The Eric Metaxas Show - Ryan Tucker

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

Ryan Tucker of Alliance Defending Freedom recounts the latest from cities across America where official government crackdowns have been enforced on drive-in church services in several states. ...

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:12 show. You know, sometimes Eric pretends to be interested in his guest. But he's really just doing a crossword puzzle and rolling his eyes at what they say. He told me never to say that ever. But look, I made a mistake. Oh, I'm human. In my way. Only I'm not. And now your host, Eric Mataxis. Hey there, folks. Welcome back to the Eric Mataxis show. This is what we like to call hour two. Technically, legally, we're obliged to call it hour two because it follows our one. I'm sorry if I've offended anyone. Let me just say. that we get to keep talking to Diana West about China, about the Kung flu pandedemic, as it's being called.
Starting point is 00:00:54 And I'm excited, so excited, really, Diana, to have you because you've written wonderful things about this. Where can people find your writings on these subjects? Thank you for asking. All my work is at diana west.net, and it contains links to my article. and blogs and also all of my books and audio books. All right.
Starting point is 00:01:18 Diana west.net. And that's not a made up name. That's your real name. That's my real name. Somebody once told me that if I wanted to succeed as a writer, I should change my name to Eric West. I never did that. Okay, so I'm in New York City.
Starting point is 00:01:37 You're in an undisclosed location. We all follow the news, try to figure out what's going on. you're saying some dramatic things, I would really prefer to think that you're wildly mistaken, but you just said that this French scientist who actually discovered HIV in the 80s and who got a Nobel Prize for his work, he has just concluded what others had previously concluded, that this Wuhan virus, this COVID-19 virus, could not have occurred naturally. It was not something that was created in the wet market. It was created in a lab by Chinese scientists.
Starting point is 00:02:22 He didn't attribute the work to Chinese scientists. He just said that looking at the virus, it is not natural. It had to have been manmade. So that was as far as he went as far as the virus. That's fair. The virus. Yes, I think it's really quite,
Starting point is 00:02:40 important because early on there was a famous team of Indian researchers who came to that conclusion as well. They are the ones who spotted the bit of HIV sequencing in this coronavirus and came to the same conclusion. But there was so much hue and cry about their finding, which disturbed this narrative that it came from Bat Soup, that they withdrew the paper or there was a problem with it and essentially the research disappeared from the official channels. And Luke Montaigne, the interview has been translated at Gates of Vienna blog. So you can actually watch the French and read the English translation there. But in the course of it, they were discussing the Indian researchers and he was confirming what they said they saw, this bit of HIV that is not normal.
Starting point is 00:03:33 I believe he actually thought that originally such a practice might have been intended to find a vaccine for HIV. But that was getting into sort of more scientific channels with this. The fact that man-made is something that we notice the media, the Chinese, Nancy Pelosi, probably, if she was asked and it occurred to her, all are denying. So anytime you see this kind of blanket denial at a time of investigation that is quite preliminary, because we really don't know, we don't know so many things about it because the Chinese have been so inhibiting of any sort of investigation that you know something's wrong when people start ruling things out and then calling them conspiracy theories. You know that that means. Well, now, the thing is that you said that this French, scientist had come out with this recently.
Starting point is 00:04:32 Where did he come out with this? And is it only on this Gates of Vienna blog? Because it sounds like a kind of a fringy blog. Oh, no, no, no, no. It was French TV. It was a French interview. And it was running around in very light translation. I can pull it up for you and send it to if you like.
Starting point is 00:04:51 But it was a mainstream French news show. And it was making quite a lot of waves in French. language and no American media bothered to translate it. So it just so happens, Gates of Vienna, it's not a fringy blog, it's a small blog, but it essentially is well known for translations of European news that don't get translated. So they have quite a translation team. And again, their subtitles in English, but the French is right there for anyone to. Look, that's terrific. And we need to get this out. But I guess, you know, if the mainstream media does not pick up on this, it could just be laziness. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. They're lazy.
