The Eric Metaxas Show - William Federer

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

With Americans concerned about the recent tariffs, Bill Federer joins us to discuss his book, The Interesting History of Income Tax.

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. We'll get you from point A to point B. But if you're looking for point C, well, buddy, you're on your own. But if you'll wait right here, in just about the two minutes, the bus to point C will be coming right by. And now here's your Ralph Cramden of the Airways, Eric Mat, Texas. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show. I have as my guest right this minute, William Federer, Bill Federer, welcome back. I know that we are in for, it's like trying to.

to catch a knuckleball with you. Like you just got to brace yourself because here it comes. It's not going to be easy. You, you, you're a man of facts. And I just love, I love that, of course. Today, I suppose we're talking about tax day or the history of taxes in America. What do you have for us? Tariffs.

So, I'm sorry, tariffs. The history of tariffs. And in context, they started to go together. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I knew tax was involved, but it's the history of terrorists. Well, most of us are not very aware of the history of the subject. So where do we start? Trump has often talked about McKinley, who was a lot of people don't think of

McKinley, but he was, of course, assassinated. So he was the second president, or no, was it Garfield who was assassinated? He was the third president to be assassinated. Am I getting that right? Right, right, yeah. I mean, that's an amazing thing. Abraham Lincoln is killed in 1865. Garfield is killed in the 1880s.

Right, yeah, 1881. Garfield did his one executive order, which was to have people off for Memorial Day. and then he was killed by some crazy guy from an Oneida, New York cult. Okay, so 16 years after the murder of Abraham Lincoln, I mean, this is just hard to fathom, really. 16 years, the first president killed, obviously, Abraham Lincoln, stunning thing. 16 years later, Garfield is murdered. And then 20 years later, McKinley is murdered. I mean, we really forget.

this history, that in the space of 36 years, we have three presidents murdered. I mean, I just find that it's kind of an amazing thing that we've sort of forgotten about. I didn't mean to get off on the history of assassinations, but it's kind of a big deal. And Trump recently has been talking about McKinley and tariffs and the age before income tax. So anyway, where do you want to start. Right. So tariffs were the number one way the federal government was financed for the first century and a half. So the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, authorizes the federal government to collect tariffs. They're called duties and imposts to help pay the debts, provide for the common defense, and the general welfare of the United States. Matter of fact, the second bill,

George Washington signed was the Tariff Act of 1789, which, imposed a 5% tariff on all goods imported from other countries. Alexander Hamilton was the first Secretary of the Treasury, and he created the Coast Guard to do what? To catch countries trying to smuggle goods into America without paying the tariffs, right? He was the Secretary of Treasury. He's in charge of raising revenue. And so these boats are fast. They're cutters.

That's the fastest boat of the day. And so they're called revenue cutters. And so the Coast Guard was started to collect tariffs, to catch people who want to not pay the tariffs. Now, we have to back up. Industrial Revolution. Britain burned coal, right? Ireland burned peat moss, right? This is this mud that they would dry out and burn.

But in England, they burned coal, which they mined out of the ground, and the mines would fill up with water. And so in 1769, Isaac Watt invented a steam pump to pump water out of the ground. of the coal mines. It quickly turned into a steam engine, and it ran factories where they could make bolts of cloth very inexpensively in other textiles, but the British did not allow manufacturing to be in the colonies because the factories in England wanted to market. So when we became independent, Washington put in place the Tariff Act to make the goods from England more expensive intentionally so that it would create an incentive to start manufacturing here on our own soil. But that was only a 5% tariff.

