The Eric Metaxas Show - Matt Rosenberg

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

Matt Rosenberg has a beef with the city of his birth, and spells out how that "toddlin' town" tipped off the rails, giving examples from his new book, "What Next, Chicago?" ...

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:10 To the Eric Mettaxas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hello there. Folks, I have the privilege of speaking to a native Chicago end. You know what that is? That's somebody who's lived in Chicago for a long time. His name is Matt Rosenberg. The book is What Next Chicago? Notes of a pissed-off native son.
Starting point is 00:00:33 Wow. Matt Rosenberg, welcome to the program. Thank you, Eric. It's a pleasure to be here. I know of you. because of your dad, the legendary Milton Rosenberg. My goodness, how long did he do radio? I mean, how many years
Starting point is 00:00:49 was he in that world? 38 years he was on WGNAM, but it was just a second job. What was his first job? He was a professor of social psychology at the University of Chicago, and I grew up in Hyde Park in Chicago. A professor of social psychology
Starting point is 00:01:08 with common sense. And a great curiosity, which I think he passed on at least partially to me. So you've been a journalist. You've done a lot of things. This book, I mean, everybody in the country, including some Chicagoans, are wondering what in the world is happening in Chicago. So what is the book about? What next Chicago?
Starting point is 00:01:34 What ultimately are you saying here? I'm addressing urban progressive misrule in our nation's biggest cities. I'm looking at the unified theory of systemic racism and positing that that is not the problem, that the problem is that urban political elites, largely of color, are running our nation's biggest cities into the ground. What I'm also trying to do in this book, I went deep into the south. I moved back to Chicago, where I lived for 30 years from the time of being a young child, six years old, to, you know, my mid-30s when I finally left and moved to Seattle with my lovely wife where we raised two children. I had to come back in 2020 looking at the city in chaos and
Starting point is 00:02:32 turmoil. I went deep into the south side, talked to black people in their homes and workplaces, about what's gone wrong, how to set things right. So that was a big part of it. But then the policy piece, Eric, was very big. And I felt, don't shy away from this. How is it that the public schools are failing? How is it that the criminal court system has run off the rails? How is it that fiscal governance has gone so wrong? Why is it that corruption is endemic and the rules of governance are rigged. So it was ambitious, but I feel like I had a chance to step up to it. I mean, I have to ask the face of Chicago, alas and a lack, has been Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who seems to project a kind of confusion. I don't know if that's just her resting face, but she just looks confused and lost.
Starting point is 00:03:31 unfortunately that doesn't seem inappropriate. Her leadership, and I'm using that word in quotes, has been to most of us at least mystifying. You're really trying to wonder what in the world, anybody with a modicum of common sense would have done many things differently. It's almost as if she's not doing it. I guess she reminds me of Biden in some ways.
Starting point is 00:03:56 I mean, I can't really make sense of how things can be falling apart in that way and how somebody like that cannot even seem to be addressing it on any level. I hope I'm misreading some of that. But what is your sense of what is happening? She's badly overwhelmed. She's floundering. She's intelligent and capable and had a fairly impressive career leading up to this,
Starting point is 00:04:21 including working as a federal prosecutor in Chicago and actually putting corrupt Chicago aldermen in jail in a few instances. University of Chicago law grad, elected. I know, it's utterly befuddling. In other words, she's brilliant and floundering. I think there was this crucial inflection point, and it tells us something about our times. In 2020, after George Floyd, with COVID,
Starting point is 00:04:51 there was a crucial inflection point where you find out whether people who are capable, intelligent, and well tested previously, whether they can step up under unusual circumstances where, you know, the heat under the pot with the boiling frogs in it is all of a sudden turned up. And she has literally gone to pieces in front of the city and in front of the nation and has fallen back, among other things, on this saw, this refrain that systemic racism is to blame for every problem. the violent crime, the higher murder rate among blacks.
