The Eric Metaxas Show - Rod Martin on Faith, Freedom, and the Future of Conservatism

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

In this episode, Rod Martin joins the conversation to unpack the intersection of faith, politics, and culture in America today. From the challenges facing religious liberty to the role of technology and economics in shaping the conservative movement, Martin offers a thoughtful big-picture view of where the country is headed. He also shares personal insights on leadership, community, and why the future of conservatism depends on both principle and innovation.

Welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show. It's a nutritious smoothie of creamy, fresh yogurt, vanilla protein powder, and a mushy banana. For your mind? Drink it all down. It's nummy. I wub, vanilla. I wub, I wop, I wap, vanilla. Here comes Eric Mataxas.

Hey there, folks. Welcome to the program. They tell me, uh, let me see, it's Wednesday, September 24th. The hour is. late, ladies and gentlemen. There are things happening. The news is moving so fast. I can't keep up. Yesterday, President Trump was insulted by the people at the UN who made his escalator break and who made his teleprompter not work. But these are glorious moments because no matter what the enemy does, it backfires. Trump was able to speak from, to shoot from the hip for an hour

at the UN, an hour of truth-telling at the UN. You realize that's about 59 minutes more truth-telling per hour than they've ever had in the history of the dopey, Jew-hating, America-hating UN, folks. And that's just part of what happened yesterday. I want to cover the news today with, I guess, in hour two, we've got John Smirak. We have Megan Basham. We're going to be talking about the Jimmy Kimmel thing. But right now in hour one, I get to talk to Rod Martin. Hooray. Rod Martin, welcome back. Great to be here. Listen, you just, you cheer me up. Even when you're not smiling, you're smiling, you're a tooth talker. But at the heart of truth, there's this joy. There's this secret joy. I know you're a man of profound Christian faith. There's so much going on in the news.

Where shall we start? I mean, maybe we can start with the murder of my friend Charlie Kirk. I was just at his, at the memorial service in Phoenix two days ago. This is a watershed moment in our culture that I don't think any of us, I know none of us could see coming, an absolute watershed moment in the culture like we really could not even dream about. Well, the word is that in addition to the couple hundred thousand who went to Arizona, a hundred million people watched this on streaming and so forth? I mean, who's ever heard of such a thing? I mean, that's the sort of thing you would expect if modern technology had existed at the time for Martin Luther King or John F. Kennedy. It's just incredible. And it speaks volumes about how this

has touched people. This is an extraordinary moment. As you say, people are actually waking up. They're actually realizing what time it is. And the hour is very late. You know, freedom is at stake at the moment when people are willing to meet speech with violence. Because freedom can't survive that. There's no possibility to have freedom if people are willing to respond to speech with violence. Because that is literally the definition of terrorism. Terrorism is using violence or the threat of violence to bring about a police.

result. That's what distinguishes it from just normal violence or organized crime or whatever. And that's what we're seeing increasingly in America. When the cities blow up in fire and brimstone, as they did in L.A. recently because somebody doesn't like deportations. Ironic, by the way, because Bill Clinton deported 10 million illegal aliens. Barack Obama deported 5 million illegal aliens, but we didn't have any riots then. They didn't even hear about it. I never heard about it. It was a complete non-issue.

The media was absolutely not interested in those deportations, but suddenly it's the most important thing to talk about. That says everything. It was just law enforcement, and it was half-hearted law enforcement at that. Clinton actually still believed in the 90s, in the idea that depressing wages was bad for unions. And so he actually meant it.