Right. And so Thomas Jefferson wrote April 6th, 1816, It may be the duty of all to submit to this sacrifice to pay for a time and imposed on importation of certain articles in order to encourage their manufacture at home. Excuse me. That sounds remarkably like what Trump is doing right now, except he doesn't say it as melifluously as Thomas Jefferson did 209 years ago. But it's really that is the thesis, isn't it? That yes, this is going to be a little bit difficult for a while,

but in the long run, it's going to be a boon to our economy. Right. So the Industrial Revolution switched over to America, and factories sprang up mostly in the northern states. And steam engines called spinning jenny's made it so that instead of you taking, you know, wool from a sheep, and if you look it under a microscope, it has these little barbs and the more you pull it, the tighter gets into a thread. Well, women had to do this by hand and spinning wheels. Well, now this factory is going to have these spinning jenny's that could make lots of thread,

and then they had looms where they could weave the thread back and forth really fast and make bolts of cloth. So basically the industrial revolution freed women up from menial tasks. And also, instead of having to go to the well and get buckets of water and bring that in, the women could have the water piped right into the house, right? So instead of outhouses, you had indoor plumbing. And then instead of the women washing clothes and wash tubs and hanging them out to dry, now they could have a washer machine and eventually you're getting a little head of Thomas, Jefferson here. You're leaping ahead

a hundred years, of course, because we didn't really have washing machines in the 19th century, just to, so that my audience is cracking. They had the tubs that had a thing that turned, but definitely no dryers. But the food prices went down because now factories

could make farm equipment like reapers, and instead of you having to pay manual labor to walk through the fields, you could have a big machine. So the price of food went down. It was the fastest rise in the standard of living in human history, right, that happened in America. So tariffs not only produce these goods cheaper, the factories could hire more workers, and so all the immigrants coming in from Europe had jobs.

And so this is before the days of unions and minimum wage, and you could hire cheap labor. So the tariffs, between 1792 and 1812, they were around 12 percent. After the, the war of 1812, they went to 25%. And then by 19, excuse me, 1820, they were at 40%, and 1860 at 60%. So Franklin Pierce, the 14th president, said in 1853, happily, I have no occasion to suggest any radical changes in the financial policy of the government. Ours is almost, if not absolutely, the solitary power of Christendom having a surplus of revenue drawn immediately from imposts on commerce. Imposts is another word for tariff. So here we are. Here's Ben Siegelman. He wrote for the Jewish newspaper called Commentary Magazine in 1962. And Siegelman's,

the article is tariffs, the Kennedy administration, and American politics. And he starts off in the early years of the Republic, all but about $20,000 out of the $4.5 million of treasury income stemmed from tariff levies that came in up to the Civil War. In fact, over 90% of the federal government's receipts came from tariffs. So here we are, prior to the Civil War, 90% of the federal government's income is from tariffs. But then the Civil War starts, and there's a problem. Most of the tariffs were collected at southern ports like Charleston, South Carolina. And so that's why the federal government sent troops to force them to collect the tariffs. And when they refused, that's when the cannons

were fired and it started the Civil War. Well, okay, hang on, hang on, hang on. We're going to go to break, folks. I told you, there's a lot of information, but this is great information. We're talking William Federer. Don't go away. There's been a national focus on eating only the healthiest of foods, and that's great news for balance of nature. Their method of producing a vibrant nutritional supplement is second to none. While so many others use chemicals and additives, balance of nature is made solely from whole food ingredients, while others' methods sacrifice nutritional quality for the sake of profits and volume. Balance of nature's advanced vacuum cold process involves freeze drying the fruits and veggies into a fine powder retaining

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That's Mypillar.com promo code Eric or call 800-858-0-263. promo code Eric. I'm back. I'm speaking to our friend Bill Federer, William Federer, talking about the history of tariffs in America. This is fascinating and important. So keep going, Bill. This is, it's really all a revelation to me. Right. So I wrote a book. It's called The Interesting History of Income Tax. And my degree actually is in accounting, of all things. Anyway, so Lincoln is now faced with a problem. He doesn't have any tariff taxes to support the federal government because most of it was collected at southern ports. And now there's a civil war and the South definitely isn't going to forward that money to the north. And so Lincoln institutes an emergency income tax.