Starting point is 00:05:34 It's as if black on black crime were not a legitimate issue, as if... Are blacks being racist when they're killing other blacks? Black people are befuddled by this. When I went into this outside, I had one woman, a woman of faith, religious faith, and an entrepreneur, a woman named Latasha Fields, one of several success stories that I share in the book, say to me, literally, you know, you need to explain something to us black people. We hear this phrase, black lives matter, but do they only matter when a white policeman takes a black life? And, you know, some of this goes back to the stoic philosophers who counseled among other things
Starting point is 00:06:20 that you choose how you react to something. If your honor is affronted by somebody, you can either get, and they said this in their own way, but it translates to, you can either get bent out of shape, or you can accept this with equanimity because it's not something you can do a great deal about, and you can prove your honor through your daily actions and your daily life. In Chicago, we have people pulling out guns and firing them because of something somebody says at a party, you know, because of minor disagreements. Or in this, takes you deep into the strange subculture of gang life. There is now a style of rap video called Chicago Drill, most unfortunately named. It has certain distinguishing musical features,
Starting point is 00:07:13 but the main aspect of it is it's a platform for insulting rival gangs. And so these are broadcast on social media. Social media is very much a part of the current environment connected to random and wanton violence. Guys will come, and the phrase is, spray the block. Guys will come and spray the block, meaning these 14 or 15-year-olds who can barely hoist these semi-automatic weapons
Starting point is 00:07:41 will cruise the block where a rival who has insulted them in a music video lives, they won't bother to target the guy who diss them. They will simply spray the block with bullets, And so grandmothers sitting in their living rooms literally may die because of this, young girls, young boys, innocent adults, sitting on the stoop, shooting the breeze with their neighbors. So it's, you know, we've always had this. But since May of 2020, things have literally gone off the chain.
Starting point is 00:08:20 Now, this is obviously removed from the preposterous. a thesis of, you know, systemic racism, because this is we're talking about gangs and violence. But it at least brings up, well, it brings up many things. It brings up this issue of gun control. I mean, it seems to me none of the guns being used in all of this violence are legal guns. In other words, the idea that you could have these laws that are not virtually meaningless, they are meaningless. anybody can get a gun, can use a gun, the guns are being used.
Starting point is 00:08:58 It's so strange to me that something that obvious isn't addressed. In other words, this is people killing people. They can get guns. The laws make no difference. What does Lori Lightfoot say, for example, about this kind of violence? Let's start there. I mean, what's her stance? There was a mass shooting one of several in Chicago this year in June.
Starting point is 00:09:22 In fact, right up the block from the home of a gentleman who I spent today with down in Englewood. And after that mass shooting, Lori Lightfoot decided essentially to channel John Lennon. If you remember this song, Imagine. Imagine a world without guns. She's, yeah, right there. We need to go to a break for my mental health. We'll be right back. Hey, folks, you wish you remembered names better and thought more clearly? Improve your memory with Vivalour memory support. Vivalore's founder prayed that God would show her the solution to memory loss when her mother had dementia.
Starting point is 00:10:11 Divine encounters, faith, and her background as a pharmacist led Susan Gibson to create Vivalor memory support. Vivalor is a premium quality, all-natural supplement with five to 20 times more nutrients than any other memory supplement. It's won numerous awards and has three books independently written about it. Visit Vivalore.com for testimonials about the life-changing improvements people have experienced. Vivalore is for those with normal memory, mild or severe memory loss. Do not wait till your memory slips. The pathology starts 20 years before your first memory loss symptom. Vivalore is V-I-V-O-L-R.
Starting point is 00:10:45 Go to Vivalore.com, buy three and get 40% off automatically applied. That's 40% off if you order three. The makers pray that God's healing presence rests on every pill. Vivalore.com, V-I-V-O-L-R.com. Check it out. Folks, I'm talking to Matt Rosenberg from Chicago. And the book is, What Next Chicago? You were just telling us something really nuts. You're saying that Mayor Lori Lightfoot was quoting John Lennon's beautiful but insipid song,
Starting point is 00:11:29 Imagine, in response to some killings. Tell us more about that, just so that we understand in what context was she doing this. Right. Well, I put it this way that she is channeling John Lennon. and she did not name him. What she did say after a mass shooting in which a number of people were killed was, essentially she said it's a whole different ballgame if we don't have all these guns around. And the absurdity of that is that it's the proclivity to shoot a gun for spurious reasons
Starting point is 00:12:06 that is the real issue here. I think common sense observers understand that. So the hard part here is going back to a failure among parents. You know, the hard part here to me is the issue of what I like to call. And Eric, this was a growth experience for me. I had to confront what is the central problem here? And I realized it's centered around something that I decided I would call moral authority. This is probably an area in which you have some experience of thinking and writing
Starting point is 00:12:43 and analyzing. And I realized it's a pretty basic definition what's constituted within that, but there are maybe only 5% of Chicago's one million households that are not living with moral authority. But that's a large enough number to affect a tyranny of the minority, which means it's not safe to be out on the streets, which means that schools, K-12 public schools, are in a state of disorder where police are required to be on-site, breaking up fights, guarding students against violence from other students. There's a great pressure on the county court system because of a small, relatively small handful of miscreants who have an outsized effect on the city. So there is a problem of moral authority in the city of Chicago.
