The Eric Metaxas Show - Todd Starnes

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

When Todd Starnes wrote his book, "Culture Jihad: How to Stop the Left from Killing the Nation," did he know just how prophetic it was? Todd has an update on many of his predictions that, unfortunately, became reality.

I'm the announcer and Eric is the host, but they name the show after the host. You have no idea who I am, do you? Well, do you? Mommy. Papa. Do you know who I am? Mommy? Now your host, Eric Mottaxis.

Welcome to Hour 2. Typically, Hour 2 follows, hour 1. I get to continue my conversation with Roger Stone. Roger, I still cannot get over the moment. A week ago, I heard your sentence was commuted. And then shortly thereafter on your first interview, I had actually been on Tucker Carlson. about 15 minutes before the Hannity Show came on. So I did my Tucker hit from here, and I went to the living room,

and I sat with my wife to watch your interview, and you declared rather boldly that you'd been born again, that you'd given your life to Christ. And I said to my wife, God's hand is on this country, because not only do we have a president who would commute your horrible sentence, but we have people like you being willing to say what you said on a program that was obviously watched by a lot of people who weren't looking forward to that part of it. They just were happy for you and for the commutation. But it just seems clear to me that God's hand is on this country.

And I don't say that as a jingoistic nut. I say that as somebody who has hope for the whole world that they could look to us like a shining city on a hill and say what they have we want. It's happening in Hong Kong. What do you think is going on around the world? When I see this president's willingness to confront China in a way that no one has done, these things are unprecedented. We are in a war. We're in a civil war, it seems to me. What is your general sense of where we are and where we're going? Well, I knew when I went on Sean's show, first of all, I had to give enormous credit to Tucker Carlson because literally no one worked harder or more persuasively to bring attention. to the complete unfairness and outrageousness of my prosecution. He's a friend of 30 years, and he is one of the finest men I've ever known. And Sean Hannity's yet another who picked up the cudgels and really helped, and so many others. And I knew that secular liberal elitists

in the media would mock me, as they have. There's a big piece in Washington Monthly. Oh, Roger Stone's converted to Christ. What a joke. It's a head fake. It's a ploy. okay, we'll see. It doesn't matter me what they think because all it matters is what he thinks and he knows what's in my heart. It'll be proven over time. So I'm not worried about that. What we see happening today is an epic struggle between dark and light. This is it for the United States. We're going to hurdle over the cliff to globalism and face a thousand years of darkness unless we win the next election and that we then move to preserve our constitutional government and end the epic two-party duopoly control of this country that has really destroyed our economy,

eroded our civil liberties, given us immigration policies that punish the people trying to come here legally for the better life of America and a reward. those who come here illegally, at the same time making our streets and neighborhoods and communities unsafe, trade policies that ship all of our good jobs out of the country. They've let, until Donald Trump came along, let our military strength erode to the point where our military strength is no longer a deterrent. See, unlike the Bushes and the Clintons, Donald Trump believes more like Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower. A strong military is a deterrent, not to go around the globe looking for trouble, but to make sure people understand that if you mess

with us, we have the strength to respond, peace through strength. So I'm very anxious to see whether our criminal justice system is completely corrupt or whether justice will be done. It is interesting to me that the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Justice recommended to Attorney General on two different investigations that James Comey be prosecuted for crimes that carry a much heavy, heavier penalty than the things I was accused of. Yet Mr. Barr gave him a pass. The prosecutor in my case, who replaced the four rogue completely political prosecutors who were trying to pass as non-political career line civil servants, which they're not. Every one of them is tied to Hillary or Obama. But the new prosecutor, J.P. Cooney,

is the same prosecutor who decided the same week I was found guilty, not to prosecute James McCabe, again, for crimes more serious than those I was wrongly convicted of. So do we have two standards of justice where General Flynn, who I, by the way, believe is a great patriotic American and a true war hero, and the only person in America probably treated worse than I was in this entire hoax. yet the real criminals, starting with John Brennan, the mastermind of this entire corrupt enterprise, and James Clapper and James Comey, and Christopher Ray, our curt FBI director, who should have been fired long ago for his role in the cover-up, and so many others, Bruce Orr, Andrew McCabe, will these people be prosecuted or won't they? Adam Schiff and his friends are jumping up and down and talking about the rule of law. This is a joke. these people got caught red-handed. No, CNN, it's not a conspiracy theory for which Trump has no proof. Read the declassified documents. This is no longer in dispute.