But Obama didn't mean it. It was just in the normal course of his duties while he also engaged in a lot of open border policies, although not to the degree that Biden did later. So, you know, where are the riots? Where are the condemnations? Where were the, you know, all the attacks on the administrations for being fascist and authoritarian? But you see the same thing in 2020 when when the cities, 140 cities are convulsed in violence, because George Floyd dies. And look, it's horrible when anybody dies, but you don't go kill other people because somebody died. That's absurd, especially people who had nothing to do with it. And this is this chaos cult that the left has become that is going to destroy our republic in very short order. You quickly become Lebanon if you allow this to continue. And thank God we actually have a president who's taking it seriously treating it as it is and sicking the FBI on it,

that's actually the FBI's job to stop things that are too big for localities, like organized crime syndicates in the 1920s and 30s, and like terrorist organizations, like the weather underground, SDS, Black Panthers, Ku Klux Klan, and now Antifa. Well, I have to say, you know, we, there's so many people, including conservatives and Christians, who do not get what a miracle and what a gift it is that Donald Trump is president. And not just Donald Trump, but this Donald Trump, this Donald Trump is that much more on fire for speaking truth and acting on behalf of the country than he was in 2016. He is a changed man and he was a wonderful president in 2016, but we cannot dream really of what they put him through

and what it is done to him and how it has really radicalized him to say, you know what? The time is short. I'm going to get it done. I'm going to do what needs to be done to save the nation. And I'm always fascinated, Rod, at how many people really don't care, how many Christians are going to churches that couldn't care less that Charlie Kirk was murdered. That couldn't care less that an election was stolen.

That couldn't care less that we had authoritarian regimes in our states telling us what we can and cannot do. They couldn't care less. And I'm going to say this like a broken record. I wrote a book called Letter to the American Church. We made it into a film called Letter

to the American Church. Charlie Kirk helped us produce the film, TPSA, produced a film with us. And Charlie is centrally featured in the film, and he said to me emphatically, I remember when he said it to me, we want to get this everywhere. We want to get this film everywhere. And I say this because more churches than not in America, people listening to this program go to these churches. They said, you know what, we don't want to screen that film. Prominent churches in Dallas. I know people who go to these

churches. They said, no, no, no, we don't want to screen that film. So now that they've murdered Charlie Kirk folks, will your pastor screen the film, which we offered free to every church? In other words, do you understand what hour we're in? Or do you want to be on the sideline? Do you really not care? God is a judge, and I believe the Lord is judging the churches that refuse to step up and be part of the battle. And it's because of the cowardice of many of these pastors that what Charlie Kirk said, which was absolutely biblical, was made to look radical. And so he had the target, the bull's eye on him because pastors refused to step up and speak out. So the hour is late. God is a gracious God, folks. But if you're going to a church that says, we don't want any part of this or we're,

you know, we're just going to do our thing here. We're going to preach our Bible and preach Jesus, which is baloney. You're not preaching the Bible in Jesus. If you shrink from these hot button topics, those churches are dying. It's like Jesus when he cursed the fig tree. God is patient, but his patient isn't infinite. At some point, he says, you're not doing what I have given you the ability to do. So time is up. And I think we're at that, we're at that hour. Rod, I want to talk to you at so many different things. But before we do that, folks, I want to remind you this interview and most of our interviews are on my YouTube channel, Eric Metaxus. Please subscribe to the YouTube channel because we want to get these conversations out

to the widest audience possible. Some of you listen on podcasts, some of you listen on radio, but the YouTube channel is fantastic. You can see what we're wearing and how we combed our hair, all that exciting stuff. But please go to Ericmetaxis.com, sign up for my newsletter and we'll send you all this stuff. So just go to Ericmataxis.com. If you're not signed up for that, you're just missing a lot of stuff. And I say this because we want to make it easy for you. We send it to you twice a week, all these interviews, and lots more.

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you'll receive free shipping plus $100 in free digital gifts. So go to MyPillow.com today or call 800-9778-3057. Use your promo code for the best offers ever. Quantities are extremely limited. So order now, that's promo code Eric. Mypillow.com. promo code Eric. Welcome back talking to Rod Martin.

Rod, you always cheer me up just talking to you. What else is going on in the culture right now? There's so much happening. We had the Jimmy Kimmel issue. We have the issue with the U.S. we're seeing an earthquake, a gigantic earthquake happening, not just an American culture, but in the world. For Donald Trump yesterday to say some of the things he said, I just thought, I've never seen anything like this. Usually people go to the UN and they're very, very diplomatic in the worst sense.

