churches and our freedoms and rights and duties as citizens and how the churches went squishy, how they went corrupt, how they sold out, this is all part of the book,

and how you can organize to demand these rights and to resist the new tyranny that is being imposed on us in the name of keeping us all safe, keeping us all neutered, making us all into good little worker ants in the colony. Hey, this is Eric Mettaxas. For years, I've told you about Nutrametics, a professional supplement brand trusted by doctors since 1993.

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You know, we've all got to be this religion, right? That effectively was as far as religious liberty got, which is not so far, until roughly the establishment of the United States of America. Right. And that's a big thing, because now I can go to any church I want, I can go to no church, I can go to a mosque. I can be an atheist. You can start a church.

I can start a church. We have total religious liberty in the United States of America, but it didn't exist before the United States of America. Before the United States of America, if you were in Connecticut, you had to be a congregationalist or if you had to be whatever. And what that means today, I know there's one of the weapons that we have today is that if you're going to some church that has this,

wrongheaded view of things, and that is marching in lockstep with the cancellation of our freedoms, you can leave. And I always say that to people, that you have an obligation. If you're going to a church that doesn't have this vigorous, healthy, biblical view of things, and you continue to go there, you are complicit. You could stay in heckle till they drag you out. Yes, you could. Yes, you could.

I guess it's interesting to me, John, because it's one thing for us to criticize church leaders, and they deserve most of the criticism. But it's fascinating because you still have many people in the pews, who I hope will read your book now, but they themselves are in a sense enabling this broken view of liberty, this broken view of what it means to be a crucial. Christian, this hyper Romans 13 view of what it means to comply with the government. I guess they never read the book of Esther.

They never read, you know, they really, they're making it possible by supporting a church that is going along with the things that you've described. A church which tells you to just obey the government even when it's promoting evil is a church that doesn't really believe in the afterlife. It believes that it's here to help us be comfortable and give us a place to gather on Sundays and social opportunities and uplifting thoughts. And we can be sort of Jesus-y, which is kind of nice. I'd rather be Jesus-y than not. But that's the kind of church.

That's the official church in China. Yeah. It's this official church in China. You go into that building, you do whatever you want on Sunday morning. But when you leave that church, you bow to the secular authority of the atheist state. And it's no accident that Hillary Clinton started talking about freedom of worship, not free exercise of religion, that under Obama the citizenship test was rewritten to talk about freedom of worship, not free exercise of religion. Do you know who alerted me to this was the late, great Chuck Colson?

I remember him bringing this up. And he was not, you know, some partisan political guy. I remember when he said that, he said freedom of worship is radically different to freedom of religion. Freedom of religion means not that you have the freedom to go into that building and do what you like for a few hours on Sunday morning. Freedom of religion is that when you leave that building, you are free, as per the Constitution of Bill rights, to exercise your faith in every. every sphere beyond that building. And these running schools that teach that there are men and women. Interesting.

Well, we'll have to talk about that another time. But I want to say that that concept of freedom of worship versus freedom. And again, these words are all, you know, words are slippery things. But the problem with freedom of worship is that it's training you to think that you're, the expression of your religious faith is meant to be a merely religious thing in a religious building, as opposed to your whole life. Freedom of worship is like your church is a bathhouse. Do what you must do in private. We don't want to hear about it.

We don't see it. It's disgusting. But, you know what? Behind closed doors, what consenting adults do to each other is of no interest to me. But don't bring that outside the bathhouse. No, the church is supposed to be a lighthouse, not a bathhouse. I would say that it's kind of like it relegates faith to like the level of a hobby. Or like some secret perversion you indulge.

It's technically legal, but we don't want to hear about it. Well, I think that's unfortunately correct, is that there are people who are repulsed by religion or by expressions of religion. But they say, but you can do it. Just don't let it. be expressed in the culture. Well, you know what's funny. That's exactly what the founders said should not happen. Well, you know what else?

