The Eric Metaxas Show - Senator Josh Hawley (Continued)

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

What is the state of Manhood in the 21st Century? What challenges plague the modern man? Senator Josh Hawley, one of America’s leading constitutional lawyers, joins Socrates in the City host Eric Metaxas to explore the meaning of manhood in America, the value of godly masculinity, and the cultural challenges confronting men today. Drawing from personal experience and insights from his book Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, Senator Hawley discusses the essential roles men are called to fulfill in society—ranging from husband and father to warrior and priest.

Noble gold investments is the official gold sponsor of the Eric Mataxis show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you can protect your wealth with noble gold investments. That's noble gold investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. They say it's a thin line between love and hate, but we're working every day to thicken that line, or at least make it a double or triple line. And now here's your line jumping host, Eric Mattaxas. Today you're listening to my conversation from a few weeks ago with Senator Josh Hawley at Socrates in the city. Before we continue that, I want to remind you today we need to go to metaxis talk.com and click on the banner to help free slaves.

Metaxistalks talk.com. You'll see the banner. We're working with CSI. We really need your help. please metaxis talk.com. God bless you. Here's my conversation with Josh Hawley. And it also, I think, has to do,

has something to do with the concept of being grounded. In other words, that, you know, if everything is in your head, if you're not working with your hands, we're meant to be grounded in this world. And there's something about hard work that does that. And, you know, as we've been talking about these trends, that's definitely been denigrated over time. You know, now I can never get the quote,

but where, you know, we've moved more and more manufacturing to other countries, and what's the solution? People say, well, then, you know, Americans just need to learn to code or whatever, you know. And that hasn't worked. It won't work. It can't work. Somehow we have to bring manufacturing.

bring back. What do you, what is your view of that? Because I see that, you know, hopefully happening in the, in the years ahead. I would just say that the truth is this, 70 plus percent of men in this country do not have a four-year college degree. I don't think that's a bad thing. But they've got to be able to get jobs where they can support themselves and support a family. And so we've got to think as a country, what do we need to do to build or rebuild an economy where if you are a hard-working American man who is willing to go out there and learn a trade and learn a skill, you can get a job and you can support a family on that and that is honored in our culture. We need to get to that place.

And I think that's something I love about our current president, but I think that culturally, we've been in a place where we've said, well, unless you're a master of the universe working on Wall Street, unless you're a coder. And listen, I went to school in Silicon Valley. I get it. You know, that's all, that's lionized, the coding. Sure, fine. but from a popular culture perspective, we've sent the message,

unless you're doing that, you're not really valuable. If you're going out and you're working on a farm, I tell the story in the book about an uncle of mine who has a little concrete business, he works concrete, you know, we send the message that if you're doing that, you know, that's kind of,

that work is kind of, it's not really honorable. You know, it's kind of, those are dead end jobs. My gosh, no job that provides for a family is a dead end job. No job that is honorable in the sight of the Lord is a dead end job.

job. I wonder, you know, as we're talking about this, whether it's possible to have a view of life with a purpose and all the things that you're talking about here without God. It doesn't seem possible to me, and it seems inevitably somehow that that is the issue, the core issue. Because if you do take God out. We said it a little while ago, how do you get to this idea of purpose? I don't I don't know that you can. I don't think you can't. And I think one of the

challenges that we're seeing in our country is we are a country and even beyond that, a civilization that is built on the deep truth that there is a God and not just any God, but a God who sacrificed himself for us.

You know, who went to a cross for us. That's the foundational core truth of all of Western civilization. And as we have allowed that to be stripped out of our culture, I think this is one of the reasons you see more and more disunity. It's why you see a lack of purpose. It's why you see Americans. What is it that binds us together? It's those core foundational beliefs. What is it that makes Western civilization unique? I mean, you think about it. Well, we believe in the dignity of the common man. Well, where does that come from? You know, that comes from Christianity. We believe in individual rights.

Where does that come from? That comes from Christianity. It's so foundational as you take that out. I think you see this cultural drift. You see purposelessness on a mass scale, just like we're seeing in individual lives. And one of the reasons this is an exciting cultural moment is you see more and more Americans saying,

wait a minute, as you're talking about, there's more to life than this, and you see a new openness in our culture to these foundational truths. I think it's interesting because I was reading a book, I guess was George Weigel wrote a book it must be 15 years ago called the Cube and the Cathedral. And he's talking about Europe and how the cathedral was once, you know, the thing

when you think of Europe and Christendom. And then he talks about this secular, just this bleak building in France, this cube that's bigger than Shard, the cathedral. And he talks about these two views. One is this view of, a world where God is at the center and we all aspire to know God. And the whole civilization is built on that.

