The Great America Show - MARXISTS MEAN TO KILL THE FREE WORLD AND GOD

00:00:00.000 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Great America podcast with Lou Dobbs,

00:00:04.200 always in the fight for truth, justice, and yes, our American way of life.

00:00:09.220 And now, here he is, the Peabody award-winning voice of truth, the great Lou Dobbs.

00:00:14.580 Welcome to the Great America show. Good to have you with us.

00:00:17.740 One of the takeaways, certainly, from the November elections was

00:00:20.880 motor discomfort with the Marxist left and their intent to defund police.

00:00:26.380 Thanks. Minneapolis rejected the abolition of their police department

00:00:30.920 that was to be replaced by a public safety department.

00:00:35.740 Our next guest is one of the country's most important conservative voices.

00:00:40.040 She's known for her pro-police views, her opposition to so-called criminal justice reform,

00:00:45.940 and has written widely on the subject.

00:00:48.820 She's written a number of books, including War on Cops.

00:00:51.840 She's an attorney as well, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute,

00:00:56.980 a graduate of Yale University with a bachelor's degree summa cum laude in English,

00:01:03.220 a master's from Cambridge University, a graduate of the Stanford Law School.

00:01:08.760 In other words, you will find her to be every bit as smart as she seems.

00:01:14.760 And now, Heather McDonald.

00:01:16.660 Heather, a delight and honor to have you with us on the podcast.

00:01:21.140 Great to have you here.

00:01:23.120 Thank you so much, Lou.

00:01:24.000 It's always a pleasure speaking with you.

00:01:25.840 We have much to speak of.

00:01:28.740 And let's begin with a country that seems to be constantly validating your fears,

00:01:37.800 my fears over the course of the past 20 years,

00:01:40.600 and to do so in the most extraordinary fashion.

00:01:47.800 And by that, I mean attacking the very roots, the very foundation,

00:01:52.620 the institutions of the country that have liberated not only a people and this nation,

00:01:59.820 but the world itself.

00:02:01.980 Your thoughts as we are witnessing all of this unfold before us.

00:02:07.380 Well, you're right, Lou.

00:02:09.760 I am in great fear that every institution of Western civilization will come down unless Americans 1.00

00:02:19.560 get the courage to fight back against the phony narrative that America today is characterized

00:02:27.200 by white supremacy and and that any ongoing socioeconomic disparities can only be explained by racism

00:02:38.300 on the part of whites.

00:02:41.060 Those two propositions are false.

00:02:44.920 And yet the elites who control the discourse make sure that no alternative explanations are allowed in.

00:02:54.200 For instance, if if we look at incarceration numbers, you know,

00:02:59.700 the criminal justice system has been under attack for 20 years now for alleged racism.

00:03:07.700 And the main piece of evidence for that is the fact that blacks are incarcerated at a higher rate than whites. 0.54

00:03:16.060 There's no disputing that the left and the Democratic Party and Joe Biden and Merrick Garland, 0.97

00:03:23.440 our attorney general, will only allow one explanation for that, which is police are racist.

00:03:30.000 Juries are racist. 0.98

00:03:31.440 Prosecutors are racist. 1.00

00:03:33.520 Judges are racist. 0.87

00:03:34.680 Well, the alternative explanation for that disparity in the incarceration rate is that crime rates are

00:03:47.500 equally disparate, but we're not allowed to talk about that.

00:03:51.460 And so instead, what's been going on and we've seen the results in the last year and a half is that

00:03:58.520 we are discrediting policing, we're discrediting the criminal justice system, the police are backing off

00:04:05.700 under the phony charge of racism.

00:04:07.540 The results speak for themselves.

00:04:09.480 Last year saw the largest percentage increase in homicide in this nation's history,

00:04:14.800 going back nearly a century, 30 percent increase in one year, which is utterly unthinkable.

00:04:23.240 Uh, and yet the, the Democratic Party continues to turn its eyes away from the effects of this crime

00:04:31.820 increase, which are more black lives taken in order to keep the narrative on track, which is

00:04:39.180 that racism defines everything in the United States.

00:04:42.620 And the way in which they are using that mantra, uh, and, and, and cosmic conclusion, uh, is as a,

00:04:53.240 is a battering ram against all of those institutions, all of our, our, uh, this country's basic values.