Starting point is 00:05:32 But when they, they're not lazy when something matches their theory. If this Nobel prize winner in French had just said absolute conspiracy theory, no, no, no, no, no. Believe me, he would have been folded right into the science coverage of the New York Times, along with the press release from the virologist of University of Sydney. I mean, they look, they scour the literature for things that confirm what they are saying or scientists who say what they are saying and what's so disturbing about the practice is, again, getting to this notion of disinformation
Starting point is 00:06:05 as an act of war. We find so many links back to Chinese research, Chinese money, Chinese academia on a number of these people because we have been in this period where we were doing a lot of collaborations with China in these decades of trade and exchange.
Starting point is 00:06:28 It's something that people are blindsided by now because the government has been telling them and the governments of the world has been telling them that Chinese investment is good, that buying Chinese products is good, all of these things that essentially started to change loan around 2016, right? When this man named Donald Trump came about
Starting point is 00:06:50 and started talking about how this trade imbalance was killing us, how the currency manipulation was killing us, killing us and how manufacturing, having left this country and gone to China and other places, was killing us. And by the way, he's been talking about this for many years. That's what I find funny. You've been watching 30-year-old interviews with him and Oprah, whoever, he's talking about this then. Yes.
Starting point is 00:07:13 Yes, it's something he's believed all his life and has finally been able to do something about it. And when you actually see the timing of the virus and the timing of the trade deal that he was able to engineer, along with Peter Navarro and others, it's quite extraordinary. It does start looking like an answer to Trump, an answer to the trade deal, a response. Okay, so that's the ultimate horror, right? It would be one level of horror to think that the Chinese don't care about life, which we know. We know. They don't care about Chinese life. They don't care about anything. They care about the Communist Party. And so if this thing emerged in the wet market and they were sloppy about something. That's one level of malfeasance. But the idea that they saw an opportunity
Starting point is 00:08:00 to strike at the heart of the West using biological warfare, we've talked about biological warfare and have written about it in novels for decades. It has not, to my knowledge, ever come into reality. It seems to me that now we are dealing with this kind of reality. And it is, it is genuinely horrifying. It is genuinely horrifying. I would say that worse to me than this specter that the Chinese weaponized a virus or at least allowed it to be used as a weapon, which I think we can actually quite concretely observe. Worse than that is the reaction of the governments in the West, the reaction of the governors, the reactions of the mayors, the totalitarianization of our nation that has come about in response is, to me, much more concerning than the virus,
Starting point is 00:08:58 than the threat the virus poses to our health and welfare. This is where you come to this notion of looking at the various grids and graphs that describe the economic impact of the shutdown, of the lockdowns, comes into play. And you just see this great depression looming when you see the, the real psychological impact on people now forced to divorce themselves from humanity in every single way. I mean, this is, this takes a toll. I read a very interesting piece a week or two ago. Actually, forgive me.
Starting point is 00:09:37 I'm doing it again. We're going to be right back with Diana West. You can complete that sentence. I promise you, don't go away. Hey, folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Diana West and you get to listen. Diana, you were just in the middle of a sentence and we had to go to a break. What's happening? Oh, thank you. I was going to, I was discussing a story that I read that was quite fascinating.
Starting point is 00:10:34 Scientists, different people looked at the impact of the 2008-2009 economic turn down on health. And it was quite extraordinary because what you see in it was this cascade of deleterious impacts of job loss. of money loss, of dislocation that was brought about in an economic turn down that we've already dwarfed. And this would be down the line a bit where you see an increase in deaths from suicide, from heart disease, from cancer, all these things that were deferred because of various economic problems. But isn't this the point is that right now, and this grieved me deeply, that the Democrats are using this situation to create a narrative. that the only death that counts is a COVID death, loosely defined.