Remember, the Durham investigation was supposed to be over in the winter, then the spring, then the summer. Now they're hinting that it will be next year. Will it ever be is the question? I'd like to think so, but the jury's still out as far as that. Well, Katie McFarland, she was supposed to be on the show this week, but she's been very clear how bad it is if this thing gets, you know, punted past the election. Do you can, I mean, I think Barr is a good guy. So I was very surprised that he would, in a way, use kid gloves and dealing with Comey and these others.

Well, he has certainly not used kid gloves in my case. He said my prosecution was righteous. I have to assume, therefore, he's never read anything about the case. He said that my sentence was appropriate. This is the same week he was giving James Comey a pass. And in this epic struggle to avoid prison in which the law and the rules and all the other factors were on my side, the government joined with the prosecution, pardon me, joined with the judge in wanting to send me to jail in violation of their own policies. So while I like some of the things Attorney General Barr has done, I also have written a book called The Bush Crime Family.

Look up the section on Mr. Barr. You may find some very interesting things. Unbelievable. I only wanted to get you on this program to see you not wearing a cutaway collar. So I ticked off that box. It really is exciting to know that you're no longer gagged. You can speak. You're not going to prison. You're not going to get a coat. and you're able to help Americans make sense of where we are. You obviously have a particular gift in thinking along these lines and thinking politically. I'm glad to see all the banners around you. If people are watching that video, they can see that.

By the way, I have a spear Agnew trash can. I just want to let you know. Very bare and hard to find. Yes. But I do think that when you have the time, not today, I'd love to continue the conversation with you because I think that what we lack, obviously only having Fox News, we don't really have the time to get into some of the deeper stuff. You know, you can hear the same stuff over and over. But some of the things that you're talking about, some of the things that you talk about in your books are not things that most Americans are aware of.

And I think the only good thing that's coming out of this is that many Americans are waking up. many, many Americans are waking up and seeing where we are and that it's a republic, if we can keep it. And again, thanks to you and a handful of others and certainly thanks to the grace of God, I think we will keep it, but I do think that we're in a civil war. Well, yesterday I sat down with Krista Davis, the woman who handles my schedule, and she said, we have a request from this pastor in Tennessee who would like you to come to his church. I said, okay.

She said, he can't pay expenses. There is no honorary and you'd have to go on your own. I said, okay. I said, how many people? She said, well, about 2,000. I said, put it on the book. She said, but they're not paying for anything. I said, I don't care.

Put it on the books I want to go. I'm going to do as much as that as I possibly can because I want people to hear my story. I went from the deepest valley to the highest mountaintop in a matter of weeks, thanks to the grace of God. So I don't care who doesn't believe it. I don't care about the skeptics. I'm going to hit the circuit to the extent that I can. And I obviously have to pursue my appeal, but I will never stop fighting.

God bless you, Roger Stone. By God's grace, to be continued. Thank you so much. Thank you. The day you're born. Ladies and gentlemen, as promised, Todd Starns is my guest. Todd, welcome to the program. Eric Metaxus.

Always great to hang out with you, sir. I love to talk to you. You've got the fire. You, in case people don't know who you are, you've got a nationally syndicated radio show for a thousand years. You're the author of a million books. The new one is called Culture Jihad. Now, this came out some months ago, but it seems prophetic. And I'm sorry to say, I wish it weren't prophetic.

I wish it were a big dud and you got it all wrong. Unfortunately, Todd, for you and for me and for the country and the world, you've got it exactly right. and we need to talk about it. The subtitle is A Culture Jihad. The subtitle is How to Stop the Left from Killing a Nation. You know and I know, unfortunately, that's exactly what this is about. So talk to my audience about what you see happening. You know, Eric, back in October, when the book came out,

many of our fellow conservatives and many people in talk radio and conservative television laughed at me. And they mocked. I want you to name names. They mocked this book. I will tell you, the people over at Fox News Channel who actually embraced this book, people like Trish Regan, who is no longer at the network, Lou Dobbs, and my good friends on Fox & Friends, they understood what was at stake here. I mean, this is, you know, people call it the cancel culture mom.