They actually say nothing. To have a president say, I don't care, I'm going to speak truth and you deal with it, UN. I mean, frankly, I said this on my ex account. we should leave the UN, we should take the property back, we should send the UN, they can have their headquarters in Gaza, and we can turn the UN headquarters into a Trump hotel. We really have to step away from an organization that refuses to stand up for what we believe in and what it was set up to do. Well, Trump has a great building across the street from the UN. I don't think he'd want theirs. It's a disaster. He'd need to rebuild.

it from the inside out. But regardless, your point is valid. The only benefit to our being part of the United Nations at this point is that we get a veto in the Security Council and are thus able to curb some of their worst instincts. But it's a horrible organization. Everything about it is just crooked for very good reason. It's dominated on a one-country, one-vote basis by the worst countries in the world, simply because they outnumber us. And it's long past time that we had a, you know, for the lack of a better term, sort of a league of democracies that actually share some degree of value and act in concert in the world that excludes countries like China and Russia and Chad and Niger and actually doesn't let Libya run its human rights council. And so there may be a place

in the world for that. But the point remains. Donald Trump went and, as you said, spoke more truth in just under an hour than those people have heard in ages. It was the high point of diplomacy for most of your in my lifetime to go and say almost nothing. You know, you could measure the effectiveness, supposedly, of diplomatic speech by its stunning lack of content, because we don't want to ruffle anybody's feathers. And the truth is, the world is on fire. You know, we live in a time when horrible things are happening. We're losing the post-war consensus regarding not conquering your neighbor.

We have China trying to dominate the planet and imposed by stealth and ultimately, overtly, its social credit system and destroy the church. everything bad is in bud. And Donald Trump is willing to say it. He sees it, and he's willing to nip it. And that's just extraordinary. It makes all these people just, you know, their heads explode and they just can't handle it. But what they have discovered is he isn't going away.

They're going to have to deal with him, and it's worse than that for them. They're probably going to have to deal with his hand-picked successor, whoever that turns out to be. And that person is probably going to be Trump 3.0. So this is the new order. We're going to rebalance trade in a way that is fair, where other people's markets are as open as ours have been. We're going to rebalance our alliances where our so-called allies actually pay their fair share, put their own skin in the game, build their own weapons, all these kinds of things. we were paying 70.5% of the bill for NATO. They were paying 29.5. There are 31 of them.

They're all rich countries. There's no excuse for that. They're completely free-loving. We made them rich. Let's be clear, folks. We made them rich. After the war, okay, just to, so we're tracking here. After World War II, Europe, of course, had been bombed into rubble, and we, the gracious,

generous, godly nation known as the United States of America, not only help them to win that war and to defeat the Nazis, but we then come in and spend our money to help them rebuild, just as we did with our enemy in Japan. We spent our money. That is a billion years ago, folks. That is a million years ago. That is forever ago. And we have continued to be like the Potter Familius, taking care of them, like their children. it's 70 years. They're not children anymore. They have robust economies. They claim to stand for what we stand for. And they ought to have been on their own 30 and 40 and even 50 years ago in some cases. And we have continued to support them with your money. Your money and my money has supported them.

So Donald Trump says, enough is enough. And you have them squawking as though, I mean, it's funny, Rod, because this really reminds me of it's kind of like the Palestinians. It's kind of like the victim people. They always want that they're going to complain no matter what you do. They want to take advantage of your generosity. And if you have any wisdom, when people want to take advantage of your generosity, you cease to be generous. You say, excuse me, that's not how this works.

If you're not grateful for what we're doing, we will stop doing it. And Donald Trump has called, he's called their bluff, basically. He said, let's put this on an even keel. Let's be honest about what you ought to pay. And it is so delightful. It's really shocking to me to have a president this courageous and clear-headed about where we stand on this and many other issues. I wrote an article on this a few weeks ago called Daddy's Home, and that's really what's happening. None of these people are going to come out behind because of what he's demanding.