Starting point is 00:11:27 I mean, if a guy falls out of a plane, that could be a COVID deaths. So COVID deaths count and zero deaths is acceptable, but the potentially dramatic numbers of deaths from everything else, from suicides, which are already happening, those aren't counting. And, you know, that narrative, the other narrative, the one that we're trying to get out right now, needs to get out. Otherwise, you know, this can destroy the West. I mean, we could go into a worldwide
Starting point is 00:11:58 depression. It seems to me that this has the potential to bring that about. Absolutely. And it's sort of, this is always, I say this in quite frequently on Twitter, probably in a tiresome way, but I think it's a really important concept to get across. You mentioned that only COVID deaths count in this narrative and other deaths do not. That's when we, people generally look and see that as, as a hypocritical kind of stance, but it's not. The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. That is, that explains why one death can count in a certain narrative scene and another death does not. I mean, it explains all manner of discrepancies that we see in the left all the time. Most people say, oh, they're so illogical or they're hypocritical. No, actually, it's musling a narrative for maximum
Starting point is 00:12:47 emotional impact. And if we've ever been in a situation where a narrative has been muscled over us for maximum emotional impact, it is today. It is right now with this panic, with this frenzy that is driving people to behaviors and forcing people into behaviors, we never imagined possible. If we've gotten the script on the Twilight Zone, we would have turned it back as being ridiculous. You know, we were editors or something. Well, I mean, it sounds like a conspiracy. theory, and here's the only problem, and this is the nightmare. It's true. This is happening. I mean, I don't like to believe things like this, but the evidence is so clear. I think that, you know, when you see people, for example, like Nancy Pelosi, behaving in a way, I mean, when we need
Starting point is 00:13:38 another $300 billion, let's say, and when you see Pelosi and Schumer saying, hey, let's use this as an opportunity to get another hundred billion of our stuff in. That is bona fide, traitorous behavior during a time of war. It is grotesque. I don't know what's possible politically, but we need to, you know, sound the alarms that this kind of behavior is, is outrageous and unacceptable. And it is happening. This is what they are doing. Yes, this is, well, go back to Rahm Emanuel's great encapsulation, never let a good crisis go to waste. I mean, crisis is a moment of chaos, and you will see the left mobilized to take advantage of it. And that's what we're living through.
Starting point is 00:14:24 And, you know, you could say, oh, well, this is great. People are really seeing who's who. And yes. And yet at the same time, our liberties are vanishing. Our economies are vanishing. So it is a dire moment. I mean, we've never lived through anything worse, in my view, honestly, in terms of stopping the economy to fight a disease, even if it came out of a lab, even if it's a weaponized. biological weapon or weaponized biological disease. It's uncanny. It's unheard of. It's, it makes no
Starting point is 00:14:55 sense. I mean, in the sense that you have to remain viable as a country in order to fight anything, whether it's a weapon or an ideology or a disease. And we have essentially unarmed ourselves and taught our people to be afraid. So this is why it's so dangerous and why I'm so heartened to see people actually protesting. Yeah. Yes. So there is still an American spirit there. And I certainly see President Trump kind of, I almost think of him sometimes as a hostage
Starting point is 00:15:24 inside the White House, you know, trying to, you know, become Trump unbound again and start the economy that he loved and built on so many of his own policies. So, you know, we have hope, but it's very dire. And time is wasting. Part of the narrative here, you know, I always want a teaching moment. What is happening? What's happened is that the utopianist left, you know, the people who want to imminentize the eschaton, they really believe that they can achieve through state control a kind of heaven on earth. And they want the government to do it. And according to them, any risk is unacceptable. Death is unacceptable. So if you're building a business, you understand that risk is rewarded. Those who risk, Those who are willing to risk their lives, their reputation, their capital, they're rewarded because they know that if you risk something, you can get something better. But when you have people who think, you know what, I don't really believe in anything except my own safety and I want to live forever and I will give the government whatever I need to give the government, they can control me.
Starting point is 00:16:34 As long as they give me back, you know, the guarantee of food and shelter and some modicum of safety. And so I just believe it's an ideological battle that's always been with us and that the government really tries to sell this idea that any suffering is unacceptable, whereas, you know, and any person with any character or spine would say, well, look, I don't want to die, but sometimes you have to go to war and you have to risk death. Sometimes to get something done, you have to exert yourself. Sometimes you get uncomfortable. I think that is really the ideological piece of this, is that the culture has become so soft that death isn't acceptable to us in the way that it would have been during the Depression or during the World War, too, so that people are more susceptible to this wicked argument. I think that's true.