But these are fascist, Eric. These are people who want to fundamentally transform our nation. and a lot of people just laughed at the concept, this idea that we would live in a country where people would literally be judged by the color of their skin and that we would live in a society where people would be talking about banning books and movies and music because of the content. But here we are just a few months after the book comes out and that's exactly what's happening. And think about what you just said. I mean the parallel, the horrific parallel, how many times have people said in Germany in the 30s, no one believed this could happen to the nation

of Goethe and Schiller, a tremendous culture. They never believed horrible things could happen, much less the death camps, which came 10 years later. But the singling out of groups, the barring from the professions of certain groups, if you don't hold to a certain national socialist line, Nobody in Germany believed it could happen. We now know that it happened in spades. And nobody in America would ever dream that you and I could be having a serious conversation about today, people talking along the lines that honestly, we never thought this could happen in America, that people would tear down statues of genuine heroes, Abraham Lincoln, or George Washington.

So you really did see this. Why did you see this? How did you see this, Todd? So about a year before I started working on the book, I was watching a documentary, I believe it was on CBS 60 minutes, and the Islamic radicals were in Afghanistan, they were in Iraq, and they were targeting the cultural centers, the museums,

and they were toppling these beautiful ancient statues and monuments and turning them literally into piles of rubble. You might remember the Buddhist statue, that were these beautiful relics of history that were just turned into piles of dust. And I thought to myself, as I was watching this, that's what's happening in this country. At the time, there were efforts to get rid of nativity scenes. There were some talks about banning books. At the time, Huckleberry Finn, and, for example, to kill a mockingbird. And I thought, this is exactly what the left is doing in this country. They are literally turning our history into piles of rubble. And that's how I came up with

the term culture jihad. It is a bloodless jihad, but it is a jihad. Nevertheless, they have declared a fatwa on the American way of life. And Eric, I don't know if people are aware of this, but we are in the middle of a war and at stake is the very future of the United States of America. Well, and unfortunately when you talk about, well, fortunately or fortunately, when you talk about the future of the United States of America, you're talking about the future of the world. Because as Lincoln said, and it's still true, we're the last best hope of earth. There is no other political entity, no other nation that has held the torch of freedom and self-government and preached right and wrong as clearly as this country has with all our faults. So there's nobody waiting in the wings except for China. or somebody truly wicked.

So you're quite right. That is what's at stake. And we have to make that case because I think most people, let's face it, Todd, and I know them, dear people, they just can't bear to believe that this could be happening. It's too painful to face. And you'll never fight it if you don't face it if you don't see it. So we have to try to help them to understand that, yes, this is happening. And if you're being silent and refusing to look at it, you are helping it happen.

And you have to ask yourself, okay, well, who? are the jihadists. We're talking about the secularist. We're talking about the sex and gender revolutionaries, and we're talking about socialists and communist out there. These are people that have formed an alliance to take out this country, and they're doing a pretty darn good job of it. And again, you wrote about this, Eric, so eloquently in the Bonhofer book, Silence in the face of evil is evil itself. And look what's happened. The church, by and large, in America, that incredibly strong, powerful voice in the culture. they stood down. Look at the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest non-Catholic denomination in the throes of a battle over critical race theory and social justice. And as a result of that, they have disengaged from this fight. And now it is a literal moral free-for-all out there. And we've got to stand up. We have to fight. And if we do not, we will lose this country. Listen, I wrote about it in my Bonhofer book unwittingly, right? But I had a fun. sense as I was writing it, I thought I could sort of smell this happening instinctively, right?

In other words, when, if you have a biblical view of sexuality and you say, listen, I'm a Christian and I've been taught, according to the Bible, that sex is between a man and a woman in marriage only. That's a tremendously radical stance in 21st century Western culture. But that's the Christian stance. And we've always had religious liberty. So if I want to have my crazy backward view that the Bible is true, I'm free to do that. Suddenly, that has been changed, challenged, I should say, very dramatically. And if I don't tow the line on whatever the new level of gay trans rights is, or if I don't tow the line on whatever they're claiming the new racial standard is, suddenly I may lose my job. I cannot get a job as a psychologist if I believe

that homosexuality is not God's first best. That is really dramatic, and that's how it began in Germany with, you know, the Nazis didn't do everything immediately, but they were very swift in the beginning when Hitler finally took power, and that's what I'm seeing now is that the swiftness of these changes, if we don't stand up and fight with everything we have now, it's going to fall apart. everything you say in this book is true. Eric, just think about this. And what I'm about to say is incredibly politically incorrect

