The Eric Metaxas Show - Kelly Shackelford

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

Can more religious freedom be on its way? Constitutional scholar Kelly Shackelford of the First Liberty Institute, who has argued before the Supreme Court, explains his optimism.

It's the show that Mark Twain once called Smartern, a Blue Jay, what can talk possum, and faster than naked fat man riding a bolt of lightning. So here's your plain spoken homespun host, Eric Mataxis. Hey, folks, welcome to Eric Mataxis show. Guess what we're going to talk about today? Did you guess religious liberty? If you did, I don't have any prizes to give you, but if you did, you were right. I have an old friend on the program today for the hour.

Kelly Shackleford is the founder and head of First Liberty Institute. Guess what the First Liberty is. Kelly, welcome. Hey, thanks for having me, Eric. When did you found First Liberty? Well, I really started this whole effort a little over 30 years ago, just fresh out of law school and court for a federal judge. You're just a kid. What are you talking about?

That's actually, seriously, that's amazing. So first liberty.org is obviously how people can find it. But you guys do what a number of organizations that I mean, I'm such a big fan of people who are putting their brains and their efforts to fighting for religious liberty. But it's always strange to me that we have to fight for religious liberty in America because for years it didn't seem like we had to. We're in a new day.

We are. The battles I had 30 years ago are very different from the type. of battles that I have now. They're more hostile. There's a lot more of them. I mean, seven years ago, I think we had 40 cases. Last year, we had 300. So it's just, you know, it's our first freedom. And it's the key to all of our freedoms. That's why the founders called it the first freedom, but we're going to have to fight to keep it. And good news is there's some really good things happening. So people shouldn't be discouraged. We might have to fight more, but we are winning. Well, I'm not discouraged because of folks like you and First Liberty,

and I mean that. And I want my audience to understand. I've said this a million times, but folks at ADF, folks at First Liberty. If it weren't for you, I don't know where we would be. In other words, citizens like you, Kelly Shackleford, have taken this on and you've decided to dedicate your life to fighting for something that we shouldn't have to fight for. But if it weren't for top lawyers, you know, constitutional lawyers like you, taking this on and you've been doing it for what? Since the 90s, I know. But I mean, if you weren't doing this, most Americans don't understand what they would lose. And in fact, what they would lose right now if you weren't fighting some of the battles you're fighting. Let's talk about, you know, what has been happening since this shutdown.

People are kept out of churches and so on and so forth. Of course, a lot of that is for good reasons. But every single time the government oversteps, every single time people with power wield the power in an awkward way. And it's up to citizens like you and me to speak up and to say, we won't have this in America. So tell us some of what's been going on recently. Well, when we came into the pandemic, we realized we've got to just totally reevaluate everything. That we knew that things were different. There never has been sort of a constitutional law like religious freedom case in a pandemic. And so there's no law.

And you and I and everybody else started seeing things we never thought we would see. You know, a father handcuffed in front of his children for throwing the baseball with them in a park. You know, somebody coming off the beach. So it was even beyond religious liberty. It was all of our freedoms. People were going, we lost our constitution. So we really wanted that first case in the pandemic to be, one that was really a good case that was thought through, because we knew whatever that first

president would be would probably have a big impact on all of our freedoms. And we prayed about that a lot and really had a lot of churches we're representing, a lot of outrageous situations. But right at Easter, a few days before Easter, we had what we thought was the right suit and we launched. And that was on Good Friday. And it was a church in Louisville, Kentucky, that was told that they could not have a drive-in service for Easter. And that's when you drive in your car to the church parking lot and you listen like to the pastor over, you know, the radio frequency. And obviously you, you know, unless there's a CDC guideline I missed, you can't pass the coronavirus from one automobile to another. And so there's no, you know, danger here. And yet

they were told by the mayor and by the governor that not only would it be a crime and they would be criminally prosecuted, but the police were going to be in the parking lot there and in every church in the state of Kentucky writing down license plates of anybody in a church parking lot. And it's just unbelievable stuff. Who is the governor of Kentucky who did this? Governor Bashir. Bashir?