Starting point is 00:13:43 And we have a certain number of parents who are not stepping up, who are not even in the game, and the results of that are being felt across the entire city. I think it almost goes without saying, but fatherlessness is an epidemic in the inner city. And it was 10,000 years ago, I think, when Moynihan, Senator Patrick Moynihan issued his report. of course, famous liberal Democrat in 1965 about fatherlessness being at the heart of a lot of most of the problems in the inner city. And even then it was thought to be somehow racially insensitive to bring this up. I would think that it's the most loving thing you could do is say, here's the problem, let's fix the problem. We never addressed that problem.
Starting point is 00:14:36 and I guess, you know, LBJ's great society, and we always act as though there are other ways to deal with this, and we've had a long time to see that none of those other ways work. But they keep acting as though, if only we would just give more money to this or give more money to that. I cannot imagine what life is like for somebody without a father trying to scrape by. But nobody seems to have the guts, as Moynihan did, to bring that up, as though we can no longer bring up that issue.
Starting point is 00:15:11 There's actually a two-for here. The city needs to dramatically reformulate its budget in order to deal with crushing public employee pension debt, which is a mammoth thing, $170 billion worth of public employee payments are owed in Chicago between now and the year 2055. So currently, we're paying two and a half billion dollars a year to former city employees to not work. That will grow to $5 billion a year before 2050 and reach $5.7 billion a year. That's nearly half of the city budget. So in order to reformulate, you've got to cut payments to social programs, which aren't working anyway and force people to step up and do what should be doing in the first place.
Starting point is 00:16:06 But we know that no one like Lori Lightfoot, even approaching what she's like, no one will do anything about this. This is classic. This is old school, democratic, big city corruption, big government corruption. It takes cities down. I mean, it almost took New York down in the 70s. And I guess the question is, will we have a federal. government willing to stand against this and say, no, we're not going to bail you out. We're not
Starting point is 00:16:38 going to reward you for your malfeasance over the decades. But what do you think will happen in Chicago? Will they face? Is there anybody who has the character to face this kind of thing and to deal with it? There's one alderman in particular that I like, and he's a little bit of a showboat and a rabble rouser, but he speaks truth about the problems at the community level and the family level. His name is Ray Lopez. He's the alderman of the 15th Ward. He's called out Lightfoot for her systemic racism schick. He has said that the problem is generational gang culture and the borderline breakdown of the family unit.
Starting point is 00:17:19 And this from a gay Latino Democratic alderman. The guy's got stones to step up and say this. We need somebody like him. I don't know what you think about Eric Adams. You probably know more about him since you're in New York. Yorker, what I do take away from his likely election soon as New York's mayor is that a candidate of color who essentially supports police, who supports school choice is a good thing. It's a remarkable contrast to the policy priorities of Bill de Blasio, who was New York's own, I suppose, Lori Lightfoot,
Starting point is 00:17:57 but for longer. Only twice as big. Yeah. So I think we have to start in. cities like Chicago with a few big takeaways. One is that civic engagement really matters, that rigged rules of governance matter. We have our elections in odd-numbered years in February and April. We have 33 percent registered voter turnout in our city of Chicago elections. It's absolutely rotten. The same electorate shows up 70 percent. to vote for the presidential elections. So why not change state law and hinge the local elections to the presidential?