And then you have this other bleak secular idea. And one of the principal metrics is that in a faith-based culture, people have a lot of kids. In a secular culture, they don't. And it strikes me as interesting that, you know, when we think of the EU at this point, you get the idea of a lot of childless bureaucrats, which is fundamentally antithetical to the American model, right? You think of Cincinnati and his plow, this idea that we're supposed to have a life and a job and whatever. And we go to serve our government for a little season,

but we're not meant to be professional politicians. We're meant to have other lives. And it's interesting because that to me comes up, over and over. They're these two dramatically opposed visions. And when I think of the EU and the plight of Europe right now, it really is, it's kind of shocking. I mean, they are, in terms just of population, they're going down the tubes, obviously. And we know that, you know, the Muslim millions are replacing them because they at least have this idea that we should have big families. So it's just fascinating how one's worldview leads to a certain kind of civilization.

Absolutely. And again, having families, I mean, having children, that is a vote for the future. To have a child is to say, I believe that the future is something worth investing in. I believe that there is a future. And as a father, you think about, fatherhood is really about giving your life away. It is to be a father is to say, I'm no longer the frontier generation. my children are literally going to replace me and I'm going to live toward the future. I'm going to live away from myself. I'm going to live toward the future. And the fact that fewer and fewer men in our society have wanted to be fathers is not a good thing. And this is why it's so important to say, no, listen, this is how you make an impact as a man.

But I'll give you, speaking of different models, Theodore Roosevelt, who's a great hero of mine, warned a century ago now, more than a century ago, that as Americans, we have a fundamental choice. Are we going to just stand for, in his words, wealth and the creation of wealth? He said, if we are a society that only stands for wealth and the creation of wealth, and I'm quoting him here now as best as I can from memory,

that he said, we will stand for little indeed when looked at through the vistas of the ages. But he went on to say, we have always stood for more than that. we have always stood for what is true, what is good, what is beautiful. We have always stood for the eternal things. Our society needs to hear that message again. I think, hold your applause.

I think that they wanted to, but they held it. In the book, you talk about a man's duties as a warrior, builder, priest, king. I want to talk for a moment about the warrior thing, because it seems to me, that that is for sure one of the things that has been lost, this idea, and particularly in the church. When I think of the models of Christianity that have been put out there by a lot of pastors or Christian leaders, it really is as though being a warrior is a dirty word. They would love to, you know, get rid of Elijah and David. And those examples are like, nah, no, no, we want to, we just want gentle Jesus meek and mild, which, by the way,

that's not even Jesus, right? So, but the idea that men are called to be warriors flies in the face of this model that a lot of particularly Christians have adopted, but this idea of perpetual winsomeness that I'm always supposed to be winsome and smiling. It's like the Ned Flanders version of Christianity, and it's not actual Christianity.

So I was excited that in the book, you talk about that aspect of it, that we're meant to be warriors. Mike Lindell and the MyPillow team want to say a big thank you for your continued support. This spring, they had a huge allotment of their famous bed sheets set aside for the big box stores. But guess what? The stores didn't come through again. So Mike's doing what he does best, passing the savings on to you.

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Eric. Today you're listening to my conversation from a few weeks ago with Senator Josh Hawley at Socrates in the city. Here's my conversation with Josh Hawley. We both know, most of us know, that that has been so denigrated. I mean, you know, going all the way back to Vietnam with the rise of feminism, this idea of man as a warrior, that's the ultimate image of toxic masculinity. So talk a little bit about why God calls us to be warriors as men. The short answer is because there's evil in the world and men are part of God's solution to confront it. And you see this as early as the Garden of Eden.

You know, we look at the garden and we know the story of Genesis 3 where the serpent comes to Eve, but we don't often pause to ask ourselves, how is it that the serpent gets into the garden in the middle of the garden? The tree of life was in the middle of the garden. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was in the middle of the garden. So how is it that the serpent, this evil thing, gets in there? And at least part of the answer is Adam had not done his job. God told Adam to guard and keep the garden. He did not do so.

