Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - November 05, 2026


Ron’s Biggest Takeaway from the Midterm Results ｜ Ron Simmons

Ep 1417 ｜ It's Time to Get to Work ｜ Jonny Ardavanis Ep 1418 ｜ 'My Bible Study Is Affirming a Lesbian in the Group'： How I'd Handle It

Episode Stats


Length

32 minutes

Words per minute

172.8

Word count

5,613

Sentence count

385

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Well, hello, everyone. I hope everyone is doing okay today. I know maybe for a lot of you that
00:00:16.020 are listening to this, this is not our best day ever, considering the election results last night
00:00:21.860 in a lot of our areas. But I wanted to get on here pretty soon after all that happened so that we
00:00:29.200 could just kind of do an analysis of it. And I would encourage you that over the next couple of
00:00:35.880 weeks, don't pay that much attention to the news. It'll take a little bit of time to do an autopsy
00:00:41.380 of what kind of went on. I know there's a lot of different states that had surprises. Texas was
00:00:47.180 probably one of the biggest surprises. We're recording this really less than 24 hours after
00:00:52.120 the election was over. And so some of the information will become more clear in the next
00:00:57.260 few days, but we want to get information out to you as soon as possible. I remind you, I'm Ron
00:01:01.560 Simmons. I'm Allie's dad, and I am actually here in London, England. So pretty good, actually pretty
00:01:08.360 good time to be out of the country considering what happened last night. I'm here in London,
00:01:13.140 England with my son, and we're doing some fun things. I'm also here doing some business conference
00:01:19.520 that I'm a part of, a group that I'm a part of, and really excited about some of the things. In
00:01:24.820 fact, tonight, we're going to Abbey Road Studios. That's going to be fun, where the Beatles recorded,
00:01:30.500 and then in a couple of days, we're going to Blenheim Palace, where Winston Churchill was born,
00:01:36.340 and then we're going to finish it up by having a black tie event at St. Patrick's Cathedral,
00:01:42.860 which is going to be pretty cool as well. So anyway, I'll bring you up to date on that next
00:01:48.260 time that we're on, but I wanted to start today with a Bible verse that I've relied on a lot.
00:01:54.820 I remember when I was first running for office back in 2012, a colleague of mine, Scott Turner, who is now the secretary of housing and urban development.
00:02:06.460 He was in the statehouse with me for a couple of sessions and we would meet sometimes for breakfast during our campaigns because we didn't know if we were going to win or not.
00:02:16.420 We had never run before, neither one of us.
00:02:18.260 And so we adopted these two verses as our kind of our mantra of what we believed as Christians.
00:02:27.440 And it's Daniel chapter two, verses 21 and 22.
00:02:32.480 So Daniel chapter two, verses 21 and 22.
00:02:35.820 And I'll just read them to you.
00:02:37.520 It says, and this is obviously talking about God.
00:02:41.100 He changes times and seasons.
00:02:43.040 He removes kings and sets up kings.
00:02:45.440 He gives wisdom for the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding.
00:02:50.800 He reveals deep and hidden things.
00:02:53.280 He knows what it is in the darkness and the light dwells with him.
00:02:59.000 So I think that's something that we have to remember.
00:03:01.820 I think we always remember also that, as Allie says, God's perfect plan is going off without a hitch.
00:03:08.740 Sometimes, like today, we don't understand that.
00:03:11.500 I certainly don't understand it.
00:03:12.980 to lose. In Texas, we lost every statewide elected official. I think a lot of people felt that
00:03:20.400 Ken Paxton might not win the Senate race, but I don't think very many people, even the Democrats,
00:03:27.340 honestly, I believe if they would be honest, did not think that Greg Abbott would lose and then
00:03:33.280 Lieutenant Governor or Agriculture Commissioner, Attorney General's office that we thought we would
00:03:37.860 win. No sugarcoating. It was a bloodbath. And it happened not just in Texas, but some other states
00:03:45.300 as well. Let's just talk about some of those. Michigan, Abdu El-Sayed is going to win that
00:03:52.360 race. It was a little closer than some people thought. And an interesting thing, one of the
00:03:57.980 interesting things was, is he actually, in his acceptance speech, did part of it in Arabic.
