The Megyn Kelly Show - Queen Elizabeth II Dies, and the Left's Divisiveness, with David and Christen Limbaugh, Calvin Robinson, and Dr. Nicholas Kardaras | Ep. 387

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

We begin today with breaking news on the unprecedented news of the Queen's dire health, and her death that occurred toward the end of the taping of this episode. Megyn Kelly is joined by Father Calvin Robinson, Anglican deacon and GB News presenter, to discuss the Queen's legacy, her health, news that family members are rushing to her bedside, what happens next with the Royals, and more. Then David Limbaugh and Christen Limbaugh, authors of "The Resurrected Jesus: The Church in the New Testament," join the show to talk about the left dividing the country and their exclusionary tactics, Biden's dark and divisive speech, Gavin Newsom's energy hypocrisy, growing up Limbaugh, keeping faith in our culture today, Jesus and Paul, our culture of decadence, what Rush Limbaugh would think of today's culture, and more. Then Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, author of "Digital Madness," joins to discuss technology and social media addiction, our current crisis of emptiness, who our "influencers" are today, social contagion, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. We had planned to start today's broadcast with Rush Limbaugh's brother, David Limbaugh, on to talk about his new book and the news today. He will join us in just a little bit. But first, an unprecedented scene is unfolding in Scotland right now as Queen Elizabeth's family races to her bedside amid reports that doctors are concerned about her health. It is extremely rare for Buckingham Palace to release that kind of a statement about the monarch. British commentators are all commenting on how severely grave things must be for them to have done this.

You know, with the British, you kind of have to read through layers of some obfuscation. Sometimes they're not as direct as we in the American media might like. And our British friends are telling us this. This sounds troubling, deeply troubling. All four of her children are reported to be with the queen right now, or at least almost with the queen, along with Prince William. Prince Harry is reportedly on the way as well, although there are reports at this moment saying his wife, Meghan Markle, who is in the region with him on a separate tour right now, the two of them are, will not be going to Scotland. Not confirmed. That's according to the New York Post. We don't know whether that's true individually yet. Joining us now to discuss Father Calvin Robinson,

Anglican deacon and GB News presenter. Calvin, what a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much for doing this today. I'm such a fan of yours and what a day to have you. So can you put in perspective what's happening over there? Because here in America, we see this statement. A royal spokesman says as follows. Following further evaluation this morning, the Queen's doctors are concerned for Her Majesty's health and have recommended she remain under medical supervision. The Queen remains comfortable and at Balmoral, the Scotland residents. As an American, you read that and you think, all right, well, it doesn't sound that bad. But I mean, the reaction across Great Britain right now suggests something else. Yeah. First of all, thank you for having me on, Megan. It's an absolute pleasure. I wish it was under better circumstances. You're right in that we have to read between the lines. When we see an official announcement from Buckingham Palace or from any of the royal family, it's always very short and very sweet. It's just the British way. You know, we are very subtle about these things.

But if we are reading between the lines, it reads that things are not looking good. There's a tense atmosphere. You know, I've been in broadcast for some time now and I don't get nervous, but today I feel anxious. There's a broad feeling of anxiety in the United Kingdom. You know, it's pouring down with the rain outside. It's a pathetic fallacy. Her Majesty the Queen is, I think, the glue that holds this country together. She is the living embodiment of our constitution. She's the person that protects our liberties from potential government dictators. She is the thing that unites us, the living embodiment of Britishness. And to think that her health might be at risk, severely at risk, is concerning to a lot of us.

It seems that all four of her children, Charles and Edward and Andrew, are either at her bedside right now in Scotland or are about to be when we saw the Royal Air Force flying some in a short time ago, including her grandson prince william and prince harry again the daily mail and the new york post at least reporting that megan markle prince harry's wife is not there i do not know about princess kate um she's not listed she's not okay and and in addition can we just talk for a moment about what's happening on the bbc um they and please forgive me because i don't know what the protocol is but some reporting that they've changed their website from having a red header to having a black header that the BBC presenters which is how we refer to the news people there are changing into black ties and black suits

is is that true and if so what does it mean so I didn't know they were doing this already but this is the protocol so I have my black suit on today instead of a coloured jacket on because I will be on TV in the next few minutes after this broadcast. It's said that when Her Majesty does, when that time comes, we are to subtly change into black and we are to change our headers and all of this in a period of mourning. Even if you're not able to change, you're supposed to wear a black horn band, this is the traditional English form of mourning

that we will enter for some period if the worst does happen. But I'm just praying for the best at the moment because, you know, as with anyone's health, I imagine the Queen's health could take a turn for the better at any given moment. But looking at the brighter side of this picture, you know, just this week Her Majesty swore in a new prime minister, the 15th prime minister of her reign.

So Liz Truss, our new PM, met Her Majesty the Queen the other day. Her Majesty the Queen has sworn in from Winston Churchill to Margaret Thatcher. She's been stable. She's been constant throughout so much of our recent history. It's incredible to think that she might not be a part of that picture one day. Right. I mean, we all understand the way life works and the inevitable will come at some point. We don't know whether that day is today and are hoping it's not.

And it's just amazing to me. We'll get to this. But the love for this monarch amongst the British people, it's withstood the test of time. There have been dark times in even her family's history, and who could forget the Annus Aribilis that she referred to after Princess Diana. But today, this 96-year-old woman, I think it's fair to say, is almost universally beloved by the British people. Right. I mean, prime ministers, presidents, popes even come and go,

that Her Majesty the Queen has been there throughout. And I think that's important to us because other countries don't have that. You know, you guys have your flag and you unite behind your flag, but it doesn't quite embody the same feeling as a living, breathing representation of what we stand for as a British people. You know, she's been on the throne for over 70 years. She's delivered over 69 Christmas messages, introduced 15 prime ministers, been the patron of thousands of charities. The good work that she's done all around the country in the name of the British Empire formerly and then the British Commonwealth of Nations more recently. And the fact that throughout all of this, she has maintained that Jesus Christ was her rock as well. She says that she is accountable to God. And for a public figure to say something quite as explicitly Christian as that would be

considered quite strange these days, but she maintains that throughout as well. So that's another reason that I hold her dear, that she's not afraid of her faith. And in fact, that's the thing that's given her a sense of service and duty. That's sort of a theme of our show today. We're going to have David Limbaugh, Rush Limbaugh's brother. Forgive me to David for referring to him in that way over and over, but that's obviously Rush was such a giant. Everybody knows him, but he's got a book out on Jesus and on faith and on the apostle Paul that we're going to be talking about in just a bit. But I think you're right. I mean, the queen's commitment to her faith has been important at

a time in which it continues to wane among the populace there and the populace here. She's needed it. It's been 70 years on the throne. She was 25 years old when her father died and she took over as monarch. And, you know, I mean, you talk about the first prime minister she swore in was Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill. Think about the tumult in the world at that time and that she's helped steady the nation through. Oh, absolutely. And from a personal perspective, she's got, you know, four children, eight grandchildren, 12 great grandchildren. But we as a nation tend to see her as the nation's grandmother. She's been with us throughout that as well. Prince Philip, unfortunately, did die quite recently, and I think nothing's been the same since. But even with that, she's maintained that her faith has continued to give her strength. And one key element of that is forgiveness. So we all know that the IRA were the biggest terrorists of the time a few decades ago and targeted the royal family and actually killed Earl Mountbatten.

But the Queen, Her Majesty the Queen, shook the hands of the leaders of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republic political party, in a sign that said, look, unity of Great Britain and Ireland and friendship and bringing the nationalists and unionists together is more important than my personal heartbreak. And I think that the Christian value of forgiveness is something that's so important that we seem to be forgetting quite often these days in this time of cancel culture and wokeness. The, and this is, Mark, viewers should know who don't know you as well as I do from watching on GB News and following you on Twitter and so on, this has been something you've bravely spoken out about, I mean, in great, smart, fierce terms from the start. You're definitely not pro-cancel culture. Just a couple of other details on what's happening right now. The changing of the guard was canceled, we're told, at Buckingham Palace today. There's just a sign up that reads,

no guard changing ceremony today where you would normally go and watch it. I mentioned the BBC presenter more than one I'm told in a black suit and black tie and the change in the website. We're also told that there is now perhaps it's always thus but extra, I guess, security, including barricades erected around Balmoral, as you might expect with so many in the royal family there. Some sort of a note had been handed to Prime Minister Liz Truss, again, brand new prime minister. So we don't, all we know for sure is that there's definitely something happening with the Queen and her health. Calvin, on Tuesday, we saw her with Liz Truss. This is the first time she ever did it at Balmoral in Scotland.