He did not guard the perimeter. He exposed his wife. He could have built a big, beautiful wall. Wood gates. With gates, of course. I was with gates, right? But that's interesting. I've not thought of that.

We'll keep going because that's... So you have this. From early on, we see that part of what it means to be a faithful man and to fulfill the duties, the call that God has in our life is, we're supposed to put ourselves in the way of evil. You know, I mean, what's a man good for? Part of what he's good for is to go stand between what matters in life, his wife, his children, and was evil. He's supposed to insert himself between those things. Now, you mentioned the church. You know, we see this later on. I don't put this in the book, but this is as true scripturally. we see this later on in Leviticus where God appoints the Levites to be the priest's imprimutuity for Israel. And what does he tell them to do?

He says, guard the temple, guard the sanctuary, guard it. And if someone tries to get in, you are to go and to stop them. There's the sense that the sacred, that which is important to God, has got to be guarded by men on pain of our lives. And again, there's something, I think, true for every man deep down, really, that we thrill to this. We want our lives to matter, and we want to go stand on a line. We want to matter in that way. And men need to hear the truth that, listen, if evil is going to be confronted in the world, we have to do it.

You know, don't look to the right, look to the left. You go do it and start right in your family. You go and protect your family. That's part of the issue, too, is that if you don't believe in God, then you can't really believe in something called evil. And we've seen this in the secular Western Europe. where they kind of act like everything can be, you know, you're not really a criminal who's done a bad thing. We can give you therapy.

We don't have to do anything dramatic. So that idea of evil, you know, people with a particularly secular view, they bristle at the concept of evil. They want to explain it away. And, you know, even recently, I didn't want to talk about current events, but recently, you know, recently the deportation of like, bloodthirsty gang members, violent people. And there are some people, they don't have, they don't, they don't, that category makes them uncomfortable. They kind of, it's almost like they're putting forth the idea, which, you know, goes all the way back to the 60s that, well, they're just misunderstood or that just comes

out of poverty or they, they're somehow unwilling to say, no, no, no, that's evil and we need to fight evil. That, that's too, it's almost too black and white. Yes, the reason is because if there's real evil and if we have. some responsibility than our decisions matter and we're accountable for something and that's not what many on the left want what they want to do is they move the concept of evil away from persons towards systems so now this system is aggressive right these structures are oppressive right what does that do well it gets me off the hook because it means oh it's not my fault i've just i was raised in a capital of society therefore i and i was raised an inherently systemically oppressive society

Of course, it's not me. It's all, it's other people. It's it out there. Whereas if Solzhenitsyn is right, if the line that divides good and evil runs through every human heart, oh, well, by golly, I have some responsibilities. You know Solzhenitin got that for me. I got it one of your books. But I'm like Reagan, like I figure I don't care who gets credit. As long as, as my ideas get out there, I don't care. No, but that's, it's such a fundamental concept that, that morality, right? And again, that's, it's gone out of the culture. It's gone out of secular culture. culture, and we're dealing with cultural Marxism, which just wants to get rid of all the basic categories, you know, male and female. I mean, we've been living through some bizarre times, but I think it's gone so far that there is a backlash.

And so I'm very, I'm hopeful. I want to ask about the other categories. You mentioned priest and king. Talk a little bit about those. We'll start with priest, I guess. You know, I think every man is called to represent the authority of God, the good purposes of God, to represent those and to be a channel for those for his family and his loved ones. In other words, and you see this again in the garden.

And Genesis is so foundational. It's really, it's all there. It's all there in the first two chapters. What does God call Adam to do? He calls Adam to reflect his love and authority into the world. It's supposed to flow from God through Adam out to the world. And as that happens, the world is made into what God intends it to be. That's to be a priest.

To be a priest also flows the other way where we take the cares and the concerns of those who are in our charge and we bring those before the Lord. And this is going to being a father is what really brought this home to me. I'd never prayed like I have before when I had children. And I tell the story in the book about my oldest son, my oldest child, Elijah, who was diagnosed with a rare condition when he was a very little. You know, that's an amazing story. Tell that. That is an amazing story. I had this tradition that I'm sure RFK, who you mentioned earlier, RFK Jr. would really approve of. I take my children for donuts every Saturday. So don't tell Bobby Kennedy.