00:04:02.920 Let's take a listen.
00:04:04.600 My name is Abdurrahman Muhammad Al-Sayyid.
00:04:14.900 And I am so proud and honored to stand here as your senator-elect from the great state of Michigan.
00:04:27.040 Up until right about now, you might have noticed, I always say, inshallah, or God willing,
00:04:32.920 whenever the outcome of this race was mentioned.
00:04:36.620 But today, tonight, we can turn that, inshallah, into alhamdulillah.
00:04:45.840 Also, just remember some of the things that some of these elected officials,
00:04:52.200 people that are now elected, said.
00:04:54.980 You know, how El-Sayed didn't denounce the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:04:59.700 And Tallarico for Texas said that God was non-binary and there were six different genders.
00:05:06.800 It was just some crazy stuff.
00:05:08.600 But also in Iowa, we lost that race.
00:05:11.700 And Democrats hadn't won a Senate race there since 2008.
00:05:15.560 And in Kansas, we lost that.
00:05:19.160 Hamilton wins.
00:05:19.980 That was an open seat, I believe.
00:05:22.780 Yep.
00:05:23.140 Crump won it by 18 points in 24.
00:05:25.540 Yeah, it's 94 years as the first Democrat Senate victory in Kansas.
00:05:29.700 If you can believe that, 94 years in Alaska, that race is still close.
00:05:35.240 Haven't called it yet because the way they do the ranked voting, you know, the people that it's, you know, it's one, two, three, four.
00:05:43.080 You pick candidates where you want to win, who you'd like to finish second, third, fourth or who your priorities are.
00:05:48.640 And then the the third and fourth place votes get reallocated to the first and second place votes based on based on how they were ranked.
00:05:59.700 And so we don't know. The real Dan Sullivan is ahead by just a little bit, but they have not called that race yet. Maine, Susan Collins, finally lost. She had held on that seat for a long time.
00:06:12.060 Now, again, some of these people that have held on to these seats for, you know, 20, 30 years, they probably shouldn't have even run and allowed someone else to step up on the Republican side.
00:06:24.640 It really irks me that people think that they're the only people that can do that job.
00:06:30.600 There are a lot of good people in every state, a lot of good Republicans, a lot of good conservatives in every state.
00:06:36.440 And I don't think someone has to stay there 30 years.
00:06:38.900 I think, you know, people stay too long, and I think people get tired of that.
00:06:44.360 Sherrod Brown, who was formerly a U.S. senator in Ohio and got beat, has now been reelected.
00:06:53.940 And this, I believe, was J.D. Vance's old seat.
00:06:57.940 But he got elected again over John Husted.
00:07:02.200 And so he was kind of he was out for a few years and now he's come back.
00:07:06.440 So that was interesting.
00:07:07.740 And, of course, the House also flipped. So the Senate will now be controlled by Democrats.
00:07:14.100 And I think it looks like they're going to have 54 maybe. And then I also think they have a couple of independents that caucus with them.
00:07:21.140 So it's going to be a tough road for Republicans.
00:07:25.240 Now, the 60 vote rule, which we've kind of talked about not liking because we couldn't get the SAVE Act passed because of the 60 vote rule, is going to actually work in Republicans' favor.
00:07:36.480 although I would still stay on the record, is I think that majority ought to rule.
00:07:40.960 Majority is what people get elected by, and we ought to make our laws by majority as well.
00:07:47.600 But I will say that that will work to the Republicans' advantage.
00:07:51.640 It will give them some leverage over the next couple of years, and we'll see how they use that.
00:07:57.480 We hope that they use it well.