Starting point is 00:17:27 And I think that the panic and the inflated numbers are all designed to create that fear and that kind of submissive attitude. but, you know, you mentioned, you paraphrase the founders who pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. I mean, this is what it takes. This is what it, this is what built the country. There is this effort on the part of many to control us. And, you know, we haven't even really discussed the vaccine aspect of this in terms of
Starting point is 00:17:56 the Bill Gates' vision of the world, the vaccinated world and the digitized immunity cards, which is a quote from him in one of his recent TED talks, that may come about as a result of people being so afraid of this virus that they will rush to embrace these vaccines, which are going through quite unsafely in terms of going to market without even, or going to trial without animal testing, going straight to human testing. It's kind of a chamber of horrors on the medical side of this. But again, pushing in this medical deep state, this globalist ideology of controlling people, controlling the world, and getting to a point where we are literally,
Starting point is 00:18:35 digitized, literally controlled in that sense of identity, being able to work if you are immune, being able to travel, if you have immunity or a vaccine. I mean, these are tyrannous plans that are in motion as we struggle with what's going on. So people really have a lot to learn about and quite a lot to resist to stay free. And it's interesting because there never was a scenario I could have envisioned where, you know, the direst predictions of readers of the Book of Revelation would come true and that we would all have a chip implanted, you know, in order to buy or sell or something like that. But it is fascinating to me that this thing is global. Yeah. That this thing, because it threatens people's lives, everybody has to just shut up and do what everyone says.
Starting point is 00:19:30 I still think that there's hope in America, that there are enough Americans who have an innate sense of freedom. And I don't know that Trump would be able to, you know, quote, Burke or the founders, but he has an innate sense, as many Americans do, an innate sense because they have grown up with this. They know what it is and they know when it's being threatened. And so when I see protests in Michigan and at other places, I don't think people will stand for it. And I think people are looking to rally, you know, to great leadership. I think, you know, Trump was born for this hour, at least to some extent. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:20:08 Well, having walked into what I consider a trap in the sense of taking down the economy to try to save lives this way, he is the only man who could also take us out of it. So I think both are the case. Once again, though, it's been a tragic marker of the Trump administration. He is not surrounded by people who believe in his. agenda at any of the departments or agencies to speak of. I mean, we can think of a couple of I can think about people. I know. We're going to have to have to have you back because you're too much fun to talk to. Diana West. Thank you so much. Folks. Go to Diana west.com. And again, Diana, thank you. We'll have you back as soon as possible. Great.
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Starting point is 00:22:49 We now shift to talk to our friends at ADF. That's the Alliance Defending Freedom. I have senior counsel Ryan Tucker on the line. And if you're watching this on video, you can see what Ryan looks like. Ryan, you look handsome. You're dressed of you wearing a jacket and a tie magnificent. Are you at the ADF offices? Can you reveal your secret location?
Starting point is 00:23:13 I am. I dressed up for you, Eric. but also I had to come in. I have a couple more webinars later on today, and so I felt the best to come in and dress up for you and the folks that are listening as well and seeing it. We certainly appreciate it. Now, we've got some really serious stuff to talk about. ADF, in my opinion, you guys are just heroes. The Alliance Defending Freedom has been genuinely defending freedom, freedom, liberty, particularly religious liberty, in ways that are so heroic. That's one of the reasons I always want to have you on. But I want to talk to you about this. ridiculous, horrifying, infuriating situation in Kansas. The Temple Baptist Church was having a drive-in service, like at a drive-in theater. Tell us what happened. Yeah, actually, we did have a dust-up in Kansas recently, but Temple Baptist is actually in Mississippi, in Greenville, Mississippi.
Starting point is 00:24:08 My apologies. Yeah, for the last several weeks, they have been hosting drive-in church services, and that's not uncommon. A lot of churches across the United States have gotten creative during this time. And Temple Baptist is no exception. But what's surprising here is the fact that this is an older populated congregation. This is a church that's been around for several decades. And its pastor figured out a way to be creative. Got an FM transmitter and started broadcasting his services inside an empty church to congregants as they showed up at the church parking lot. Their windows were up. No one was out of their vehicles. It wasn't until the local police department saw it,
Starting point is 00:24:50 and an order had been granted, if you will, the day before, which basically prohibited driving services. And so these police officers came up. There were about eight of them with 20 or so vehicles in the parking lot, knocked on the windows, and proceeded to hand these individuals $500 fines for merely sitting in the church parking lot listening to the past. part of Mississippi is this in? This is in Greenville, Mississippi. Let me ask you, first of all, under what pretext would someone, was it the mayor of this town? The mayor and council voted on an order banning drive-ins. Okay. I mean, that sounds on the face of it idiotic, but what would their reasoning be to ban drive-in services? Because it's just, it's just, it's
Starting point is 00:25:43 sounds so stupid. Do they have any reason for this that we can give them some credit for? Well, certainly after they signed this order, and the U.S. government came in and filed a statement of interest in this case, they started to try to expound upon what their supposed reasoning was behind it. But this was clear targeting of the church. What we're seeing across, not just in Mississippi, but in other areas, these orders cropping up that clearly target churches and prohibit the ability for them to worship. How does a mayor get elected in a place like Greenville, Mississippi, who would want to target the church? We're not talking about the upper west side of Manhattan. What is going on? In other words, if it's the actual targeting of churches,
Starting point is 00:26:34 is why would the mayor of a place like this be against the church service? I don't, I can't make any sense of it. Well, I don't know that he's against the services overall. I mean, he certainly come out after the fact through press conferences and tried to explain what he did. But the city itself basically put together an order that its sole intent was to prohibit drive-in services. And so we've seen that in Mississippi.