If Germany has a real army and isn't training its infantry with broomsticks for lack of rifles, as they were doing last decade, if Poland can defend itself better than Ukraine did three years ago, which was already pretty good, if you have a strong NATO army that is indigenous to Europe, Europe is no longer under threat. No one can do anything to a strong NATO army. Europe. And if they're picking up 50% of the bill beside us, the alliance is infinitely stronger. So when you get all of these people from both Bush and Obama eras saying that Trump is destroying NATO, no, Trump is actually reinvigorating NATO. It's one of the few international organizations we're involved in that actually works. It hasn't been working as well as it should

for the last 35 years. He's making it work. And suddenly the world is. changing. And the more you see the free peoples of the world strengthen, not just militarily, but economically, which is what the trade piece is about, everybody's focused on the tariffs. They're missing the fact that what he's really doing is he's using tariffs to open their markets, which they have had closed to us. For example, Germany was charging us four times the tariff on autos that we were charging them. Well, that's not free trade. There's nothing free about it. But if you level that playing field, all of a sudden, everybody has a chance to compete and get better and their economies grow. So they can support a bigger defense on a lower percentage of GDP ultimately, and no one can attack them.

This is really the key. And it's the key in the Indo-Pacific also to the degree that China is a threat, it certainly doesn't have to be if we and our allies are sufficiently strong to deter them from doing anything stupid. And then their societal problems kick in. They become less and less of a threat. And over time, maybe they do evolve into a better country. But in the meantime, our country is safe. That's where we are. And on the trajectory we were on, we were letting it all spin out of control,

and we were letting tyrants come to dominate the world again. And honestly, I can't fathom on a certain level why the Democrats are for that. but the Democrats are for that, and the actual reason they're for that is they're in sympathy with it. They see America as the source of evil in the world. They see nations as bad. They are for international globalist organizations that tell us what to do without accountability and without elections. And so they're on board. And that is expressed in the streets by Antifa. That's expressed in their foreign policy when they're in power? Well, it's interesting you say this because I keep going back to the American Revolution.

I'm working on a book about the American Revolution right now. And exactly what you're saying applies during that time. At that time, Great Britain was at war with its own values. And America, the 13 colonies, we were more – we cared about what the British Constitution said. We cared about natural rights. We cared about these things that flow from a biblical view, that we are created in God's image with certain inalienable rights. Theoretically, that's what the British believed, but there were enough people there. It's kind of like the Democrats of the time who said, well, we don't care so much about that.

They became the enemies of their own values. That is what's playing out in Europe right now. That's what's playing out in the Democratic Party right now. They no longer believe really anything. They've become the enemies of the very things that made them fruitful and flourishing. And so it's another existential crisis. We're dealing with the basics right now. When we come back, folks, I continue my conversation with Rod Martin.

Stay tuned. Welcome back, folks, talking to Rod Martin. Rod, I was just saying that in my research on the American Revolution, what fascinates me is you see this played out over and over. because in a funny way, truth doesn't change. Biblical values, truth is what it is. And it's clear that from a biblical worldview, you know, you see that mankind is fallen on the one hand. On the other hand, God wants us to have a relationship with him

so that we can have a covenant relationship with him. We can govern ourselves and we can flourish. So the founders understood this. And they put this together and they said, we believe it's possible to have a people, if those people are virtuous, if they love God, they can govern themselves. And the British at the time said, we don't think so much. Now, not all the British, of course, there are people like Edmund Burke and others who sided with America. But you're seeing the same thing right now. There's only one way for people to be free.

There's only one way for a country to really flourish. And if you're on board with that, you will flourish. If you're not, you will go downhill. And so we see that Western Europe has, in recent years, I would say increasingly over the decades, drifted farther and farther away from that. So when J.D. Vance gave his speech, you know, last year in Munich, he's saying whatever values we had in common after the World War II, we no longer have those values in common. You don't believe in free speech. You are persecuting Christians. You're allowing, uh, uh, it is Islamic populations to come into your countries, to take over, to erode what you theoretically believed in.