00:05:00.960 And at the same time, disregarding, uh, any semblance of investigation and as to what is the true causal

00:05:10.560 relationship between racism, between economic, uh, socioeconomic conditions, uh, and outcomes,

00:05:19.400 outcomes being in this instance, violent crime, uh, it, it is, it, it is awful to watch our national

00:05:27.960 left-wing media in particular report as if, uh, they're a direct conduit from truth and God almighty,

00:05:36.040 uh, to the ears, uh, of the television or web audience without so much as a single skeptical,

00:05:46.720 uh, glance at the facts, uh, and the correlations, uh, that, that follow from an honest examination

00:05:55.900 of our, our society.

00:05:57.800 It's as if 50, 60 years of progress in civil rights, uh, in this country's histories have

00:06:04.640 been wiped clean by the, uh, the Black Lives Matter and Tifa, the neo-Marxists who basically 0.99

00:06:14.440 guide and outright run, uh, most, I believe it's fair to say most, uh, colleges and universities.

00:06:23.420 Well, Lou, you're absolutely right to finger the universities as the conveyor belt of this

00:06:30.160 poison into the American polity. 0.52

00:06:33.000 They are, every year we graduate a new crop of, of students who have been brainwashed by

00:06:40.880 the poison of identity politics.

00:06:42.920 They're carrying it into corporations.

00:06:45.520 CEOs are terrified of their own workers.

00:06:47.740 Uh, these are, are young people who are determined, uh, to instantiate the ideology of the university, 0.96

00:06:56.280 which is that white people are evil, that the institutions of Western civilization are 0.53

00:07:03.220 oppressive, whereas in fact, they're the most liberating institutions that have been developed 0.99

00:07:08.380 in human history.

00:07:09.380 The left operates under principles that are developed uniquely in the West, equality, tolerance,

00:07:18.420 rights.

00:07:18.820 These are uniquely Western concepts.

00:07:22.760 Uh, and yes, this, uh, this country had a extraordinarily, uh, hypocritical history that was tragically,

00:07:33.620 uh, indifferent at the best, uh, indifferent at the best, at best to the mistreatment, the 0.93

00:07:40.860 cruelty towards blacks that is undeniable. 1.00

00:07:43.720 And that is the one, one piece of truth that I will grant the 1619 project, which is that 0.77

00:07:51.820 we do need to acknowledge how gratuitously ugly parts of our history were.

00:07:59.300 I can say that, and I can say at the same time, Lou, that we are not that world any longer.

00:08:06.560 And that the concept of white privilege today is a complete fraud.

00:08:12.700 The reality of our world today is black privilege because there is not a single mainstream institution, 0.92

00:08:21.540 whether it's a law firm, a bank, a corporation, a foundation, a university, a big tech firm,

00:08:28.820 a science lab, which is not twisting itself into knots to hire, admit, and promote as many

00:08:36.940 minorities as possible.

00:08:38.560 Anybody in the corporate world knows this, who is honest with himself.

00:08:44.220 Anybody in the academic world knows this.

00:08:46.720 Every faculty search is one desperate effort to find both so-called URMs that stands for

00:08:55.320 underrepresented minorities because Asians don't count as minorities in academic calculations

00:09:02.920 or corporate calculations and females.

00:09:06.320 So the blacks are being admitted to universities. 0.99

00:09:10.840 They're being hired to universities with qualifications that would be automatically disqualifying if presented 0.81

00:09:18.080 by a white or an Asian student or often by a faculty admit.

00:09:23.580 That is the reality.

00:09:24.760 The statistics are clear.

00:09:27.500 And yet we're all going around pretending that the discrimination of 60 or 70 years ago continues

00:09:36.060 to define our world.

00:09:37.380 It does not.

00:09:38.500 And as you warn, Lou, this is so sweeping.

00:09:42.820 You know, we spoke about criminal justice.

00:09:45.080 It's not confined to that.

00:09:46.660 I've recently been writing on the arts and classical music in particular.

00:09:51.340 Classical music, Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms, and Chopin are being torn down on the ground

00:09:58.240 that they are somehow associated with white supremacy.

00:10:02.160 Science is being torn down.

00:10:04.880 The federal science agencies, and I'm sad to say that Trump did nothing about this, are putting

00:10:12.220 considerations of race and gender way ahead of scientific merit.

00:10:18.280 They are putting our scientific edge at risk.

00:10:21.780 They are putting our safety at risk.