Yeah, Bashir. And the mayor of Louisville as well. Yeah, I was just in Louisville. And I got to say, are these folks just like jugheads? I mean, like common sense Americans, no, this is stupid. This is not some complex medical issue. We just know this is flat out dumb. Americans are smart.

They don't want to die. I mean, it's kind of like the government is so condescending. And this is what happens when you get big government. They act like rulers. They act like you're stupid peasants. We're educated. and our educated team are going to tell you stuff and just shut up and do it. No American wants to die. So the idea that you'd go to a drive-in service, the whole point of that is to do this right.

So did the governor or the mayor have anything to say that made any sense that can help us understand how they could do something so patently ridiculous? No. And in fact, I mean, it was happening around the country, believe it or not, Eric. I don't know how many calls we got, but you probably saw our other case we had at the exact same time. It was a small African American church in Greenville, Mississippi, that they were actually surrounded in their church parking lot on Good Friday with squad cars. And this was on film. The police officer said to the African American pastor, quote, because of the local order from the mayor, your rights have been suspended. I mean, that's a quote. So this was, I mean, unbelievably, this was happening other places, but they didn't have an argument, and, you know, we gave them a shot to have their best argument, and we got into court, and the federal judge, which was really the hero of the day here to me, we've considered this the shot heard around the country. Everybody was like, what is going on with our constitutional freedoms? This seems nuts.

Justin Walker, the federal judge there, just really threw a decision down that was very powerful. And he said, kind of like you did, this is completely a rat. You're criminalizing a church service of people in their cars. Have you lost your mind? And then he went through the religious freedom that our country was built upon. And it was just a great start to re-instituting that we're in a constitutional system in the middle of this pandemic. And these petty dictators or local mayors or whoever don't have the authority to take away people's freedoms. They still have to exist under the Constitution. So it was a, I think a really important start to constitutional law.

and what I think all of us have recognized has been really a lot of lunacy going on. Well, Kelly, the thing that has become so clear to me, and it is literally why I wrote my book, if you can keep it, because it wasn't until late in life that it dawned on me that if we the people don't get all this stuff, we don't know what to do. And somebody comes along and says, your rights are suspended,

but we will just go, oh, okay. and the point is an informed citizenry says, excuse me, you work for me. What you just said makes no sense, unless you can explain it to me in a way that makes sense. I'm not going to listen to you. You're not God. You're just a cop, okay?

And so you're here to protect me. So telling me what you just said makes no sense. And I'd like your badge number, and you better be right, and the mayor better be right, because I will come after you. So go ahead and put your cuffs on. me, if you like. I mean, the Mississippi case is the most ridiculous because I know that these were,

I didn't know that they were African Americans, but I knew a lot of them were elderly and that they were being given $500 tickets. I mean, $500 for your average American, especially an elderly person, is an infinite amount of money. I mean, this is, this is not a $30 fine. And the level of stupidity, I mean, this is, I think the lesson, Kelly, for me, is that we have to understand our leaders can be idiots. If we elect people who don't know anything about the Constitution, this is what's going to happen. And that's why we need to know about the Constitution so that when this happens, we can speak up. And so that we can elect people who understand this stuff. But the chickens are coming home to roost.

We're seeing stuff. We've not seen this. And so our ignorance is bearing fruit. We're going to be right back, folks. I'm talking to Kelly Shackleford with the First Liberty Institute. And you go to First Liberty.org. I hope you will. Important stuff.

Folks, welcome back to Sierra from Texas. I'm talking to my friend Kelly Shackleford with First Liberty Institute. You can find them at First Liberty.org. They are defending religious liberty in America. And Kelly, when we talk about this stuff, I mean, it just reminds me, over and over that we've kind of let this whole issue slide for 50 years or so. We haven't taught civics. We haven't taught the basics. So a lot of Americans don't know what it means to be free. And when your freedom is challenged by people who have no business challenging it,

they don't know what to say. We need to get educated. And if you know this stuff, you need to explain it to people because this is un-American. It's fundamentally an American. But I see this as a teaching moment for America. In other words, when you see the overreach of these jug-headed bureaucrats, it suddenly makes you realize, oh, oh, it does matter who I voted to be dog catcher and mayor and councilman and governor and whatever. Because if I don't vote for people who get this stuff, when crisis happens, which it can, now we know, this is the results we get.