And so in a sense, Trump is forcing them to see this right now. And he's saying, listen, this is tough love. Either you get these things right or you go away. Your people hate what you're doing, but they don't seem to have the power. I guess what I wonder is whether you think any of these countries in Europe can pull out of this leftist, socialist, open borders, death spiral. It really is dismaying to see Kierstormer and others who absolutely don't get what President Trump is trying to communicate. Well, yes, I do. I'm actually pretty optimistic about Britain because I think Nigel Farage is going

to succeed in forming a government, which was absolutely unthinkable five years ago. But reform is just killing it over there. The polling is. is just staggering. The Tories are dying. I hate that. I was political officer of the Cambridge University of Conservative Association. I was actually a dues paid member of the Tory party. But, you know, they have just jumped the shark. They governed as though they were labor. And now labor is governing like it's old labor. You know, the old bad days of, for instance, in 83, the standard bearer of the Labor Party running against Margaret Thatcher in her first general election after she became prime minister, actually suggested that they should leave NATO and join the Warsaw Pact. This is bad. This is really bad.

Well, look, just to be clear, yeah, no, folks, just to be clear, because not everybody in this audience thinks too much about UK politics. but, you know, the Tories, the conservatives, they are the rhinos. They have become worse than useless, that they say they're conservative, but they're acting, you know, as conservative as George Herbert Walker Bush was conservative. These are uniparty, globalist, useless conservatives. And so, of course, the Reform Party, like the MAGA party, has stepped up and said, you know, Nigel Farage led the Brexit thing. you really have something cooking.

I am desperately hopeful that what you're saying is true, that they can pull out of this, that the people of Britain want this, but whether they can pull it off, whether the ADF in Germany can pull it off, whether Marine Le Pen can pull it off in France. I certainly hope so. I think things have gotten bad enough that it's at least possible, just as in this country, things had to get really, really bad before we get Donald Trump in his second term. Well, and that was true with Carter and Reagan also. If Carter hadn't absolutely tanked to the country, there wouldn't have been a Reagan.

And Reagan was a transformative figure because he wasn't willing to accept the conventional wisdom in the Beltway. And he just opposed them at every turn. But this is an aspect of what we were talking about earlier with diplomatic language. The fact that, you know, people had to fight for Reagan to be able to make the tear down this wall speech is just, extraordinary, and it tells you these people have no moral center. They have no moral clarity. They are not willing to have any courage. And Reagan had that courage. And Trump has that courage on steroids. I mean, it's just all day, every day. And he says whatever he thinks. But most of what he thinks these days is much more intellectually grounded than it was at this same point eight years ago.

You know, we all said the big problem with Donald Trump in 2016 is that he's an outsider. That's his greatest benefit and also his greatest weakness because he has no idea what they're about to do to him. Well, he didn't. And he spent four years learning. And then he spent four years in exile thinking about it intimately. And now they're executing on a game plan that I don't think anybody could have imagined possible from any president, not even a Ted Cruz or a Ronda Santos or a J.D. Vance, for heaven's sake,

maybe not even a Reagan. And Trump is on target. So that's my biggest hope for Europe. Trump is setting an example. Trump is showing that you don't just cease to exist if you tell the truth. Trump is showing that you can actually make America great again. And that means you could make England great again. You could make Germany and Poland great again. And there's no reason not to accept getting out of your own way. And I think we're seeing that process take root. We will be right back. I'm talking to Rod Martin.

Don't go away. Welcome back, folks. I have the pleasure of speaking with Rod Martin. Rod, what is your website? Rodmartin.org. We want everybody to come. We've got about 25,000 subscribers there. We've got 275,000 more followers on X.