00:10:24.280 Medical schools are admitting students with woefully inadequate qualifications simply in order

00:10:30.680 to meet diversity metrics.

00:10:32.720 And talking about the university and our colleges, our educational system, suddenly the white male 0.90

00:10:41.020 in this country is not only despicable, deplorable, if you will, in the minds of the left-wing media 0.65

00:10:50.240 and the neo-Marxists who now seem to be driving the ideological momentum within our society and body politic.

00:11:01.220 But the reality is the white male is now underrepresented, at least in historical terms, on our college campuses.

00:11:09.760 The white female is still prized because there is a box that each institution can check off to virtue signal, if you will, back to the federal government, 0.99

00:11:21.560 which is the arbiter of all such things that, by golly, you know, someone is actually paying attention to those poor females in our society 1.00

00:11:31.480 who historically have been ignored or suppressed at various points in our history.

00:11:38.140 It's absurd what we're witnessing.

00:11:42.640 It has to be named as such, and you have just done it, Lou. 0.72

00:11:46.040 It is a war on white males, and it's a war on a civilization deemed too white and too male. 0.79

00:11:53.580 We cannot beat around the bush.

00:11:56.000 That is what's going on.

00:11:58.480 The New York Times is quite explicit.

00:12:01.100 We saw over the last year and a half, two years, in its coverage of the presidential campaign

00:12:06.340 and more broadly, all it needs to do to discredit an individual or an institution

00:12:12.600 is to append white before that individual or institution.

00:12:19.320 And yet the Times claims that Trump is the one who is divisive.

00:12:23.260 We have heard endlessly about white supremacy.

00:12:26.900 We've been living this fiction.

00:12:29.520 Our culture is now engaged in these dramatic fictions where we're trying to body forth this idea of dominant white supremacy.

00:12:39.760 That's why we had razor wire and barricades around the Capitol for three months after January 6th

00:12:45.900 to pretend that this one-off event of people that were out of control, unruly, despicable in their respect for our public institutions

00:12:58.900 represents some kind of growing tide, which is absurd.

00:13:02.540 This was a unitary event that will not be repeated, but there you had the resources of the federal government

00:13:12.040 arming itself to the teeth to try and send the visual message that we were all under siege by white supremacists.

00:13:21.640 And, you know, it's not a historical disproportion on college campuses today, Lou.

00:13:28.800 It is just right now, it is a disproportion.

00:13:32.060 It's about two to one females to males.

00:13:34.920 I want to throw up.

00:13:36.660 I want to throw up every time I hear about a new foundation initiative to get, you know, females into STEM 1.00

00:13:43.940 or the idea that females somehow need more encouragement. 1.00

00:13:48.860 No, it's males who are being suppressed and discredited and demoralized.

00:13:55.140 And it's amazing that they succeed at all under these conditions where they are viewed as toxically masculine

00:14:02.760 if they show any kind of traditional male values of self-reliance and competitiveness and courage and effort.

00:14:10.960 It's the white male as an oppressed group in this age.

00:14:18.960 You scratch your head as you try to assimilate what all has happened over the course of, well, since the 1960s.

00:14:27.960 And why we are witnessing this now is, frankly, I struggle to comprehend it, Heather.

00:14:36.340 I just, I cannot figure out, was it the war on poverty when we started differentiating by race and ethnicity and subsequently gender?

00:14:48.440 What happened that we went from melting pot to multiculturalism, but with a real zinger in the midst of it, 0.84

00:14:59.660 that there will be reparations, there will be, we will reach back 200 years for those reparations to those who've been oppressed or suppressed or mistreated in our society.

00:15:14.220 Without even an acknowledgement for the veterans of the Revolutionary War, how about those Americans who fought to free the slaves,

00:15:24.820 who died by the hundreds of thousands in the 1860s to free slaves?

00:15:31.840 Where is the balance and proportionality and the sense of history as this nation has advanced?

00:15:39.420 We are not the same as we were in 1776, nor certainly 1619.

00:15:44.620 We are far, far better.

00:15:47.000 But there is no implied credit to our society, to our system of government, to our body politic,

00:15:54.200 and to our better natures as Americans for all that we've achieved.

00:16:00.260 Well, I agree with that analysis.

00:16:05.240 I have been recently on sort of a reading jag of Black literature, some of the Black classics,

00:16:11.880 whether it's Booker T. Washington or W.E. Du Bois or Claude Brown's Man's Child in a Promised Land or Native Son.