00:07:59.040 There is a little bit of a lame duck period that's going on now,
00:08:02.320 from now until I think January 3rd is when the Senate and the House actually come back into
00:08:07.600 session for the new House, you know, House and Senate. So there's about, what, seven or eight
00:08:13.980 weeks. Now, they will not work that whole time because they'll take off for Thanksgiving and
00:08:17.840 they'll take off sometime during Christmas. So we'll see if they can push anything through in
00:08:22.500 the next several weeks. It's hard to do that, but we'll see what they do. They'll probably try to
00:08:27.940 get some appointments done, although who knows whether or not that's really going to happen or
00:08:33.180 not. There was also some races in the House that were kind of the one, several of them that we were
00:08:39.460 watching to see how they did. The redrawing, you remember there was a lot of redistricting done?
00:08:47.140 I do think that that helped the Republicans. I haven't analyzed it totally yet, so don't hold
00:08:53.280 me to that, but it feels like, at least in Texas, I think the Republicans did pretty well in that,
00:08:58.720 and I think they did pretty well in where they redistricted another place. Not every place,
00:09:02.340 because in Florida, we actually lost one that we thought was going to be our advantage. Now,
00:09:09.560 I want to come back to Florida in just a minute on a bigger picture thing. And they lost a couple
00:09:15.800 of those races that we thought we probably could win. Same thing happened in New York when the
00:09:21.200 The Democrat Conley beat Mike Lawler, who was a very close race, and he was an incumbent.
00:09:29.460 He defended that district in 2024, even though Kamala Harris won that district as a presidential candidate.
00:09:37.420 And so it was a tough night.
00:09:39.360 Now, the governorships was also something.
00:09:41.740 You know, Greg Abbott has been a really, really good governor, no question about it.
00:09:46.260 I mean, he's lowered taxes.
00:09:47.440 He has helped on immigration where we can as a state.
00:09:52.380 He's done so many good things, done a lot of conservative appointments to our governing boards of our universities.
00:10:00.920 But he's no longer going to be our governor.
00:10:03.300 That was very surprising.
00:10:05.080 But he wasn't the only one who lost the governorship.
00:10:07.800 In fact, there are more now going to be more Democrat governors than there are Republican governors.
00:10:12.700 We didn't win the governorship in Ohio, which is surprising to me.
00:10:19.020 But interestingly enough, Florida stayed red.
00:10:24.420 They won their governorship and they won their Senate seat.
00:10:28.900 So that was really interesting when everybody else pretty much was whitewashed.
00:10:34.280 Now, I don't know why that is yet, but I do think that the GOP of Texas, for example, we need to go down and meet with the head of the GOP down in Florida and say, OK, what did y'all do?
00:10:50.760 Your messaging couldn't have been that much different.
00:10:55.240 What did y'all do?
00:10:56.180 Was it a get out the vote?
00:10:57.380 Which I think that's what we're going to learn.
00:10:59.860 I'm afraid what we're going to learn in a lot of these places that we were not victorious, that we should have won, is that either people were upset with Republicans so they just stayed home, all right, or they switched over and voted for Democrats.
00:11:17.780 What I want to see, at least in Texas, and I really like to see this nationwide, is how many Republican primary voters did not vote in this general election?
00:11:28.660 Because a Republican primary voter generally is a, you know, pretty much if they voted in the Republican primary or Democrat primary, but if they vote in the Republican primary, they're going to vote for a Republican in the general election.
00:11:41.080 Same way in the Democrat primary.
00:11:43.040 So I want to see how many of our people didn't vote.
00:11:46.620 And, you know, someone will do an analysis of how many evangelicals didn't vote, how many Christians didn't vote.
00:11:53.480 And again, that's a little bit you don't know that for sure.
00:11:56.960 They do that through I believe they do that through some type of polling to determine that.
00:12:01.920 But it'll be very interesting to see, you know, as I've said before, whether or not you voted is public record.
