The Eric Metaxas Show - Michael Wilkerson (Encore continued)

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Michael Wilkerson continues his interview exploring ideas from his new book which points the way to an American renaissance, "Why America Matters: The Case for a New Exceptionalism." (Encore Presentation)

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Taxis show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Ding, ding, ding. We enter hour two in my conversation with my friend Michael Wilkerson, the book, really an amazing book. It's called Why America Matters. Okay, so Michael, we left off talking about the issue of slavery, and you write really extensively about that battle in our history, because a lot of times we get the short version of it.

To me, this was the foundational challenge. This was the question that was going to define who would we become as a nation. Slavery was an aberration. It was inimical to the ideals articulated in the declaration, in the Constitution, and yet we allowed it to. to live. There was a belief that, oh, it'll just go away on its own. Later in following the signing of the declaration, a lot of the signatories and others really began to rally around resistance to the idea of slavery. But we were in conflict because half of the nation in the South were very much wedded to it from their economic and cultural social life. John Quincy Adams, after he left the White House spent the next three decades in the House of Representatives haranguing about the issue of slavery. Benjamin Franklin in his last decade really devoted himself to abolitionist causes.

The rise of the abolitionist movements in the 1830s through 50, 60s really were a catalyst to begin to awaken public consciousness at a broader level to the evil that was the institution of slavery. The most fascinating person that I found in this whole period of history was Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass was a escaped slave who, in his use, who in his use, had taught himself to read, taught himself, got all kinds of books whenever he could, eventually escaped to the North. And long story short, became a leading abolitionist, a leading voice, a friend of President Lincoln, and in my view was the most prophetic voice speaking to the conscious of America saying,

this thing is evil and it has to be destroyed. And the only way it's going to be destroyed is through the fires of the war. And the interesting thing about Frederick Douglass that I think is relevant, one of the things for our time is he was very clear that patriotism requires the citizen to stand up and challenge its country when it goes off track. That it is not possible for someone, a lover of their country, to sit back and watch the forces of dissolution and destruction tear apart what matters. And it challenged audiences at the time, because he was speaking to largely white, elite, members of society saying, you must act. You can no longer sit here. And of course, they did act. And you mentioned before the break, the millions of lives that were lost in the war, that, you know, Northern Union lives that were lost to try to break apart this wretched evil.

What scares me is that there are polls out there today that show that only a minority of Americans believe that, the Civil War was over the issue of slavery. The most common answer is the propaganda one, which was about state's rights and sort of our right to choose what we wanted to do. No, Frederick Douglass himself said the mission of the war, the purpose of the war, is slavery above all else.

Yes, it encompasses all these other objectives, like holding the union together. But it was about creating an America that represented the American ideal that had been created at the time of the founding and set up long before. Did it work? No. We went through the war, Reconstruction.

General and President Grant was a leading advocate of reconstruction. The Department of Justice actually was originally established to go after the KKK, the KKK, which was a militarized arm of the Democratic Party at the time. Fascinating that we've gone so far in our history. Was the KKK funded by George Soros? I'm just asking. I pretty much, we would assume that.

Only indirectly. I don't know if he's that old. But it's a fascinating thing because part of, I think the reason sometimes people say, oh, Eric, you're really humble. It's like, no, I'm actually honest when I say that 10 minutes ago, I didn't know things that I'm really embarrassed. You know, when I think about Dinesh D'Souza has written in depth about how the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. It was the party of racism, the party of Jim Crow. And this is going into

our lifetimes when you've got, you know, Dixiecrats like Bird, the head of the Senate. And I have to say, I'm ashamed that I didn't really understand that history, that I swallowed the false narrative of our time, that the Democratic Party is for the common man and for black Americans. And you think, no, like 10 minutes ago, they kind of flipped the narrative. but the history is incredibly gruesome. So when you read about the KKK, you read about the Republican Party being founded with Lincoln. That history has not been taught, basically,

and it's pretty ugly. This has to be the biggest political sleigh of hand in history. To erase the history of the Democratic Party, to invent something new, going back to the point you made, so the party was split before the war with a lot of people leaving from the north who just could not brook the continuation of slavery.