The Queen is normally at Buckingham Palace for this, but she stayed in Scotland for it. She's obviously been struggling. And there were some comments on how her hands had bruises on them. The backs of her hands were very bruised up. I mean, she's 96 and she's been struggling with her health. And you certainly anybody who's ever had an IV put in them understands this can happen to you even when you're in your 30s or 40s, never mind in your in your mid 90s. But it's extraordinary that she could be this unwell 48 hours ago and still did her duty, still got dressed, still went out there, still met the incoming prime minister. I mean, extraordinary. This is it. Her Majesty the Queen is from another generation that understood the words duty, service, and obligation. In fact, when she acceded the throne, one of the first things she said was she was going to give her life in service to this country. And that is exactly what she has done. And I think she will do it right up until the moment that she dies. But the fact that she was willing to break tradition, you know how important tradition is to the royal family

and to the English in general, but broke tradition in meeting Liz Truss at Balmoral showed that she's not work shy. Even when she is very, very ill, she still wants to do her duty in meeting and swearing in the next prime minister. It's that important to her. And this is why she is the head of state for 54 nations around the Commonwealth. This is why people hold her in such high regard.

They just don't make them like that anymore. She's been celebrated. I mean, across the globe, her platinum jubilee was just celebrated 70 years on the throne. She did manage to make two appearances at that, even though she wasn't feeling well, just continuing with the fact that she's always put public service over herself, always. That's the thing about the Queen. I made it to that Jubilee service, by the way. It was absolutely fantastic. It was the first time, I think, since the 2012 Olympics that we held in London that I felt a sense of unity in the country. Because of course, there are some Republicans, and I mean that in the English sense of not being a monarchist, than the european political sense there are some republicans over here but for the vast majority of the british public there is a love for her majesty the queen and celebrating all of those

years of service is something that united us in a time when we need it we've just had brexit we've just had the horrible lockdowns and the covid years and we feel more divided or we have felt more divided than we have in a long time. So it's good to have something to bring us all together. And no matter if we're left or the right, if we're woke or not, just to say, yes, we're all English, we're all British. And Her Majesty the Queen has been there for all of us. And I think the Jubilee really shows that. That makes so much sense. Because over here, of course, we're equally divided in terms of Democrats versus Republicans. And we used to have just America, the belief in this idea of America that would bring us together.

As you point out, our flag, our national anthem. And that's changing, too. You know, the left in particular has been tearing that down as well day by day. And now we're in these fierce tribal culture wars. But unlike you, we don't have this other major figure that we can get behind. It was an idea. And as that degrades in the eyes of some, we don't have a person that we can all agree on is a great representative of our country.

I mean, the closest thing we had was Betty White. She was wonderful, but she wasn't the Queen of England. We just don't have something like this. The reason I think that that's so important is because no matter how polarized society gets and how polarized politics gets, we have that stable figure. So right now we're seeing the Republicans and the Democrats are so far apart and we're seeing the same in the United Kingdom. The Labour Party have gone so far left, they can't even define what a woman is anymore. And the Conservative Party are reacting to that on the right. But smack bang in the middle, this stable figure, this embodiment of the Constitution is Her Majesty the Queen. And no matter who comes and goes in politics, from left or right, from leader or opposition,

she will still be there holding it all together. Now, we understand, I mean, that when she took office, it was when her dad passed away. And she took office, that's not the right term, but when she ascended to the throne. But she wasn't sworn in officially. She didn't have her coronation ceremony, I guess is the term, until sometime later. But just as a procedural matter, when the queen passes, will Prince Charles immediately become the king? And then same thing, there'll be a coronation later? Yes, technically, he'll become the king? And then same thing, there'll be a coronation later? Yes, technically he'll become the king. Her Majesty the Queen's funeral will usually happen 10 days after her death.

And then sometime after that, the next in line will be crowned. I think it was 18 months before Her Majesty the Queen was crowned, actually. But yes, because in 1952, she ascended the throne. But in 1953, in, because in 1952, she ascended the throne, but in 1953, in June, she became queen. And in that broadcast, before she ascended the throne, she gave us all a Christmas broadcast and she said, pray for me that God may give me wisdom and strength to carry out the solemn promise I shall be making and that I may faithfully serve him and you all the days of my life. I think that's just so fitting to read right now

because that's literally exactly what she has done since before she was enthroned, before she was crowned, she was swearing to God and to the British people that she'll serve us all of her life. That gave me the chills. One more to trust for. Do we expect that if there were an announcement to come, it would come directly from Buckingham Palace

as opposed to from the BBC or the news agencies? Well, Buckingham Palace will let the Prime Minister know and then the Prime Minister may decide to let the public know, probably via the BBC, and then it will disseminate from there. But there are a chain of events that are supposed to happen. It's called London Bridge Falls, the plan, but some of it has changed because it was leaked i think just over a year ago uh by some shameful aid so they had to change what will happen so we don't know entirely but there are so many protocols and traditions that they have to follow but at least we know it will be done in a in a proper and traditional manner

it won't be just blurted out over the airwaves, which was unfortunately the case when his royal highness Prince Philip died. I think BBC radio were playing some drum and bass. They paused to say he had died and continued the drum and bass, almost as if it was part of the track. It was very tasteless. Oh my goodness.

I mean, it's terrifying. Already on anything like this, you know, you got to stay off social media because of course there will always be somebody trying to misdirect you. And, you know, we see these reports where people they report that some famous person has passed and the person hasn't at all and actually is perfectly well with somebody of this advanced age and this important on the global stage. You've got to be very careful. There was already one report by some Twitter account that has about 600 followers. I'm not going to say the name, but it's very close to a legitimate news agency.

But it's not a legitimate news agency reporting that the queen had, in fact, passed. Not true, as far as we can tell from virtually any news, real news organization and and a very well-known news organization here in the States ran with it. So that's how you become part of the story by not really checking. In any event, we need to wait to hear from the prime minister, the palace, and it sounds like the BBC as well. And the heavens have just opened. It's absolutely torrential out here. It really does feel like the end of a horror movie.

It's a horrible time. But yes, I'm not a big fan of the BBC, but they will be one of the first to publicize if there are any official changes, and that will come from the prime minister himself. Well, herself now. Hopefully they'll get smart and start giving it to GB News, which I would much rather watch as this news breaks and will. Calvin, thank you so much.

It's such a pleasure to have you here. I'm sorry it's on such a dark day, both figuratively and literally. Thank you, Megan. God's such a pleasure to have you here. I'm sorry it's on such a dark day, both figuratively and literally. Thank you, Megan. God bless. All the best to you, too. We're going to keep an eye on this. We'll update you as the two hours progress to see if there's any news.

And wow, what a great time to have David Limbaugh, I mean, who's literally just written a book on Jesus Christ, on his apostle Paul, and on things like forgiveness, which you just heard Calvin mention. We'll hit some news stories with David and get into his book when his daughter joins us as well. A big day for political headlines as Hillary Clinton steps in it on The View, and a U.S. Senate candidate gets caught in another undercover video. This one again from James O'Keefe bashing white people. OK, all that comes as the fallout over Joe Biden's soul of America speech, Dark Brandon, continues to create waves with one Boston Globe columnist suggesting the president did not go far enough in condemning the

evil MAGA Republicans, suggesting there would be no threat to the nation, no MAGA Republicans at all without fill in blank white supremacy. It's days like today when we often feel the absence of Rush Limbaugh, right? Like I, I miss Rush. I miss Charles Krauthammer. There are certain just cultural voices that were unique and had so much wisdom and so many years of walking you through the rough times that they would provide a comfort when things got really dark like they have just now. And so today we're particularly excited to welcome two members of the Limbaugh family to the show. They're here to talk about their new book, The Resurrected Jesus, The Church and the New Testament. But Rush's brother,

David Limbaugh, also agreed to talk news and politics with us, which he's very, very good at doing. So we're going to start with just David. David, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show. Megan, thank you so much. Long time, no see. This is the craziest thing I've read. The fact that The Globe, and I realize it's the Globe, published this is almost stunning to me. The opinion columnist is also associate editor for their op-ed page. Her name is Renee Graham. And what she wrote is and follows, that centuries old brew of racism, grievance and entitlement continues to roil and undermine this nation. After referencing the Klan and others who have, you know, sullied our history.

She says more than a century before MAGA Republicans, there were the red shirts, white leagues and KKK terrorizing and massacring black people. For them, the Civil War never ended. It simply moved to new fronts. And then she quotes somebody with them. The end sanctifies the means, however desperate and bloody. And that end is first, midst, last and always a white man's government, meaning that's what these people want. Tantamount to the old slaveholding oligarchic supremacy that she was quoting William Lloyd Garrison, a Boston abolitionist who wrote that in an 1875 letter to the Boston Journal. Then she picks it up. Not a single word of what this guy Garrison wrote. Not a single word needs to be altered to capture the current climate.