00:12:10.260 So if you want to know if you're if you're a pastor of a church or, you know, work at a church or something like that,
00:12:18.380 and you have your roster of people that are members of your church and you want to know how many of your people voted,
00:12:25.780 what percentage, I certainly would never call anybody out by name, but you could get your church roster, compare that internally.
00:12:32.880 OK, I wouldn't do it externally. Compare that to a vote, you know, who voted.
00:12:37.240 You never know who they voted for, but whether or not they vote or not.
00:12:40.520 And if, you know, if we have churches where, you know, 30 percent of their membership didn't vote, that's a problem.
00:12:46.360 And we've got to do a better job at that.
00:12:48.080 And again, we're not telling them to vote Republican or Democrat.
00:12:51.320 I wouldn't be.
00:12:51.960 I'd just say, look, look at the policies that of each of the candidates or the parties, depending on, you know, where you're what you're voting for and determine which of those follows close to the Bible, the values of the Bible as possible.
00:13:07.420 And then, you know, that's that's how we promote it. Now, it wasn't all bad news.
00:13:13.020 Again, I talked about Florida. That's really good news. The first black governor to ever serve in Florida is a Republican.
00:13:18.740 That's going to be interesting to see how that goes, so I'm excited about that.
00:13:23.940 A few of my friends either won a seat in Congress or they were reelected in Congress.
00:13:31.460 Some of my friends that were former House members of mine lost, and that was pretty surprising.
00:13:37.740 In fact, the Texas House of Representatives is now going to be controlled by Democrats,
00:13:42.360 which that hasn't happened in, I assume it's probably been 30 years.
00:13:46.580 I really don't know.
00:13:47.360 Now, the Senate, this is very interesting for those of you that are political nerds a little bit, is that the Senate in Texas is going to be still controlled by Republicans.
00:13:58.120 But the lieutenant governor who kind of presides over the Senate, that's a Democrat.
00:14:03.140 Vicki Goodwin, the lady that was a state representative, beat Dan Patrick.
00:14:07.340 However, her powers are not that much constitutional. 0.87
00:14:11.720 Most of her powers are given to her by the sitting senators. 0.99
00:14:16.220 So the sitting senators will have to probably, since it's controlled by Republicans, they'll 1.00
00:14:21.100 probably rein in the powers of the lieutenant governor.
00:14:23.900 I don't know that for sure.
00:14:24.980 That's my guess.
00:14:26.160 We'll see how that works out. 0.64
00:14:27.560 It should be pretty good political theater.
00:14:31.080 But I'll just tell you, the Democrats won.
00:14:35.560 No question about that.
00:14:37.140 This was for them.
00:14:38.420 This was a good election.
00:14:40.880 But that doesn't excuse Republicans.
00:14:43.580 We made some massive mistakes. In fact, you know, I don't think we ran the correct person in Texas
00:14:52.180 for Senate. I'm not saying it even should have been Senator Cornyn, although I do think that
00:14:57.220 he would have had a better chance of winning against Tallarico. Senator Cornyn had also been
00:15:02.720 there probably about 20 years or so. And it might have been time for that to be an open seat to let
00:15:09.000 people in the primary fight it out and see what happened. I definitely don't think it should have
00:15:13.380 been Attorney General Paxton. I just think there was too much damage there for us to overcome.
00:15:20.660 And that, I believe, is the reason that Governor Abbott lost as well. There was so much
00:15:26.980 anti-Paxton. In fact, based on the data that I have today, 300,000 people, 300,000 people
00:15:35.780 voted for Governor Abbott that did not vote for Paxton for Senator. They call that an undervote
00:15:44.300 for Paxton, right? 300,000 people. That's a lot of people. And some of those were Republicans.
00:15:50.300 And some of those just either didn't vote at all or they voted for the other candidate,
00:15:55.160 which is very, very hard to believe. Now, the question is, how do we get back to work?