During the Civil War and after, the Democratic Party became the party of the slave holding south, of the slave power, trying to get federal troops out of the south, trying to reimpose the black codes, keeping black Americans away from the voting booths. It moved, as you said, through a period where they were really quite effective

to reestablish segregation, reestablished a Jim Crow laws, you move into the 20th century, and somehow, when I set a sleigh of hand, somehow it was the trick to that the Democratic Party became largely the party of blacks and other minorities, notwithstanding its own history and notwithstanding the fact that even today, the programs that are advocated by the Democratic Party ostensibly on behalf of blacks and other minorities are the very things that are destroying their cultures, their families. Now, I just want to say, folks, this is, you know, gets, little complicated, but this goes way back. In 1965, one of the heroes, the intellectually

honest members of the Democratic Party, Senator Moynihan, wrote extensively about how the breakdown of family was destroying black communities. He dared to say that in 1965. In other words, that that issue was at the heart of everything, and he was shut down. It was kind of like, well, know that's considered racist, even though he was very liberal, he was honest about talking about some of these policies, big government policies, these kinds of things are destroying black communities. And so we've been living with that ever since that, you know, Dr. King, of course, was openly Christian in what he was writing about and what he's advocating for. But there's this other side of black activism.

whether it's Malcolm X going into Al Sharpton and the radical left that we see today, but they are advocating policies. We need to be clear that are harmful to black Americans. And so just because I'm white doesn't prevent me from saying that. If I love my black brothers and sisters, I'm going to say those policies are wicked. And so there's always been this kind of battle in a way. and I would like to think that today

a lot of black Americans are kind of waking up to this. They've been taken for granted. They've been targeted by Planned Parenthood. That's getting into so much more recent stuff. But keep going on Frederick Douglass. Well, one of the things I was going to say is that in the book, I move away from the history of events like the wars and foundational events like the Revolution War

the signing of the Constitution. I move into what I call the ideological attack that occurred in really beginning in the 60s. And I think that that's very foundational what's going on right now because at the same time, one of the things that Frederick Douglass himself pointed out was he articulated very clearly

that the institutions of the slave power, including the slave trade, including what was going on interstate, was effective. black slaves and the white poor equally. So Irish immigrants coming across, getting impressed to work in the shipyards and other things, basically slave conditions, not nearly as bad as being an African American, a black American in the South. But nonetheless, Frederick Douglass was the first one to say, this is not about race. This is about class. This is about an elite

cabal trying to keep down certain parts of society. And those two, the black slave and the and the poor immigrant, white immigrant, have more in common with each other than they do with their so-called racial brothers or sisters. Okay, I am talking to the author of Why America Matters. We'll be right back. Legacy precious metals has a revolutionary new online platform that allows you to invest in real gold and silver online.

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I think I just wanted to go to. a good portion of the book is talking about what I call the ideological attack. I mentioned this right before the break, that something fundamentally shifted in around, beginning of the 1960s, that over the course of our lifetimes, our generation, that the battle moved into the very foundational ideas of what is truth, what is real and what is not. So with the rise of postmodernism, this idea that there was no truth,

that words didn't have any specific meaning. They could mean whatever they wanted, Okay, now we're talking about the 20th century. 20th century. So I'm moving ahead here unless we want to be here for three days. No, no, no, no, no. Well, I mean, I just love the history lesson and I love the discussion. But in your book, you do really beautifully move through the decades and help us understand kind of how we got here.

So in the 20th century, this new idea comes in. And again, there are no new ideas. It's just the new version or the new manifestation of it. But, yeah, this this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, war on truth, which if you don't believe in truth, it's really hard to believe in transcendent values in the dignity of the human being. And so the deconstruction critical theory really undermines everything that makes liberty and freedom possible. I mean, liberty and truth possible. You know, I think in the 60s and the 70s, even in the 80s, postmodernism

was in a corner of academia. It was seen as, okay, there it is. I don't think we've appreciated how pervasive it's become, how much it has leaked out into society as a whole. And what is it? What are we talking about? It's the idea that there is no truth that you can't make any judgment on absolute sense.