Starting point is 00:18:42 And you know who shows up to vote in the local elections. It's public employee union members and a few ineffectual white progressives. So this is why we end up with more of the same. But, Eric, if you go into the communities of color where so many people have tuned out and don't vote, they believe it makes no difference, but that apathy then becomes sort of self-fulfilling and cyclical. So there's a big problem there. Well, it is amazing just to hear you get into some of this stuff. I think when we're talking about Chicago politics, we could be talking about Philadelphia politics, New York politics, Detroit politics,
Starting point is 00:19:28 it reminds me of, you know, Tammany Hall. There's a level of corruption that it can become very difficult to get past it because it's so deep. Do you really think it's possible or for Chicago to get? I mean, I think Giuliani virtually single-handedly pulled New York out of the abyss. And we've been riding, you know, living off of that ever since, de Blasio is doing his best to take us back to 1970. But the fact is that at some point, you need a really dedicated warrior reformer to get in. And I just wonder, is there, I mean, do you think that the person, the alderman that you mentioned is capable of that?
Starting point is 00:20:18 I mean, this is a rather big job. This is not just a change of attitude. It would take more than a strong mayoral candidate and winner. It would take a rebranding, really, of the reform effort, which has been an important part of Chicago's political history and that of other big cities. When I was 19 years old, I worked on a Pulitzer finalist investigative series called the Mirage Tavern.
Starting point is 00:20:48 We set up, we being the Better Government Association and the Chicago Sun, set up a fake tavern to document the shakedowns by inspectors. You know, you leave that envelope with the 20s and the 50s inside a folded newspaper on the bench of a booth. And this is how you correct your faulty wiring, the maggots in the basement, and all of that. Ben Bradley didn't like the supposed entrapment, you know. Sting operation. The sting operation. How dare these citizens try to save their city?
Starting point is 00:21:26 What is wrong with them? Sorry, Ben Bradley. You can't get it right all the time. Folks, we're talking to Matt Rosenberg. The book is What Next Chicago? And we will continue the conversation in just a moment. Don't go away. Once there was a way to get back home and I will sing a lullaby.
Starting point is 00:21:58 Hey, folks, I've got to tell you a see a sea. secret about relief factor that the father, son, owners, Pete and Seth Talbot have never made a big deal about, but I think it is a big deal. I really do. They sell the three-week quick start pack for just 1995 to anyone struggling from pain like neck, shoulder, back, hip, or knee pain, 1995, about a dollar a day. But what they haven't broadcasted much is that every time they sell a three-week quick start, they lose money. In fact, they don't even break even until about four to five months after if you keep ordering it. Friends, that's huge. People don't keep ordering Relief Factor month after month if it doesn't work. So yes, Pete and Seth are literally on a
Starting point is 00:22:36 mission to help as many people as possible deal with their pain. They really do put their money where their mouths are. So if you're in pain from exercise or even just getting older, order the three-week quick start for 1995. Let's see if we can get you at a pain too. Go to Relieffactor.com. Relieffactor.com or call 800-500-584-3-834. Relieffactor.com. Use it. It works. Hey there, folks. The great Glenn Lowry has said that this book, it's a loving tribute to Chicago. It's a moving, sensitive, humane, entrenched, critical assessment, read it, and weep. What else is in this book? We could go in so many different directions.
Starting point is 00:23:29 I think I would accent the success stories too. There are people like Daryl Smith who did three years in prison at the age of 18 on an involuntary manslaughter rap who came out and now at age 51 is a pillar of the black community in the Englewood neighborhood, a very dangerous, tough neighborhood. He could move out. He owns 10 residential programs. properties. He does quite well. He's the unofficial mayor of Englewood. I spent a day with him hearing his life story. There are people like Daryl Smith all over the place and they're part of the
Starting point is 00:24:12 strong fabric that exists still to some degree in many of these communities. He was one of the guys who, when Black Lives Protesters, Black Lives Matter protesters, came to the local police station to to protest in favor of defunding police. He was one of the middle-aged black men who confronted them in the summer of 2020 when this happened and said, no, we don't want that. We want more police and we want better police. Daryl's story made me think he inherited some of the 10 properties he owns from his father and grandfather, who came and worked hard in the factories,
Starting point is 00:24:56 in Chicago. And I thought, well, this is interesting. Here's a black man who owns 10 residential properties. If he were white, somebody would be accusing him of white privilege. So what is this? Is this black privilege? And it hit me, no. This is an example of a family's life well-lived. It's not a big leap from that to understand that this is the very thing we want for everybody. that one of the big takeaways is all of this starts at the bottom up. Families have to have it together. Citizens have to pay heed when policies go wrong. So there is no excuse for disengagement. You get more of rotten governance if you tune it out. You have to pay attention when the teachers union pushes for a cap on charter school growth. You have to pay attention when you learn
Starting point is 00:25:56 that the public employee pension debt is skyrocketing into the hundreds of billions over coming decades. You have to pay attention when the court system decides it's going to embrace something called bail reform, which amounts to a revolving door policy that makes your neighborhood and your entire city into a shooting gallery. Is there anybody who doesn't think these things are madness? In other words, what fascinates me is that when I first heard defund the police, it's so stupid that I didn't even respond. I thought everyone knows this is madness, this is suicide. Who is promoting these ideas?
