The Eric Metaxas Show - Rod Martin on John Bolton, DOJ & FBI: What’s Really Happening

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Rod Martin breaks down the latest moves by the DOJ and FBI involving former National Security Adviser John Bolton, and what it means for the Trump administration and ongoing investigations. More at ht...tps://www.rodmartin.org/

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:10 Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Did you like your gravy thick and rich and loaded with creamy mushrooms? If no one was looking, would you chug the whole gravy boat? Chug, chug, chug, chug, chug. Stay tuned. Here comes Mr. Chugg-a-lug-lug himself, Eric Mattaxas. Hey, folks, welcome to Hour 2. Guess what?
Starting point is 00:00:37 In Hour 2, you don't have to just listen to me. I have a guest. And even better news, my guests, my guests, is Rod Martin. Rod, welcome back. Good to be here. Thank you. Well, listen, you're fun to talk to for many reasons because, you know, I can say this. There are a lot of people that they bring the facts, which is very important, and they have something to say. But to say, to talk about stuff, some of which is kind of dark with joy, that's extra credit. And so I really, I really, appreciate that because we're, you know, we're living through some crazy stuff. So some of it is happy
Starting point is 00:01:17 and some of it is just, you know, kind of dark in a way. And I mean, for example, today we can talk about the Bolton situation. I mean, he was not arrested, but his home was, it wasn't even raided, technically. It wasn't a raid. But the FBI went to his home. He wasn't there. They had a warrant and they went in and they took stuff. huge news. What is your sense of what's going on with that? Bolton is just the beginning. This is the thing that conservatives have been incredibly concerned about and in a despairing and almost apathetic kind of way. Ever since Tulsi started releasing all these previously classified documents,
Starting point is 00:02:08 there will never really be arrests. There will never really be indictments. none of this is ever really going to happen. And I understand how they feel because it seemed to that way for the last eight years. But the truth of the matter is that in Trump's first term, all of the agencies that would have to go after these people were working against him. And it turned out that even some of his own appointees were some of the worst offenders, like Chris Ray, who as head of the FBI, not only authorized the now we know completely. unconstitutionally an impermissible raid on Mar-a-Lago, but actually authorized the agents to use deadly force against anyone who might offer even token resistance. So they're literally saying, you guys can go in and shoot Baron or Melania if you want to. And this is a Donald Trump appointee.
Starting point is 00:03:06 Chris Ray is one of his. So you look at that and it's like, gee whiz, nothing's ever really going to happen here. And we had the John Durham mess and nothing came of that and on and on. In case anybody forgets, in case anybody forgets, John Bolton was a Trump appointee. And again, I think we have to say these things over and over because people, some people maybe don't know this. Ladies and gentlemen, none of us, most of us, at least, did not know. In 2016, 17, 18, 19. We didn't know that you couldn't trust the head of the CIA or the head of the FBI. We didn't know that these were deep state actors who don't give a darn about we the people.
Starting point is 00:03:53 They don't give a darn. They think they are somehow beyond having to care, beyond accountability. And they did what they wanted. And many of them did deeply wicked things. Donald Trump, when he appointed John Bolton, we can only imagine who told him to appoint John. Oh, he's a good guy. Okay, I appoint John Bolton. Christopher Ray. And on down the list, his chief of staff. In 2016, in his first administration, he was hamstrung, the deep state around him, put people around him like Mike Pence, and many others who were there to prevent Trump from doing what he thought was right. to prevent him from doing the will of we, the people. So now we're in a new day.
Starting point is 00:04:41 And so it's interesting because I said on X, and I think you agreed with me on X, kind of what you just said, Rod, that this is the grenade, the pin has just been pulled on the grenade. This is the beginning. We now are going to see more and more and more and more. But it seems that Tulsi Gabbard and Cash Patel
Starting point is 00:05:05 and others, they have been very, very cagey and canny and wise because they don't want to spook people. They want to have all their ducks in a row before they make a move. So it strikes me that they have been careful. Some of us maybe would fear they're being over careful. But is it your sense that, well, just to go back to the Bolton thing, what is your sense of why he would be the first? Well, first things first, you know, as far as them being slow and methodical, I completely agree. You have to build an airtight case. Certainly, if any of these prosecutions have to happen in the District of Columbia, the court's going to be horribly unfair, and you're probably not going to be able to impanel a fair jury.