Absolutely. You know, I think another example of what you're describing, the mayor, I don't know if you saw this comment, the mayor in Los Angeles, who. who said that people had to, quote, earn the right to have their freedoms back. I mean, he's just got it completely backwards, you know, as to how that he might need to earn the right to keep his position in the future. But the idea that citizens have to be good citizens in order to earn their freedom back under his orders is this whole mindset.

But to me, it's the disrespect. In other words, how dare you? How dare you talk to the people who elected you like their children? like they're stupid. Even if they are stupid and children, you have no right to talk to them that way. You're their elected official, and he's talking to them in a high-handed way,

like he's their ruler. And again, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between we, the people, and the people we choose. We hire you to represent us. And, you know, again, this is something that we seem to have forgotten, and you kind of slide back into these deep,

in patterns of the human race that, you know, our founders enabled us to break away from it. But if we're not aware of these things, then we'll put up with them. But it does amaze me in a way how bad it is. It's like a lesson for every American. It is. You know, and we had drive-in service cases like up in Upper State, New York, you know, with a county that was trying to tell them they couldn't have a drive-in service at their church. but the way things have moved now is it's about churches meeting in person.

And I'm amazed at the arrogance of the government entities, and I mean entire state, the argument they just had in California, but we're seeing it all around. I don't know if you know what they argued in California. What they argued there was that during a time like this of emergency, that the state could deprive you of all of your constitutional rights as long as they were in good faith. I mean, this was their argument. And in particular for the churches, what they said is,

because if you look at these orders, what they're doing over and over again, and we've won every case we filed so far because they do this same thing, which is they treat churches or religious organizations differently than they treat similar organizations that are secular. So, for instance, you can go to Home Depot and hang around with a thousand people,

and touch things and everything, but you can't go for one hour at church on the weekend where they have social distancing and all these things in place. Well, the argument they made in California in the Ninth Circuit, I couldn't believe when I read this, was that there was too great a risk that congregants would follow the safety protocols. That's a quote. So in other words, you can trust the people at the liquor stores and the grocery, but you can't trust people who go to church or synagogue. I mean, it's just pure discrimination on the face of it.

And some of these people, I think, are just anti-religious, but some of them, I think, are just totally incompetent. These governors and these orders they're issuing. I think it's both. I think that we have a sort of a secular default in America, and people are really just fathomlessly ignorant of who we have been as a people, the centrality of faith to American freedom and to the strength of the country. And, you know, we have to educate them.

But, you know, when you talk about California, this kind of stuff, it's almost funny that they don't seem, this is the paternalism that you find. Usually, I'm sorry to say, in the Democratic Party, they have treated blacks this way. There's a paternalism. Like, we know what's best, and we're just going to say, you just do what we tell you, right? You get on the bus. We'll take you to the polling station. And we know that you don't know much, but we'll take care of you, which is paternalistic. and it's fundamentally anti-American.

And so you have these high-handed elected officials forgetting that your average person who's going to church doesn't want to die, doesn't want to get COVID. You act like they're idiots that they don't know this. And so we have to protect you. And I think, you know, this is a role for that. Like we have seatbelt laws. We have different things. I get it.

But the idea that they would say, you know, no singing. you know, you kind of think, wow, you're not going to let them figure this out. Like, you could do your job, which is give some guidelines, give some tips, and then back the heck off because it's none of your business. But again, we have to have these conversations. And I hope there's some people listening to our conversation right now who are thinking about this and who are understanding some of the things that they maybe they took for granted earlier. One of the things I thought was interesting, Eric, was I've gotten a lot of call. I mean, we've won all these lawsuits on behalf of churches. So a business leader started calling me and saying, look, they're destroying our businesses in our state.

Should we file a lawsuit? And what I've responded to them is no, that you have freedoms. But when you compare you to the church, I mean, the church is protected under the First Amendment, free speech, freedom of assembly, free exercise of religion. I mean, these are our most fundamental rights. if the church can't win freedom, you've got no hope. And so there's a part of this that I really do appreciate, which I think people are seeing who is leading the way out for freedom in the midst of this. It's the churches.