Starting point is 00:26:38 And I can't think in what universe, any of these ideas make sense. You know, these bail policies. Who is behind this? And do they genuinely think that, you know, decriminalizing theft, any of these things? They really think this may help? Well, on what basis do they believe that? I don't think they do believe it helps. And who is that they, you were asking?
Starting point is 00:27:04 And I will advance my theory. And I don't think it's too radical. The theory, they are a professional, administrative, political class educated in the universities of this country over the last several decades. So the people now running our cities, both the top. elected officials and the top administrators have all been brought up reading, you know, Michael Foucault and Jacques Gailul in all of these people. They're deconstructionists. They don't believe there's a right and wrong, and they use the power of their position to affect their conception of social justice. I mean, look, it seems obvious to me we need a new American revolution in the cities, in the federal
Starting point is 00:27:53 government that we have allowed an entrenched bureaucracy to take over. They don't represent the people. So they are not, they're not even operating along any kind of American vision, but we've somehow allowed this. In places like Chicago, I really do wonder whether it's possible for a city like that to get past it. I gather by writing this book, you think that there is hope for this kind of wholesale restructuring of things. I think there is, and I think it resides, you know, one household at a time. I talked near the end of my field research to a woman from Venezuela who longs to go back to her home country who is a playwright and a theater company owner. And she said when she came to Chicago, she was struck that it was a city of hope, a clean
Starting point is 00:29:00 city, a beautiful city, a dramatic contrast to living in Venezuela. And I think, Eric, here's one thing that I noticed. The people are part of the reason for hope. The city itself, though, like New York, there's a heavy, duality at play here. I was standing downtown watching a live blues concert sponsored by the city with this amazing beautiful skyline in front of me just a weekend or two ago. Three or four thousand people there all happy, smiling, no violence right there at that site. And a friend turned to me and he said, Matt, this is the brilliance of Chicago. And I felt it too later, though. I asked myself, how many people
Starting point is 00:29:45 got shot or died this weekend. And it turned out to be only 56 shot, nine killed. And Eric, let's actually, let's put a pin in it there. This is too exciting. We call this cliffhanger. Don't go away. Hey folks, Eric Metaxis here. Joe Biden and the Democrats have laid out the most socialist agenda our country has ever seen. Instead of following President Trump's blueprint that had the economy booming, the Dems are going to raise taxes, increase regulations, and skyrocket an already outrageous national debt. If your retirement is in traditional investments, it is in jeopardy. Americans should be diversifying their investments with gold and precious metals. Gold gives you control over your wealth and protects you from market volatility, inflation, and a weakening dollar.