It really is subjective as to the meaning. And the way this manifests is in power and language in a view in that world. That power, you can understand. everything by looking at the power structure, who's in charge, and that's how identity politics really comes up with this ideas of intersectionality and being able to look at somebody based on an oppressor or victim construct. But it also comes down to language. And one of the things that this ideological attack is doing is systematically undermining for all of us the meaning of words. The meaning

of patriotism. It's no longer a virtue. It's a bad thing to be a patriot. The meaning of truth. the meaning of family, the meaning of men, women. And let me cut to the chase, just to sum up. This is satanic. I can say that. The distinguished author doesn't need to say that, but it's satanic. You are undermining everything,

and you're making it possible for evil to triumph, but it's with such a level of sophistry that it's done. I mean, you were just saying it. I was at Yale in the 80s when you had the deconstructionists. You know, Jacques Derrida came to, visit and you have the, and this is all this academic, I mean, most people know it's just baloney. They're blowing smoke, but it's so pernicious. And that acid worked its way through the decades until you get suddenly to where we are now.

It's the long march through the institutions. That's the cultural Marxism of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. And they basically took these really evil ideas and worked them through. So that suddenly you think, how did we get here? Well, they've been working on it. What's shifted from that time? I followed in the same institution a few years after you. Yes, you did.

At least at the time, there was a fair fight. In other words, there were the reactionaries, the conservatives who were saying, no, no, there is such a thing as truth. There is a reality that is objective that's outside of ourselves. And there was a healthy debate. Today, that is no longer true. There's no public square anymore in our universities. where the other side of the view can speak truth without being canceled, without being expelled, without being compromised.

I mean, I just want to say, so when I was at Yale, Harold Bloom, you could never consider him a conservative or any kind of a Christian at all. But he was sickened, kind of viscerally, by what he called the grievance industry, that it was basically he just knew that it was wrong. But he was not coming from some conservative position. He was coming from an old liberal position. I was recently in Las Vegas, where I had the privilege of interviewing John Cleese of Monty Python fame. He, like a lot of old school comedians and geniuses, they're sickened by the cancel culture that I can't bring up this or this or this.

And in the conversation with him, he was saying, it's the French, isn't it? It was kind of funny because it's like kind of a python skit. But yes, Deri Dair and Foucault and Foucault and others, have brought these wicked ideas in. And so old school people like John Cleese, who's an atheist, he's a liberal, he's a Trump hater. But he understands that this cancel culture comes out of these philosophies.

And I think a lot of the, a lot of comedians kind of get this, because they're all about speaking truth, saying the uncomfortable thing. And the older comedians are saying, well, I can't, you know, Jerry Seinfeld, even 10 years ago said, I'm not going to colleges anymore. It's sickening. I crack a joke. and I get attacked. So it's kind of interesting to see that some people

who we wouldn't think of as on our team politically or theologically, but they have this visceral sense. There's a thing called liberty. I like it. It's beautiful. Those are like what we call the old liberals. They are not the woke liberals. Yeah.

So one of the things I do is make a distinction between the old school liberals and new more radicalized progressives, what we would call the woke today. What's so strange is that today's today's part. Populist conservative movement has more in common with the old liberal than with the new progressives. What do I mean by that? The old liberals were concerned about individual freedom, privacy, the right to just be left alone. These are issues that are now coming full circle, and it's now conservatives that are concerned about the power of the police state, about the power of surveillance,

where the progressive left, the radicalized woke left, followed. a set of understandings, I write in the book that the politics of grievance are never satisfied. The idea you mentioned that this grievance industry, the irony that at a time where it's never been better for minorities in America, blacks or others, not perfect, obviously, but never been better in terms of equality, wages between men and women, between the races than today, is the same time at which this battle flag of BLM has been raised. It's hurting the black communities because it's, first of all, it's a lie, but it's also undermining their ability to thrive.