So I had my two boys. And we were, we were. at the donut shop and I noticed that my older boy was limping and I thought, well, you know, he'd be an active kid. I thought maybe he fell out of a tree or something. So I asked him, I said, but is your lake hurting you? And he said, no? And I said,

but you're kind of dragging it. And he said, well, I can't put any weight on it. He was a really little guy. So I, you know, I'm that, okay, so I go home and miss it to my wife. She being a lot smarter than I am, she immediately calls the doctor. She's like, I don't like the sound of that. And the doctor said, we need to see him right away. Long story short,

He was diagnosed with what we thought at first was going to be a degenerative condition that would affect all of his joints. And, you know, my wife and I was thinking, what can we do? And so he goes through these batteries of tests and they're thinking, you know, they're telling me at one point, the doctor was like, well, listen, you know, I mean, it, he may have to be in a wheelchair when he gets older. And I'm thinking, you're kidding me. What did this drive me to do?

I have never prayed Eric like I have in my life. literally getting down physically onto my knees. All I know to do was, you know, I'm not a doctor. I don't know what to do. These are smart people who are telling me this is maybe the best we can hope for for your kid. And all I know to do is just cry out to the Lord. That's when I learned something about what it has to be a father,

but also to be a priest, to take the cares and burdens of my children that I cannot do anything for myself. I mean, I couldn't make it right for him, but I could take that to the Lord. And it's really, it's a story of healing. We had a lot of people who prayed for Elijah. He then went back and got another diagnosis, and they said, actually, that's not it. It's not the joint condition.

We think it's a condition just located to his hip. And I am pleased to report here today. He's 12 years old. He is a soccer player extraordinaire. That hip is completely healed. He does no limb. It's amazing. That's just the Lord.

It's interesting as you, you know, talk about when you're a parent, you know, God, it's almost like the Lord tricks us in a good way, right? I mean, you know, he tricks us by, you know, we fall in love with this beautiful woman, right? And, you know, not thinking about the work that lies ahead in the marriage, right? It's not just us. It's just, it's every marriage. But it's kind of funny. It's the same thing with kids is like, you're, you know, it's so wonderful to have kids. And then you realize, wow, I love this kid so much. I would happily die. for this kid. It's a new kind of reality. And so it's like the Lord kind of, I say, tricks us, brings us into this idea of self-sacrifice where we joyfully would die for our spouse or our kids.

It's something that you can't really experience very much if you don't have kids or you don't whatever. And it humbles you. I mean, like you said, you're never going to pray harder than you pray for your kids. You're just not going to. So it's humble. and it's beautiful. And so part of what you talk about in the book really is that God calls us to this adventure. It's an adventure. It's a glorious adventure. And it's hard. And so many young men are hungry for that. Before we close, I want to talk a little bit about, you talk about King. I mean, this is another great concept. So go ahead. Well, and speaking of a concept that our popular culture,

and particularly the left wing of it, really detests the idea that any kind of masculine authority would be good. That's been the brunt of the attack. Yeah. The kind of masculine authority is attacked and has denigrated. But in truth, God gives us power to exercise on behalf of others. Men are meant to use the authority from their physical strength to the other positions of authority, like being a father that God gives them, in order to shelter, to protect, to empower and upbuild.

There is nothing that I found in my life that is more incredibly satisfying than getting to watch my children grow and flourish into the men and woman that God has made them to be. And part of my job is to cover over them, protect them, to rule them in terms of helping them acquire discipline, self-discipline, helping them understand this is true, this is not, this is good, this is bad. You know, that's a form of exercising authority. But by doing that, I help them become who God has meant them to be. And it's incredibly, incredibly rewarding.

And that's what God gives us authority to do. I want to touch finally on just the concept of courage, because this is something that I've thought about just in the last few years, how courage is not extra credit. like if you don't have courage, you can't hope to be who God made you to be. That that's at the heart of everything. But you talk about that in the book. Yes.

And, you know, to go back to what you said a second ago about being an adventure, following God is an incredible adventure. Following the path of manhood is an incredible adventure. And it's an adventure precisely because it's hard. And that's where courage comes in. And, you know, I think that I hear a lot of times young men, I've got a lot of young men who work with me and work for me. And sometimes they'll say things like men who aren't married yet, don't have kids yet.

They'll say, oh, I'm just so busy. And I think, you're not busy. And they'll say, oh, I'm just so tired. And I'll think, just waits. Just wait. But the courage, you know, C.S. Lewis put this so beautifully in a book he wrote on the virtues. You know, he said that courage is really the testing ground of all the other virtues. If you don't have courage, you can't have love.

