The Eric Metaxas Show - Prison Time for Burning the American Flag?

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Big Bad John Zmirak joins us to discuss Trump's executive order on flag burning. 

Have you checked your bucket list lately? Are you ready to take care of item number seven? Listening to the Eric Mataxis show? Well, welcome. Tune in and then move on to item number eight, skydiving with Chuck Schumer and AOC. Here now is Mr. Completed My Bucket List at age 12, Eric Mattaxas. Hey folks, welcome on the program. It's August 26th.

I believe today's Tuesday. I'm pretty sure because yesterday was much. Monday, but you never know. Tuesday, August 26th. Today, in hour one, which is to say, right now, my guest is John Smirak. In hour two, we're going to have a supercentennial update about the Battle of Brooklyn, August 27th. That's tomorrow. August 27th, 1776, 249 years ago tomorrow. Amazing. that's an hour too. And then we're speaking to the great Roger Kimball, fascinating conversation with Roger Kimball coming up. But right now, John Zmirak. John, welcome. Hey, Erica. It's a pleasure to talk. We've got a lot to talk about. Now, you've written an article,

you've written two articles. One of them will be out when this airs today. And it is concerning the comments made by Hillsdale President Larry Arne, who is an amazing. American hero, and Hillsdale is absolutely one of the best colleges that has ever existed, just an amazing school. But he made a comment in effect saying that America is not a Christian nation, that having a Christian nation is not possible. I want to discuss that with you, because I've got a lot of thoughts on it as well. And your article really beautifully sums it up. It's an important, it's an important question, an important conversation, an important thing for for every American to understand. But before we do that, John, can we talk about some of the things

that have been happening in the news very recently? I don't know if you want to comment on them. We, the, the raid on John Bolton's house, I was very excited about that. I thought finally we're getting some action, but the left is apoplectic losing their minds. anytime, I mean, there's going to be a lot of stuff that happens. And all they can do, and I guess many of them believe it, all they can do is say it's revenge. He's an authoritarian. You know, if he prosecutes you for like speeding, going to 80 miles an hour in a 40 mile an hour zone, they would say it's because you once said something he didn't like. It just doesn't make any sense. I want to endorse the principle of retribution in this case.

case, justice is about requiting wrongs. The left and the Uniparty. John Bolton is just part of the right wing of the war party. They were completely lawless, completely anti-democratic. They tried to subvert the will of the American people to nullify a democratic election. And then they infiltrated Trump's administration from the inside and leaked and spread lies and stabbed him in the back and did everything they could to cripple him in office and to send his friends and supporters to prison for non-crimes. Now we get to prosecute them on their real crimes. And that is sweet payback and that is good. And I want to point out to you the biggest revenge story, the most explosive scene of retribution anywhere in literature is the last book of the Bible when Jesus throws

the damned into hell. It closes it up and the blessed are in heaven and the damned are in hell. And folks, that's a happy ending. If you don't think that's a happy ending, you're on the devil's side. So I'm not going to say, oh, two wrongs don't make a right. We should never weaponize the justice. That is not. Wait a minute, but John, John, John. You have to lay things out. You've got to lay things out. You're not supposed to weaponize the justice system, and he's not weaponizing the justice system. I wanted to finish the sentence.

That's what I was saying, okay? I'm imitating the whimpering, process-obsessed people like over the National Review who pretend that punishing real crimes is somehow inappropriate because it makes the president look like an authoritarian. It could be perceived as revenge. If Trump is prosecuting people for real crimes, that's all you have to ask. Is he following the law? Not, do you think his motives might be? That's irrelevant. Is he following the law or not? If he's following the law, then what he's doing is legitimate. And it's important that the people who practice lawfare, who persecuted the innocent, that they be prosecuted for their genuine crimes.

Their genuine crime. John Bolton endorsed the raid on Mar-a-Lago, which was completely dubious, completely questionable. The president had the power to declassify those documents. John Bolton endorsed it on television, was on TV talking about how sacred classified documents are, and now we find out he was abusing classified documents. So he's going to be punished for actual crime.

That is completely legitimate. And it's important. It's important that when the left takes the gloves off and starts using the justice system, that they see it can be turned around against them. Because otherwise, they have no incentive not to do it again and again and again until you and I are all, and all of us are in prison like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro. It is, I mean, I almost never, you know, look at TV, but spending some time with my mom up in Connecticut with her, I'll turn it on, and I'll see a little Fox. I'll see a little MSNBC, a little CNN.