The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are nothing more than rebranded red shirts and white leagues. And Garrison's descriptions also apply to Trump's acolytes, whether they're on school boards, in Congress or on the Supreme Court. I'll give you one more line. She says Biden took pains to say, I'm not talking about every Republican, not even the majority, but the MAGA ones. I am not as generous as President Biden, she says. If there are Republicans opposed to their party's full embrace of Trumpism, most remained awfully quiet about it. She goes on a reminder that not every white supremacist wears a white hood or a red MAGA cap. What do you make of it? This is why, and you read the ben shapiro story which may begin

we may get into uh the left is so exclusive so intolerant while accusing us of wrongly of being that way they biden did intend to demonize all trump republicans which i i dare say is 95 percent of republicans these are not people that necessarily like Trump, everything about Trump. They like his policies and they like the fact that he stood up for America as founded. And I challenge the premise that conservatives are racist at all. I am so, I resent this constant accusation made out of whole cloth that first place. I don't believe Trump is a racist and I don't believe that they first started it because he was his border enforcement policies. And they said that that was based on race. And now he made some inartful comments.

It has nothing to do with race. It has to do with the unique American culture and orderly assimilation to our society and law and order and the rest. Any nation preserving its sovereignty has to have ordered borders. And but they somehow conflate these things and they know they're lying. Although the problem is that the followers of the left, the leaders of the Democratic Party, many of them do believe it. On my Twitter feed, I say I lament the fact that the America as founded is imploding. And they say, yeah, you mean when there was slavery and all that, you can't wait. And I think some of these people really believe it. And it really troubles me. It grieves me, Megan, that so many people now believe that conservatives are racist because that has been the constant drumbeat of the Democratic Party because they have no effective policies and they have to do

something to stay in power. And I mean, it is just that cynical because they know better. And I'll give you a personal example. A good friend of mine in high school, black guy, really close to him. I heard he was not going to come to the 50th high school reunion. I can't believe how old I am. He's not going to come to the reunion because I and others in the class are racist. Why are we racist? Because we supported Trump. So this has real life consequences. These lies the Democrats are saying about race and they're harming race relations because they're causing too many blacks, and I don't know how many, to really believe that we are racist. And it's so false. And I just find it lamentable that the whole Democratic Party now, their whole

mode is to exclude and to demonize us because, like I said, they have no solutions to what's going on. They don't have solutions because they're affirmatively causing them. Okay. Yeah. I don't think that Joe Biden actually wanted to distinguish between MAGA Republicans and any other Republicans. I think his speech certainly tarred everybody. And that when in the light of day, he decided that might not be a great move given what happened with Hillary's deplorable speech, which may have cost her the election. So he tried to walk it back in a question that Peter Doocy shouted at him. But I'm going to play just a piece of the dark Brandon speech from Thursday night and then the Peter Doocy Q&A. You have to listen because it's a

little hard to hear the Peter Doocy bit. Right. But I mean, it's a direct, direct contradiction of what he actually said. Here it is. They tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people. This time, their determination is exceeding and thwarting the will of the people. That's why respected conservatives like federal circuit court judge Michael Ludwig has called Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans quote a clear and present danger to our democracy. But while the threat to American democracy is real, I want to say as clearly as we can, we are not powerless in the face of these threats. We are not bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy. Mr. President, do you consider all Trump supporters to be a threat to the country?

Y'all, everyone, come on. If you're going to make that case, I don't consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country. I don't consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country. He literally the night before said the Trump supporters are a clear and present danger to the country and are, and I quote, a threat to the country. I mean, he doesn't even remember what he said less than 12 hours earlier. It is so farcical what we're witnessing. We have an utterly incompetent, mean-spirited old man running the country, and we're horrified yet at the prospect of impeaching him, which we never do anyway, because what waits in

the wings is worse. Kamala Harris and then Nancy Pelosi. We are in such a mess. This is so embarrassing, but I don't care about embarrassment. And by the way, it's not incompetence. This is a deliberate destruction of the things that traditional Americans hold dear. And so people say, well, Biden's incompetent. No, he's not incompetent. Whoever is handling him is doing precisely what they want to do. And you can see that in the intentional sabotaging of the domestic energy grid and how these absurd things, you're now going to power electric cars because the Florida and the California grid, electrical grid

is down. So you're going to power them with gas generators. You can't, as someone said, make this stuff up. Their policies make no sense. And while we punish and suppress our energy producers in the United States, we then try to buy at higher prices, dirtier energy from foreign countries. And if this truly is, if climate change truly is a global phenomenon, I reject a lot of this anyway. But let's assume for the sake of argument that it is, then it's going to have just as much damage globally in another country as it does here. And so I find their their policies are so absurd, reducing inflation with with an inflationary act, a spending act. I they just lie straight to our faces. They can't possibly believe the things they're saying, but they do, they are committed ideologues,

socialists, and you can't even, you can't even say that's hyperbole anymore. They're full-blown socialists in my view. Uh, the, the hyper, yeah, go ahead. I was going to say the hypocrisy, uh, from some on the left who are pushing these policies, like Gavin Newsom, you're talking about energy. He's getting hit today because let me ask you, I'll show you the soundbite and ask you if you notice something about what he's wearing in this soundbite that has made news here. Stand by. Here it is. And I'll explain. I can't see it. I can't see anything still. So, all right. Well, you've stepped up to help in a big way to keep the lights on so far. But we're heading we're heading to the worst part of this heat wave, and the risk for outages is real, and it's immediate.

These triple-digit temperatures throughout much of our state are leading, not surprisingly, to record demand on the energy grid. Everyone has to do their part to help step up for just a few more days. Okay, so you can't see it, but he's wearing a fleece coat. He's sitting there telling everybody you really can't crank your air conditioning, you know, because we're in an energy crisis. Meanwhile, he's clearly in a room that's as cold as an icebox. Otherwise, he wouldn't need his hat and his and his fleece jacket. Mr. French laundry don't have any gatherings at home during uh covet or any gatherings at all during covet while he's dining out of french laundry has

done it again yeah and you know it is hypocrisy but it's worse than hypocrisy because they're affirmatively harming the country harming people, destroying the very people they claim to protect, because this is creating, actually, it's a global movement that's creating worldwide poverty. And there's really credible evidence to believe that Europe is going to face severe shortages and people will die in the winter because they can't heat their homes. And you know that's bleeding into the United States. It's not even bleeding. We're enacting the same silly, insane policies to cause that here. We have it within our power to stop this stuff. I just find it preposterous, by the way, Megan, that we can control the global thermostat anyway. And even if we could, all the experts except the politicized scientists will say that even if you enact even the draconian provisions of the Kyoto Protocol,

you can't change mean temperature one degree Celsius in 100 years. So they know this can't work. But yet they keep saying we're going to die in 10 years. You can't believe anything they say. But in the meantime, they're destroying us. This is just some innocuous debate we're having. This is going to kill people. It's going to impoverish people.

But that's what socialism does. And that's what environmental idolatry does. Yeah. And soon and soon. I mean, especially given Putin saying he's shutting down Nord Stream 1 to Europe and keeping sort of that gas pipeline shut down, or as Karine Jean-Pierre calls it, Nordstrom 1. She doesn't know anything. She knows absolutely nothing. There was a great piece by David Marcus in the New York Post on her today, just talking about how, listen, she's just not up. She's not ready for primetime. And

she's an embarrassment. She can't do anything without her notes. And when she does weigh in, she lies. It's pathetic. I really it's unfair that she doesn't even know that she's an embarrassment. That's how ignorant she is. And I don't say that to insult her. They have a they have a fiduciary duty in the executive branch to be competently, at least trying to competently run things and to communicate with us. Biden's continually in the basement and on vacation. So he sends out someone who checks all the boxes for identity politics. And it's just an insult like nothing matters anymore. You can't you can't be serious.

The only thing that matters in the military is whether you've got woke policies. It doesn't matter if our military is being emboldened or if we're increasing our shipbuilding to stay up with the Chinese who represent an existential threat to the United States. We're going around in a horrifying way in the United States. Senate candidate like Christy Crystal Matthews and say stuff like this about white people. And it's totally fine. Anti-white racism is not only not a problem, it'll probably get praised. Listen to her in an undercover video captured by James O'Keefe. Republican and it's heavily white. I'm not a stranger to white people. I'm a mostly white town. Let me tell you one thing. You gotta know who you're dealing with. You gotta treat them like shit.

That's the only way I respect you. I keep them right here. I'll come in my phone. That's where I keep them. You have to. Otherwise they get out of control like kids. You gotta treat the white people like shit. You gotta keep them right here. Otherwise they get out of control like he was. You've got to treat the white people like shit. You've got to keep them right here.