But come to rodmartin.org. We do daily geopolitical analysis that Fox Business calls absolutely phenomenal, quote unquote. So you should partake. Well, I happen to agree with that. In my opinion, counts way more than Fox business. Rod Martin. Yes, it does. But in all seriousness, your stuff is so terrific.

I thank God for you. I am grateful that I get to speak with you on this program because there are very few who are doing what you're doing. And it's very important. I think one of the things God's calling in my life is I identify folks and voices and I say, you need to listen to this one and this one. We have most of them on this program. My friend Jim Cuncelor, his stuff is unbelievable. And a lot of people I've never heard of him, John Zmirak, he'll be on later today. But it is so important that we get our news and our views from the right place.

folks. Haven't we spent enough decades getting our news and our views from the wrong places? This is a big part of going forward is to, you know, to bless those folks that are blessing us. And so, Rod, you're leading the back. I want to talk to you about what we were just touching on with Europe. I really hope that Europe can pull out of this death spiral. John Smirak, he'll be on an hour two. He is not sanguine on this issue. He seems to think that, you know, the Islamists are just going to take over and that if the folks in these countries say we're going to get rid of these Islamists, there's going to be civil war. Where do you think that goes? Because we understand their problems are very, very deep over there.

Well, they are. And if things continue as they are, John is exactly right. But that's always the thing, if things continue as they are. If things had continued as they were under Jimmy Carter, the American economy never would have pulled out of its tailspin. We would have been at the mercy of OPEC forever. And we'd have lost the Cold War, to be perfectly honest. And I think General Sir John Hackett and his team did a brilliant job of explaining that in a book that they handed to Margaret Thatcher and Jimmy Carter, which kind of began to wake him up. But he was. was, but he was never really awake. So, you know, you can pull out of these things. And you can do so remarkably quickly because capitalism works fast. If you actually give people the opportunity to

innovate and be creative and be entrepreneurial, freedom actually produces a phenomenal amount of wealth and integrity and just, you know, everything good. And we see that in the places where, where it takes root because capitalism, first of all, thrives on a lack of covetousness. For me to have a capitalist society, I actually have to be happy for my neighbor getting ahead. And that's the opposite, folks, of Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, greed is good. We're not talking about that. Self-interest can be good. It's an important part of how the free market works, but it's different from greed or covetousness. Nobody ever makes that. point and rod of course you just did that is a very important point to make about the true the way the

free market is supposed to work well if you take gordon gecko's view and apply it systematically you're going to end up a totalitarian society because in real capitalism and of course gecko was a traitor so that isn't real capitalism but you know when you're actually making stuff, you actually have to solve someone else's problem to make a penny. You can't make any money if you don't actually think about somebody else's problems and try to creatively solve them. That is the golden rule. So you have one system that is rooted in a worldview that involves my respecting your property, my respecting your life, my respecting your right to disagree with me, and my seeking to solve your problems.

That's one worldview. That's the worldview Burke and Pitt and our founding fathers understood. And then there's the other worldview that's exemplified by the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution and every communist revolution, which Tim Kane exemplified the other day

when he said that your rights come from government, not from God. Well, if government gives you your rights, then government can take them away. They aren't a right. they're a privilege. And Tim Kane gets to decide what you have and don't have. In effect, he's a governmental Gordon Gecko. And that's what we're seeing in Europe. And that's what we're seeing revolted against in Europe in Nigel Farage. You mentioned AFD and Lepin and others. I think we're seeing a tremendous

upswing in shaking off the collective guilt that the left has imposed. opposed upon the people of Europe feeling like nation states are the reason for World War II. And the truth of the matter is, that's bunk. Imperialism was the reason for World War II. Hitler was an imperialist. This is why we have to have this program, folks, and it's why Rod does what he does and why I do what I do. We have to understand this.