and may be offensive to a lot of people. But my greater concern now, what does this country look like 10 years from now when you've had young people that have been taught from kindergarten first grade? And by the way, when I say kindergarten in Virginia, Loudoun County, Virginia, they just announced they're going to start teaching kids in kindergarten about white privilege and slavery. So when you look at the future 10 years from now, you've got a generation of American young people who have been taught to marginalize and look down on white children simply because of the color of their skin. They're being taught in public schools that white kids have what they have because of the color of their skin and that white children are responsible for your problems.

How do you think that's going to play out in the culture at large when these young people become 18, 19, 19, 20 years old? We've already got a glimpse of that, Eric. It's happening right now in the streets of American cities. I mean, this is a very dangerous thing where you have the curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a white guy. And I don't know his politics, probably a liberal, but you've got a guy like him who had to be forced out of his job. He had to leave his job because he actually said, no, we can't get, no, we're not going

to get rid of all the paintings by the white guys. That's discrimination. But this is where we are in America right now, where people are. are being judged by the color of their skin. And we are setting ourselves up for a very dangerous time in our near future if we're teaching little boys and girls that white people are bad people. Well, look, first of all, I would say to everyone who can get your kids out of these schools, home school, and put them in a radical Christian school.

But if you can, get your kids out of these schools. If you can't get your kids out of these schools, raise hell with the school board and the administration. Don't sit back. Raise hell. Be brave and speak the truth because that's what Americans typically don't do. We're nice people. We believe in tolerance. But that can go too far. Even Bonhofer saw that when he went to Union Theological Seminary. He was kind of amazed how everybody was all about getting along with each other. This is in 1930. And they didn't really appreciate the sharp tang of truth or fighting for truth and arguing. It was all about, hey, we all get along. And that can be. a good thing and it can be a tragic thing. We'll be right back, folks. I'm talking to Todd Starnes. The book is Culture Jihad. President Trump has a huge announcement for his top supporters. We'll be celebrating the 2020 Republican National Convention this summer and he wants you to enter for your chance to join him at the convention. If you win, the team will cover

the flight, hotel and give you VIP passes for yourself and a guest. All you have to do is text Metaxus to 88022. Today for your chance to meet President Trump at the convention. Again, that's M-E-T-A-X-A-S to 88022 to enter to win this once-in-lifetime opportunity via special guest paid for by Donald J. Trump for president. Folks, I'm talking to my friend Todd Starns. The book is Culture, Jihad, and the subtitle is How to Stop the Left from Killing a Nation. Todd, explain to us how has the left become the left of today? In other words, I've always had friends in the Democratic Party.

We would disagree on certain things. But the left of Jimmy Carter or even of Bill Clinton seems dramatically moderate compared to the left of today are cultural Marxists who seem to despise everything that we have celebrated for 244 years in America. How did that happen? Yeah, look, that's a great question. My dad was one of those Southern Democrats here. He voted for Jimmy Carter back in the day. And then that was the last time he voted for a Democrat. but even someone like Jimmy Carter, who was at the time a liberal, and I would say that

Jimmy Carter has probably gone over to the left by and large, I think it's a result of our public education system. And this is the answer to a lot of our problems, Eric, is that we have given the public education system too much control over our kids and, quite frankly, control over our country. You know, we've been in the throes of this global pandemic, the China virus, and a lot of people are saying, well, we've got to get the schools back open. Honestly, I think having the schools closed may be the best thing to happen. At least we have a fighting chance here. But what saddens me are the number of parents who say, we've got to get the kids back to school.

What are we going to do? You know what? You're a mom. You're a dad. That's your responsibility to train up your child. What was it Ronald Reagan said? That American success, it doesn't start anywhere else except at the dinner table, the supper table. So we've really got to reclaim our public education system and rethink how we do education in this country.

Otherwise, it's going to be a tough bite. Well, and that's another thing. I've been a broken record on this. But the reason I get really, really angry at injustice and at lying, Black Lives Matter as a concept, I don't know anybody who doesn't believe Black Lives Matter. But the organization and the movement, they are absolute liars. They are cynically using the tragic death of George Floyd and other injustices to promote a system that is against everything, almost all blacks I know believe in. For example, the nuclear family, the idea that family is important, the idea of having a biblical view of sexuality.