And it's absolutely fascinating how MSNBC and CNN are sputtering and CNN are sputtering with rage. And you think all your whole argument is we don't like this. We're unhappy. And so that's it. That's all I have to say. So they have to make up the idea that he's authoritarian. He's a fascist. This is unprecedented.

It's so it's just I'm I'm really fascinated to see how the left is going to respond because they are more and more and more being painting themselves into a corner. And they have announced themselves, and I've got a number of pieces over at the stream about this, as the party of chaos and crime. They are the pro-crime party. And we need to focus that in TV commercials. That needs to be our message. Zoran Kawame Mdani, I cannot believe that is the name of a man who might become mayor of my city, New York, has just been outed by the New York Post as endorsing the Democratic Socialists of America.

He's a member of that. The New York Post looked in their platform, which Mandani endorses and talks about on the campaign trail. They want to abolish misdemeanors. In New York, they want to not prosecute people for anything that's not a felony. So shoplifting, theft under a certain amount would just not be prosecuted. And Mbondani on the campaign trail was said, oh, we need the police to focus on serious crimes. Not these property crimes. It needs to focus on serious crime.

In other words, it's the opposite of the broken window theory. Giuliani came in and said, well, if you arrest people for, I don't know, urinating onto a bus driver or jumping turnstiles or breaking windows, you'll often find that they're wanted on other crimes, and then you'll get them off the street. And sure enough, crime went way down. Black and Hispanic people were safer in their neighborhoods. A lot of black lives were saved by Giuliani's law enforcement. Mom, Donnie's turning it around. You can walk around spraying graffiti on the Statue of Liberty.

That's not a felony. We're not going to bust you. You can go loot stores. You can just go in and take everything you want from privately on grocery stores. And I think that's part of the plan. Mdani wants government-owned stores. He wants the government to be distributing the food, to run the grocery stores. So if you let the citizens, you let the urban youths loot the privately owned stores, they'll go out of business, as they are going out of business in places like San Francisco.

And they can be replaced by government outlets the way they do it in Cuba and Venezuela. Unbelievable. They use it. Okay. When we come back, when we come back, when we come back, folks. John and I are going to discuss whether Trump was correct. I will say he was incorrect

in what he said yesterday about outlawing burning the American flag. I believe in free speech. Burning the American flag is absolutely wrong, but not a crime. We'll be right back. A major retail chain

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Welcome back. Talking to John, Smirak, talking about a lot of stuff. John, before we went to the, break, I brought up this issue. Yesterday, Trump ostensibly announced two things that he wants to do, which I believe are both wrong. I almost never disagree with President Trump, and I love him. He has done so much, so well, so quickly that I find it breathtaking, exhilarating, glorious. But yesterday, there were two things that came out of his administration, one of them that he spoke about, an executive order, again, ostensibly, I have to use the word ostensibly, to criminalize burning the American flag. So I want to say there are many things that are very, very, very wrong, very wrong. Burning an American flag, extremely wrong, whether it is criminal. is another case. If somebody

stands up and starts praising Satan, that is very, very, very wrong. Should it be criminalized? That's the question. You know what is criminalized? Calling for the violent overthrow of the United States government is illegal. You can be arrested for that.

That is perfectly constitutional. that so free speech is not absolute free speech has its limits you cannot broadcast the nuclear launch codes you can't reveal classified information free speech is very very far from being absolute which is why we have libel laws so free speech pornography a lot of people say that is protected free speech and that's why filth completely control it floods the internet and you can't keep your kids away from it This free speech absolutism that supports burning the flag dates back to 1989, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision where Rehnquist and most of the conservatives voted against the flag burning, and several of the people who helped write Roe v. Wade voted for it. To my mind, if you say if burning a flag is a symbolic speech, well, then what does it say? what does burning the emblem of the country say

except that you want to just violently overthrow its government or destroy? I disagree with you, John Smirak. Okay, so what does it mean when you burn a flag? Well, that's the whole point. You have to interpret what it means. It may mean that I'm very angry at my country. Now, that might be something that I disagree with and you disagree with, but people have the right to say,

I'm angry with my country or that my country is not living up to its standards. Maybe somebody's saying that. But for me to police it and to say, I know what they're thinking, they want to violently over the, you know, when somebody begins to actually violently overthrow the country, that's when they are violently overthrowing the country. But to do something symbolic like that, in other words, if somebody burns the flag and says, I'm doing this because I want to destroy America, well, now we can, we have a case. Well, guess what, Eric? That's exactly what Trump said. If you look at his comments,

he said, if a flag is burned in the context of, and he laid out the context of people calling for violent measures against the country. If you look at the text of what Trump actually said, it meets precisely the criteria you just laid out. I've lured you into my trap, Johns Merrick. You've explained it. Thank you very much. But however, my solution to the flag burning thing is much, much more elegant. I would simply decriminalize whatever the veterans or patriots, if a group of people see somebody burning a flag, I would simply not prosecute any American who went after that guy. I would simply, and if I were on a jury, I would nullify the jury. I would vote to acquit anybody who did anything to the flag burner.