Yeah. It's religious freedom. It's our first freedom. It's exactly what the founders were talking about. They knew this is the first freedom. If you have this freedom, you'll have your other freedoms. But if you lose it, you'll lose everything. And it's interesting how we're watching this.

this play out in front of our eyes right now. Well, I know, too, that some of these, I don't know if they're laws or if there are suggestions, but that, you know, you should have 25% of the people and have more services and whatever. So I think, okay, that sounds reasonable,

but then they made a limit of 100 people. Yes. And I think the people who made that law obviously are unfamiliar with American Christianity. Because if you go to some dead mainline Protestant Church or to some dead Catholic Church, you know, there's nobody there anyway. But when you go to some vibrant evangelical church, there are thousands of people there.

So the idea that, you know, 25% of thousands is way over 100, but they don't seem to have thought this through. And I know that there's pushback now in California on that issue. Yeah. And again, here's the question you want to ask yourself. Why wouldn't you make these regulations based upon how many people are attending, whether they're religious or not, how many people are attending, what is the size of the facility? Those would be rational things to look at, but that's not what they're doing. You know, you can have, you know, thousands and thousands of people in the Home Depot or wherever else. But in a church, you can only have 100. And this is what doesn't make sense.

You know, you could have a, like you say, there could be a 10,000 seat facility and your limited to 100 people. That doesn't make any sense. And again, they're only applying this to churches and houses of worship and not to secular organizations or secular businesses. So this is the problem. It's just bizarre thinking and it's clearly discriminatory. I really appreciate what the churches have done out there.

They've said, look, on Pentecost weekend, we're going back to service. And I think that's been really necessary to kind of lead the way. It is. Yeah, I was talking to one of the leaders of that movement, Rob McCoy, who was the mayor of Thousand Oaks, California. And I have to say that it's very encouraging to see pastors who take this kind of leadership and say, look, this is nonsense. I'm an American. I have rights. And we're going to do this. And I think Americans need to be willing to be civilly disobedient, to understand that there are going to be times. You're going to be times. You're going to be. have to fight and stand up for what is right. Even in a country like America, you know, they're going to be times when the weeds grow back and you're going to have to get on your knees and do some weeding because we've allowed that to happen. Absolutely. I mean, you know, the David Barton stuff, if you've ever seen that, talks about how our pastors were key leaders

in the revolution in the beginning of this country. And, you know, we need them to be leaders again. have major congregations and what's happening is wrong. Look, they want to be safe, as you say. I mean, they're going to care about their people as much as some secular business is going to care about the people that come in their stores. I mean, they're going to be really safe. In fact, they're going to be, I think, much more safe. They're going to have social distancing.

If you've seen them, they're like your family can sit together, but they're going to be two pews between you and the next family. I mean, it is, it's common sense. We're going to go to a break. Folks, don't forget about Angel Tree. You can call 888206-2793. 888206-2793 or go to Metaxus.com. We'll be right back with Kelly Schocher.

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Kelly, what else are you all working on these days? It's not all church cases, I assume. No, I mean, we're having to deal with a lot of situations in the military right now. Of course, you know, during the pandemic, they closed down the chapels. And so what a lot of the chaplains did, which is, you know, natural, is they began doing messages and things online. Well, a bunch of people freaked out because, you know, somebody in the military was saying something religious online and all these complaints came in from Mikey Weinstein and his group and these other groups. And unfortunately, a number of the base commanders

shut the chaplains down. Said, yeah, you can't do anything religious. And you're like, again, it makes your head explode, right? Chaplains are supposed to do something religious. And in fact, the troops need to have a spiritual outlet during this time, just like everybody else. So we've had to, we just sent a letter to the Secretary of Defense to try to get this turned around the things that were happening. So it's, it's crazy. We're still having to do a lot of religious freedom work in the middle of this. But the bad thing about this to me, Eric, is we were on such a role right before the pandemic. I've been fighting for religious freedom for 30 years, and there are things that, that I thought probably would not change in my lifetime or not dramatically.

and we're watching major bad precedents from the past that have been real trouble for religious freedom began to be dismantled. And it's because we're putting really good judges on the court. And they're starting to take us back to those founding principles and the actual original meaning of the Constitution, including the ruling clauses. And we're seeing some pretty significant changes. The victory won last summer in the Bladenburg Cross case is really just a landmark change for the future. Tell us about that one because I don't remember those details.