I know so many people that seem to think that Black Lives Matter is, you know, just for helping Blacks. If you want to destroy black families and black communities, give money to Black Lives Matter and support the organizations giving money to Black Lives Matter. Because as you just said, this country, you know, the little platoons that Burke referred to, the family, these little organizations, the churches, that's where this country finds its greatness. And that actually, when you talk about a culture jihad, the title of your book,

that is what is being destroyed. They want to have a top-down, huge federal government that has all the power of the Chinese communist state, that is the enemy of American-style liberty. And Eric, I mean, the evidence is all there. The birthing pains within the Democrat Party, which by and large, for most of its existence, was either, you know, middle of the road leaning to the left, but now it's to the far left. And you have people like Elliot Ingle, who was able to work across the lives with Republicans, and every now, and again, had good friends with the Republican lawmakers. Many of them are conservative, some members

of the House Freedom Caucus. This guy lost his primary battle in New York State to a radical leftist, a guy to the left of AOC. You say, well, that's just a handful of the Democrats. No, it's the future of the Democrat Party. And people need to wake up and understand what's at stake here. Look, one of the most troubling parts about all of this, Eric Mataxis, one day I woke up and I found myself, but bring with Gloria Steinem, for goodness sakes. Here we are, where these, God love them. These liberals are just, you know, they have, they have been completely blinded by this, but all of a sudden they woke up and guess what? That council culture mob came after their beehimes, and it is imperative. It's really easy for you and I to sit back and laugh at people like

J.K. Rowling and Gloria Steinem and Barry Weiss over formerly of the New York Times, but we can't do that. We've got to stand alongside these people, and we've got to fight the fascist. or they're going to shut all of us down. We've got to stand together. They all have the culture. These folks are all old enough to have the cultural memory of Lenny Bruce and people who, you know, were saying things. Everybody said, you shouldn't say that.

And they said, no, no, no, we've got to be able to have free speech. That's what America's all about. And they cherish that. They cherished kind of, you know, walking on that line between what you can say and what you can't say. And they said there's something healthy in that, right? Well, suddenly, they see. they see that the mobs are coming for them. I actually saw this at my graduation from Yale in 1984,

which was already a woke, crazy place in 84. But Dick Cavett was the graduation speaker, and he said some sort of cheeky, politically incorrect things that were funny, and the feminists came after him. That's in 1984. So if you want to know where this is all coming from, it's coming from academia. I saw it with my own eyes, 36 years of.

ago and we are now at a place where it is absolutely everywhere. And as you say, if we don't stand now and fight this battle, you know, Todd, it's an amazing thing. There is only one America. Here we are. Who else is going to step up? If we do not step up, I know there are enough Americans to step up, but they better do it now. One of my favorite chapters in the book, I tell the story about how country music was going woke. And a lot of people are like, oh, that's just a load on hooey. Not only country music, but also NASCAR. And if you remember Bill Robertson, our good friend, Phil Robertson, the bearded one,

gave a prayer at a NASCAR event and got blowback from that. And I wrote in the book, I was at, I realized, I think, that the country was in trouble. I was in Asheville, North Carolina, which technically is the Berkeley of the South. Asheville, North Carolina, walked into a restaurant. I was looking at the menu. They had no sweet tea and the barbecue, the only barbecue they had Eric Mataxe, which was barbecue tofu. Hold on. Hold on. We're going to break. This is insane. Don't go away.

Folks, I'm talking to Todd Stearns. The book is Culture Jihad. Todd, you just said something, and this is where it really gets horrific. NASCAR is going woke. Country music is going woke. And you just said you went into a place and all they had was barbecued tofu. Where was this? An unsweet tea. It was in Asheville, North Carolina, or at Metaxus. So I did what any God-fearing Southern man would do.

I rebuked them in the name of Jesus and got the hell out of there. But again, it's tragic because you realize, oh, my gosh, we've lost the South. And that really was the beginning. I know it's sort of a funny story, but we're talking about traditions and culture. And that's what's under attack here. You know, our good friend, Governor Mike Hockaby, got into a big dust up with the Country Music Association Foundation, the head of that organization, a gay man, a gay married man,

and he took offense that Mike Huckabee was going to be named to the board of directors because of his position on marriage. And Mike Hockaby graciously stepped aside because he didn't want to get in the way of raising money for poor kids to have a guitar. And I thought to myself, have we reached this point where country music, someone like Mike Huckabee is no longer welcome in the world of country music. You know, again, America needs to wake up. You've got to pay attention to these warning signs out there.