So I'm more, to think it's a libertarian thing, I will outsource the defense of the American flag to angry passers by. and simply not prosecute them for beating up the guy who burns the flag. Well, I know what you mean, but I think, of course, there have to be limits there as well. But the point is, the larger point is that there's a couple of things, first of all. What you said, which I lured you into saying, is that what Trump said is different than just if you burn the American flag, you go to jail for a year. He tied it to within the context of calling for the violent overthrow of America. So he clarified or acts of terrorism. Yeah.

Trump has smart lawyers advising him. He's not just popping up. But the beauty of it, and this is what Trump does consistently, is he's kind of trolling his enemies and he's doing stuff to scare people, which I find funny. I mean, by him having or allowing the raid. of Bolton's house, all of the bad guys are now wringing their hands. Oh, he's going to, he's going to go after me. That's good. Also, Democrats to defy him are now going to burn flags, and we're going to get video of it. We're going to use it in campaign commercials.

This is the party of burning flags, open borders, looted stores, urine on the subway. This is the party of everything that makes you not want to hang out in a Greyhound bus station at four o'clock in the morning. The Democrats want to turn all of America into a reeking gray-hound bus station full of hobos on fentanyl. That is their vision of the future. They have a dream. That is their dream. We have a different dream. Well, I just find it funny to see how liberals are, they lose their minds because Trump, and again, he seems to know that he's doing this. like he just says this stuff and they're all just losing it. They're all, you know, projecting their

worst fears that this is going to happen and that's going to happen. And part of me just laughs at it because I don't, you know, again, you or I would be the first one if Trump were actually doing something genuinely authoritarian, overstepping his bounds legally. Where we would first say, sorry, that's not right. But the point is he's not going to do that. And, but they, They really believe he's Hitler, I guess, half of them. And so they think, oh, he can do anything. Oh, we're now, we're in danger of our lives. These people are very fragile worldview, which is completely incoherent and self-contradictory,

and they can only maintain their sense of confidence because they have institutional power. And if you threaten that power, suddenly the emperor realizes he has no clothes. These are people who say that the world, world has. no purpose, there's no justice. Everything is the result of accidents and evolution and random mutations and the survival of the fittest. But, but, but, racism is terrible and transphobia is terrible because it violates the human dignity of these featherless bipeds who accidentally popped out of the evolutionary process and are going to die soon and don't have immortal souls and don't matter. But it's very important that you respect the dignity of the drag queen as he

exposes himself to the children because that's part of his right to express himself, which is guaranteed by these fundamental rights that are based on absolutely nothing because you're just a featherless biped. It is complete self-consuming nonsense. And all you have to do is prick it with a needle and show them you're not afraid of them. You don't respect their power. You're going to take away their institutional power. They can't cancel you. They can't break you. And then they fold like the cheap circus tent that they are right on top of the freaks and the clowns. Very well said, right on top of the freaks and the clowns and the other freaks. Okay, so, John, another thing yesterday that President Trump seems to have okayed is the idea,

I don't know who it was, is Secretary of Commerce. I always forget these names. It's not Zeldon, but it's a... What is it, Leibnick? Is it Leibn? What's that? I don't, I can't. Is this the Chinese students?

Yeah. Yeah, that's insane. If you were talking about bringing off, if Trump wanted to read. Excuse me. State what it is. I was going to state what it is. President Trump, it seems, has given the okay when this makes no sense to John or to me, and we're going to talk about it, to allow the number can't be right,

600,000 Chinese students to study at American universities 600,000 Chinese schools. There are already tons. 600,000 more. Now, every Chinese student, as a condition of leaving China, promises to spy for the government,

says he will report back to the government what he finds in America. That's part of the boilerplate of what they signed. So this is 600,000 potential spies. And they're doing it. He said he's doing it because otherwise some of the colleges will close. Guess what? If the colleges can't stay open without cheap Chinese students or cheap illegal Honduran workers

or any other kind of ridiculous subsidy that's bad for the country, then they deserve to close. Why do you suppose President Trump, who is typically brilliant, and typically here's all sides of things. Why do you suppose he would countenance this idea? And do you think, I hope, he's just floating the idea so that there is blowback and then he'll say, okay, we're not doing it. Yeah, I think that might be it.