Otherwise, they get out of control, as if she's corralling them with her arm. That's how she treats the whites. Imagine if a white politician said that about black constituents in his or her district. They'd be run out of town on a rail. It is so unbelievable what's going on, and it's being elevated in the universities, indoctrinating students to literally self-loathe that they're white, and to justify all this hatred in the name of past wrongs, I guess,

which, by the way, you and I didn't commit, even if it existed to the extent they say it did. And it was bad in the past, but we've made so many national sacrifices, fought wars, fought the civil war, went through all the turmoil of the civil rights era. And now we're still more evil than we ever were. They're training, they're indoctrinating young black children to hate the cops you've seen the videos of the young kids spitting on cops how can you sustain a society with this kind of hatred and then these very people i'm not talking about blacks i'm talking about mainly white liberals who are virtue signaling to their deathbed why how can you possibly uh run a society when you demonize one group of people and you do it in the name of, I guess, equality. I don't get it, but it can't work. And these people are so intolerant. The

left is so intolerant and so exclusive, and they do it in the name of inclusiveness, inclusivity. It boggles my mind that they can say these things with a straight face. It boggles my mind that they can say these things with a straight face. It boggles my mind that the liberal media is in lockstep with this insanity. I mean, you would think, we know they're Democrats and probably mostly atheists, but how can they accept that some of these premises that the left is now proposing. And it doesn't matter how extreme they get, which is, yeah, they're going to embrace it. Matthews is not going to get in trouble with the left at all. The same as Don Lemon will not get in trouble for looking at a female commentator on his panel last night. And when she lost her train of thought, accused her of having mommy brain.

I mean, absolutely sexist and disgusting, but they won't call out Don Lemon and they won't call out Crystal Matthews because they're on the right team. public figures who are open leftists. And so there's a very narrow category that will get you a pass. If you were white and a leftist, you could still get hit. But black, leftist, and in Don Lemon's case, gay, as he continues to remind us all, black and gay, black and gay, because he didn't want to get fired. You're fine. You're not going to get touched. That's the reality. That's why people get so angry, because their racism and their sexism gets a complete pass. And meanwhile, they look at people on the right and make things up about them, find dog whistles where they don't agree. Tell us all Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist when there's no proof of it and then want us to look at them as our moral betters. And but what's scary to me is then the people on the left believe it. And it's been going on for so long that people now believe it. And this idea that Trump Republicans, even if it were only 40 percent maggot, that's what they mean. I don't know who they're talking to. The people I know are Bible believing good people and they just believe in traditional values and God, motherhood and apple pie and all that. And they're not bigots. And these are the people that they're

happy people. They're not filled with hate. They're not people who would ever censor the speech of the other side. Why isn't that objective evidence of which side is on the right, which side is wrong? David, can I add to that? Nor are they semi-fascist or fascist. They want nothing to do with government. They don't want more government. They want government out of their lives. That's another note that I had written myself to bring up. The people who are authoritarian are the left. Biden is running in the left. All Democrats try to get as much done as they can through executive order, unaccountable administrative bureaucracies, unelected judges who are activist liberal judges who will rewrite the Constitution, who are not accountable.

That's the threat to so-called democracy. I think they mean constitutional republic, but they don't know the difference. And so we don't do that. We want as much freedom as we can possibly have and get the government out of our lives, although we do want law and order. We want a strong military so that we can preserve those liberties. But we believe in a safety net. And we're probably way more compassionate individually than the liberals. Not only do Christians give more in charitable contributions, but our policies create more wealth. We don't have a zero sum game. These people think the

only way you can make the people, impoverished people better off is by redistributing wealth. And it's such flawed economic thought. But even if it weren't, look at the reality of what happens when you have full-blown liberalism, full-blown socialistic ideas implemented. You have impoverishment and death in world history. Look at the Jimmy Carter years, the years of malaise. You implement those so-called well-intentioned policies. You end up with the misery index off the charts. Now what we're experiencing is horrifying. Megan, $31 trillion debt, and we're just continuing to print money and spend it at an alarming rate. And even the conservatives are distracted from this. You and I with kids, how can we sleep at night other than through our faith with that kind of thing?

And the rest of I could I could tick off as you as you could 10 existential threats. What about China? What about the border and fentanyl? I mean, any of these things single handedly could could destroy the country. Law and order. I mean, everything that the Democrats are doing is really horrifying to me. And there is no limit. And we warned it, Rush warned about, I wrote a book in 2019. I'm no prophet. I'm not as well versed as you guys are. But it didn't take a seer to know that the Democrats, if they got in power in all the major branches, they would implement policies that would destroy. And we see no restraint. They are out for power. They are ideologues. They're hateful. I don't mean the Democrat party. The country. They hate America.

And bit by bit, they find new ways and new messaging to tear it down. And part of the plan is to remove God, not just from the public square, but from the public, from America, which is a perfect place to pause because you've essentially written multiple books about this, including your latest, along this one with your daughter, Kristen. So she's going to join us and we're going to get into what you've written about, what you want people to know right after this very quick break. Don't go away. David Limbaugh is here today, and we're also joined now by his daughter, Kristen Limbaugh Bloom. Together, they wrote the new book, The Resurrected Jesus, The Church in the New Testament.

Kristen, welcome to the show. Great to have you here. All right, so first, just give me an overview on what it was like growing up Limbaugh, because that's what America wants to know. You know, we grew up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where dad and Rush are both from. So growing up, everyone knew my family knew who I was. And then going to college, I went to a pretty conservative college. So when they heard my last name, they make the connection like you're oh, you're Rush on Buzz.

I love him. I'm a Rush baby. But I did have some liberal professors who definitely were not fans of Rush and so dealt with that. But no, I my family's great. They've always instilled in me conservative Christian values. And and really, my dad and Rush both, I mean are, have both been very humble. And, um, I grew up like any other kid in America would have, and grew up believing that America is exceptional. And so I'm very blessed. Now I can understand how they instilled conservative values in you, but in today's day and age with so much, you know, I have so much drinking, so many drugs, so much

premarital sex. So all like, you know, debauchery and so on. How, how were they able to your dad in particular and your parents to instill a love of Christ, an understanding of Christianity to the point where now you're, I think, 29 years old and writing books about it. To me, that's extraordinary. It's not easy to do. Oh, that's so kind of you to say. Well, my mom is always the prayer warrior in our family. And then I like to call dad the divine truth warrior. So a little anecdote of that is before I went off to college, dad was very concerned about me not losing my faith, but my faith being attacked. Maybe me having doubts based on the different arguments that various

liberal professors would make to attack the faith. So he said, look, I'm going to start taking you on lunches once a week, and I'm just going to go through the arguments that you can know in your heart and can use if you have to, to defend the Christian faith. And so we met, we had like our little father-daughter dates and I felt very equipped. And actually, I had signed up for a class on the Bible my first semester of freshman year, not knowing that the actual premise of the class was to pick apart the Bible as a piece of literature and actually try to discredit it. So, you know, a little all me. So, but I was prepared for that because dad had equipped me.

And so I spit out the answers that I needed to do, which is also something dad taught me. So just, just get the A, you know, it's not worth, it's not worth getting into a fight with your professor your freshman year over something that they're not going to agree with you on. So I spit out the answers. But in my heart of hearts, I knew the arguments to defend the faith. And I was so grateful to dad for preparing me that way. Oh, fascinating. Now, this is I just had a friend of mine go to Wake Forest University because her dad, her dad was like, Sean Hannity sent his kid there. So it can't be too far left. So what, like, that's interesting that the approach was to sort of just get the egg.

Cause we've been having this ongoing debate on the show. I can't imagine Sean's son is going, it's just getting the, I just can't imagine he'd be in there going along with it. Yeah. Um, so funny because actually I met my husband through Sean because Sam played tennis at Wake Forest and helped recruit Patrick onto the Wake Forest tennis team. Yeah. Yeah. And you worked at Fox. You still work at Fox. You worked on Sean's show. Yeah, I do. I mostly just handle scheduling now, not so much production, but yeah, it's just a small world. God has actually, you know, connected me with so many important people in my life. Maybe when you're maybe when you're the daughter of

David Limbaugh, who while well known in our circles, maybe not at the college level is as well known as Rush was, you can get away with it. But I got to imagine like there's certain last names like Hannity. Everybody knows they know exactly what you're feeling. There's no hiding it. You got no chance. Yeah. So you better be ready for whatever comes at you, good or bad. That's right. But he's going to be a stronger kid because of it, as I'm sure you are as well. He's a great kid. Yeah, of course. So, you know, that's a risky thing. Like if you don't send your kid to Liberty or Hillsdale, David, you take a big risk in today's day and age, maybe SMU. There's a short list of colleges that are not looking to turn you into a far left progressive. King's College is pretty good, too. We sent her younger sister to King's. And although, you know, there's liberals there, too. But we conservatives don't object to liberals. We just

want some conservative balance, you know? So, although I love Hillsdale. Oh my gosh. Awesome. Whenever you see sort of an, whenever you see a sort of a, like an online offering from Hillsdale, it's always somebody I love and always something I want to sign up for. All right, listen, next we're going to get into the book and you're going to teach me about the apostle Paul. And my first question, I'll let you think about this during the break, is how is he an apostle if he never necessarily met Jesus? All right. That's a tough question.