Starting point is 00:27:04 We saw that in Tennessee recently where we had to be engaged. You know, I can't get into the mind of these individuals on why they did it. But it's clearly a constitutional problem and it's just not at all commonsensical. Well, it's not just that, but what you're describing, I mean, for cops, for cops to be going up to cars and knocking on windows during a church service and saying, hey, hey, here's $500 fine. I mean, that sounds like a kind of harassed. and police thuggery. I cannot imagine that they couldn't have been more creative in dealing with this if they had to deal with it than to do something like that because that's a lot of money for most people.
Starting point is 00:27:48 Oh, absolutely it is, in particular during this time. I mean, there's no question that what took place was absolute insanity. And to make it even worse, if you go just a couple football fields down from this church, there's a drive-in restaurant, a sonic, a hamburger joint. Some people may be familiar. familiar with, you can go and sit in that parking lot, talk to people right next to you. You can talk to the employee that comes and gives you your food with no problem. But if you were to go sit in this church parking lot, you're going to be given a $500 ticket. So it's absolute insanity and obviously unconstitutional. And that's why the United States government got involved as well by filing a statement of interest. The attorney general of the United States commented on this very case. And the mayor, fortunately, has come forward and said, look, I'm going to drop these citations. So hopefully we'll see soon those going away. In addition to that, the city has indicated that it will revise its order.
Starting point is 00:28:47 Now, whether it does so... But wait a second. Like, this is a big deal. He's going to rescind these things. He should be made to eat them with salt and pepper. Like, I can't even believe that we say, oh, sorry, we made a mistake. Somebody needs to pay. Like, this is a very, this is a very big mistake. You have hassled and freaked out a lot of older people. We're going to be right back talking to our folks at ADF. Don't go away. Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone. Susan, the plans they made. Hey there, folks. It's Eric Metaxa show. We're talking to Ryan Tucker, Senior Counsel, with the Alliance Defending Freedom, our friends at ADF. And we're talking about some looniness that is happening. And if you don't have folks like ADF,
Starting point is 00:30:06 pro bono defending this stuff, we're in a bad place. So, Ryan, first of all, thank you for being with the Alliance Defending Freedom and thank you on behalf of most of my listeners know that you guys are just heroes doing this stuff. But you were just saying that, you know, the mayor of the town said, oh, okay, we're going to rescind these $500 tickets. That's a joke.
Starting point is 00:30:30 I mean, that's like I'm caught with my hand in the finger in the cookie jar. And then I go, oh, you know what? I tell you what I'll do, I'm going to put back that cookie. That really doesn't deal with this. No, no, it doesn't. I mean, it's an absolute shame that we're even having this conversation. It's insane to thank that just a few weeks ago that, you know, I would come on and be talking about this very subject.