He's floating the idea and then it gets shot down. And he tells the Chinese, I'm sorry, I tried to make a deal for you. But, you know, my people that own my base, they then accept it. No, no, no. What I would welcome would be 600,000 dim sum chefs brought in from China because I want their dumplings. I don't want their espionage. Can we make that deal? Dumplings, not espionage. That's a great slogan, John. We'll be right back. Welcome back. We're talking to John Smirak. I believe that's his real name.

John Zmirak, we've talked about Trump's executive order on the American flag. We've talked about this very lamentable proposal to bring in 600,000 Chinese university students. Honestly, that number, I thought that doesn't make sense. There can't be that many. Like, that's the weirdest thing I've ever heard. There are a lot of Chinese, Eric. There are more than 600. No, I mean, I'm telling you, there are a lot of them.

This is a crackpot idea, and it should get shot down by Trump's. Well, look, let's review. Okay, number one, a lot of these Chinese students, they could be the most wonderful people in the world, but they, as you said, must agree, because they're under communist dictatorship. If they're going to come to America, they have to agree to spy for their satanic government. So most of them won't actually do that. But if you will, and it's very, very bad, we ought not to have any of them here, period. Why should we be training foreigners with our technology to bring those skills back to their evil country? China exists by stealing our intellectual property, pirating our movies, ripping off the design.

of our factories, stealing our technology. China is arguably more of an enemy than liberal Protestant churches. I say that. Right. Okay, so we have to talk, John, about your articles. So just to reprise, the president of Hillsdale, Larry Arne, said we cannot have a Christian nation. America can't be a Christian nation because Jesus said my kingdom is not of this world. I talk about this a lot. And so if somebody says, is America a Christian nation, the only right answer to that question is yes and no. You have to explain yes and no, and you have to explain what you mean. So when he said it cannot be a Christian nation, he was kind of like inviting trouble because on one hand, America is a Christian nation. It's not officially a Christian nation. It's kind of complicated. What say you, sir?

He also said the whole idea of a Christian nation is bad because it's unchristian to have. a nation. So I'm... Oh, he said that? Yeah, he basically, he said the idea of a nation that's Christian. I think he meant a government. I think he meant a Christian, officially Christian government. Like a theocracy. Well, no, there is a big spectrum between, okay, in my article I lay out, imagine a left-right axis of church and state, okay? And at the far right, you have theocracy. You have Calvin's Geneva, you have Spain of the Inquisition, where the government persecutes heresy, where the government prints its own version of the Bible and enforces its own version of Christianity. And basically, on one hand, takes orders from the official church, but also ends up taking over that official church. Whenever the church and state are fused, you give the government a very strong temptation to control the church.

And sure enough, in all those Catholic countries, the king was picking the bishops, not the pope. The government will end up running the church if the two get intertwined. That is if you want the far right position. You go to the far left position of like David French and Russell Moore. The Bible and the Christian moral code have no influence in the public square. David French called Drag Queen Story Hour one of the blessings of liberty. He and Russell Moore take money from Planned Parenthood. Donors to bash Donald Trump.

The far left says that the church should have virtually no influence on the laws. I present what I think is a centrist position. And this is the position of the American founders, by the way. Okay, parentheses, folks, if you're listening, this is the correct position. Go ahead, John. All right. The government should enforce the morality. based on natural law, natural law that's written on the human heart, that every human being

potentially can come to by thinking rationally about what is good for mankind. It is good for men to marry women. It is good for them not to be divorced. It is good for children to be protected from pornography. It is bad to be a prostitute. It is bad to be a drug addict. All the things that flow from the Christian biblical vision of the human person. that can be argued for rationally, that don't require the supernatural virtue of faith. So, if you argue for the Trinity, you go up to a Jew or a pagan and you try to explain the Trinity to them, you can't prove that rationally. In fact, they can't even come to believe in it unless they're granted by the Holy Spirit, the supernatural virtue of faith, which saves us from hell. The government can't provide that grace.

The government can't tell whether that person has that grace or not. So it would be wrong. It would be tyrannical for the government to say, everyone must honor the Blessed Trinity. Everyone must believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Everyone must believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary. These are all truths of faith that can only come to us from the Holy Spirit. So the government shouldn't enforce those.