Perpetual victimhood is no means for thriving in life. But we also have to be clear that this concept of perpetual victimhood, this is Marxism. In other words, dividing people is good for business if you're a Marxist. And so if you can't divide people economically, it's the workers. and now we're going to do it with these categories. So women, people of color, transgender, we're going to create these categories, and we're going to divide people that way.

And if you say, hey, I'm a Christian, I believe God loves everybody, that's not good for business. They want to stoke the fires of racism. They want to invent racism. We've seen this unbelievable proliferation of hoaxes. of racist events that turn out to be created by people of color, almost to draw attention to themselves.

And you think, what a bizarre world we've entered. So I think people are kind of recognizing this, but you're giving us the historical background. And I want to almost telescope out from that a moment to say, I believe there is a sort of a meta-narrative going on here around creating this impression that things are just terrible everywhere. Now, let me caveat by saying bad things are happening all the time that they're real, there are victims, they should be recognized, taken care of. Something is going on, and you see it even in the economy, you see it even in the various climate crisis, looming apocalypse, all of this language is also Marxists.

You know, the Marxists have this idea of the emissoration theory, thesis, right, which is this idea that in order to bring in our utopia, we have to make sure people understand that things are bad. they're going to get worse and they're going to continue to get worse until there's this cataclysm that flushes it all out, which of course was the Bolshevik revolution as a type where basically impoverished the people, broke the currency, did all of these things. I mention it because I think if you look carefully enough or at least take actually back away and look from perspective, you see this sort of intentional emissoration, making things worse, making things bad. Look, there's no doubt about it.

And I think people need to hear this because many people are looking around and thinking, what is what is going on? It looks almost as though the Democrats are working overtime to destroy America. But why would they do that? They're just incompetent. You realize, no, they are working overtime to destroy the version of America they don't like to fundamentally transform America. So they want to bring in millions of people through our southern borders to create that kind of

chaos to create that kind of financial pressure. They want to destroy this pipeline and that they don't want us to be energy independent. These crises, they believe, will kind of bring us to our knees and lead to the socialist utopia where everybody will say, okay, we can't handle it, so government just tell us what to do. We're going to a break. We continue the conversation with Michael Wilkerson, the book, an important book, Why America Matters. Tell me why Relief Factor is so successful at lowering or eliminating pain. I'm often asked that question just the other night. I was asked that question.

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because I think it is. It is why America matters. So you take us through the history of America to help us understand where we are now. It's important that we understand this, and that's why I'm so grateful to you for writing this book. Obviously, you're not the only person trying to make sense. of things, but you do so in a unique way. And let me ask you, Michael, how do you think your book is unique? In other words, because there are people writing books trying to make sense of where we are. What is it about your book that you think is different? I think the perspective of really starting

with what do we see going on around us in the last couple of years. I talk about four crises. The crisis of circumstances, you know, all the things that are happening, pandemic, China. Secondly, the crisis of institutions, they don't trust us and we don't trust them. the crisis of identity that Americans no longer know who we are. And finally, the crisis of engagement, which means that all three of those things conspire to limit America's ability to engage with itself and to engage with the world.

We can't make good policies because we have a confused sense of what we're trying to accomplish. So number one, I think the perspective, what's different, the perspective that I come at it in time. Secondly, I really do try to move on from problem identification to what can, can we do to address this issue? How can America be restored? And I'm making a point that says, we can't just go back to the past. This isn't about just a lament for traditional values. They're

important. I affirm them, but I make a statement to say, let's take the example of foreign policy. America was very isolationist for its first 150 years. The wars of the 20th century made that position impossible forevermore. On the other hand, at the the turn of the next millennium, what I call the book, The Millennial Turning, we took the opposite approach of interventionalism everywhere, endless wars, having to be everywhere at all times, forcing American values on people that may or may not have wanted them at enormous cost and consequence to our own nation and our identity.