If you don't have courage, you can't have faithfulness. if you don't have courage, you really can't have anything else. That's where we prove it. Do you mean it or not? And this is why I come back to the point making about sacrifice. Sacrifice is how you know it's real. And for men, I want to say, you know you're serious about it when you're willing to sacrifice. When it's costing you something, it is worth something. And we need to say to men, ultimately, our lives are meant to be a sacrifice.

We're meant to lay down our lives on behalf of our wives, on behalf of our children, on behalf of our country, if need be. and putting your life onto that altar as a sacrifice, there is nothing more noble than that and nothing that mirrors the character of Christ Jesus than that. And that takes courage, it takes humility, it takes surrender, it reveals grace, and those are ultimately the greatest, most profound,

most empowering concepts in all of our civilization. And of course, we've touched on it, but that is at the heart of everything we're talking about, that men are called by God to, be strong for others. That's right. Not for themselves, but for others.

And that the idea of Jesus is the ultimate example of that, the self-sacrifice for others, which is really it's so humbling. I mean, again, I just think of my dad sacrificing for us. That gives you total moral authority.

You know, when you sacrifice for others, then they should shut up and do what you say. Because you're basically saying, I will die for you. I will die for you. So I have moral authority over you because I would die for you. Would you die for me?

You know, and there's something, it's so powerful about that. And that's really what God gives us in Jesus is this picture that if you really believe that he did that for you, you're like, okay, I get it. I should follow you. Yeah, maybe, maybe if you died for me, maybe I owe my life to you. you. Right. Which is the great revelation. Well, and that's when you think of all great leaders, I think because I'm writing a book on the American Revolution, I'm thinking so much about George Washington, and he evinced that character. I mean, it was, and what it is too is it's

unbelievably inspiring. Yes. You want to die for that man because he wants to die for you, because he's willing to lead in that way, and it just does something on the inside of us. Yes, it does. We just got moments left. Any final thought, anything we haven't touched on that... Well, let me just tell a story from the book, a humble story that makes your point about Washington. I was coached when I was in high school

by a great high school football coach, one of these iconic high school football coaches, his name even sounds like a high school football coach. Tony Severino, was a great Italian name, and he sounded and looked just like his name sounded. But, you know, I think about it, the difference that we can make, the impact we can make as men, he had the effect on me that Washington had on his troops.

There was nothing I wouldn't do for that man. And the reason was he believed in me. He made me do hard things. And he looked at me and said, Holly, you can do more than that. You can do more reps on the bench press of that. You can do more weight. You can run faster than that. You can go harder than that.

You can go longer than that. And because he believed in me, I believed in me. And I was willing to do things for him that I didn't know I could do. And you think about it, he chose with his time and his life. I mean, how would you like to coach teenagers for a living? You know, I mean, talk about sacrifice. This is what he did with his life. And I just think about, for us as men, it seems like a small thing. It changed my life. There's an example of a man who is also giving his life in service of others and is changing these young lives by pouring into them, by calling out the best in them, by raising them up. He changed. Who knows

many generations. He taught and coached for 40-some years. He only recently retired. I mean, we're talking about multiple generations of men there. And I just think about for me, I hope to, at the end of my days, be able to look back and say, boy, I hope that I have one, one hundredth of the impact of men like Tony Severino, who's probably never going to be famous, but I think will be famous in heaven because of the impact in the lives that he touched and checked. That's beautiful. In case I haven't said it, I think this is a great book. book. We need to focus more on this. And in closing, Senator Hawley, I just want to say thank you for being bold enough to write a book like this. I think it's extraordinarily important.

And I'm just grateful for your voice and grateful that you gave us your evening at Socrates in the city. Thank you very much. Thank you for having. Folks, welcome back. Very exciting. that we get to participate in the modern day abolitionist movement. We get to free slaves. We've been talking about this on this program. This is a real thing. But just as real as the evil of modern day slavery is,

just as real is the good that we get to do. We get to do something about this because of Christian Solidarity International with whom we partner on this program. I'm talking to Todd Chapman, who's telling us the stories, the reality of this. I think I mentioned that every $250 that we give, freeze a slave. So if you go to the website, MetaxistalkisTalk.com, you'll see the banner. You click on the banner.