It should enforce laws against murder and pornography and drugs and same-sex marriage and all these other things that you can argue for simply by looking at man's nature and looking at the tradition of natural law, which goes back to Aristotle and the Greeks, that you don't need supernatural faith to believe. This to me, I call this a centrist position, but of course it would be considered far right

on today's political spectrum. You don't have the right to do something that violates the natural law. So it's not wrong for the government to prevent you from doing it. However, you don't necessarily want the government enforcing every aspect of the natural law because then the government gets too much power. So that's an argument about prudence. Hang on.

We'll be right back with more. Don't go away. Folks, talking to John Smirak, we're reacting to Larry Arn, the president of Hillsdale College's statement that America is not a Christian nation or that you can't have a Christian nation. and John, you're laying out what you call a centrist position. But, you know, you're also tying it to natural law. But the founders of this country who set up the whole thing, who understood all this stuff, never heard of the term natural law.

Well, of course they did. Eric, absolutely they did. Natural law was a very strong current in Calvinist churches, which most of the founders came from. The concept of it, but the term natural law? Yes, the term. Natural law. There are books and books and books. written by Calvinist theologians of that century talking about natural law. Absolutely. It was a

very lively concept in Protestant and Catholic circles. Look, when Thomas Jefferson says nature's God and nature's law, that's what he's referring to. He's referring to what we can know is good or evil based on reason, not the secular empty reasoning of the Enlightenment, but the traditional reason that was used. The whole European tradition of law is based on natural law. The Enlightenment is necessarily secular. I feel like it kind of tended that way,

but I feel like it helped clarify some of the very things we're talking about. What did? The Enlightenment. In other words, that... Well, I think the Enlightenment was almost 100% a dark, wicked, and evil apostasy.

And I call it, I call it, I call it, it the end-darkenedment. But in any case, our founders never imagined that free speech would cover pornography. They never imagined that marriage laws, that the Supreme Court would say, someone's, a gay person's human dignity is violated if you don't let him get a marriage to someone of the same sex. All the things that the liberal courts have done in the 20th century, in the name of the Constitution would have horrified every one of the American founders. They would have said this clearly violates the nature of man and natural law.

We have had completely dishonest jurisprudence. The ACLU and other radical secularist groups won over judges in the 20th century and got them to issue false, dishonest readings of the Constitution, which took the broadly Christian. America that the founders intended to create that did not have an established church but was broadly Christian and governed my natural law. And they turned it into something much more like the radically secular anti-Christian government of revolutionary France and eventually Bolshevik Russia, where the church and the state are enemies. And it's the state's job to restrain the church

and to impose secularism on the population. We should explain that in, I think it was 1984, Father Richard John Newhouse wrote a book called The Naked Public Square. It might have been 1980. But in that book, he talks about what we're talking about. He basically says that the public square, we're supposed to have faith in the middle of the public square. The Constitution talks about we're not supposed to have an establishment of religion. So the government cannot say everybody has to be Presbyterian or everybody has to be Catholic. Well, we can't have that, but we can have Christian.

And this is the conundrum that people don't understand. I was just writing in my book on the Revolution about the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774. And it's so fascinating where somebody, I'm not remembering who, I think was John Jay of New York, said, let's begin with prayer. Or who said it? I don't remember now. Who said we need to begin with prayer? George Washington called for a National Day of Fasting and Penance. Well, no, no, that's a separate issue. I'm just saying as in the, there's no doubt about that. So there's tons of Christianity in our founding. But in the First Continental Congress, somebody calls for prayer and somebody else says, we can't have prayer because, because all of the members here are from different denominations. And it's just too confusing and it will cause division. And I think at that point, Samuel Adams, who comes from this puritan. background gets up and says, no, I am happy to hear the prayer of anyone in the room, including the Reverend Doucher, who was an Anglican on the opposite end of the theological

spectrum from a Puritan or a congregationalist. And they, so in that moment, all of these Christian men of various denominations agreed that we can, we can agree on Christian prayer. We can agree on the Bible. It's fascinating to me. We never codified what we as Americans agreed on. And in a way, because it was never codified, or maybe it can't be codified, people say, oh, we didn't agree on anything, and we can't have any religion. Right. And to me, the best compromise, the best way going forward is to focus on natural law, because in principle, it's written on everyone's heart. Everybody can, if can be, you can be. You can be. You can be. You can do. You can focus. You can focus. You. You can could at least lay out arguments that make sense, whether they decide to be persuaded of them or not.