I know you're ready for it. We're going to pick it up on forgiveness and the messages that David and Kristen have immersed themselves in while researching this book. Don't go away. We'll be right back and we will dig into the resurrected Jesus. So Paul is interesting to me. I have a stepbrother who's named Paul after Paul, and I didn't know any of this stuff about him or why he was, they chose this name or just exactly how important he was. But let me just begin with the basics, since I'm not a Bible study girl, as will be apparent to you. How was he an apostle if he was not around when Jesus was around? In the first letter to the Corinthians, he says, am I not free? Paul says, am I not free?

Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? He did see Jesus. He encountered him on the Damascus road. He was on his way to murder and persecute and imprison Christians who he viewed as apostates from the Jewish faith. And Christ encountered him in a supernatural experience, a vision. Actually, Christ actually appeared to him and blinded him on the road. Thereafter, shortly, he was converted. But as I discussed in the previous book, Jesus is risen. He doesn't technically satisfy the apostolic credentials that were specified in Acts 1, 21 through 22, because he wasn't with Jesus during his earthly ministry and didn't witness his resurrection. Those are the assigned credentials.

But he was an exception because Christ specially chose him. He did see Christ, not in his resurrected form, of course, but he didn't witness the resurrection, but he did see him on the Damascus road and Christ commissions him directly. So no matter what rules existed, Christ is the God of the universe. So he can overrule any of those kinds of rules. Okay. So why Paul? I mean, I realize it's not just about Paul, but Paul's the star. So why? What is it about Paul, Kristen, that made him so ripe to be the star of this book and this message? Well, Paul wrote all seven of these epistles, and he was actually under arrest while writing these letters is what they actually were at the time. He was writing letters to the different churches that had blossomed in Asia and in Europe.

And so he's writing them for different reasons because different things were happening in each of these churches. Some of them were believing false doctrine about Christianity, things were getting muddled. Others were doing well, but they were under persecution, so he's writing to encourage them. And so it's interesting because a lot of the issues that we face in our modern church were already happening as early as the first century church that Paul was helping to ignite. Well, like doctrine getting mixed in. You know, today we deal with the new age where there's a lot of syncretism,

where people take something that is actually not of Christianity and try to meld it with Christianity. And so ideas get muddled in people's minds, and it's not the true doctrine of Jesus. And, um, and also kind of the lukewarm, um, aspect of the faith where people, um, aren't, are kind of like going to church, but not fully having a personal relationship with Jesus, understanding that he is the only way, um, to, to true salvation. And that is the key here that, and that's the theme of the book, obviously, that Jesus is the one who is actually carrying out this mission of his church through Paul and

continuing today through Christians, because it's actually his Holy Spirit who lives inside Christians' hearts. And when we connect with him on a personal level, that's when we're able to have revelation and discern what his will is in our lives. And that's when we're able to have revelation and discern what his will is in our lives and then for how we're supposed to be affecting the rest of the world. So that's what Kathy Lee Gifford's always saying. She's saying she doesn't really have much use for organized religion, but she has a lot of use for her direct relationship with Jesus and has written so many books on it and talked about it at length. So she is like you. She'll get you very fired up about Jesus, and I love that because maybe you get something out of the Sunday Mass, maybe you don't.

But the direct line to Jesus himself can be much more enriching. And let me just, again, let me ask my pedestrian question. I did not realize this from chapter four, where you talk about how Paul closes this one letter by giving glory to God with his final greetings to all believers in Christ, ending with this, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. And you go on to expand on that. But, you know, a few years ago, the church changed the way we respond in mass to, you know, the Lord be with you. And you used to say, and also with you. Now they change it to, and with your spirit.

And I didn't know until I read this book that this is probably where that came from, from Paul. And that line, although I could be wrong. No, I don't know. We're not Catholic, although I love you Catholics. But I didn't know that they changed that. I would have to assume that it was in line with the scripture. That's encouraging. Can I add something? Because I think you're intrigued by Paul. Kristen gave a great answer. I want to add something to what your

question was. Is that okay? Yeah, please. Megan? Please. Okay. Why did he choose Paul? I think Paul was the least likely person for Christ to pick because he was a persecutor of the church and hateful, murder, just rebellious. But, and he was a Hebrew of Hebrews, you know, he was strictly followed the Hebrew laws and didn't want to accept faith in Christ. But I think he chose him precisely because of his qualities, his zealotry, his energy, his intellect. And because he would be the fiercest evangelist once he was converted, he would approach that with every bit of zeal as he did when he was an Orthodox Jew. And by the way, as you know, we Christians love the Jewish people. So this isn't anything, none of this has anything to do with denigrating Jews. We love them. And that's not just gratuitous.

But so Paul, but in the early church, there were these heresies that threatened the very survival of Christianity in its incipiency. These false teachers who Paul confronted in the church, in the early churches, like in Ephesians or Ephesus, some of these false teachers were saying God is either not, I mean, Jesus is not either fully God or fully man. The Christian doctrine is that he's fully, 100% both, melded into one being. And some of the Gnostics would say material life is evil, therefore Christ could not have been a human being. It was an illusion. He was only spirit, so he couldn't have died on the cross. Well, that negates the entire premise of Christianity, which is that Christ's incarnation, he became a man so he could save us and so we could relate to him. He could suffer for us, die for us, redeem us if we have faith in him.

There are also challenges to his to Paul's assertion that salvation is by faith alone. And he wanted to embolden and reinvigorate his arguments to correct these false teachers. And he called them false teachers. And so he instructed the churches to purge themselves of these false teachings. Otherwise, you dilute it and then you have nothing. It's what's happening in America on a secular level today and a spiritual level. And I know you write about how Paul felt like it was really important to equip younger leaders and workers with practical knowledge to carry on the message and carry on the work. And that's where we've fallen down. That's one of the many places where we've fallen down. This is what,

again, this is two days in a row, but this is what Larry Elder was saying in Uncle Tom 2, which is like, there's been a design by the left, capital L, to extract not just religion from the public square, but religion from the people, and replace it with Marxism, with this leftist idea of how society is supposed to run. And I'm not going to say Paul saw Marx coming, but Paul certainly saw this as a massive problem, that if the young people didn't have a relationship with Christ, things are going to go south fast. No question. And another thing about this that is analogous to modern times, I used to read the Bible and think ancient Corinth, ancient Rome, the decadence, the licentiousness in those cultures and those communities. We'd never get that way in America. And I swear to you, Megan, we're there.

This is the most horrifying thing I've ever seen, the licentiousness and the celebration of pure evil in the United States, the glorification of killing babies, no matter what you believe about it. It used to be safe, legal, and rare, which was always a lie. They never meant that. But now, they advocate the killing of babies even up to the point of birth and beyond by resisting the infant born alive act obama did that obama was an extremist and i don't know how you can how you can reconcile i don't know how that is not objectively evil uh but and they'll wear shirts i celebrate my abortion i like to murder baby i mean these this is pure evil celebrate and worse how can anybody side with that anybody that's not you have women at the supreme court of spiritual forces for eight or This is pure evil celebration. And how can anybody side with that?

Anybody that's not under the influence of spiritual forces. For eight or nine months pregnant with a T-shirt on that reads, this is not a baby. OK, can I just say, because I wasn't sure I was going to bring this up or not, but you just said like we're getting like we're embracing evil. My God. I mean, almost literally there is a new FX show produced by Disney. It's literally the opposite of what you two are doing. A father and daughter here sitting on this show promoting the word of the Lord and talking about the apostles. And this show is promoting the devil.

And it's a father daughter team, too. It's Danny DeVito and his daughter that he has with Rhea Perlman. She plays the daughter of Satan. It's a cartoon. So they do the voiceovers. She does the voiceover for Chrissy, who's the daughter of the devil. Danny DeVito does the voice for Satan. And it's kind of crazy how weirdly violent and upsetting this entire thing is.

They're running around saying things like let's go boil some babies while their heads are still soft um it's it's very off-putting that disney has decided this is an appropriate cartoon to air yes maybe it's targeted toward adults but still like talk about the coarsening of our society we actually have a little soundbite from it. Soundbite nine. The sky over a local junior high has torn open. Mom, get in. There's no more putting this off. Your dad is the devil and you're the antichrist.

I'm supposed to accept that you had sex with Satan or anyone. Please allow me to introduce myself. Come to your father, Damien. Huh, you're a girl. The future is female. Great to meet you. Where have you been my whole life? The metaphysical realm.