That is also what Islam teaches about Christianity is that you can be, you can have Christians and Jews as subjugated minorities in a Sharia state, but they can have freedom of worship in a building, but it should be unmarked, no crosses, no bells, no processions. You can't, you can't solicit, you can't proselyt, you can't proselyt, you can't evangelize, but we will let you have your building, and what you do in the privacy of your building, your infidel building, we will permit.

So it is Sharia. It is a secular Sharia supported by leftists and radical Muslims working together for their common goal of destroying the West and destroying Christianity, and then they'll sort out afterwards who kills whom. So is this what they call Dimmitude? Dimitude is the Jim Crow third-class citizenship that is technically offered to Christians in a Sharia state. If you change your mind, I'm the 13th line, on the young chance, tick a chance, this is unfortunately an important subject and an important parallel to draw. So here you have something that the most radical Muslims do to Jews, if they're lucky,

and Christians, if they're lucky, is they let you live as a subjugated second class citizen in their state, as though this is some kind of generous thing that they're not killing you. In China, if you want to be a Christian, they let you live as a second class citizen. You go into that building. You do your thing, but when you come out, you offer your pinch of incense to Caesar or Satan. And in America, and you talked about it in the beginning, many Christians voluntarily adopted this view of their faith. They weren't forced to by our government because we have a constitution that very specifically, explicitly says, no, that's not our view. But they did it voluntarily.

It was this mission drift over the decades. It's less work. it's a lot easier and it doesn't require you to face hard questions and make sacrifices. Also, the churches kind of began to give up

on the idea that they teach what is true about the universe. Starting with the discovery of the age of the earth in the 19th century and then with the publication of Darwin, more and more churches began

to say, well, okay, so the Bible doesn't really tell us what actually happened. It doesn't have any historical value. It doesn't have any scientific value. It's a book of uplifting principles for how we can, gosh, darn it, be really good kind of people. And just shiny, happy people. I think that's the term Friedrich Schleiermacher. You coined the term shiny happy people.

You're kidding. Yes. No. Yes. It was Ned Flanders. But Schleermacher. Ned Flanders or Andy Stanley. They look exactly.

Okay. Or Schleiermacher, the 19th century German version. Right. Schleiermacher said Christianity doesn't offer any scientific or historical knowledge, but it offers us knowledge of what we should aspire to and how we can be good people. There's a wonderful book, Heart and Soul of the American University by George Marsden. And he shows how America's elite Protestant College. like Harvard and Yale and Princeton,

all adopted Slyermacher. That was their model, so that by the 1930s, the Christian ministries like Dwight Hall at places like Yale were basically glorified soup kitchens. The YMCA. Used to be a Christian mission organization,

not a village people song. Right. Hard to believe. Well, it's funny, John, because all of this is touching on the book that I've got coming out in a few months, where I write about this, that something happened, obviously, because of German higher criticism and folks like Schleiermacher.

And Bonhofer was confronting it directly in his day. So in 1930, the German church had adopted this bastardized, dramatically circumscribed version of the faith. faith that said whatever is specifically theological or we'll talk about those things. But anything beyond that, we're going to keep it in the basement. It's a hobby. It doesn't exist in the real world. I'm a train conductor down in my basement with my HO scale train set.

But in the real world, I'm not. I'm not a real train conductor. I just have a job in corporate America. Basically, that view of Christianity had happened to Germany. which was what allowed the Nazis to take over Germany. And of course, in America, that view, it took us longer to get here. But that view trickled down through mainstream Protestant Christianity. And then among my own Catholic church, they were so desperate to be mistaken for Episcopalians to arrive in America and be upper class that we,

We explicitly started imitating post-Christian mainline Protestant churches. There's one last thing I want to suggest to you. There's a book called Politicizing the Bible. I was the editor of it by Scott Hahn and Ben Wicker. And he goes into the roots of the higher biblical criticism. And he shows that from the beginning, biblical criticism started with Hobbs and Machiavelli. the principles of biblical criticism started with Hobbes and Machiavelli and the whole point of biblical criticism

was to take power from the church and give it to the state and to use these techniques of understanding the Bible to peel away one privilege after another from the church and hand it over to the state to empower Caesar. This was the whole point of it. So it's not a surprise or a shock or a betrayal for it to end up creating the Reich church in Hitler's control. That was the whole point of biblical criticism over the course of 500 years.