00:16:01.960 A lot of you are stay-at-home moms or working moms or some of the related bros are listening to this.
00:16:08.360 What do we do right now?
00:16:09.480 Well, here's what we do.
00:16:11.620 We have to go back to work.
00:16:13.520 And here's how we go back to work is that in your local area, in your local county or your local area,
00:16:22.380 you should make sure that if you align with the Republican Party's principles,
00:16:27.280 that you should be involved in it. 0.99
00:16:29.280 Join the local women's club.
00:16:31.960 the Republican Women's Club. And here's what they do. Most of the campaigns on the local basis,
00:16:38.120 which end up at the state level, the new governor of Texas was a state rep. Okay. The new lieutenant
00:16:43.940 governor of Texas was a state rep. The new attorney general was a state senator. And all of those are
00:16:51.300 really driven by what happens and who is known locally. And the women's clubs, or even the men's
00:16:59.420 clubs, Republican clubs in the area, they're the ones that vet the candidates the most.
00:17:05.520 They usually, you know, try to meet once a month. You may not be able to go to every meeting,
00:17:09.300 but you should join to keep yourself informed. And the candidates generally have to go through
00:17:15.520 them if they think they're going to be successful because their endorsements at the local level
00:17:20.320 make a huge difference. And so I want to make sure that you get involved right there. You do the same
00:17:27.640 thing in your local school board races, okay? That you make sure that you go to, all you have to do
00:17:35.000 is if you want to know what's going on in your, like say, a school board race, just all you have
00:17:41.400 to do is search on the web for candidates for XYZ school district and make sure that you vet those
00:17:49.600 candidates. And they generally have their own website. And you can also go to like your
00:17:56.600 conservative women's clubs or your conservative clubs, Republican clubs, they will have vetted
00:18:02.140 the candidates, right? And make sure as we put candidates up, that we put candidates up that we 1.00
00:18:07.740 think can win, all right? We not only have to be conservative, we have to be smart conservatives.
00:18:13.400 And smart conservatives are ones that, in my opinion, look at the values that they have
00:18:21.240 and put those into policies, and those values need to be lined up biblically, right? We need
00:18:28.540 to have a true biblical worldview, and a biblical worldview will create the values that we want to
00:18:35.320 put in public policy. That's why, as Ali says, politics matter because policy matters because
00:18:41.520 people matter. So that's really what's important in there. But that's how you can do that. You can
00:18:48.020 also always email me with any questions. I'll be happy to answer any questions that you have. If
00:18:54.260 you're in a local area and you don't really know how to get involved, let me do some of that
00:18:58.680 research for you. I can help you with that. So email me about that. And I'm happy. I'm happy
00:19:04.020 to do that. I also think this is a this is also a very good time, especially for your teenagers
00:19:09.920 to talk to them. And this is a good lesson for us to learn. And again, we don't need to just,
00:19:16.240 blame the Democrats. We have to blame ourselves sometimes. We didn't get our message across as
00:19:22.320 well as we should have. And President Trump ended up being not very helpful. He put up a Senate
00:19:30.340 candidate in South Carolina, who's probably a very fine lady. But was that really the best
00:19:34.600 candidate just because she was Lindsey Graham's sister? He endorsed a candidate in Texas that he
00:19:40.100 knew was flawed. He even called it flawed. And I get it. We should be voting for policy. But a lot
00:19:45.560 of people don't look at it that way. All right. So we got to put the best candidate up. And then
00:19:49.900 this whole affordability issue is a real problem. I've been a supporter of not allowing Iran to have 1.00
00:19:55.980 a weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear bomb. And I support that. However, we can't go into 0.82
00:20:04.440 that blindly without how it affects other people. And people have really been concerned about gas
00:20:10.060 prices and affordability. And I get that. Even though that a lot of the affordability issues