It's not hell, but it's got the essentials. Yeah, what do you make of it? Looked like the backdrop for Biden's speech. Who knows? He's won big pro-bomb. Let me hog the... See, I try to conflate spiritual and political issues. Actually, they're all so joined anymore. Let me take a quick stab before Kristen.

I think nothing's sacred anymore except evil, in this culture the what's dangerous here obviously we're exposed to this kind of thing in our culture all the time but the dangerous thing is disney which purports to be a children's network is doing this and so kids are going to necessarily run into this and they're trivially trivializing spiritual warfare by and glorifying witchcraft by the way and lying about it like witchcraft can fight these thingsifying witchcraft, by the way, and lying about it like witchcraft can fight these things when witchcraft is very part of the evil spiritual realm. They're normalizing evil. They're acting like evil really isn't evil. It's something to laugh about. And what we don't understand, we become desensitized. The Bible, and Paul tells us in

Ephesians, it's a handbook for spiritual warfare. Don't think this is all about ghosts and goblins. Evil spirits truly exist. Satan truly exists. He's behind the scenes. I know I sound like a maniac. I used to not even believe in the devil. How else do you explain the rampant evil in this society apart from some spiritual forces

at work? Kristen, sorry, I talked bad. No, I would just add that the Bible says that Jesus told his disciples that the enemy comes to kill, steal, and destroy your life, but I have come to give you life and life to the fullest. And it's true. This is nothing to laugh about. People are trying to make a joke of evil in this world of the spiritual warfare that's actually going on and of hell. And it's a slippery slope because obviously boycotts are, you know,

it's a slippery slope with that. But honestly, this is geared toward children. It's about a 13 year old girl. You can say it's geared toward adults, but it's already about a child. And it's obviously going to be on Disney plus. I mean, it's, it's so sad to me because the kids who watch this are going to be desensitized and are going to think that hell is, he said, it's not hell. It's a, it's a metaphysical verse. I mean, they're literally mocking God, mocking the Bible. And we're not just talking about heaven and hell here. Satan is out to ruin and rule your life. And so we're talking about your life on earth here as well. I mean, he wants to steal every good piece of fullness that God has for your life. And that is true for every single human being. So I'm just repulsed by this and I'm so sad and I pray that maybe the kind of devil

has overplayed his hand with this and this will wake more and more people up to the truth. Yes, good point. I think about where we should be focusing our energy given how divided we are and how unhappy our kids in particular are and the teenage suicide rate being what it is and the social media. Actually, we have a guest coming on in a minute with all that. But I think about just where we are as a society and couldn't we use more uplifting messages? You know, what about remember Michael Landon's Highway to Heaven? That show couldn't get made today, but you can get a show on about the devil and killing

babies. Sure, that's funny. That'll be a laugh riot. And it made me think about before you guys were coming on, my producer pulled a bunch of great Rush clips and it was just so fun going back and listening to them but the one that i wanted to play for you guys is it's a little sadder um and it's from one of his last shows but it's talking i mean like it's forgive me for comparing rush to oprah in a way but when oprah did her last show ever it was very good i I liked it. I'm no longer an Oprah fan, but I loved her last show because it was sort of the accumulation

of all this wisdom she'd gotten over 30 years. And she gave sort of the life lessons. You know, there was one like everyone wants to feel that they matter, that they need to feel like they matter. And Rush did something similar. And this was just this is a brief clip on him talking about pretty much what matters is the opposite of what's in this new FX show.

Here's Sod 11. My point in everything today that I share with you about this is to say thanks and to tell everybody involved how much I love you from the bottom of a sizable and growing and still beating heart. And there's room for much more.

All because I have learned what love really is during this. You know, I have a philosophy. There's good that happens in everything. It may not reveal itself immediately. And even in the most dire circumstances, if you just wait, if you just remain open to things, the good in it will reveal itself. And that has happened to me as well in countless, countless ways. Oh, wow. Miss him so much. I know you guys do. I don't know what now, what do you make of that? I mean, what do you, what do you think Rush would make of where we are right now? More divided than

even when he passed? Well, you know, what he said, he was living out the very message he was delivering, which is God uses evil for good. And the evil of cancer, sorry to get emotional, really drew him closer to Christ so it's awesome but now getting myself cheered up again the i i really think megan uh and i think rush thought this that we lament divisiveness and we say it's terrible that we have disunity i think what what what we have is strident divisiveness and such hate,

mainly coming from the left. But I don't really aspire to get rid of, I don't aspire to reaching across the aisle because I don't think there's any reconciling. On a spiritual level, I do. But on a political level, I don't think you can compromise with evil. And I don't mean the people are evil, but their ideas are evil. Marxism is evil. And that's what they're advocating. I believe like Russ, we have to defeat them. And I don't mean grind them into the ground. I don't mean to deny them a platform like they want to do Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly. I believe that we show love and we're winsome about it, but we cannot fool ourselves by believing and reason with people who are not governed by reason.

I think they're governed by spiritual dark forces, and I don't mean in some cases, in other cases not. They're just ideologues, and they're so warped in their ideas, and they're not willing to compromise. You can talk to them., and they're so warped in their ideas, and they're not willing to compromise. You can talk to them. You can listen. Biden calls us divisive and then demonizes the entire Trump supporters. So anyway, it's just not something I aspire to, even though we want to love everyone and we'd like to bring everyone to Christ and to peace. But in the political realm, I think we've got to defeat them or the country dies. Yeah, there are limits to your powers.

Kristen, I know we began with growing up limbaugh. You've got to think about that on a number of levels now. You're a new mom. You have baby Zeke, who I think is David's first grandchild. And, you know, and things change, right? When you become a mother, you necessarily become a mother warrior and you look at all these issues very differently and you are ready to fight, you know, do you, do you, how, how, before I let you go, how has motherhood changed you when it comes to, you know, all of the things we've been discussing?

Honestly, it's exactly what you're implying. I think of myself more as a mama bear now. I get a lot more fired up about all the evil that we are seeing in this world. And I just think of what Jesus said. He said that people will hate you because of me, because Jesus was hated when he came to the earth. And so I think that it's important to remember that not everyone's going to agree with our beliefs. But we're doing this because we have children to bring up, because we have a higher call, especially as parents, to bring up our own kids and to set a legacy for generations that can be used by God, because God is a generational God who works through hundreds and thousands of generations of people. And I truly believe that. I think that the prayers of parents are so powerful. I pray for my son throughout the day. I know my mom was the prayer warrior of our family and did the same. And I've seen the way that her prayers

have blessed my life so much and dad's prayers. And I pray that the same can happen for my child. Megan, I want to say too, that I've noticed, you know, a quickening in your steps since you became a mother. You are obviously such a loving mother. And I love that. And Doug is such a great guy, your husband. I've so enjoyed meeting him over the years. And I do want to say one last thing I meant to add to my substantive answer. Jesus, contrary to popular opinion, did not come to unite us. He came to divide us. He said so. He is the truth and people will oppose the truth. He will separate mother from father, brother and sister and all. And it doesn't mean he wants to divide people, but he knows people will reject the truth. And he knows that Satan's in control of this world to the extent that he does. And so there will never be... So there's nothing inherently evil

about being divided if you're advocating the truth. We cannot deviate from the truth or everything disintegrates. That's a very good point. Very, very good place to leave it. David, thank you. Such a pleasure to see you again. And Kristen, so nice to meet you. Good luck with the book. Yes, everybody's got to buy it. It's called The Resurrected Jesus. And all of David's books have been amazing, but I'm excited to read this one in full with the two of you working on it together. Thank you so much. social contagions that are going around as a result of not breaking it. Okay, so stand by for that. You heard with our last two guests, we were talking about things like God and his recession

from the public square, from the public hearts and minds, and the effect that that's causing on our society, on our country, on the hearts and minds of our teenagers whose depression is growing and spiking, because guess what? They're filling their time with as they're not part of the Boy Scouts anymore. They're not joining the youth groups. They're not in a Bible study. Many don't go to church on Sundays. They're filling it with technology. You know that they're on the iPhone or they're on the iPad or they're on the Android all day long in far, far too many houses. There is a growing addiction, an actual addiction to technology and social media, and it is a real problem that's only getting worse. Our guest now, Dr. Nicholas Cardaris, joins us to talk about it. He's one of the country's foremost addiction experts, and he's developed clinical treatment programs all over the country. He's got a new book out called Digital Madness, How Social Media is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis and How to Restore Our Sanity.

It's out soon. You can order it now. And that really helps him because you get the pre-orders going and then the Amazon list and all that, the New York Times list, they bump you up and they don't like books that, whatever. So just buy it. That's all I'm saying. It's out soon. It offers a blueprint for putting the phone down and living a better life. Nicholas, welcome. Well, thanks for having me on the show. And I've got some tough acts to follow. I've got the queen and the lemon bows and Jesus and God.