Well, look, you cannot force self-government on people any more than you can force believing in Jesus on people. There are certain things that are by definition free. And so, yeah, that's kind of what happened under George Bush, and obviously it didn't go well. Yeah, it didn't go well. Having said that, one of the links that I make in the book, right before the break, we were talking about what I called the ideological attack. What is happening inside of America, and our confusion, has been clearly identified as an opportunity by our adversaries. China and the lead, Russia, Iran and others, have noticed entertainment.

taking advantage of it, taking opportunity. We've seen it in terms of China's incursions, the espionage, stealing of massive amounts of information and data. We see it in their influencing of the same social media, the same surveillance, the same issues that we've talked about in other aspects. This is something that, again, I think more so today Americans are aware of it, but even two years ago, I would suggest the vast majority of Americans had no idea the undermining of our economy, of our society, of our culture, our values that was being taken place surreptitiously, it's now coming to light and Americans are starting to wake up to us. Well, it does seem to me that Trump was awake to much of this. In other words,

he knew the game that China was playing. And I think that the reason he's been so attacked is because he did begin to go against that. And when you go against that, you're going against those in this country who have been appeasing China, which is to say many Republicans, most of the Democrats, it's good for business. Biden, I can't imagine that anyone today doesn't think that Biden is deeply corrupt along with the Clintons and was making millions and millions of dollars by not going there, by not confronting any of this stuff. So it seems to me part of the solution has to be to elect people that understand this, and there are just a handful of them.

You've hit on so many issues so quickly that I want to respond at a bunch of different ways. But let me just touch on a couple things that I also hit on in the book, which is the censorship of important issues that are going on. You mentioned the laptop now infamously known as having a lot more than what was led onto at the time. The takedown of the social media platform parlor by a group of big tech companies that basically would take advantage of a moment in time around January 6th. January 6th, the treatment, no one, myself included, advocates or supports what happened on January 6th. The issue becomes the unequal application of justice. It becomes the illegitimate prosecution

of people that were foolish, that were wrong, but also, aren't terrorists, aren't domestic terrorists. Well, I mean, I think we don't even want to get into that conversation because, first of all, nobody even knows what happened on January 6th, which tells you everything you need to know. If you don't know what happened, the idea that people are up in arms over what. Can somebody explain to me exactly what? And clearly, they're working hard not to explain what really happened, but trying to push forward this narrative, which, again, it's one of those things that you just think, this is unprecedented in America

that the governing classes would work with this kind of heavy hand to demonize. half of the country. Anyway, we've got 30 seconds left. Please continue, and then we'll be back. So I think what I would say there is that the attack has come in a way, when half of Americans are deemed domestic terrorists, we've reached the end of the road for reconciliation. So the question that I raise is how in the world do we ever recover

from a nation in which people are so polarized? This isn't 80% of people, 90% of people being controlled by a 10% elite. There is an element of that in the deep state. The problem is that we truly are divided, call it 40, 40, 20% of people who don't know, don't care, who really are fundamentally opposed to each other and the ideas of America. That's a scary place to be. I suggest how we might get out of that stalemate in the book. Stay tuned.

We'll be right back. Tell me, Eric, why is Relief Factor so successful at lowering or eliminating pain? I'm often asked that question. The owners of Relief Factor tell me they believe our bodies were designed to heal. designed to heal, and I agree with them. So the doctors who formulated relief factor for them selected the four best ingredients, yes, 100% drug-free ingredients, each helps your body deal with inflammation. Each of the four ingredients deals with inflammation from a different metabolic pathway.

And that right there, approaching from four different angles, may be why so many people find such wonderful relief. So if you've got back pain, shoulder, neck, hip, knee, or foot pain from exercise or just getting older, you should order the three-week quick start discounted. to only 1995 to see if it will work for you. It works for me. It has for about 70% of the half a million people who've tried it and have ordered more. Go to Relieffactor.com or call 800 for relief to find out about this offer.

Feel the difference. When you were young, it was an open book. Welcome back. Final segment with Michael Wilkison, the author of an extraordinary book, Why America Matters. It's like two books in one. Amazing reprise of American history, which then leads to where we are now and what we do to deal with where we are now. One of the things you touched on, one of the four, I don't know what you call them, crises. Crisis of institutions, identity.