Starting point is 00:05:56 So you have to have it nailed. And even if you do this in South Florida or somewhere else, the case has to be airtight, and you don't build it. that based on suspicion. So they're taking their time. But I want to come back and say, look, at the same time, some of these people have been on the job for four months. You know, this is quick. This is shockingly quick. And they've had to spend quite a bit of that time getting rid of bad deep staters who are actively working against the president's agenda. There are 540 elected officials in the entire federal government. The president gets to a point about 5,000. The bureaucracy is about 3 million. And the minute you do that, what you get
Starting point is 00:06:43 is an enormous number of people who may or may not be partisan, but, oh, wait, they're all Democrats. And they generally all have the attitude of, I was here before you came, I will be here after you're gone. And that has been true. So that is your deep state problem. And Bolton is a perfect person to go after first. First of all, there was about a month left before the statute of limitations ran on his offenses. He isn't probably part of the grand conspiracy investigation that Patel and Bonchino have launched against the Russiagate conspirators. That probably isn't Bolton's crime. We don't know the full scope of the investigation, but Bolton clearly, I mean, just blatantly, used classified information to write his hit piece memoir after he got fired by Donald Trump. And he was
Starting point is 00:07:41 warned at the time. Fred Flights, my friend, who was chief of staff at the National Security Council, when Bolton was the National Security Advisor, warned him in public. There's a good video clip of that. I'll probably post tomorrow. You know, this is just blatant. You can't do this. Well, he thought he could because he's part of that uniparty, not necessarily always deep state, but that uniparty beltway establishment that is completely captured by groupthink is there to protect itself and its own interests. And he thought he could get away with it. He literally thought he was above the law. And all these guys who just spent the last five years saying no one is above the law are about to find it out.
Starting point is 00:08:29 at the tip of the spear. I ask Adam Schiff. I ask Tish Jang's. Well, it is so interesting. Obviously, people who don't care about actual justice have to call this retribution. They don't, you know, they're just throwing terms around because they don't like it. Because they're people that they like, you know, what do they have in common with the people that they like? They all hate Donald Trump.
Starting point is 00:08:57 So they're not really interested in the facts or the, truth or an actual justice. So they call it retribution. And I think we have to push back very, very hard. I mean, MSNBC and CNN, they are spending most of their time attacking Donald Trump. For some reason, he's an existential threat to them. And of course, he is. Praise the Lord. He is. Because what they are doing and what they've been saying, they're slowly but surely being called out on it. So I really think that we are living in exciting times and that the Bolton, whatever is going on with him is a very, very good sign. And it is a signal to all these other nefarious figures. Listen, you're in trouble. And you didn't think, you know, we would ever get
Starting point is 00:09:49 in power and be able to do what justice requires. But we are and we will. And we've just begun. We'll be right back, folks, talking to Rod Martin. Don't go away. A major retail chain just canceled a massive order, leaving My Pillo with an overstock of the classic My Pills. And this is your gain, because for a limited time, my pillow is offering their entire classic collection at true wholesale prices. Get a standard My Pillar for just 1798. Want more upgrade to queen size for only 2298 or king size for 2498? Snag body pillows for 2998 and versatile multi-use pillows for just 998. Give your bet a whole new pillow set only while supplies last.
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Starting point is 00:10:53 Don't forget to use promo code Eric to grab your standard. my pillow for only 1798 only while supplies last. To Rod Martin. Okay, so Rod, where do you think this goes from here? There are a lot of people out there who complain, I think, too much, people that I really like, but they complain about, oh, nothing's being done, nobody's being arrested. I mean, I think it's a legitimate concern because, as you said, in the past,
Starting point is 00:11:33 nothing ever seems to happen. and Jim Jordan and others, they have these commitments. Nothing happens. What is your, why are you encouraged to think even beyond the Bolton situation that things are happening? Well, first, as to Congress, they simply don't have the power that people would like for them to have. And trust me, if they did have that power, no one would like it. But they don't have the power to arrest people and try and convict them. That's not in their bailiwick. and to the degree that they can do something, they can investigate things, they can shed light on things, they can gather sworn testimony that can be used against the witnesses if they commit perjury, but they have to refer any criminal activity to the Justice Department.