Well, I was going to say, you know, the point is it's the long march through the institutions. The woke maniac radicals have gone everywhere and taken over everywhere. And most good-hearted Americans who are also naive don't know what to do. And I think it's time for folks like you and me to tell them, okay, folks, It's over. You need to wake up and face what has happened. When somebody like Mike Huckabee can get pushed out for having a biblical view of marriage, I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen,

even if you don't have, I have friends who don't have a biblical view of marriage at all. But they don't try to force me to have their view or to throw away the Bible or to throw away my faith. If they do that, they're no longer my friends. that is what's happening. And I think you can have friends that disagree with you that have completely have no faith or different faith or different views on sexuality. That's what America's all about. But when they start demanding like fascists that you bow the knee to whatever ideology they're pushing, that's the end of freedom. That's the end of America. That's the cultural jihad

where we are right now. It's a stunning thing. And I'm so glad to you for helping people wake up to it. Well, I appreciate that, Eric. And I appreciate the great work. you are doing. And I like what you said there. It really is a march through the institutions. And when you look at, you know, where we are, public education, we've got to get a control. We've got to get a handle on that. But also the communication part of it. And I truly believe, you know, looking at the landscape, talk radio is going to be so, so vitally important to the future of this country. That's where people are able to have conversations like this. because, sad to say, a lot of the conservative cable channels are starting to go woke as well.

Well, we need more conservative cable channels. Let's face it. I mean, the idea that there is one, the entire landscape of TV is secular humanists, liberal. And I think that the free market ought to deliver up more options just than Fox News. Because, you know, maybe I already heard what Sean Hannity is saying. Is there anything else out there? you know, maybe a rerun of the Andy Griffith show is about it, or I'm going to bed. I mean, it seems to me that there are Christian billionaires out there.

I don't know what they're planning to do with their money. The Lord is not going to let them take it with them. Maybe they didn't realize that they can't bring the boat to heaven. And so I think it's possible that they should spend their money now. We need distribution. We need broadcast channels. We need a media that speaks for all of the American people. public and you know and i know we have not had that fox news can't cut it that is one network uh yeah

yes and and eric let's be honest you look at me i'm a radio guy i got the face for radio you are a handsome man eric metaxus the world needs to see you on the tv well we're at least we're videotaping this now so people can laugh at your dumb comment but i got to tell you no joke we do need tv because there's so many people that they're just flipping around you know and i know also that CNN has gone insane. I mean, five years ago, I could turn to CNN and know that I'm going to get, kind of like with the New York Times, it's going to be liberal, but I may learn something. That is over.

Once this president became president, CNN went, when crazy, Don Lemon jumped off a cliff. I've never seen anything as crazy as what we're seeing, that even when the president gives a great speech that everybody should say is great, they quibble. And the New York Times, of course, they do. died. And I really think that if people of faith and people of traditional values and good liberals who simply believe in a free exchange of ideas, the old America, if those folks don't step up, this is all over. It is, as your book says, a culture jihad. And there are, I think, many Americans that simply, they don't want to face it. And you and I are doing what we can to say,

we need you to face it. If you face it, we can win, and we will win by the grace of God. Amen. Look, I believe in being a happy warrior. I don't think we should embrace the violent tactics of the left. I believe we can make our point in the public square. I believe that we ought to engage in the political process. Dr. James Thompson gave me permission to publish a letter he wrote to all of his followers in the book. And he harkens back to what you talked about earlier, about Nazi Germany and the parallels between what's happening there and what's happening here. And as Dr. Dobson just so eloquently wrote in this letter,

the problem is that Christians are not engaged in the political process. And if we got engaged, if we went out there and voted on election day, we would be able to change the direction of this country. So it's really up to us. You know, Christians, people of faith, got to get out. there and we've got to get engaged in the political process. Well, Christians either, either avoid politics entirely or they have no discernment. And they seem to think that because Donald Trump is is rough around the edges and has sinned in his past and sins in his future, I guess,

sometimes that that he's disqualified. And I think you'd never say that about a, you know, you'd never say that about George Clooney. You watch his movies. You don't say, well, he did this and he did this into the day. We have tons of heroes in Hollywood that we hold to a different standard because we understand we're not hiring them for that. Okay. Now, if they murder somebody, maybe that's a deal breaker. But we're talking about people who don't necessarily share our values, but we're asking something different of them. When you have a politician, you are not asking him to be Billy Graham. You're not asking him, even to be Jimmy Carter. You're asking him to do his job for the American people. We're going to be back. Final segment. We're talking to Todd