You see a number of options. Some people can easily give $250 or multiples of that. I encourage you to do that. It's tax deductible. And it is literally freeing slaves and setting them up in a life or freedom. But if you can't give $250, maybe you can give monthly. Some of you can give monthly. If you give $10 monthly, if you give $20 monthly, that's a huge thing at the end of the year.

Every $250 frees a slave, sets them up in a life of freedom. So I want to encourage you to do that. There's a phone number. I will give you. The website is metaxis talk.com. You'll see the banner. But Todd, tell us more about this because, again, so many of us cannot fathom this. This is real.

This is going on while we're having this conversation. There are people praying that somebody will read. out and save them from a life of slavery. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And just to quantify the impact that you have had, if you've ever participated in one of our campaigns here on the Eric Mattaxas show, over 100,000 slaves have been freed since CSI's been doing this.

And every year, more and more freed. I think last year, your listeners freed about a thousand slaves between our May campaign that we're kicking off right now and the one that we do at the end of the year. So thank you. if you've been a part of that. If you never have, could I just boldly say, you're missing out on a blessing? You really are.

Because think about it, this is the gospel. This is the gospel message. We were all born into slavery and sin, right? And God redeemed us through the gift of his son, Jesus Christ. And we now, you know, because of our gratitude for what God has done for us, we can set another person free, a person who is actually in physical bondage. They're enslaved. They're being verbally abused, psychologically abused,

physically abused. They're being forced to convert to Islam, even though they're Christian, their slave master says you will convert to Islam, and then they get physically mutilated as part of that process. It's absolutely horrendous what happens to them, but you know what? They don't give up. They don't ultimately give up their faith that God can, and hopefully one day will deliver them. And we get to be a part of that. It's just such a beautiful opportunity for you. And I'm looking at a story right here. This young lady just came into freedom. in a freedom liberation about three weeks ago.

Nijang is her name. She was just a young girl in a peaceful South Sudanese village when she was out fetching water with her mom one day and the raiders came through and they took her captive. She and her mom, they walked her into the north.

She watched men slaughtered in front of her, women and girls raped along the way, and in captivity. She was in prison. She was mutilated like I was just talking about. She was abused, raped by her master. She thought it would never end.

And then one day she met a man who works for CSI. He identified her as a slave and he said, do you want to be free? I can help you get free. And he negotiated her freedom. She now is in South Sudan. She's been given that bag of hope. We're working on reuniting her with her family. And that's the kind of story, Eric, that is told a couple thousand times a year, thanks to your generosity.

So our goal during this May campaign, We do this every year. We would love to see at least 100 slaves liberated. And I would just like to, you know, obviously every gift makes a difference, but I just want to put a challenge out there. If you have the capacity and you could give $1,000, you would free four of these slaves and set them on the path to a new life. Man, if we had 25 people amongst all the people that are listening and watching right now,

do that, and I know that God has provided for you to be able to do that, that would be 100 slaves freed right now. If you can't give $1,000, give $2.50. give 50 bucks a month, whatever you can do. Eric, we have people to listen to your program that for years now have been giving a monthly gift. They're so committed to this. They're like, maybe I can't do 250 every month, but I can give 25 a month. They're 50 a month, and they've done it for years, seven, eight years, because it's so important to them that they let God use them to free slaves.

And I believe that that's your posture as well. And we would love for you to join us in free. I just say over and over, it's about putting your faith into action. This is an opportunity. And it's also crystal. It's not vague. It's not sort of. This is very clear. CSI uses every penny in doing what we're talking about. So it's an unmitigated good. And I throw this out there, you know, as much as I say, everyone should participate, if you can give $10 a month, whatever it is. I know there are folks out there who can give a lot. And I would want to say to them, I do this all the time. If there is someone out there who can give 15,000. thousand dollars. I offer myself, you know, to spend an evening to have dinner. We've done this

around the country. You know, you can get a group of people together and you can all pitch in. But if somebody can give a gift to $15,000 tax deductible, it's my joy to thank you by spending an evening with you, whether it's just a two of you or a family or you want to put together, you know, 20 people in a in a private room at a restaurant, whatever you want to do, I just want to give my time to make it available to you because obviously I believe in this and I want to thank you for that. But I just put that out there because there are some people that say, well, yeah, that might be fun.