Starting point is 00:12:25 And I'm sorry, Joe Biden's Justice Department simply wasn't going to prosecute anybody that a Republican Congressional Committee wanted prosecuted. simply wasn't going to happen. By contrast, they were quite happy to send Steve Bannon to jail for 90 days and throw away the key, you know, for contempt of Congress, which nobody had ever been convicted of or punished in the way that Bannon was. So, you know, we've had this two-tier justice system, and if it looks like retribution, it's simply because one side has never faced prosecution. Now, ever. And that's really where the hope lies. This Trump administration is entirely different. Tulsi Gabbard is the
Starting point is 00:13:12 director of national intelligence. She was personally targeted by the Biden people. She was on a no-fly list. You've got Cash Patel, who wrote an entire book on all of the people in the grand conspiracy. He's now investigating. You've got Dan Bongino. Dan doesn't need the money. He's not. He's not. not there to get rich. He's not there to write his book. You know, these people are committed. Pam Bondi's committed. She was a great AG here in Florida. And these people mean to go clean house. This is why the Democrats are freaking out, but they are only at the very beginning of that. There will be arrests as soon as these cases are made, and these cases are going to mostly fall, maybe not John Bolton's, but most of these are going to fall under that grand conspiracy label
Starting point is 00:14:07 that Cash Patel is put on it because what it does is if you go at it that way, all of the conspirators are part of the same ongoing crime, which completely eliminates your statute of limitations problem. You know, the statute of limitations is run on Hillary's Homebrew server. Those things are gone, but wait, not if she's part of an ongoing conspiracy, or at least one that continued into pretty recently. That also gives you the opportunity to try them in a venue other than Washington, D.C., because material aspects of the conspiracy took place, for example, in South Florida. Are we necessarily going to get a fair trial in South Florida? No, you can't count on anything in life. This is not heaven. But do you have a better chance? Absolutely. And my guess is we would impanel a fair jury and we'd get a fair judge and we'd have a real shot. So these people are in trouble. When we think about a former First Lady and Secretary of State like Hillary Clinton, when we think about a two-term president like Barack Obama, it is hard for most of us to conceive of them pay.
Starting point is 00:15:27 paying the price they should pay if they actually did what they seem to have done. What is your sense of this? Because I think, you know, nobody, I think precedents can be broken. Do you think we're on the verge of these kinds of precedents being broken? In 2016, Donald Trump made the decision graciously, overly graciously. as we now know, to let Hillary Clinton skate. He's been asked about that, and it seems that he is a very different person now and that he feels that justice must be done.
Starting point is 00:16:09 What is your sense of what could happen with Hillary Clinton with a Barack Obama? Well, and Trump's the one who told us that, which I think is very telling. He is aware that he was trying to maintain what we politely call democratic norms. And in reality, the other party was completely committed to the opposite. So, you know, they spent the last four years trying to put him in prison in multiple states. And, okay, if those are the rules, then equal justice under law. Hillary's guilty of a ton of stuff that if you were a corporal over here at Egglin Air Force Base across the bay from me, you'd be in prison for the rest of your life for.