00:20:15.280 were created under President Biden when inflation was up over 20 percent and inflation has not been
00:20:22.040 growing by near as much since Trump has been there. The affordability issue, and he promised
00:20:27.960 it would be more affordable and it hasn't become more affordable. And so I think that people were
00:20:33.220 tired of that. So we have to admit that we have not lived up to what we said we were going to do,
00:20:39.640 no matter what President Trump says. Now, remember, he is probably not going to take any blame or
00:20:45.180 any responsibility for anything that happened. I haven't heard him talk about it yet, but based on
00:20:51.080 his past conversations, that's right. And he would be wrong on that. Now, it certainly wasn't all his
00:20:55.460 fault. Every candidate has to win their own race. And if, you know, I lost a race at the end of my
00:21:02.480 career and I don't blame anybody. I have people I think could have done better. For example, Senator
00:21:07.540 Cruz lost my district by 10 points when I lost it by one point. So that tells me that, you know,
00:21:13.740 he might could have worked harder in my district to get more votes that probably would have helped
00:21:18.540 me. But at the end of the day, I can't really blame him. It's, you know, it's just, it's just
00:21:23.380 what happened. I didn't get the message across as well as I should have. And we learn from those
00:21:27.100 things sometimes. So we, you know, we reflect, but again, I would encourage you, don't let it
00:21:34.140 settle for a little bit. Okay. And then let's, we'll, I'll talk some more about this, but there'll
00:21:39.800 be an autopsy done of kind of what the messaging was that didn't get across because it's really
00:21:45.900 interesting. And I think people got really frustrated by not passing the SAVE Act that
00:21:52.620 we could have that would have made voting less hard to cheat at because I do think a lot of
00:21:58.320 people believe, and I'm one of them, that there are a lot of shenanigans that goes on in voting.
00:22:04.080 If you don't think every vote counts, if you have somebody tell you that, well, that wouldn't have
00:22:09.320 made a difference. I have a good friend that I believe is still going to win his Texas House
00:22:15.240 seat, but you know, he's only ahead by 30 votes. 30 votes. That's not many votes at all. And if
00:22:25.220 the other side could get 30 ineligible voters to vote, they could flip that seat. So it makes
00:22:33.060 a difference. And if you don't think your vote makes a difference, just think about races like
00:22:36.780 that, it's really pretty incredible. Now, there were a couple of really good things that happened.
00:22:41.480 And for example, North Carolina, even though he elected a Democrat senator and a Democrat governor,
00:22:48.420 they did pass a measure to require photo voter ID, which is a bipartisan issue, even though
00:22:56.780 Democrats don't want to admit that. They passed a measure to that. They also passed a measure
00:23:00.620 to reduce their state income tax, which is pretty cool, right? And those are very conservative
00:23:06.140 thing. So this is kind of the dichotomy that we see. That tells us that we have an electorate,
00:23:12.480 and I'm talking about North Carolina, but I think it goes across all states. We have an electorate
00:23:15.860 that wants conservative values, but we haven't put up, I guess, the right candidates or the right
00:23:22.420 messaging to get that across. And again, that's our fault. And we're going to have to do better
00:23:28.120 at that. Idaho passed, and they're a very conservative state, but they passed a measure
00:23:34.580 that says, yeah, failed abortions are still illegal.
00:23:38.480 OK, you can't that can't happen.
00:23:40.880 Colorado is the they voted on boys and girls sports.
00:23:45.620 And while I say it's too close to call, the banning of girls and boys sports is I mean, 0.64
00:23:53.020 boys and girls sports is is ahead right now. 1.00
00:23:55.560 And hopefully it'll stay ahead.
00:23:56.740 And and we'll see how we'll see how all that happens.
00:23:59.580 So there are some good things, you know, that that did happen.
00:24:03.160 And again, I think we hopefully we're going to win the Alaska seat, the Senate seat.
00:24:08.640 But we just have to remember everything is going to be OK.
00:24:13.920 All right. Everything's going to be OK.
00:24:17.280 This is what happened.