Starting point is 00:30:28 When investing in gold, I turn to Legacy Precious Metals. Legacy Precious Metals has over 40 years of experience in helping Americans protect their finances, and this team is prepared to patiently consider your own personal financial needs. If you're looking to invest in gold, call the good folks at Legacy Precious. Metals today at 866 473-6204 or visit them online at legacy p.m. Investments.com. Don't leave your retirement to chance friends. Contact Legacy. Precious Metals today. That's 866-473-6204. Folks, I'm talking to Matt Rosenberg. The book is What Next Chicago? And you were just sharing something we had to go to the break. So keep talking there. Right. I had been downtown at a concert
Starting point is 00:31:21 looking at the beautiful skyline. A friend said to me, this, you know, is the beauty of Chicago, the brilliance of it. And I agreed with him, but then I wondered how many people died this weekend, how many people got shot. It turned out to be just 56 shot and nine killed. And the sad part, Eric, was that I realized that was a good weekend for Chicago. The duality of Chicago is that brilliant minds have always lived there, that most people are warm, open-hearted, generous, smart, capable,
Starting point is 00:31:52 and accomplished. Our universities are great. Our architecture is dramatic. The neighborhoods are great. The culture is fantastic. And yet, and yet, it's become an unlivable, greatly misgoverned place. So as Chicago goes, so go all of our nation's great cities in my view, and so goes our nation. in the end. So it's not feasible to ignore the plight of cities. And all of the big cities in our country now have been under great, great pressure since the middle of last year. And most of them are failing in a dramatic way. So something has to change here. And I think it has to start at the community level. People have to get out of of this sort of cognitive dissonance of thinking that this politics of virtue, you were asking why and how is it, that this all can persist, this politics of virtue of turning your head
Starting point is 00:33:07 when you know that the forms of governance are failing, that the values are failing, you turn your head because you don't want to be that guy, right? You don't want to be that guy who calls out fatherless families, right, who calls out a culture which makes it so that young black men are not comfortable excelling academically. You don't want to be the person who calls that out at your Upper West Side Dinner Party because you might not get an invitation to come back. This is part of what's gone wrong. So I think we, We sort of need a new political party in our nonpartisan local elections. If the socialists can put six people on the city council of Chicago,
Starting point is 00:34:00 which they did last time around, adding five to one who was already there in 2019, then I would say a new reform party of Chicago can do something too. And it's time for that. Well, I want to ask you about, it seems to me I just finished watching Rick Burns as 1990. documentary on New York. And I thought to myself, you know, government rises to solve problems when they're not solved in the public sector. So when you have, you know, the negative side of capitalism, the triangle shirt factory, horrible conditions. When you have people not governing themselves, the government steps in and says, we'll take care of it, and then suddenly you get
Starting point is 00:34:44 laws and regulations and the government grows. And at some point, that gets incredible. incredibly out of hand. You get somebody like a Robert Moses who's acting like a dictator. The government gets so big. And people fail to understand this is fundamentally against freedom, against American principles. And so talking to something I know you do with in the book, but the issue of school choice, how is it that you can have these unions? I mean, unions were originally formed because they needed to be formed. But they have now become the enemy. They've gotten all this power, and they're working against the common men and women of these cities by saying, we don't want to give you choice in schools. We want your kids to go to these rat traps where
Starting point is 00:35:30 they have to have cops and metal detectors. It's amazing to me that that basic idea of freedom, especially in our cities, we don't talk about that. It's as though that's an old-fashioned jingoistic, white nationalist idea. And you think, well, it's not. It's meant for everybody. Freedom, freedom of choice, freedom to choose where your kids go to school, whether they go to school, whether you want to homeschool them or take them to a church school. There's a school in Chicago, by the way, Chicago Hope Academy, which was started by a friend of mine, Bob Mazakowski, a Christian high school. They are right in the inner city. They have done unbelievable work. And I think to myself, boy, if we had 10 of those across Chicago, it would change everything. But I don't know if you're
Starting point is 00:36:13 aware of that. But it's, you know, only about maybe 10 years old, 15 years old. But to give people a choice, that used to be a bedrock American idea. Now it's become sort of, oh, it's some kind of a conservative, you know, idea. You talk about school choice in here. There's a place called legal prep charter high school where kids in one of the most violent, dangerous neighborhoods of the whole city, West Garfield Park, are immersed in right. The guy who started it was a lawyer and law teacher who found through his work for another nonprofit that kids just didn't have the basic writing skills to even get accepted to college. And it really hit him hard since he was a young attorney and a legal writing teacher working for another nonprofit that was encouraging kids to develop careers in law. He felt there was a false promise.
Starting point is 00:37:18 So he started this charter school. It's worked very well. Kids are writing at a college level, usually by their junior year of high school. They're going on to college. They're aiming for jobs in the professions, not necessarily law. That's just one success story. The problem is, yes, that the Chicago Teachers Union is involved in a mad, monopolistic power quest. They've convinced Lightfoot to extend a ban on charter school growth.