Starting point is 00:30:52 But it's not limited to Greenville, Mississippi. We had the same situation in Chattanooga, Tennessee, just a handful of days ago. There, the mayor himself came out and basically said the exact same thing, says no drive-in church services allowed. doubled down on it even after the Attorney General of the United States came out and indicated that was certainly fine. So we ended up having to file yet another lawsuit in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Fortunately, over the weekend, the mayor, the city came out and said, okay, just kidding, they are allowed now. But the mere fact that we at ADF and other organizations are having to go out there
Starting point is 00:31:25 and educate these government officials on the Constitution is no doubt unfortunate. It sounds to me like it's a time for civil disobedience. and I wonder if Americans still have the spine for this kind of thing, because when you're treated this way, you have to stand up for what is right. And if it means maybe getting arrested or if it means upsetting some people, the very idea that people going to a church service would be treated this despicably rises to the level of, I think, some kind of civil disobedience that people ought to then have these services more. I don't even understand, you know, it's one thing to ask people to stay out of church buildings. But then you have to say, well, what about social distancing? Why can't we come into a building and use our own freedoms to figure out this 91-year-old, maybe you shouldn't be in the building because we don't want you to get sick?
Starting point is 00:32:23 But, you know, everybody under the age of 40 can come and we'll do social distancing. Why is that a big deal? The idea that the government is stepping in is so fundamentally un-American. but I guess I wonder if enough Americans are aware of their rights with regard to this kind of thing. Well, I think they're becoming more aware because in some instances, you know, folks are showing up to maybe a drive-in service or other events, not even realizing that what they're doing is supposedly, at least against that local law. And you mentioned, you know, why is it that, you know, we're targeting drive-in services
Starting point is 00:32:56 or why even in some instances, depending on the nature of what's happening in a particular area, let's say have a rural area with no cases at all reported, you know, why is it that a bar, a, you know, liquor store, a retail establishment, why are they being placed on a higher pedestal than the church? And it's because of that question that we actually came in and sued the state of Kansas, the governor there, arguing that very point because what happened in Kansas? I referred to Kansas earlier, but you did mention something with the governor of Kansas. What's happening there? Yeah, so last week, we were alerted to a number of different issues in Kansas, and part of that included the fact that, you know, you could go to the library, you could go to a bar, you could go to a restaurant, other places, but you certainly couldn't go to a church. And after we contacted the governor, the governor agreed to make changes, or I guess when called on the carpet, decided to make changes to her order.
Starting point is 00:33:57 problem was they didn't go far enough. And so we had to continue pursuing a restraining order against her and enforcement of it. And in the state of Kansas, you can go to, say, an office building that has 500 plus people. You can have meetings with other employees. But if you were to have a Bible study in that same building with more than 10 people, well, then that's a violation. That'll get you in trouble. What is the name of this, the governor of Kansas at this point?
Starting point is 00:34:25 Kelly. Governor Kelly. Do you suppose that she has an animus against people of faith? Because, you know, we've seen this happen. It happened in Houston, the mayor of Houston a number of years ago, insisted that pastors submit their sermons in advance. I thought, is this Nazi Germany? Is this the Gestapo is going to confiscate our Bibles and our offering plates?
Starting point is 00:34:48 I mean, it's extraordinary to me that this could happen in America, much less in places like Kansas, like Chattanooga. The mayor of Chattanooga, previous mayor, was a serious Christian and a wonderful man. I don't know who the new mayor is. I don't know who the mayor is down in Greenville, Mississippi. But I have to say that this strikes me as very strange. And there has to be pushback, not just legally from ADF, but the people themselves have to be aware of how they're being treated, that they're being treated in a way that if King George III treated you this way for a few years,
Starting point is 00:35:23 you would have a Boston Tea Party. Well, I think you're seeing some signs of that. I mean, I think we've all seen the video in Michigan and, you know, folks driving around the Lansing Capitol. And so you're seeing these cases continue to pop up. What's most unfortunate about this, Eric, is the fact that we're talking about the Bible Belt here. We mentioned Mississippi, Tennessee, some other places. And that's very concerning. Fortunately, over the weekend, the federal court in the Kansas case actually granted a temporary restraining order and basically looked at. it not just commonsensically, but constitutionally, and said, you cannot single out the church. And that's what we're seeing in all of these states, states. And we continue to receive hundreds of phone calls. And we're looking at a number of different instances and areas where we may have to be engaged. I'm just, I'm fascinated again that, you know, when we're talking about Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Greenville, Mississippi, and Kansas, it almost makes no sense. I mean, I expect this, you know, in Portland, Oregon or maybe Seattle.
Starting point is 00:36:25 Maybe they just don't have church services in those places. I don't know. Well, we certainly are looking at, you know, potential issues in those states. And honestly, there have been many instances, you mentioned Washington. We've written letters in some instances we've seen change when, you know, governors or mayors have received correspondence, you know, where we show them the error of their ways. we have seen some positive results in other areas. So this isn't all lawsuits.