Starting point is 00:16:52 And everybody knows it. I mean, you've got this unbelievable two-tier justice. system where normal people do hard time and important Democrats skate. And that day is over. I mean, the fact that Tulsi Gabbard personally fingered Obama as the chief conspirator in this case that they're bringing tells you that they actually mean to go after these folks. And if they don't go after the very top folks, honestly, the world doesn't end from that. what we need is significant upper mid-level heads to roll. People who have to do the execution of these schemes,
Starting point is 00:17:32 if you start getting those guys, their successors are not going to commit this kind of criminality for a generation. What you just said about, you know, Hillary Clinton, in other words, what, in your mind are the crimes that she committed that somebody else would go to jail for the rest of their lives for. I hadn't really heard that. What do you mean by that? Oh, just the mishandling of classified information. The thing that always gets lost in this discussion, because the enemy media intended us to lose it, was Donald Trump had a bunch of classified information, some of which was sent to him against his will by the National Archives,
Starting point is 00:18:18 and then they write him for it. But everything he took with him, everything he knew he had. As president, he had an absolute 100% legal power to declassify simply by fiat. He didn't have to sign anything. He didn't have to declare anything. There doesn't have to be an order.
Starting point is 00:18:40 He has total power to classify and declassify, as does every president. Problem. Joe Biden wasn't president. when he took all those classified documents that were sitting in his garage. Hillary Clinton wasn't ever president. She was inevitably going to be a couple times, but she never made it. And Barack Obama, arguably, has some protection on some of these things, but the grand conspiracy charge doesn't necessarily protect him, because if you go at it that way, that isn't an official act. And there is
Starting point is 00:19:16 definitely a case to be made that he does not qualify for the presidential immunity that the Supreme Court just established. So all these people are vulnerable and they're vulnerable in a way that no one's ever been before because Democrats selectively enforced this against Republicans. Republicans never enforced any of this against Democrats. And once upon a time, they all gave each other a pass because there wasn't enough criminal behavior to really go after and make it look third world. But we're in that world now. We're absolutely past the point of no return. These people have to hang. There's no getting around it. Well, we don't mean literally, folks, but hey. Well, a couple of them maybe. Some of these people committed crimes that might qualify
Starting point is 00:20:06 for the death penalty. I don't think anybody's going to get prosecuted for that. I don't think the Justice Department is going to ask anybody for that. But some of this stuff absolutely violates the espionage act and would be a capital offense if somebody else did it well if that's true rod then you know what's fair is fair now that's a chilling thing but i think we ought need to we we ought at least to be talking about this uh i mean we're talking about it here but i mean just generally in the cultural conversation um what amazes me is that these people are on tv last night Adam Schiff was talking, I think, on MSNBC. Some of these people, is it your sense that they fear what is coming?
Starting point is 00:20:57 I think they have to. And Schiff, of course, has launched a legal defense fund. I'm not sure I've ever seen anybody launch a legal defense fund for their mortgage fraud before, but okay, whatever. Tish James is going to need to do the same thing. You know, a bunch of these people, including now a Federal Reserve Governor, it turns out, are being referred to the Justice Department by the federal mortgage lenders because they've just blatantly done something that would send you and me to prison. And look, you can't fool a bank. I mean, you really can't. They're going to do their own appraisals. That kind of thing is true. But what you can do is, you can do is,
Starting point is 00:21:42 you can lie to them on a federal form. And if you claim a house as your primary residence to get a cheaper interest rate, you're defrauding the public. You committed a crime, ladies and committing crimes, as far as I know, is illegal. We'll be right back. Welcome back. I'm talking to Rod Martin about the news of the day. And I just went out on a limb. I may not be a constitutional scholar, Rod Martin. But I'm willing to say that committing crimes is illegal. And so what we're talking about is a lot of people who have done a lot of things and they thought they could get away with it. Now, why do you think Tish James, for example, or one of these judges at the Fed, why do you think they thought they could get away with that?