It's the first federal income tax in American history instituted by Lincoln. It was an emergency effort to raise $750 million so that the federal income tax. a union could fight and win the civil war. After the civil war was over, the income tax was repealed. There's no federal emergency. And so back to tariffs. And so tariffs by the year 1900 was 95% of the federal government's revenue. This is during William McKinley that you had mentioned before. And America was at its gilded age. I mean, we had money flowing in. I've, I've, Remember, I spoke once in Philadelphia, and they gave me a tour of the capital there in Harrisburg, and it was built during this time. And it is gilded all over. I mean, it is like opulent.

Actually, the Pennsylvania state capital in Harrisburg, which I have had a tour of as well, is so glorious. I mean, if you can get to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania just to see it, it is absolutely magnificent. So please continue. Yeah, so this is during this, this gilded era, and we have money coming in, America's prosperous. Even in 1921, the United Peanut Growers Association asked Dr. George Washington Carver from Tuskegee to go to the U.S. Capitol and lobby the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee for what? For a tariff on peanuts imported from China, right? They're bringing in cheap stuff from China.

Imagine that. And so here's George Washington Carver lobbying the federal Congress say, hey, put a tariff on these peanuts from China. It'll help our peanut farmers in the South. And they do. It's called the Mercumber tariff bill of 1922. And then there's the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill of 1930. But then we'll be a Smoot-Hawley famous. I mean, why do I remember Smoot-Hawley?

Was there something particular about that? Right. Well, this is during the Department. and you had the tariff bill put in place by Hoover, and then other countries wanted to retaliate and put off on tariffs. And the timing of it was that the Federal Reserve was tightening up credit. They weren't like lowering the interest rates and it caused this economic downturn. But then we began to switch over to income tax revenue. So let's look at income tax.

There was a temporary one during the emergency of the Civil War. Then it's repealed. They try pushing through a peacetime income tax in 1892, but the Supreme Court declared income tax unconstitutional. They said any legislation that discriminates based on race, religion, or economic statuses class legislation leads to abuses. It was sort of like DEI in the financial arena. You're going to tax some people more and some people,

you're going to give some people based on their race or their, you know, position. You're going to give them. Wait a minute. Where does any of that come in except for economic status? I don't see any of these other categories attaching themselves to this. In other words, was it considered unconstitutional because the rich would be taxed more? In other words, I'm not clear. Right.

So the income tax bill that was passed and then declared unconstitutional. You had the Supreme Court Justice, Stephen Field. He was Justice Field. He said this, the income tax law under consideration is class legislation. Whenever a distinction is made in the burden a law imposes or in the benefit it confers on any citizen by reason of their birth or wealth or religion. It is class legislation and leads inevitably to oppression and abuses. It is the same. Okay. So what year are we talking about? Sorry, what year? This is 1892. Okay. You said that. So, right. So because the income tax is a graded tax,

then the case is that it's unconstitutional. Well, keep going, but that's, I just want to be clear that I'm tracking with the idea behind it. So Justice Fields makes the case. And so Justice Stephen Field continues, it is the same and essential character as that of the English income tax statute of 1691, which tax Protestants at a certain rate, Catholics at double the rate, and choose it triple the rate, right? And so the reason that the Supreme Court declared it's the Pollock versus Farmers Loan and Trust, and it declares income tax on constitutional. So what's the alternative? Amend the Constitution. And so that's what Woodrow Wilson does. He pushes through the 1913 Tariff Act, but he tax on a 1% tax on the top 1% richest people in America.

It was just a tax to tax the Rockefellers and Carnegie's and Jay Paul Geddes. He was going to tax us. The idea of income tax came from German immigrants who had been infected with Marxism and this class struggle over in Germany. And so he caved, but it was just to tax the upper class. then you have the emergency of World War I and everybody swallows that well we had a income tax during the Civil War so emergency time but World War II is when it changed Franklin Roosevelt had the largest tax increase in income tax in American history and he expanded it to the entire population and even John F. Kennedy when he is writing about income taxes he says the income tax introduced during the war when the income tax was extended to millions of new taxpayers. So this is, it's during the war, it's a wartime emergency. And then people made about $5,000 a year.