Starting point is 00:36:55 We try to get this rectified in advance. I've got a lot of Christian friends in Seattle and in Portland. So I'm only half joking there. But I am just so glad for you and for the Alliance Defending Freedom and the work you do. I want people to know that you're out there and that unfortunately in many cases, without you, we wouldn't have anyone standing up for these constitutional rights. So God bless you. We'll have you on again.
Starting point is 00:37:19 Thank you so much, Ryan. Thank you. Hey folks, before we get back to Diana West, and we're also talking to Ryan Tucker today, I've just got to say, again, I said it in the opener, today is Hitler's birthday. And the only reason I'm bringing that up is because yesterday I went jogging past Abyssinian Baptist Church, where one of Hitler's greatest enemies, Dietrich Bonhoeff, used to attend. You can see my video on Twitter and on my Instagram account, but actually, no, the reason I'm mentioning it is because this is five years we've been doing the show as
Starting point is 00:38:11 of today. So happy birthday to us, not to the furor. Let's be very clear. Yeah, if Hitler showed up that Chucky Cheese today, he qualified for some free tokens, maybe some football. What do you really? Yeah. Okay, so I just want to say in the few seconds we have here. We have some sponsors that we care about very much. I would like to think it's not true, but it is true. They're probably going through a very tough time right now. So I wanted to kind of specially thank them. The folks
Starting point is 00:38:50 at Relief Factor, who are the same people behind Honourbound Coffee, and Mike Lindell, who of course is behind my pill. Hello.com. Actually, you know what? Can we play the video of what Mike Lindell, my hero, Mike Lindell said at the greenhouse a few weeks ago. The press went nuts. I was eating it up for the school. Gave us grace on November 8, 2016, to change the course we were on. God had been taken out of our schools and lives. A nation had turned his back on God.
Starting point is 00:39:27 And I encourage you to use this time at home to get back in the word, read our Bibles, and spend time with our families. Our president gave us so much hope where just a few short months ago, we had the best economy, the lowest unemployment and wages going up. It was amazing. With our great president, vice president, and this administration and all the great people in this country praying daily, we will get through this and get back to a place that's stronger and safer than ever. Wow. What a bigot. I cannot believe that they let him say that at the White House, White House. What's going on? He's just preaching hate. Why? Hate and division. What a monster. You can see why Christians are against him. You can see that. That guy, listen, we need a hundred more Mike
Starting point is 00:40:15 Lundell's in every town across America. But the reason I want to play that is he got such pushback on that. And I said, I want to play that as often as I can because that guy is my hero. And today's a good day to play it. because I want to exhort you to support our sponsors, number one, sponsor, mypillow.com. I think I've said it, oh, perhaps once or twice, that if you go to MyPillow.com, you get our whopping super 70s, groovy disco discount. It's huge. It's up to 60% or even more on some products. But go to MyPillow.com, put in the code Eric or Metaxus. But just as a way to thank Mike Lindell, if you're ever going to buy towels or pillows or pet pillows or body pillows or whatever it is that they have.
Starting point is 00:41:01 They've got all kinds of... Now they have flannel sheets just in time for summer. They've got flannel sheets. They've got everything there. But if you're thinking of purchasing anything from them, do it now because you know they're taking a hit. And it's mypillow.com, but you have to use the code Eric or Metaxus. And then our friends at honor bound coffee, which I love and drink this morning.
Starting point is 00:41:24 We've got to ask them to make some mugs. I have an honor bound coffee mug, which they sent me as an official, you know, because they're a sponsor on the program. But we've got to ask them if they're going to be able to sell those. But honorbound coffee, if you go to honorbound coffee.com, every penny that they make, and this is the relief factor people, same people. Every penny they make from honor bound coffee goes to support the military families. Families in America. Think about that. All of their profit.
Starting point is 00:41:56 all of their profit 100% goes to support military families in America. Folks, honorbound coffee.com, my pillow.com. These folks are heroes. Please support them at this time. Oh, and whatever you do, do not forget to see no safe spaces. Fantastic movie, no safespaces.com. You got to go there, nosafspaces.com and use the code save 25.

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