Starting point is 00:22:43 I mean, it's an interesting question for me. And Adam Schiff, throwing Adam Schiff into that as well. I mean, Democrats just don't get prosecuted. Tish James was down at the White House coordinating her persecution of Donald Trump with the Biden team. They weren't going to let her get prosecuted for anything. And, you know, what are the odds you get found out anyway? I mean, if you lie on a mortgage application, 99 times out of 100, nobody's ever going to notice, you know, unless you're just ridiculous about it. So, you know, it was an easy thing to do. And, you know, it was an easy thing to do. And, you know, it's one of many easy things to do. They've been sloppy because when you're not faced with real opposition, that's what happens. You know, if you have a football team that only plays inferior teams, it becomes an inferior team itself because it's never challenged on the field. And you see that with, with, you know, top ranked teams that sometimes get knocked off by some lower ranked team. And it's like, what happened? Well, they got lazy. They got complacent. And that's, what's happened here. They are used to being able to get away with murder, and they have,
Starting point is 00:23:55 and that is coming to an end. We've mentioned Adam Schiff. Comi, Clapper, Brennan, if you, you know, if you're willing to guess, I guess I guess I guess what is your guess on what will become of those three figures? Well, there's no question those guys are part of the grand conspiracy investigation. And if there was, in fact, a grand conspiracy, there is no question they were part of it. There's plenty, plenty of evidence of that. But it's worse than that for some of these guys. Comey in particular perjured himself before Congress. And if memory serves, Clapper did also. A couple of the, well, Clapper absolutely did. A couple of these other guys have these ancillary
Starting point is 00:24:45 process crime issues. But the bigger. Fish is the Russia Gate conspiracy itself. It was cooked up in the Oval Office. It was led by Barack Obama. They created whole. They manufactured a fake intelligence community assessment and lied to the public for all these years claiming that all 18 intelligence agencies agreed. No, they didn't. It was a lie. It was entirely this group of conspirators at the time. and they are going to see their day in court. I'm convinced of it. I don't think Pam Bondi's going to let them go.
Starting point is 00:25:28 Well, one of the things that fascinates me, I keep hearing people say, like, this is bigger than Watergate. And I want to laugh. I can't even believe anybody would even compare Watergate to this. This makes Watergate look like jaywalking. I'm not exaggerating when I say that. This makes Watergate look like absolutely,
Starting point is 00:25:49 nothing. And I think unless a lot of people don't have a sense of history or a lot of people just, they're not aware of the facts. But the facts of what we're talking about makes Watergate look like absolutely nothing. And by the way, my friend Chuck Colson, he went to prison. He was the special counsel to President Nixon. Haldeman and Ehrlichman went to prison. A lot of people went to prison. If it could happen then for something that's almost nothing, it stands to reason that many of these figures can and ought to go to prison. Well, and it was almost nothing by comparison. For those among your audience who are a little younger, I was three when Watergate happened, so that may include me. The truth is, what happened is there was. There was.
Starting point is 00:26:48 was a group of people in support of Richard Nixon's re-election who broke into the Democratic National Committee to try to find dirt on a candidate who proceeded to lose 49 states and could have lost 50. And it's just the dumbest thing that anyone's ever done. And they didn't find anything useful anyway. So what gets Richard Nixon ultimately is the appearance that perhaps maybe in eight minutes of tape that was deleted, possibly he actually led a cover-up of this. Okay, well, that's bad. I'll agree. I don't know that it should have ended his presidency,
Starting point is 00:27:29 but it's certainly not a good thing. We don't want people to do that. This is the president of the United States concocting a fake intelligence community assessment on the basis of supposed intel he knows to be false. Every single intelligence agency of this, government said was false to remove a duly elected president who was his successor. And don't miss that detail. They weren't just trying to hurt him. They weren't just trying to tie down the
Starting point is 00:28:04 administration. They were trying to remove him. And you, Eric, will know, and maybe not all your viewers were paying close attention, but you know that in that first six months after Trump took office, all we heard was that he was likely to be removed from office. And part of the reason for appointing a special counsel was to avoid Congress acting ahead of a special counsel. Well, of course, as we all know, Mueller politicized that horribly for the next two and a half years and then came up with literally nothing. Total goose egg. Absolutely nothing. We're going to have to go to break.
Starting point is 00:28:42 We'll be right back talking to Rod Martin. When I look into you. The sky is dark and gray. The teardrops from my eye. Welcome back talking to Rod Martin. Rod, the other day you wrote a piece saying that Christianity commands capitalism. And I wanted to talk about that. I should have brought it up before now.