The Blainsburg Cross was a memorial put up almost 100 years ago right outside of D.C. in Maryland, Blainsburg, Maryland. And it was to remember 49 young men who died in World War I. And it was put up by the American Legion and mothers who lost their sons in World War I. And it sat there. What happened is that land eventually got taken over by the government because there were roads there next to D.C. and they didn't want to disturb the memorial, and they didn't, but they had to take over the land for safety and health and those things.

Go along another few decades, and then the American Humanist Association comes along and says, hey, you can't have this cross on government property, and they file a lawsuit. And we represented the American Legion. We won at the district court, but unbelievably at the federal court of appeals, one of the judges in the oral argument, Eric said,

why don't we just cut the arms off the cross? because that way nobody will be offended, but we won't have to tear it down. So we knew we had a problem at the Court of Appeals, and we got a two-to-one decision saying, after almost 100 years, this memorial was unconstitutional. So we took that to the Supreme Court, and we had to make a decision. You know, we could have kind of just gone after, let's preserve this one memorial.

But we thought by then we had Justice Kavanaugh on the court. We had Justice Gorsuch on the court, and we thought we had enough numbers to overturn a row. really bad precedent that had been in place for 50 years. It's called the Lemon case and the lemon test. And it's what's created this sort of separation of church and state, hostility to religion kind of approach. We've seen our whole lives, like nativity scenes in public come under attack and Ten Commandments monuments and a menorah and a cross or a star, all these things come under attack. It's not because the Constitution or the founders wanted there to be a sort of an

anti-religion. It's because of this opinion back 50 years ago in the 60s and early 70s. And so we at the Supreme Court said, not only should you uphold this memorial, this cross, but you need to get rid of this bad precedent that's caused all this damage to our country. It's not what the Constitution says. And good news is we won the decision 7-2, but more importantly, we won 5.4, 5 of the justices said, we're not following lemon. And so basically 50 years. First Liberty Institute argued at the Supreme Court against Starre decisis. In other words, you're telling me you dared to go back to overturn a bad Supreme Court ruling.

That is amazing. Now, were you in on that argument? How does that work? Yeah, we build, what we do in our cases is we bring in the top litigators, the top, lawyers in the country from all the major law firms and they team up with us so that wherever we're litigating in any part of the country, we have the top law firms, top lawyers in that area who know those judges and all that. So we had a team that went, Jones Day was the big law firm, one of the biggest law firms in the world that was with us on this case at the Supreme Court.

And we argued, we knew that that was a, and people thought that's kind of a risky argument, you know. Usually your argument is sort of 90%, hey, we'll go with your current test and we win, but oh, by the way, you should change your test. We went the opposite way. We spent 90% of our briefs and stuff on, you got to change these tests. And then 10% on, hey, by the way, even if you keep your current law, current tests, we still meet those. And so it paid off because 5-4, you know, they said, we're not following lemon. And it was what's created all the, our whole lives, you know, I know, we've sort of had this government almost hostile to religion. I want to talk about this. We have another segment coming up, Kelly. Hang on. And we're going to talk about this when we come back. Very important subject. Honestly, folks, don't go away. Hey, folks, I'm talking to Kelly Shackleford of the First Liberty Institute. You can go to firstliberty.org and check them out. Kelly, I cannot believe the work that you all are doing. Obviously, you need support. So if people are excited about what you're doing, they should give. Because, you're