They hadn't saved up money at the end of the year to pay this FDR income tax. And so that's when FDR instituted paycheck withholding. It came from Beardsley Rummel. chairman of the Macy's department store in New York City, you know, Thanksgiving Day parade. So Beardsley Rommel goes from Macy's to the New York Federal Reserve. He comes up with this idea of just taking a little bit out of your paycheck every week. And after the war ended, it didn't. And so whenever you see, money.

Well, I mean, you haven't even explained. I mean, Woodrow Wilson does this thing in 1913. Then you have the First World War. Why is the income tax not repealed after the First World War in the way that it's repealed after the Civil War? My guess is the progressives and progressivism have taken hold in the United States of America after World War I, thanks to Woodrow Wilson. I mean, is that roughly the reason? Yeah, yeah. And again, it was just to soak the rich tax.

And Kennedy even mentions that. He says that in meeting the demands of war finance, this is April 20th, 1961, John of Kennedy, in meeting the demands of war finance, the individual income tax moved from a selective tax imposed on the wealthy to the means by which the great majority of our citizens participated in paying. So here he admits before World War II, it was just a selective tax imposed on the wealthy. And then FDR expanded it to everybody. And then Kennedy goes on. He says, withholding on wages and salaries was introduced during the war when the income tax was extended to millions of new taxpayers. Right.

So here we have this. But there's a fallout, an unanticipated consequence of FDR raise in income taxes. It's called outsourcing. And so here we are after World War II, rebuilding, Germany in Japan with brand new equipment and businesses owners aren't successful because they're dumb. They're successful because they make smart business decisions. And they realize, hey, we can move our factory overseas and hire cheap labor, avoid lawsuits, avoid government red tape and regulations and EPA and everything. And then we can produce stuff cheaper. And then we can take our

profits and lobby politicians in America to lower the tariffs so that we can bring our goods back to America and undercut American competition. And so once this happened, they called this free trade. But the question is, is it fair trade? Other countries, when you examine their tax codes, they would give subsidies to their businesses intentionally to help them produce stuff cheaper than American goods. So once they put American factors out of business and we're dependent on foreign goods. Then they could flex their muscle when it came to negotiating time on foreign policy

by threatening to withhold the products that were now dependent upon. And so we can... I'm sorry, we're going to, we have to go to another hard break here. We'll be right back, folks, with William Federer. See days and reckless nights. Limousines and bright spotlights. We were brothers through... Welcome back talking to... William Federer. Bill, it's absolutely fascinating. Your book on this subject is titled, what? It's called The Interesting History of Income Tax. Okay, and that sounds funny because you think, how interesting could it be? It is very interesting. The interesting history of income tax by William Federer.

So please continue. This is fascinating. Right. And so when you squeeze a sponge, the water goes out, when FDR raised taxes on businesses in America, it causes the money to leave. Kennedy told Congress April 20th, 1961, in those countries where income taxes are lower than in the United States, the ability to defer the payment of U.S. tax by retaining income in the subsidiary companies abroad, provides a tax advantage for companies operating through overseas subsidiaries that is not available to companies operating solely in the United States. And so Kennedy said, look, our capital is leaving the country? We're rebuilding these other countries around the world, but we're not benefiting from it. And so Kennedy put forward an immediate income tax cut across the board, business, and individuals. And so September 18, 1963, Kennedy said, a tax cut means higher family income, higher business profits, and a balanced federal budget. Every taxpayer and his family will have more money left over after taxes for a new country.

car, a new home, new convenience, education, investment. Every businessman can keep a higher percentage of its profits in his cash register or put it to work expanding or improving his business. And as the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenue. So this is going to say this is 20 years before trickle-down economics, 20 years before the laffer curve. In other words, it makes sense. If you give Americans, more money, they will spend the money, it will help the economy, so it's a win-win. It's a win-win. It's a win for everybody. All right, so keep going. And the only caveat is you give the tax cuts to businesses that are located on American soil.