Okay, the institutions. That is something that I didn't understand that. That's why I always say, like, I admit how dumb I was until 10 minutes ago. when I wrote my book, if you can keep it, it struck me that, wow, if we the people are the government, if we're self-governing, it means by definition we have to believe in the institutions, because we are the institutions. There's no government up there governing me. I'm governing myself. So I have to trust the IRS. I have to trust the cops, the FBI. I have to trust that these organizations are just extension. of myself, we are self-governing. When that begins to break down, you get corruption. And of course, corruption, it's like the death spiral because now the government is corrupt, so I pull back. I don't vote. I don't get involved. It's us against them, whatever. And so in a sense, we need to

restore the government to the American people. That to me is kind of at the heart of all this. Now, how that's done is complicated. But that is a major crisis when you, finally get to the point where you say we are no longer being represented. I mean, you could argue that the 13 colonies finally got to that point with King George's government. They said, we now know that he is at odds with us. This is no longer imperfect. It's now broken. Most of the debate, a lot of the debate that went on around the time of the declaration, the Constitution, that founding era, was an acknowledgement that the biggest danger of the new Republic would face would be the consolidation of power behind a king, a monarch, that all of the

checks and balances, the institutional framework, the three branches of government were set up in order to try to put in protections for that. We have entered into a dangerous phase where the tyranny that was feared by the founding fathers has manifested, not in an imperious monarch, but in the executive branch, all of these institutions, these three-letter, three-elph, three letter organizations that have now usurped the control that rightly belongs to the citizens acting through Congress, through their elected representatives, to make laws and a judiciary that judges them. But those organizations now are disregarding Congress.

They're not being held accountable. They're lying to Congress. There's multiple, and I cover some of them in my book, multiple instances of senior officials from these three-letter institutions. blatantly lying to Congress and thus to the American people, or simply refusing not to show up and answer questions. Look, the FBI, when they raid a pro-life pastor's home and come at him with like 30 agents,

these are the red coats, folks. It's pretty clear. They are no longer representatives of we, the people. These are the red coats. They're oppressive. Now, what we do about it, I don't know. But I think we need to be clear that something has gone so wrong, that we have these kinds of things happening over and over again.

I think it's the good news is I think it is waking up your average American and saying, something's wrong. This is not America. That's right. And so beyond just informing Americans about their own history and these events, one of the purposes of why American matters is exactly what you just said, to motivate Americans of all stripes and all walks of life to get off the couch, get off from behind the screen, and actually do something.

We're seeing it right now because Americans are realizing what's going on. increased activism in schools, school boards, all sorts of ways. The moment that we're in is challenging because the institutions are reacting. You described one of many examples of what appear to be weaponization of the Justice Department of the FBI. There are many. The list is very long, and it's getting worse. And so something does have to be done. I go through some of that in the book as to what can be done. But simply put, one way or another, the power of the surveillance state, the power of the surveillance corporation society has to be broken, has to be modified, and Americans have to stand up. They have to stand up for their families, for their communities,

for their local lives. And if they don't, my concern, my fear is that we are entering the point of, about to hit the point of no return. At some point you can no longer stand up and resist. Well, that's, that has animated me, what you just said. for the last number of years. I've said, we no longer have anything to lose. We have to fight. I cannot keep my powder dry for another day. The battle is now, but there are many people still thinking,

well, not yet, not yet. And obviously in my new book letter to the American Church, I am horrified at Christian leaders who still, they kind of want to go back to where we were five or ten years ago. They don't understand that the people in your pews are going through agony. They're looking for leadership.

and it ought to be the church that has the courage, that has no excuse in terms of speaking out, as church leaders did during the revolution, up to the revolution, against the slave trade, people who kind of put two and two together. And that to me, again, the reason it's horrifying is because we know what happens. In Germany, when the church was silent, there came a point, you just said it, where now if you figured it out, it's too late. You missed your window. Shut up. You have nothing to say. And so if people don't fight now, it's over. So I don't remember exactly how you conclude your book, but I know that that's part of it. It's part of it. And by the way, I have read your new book, a letter to the American church. It is excellent. This is a great book that everyone should read if you haven't already, because it is a wake-up call. It is the Tuscan sounding, the alarm bell that we need to hear as Americans. The what? The Tuscan bell, the ringing of the bell.