Starting point is 00:29:26 What do you say in that piece? What do you mean by that? Well, it's just plainly true. The scripture creates a system of private property. And you start with God's ownership of everything. By virtue of creation, God owns everything. In a conventional economics class, we all learned that the economic problem is scarcity, you know, unlimited wants met by limited resources. But no, that's not actually the genesis of it. And I use that word deliberately. The genesis of scarcity is the fall. Ownership predates it.
Starting point is 00:30:06 and God owns not only everything, but every one. So he gets to set the rules for how things work. The Ten Commandments give us very plainly this picture that not only may you not steal, but in the Tenth Commandment, you may not even think about it. And we have countless laws in Moses delineating that. You must not move the ancient landmark. You must have honest weights and measures. everything is designed to eliminate fraud and deception and theft. The only nationalization we see in
Starting point is 00:30:44 Israel, of course, is Ahab and Jezabel stealing Naboth's vineyard. And for that, they ended up dead, and their dynasty ended up destroyed. So, you know, God took a very dim view of this. Everything in scripture requires private property, and just to cap it off, 1 Samuel 8 tells us that a tax level as high as the tithe, which is 10%, for those of you from Rio Lenda, is oppression. So, okay, we have a system where you have a small government, you have an empowered populace, and they have resources that are delegated to them by the ultimate owner, God, and are expected to produce a good result, as we see in Jesus' parables of the talents and the minas. Everything here is designed to maximize individual freedom, limit government oppression,
Starting point is 00:31:42 and bring about better and better stewardship among God's people to actually finish the creation mandate, to actually be fruitful and multiple. I fill the earth and subdue it. And that's really the ultimate point in the garden. God gives Adam work well before there's a fall, And he gives him the garden not as a museum, but as a template. If you have that much multiplication, you're going to necessarily have to spread outside the garden, and Adam's task is to make the world like the garden. That's what we're doing, and that's what we're going to see ultimately, because we see it in Revelation 21, the new Jerusalem descending out of heaven, is filled with all the symbolism of Eden.
Starting point is 00:32:30 the only real difference is population, a huge, huge number of people, the redeemed of Christ. So, yes, Christianity has established what we only in modern times call capitalism as the rules for how we are to treat God's property. And I do not have the right to take what belongs to someone else because it was given to him by God in much the same way that I am not permitted to take someone else's life because he was made in the image of God. Well, it's so interesting that, you know, we now have leading the race for mayor in New York, somebody who's essentially a communist who believes in, what do we call it, theft, right? That there are people who have some stuff, we're going to take it away from them,
Starting point is 00:33:21 and we're going to redistribute it as we see fit. That's called theft. We have had an America, a system where you can't do that. But it's amazing that there's so many people that they know so little about how things work that they think, well, that sounds fair. You know, steal from the rich, give to the poor. What's wrong with that? Some people even think it's Christian. Obviously, well, maybe not so obviously, but it is not Christian.
Starting point is 00:33:47 It is wrong. And God has established these ways of doing things. One of the things that I think about a lot is how God works through history and how God's way of doing things. It takes centuries, even millennia, you know, before we get Luther, before we get religious liberty, before we get the idea of liberty to produce a country like the United States of America, these things take time, but that it seems to be the Lord's ultimate plan. Why he decides to let it go through history and he doesn't just kind of make it happen is another story. But capitalism, and when we say capitalism, we mean virtuous capitalism. We mean good capitalism. We mean good
Starting point is 00:34:29 capitalism. We don't mean crony capitalism or whatever. We don't mean an abuse of capitalism. We mean the good thing that you were talking about. It does seem that that is the Lord's plan to bless people. Well, it's the golden rule. I can't make a penny in what I do unless I solve someone else's problem. And that's what we did at PayPal. When we went from zero to 25 million customers in two and a half years, we solved an acute problem that millions of people had. And we took a very tiny amount of money from them. And collectively, that added up to 10 figures and more. So everything in a free system depends on solving someone else's problem. And this is the genius of the system. God has arranged things such that even completely selfish and sinful motives lead you as long as you're following the rules in the absence of fraud.