And the social conservative movement in arguing against things like same-sex marriage and arguing against things like abortion, it doesn't cite the Bible. We don't cite statements by popes. We talk about the nature of man. We talk about what is marriage? What is the purpose of marriage? What does it mean to be apparent? We look at man's nature in a full, rich way, not the boiled down materialistic Darwinian pseudo-scientific vision of man, but the broader vision of who man is, as by Western philosophy over the centuries,

the reflection on man's nature, and we try to promote what is good and to restrict what is evil. It's really important that people investigate what natural law is. I recommend a great book, and I think every one of your listeners who's interested in what is natural law should get hold of this book called What We Can't Not Know, What We Can't Not Know by Professor Jay Bejewski of the University of Texas. And it goes into the natural law tradition and it lays out, shows you how you can practice natural law jurisprudence, basically, how you can use the tools of natural law to understand good and evil in a way. a broad context. You don't have to just pull things ready made out of the Bible, and you don't have to defer to Carl Sagan and Cosmos for this empty, dead post-Christian, secular worldview. There was a rich, rich tradition of rational, moral reflection on what is good that is neither theocratic nor atheistic. And that's where I think people should be.

What we can't not know is the type. What We Can't Not Know, and the author's name, Unpronounceable, Jay, Budja, Juke, just get to stream.org and read John's article. We'll be right back. Talking to John Zmirach, John, Zmirak, John, these issues that. we're discussing right now on whether America's a Christian nation or what that means, this is so central to everything. I mean, it is absolutely undeniably central to everything. Yeah, well, a country has to have a governing creed of some kind. As Bob Dylan said, you've got to serve

somebody. Might be the devil, it might be the Lord, but you've got to serve somebody. There's going to be an official morality of any government. As of now, our official morality, says you can burn the American flag, but you can't burn the rainbow transgender pride flag. That's sacred. You'll go to prison for that. That's a moral position. The government is not morally neutral. The government always takes moral stance.

I'm simply saying the moral stand ought to be based on the Western tradition and the full, rich, biblical view of man, rather than based on an empty, dead, pseudoscientific, post-Christian secularism. I write about this a lot in my recent book, no Second Amendment, no first, where I show how the founder's vision of man, based on the biblical Western view of man, that view of man said you have the right to practice your religion, you have the right to defend yourself against violence from criminals, and you have the right to rebel against tyrannical governments. that's why the populace need to have weapons so that if the government becomes tyrannical, they can overthrow it. That's James Madison writing in the Federalist Papers. The ordinary citizens need to be empowered. The government needs to be a little bit afraid of the people.

Whereas if you go to Great Britain, the people are afraid of the government. They're arresting people there for defending themselves against attempted rapes by Muslim refugees. They're arresting the people who defended themselves. They're arresting citizens for criticizing the government's immigration policy. That's what happens when the citizens have been disarmed and rendered helpless. There are a bunch of veal calves at a Scalapini factory waiting to see if the government's going to come for them.

That's what happened throughout the 20th century, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Cuba. You see one tyranny after another, and the first thing they do is disarm the citizens. And that's why I wrote that book. Well, and that's the point is we, the people, are supposed to be. to be the government. So we can't be afraid of ourselves. But if there is some government different from we the people, we know that we're already sliding toward tyranny. The title of your book is no Second Amendment, no first. Right. And it's all about the connection between gun rights and religious freedom. And you see that in country after country after country, a citizenry

that has been disarmed by the government can be forced out of its church. It can be be persecuted for its religion. It can be brainwashed and doctrinated and subject to terror. And we saw that the whole 20th century, the ugly story of people being enslaved by their governments and not having their ability to fight back. Well, before we leave you for the day, folks, let me remind you, we're posting a lot of stuff on my personal YouTube channel. This conversation, for example, will be posted on my personal YouTube channel. Please subscribe to my personal YouTube channel. And gosh, I think, yeah, tomorrow we're going to air a conversation I had with L.A.

Marzuli about the Nephilim, Bigfoot, UFOs. It is unbelievable. And the whole conversation began because I noticed behind him, and you can see it on the YouTube video, which is already posted of my channel. I noticed behind him a curiously, horribly misshapen skull. I asked him about it. It is a replica of what he claims, not kidding, is a Nephilim skull. The conversation was unbelievably fascinating. That'll be tomorrow. In the meantime, thanks for tuning in. Thank you, John Smirik. Oh, by the way, in hour two coming up in a couple of seconds, we have a supercentennial update followed by my conversation with Roger Kimball. Stay tuned.