Every American needs to understand this stuff. So when some jughead says nationalism is bad, ladies and gentlemen, nationalism is not bad. You know what's bad? Bad nationalism is bad. Hitler's nationalism is bad. George Washington's nationalism is good. You need to understand how this works. And so when you have a whole Western elite culture that does not understand this, the Democrats in America don't understand this, the Uniparty, rhinos don't understand this. You're going to go downhill quick, and we've been going, we've been drifting downhill until this moment where suddenly we have this great hero we don't deserve in Donald Trump leading us out of this and being willing to articulate

the basics that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and every great leader has understood, but which we've been forgetting. 30 seconds left and then we'll be back. Go ahead, Rod. Well, this is the battle. And this is why you see the red, green axis that we're experiencing, where Marxists hook up with Islamists. The only thing they have in common is tyranny and a hate for America and our worldview. So they're allied until they aren't. Well, that's exactly right. And of course,

it's no coincidence, folks, that these people basically hate God. They hate the God of the Jews, the God of the Christians. There's something spiritually underlying where they're coming from. It is a spirit of hatred. It is false. It is fundamentally. objectively false. We need to understand these things, stand for the truth. Heroically, we'll be right back with Rod Martin. Welcome back, folks. I'm talking to Rod Martin. You can find him at Rodmartin.org. Tomorrow, we're talking to our friend Sidney Powell, an American hero. I'm just thrilled to get her back on the program. We're talking to Pastor Cheon, who's running for governor in California. Later today, we've got Megan Basham and John.

the great John Zmirak. So, Rod, where do you see things going from here? I mentioned that this Charlie Kirk murder, and this is a moment in the culture where I think this is where the enemy, it's the cliche of the enemy overplays his hand. If you want to kill Jesus, I would say if you're the devil, I wouldn't do that. That's not going to go well for you. If you want to kill these saints of God, these good people, I wouldn't do that. That's actually going to backfire. I think this is the ultimate backfiring. I think we're going to have more robust expressions of Christian faith and love of freedom and love of America than the secular left ever dreamt of. This is going to be an amazing moment going forward in the culture. Well, Erica Kirk did the world, the biggest favor anyone's done it in memory, when she stood up there and forgave her husband's killer. And it's just this powerful moment. And it was like, wait, we didn't see that after George Floyd.

We saw random black people demanding that random white people kneel to them. You know, we saw anything but forgiveness. And so you get this fortunately very alliterative idea that is just permeating everywhere all of a sudden of they burn cities, we burn candles. And that's the reality. One side believes that even if you completely disagree with me, I respect your right to say it. I'm going to debate you. I hope I win. It's my job to persuade people. And then we're going to have a vote. And the other side says, you people are evil and we're going to kill you. Or at least we're going to cheer when somebody else does. Those are stark differences. So thank you, Erica Kirk. And And thank you all the people who were presenting the gospel at that amazing memorial service. And shame on the pastors that I'm sure Megan Basham is about to shame for ignoring the truth of Charlie Kirk's ministry.

Charlie Kirk was possibly the greatest evangelist of our era simply in his boldness and in the numbers of people who responded to him. but he was also a, forgive the term, a minister of applied theology. He took his worldview and he applied it to everything that he addressed. And so if he's talking about tax policy, if he's talking about property rights, if he's talking about DEI, if he's talking about whatever, he's actually coming at it from a biblical worldview as he understands it. I'm not going to say that every single thing that ever came out of Charlie Kirk's mouth was right, but it was right in intent. Every single thing the man ever said in his too brief life

was aimed at glorifying Christ and making the world better for regular people. And if we look at the crime that we witnessed immediately before Charlie's assassination, Irina Zerutska being brutally murdered by a man who walks off muttering, I got that white girl. This is horrifying. It's racism that the critical race theory people will not consider racism, but it's also wanton crime that was made possible by a system that released him 14 times. And the truth is, if you apply the worldview that we espouse, that goes away. You stop having that kind of wanton death and destruction aimed, usually not at the Charlie Kirk. of the world, usually at the innocent single mom and her kids who are just trying to get them to school. That's right. That's right. We're out of time. Rod Martin, always a joy to be with you.

Folks, go to rodmartin.org. Rod, thank you so much. God bless you. Thank you.