It's not just a tax cut to all the businesses because the ones that are operating overseas, hey, it's just the ones. And so what happens is if you make it less expensive to have your factory located here than overseas, then the factors will be built. They'll have to hire more workers to meet increased demand because the workers have more money because of the tax cuts and they want to spend the money. And so it was a great benefit. Kennedy's plan was adopted by Reagan. And basically Trump is wanting to return to this lower federal income taxes and increase the tariff taxes. make the foreign goods more expensive, then we'll be motivated to build and manufacture stuff on our own soil. We'll be able to hire more workers and wages can go up and all the rest.

Another quote from Kennedy, January 24, 1964, 1963. Our tax system still siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power and reduces the incentive for risk investment effort there by absorbing our recovery. and shifting our national growth rate. So Kennedy's saying, look, we got to cut these taxes. Now, there's one other ingredient to throw into this pot, if I can. And FDR not only raised taxes, FDR did debt stimulated economy. In other words, he...

I'm sorry, you said raised taxes. Did you mean lower taxes? No, no, I'm sorry for FDR. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought JFK. Okay, FDR raised to obviously raise taxes and woppingly increased the size of the federal government, generally speaking. But he did what else, you said? So he liked a economist named John Maynard Keynes. And John, this is right, during the Depression, the, they're blood out of work. And so John Maynard Keynes came up with this idea of a debt-stimulated economy. So have the government go in debt, spend money, in the private sector to create jobs, jobs will pay the taxes, and taxes will pay off the government debt. It looks really nice on a chalkboard, you know, professors, but in reality, it doesn't work because politicians realize that if they go in debt and the government go in debt and spend money

in the private sector to create jobs, they'll get votes. So they want to continue to go in debt, continue to spend the money, and they never want to have the taxes to pay off the debt because that will hurt their chances of re-election. And so there's an economist named James Buchanan, Jr. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in economics in 1988. Why? Well, he's an economist. He's studying, why is the government continuing to go in debt?

He's scratching his head. He's looking at formulas and ratios. And then he realizes that politicians want to get reelected. And so he discovered this. and he wins the Nobel Peace Prize, that politicians will have the government continue to go in debt to spend money because it'll help them to get votes, but they just kick the can down the road,

and they'd let the next Congress worry about it. Now we have a $36 trillion debt, and we can barely pay the interest on it. And we're talking about borrowing more money so that we can give it to Ukraine and other countries when we're like the most in-debt nation in world history. It's like, hello. So Trump is doing emergency surgery.

I mean, we're like a 400. I mean, that's about right. We are, we're right at the edge of the abyss financially. And you need somebody, look, we've never, I keep saying this. We've never had anybody with the political courage of Trump who's willing to do what's necessary because it is necessary. But we've had tons of Republican leadership, forget about the Democrats, who have been very happy to kick the can down the road, as you put it, who don't really seem to care about the future, which is a scan. even to think of it, that they're supposed to be representing the best interests of people. I'm talking to William Federer. Final segment coming up. Don't go away. Talking to Bill Federer, William Federer. It's fascinating stuff, Bill, as you lay it out. Do you have any opinions on where we are? I mean, where things go from here? Because there's so much, you know, misinformation. The mainstream media attacks the tariffs. Wall Street to tax the tariff idea. And I know that we're at a pause right now with the tariffs, right, except for China. Right. Anything, if you remember when Millie became president of Argentina,

and he starts cutting out all the globalist debt and everything. And for about a year, Argentina was sort of shaky, but now he's got the country on solid footing and people are investing in Argentina. Right. And so we're talking debt is fat to the body politic. So what's fat? Well, you eat something you shouldn't and you have to carry it around. It's not brain tissue. It's not muscle tissue. It doesn't help you at all, but you got to pay for it. You got to keep those cells alive. And so what's debt? Well, that's where you spend money you shouldn't have spent, but then you got to keep paying interest on it. And so one of the things that I've done is study world's history. Debt is the precursor to the collapse of every major civilization. The Roman

empire. It kept expanding, expanding, expanding, and living off the money of the conquered peoples. But once Hadrian built his wall and said, this far and no further, we're not going to conquer anymore, they couldn't live within their means. And the Roman Empire went in debt and eventually collapsed. The Mongolian Empire under Genghis Khan, right, the WAND dynasty. It kept growing. But then he printed the first paper currency in world history, right? They called it the wand, but it was Marco Polo talked about it. But he printed too much of it. and they went in debt, and the Mongolian Empire collapsed. Florence, under the Italian Medici banking family, went in debt.