00:24:18.360 If you remember back in 2010, which some of you, a lot of you are probably too young to remember that because you weren't thinking about it.
00:24:24.860 You weren't even eligible to vote at the time.
00:24:26.220 But 2010, the Republicans did exactly the same thing to Obama, who, you know, the media thinks has been the godsend to presidencies that the people did to Trump.
00:24:38.040 It's very common for this to happen in the second terms of presidents.
00:24:42.420 Happened to President George W. Bush that lost a bunch of seats in the House and the Senate.
00:24:48.080 And then in 2010, we took a bunch of those back.
00:24:52.100 So we'll see what happens in 2028.
00:24:55.060 A lot of it will be based on who we put at the top of the ticket.
00:24:59.080 And while I have believed in a lot of the policies that President Trump has put in place, and I appreciate him doing that, I do think that a lot of the excitement on the Democrat side was to go and vote against President Trump.
00:25:14.200 And what that's going to cause is that's going to cause the next two years, there's going to be somewhat of a stalemate.
00:25:23.240 And in some ways, from the stock market standpoint and the economy standpoint, sometimes a stalemate is a good thing.
00:25:30.320 So I don't want you to be too disappointed in that.
00:25:32.840 But it's going to be much harder to get something passed.
00:25:36.340 If he wants something passed, he's going to have to negotiate.
00:25:40.020 And knowing President Trump, who is a negotiator, he will probably make some deals.
00:25:46.420 This is my guess that you or I won't end up being happy with just to get something else done.
00:25:52.080 But we'll see how that happens. The thing that I'm the most concerned about is he probably won't get any real conservative judges appointed because the Senate has to approve those.
00:26:04.460 And I don't think they're going to get approved without, you know, with the Democrat-controlled Senate.
00:26:09.960 I just don't think that they will. And that's a big, big deal. And that's, you know, that's the results of it.
00:26:16.600 But, you know, we get that we, unfortunately, and I hope it doesn't make anybody too mad,
00:26:21.940 but we get the government that we deserve.
00:26:25.540 And if you look throughout biblical history, as I told you, I've been reading through the
00:26:29.620 Bible this year, and they got you, you know, you got me reading some Old Testament every
00:26:34.100 day and some New Testament every day and a psalm, some psalm, and then some proverb.
00:26:38.440 And so I was reading something, you know, just right now in Ezekiel.
00:26:48.320 And, you know, Ezekiel is a prophecy book, but it talks a lot about what God was doing related to essentially the government, right?
00:26:58.260 Because he brought in these kings that were certainly not believers in him, but he used them to teach his people a lesson.
00:27:09.800 And at the end of the day, he always keeps his covenants.
00:27:15.640 So he revives them, but he had to flush out some of the people that he considered his people that weren't doing what they were supposed to.
00:27:25.280 You know, they were, you know, they were worshiping other gods and all that stuff.
00:27:28.960 In fact, I think what actually my reading today I thought was pretty good.
00:27:34.400 And what it said to me was that God keeps his covenants.
00:27:39.560 And the two verses I want you to write down and maybe go read as an encouragement is Hebrews 6, 13 through 20 and Psalms 105, verse 42.
00:27:52.500 So it's Hebrews 6, 13 through 20, Psalms 105, 42.
00:27:57.460 And the precept of those is that God keeps his covenants.
00:28:01.920 Let's spend just a couple of minutes here as we wrap up,
00:28:04.880 take a couple of listener questions, and I'll take more of them personally.
00:28:08.100 Again, if you've emailed me, if you email me, ron at ronsimmons.com,
00:28:12.120 I'll do my best to answer you.
00:28:13.320 If you've emailed me and I haven't answered, please resend the email
00:28:16.960 because sometimes it gets lost down on the second or third page,
00:28:19.920 I just miss it, not on purpose, but I just miss it. All right. I think we've already talked about
00:28:24.980 that. My state looks like it's a flipping blue. What do I do? I'm scared for my kid's job in the
00:28:28.740 future. We got to get involved and we got to make sure that we're doing all that we can. All right.