That would be a great anniversary gift. Sounds like something we'd like to do. Folks, my time has just become preposterously valuable. I don't get to do this, but this I will do if there's any. who can do that. So I say that. I'll give you the phone number again because obviously a lot of people would like to talk to a person. The phone number, which I hope you'll dial today, is 888-253-3522. 888-253-35-22. 8-88-253-35-22. 8-88-253-25-22. 3522.

And the website, if you go to metaxis talk.com, at the top of the page, you'll see the banner. Click on the banner at metaxis talk.com. It'll take you a number of options that are there. Again, you can call, but if it's easier for you, just go to metaxis talk.com. And it'll show you a number of options, including some of you would rather just give a smaller amount monthly. that's easier, obviously, whatever you can do. This is, you're doing the Lord's work.

So, Todd, thank you for sharing this important. It's an important opportunity as I see it, folks. You put your faith in action. It will strengthen your faith. Those aren't just words. That's real. So thanks for doing what you can do. And thank you, Todd, for sharing.

My pleasure. Thanks, Eric. Welcome back, folks. I'm talking to Robert Netsley. He's the CEO and founder of Inspire Advisors. And we are talking. about stuff that, again, Robert, thanks for coming on here. Thanks for what you do. You're just an anointed leader in this. God is using you to change the nation, to change the culture,

by persuading huge companies not to do evil things. You have persuaded Walmart and Kroger, for example, not to carry the abortion pill. That is huge. And there's so many people who want their money to be used for God's purposes, not to be used for wicked purposes. So, So you were just going through, you mentioned Walgreens. They've been bad guys here. They have said, we can make a lot of money off the abortion pill. We're totally going to carry it. So ladies and gentlemen, these are moral issues.

Where you go to buy stuff, where you invest, you have to think, do you want to go to Walgreens? They have made some evil, cynical decisions. You should at least know what is going on. Who are the good guys? Who's doing the right thing and who's not? And you mentioned, Robert, just as we went to the break, Costco, you're trying to persuade them. They have not yet chosen to do the right thing here. You mentioned a few others.

And you said that some of these companies are based in the Seattle area, which is, of course, extremely liberal. And so there's pressure on them not to do the right thing. Yeah, Costco in particular, right, their headquarters are within Seattle area. so you can imagine what all that entails with the people who work there and they're sort of a labor pool. But I do believe that there's desire at Costco to sort of stay out of the issue. Historically, they've been pretty neutral and just sticking to their knitting, right? Let's provide low-cost goods, you know, in large quantities to people all over the country.

And they've got a raving fan base, you know. And it's, there's not really a good reason. reason for a company like Costco to start selling the abortion drug. They're not going to make any money on it. It's outside their, you know, core business of kind of the large bulk item at discount. It doesn't make any sense, right? So it would really be an ideological choice for them to decide to dispense this drug, to apply for a special exemption from the federal government for them to actually dispense this in a pharmacy. It's a very, it'd be a strange thing for them to do. but there's a lot of pressure on them to do that.

And I've got to be honest, the abortion mafia is a big, powerful, angry, dangerous mob. And companies can be intimidated. And so what we're trying to do is give them the confidence, the moral fortitude to say, hey, look, there's not just one voice. Yes, these people are very animated and very upset over here. but there's a very large contingent, probably the overwhelming majority of your members at Costco, who are the proverbial soccer mom in Minnesota,

you know, out in the interlands or in the Midwest, who, you know, they just want to go buy, you know, cheap granola bars for their kids. They don't want Mitha Pristone and abortion drugs. You know, they don't want to be involved in those things. We actually have a petition of over 9,000, probably close to 10,000 signatures now. Costco members who are saying that they would cancel their Costco membership if Costco decided to go ahead of this decision.

So that's a lot of members. There's probably for everyone on our petition. There's probably many more that are out there that would follow suit that haven't seen our petition. So good on Costco for not going there yet, but we need some assurances from them. And listeners here, you can help by, again, just joining the movement, right? come on over to Inspire Advisors, help us to help you to speak biblical truth of corporate power like Costco and keep the abortion drug out of their pharmacies as well. InspireAdvisors.com slash Eric, tell your friends, we've got to do this.

If more and more people do this, we will change the country. We are changing the country. We just heard the great news that Walmart and Kroger will not carry this abortion pill. This is just praise the Lord, hallelujah. But we just want everybody to be involved. So go to inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. Please tell your friends, InspireAdvisors.com slash Eric. And Robert Netsley, God bless you for what you do.

Thanks for coming on. Thank you. God bless you, Eric.