The Spanish Empire, as long as it had the gold from America, they would spend it as fast as they got it, but then when the gold stopped, they kept spending, and the Spanish Empire collapsed because of debt. The Holy Roman Empire collapsed after the 30 years' war because of debt. The French Empire after the 7th. So Louis XVIth helped us during the Revolution, and you know what he got in return?

nothing but debt, lots of debt. And then they're funny. I'm writing a book on the Revolution, and that to me is so fascinating that the French, obviously they just wanted to get back at the British and they join us. And it really is kind of fascinating to think that they didn't, in some ways, it didn't go so well for them. Yeah, they thought that maybe they could get some favorable trade deals out of it or something, but they didn't get anything.

and then a couple years their crops failed, and the people blamed King Louis the 16th, but it was because of debt that the country collapsed. The Confederacy during the Civil War, when the British were about to recognize them, Lincoln-initiated Emancipation Proclamation, and since the British had William Wilberforce and got rid of slavery,

and Lincoln switched the purpose of the war from tariffs and northern aggression to slavery, then the British said were hands off. And so the finances for the South dried up and the Confederacy collapsed because of debt. The Ottoman Empire, under Abdul Hamid, the second collapsed because of debt. The Russian Empire, under the Tsar collapse, the British Empire. And then this is what we did to the Soviet Union during the arms race with Reagan. The Russians tried to keep up with our military spending and they took money out of their economy to put it into missiles and their economy created. And so we're doing to ourselves what we did to collapse the Soviet Union. We're racking up all this debt, spending money, giving it to all the

countries around the world, right? And we can barely pay the interest on it. And so Trump's doing emergency surgery. We're like a 400-pound patient on the emergency room table. And the Democrats walk in, and they say, I think he can handle another 100 pounds of fat. And Trump's like, no, we need to put in stints. We need to stop this. There's a great quote from Gerald Ford. And so he's talking about it. By the way, I never heard, I never thought I'd hear anyone say that either on this program or anywhere in the world. A great quote from Gerald Ford.

I'm really excited to hear what this would be. Leave it to you to have a great quote from Gerald Ford. Please let us know what it is. Well, he said it 150 times. I read through every address. by every president. And Ford said this about 150 times. He got it originally from Eddie Rickenbocker, who was sort of the founding father of the conservative movement. And then Reagan quoted it afterwards. But Ford said this. He said October 19th, 1974, why don't they tell us when they propose all these

benefits that they are going to give you from our government, that a government big enough to give us everything we want is a government big enough to take from us everything we have. And so prior to FDR, the church did all the social programs. The church had soup kitchens and visited the orphans and the widows and the maimed and the prisoners and the church, you know, had hospitals and schools. The church did all that. But FDR began to take those responsibilities away from the church. And then Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Welfare State took it away. then the government got to be the one handing out the welfare. And here's Gerald Ford saying, okay, people saying government hand out more stuff. And he goes, don't you realize the government

that's big enough to give you everything you want, it's big enough to take away everything you have? And so Donald Trump, this is February 18th, 2019. He said, the more power they get, the more power they crave. They want to run health care, transportation, finance, energy, education. Socialism is not about justice. It's not about equality. it's not about lifting up the board it's about one thing only power for the ruling class so it's which is another way of saying corruption uh this is corruption this is an undermining of who we are as a nation and uh we're really see it seems to me i keep saying that we we have a president who seems to have the courage to uh undo or to begin to undo what has been going on for as you've