Starting point is 00:35:29 in the absence of coercion, which is the essence of a socialist system, in the absence of those things, I can never make a dime without solving your problem first. And not only that, but you're free to reject my solution. That's liberty. That's what, that's the brilliance of the American system, but it's also the brilliance of God to cause even his enemies to follow the golden rule. It's interesting. I'm writing a book now about the American Revolution, and it's so fascinating to me to see, you know, how the Americans understood this. And the British, some of them understood it in the 17th century. But by the time you get into the 18th century, a lot of them forgot this stuff. A lot of them, they weren't interested in what John Locke had to say. And so it's fascinating to me how these ideas work their way through history, that because of the British Constitution, because of John Locke, because a lot of figures in 17th century England, you eventually get people understanding this, but it kind of leaps over to the United States where we have kind of carried the torch for this. Folks, when we come back,
Starting point is 00:36:44 I'll continue my conversation with Rod Martin. Welcome back talking to Rod Martin. And folks, I forgot to say, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, Eric Mataxis, so you can watch these videos because you have no idea what you're missing. We're doing all kinds of stuff with our hands. You're missing it. Okay. So, Rod, I was just saying that it's fascinating to me as I've done my research on the American Revolution, how these beautiful ideas, which are fundamentally biblical ideas, they work their way into English law, into the United. the British Constitution in the latter part of the 17th century. But it seems like America grabbed that torch and that what we have here is the continuation
Starting point is 00:37:55 of that. They pretty much dropped it there, or at least they didn't seem to believe in it the way we do. And now in England, they don't seem to believe in free speech. All these things that we ultimately got from them, they no longer believe in. I'm hopeful that a Nigel Farage government will reestablish some of these liberties, but yeah, you're exactly right. And there's a very specific reason for it. The first great awakening transformed America. And that's just a generation back from the American Revolution. So even the guys like Jefferson, who clearly weren't Christian, were marinated in Christian thought in a way that was no longer the case in Great Britain in the era. of Adam Smith and David Hume. So you have this very enlightenment humanist approach to these matters in Great Britain, and you see it in the wealth of nations, you see it in the theory of moral sentiments for that matter, but in America, you see, and I want you to check this out,
Starting point is 00:38:58 it'll be good for your book, my Fourth of July article at rodmartin.org, the Christian worldview of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even in the Declaration, drafted by an unbeliever, there is an expression of Christian faith and Christian principle that's extraordinary and that you simply wouldn't have gotten in England, even though it was largely nominally Christian. And there were a lot of faithful people in England at that time. But they had moved on into the Enlightenment, and America was certainly influenced by the enlightenment, but it was even more influenced by the Christian revival of the prior generation. Well, I mean, I would say that the Enlightenment came out of the Christian faith, and like many things, it goes wobbly.
Starting point is 00:39:46 But many of the Enlightenment ideas come from Christian faith. And people say, well, that's the Enlightenment. Well, every good idea ultimately comes back from God. And even in history, you can trace every good idea, the scientific revolution. All of this stuff comes from Christian faith. But then eventually they take a left turn and other people don't. And you're quite right that, you know, thanks to George Whitfield and the, you know, The Great Awakening, we in the 13 colonies were marinated in these ideas so that all kinds of people that even though they were not explicitly, theologically Orthodox Christians, they had that view. There was no way around it.
Starting point is 00:40:26 It was a culture of virtue in the 13 colonies. It's an amazing thing to see the culture of virtue that suffused life in the 13 colonies. You see that obviously in George White. Washington's life. So it really is, it is amazing, amazing stuff. So good to have you for this hour, Rod. How can people find you? Where can people find you online? Come to rodmartin.org. We publish important geopolitical analysis every single day, suffused with a Christian worldview. So occasionally you do get an article like Christianity commands capitalism. And also on X, at Rod D. Martin. We've got 273,000 followers and rising fast. You're ahead of me, Rod. I need to hitch
Starting point is 00:41:14 my wagon. Now, you're like just ahead of me. That's kind of funny. That's kind of funny. I got to say, I love your stuff, and I follow you on X and elsewhere, and just great to have you here, and we'll have you back. Thanks so much. Thank you.

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