Stearns. The book is Culture. Jihad. I'm glad you wrote it. I'm glad it's out. I'm glad we're talking about it. We'll be right back. Folks, I'm talking to Todd Starns. Todd, where are you on social media? Can I find you? You can. Facebook at Todd Starns and Twitter at Todd Starnes. I'm one of the blue checkmark people. I'm only kidding because, of course, I follow you. And I want to say that, you know, part of what I like about you is because of your faith, you really do have hope. And others, you know that even though we're in a battle, which we are, God wants us to rise up as we did in 1860, as we did in 1776, and as good people have done for millennia. And you fight. You don't lie down. It seems to me that because the left has gotten so radical and because the things you write about in your book are coming true now, I think a lot of people in the middle are waking up and are saying, that it's far worse than I thought.

Yeah, and, and you know, again, I say, welcome to the fight. You know, how'd he do? Andrew Sullivan, formerly in the New York Magazine, and he's a great writer. I don't agree with anything he die rights. And he's written some pretty awful things about me too. But you know what?

I'm going to defend his right to say those things, because he has that right as an American citizen. And we've got to, look, we're going to have to stand up, put on our big boy pants, and we're going to have to get out there, and partner with people who we may not necessarily agree with politically. We may, for example, my next-door neighbor back when I lived in Brooklyn, New York, but was a good fellow. He is an atheist.

But you know what? We were able to share a meal together every now and again, and I was able to understand where he was coming from, and he understood where I was coming from. Eric, we're not having these conversations anymore. And that's a big problem. We've got to break down those barriers, and we have to understand that we all have to fight here. And you're right, I do have hope in America. As I wrote in my book, I have hope because my hope is not based in Washington. It's not based up on Capitol Hill.

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus Blunt and righteousness, as the great songwriter once wrote so eloquently. So, yeah, I do have hope. And I think that we need a lot of happy Christian warriors out there fighting the good fight. And of course, there are a lot of really unhappy, gloomy Christian people who have just, They're just sitting on there and saying, it's all going to hell. Lord's coming back in 10 minutes. And I think, guess what?

Even if that were true, you are in sin by having that attitude. Scripture commands us to fight, to rejoice in the Lord always. That's not an option, folks. We need to rejoice and fight. And it's the Lord's business, how it ends up. But for us to sit in our hands and to not vote and to not do anything. So I want to say to my audience, what I say periodically, spread these interviews.

This interview that I'm doing with Todd will be on YouTube. Please share it with everyone you know. Follow Todd on Twitter. Make your friends aware that there are people like us having these conversations because I'm telling you, folks, there's a lot of good people out there. They just haven't heard any of this before. They haven't heard this case made before. I mean, faith is so important to you.

and to me, Todd, and yet because we're Americans and because we're serious Christians, we don't force our faith. We don't believe faith or freedom can be forced. And so we are forced simply to love our neighbors and to make the arguments as best we can to pray for our enemies. It's a whole different kind of battling, isn't it? You know, it is, Eric, and I go back to the early days of the country. I tell us this terrific story about a Baptist preacher in Charleston, South Carolina. He was actually preaching about freedom and politics from the pulpit during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War. And his sermons were so powerful that a delegation of our founding fathers sent a group to Charleston. They said, hey, look, we're having

a hard time rounding up farmers to get out there and fight the British. Can you go out into the countryside, grab a couple of your other preacher friends, and get out there. And you know what, he did it. And I thought it's interesting that when it came time to fight for our freedom in America, Eric, Mattaxis, our founding fathers went to the church house for help. And that is going to happen again by the grace of God. It's happening now. Todd, Starns, my friend, congratulations on culture jihad. And thank you for your time. We appreciate it. Thanks, Eric.