It's a lot, a lot. But you're kind of the perfect guest because as I said in the intro, we've been talking about a lot of these issues, why people are so depressed, why we're so divided, why we're becoming more Marxist in weird ways. And we've withdrawn from faith, whatever the faith is, and we've embraced emptiness. Like, forgive me, I don't mean to blame it all on the Kardashians, but they are one example of just vanity and selfie culture and narcissism. And in your case, you're focused on technology and just the void of the screen and how dangerous it is and what it's doing to our kids. Let's start there.

Yeah. And I think even beyond our kids, you're nailing it when you're saying our society. It's not just our children, it's all of us. So I think the one conundrum that I was looking at over the last few years as an author, a psychologist, a researcher was just the simple equation of, as our technology was marching forward, we were digressing and our mental health metrics were skyrocketing. We were at our worst all time in our mental health. Pre-COVID in 2019, we had the worst rates of depression, suicides, we're over 40,000, overdoses, anxiety, loneliness. And so we were going through this real crisis of mental health, and it seemed to correlate with the advancing progression of our dependence on this thing, this new way of being that has really snuck up on many of us. So I started really exploring and looking at what was this relationship with our technology love affair.

And, you know, the one phrase that I think is apt is, as we've become mad for our devices, our devices are increasingly driving us mad. And I think the research bears that out. There's a crisis of emptiness, and technology exacerbates that. And it amplifies certain things in social contagion fashion that are inherently, inherently unhealthy. A crisis of emptiness. Oh, my God, that's so sad sad and it's very clearly so true you write about one patient of yours uh named suzy who i think embodies this this and in fact in fact was very illuminating to me uh as somebody who's followed the she didn't declare herself trans

but somebody who's followed the whole trans thing very closely, which Abigail Schreier and others have concluded is at least in part as a result of the technology and it's sort of a social contagion. So the story of Susie gets to this crisis of emptiness. Can you tell that story? Yeah. I think really the debate a few years ago when I first started writing about this was, can we be habituated to our devices? And I think now that's a fait accompli. We know that. We understand that. The clinical world knows that.

The society understands that. Oh, yeah, we're addicted to our devices. And by design, this is not an accident. This is the social dilemma. And a lot of other documentaries have sort of pulled back the curtain and showed playbook but habituation was just the entry point that was just the price of admission once somebody's habituated to a device now they're much more vulnerable but i like to call their psychological immune system now is much more vulnerable to a whole host of other influences or behavior modifications or shaping effects and so so our client Susie, like so many,

and her real name wasn't Susie, obviously, but like so many of the young people that I treat in our programs, which are geared for young adults, they've been severely impacted by these shaping influences. You know, they don't call them influencers without reason. And we've always had influencers, Megan. We've always had the Michael Jordans and the athletes and the celebrities that we wanted to aspire to. But, but social media has made that impact much more pervasive and insidious. And so

we're not just trying to be like Mike back in the Michael Jordan days. Now we're, we're getting our values shaped. And now what's interesting. Well, let me back up we were seeing this depression epidemic that was happening because we weren't evolutionarily designed to be sedentary isolated screen staring people uh we weren't designed to be that way we were designed to be social face-to-face community physically active tethered to things that gave us meaning and value in our lives and and the technological information age was a nuclear bomb and all of that so people started getting more depressed and more empty and filling that void with the shaping influences of kardashian-esque tiktok influencers and what

was interesting is not only were they beginning to shape not only were we seeing that they were beginning to shape people's values and how they see the world, but now in literal social contagion fashion, they were spreading things like Tourette's disorder, gender dysphoria, borderline personality disorder. They were emulating the behaviors of their influencers. And some of these influencers who had some of these psychiatric disorders were getting billions of views. These Tourette's influencers on TikTok had over 2 billion views and their teenage followers, these adolescent girls that were following them started manifesting signs of Tourette's disorder. This was an amazing new phenomenon to see just how impactful some of this stuff, some of this pervasive and insidious content has been on people.

Let me just pause for one second, Nicholas, to update the audience. A tweet coming in from the royal family. The queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon. The king and the queen consort, meaning Charles and Camilla, will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow with one single black and white photo of Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen Elizabeth. So sad and so, so hard to really get your arms around, you know? I i mean she just seemed like of course you know she's going to pass she's only human but she seemed almost otherworldly like she like somehow she would avoid it and she'd be there for us as this steady ship in the storm for you know decades to come you know and i'm saddened to hear that because I, unlike some other Americans, I'm a fan of the royal family.

I think there's something to be said for the ritual and the tethering of our culture and certain important hallmarks. It gives us a sense of bearing, cultural bearing, societal bearing. And I think that's a big part of what's been evaporating. We've lost some of these iconic influences, and now they've been replaced by some of the stuff that we were just talking about. Yes, yes. That's such a good point. Her class and her dignity and her grace and sense of public service and sacrifice of self. We're living in a world now that's exactly the opposite of that. Right, right, right. And self-centric, egocentric. Part of what I really try to really raise a red flag about is that some of the values that somebody like the Queen embraced. In my book, Digital Madness, I wrote about my father who grew up in Greece during World War II and saw the Nazis destroy his entire village and murder all the adult males in this town. And, you know, my father was an old school Greek immigrant from a different time and a different place.

But he had such a clarity of mind and thought. You know, when you've gone through that kind of life, when you've seen real war and famine, it crystallizes what's important in life. And my father always had that clarity until he died of cancer a couple of years ago. And I feel kind of like you're saying with the queen now, we've lost the wisdom of some of our elders that really were giving us this sense of direction and up is down and left is right and male is female. And it's all connected. I think all of this is sort of creating a mass confusion

that's creating this unwellness that we're struggling through. There's no sense of mooring. There's no sense of bearing. And so people are just, I think, a lot of the young people that I work with are drifting. They're just feeling empty and they're confused. And I get it. I mean, we've all been through, you know, I think all of us who have been through high school have been through

any kind of transitional periods in their lives, understand what it might be like to be confused and trying to find meaning in the world. And it's just not readily available right now because the world right now is a very confusing place. Yeah. So you, you look at Queen Elizabeth and you think there's a woman who understood what duty, honor, country means the same way our Marines do. She understood it. She lived it. Duty, honor, country. And our teens today are focused on this device, which either fits in their pocket or fits on the seat back in front of them, which drives hate, self-loathing, prizes, victimhood. I heard a great quote in this book I'm reading the other day. Suffering is universal. Victimhood is a choice. And instead of stiff upper lip, Queen of England approach to the world, we're telling our kids online today, victimhood is to be prized. It's to be celebrated. It makes you special. And they're actually finding, finding ways to declare

themselves a victim that aren't even authentic to them. That was what was so remarkable to me in your story about Susie, who said, I've got, I've been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. And the deeper you looked, the more you realized she doesn't, she doesn't have borderline personality disorder. And the deeper you looked, the more you realized she doesn't have borderline personality. She doesn't have any of the signs of that. Somebody who has that has had difficulty making relationships their whole lives and so on and so forth. This is a person who saw this discussed online

and then decided to start doing some of the things that somebody who really has it does as, forgive me for using this term, but like to sort of glom on and embrace the traits of it. Well, that's exactly right. And the way that I've come to view social media, it's almost like a living organism, right? It's like this organism that feeds off of our most primal vitriolic emotions, right? So social media gets fed by the most toxic content, you know, whether it's political or psychiatric, you know, we feed the beast and then the beast in

turn feeds us through predictive algorithms and really, really sophisticated behavior modification techniques will like, like heat seeking missiles, the algorithms will find our psychological vulnerabilities. So if you're a young teenage girl with body image missiles, the algorithms will find our psychological vulnerabilities. So if you're a young teenage girl with body image issues, the content that you'll be exposed to is going to really compromise. Well, it's going to engage you because it knows, right, this beast, this social media entity understands that somebody that's concerned about their weight or if they have the propensity for an eating disorder, they can't stop rubbernecking at content that is unhealthy. They're going to look at that and it's going to amplify their psychiatric distress. It's going to make their eating disorder worse. And that's what

this thing is. And if from a political spectrum, if we're extreme left or extreme right, the algorithm senses that and feeds us in what's called an extremification loop, more and more of that toxic content, because we know that that activates our lizard brain. We can't look away, but it makes us more and more unwell. I think what it's done to our young people is it's also made them not nuanced. It's changed the structure of how they process information to be black and white thinkers. It's really difficult. I've been a professor. I was a professor at Stony Brook University for 10 years. And you saw each year young people were less and less able to hold a conversation that used critical thinking, that used logic, that used reason.