Starting point is 00:37:54 This at a time when charter school enrollment has grown greatly over 10 years in Chicago, while the public school district's overall enrollment has been plummeting. In other words, parents and students are voting with their feet. But the response is to clamp down on the thing that they want. So added to that, the Democrats in the legislature passed a bill, which included a little secret addition to ban the closure of any more regular public schools for low enrollment. We're going to have to end it there. This is astonishing stuff. Folks, if you live in Chicago or know somebody who does, you need to read What Next Chicago.
Starting point is 00:38:43 Matt Rosenberg, congratulations. And thank you. My pleasure. Phil Boyce, he's part of the brass up at the Salem headquarters. Phil sent us an email yesterday telling us to tell our listeners and viewers, that's you folks. I'm sorry, but that's who you are, that they are having a, what is it? Can you read it? I really don't understand this. Yeah, this is a cultural warrior contest, believe it or not.
Starting point is 00:39:31 It says this show wants to honor, and that's this show, Eric Mattaxia show, honor those in American life who are standing up for what they believe in. Okay, we know there is a cultural war going on around us, but some people rise up and become cultural warriors. You can nominate one of those as the 2021 Salem culture warrior of the year. Just go to Eric's website, metaxistock.com and click on the banner. Just let us know, give praise and encouragement to a cultural warrior that you believe deserves it for this year. Are we, now, is the secret idea that everybody on my program who listens to this program is going to vote for me to win this? I hope so.
Starting point is 00:40:13 I mean, I don't really understand. If you don't vote for me, what does that say about you? I don't know. My relationship with you. Candice Owens won. She won last year, so definitely don't vote for Candice Owens. She's already got one of these on her mantelpiece. So enough about can.
Starting point is 00:40:28 Hey, enough, okay? She's got one on her mantlepiece. I don't have an Emmy, a Tony. I got nothing. So you want to go to metaxis talk.com and you want to vote for a culture warrior. I guess, I mean, I would vote for Mike Lindell because I love him. Let me ask also when you go to metaxis talk.com and yet now you have to go there. Yeah, I'm sorry, you have to go.
Starting point is 00:40:54 It's a legal requirement. You want to go to jail or what? No, you don't want to go to jail. You want to go to metaxistocot.com. when you go there, you're going to see the banner for the alliance defending freedom. Ladies and gentlemen, we need your help. I'm being blunt. Some of you can give very generously.
Starting point is 00:41:13 This is a place you don't need to think very hard whether this is worth your giving. This is about as good as it gets. If you could give them a million dollars, I would say you should do it. They need your help. They need our help. They are the front line of defense and religious liberty. everywhere in America, Judeo-Christian values, Christians specifically, are being attacked for what reason? Well, for no good legal reason, but for reasons of cultural animus against people of faith.
Starting point is 00:41:44 If we don't stand and fight in the courts, if we don't support the alliance defending freedom, the whole nation goes down without religious liberty. And I've argued this many times in my books and other places, we cannot have in America. And because we've not been teaching this in schools, people don't really understand what's the big deal. It sounds like a religious thing. Maybe you're not that religious. It's not about that. It's about America. It's about liberty. It's about your ability to be free. So we need anybody who can give to the lines of pending freedom. Go to metaxis talk.com today. Folks, please, please, I cannot stress this enough. This is one of the great organizations that I honestly wish
Starting point is 00:42:22 we could give them millions of dollars. They are absolute heroes. I know the people involved. We've had some of them on this program. We do. need your help. It's very important. The other day I saw on my block a bunch of kids like in a playground, little kids wearing masks. I was so angry. I cannot begin to tell you. I thought these kids are being abused. Their parents don't stand up. The teachers don't stand up. This is all about religious liberty. We have mandates and things going down that are preposterous. We have to stand up. Folks, please go to the Alliance Defending Freedom. This is a moment where we can stand in our generation. It's a small thing, but if we don't do it, it's a big thing. So please go to
Starting point is 00:43:10 Metaxus Talk.com. While you're there, sign up for our newsletter. We're sending all kinds of crazy stuff, prizes and awards for pre-ordering my book, the new book, which is atheism dead. We do need your help. Tonight, I'm going to be on Newsmax at 9 p.m. with Steve Cortez. Lots of other crazy stuff happening this week. But we need you to go to metaxus talk.com. We need you to go to Ericmetaxis.com. And that's all we have time to tell you what we need you to do. Thank you.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.