00:28:34.100 I do. I do think that we have to rely on God's promises, but he also requires us to do work.
00:28:39.340 Even in all of his prophecies, he works through humans. All right. He works through people.
00:28:44.520 And so we have to make sure that we're doing that. How are we ever going to win a presidential
00:28:49.380 election without Texas? Well, I don't think Texas has gone blue. I mean, it has temporarily,
00:28:55.220 but I don't think Texas is a liberal state. I really don't believe it's a liberal state. I
00:28:59.780 just think we have to go back at it. It'll be four years, though, before we elect statewide.
00:29:05.460 Now, we have presidential election coming up in 28, and I think that the right Republican candidate
00:29:10.140 can absolutely win Texas. The Democrats are going to have had two years, and I think a lot of Texans
00:29:15.800 that allowed this to happen, that we'll be tired of that. And that'll be a vote against our own
00:29:22.440 people as well when we vote for a Republican candidate in Texas. It'll be a vote against
00:29:27.160 the Democrat administration in Texas. And the silver lining for 2028 is that I think that we're
00:29:33.520 going to be, you know, sometimes when you're the underdog, you're much more engaged and much more
00:29:40.780 excited. That's happened in politics. It happens in sports. I think that's the silver lining. And
00:29:45.400 And plus, I also think purging sometimes is good, you know, just like a spring cleaning.
00:29:49.680 Sometimes purging is good for us.
00:29:51.780 And that's certainly what we did, what we did.
00:29:55.540 And the reason that opposing parties always win the midterms, because it's a people, even
00:30:01.920 though we only have two years of presidency and because the way the media works, in other
00:30:06.760 words, the president, no matter who that person is, is in the media all the time.
00:30:10.900 I think the electorate gets tired of that, honestly.
00:30:13.040 Now, I don't think we should have only one-term presidents. That's too much. But I do think it might be better if they had maybe a one-term six-year term as opposed to a one-term four-year term. It's better than two four-year terms. That might be a better system because we just get tired. So we vote against whatever's happening now, no matter whether it's Democrat or Republican.
00:30:35.080 again uh prepping for a power grid failure i think we all ought to have a backup generator
00:30:42.660 even if it's just a portable one we have a portable one in our home in texas we have a
00:30:46.960 different kind uh at our at our vacation home uh because it's more likely to be involved in
00:30:53.120 in bad weather but everybody should have that you also should make sure that you always have
00:30:58.220 plenty of drinking water all right uh have enough where you can if you need to use it to you know
00:31:03.640 obviously to drink, but also you may need some extra water to flush the toilets, things like
00:31:07.520 that. So I'd make sure you had plenty of that around. And let's see here. What's something that
00:31:13.520 younger Ron believed that current Ron believes differently today? I think what younger Ron
00:31:18.260 believed is that he believed that hard work was the only thing that mattered. And that's just not
00:31:28.180 true. I think smart work is much more important than hard work. And what I mean by that is that
00:31:35.380 when you're going through your career or whatever it is that you're doing, even if it's raising your
00:31:43.260 kids, that taking a little time to think. There's a book out by an author that I like, as y'all know,
00:31:50.100 John Maxwell, called Thinking for a Change. And when I read that book, that was really helpful to
00:31:55.460 me to make sure that I spent time thinking before I spent time acting. Now, I'm a little bit hesitant
00:32:03.100 to say that because I think some people, all they do is think and they never act. I believe God
00:32:08.980 honors righteous action, but that does require some thinking. And I think a young Ron was much
00:32:14.440 more ready, fire, aim than it should have been ready, aim, fire, right? All right, so that's the
00:32:21.300 questions I can get to today, sorry I didn't get to all of them again, feel free to email me
00:32:25.200 ron at ronsimmons.com and we'll look forward to talking to you next time.