You don't get rich doing what you're doing. This is, you're really just doing something so beautiful for every American. And I just want to say that what you just said about this Lemon case, which has been, what, 55 years or whatever, that the Supreme Court just overturned because of you, because of First Liberty having the guts to know the law and to be willing to risk an important case by going that far. But what you were just saying before we went to. the break, we've been living, you and I in our lifetimes, I've been living in a time where there has been a profound misunderstanding of the so-called separation of church and state, which led to, you know, Father Richard John Newhouse wrote his famous book in 1984, I think, the naked public square. In other words, rather than understanding that there's a role that religion plays and that

the government can't really take sides very much. It has to be careful. They basically misunderstood the whole thing and said, you know what, we need to keep religion totally out of the public square and have a secular public square, which is fundamentally as bad as a theocracy. In other words, you're taking a secular worldview, which is a religion, whatever you want to call it,

and you are establishing it as this is the American religion, this is what the state is going to put its, power behind with all of our might and main, we are going to force people to bow to this secular civil religion. And that's what's been happening in our lifetime. And you're telling me, thanks to you and First Liberty, you were able to make a reversal actually happen in this bad narrative. You're exactly right. And I mean, it's like for 50 years we've been going in this bad direction, this hostility to religion, which the founders would be appalled by. And what just happen in this, I mean, most people don't realize this, but what just happened in this lawsuit is

we just turn the other direction. Now, we've still got to do our work and build out the positive part of this, but this hostility to religion approach is over. Lemon was their tool. They've been using it for 50 years, and Lemon's dead. And what's fun, Eric, is watching the opinions come down after our win where everything is now flipping. We're seeing opinions flip the other direction. They're saying, no, we're citing the American Legion case at the Supreme Court. This hostility of religion approach is no longer the approach. So we're just at the beginning of something really great for our country. And I think the same thing is going to happen under the Free Exercise Clause.

That was under the Establishment Clause. There's a really bad precedent there, too. And we were up at the Supreme Court, not in a final decision, but in what's called a cert, grant, or denial. And in that, four of the justices said, this is our case. of the coach who was fired for Coach Kennedy, who was fired for going to a knee after the football game and saying a prayer. And we got up to the Supreme Court and the four conservative justice said, hey, it's not time yet. Go back down. We want some facts proved up. But they said, you know, we noticed that the first claim to reach us was a free speech claim, not a free exercise

claim. They said, maybe that's because of the Smith decision from 30 years ago that has caused so much damage to the free exercise clause. So basically they sent a strong signal. Oh, by the way, the next sentence was, but we haven't been asked to review that decision yet. So not a subtle hint that the other really bad decision that's out there that's really cramped the free exercise or religion protection, the Smith decision. I think we're on the verge of maybe dismantling that as well.

And I really believe as I've been speaking around the country, Over the last six months I've been saying, I really believe if we do our job right in the next five to ten years, every American is about to have more religious freedom than they've ever had in their lifetime. And that's a pretty amazing thing. And the funny thing, Kelly, is that religious freedom and religious liberty has become so misunderstood by the cultural elites who are largely secular that they see that as a bad thing.

In other words, they have no understanding. that religious liberty and all of these liberties help everyone. This is the irony. They think it means some kind of move toward theocracy. They don't understand how our government works and was designed to work. And so they're actually frightened by this. They put religious freedom or religious liberty in scare quotes in the New York Times, whatever. They treat it now like, you know, it's this thing which is code, it's dog whistle for something.

that's bad, you know? And it, you think, wow, it took us a long time to get to the point where, you know, not only do we have misunderstanding on this, but it's become codified. And now we have to go back and change laws that have been wrecking lives for decades now. But I, again, it's one of the reasons that I, I'm just so proud of you and First Liberty and what you guys are doing, because if you don't do this, America goes away. It's hard for me to believe that it's dependent on a handful of people who get this kind of thing, but it is. You're one of those people and you know it, and I hope there are a lot of people listening to this who'll pray for you and who'll want to support you because this is, it's at the heart of everything, I guess,

is my point. It's not something like I have a hobby and I'm interested in this. This is like at the root of everything, but what good news? I think you mentioned this to me when we last bumped into each other someplace, and I was just so excited. I'm sorry it's taking this long to get you on here, but it's very exciting. And I can see that you are yourself excited. Yeah, I've been fighting for 30 years and things are happening now. I never thought possible in my lifetime. And as you say, it's so central.

The people of faith immediately know, yeah, religious freedom is important to me, but a lot of people, as you say, don't get it. And I tell you who does get it is when I speak around the country, I always have people from like Eastern European countries come up to me and say, you know what, I'm not religious, but I saw this happen in my country. They took down the religious symbols. And then two months later, we all lost our political freedoms.