It was real all emotional reactivity. And that's being fomented by this thing, by this thing that we're calling social media that feeds off of that, that drives that. And what you talked about is what I talk about is the antidote, civics, honor. Because I'm a big, I've studied the classics, classical philosophy. And I do believe that the antidote civics um honor um because i'm a big um i've studied the classics classical philosophy and i do believe that the antidote to the modern is the ancient and what the ancients talked about was how to develop your abilities to critically think how to develop a sense of civic responsibility um how to break through the narcissism of egocentrism. And if you think also about what the digital landscape does, it curates a digital world that is me-centric, right?

Because the algorithms read what your interests are, what your tendencies are, and then they feed them back to you. So of course a young person is going to think that the world is created in their image because that's what their digital world is. It's created in their image by these predictive algorithms. So it feeds this narcissistic tendency. And that's what we're having to sort of break out of because this narcissism,

this emptiness is the disease now. Yes. Well, you mentioned, I know that you're a big fan of the Stoics. Read Marcus Aurelius. Read some of our philosophers, our great philosophers who came before us to keep a foothold in the past in these great philosophies that have why we're both feeling sad. It's like we've lost somebody who was of that ilk, who was a serious person, who was a deep thinker, who cared about more than just herself. And like the story is just reading up on her understanding that, you know, she was late in her life. And as a news person, you want to make sure you know what's going on. She it's not that she was humorless. It's not like she was unable to have a good time and do all the things that we all want to do while we're here. If we should be so lucky to. She was sworn in. She was coronated in 53, I think. Her dad died in 52. And so she comes to visit Gerald Ford. And first of all, he took her on the dance floor. And when the band began playing, they inadvertently started playing the lady as a tramp,

which I'm sure she got somewhat of a kick out of but then she met um their son at the residence at the the the president ford's residence he was 24 and he was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and the queen reassured the first lady at the time saying don't worry betty i have one of those at home too you know she was a mom she was she had a sense of humor she was a realist she loved america too um one by one we lose them and we get people who like tell us they're a different gender or even a different species on tuesday than they were on monday and we have to pretend like that's real and they're making their way into government too i mean they're starting to run the country If you see some of the things on Twitter today about half of Biden's cabinet,

it's downright alarming. So that brings me to this. What do we do? Because I know, like Abigail Schreier has said, and this is what I would do, too, that if your kid comes home and, you know, without having had any gender dysphoria from age two, which they will have if they genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria, if they come home at 16 and suddenly say, I'm trans, or your kid suddenly comes home at 16 and says, I'm now a cutter. I have borderline personality disorder, something they didn't. She says, you're taking a six month, a year long trip to Europe. The phone doesn't come. The screens don't come, you know, wherever it could be camping. It doesn't have to be Europe. But I'm just saying, get them away. Like, there is a way of addressing this addiction and its pernicious effect on your child's mental health.

Yeah, it's an invasive species. Well, I equate it to a digital social virus. And that's where we're knowing that it knowing that when is it the real psychiatric disorder? When is it real authentic gender dysphoria or borderline personality disorder? It's when you remove the toxin, when you remove the social media, and if the symptoms go away, then it wasn't the real deal. If the person's still struggling, typically those disorders show themselves very early on in early infancy. So they don't tend to manifest themselves in late adolescence. So a lot of these are social contagions. As a psychologist, I fully acknowledge gender dysphoria, but the exponential spike that we've been seeing over

the last five to 10 years clearly is you can trace back to the social contagion effect. But we've not only normalized, we've tried to normalize gender dysphoria, but now we've idealized it. Now it's cool to be trans, and we are a social species, and teenagers who are struggling with their identity are going to think that the solutions to some of their discomfort is external. In addiction, we know that sometimes when people struggle with their own lives and they're trying to escape, they do what's called a geographic.

So an addict who hates their lives might move to Los Angeles because they think, well, the solution is in Los Angeles. I'm doing a geographic. I think gender dysphoria in a lot of cases and a lot of our psychiatric, assuming some of the psychiatric behaviors, is doing sort of a biological geographic. You don't like who you are, you're going through some depression or some other types of issues, and you say, well, hey, the solution might be maybe if I change my biology, or if I change and I assume this other identity. And that's clearly not the answer, because the answer is internal. Sometimes these are real psychiatric issues, but the percentages tend to be really small, not the numbers that we've been seeing over the last five to 10 years. They clearly have been driven by social media.

And even Erica Anderson, Dr. Anderson, the 70-year-old trans psychologist, has said the same. She said this has gone too far. And clearly these are being amplified by quarantines, COVID and social media increases in young people's lives. Yeah. We had Dr. Anderson on the show and made a lot of sense and was very sensible about the whole issue. But how do you know, right? Because you can't really disconnect your child from all technology in today's day and age. And so is it the same? I like to think if my child, God forbid, they're young, but if they start drinking or started taking drugs and it crosses over to a place where it's not just like a kid being a kid, but an addiction,ier because that they can do in your home while you're there and you're distracted. It's not like they come out smelling like marijuana after they've been on the iPad for eight hours. So how do you know? I was an expert witness on the capital murder

case in Palm Beach County earlier this year where there was a 16-year-old Palm Beach County white suburban skater-looking kid who got radicalized into Islam and became an ISIS warrior through constant YouTube exposure. He started going down the YouTube rabbit hole through ISIS, and they indoctrinated him in his bedroom over the course of several months, and he committed one of the most horrific murders that I don't have to go over now. But this once young, nice kid and his mother, his single mom, thought he was just up in his bedroom on the computer. She didn't realize that he went in the period of six to eight months from nice kid who wouldn't hurt a fly

to essentially someone who decapitated someone, a 13-year-old with a 13-inch knife. And the mother had ostensibly had no idea. And I'd like to think, I'm a parent of 15-year-old twin boys. I'd like to think as parents, we'd have some sense of that things are changing, the behaviors are changing. But I have seen it happen very rapidly too, where over the course of a couple of weeks or a summer, somebody can entirely change their identity because of this emptiness that I'm talking about. So if you don't have countervailing influences, now I think if we're trying to be good parents,

you're a mom, I'm a dad, we try to get our kids involved in activities and sports and music and things that give them a sense of mooring and some faith-based also helps. Because if they don't have that, every kid wants to belong to something, to a team, they're going to find something more toxic, a more toxic team to belong to if they don't have something healthier to tether themselves to. So part of the antidote is keep them tethered to something healthy. So good.

That's such good advice. Yes, because a lot of the times you see these kids who are, you know, it's absentee parents and they're the ones who are most at risk and not just for this kind of thing, but for sex trafficking off the internet. I mean, it's just a very dangerous place and your kid should never be sitting in his or her room for hours at a time with the door closed and the internet in there. It's just not a smart idea while they're still developing. You got to monitor them more closely. Yeah, it's a portal to, like I said, because of the way social media is designed, I do think

there's a Frankenstein monster effect. I think that the big tech moguls have created this Frankenstein monster that quite honestly, I think they've lost control over because it is now morphing and evolving in ways that I think some of them never even predicted as well. But let's not kid ourselves. I mean, big tech, you know, five people right now are controlling or the most powerful people that have ever lived on the planet. You know, J.D. Rockefeller, as the head of Standard Oil, controlled one commodity, oil. These five men, these five white men, are the gatekeepers into our thoughts, our emotions, our children, our lives. They can shape and control everything. And so not only are they more wealthy than anybody's ever been, but the level of control that they have,

even a despotic dictator was only able to physically control your body right the the they could throw you into the gulag but they couldn't control your mind but now the big tech gatekeepers through you know i i can't stand this misinformation disinformation nonsense you know this orwellian reshaping of information and thinking that we need gatekeepers to let us know what's real and what's not. And who made some Twitter gatekeeper, the arbiter of what's real and what's not? I'm a real free speech purist. And that's the other part of this thing is now we're having people control what reality is, what's up and what's down. And we've seen that abused from everything from

the hunter biden case to the lab leak theory i mean i got told very early on and i remember the first month it was march 2020 reading about the wuhan virology lab and thinking oh well i'm not a virologist but it makes sense that this might be a possible source of this contagion. Disinformation. But it was disinformation. Listen, I think this is an important book. I want everybody to read this just for the sake of your family and for our society. It's called Digital Madness. Again, it's available right now for pre-order on Amazon and with other booksellers. Nicholas, thank you so much.

Please come back. We didn't even get to your amazing backstory, which, you know, the Queen took up some of our time. But please buy the book and read about what Nicholas has been through to find out for yourself. He knows of what he speaks. All the best to you. Thank you, Megan. and it really is just as moving as you would think it would be. Queen Elizabeth, dead at age 96, at age 21, this is what she said. I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong. She did that and much, much more. She will be missed and we will have full coverage of the passing of the Queen and a new King of England tomorrow. Thank you so much for being with us. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.