Oh, right, right, right. My book's longer, and that's the only problem with it. You've got it done it pretty short way. There are different kinds of books, but listen, part of the good news is that the horrible crises through which we are living is leading people like you and me to write books and to shout, and it's leading people to take action and to understand where we are. Yeah, and I do. We've talked about a lot of heavy things. and some of them can be discouraging. What I will say is writing this book left me with a great hope

that just at the beginning, God does care about the future of America. He does have his hand on this nation. He loves it. The only nation in history that actually chose God as sort of a foundational idea. He chose the Israelites, we chose him.

And even today, where goes America, so goes the world. And I take comfort and courage in knowing that our virtues of justice, equality, democracy, all the things that we stand for have a place in the world. And, in fact, are more needed today than ever. And so I take heart.

And I want Americans to take heart as well. The book is Why America Matters. The author Michael Wilkerson. Michael, thank you so much. Thank you. Eric, great to be with you. Hey, the folks, before we leave you for the day and the weekend, Albin, we got to mention Greek Orthodox Easter,

Cali Anastasy. We don't say that until Sunday. that means kind of like happy resurrection day. Anastasis, if your name is Anastasios, Anastasia, it means resurrection. I want to talk a little bit more about that, but I want to remind everyone, I'm going to be doing a dramatic reading on Monday from my book, Fish Out of Water. And we're going to do more of these in the future, just to wet your appetite. for what I'm reading on Monday.

I want to talk a little bit about that right now with Albin. But before that, I should remember the book that I wrote after, Fish Out of Water is called Is Atheism Dead? In there, the middle section is all about archaeology in the Holy Land. And we want to encourage you to go to holleland. com Israel. Travel. The website is holyland.

Israel. Travel, to think about visiting Israel, I say it over and over that there's something almost unbelievable about going there and realizing that these places about which you have read are real. Many of them have been excavated and are dramatically real. And they bring you into that world in a way that you cannot possibly experience if you don't go there. So holyland.israel.t.travel is the website. And if you want a list of places to visit, just read my book, because atheism dead. And you'll think, oh my gosh, this place exists.

I didn't know it did exist. Most people don't. Well, you'll see. It's exciting. Okay. But so to my book, which just came out in paperback, it's called Fish Out of Water, or search for the meaning of life. And so on Monday, Albin, you and I were going to be talking to Larry Loftus about his book.

But after that, I'm doing a dramatic reading about my experience with Okidio Siambas, a forbidding figure. Trust me, folks. He was like a scary authoritarian figure, like from another century. You know what I love is the reviews of your book? Kirkus reviews, I can't believe this. They said it's a narrative reminiscent of St. Augustine's confession. Metaxus delivers a warts and all exploration of his youth.

St. Augustine, sir? No, it was quite well reviewed. I'm really happy to say. You know, it's a literary memoir. So it's not like some Christian book. I mean, it's a story of my life up until my conversion. So the culmination of the whole book is the ending, which is my dream, my Jesus dream with the golden fish.

So it's not really St. You're not a saint yet like Augustine. Well, I am a saint in the sense that you are. Any of us who have been have been sanctified by the Holy Spirit. But it's before. But do you say it's up too? Yeah. Yeah, I get it.

Okay. So, well, in any event, so the passage that I'm going to read on Monday, Albin, you went out of your way not to bust up while I was reading it. Yeah. And I just thought people are going to hear that version on Monday. So, but I want to say now that there are phrases in here that are so disgusting. And so I want to say kudos to you, Albin, for not laughing, like for stifling your laughter because this is so disgusting. Yeah.

But I talk about how Kiteos Siambas, Mr. Siambas, this forbidding figure, he basically was a heavy smoker. And he would hack a lot and spit. spit is really the cleaned up word and I talk about how he would very noisily summon a nasty curd as though loading a viscous round into the chamber and then masterfully hock-toed the flemy missile into the trash can. All right, look, this is real, folks. This happened. This is why I'm a messed up person. Thanks for listening.