One of these guys, I mean, handed me a check for $5,000, said, I'm going to be given to your nonprofit from now on because I think that what you guys are doing is the most important thing anybody's doing in this country. And he wasn't a person of faith. He just understood his freedoms. And in order to keep his freedoms, you have to have religious freedom. because the first flashpoint, whenever a totalitarian regime comes in,

is always going to be these people that have a God greater than the government. And so if you lose there, you're going to lose everything. But that's exactly why the founders understood the centrality of faith to American-style self-government. There's no other way to get there. They understood that. We have been forgetting it. Thanks to you, we're beginning to remember it again. We're out of time.

Kelly, just a joy to have you. Thank you. and God bless you and what you and First Liberty have been doing. Thank you, Eric. Thank you for what you're doing. Hey, folks, welcome back. Albin. Yes, yes.

What's that and not a wonderful conversation with Kelly Shackleford? I love it. There's some positive news out there. He's been working for 30 years and he's got some great news. I love that. I know. It's like we never get great news. That's good news, man.

That is, oh, gosh. Well, listen, yeah, people should give money to firstliberty.org. I mean, it's one of those things. I, another story. Speaking of giving money, hey, we want to blow the lid off of this angel tree campaign. We just have this week as it. So anyone who hasn't yet given, and that's most of you who are listening, I think, you're on the hook.

Unfortunately, I'm looking at you. You might be looking at me. You might just be listening. But let me tell you something. I'm looking at you and I'm saying, would you please give anything you can give? If everybody gave a little bit, $10, $20, it would change lives. I just can't begin to tell you what a great idea it is. They're sending these kids.

Imagine these are kids who have a mom or dad that is in prison. You can imagine the shame and then the difficulty of growing up without that mom or that dad. You folks know what I'm talking about. This is tough stuff. So to send one of these kids to an angel tree camp for a week for $200, that's like nothing. And they get to do that. And if they can't go to camp because of the COVID shutdown, camps are closed, they get a care package, which is just, you know, I get tears on my eyes thinking that these kids, they can't afford groceries.

There's a lot of people, as you know, out of work. So imagine having one parent at home and that parent's out of work. they get a grocery card for $150. They get a Bible. They get a Bible study resource. This is all age appropriate for the kids. They get a piece of sporting equipment, like a soccer ball or something like that. And it's just a beautiful thing.

It's a way of telling them God has not forgotten them. They are loved. I don't care where you're coming from. You've got to understand that society is defined by how we treat our prisoners and how we treat the least of these, the kids of prisoners who, you know, they didn't do anything wrong and they're paying a price. And if you want to invest in the culture, folks, these kids are the ones that are most likely to follow in their parents' footsteps. We need to break the cycle. And God wants us to break the cycle. So you go to Metaxistock.com. You'll see the little banner there.

There's also a phone number. I want to give you 888-206-2793. It's 888-208-20. 206, 2793, 888, 206, 2793. I think right now I checked and we've raised enough money to send 226 kids to camp or 226 care packages. 226, it's $200 for each one of those. Whatever you can do, there's some folks out there who can do a lot. Please understand it's tax deductible and it's for a genuinely great cause. I don't know how else to put it. The, we have said to sweeten the deal, the sweet spot, we're sending a signed copy of my book, seven men, seven more men, to everybody who gives $200. But we, somebody has donated to us a bunch of beautiful Geneva Bible pages.

These are 400-year-old pages from the Geneva Bible. They're beautiful. you will certainly frame it. And, you know, they're valuable. And somebody's given them to us, I said, so anybody who sends us $250, you'll get the signed copy of seven more men. You'll get two subscriptions to Metaxa Super. And you'll also get a Geneva Bible.

Now, that's just the next few days, while supplies last because we don't have that many of them. So I think we have 35. 35. Okay. So please do that, folks. I'll give you the number again. This is very important.

If you care about America, if you care about our culture, step up. 1-88-88-208-2793. 888-206-2793. Or go to Metaxistalk.com and click on the banner. God bless you. Thank you.