I highly recommend that book. Wow. Okay. We just have a few moments left. I want to say just how excited I am that you wrote this book, John, because this subject needed the kind of treatment you give it. Do you have an answer to why this vital subject has not gotten the treatment that you give it until now, until this book? Because it's a little bit surprising to me that that's the case. People sort of took this whole complex of ideas for granted.

Like everyone knows that the Constitution emerged from the Christian view of the human person with some enlightenment tweaks. And the Christian view of the human person implies all these freedoms and all these rights. And these things weren't under such fundamental threat as they have been in the last five to ten years. You might have heard Mike Lindell and My Pillo no longer have the support of their box stores or shopping channels the way they used to. Yes, it's because of cancel culture. But as a result, they get to pass the savings on to you directly by having a $25 extravaganza. When Mike started My Pillo, it was just a one product company with the help of his dedicated, employees. They now have hundreds of products, some you may not even know about. To get the word out,

I want to invite my listeners to check out their $25 extravaganza. Two-pack multi-use, My Pillows, just $25. My Pillow, $25. MyPillow Sandals, there's six-pack towels, just $25. Brand-new four-pack dish towels. You guessed it, just $25. For the first time ever, 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. Use promo code Eric or call 800-978-3057. That's promo code Eric. 800-978-3057-3057 promo-com promo code Eric or go to MyPillow.com and use promo code Eric. Democrats in the left have decided there are no rules.

We're in a boxing. We're following the Marquess of Queensbury rules and they take out a chainsaw and they take out a flamethrower. Do we keep following the Marquist of Queensberry rules? that's what the Establisher Republican say, oh yeah, we're going to win on points. The judges will award it to us on points and then the flamethrower and then the chainsaw. No, the stuff.

I think that's, by the way, that's a direct Mike Pence quote. You need to give attribution. I know. Do you mention... There was an invisible footman. Do you mention the black robe regiment in the book? No, no. It's a black robe regiment.

See, now that's amazing. That's the beauty of... John Smirak is that every once in a while he'll miss something, but it just proves what is otherwise impossible to believe that you're human. Even Homer Simpson nods. It's, well, it's just because, no, but what's so fascinating to me is that everything you're writing about could be summed up, in a sense, by the Black Row Bridgeman, which is to say those revolutionary era ministers and pastors who

who not only fought but exhorted their congregations in other words they understood what you write about in this book innately because they were all you know Lockyans they were all they all of this stuff was fresh 250 years ago

and now we need to be reminded but so anybody and there will be many in the audience familiar with the black robe regiment need to read this book because we need to understand where the black robe regiment got their ideas from. And of course, you do cover that in the book. I even go through the history of Christian thinking about our right to rebel against tyrannical

governments and how and where the conviction that we had the right to overthrow tyrants, how that emerged in the Christian world. and interestingly, it came from, on the one hand, Calvinists and on the other hand, Jesuits, both of whom elaborated theories on how and why you could overthrow a government that was persecuting your religion or taking your other fundamental human rights. So it's a fascinating narrative in the course of this intellectual book. Well, the book is worth the price of... The price you pay just for my forward.

That's right. My forward is that good. And I want to say, John, thank you for writing the book. Thank you for all that you do. And thank you specifically for being my guest today at Socrates in the studio. Thank you. And if people want to read my writing, I write four times a week at stream.org. One of the best ecumenical Christian conservative news sites out there, stream.org.

I agree heartily. Thank you. Thank you. 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 Herzog Foundation are good people. We know them. And they exist to help people do quality, price-centered K-12 education. go to Herzog Foundation.com.

Please look them up. They're just delightful, and they're there to help.