been saying a very, very, very long time. And I'm afraid we're at a time, Bill, just to give us a quick answer. Do you think that we will be able to do this? Yeah, I do. I think Trump has, it's been miraculous. He survived a bullet. Some miraculous he got elected. I think we just need to stick with him and give it time. He's brilliant when it comes to business. Give him a chance to let his policies take root. So in recapping, tariff was the number one way the federal government brought an income for the first century and a half. And then Woodrow Wilson introduces the income tax. FDR raises it. And what happens is it starts outsourcing. And then all of our factories are built overseas. And so Trump wants to go back to the way it was. Let's bring the factories back. Let's raise the

tariffs. Let's lower income taxes. And all this is in my book called the interesting history of income tax. interesting history of income tax by William Federer. William Federer, thank you so much. Thank you, Eric. Thank you, Aaron. Little lamb and wham, you're shorn. I tell you, chum, it's time. Hey there, folks.

Welcome back. Some of you know that one of our friends on the program is the Herzog Foundation, and we have Chris Stagall with Herzog on right now. Chris, I just wanted to get a few minutes from you to give us an update on what Herzog is up to because a lot of people aren't aware of what it is that the Herzog Foundation does. But since you're here, let's tell them. Yeah, I think it's twofold, Eric, and I'm so grateful for your friendship, your partnership,

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administrative things in place, curriculums in place that keep that biblical standard intact. And the Herzl Foundation trainings that we offer all across the country are free of charge to people who are interested in taking various trainings along those lines, lots of different subjects. We offer over 100 a year all over the country. And if you're able to get to them, the only ask that we make of you is that you apply for the trainings. And then if you are accepted by the application, you travel to the trainings. We put you up, we feed you, we cover the trainings, and the whole thing. All you've got to do is pay to get there, and the rest of it's on us.

So that's part of it. The other half of it, of course, is if you'd like to start your own Christian school, or maybe it's just on your heart to homeschool or start a microschool or a pod school, We plug you in with mentors and resources, eight steps right there on our website at HerzogFoundation.com, where you can learn to do those things on your own. If you wonder, where do I start, we tell you where to start. HerzogFoundation.com. And I know I've said this many times, but I've traveled around the country for years,

and everywhere I go, I bump into homeschoolers and their parents. Yes. And I think without exception, they are. some of the most socially mature, generally mature, well-informed, well-educated young people that I've ever met. And I find this fascinating because it's to a point where I keep saying homeschoolers are going to take over the world. Like the world is not prepared for what has been happening, what has been brewing silently because the mainstream media doesn't ever discuss homeschool that doesn't exist in their secular leftist world.

Homeschoolers are just magnificently prepared to do all kinds of things, to run stuff. I mean, in a meritocracy, it's game over. And so I think that anybody who isn't familiar with homeschool, I can't tell you how many people come up to me and say, oh, in my homeschool class, I read your book seven men. I read your book Seven Women. I read your book, If You Can Keep It. I read your Bonhofer book in homeschool. I thought, these kids are way ahead of your average kid in America.

And so it's really important for people to understand that this is a phenomenon. Now, some people are well aware of this, but a lot of people, they have no clue. It is amazing, folks. And that's why I keep saying the Herzog Foundation is a place to kind of acquaint yourself. HerzogFoundation.com is the website. And read lion, is it dot com or dot org? Dot com. Yeah.

I'm sorry. Read lion, R-A-D-L-I-O-N, readlion. Readlion.com. There are all kinds of resources. This is a world. If you're a parent, this is just, it's a wonderful thing. We will be an amazing country if we get education right. And homeschooling to me, it's the best of the best.

And there's all kinds of options available that weren't available 10 and 20 years ago to make it easy, convenient to make it possible for people for whom it wouldn't have been possible because they're too busy. So there's all kinds of stuff. So folks, go to Herzog Foundation.com. We're not blowing smoke here. This is, it's a great thing. Hurdsockfoundation.com. Chris de Gaul, thank you. Eric, thanks for your friendship. Appreciate you as always.