00:16:20.300 And I have to say that the sort of conservative trope that we paid our dues in the Civil War

00:16:28.440 is no longer too persuasive to me because the gratuitous cruelty and nastiness to demean Blacks 1.00

00:16:39.860 continued well into the 20th century, and it's heartbreaking to witness.

00:16:45.020 I can say that again, and I can also say this, what I've come to understand about why this is happening now

00:16:53.800 is I think the elites are terrified that the academic skills gap is not going to close

00:17:00.380 or the behavior skills gap that means that Blacks are killed at 13 times the rate of whites

00:17:07.700 between the ages of 10 and 43. 0.89

00:17:10.680 They die at 13 times the rate of whites.

00:17:13.320 Why?

00:17:14.160 Because their crime rates are that much higher as well. 0.99

00:17:17.060 Those Blacks are not being killed by cops. 0.99

00:17:20.220 They're not being killed by whites. 1.00

00:17:21.460 They're being killed by other Blacks. 1.00

00:17:23.020 So there's a huge crime and work and behavior gap. 0.99

00:17:27.480 There's also a huge academic skills gap.

00:17:30.640 The average Black 12th grader reads at the average level of the average white 8th grader.

00:17:38.900 54% of Black 8th graders do not possess even partial mastery of math skills for an 8th grade level. 0.69

00:17:50.120 At that rate, you're not going to, it is absurd to expect that Google is going to have 13% Black engineers

00:17:58.420 when the math skills are so, so low and they never get better over the course of college.

00:18:04.520 So I've concluded that what's going on now with this fanatical obsession to denounce phantom racism,

00:18:13.500 where again, as I say, the reality of our world is Black privilege, 0.51

00:18:17.060 where every institution has got double standards to admit Blacks,

00:18:23.420 is that the elites are terrified that after the 60 years of civil rights effort,

00:18:30.440 things are not changing for the better.

00:18:32.360 And the only allowable explanation that they want in play is racism.

00:18:38.000 Alternatives like culture or, God forbid, heritability are simply taboo.

00:18:45.180 As far as the female stuff and males, that's just feminism that is drunk on its own power, 1.00

00:18:53.720 that is angry for no reason whatsoever.

00:18:57.320 I have never been discriminated against in my life.

00:19:01.500 To the contrary, I'm sure that I've been the recipient of unwarranted gender privilege constantly. 0.69

00:19:08.280 And yet the feminists still insist on playing a victim card, which is ludicrous. 1.00

00:19:15.040 Well, they are aligned with the left, the Marxist left in this country.

00:19:21.560 And understandably, they are drinking from the same punch bowl.

00:19:27.860 Are they inebriated?

00:19:29.120 I don't know, but they are simply, they are, if you will, entertained by the prospect of all of that political power

00:19:38.780 that they enjoy as part of the Democratic Party's coalition.

00:19:44.060 And to what end?

00:19:45.400 It's uncertain.

00:19:46.960 And the role of white males, whites particularly in this society,

00:19:53.540 you know, when I'm referring to the Civil War and hundreds of thousands of Americans dying to free the slaves,

00:20:00.440 I'm just talking about how about a footnote in history?

00:20:03.020 Perhaps just a little measure of credit for doing the right thing.

00:20:07.520 This country, over time, have we made mistakes?

00:20:11.000 Have we had periods of awful and ugly, inhuman, occasionally, behavior?

00:20:18.860 Certainly, but not as a main course of our historic advancement.

00:20:24.580 The arc of history is not bending this nation toward totalitarianism,

00:20:30.360 toward a discordant departure from a worship of human rights, and indeed, God himself.

00:20:42.740 This is a religious country.

00:20:45.700 It is a decent country.

00:20:47.740 And when you watch the evening news or cable television, you would think, my gosh, who are these Americans?

00:20:55.940 I find them unrecognizable.

00:20:58.280 Yeah.

00:20:58.960 How about you?

00:20:59.920 Well, yes.

00:21:01.040 And it's not just American history. 1.00

00:21:03.340 It's Western history that is coming under attack by people who are completely ignorant. 0.96

00:21:08.960 The, you know, look around, Lou, your listeners should just look around their room or their house right now. 0.92

00:21:18.860 Let their eye rest on every single surface.

00:21:22.100 Every single surface was created by materials engineer, all the gadgets we've got, all the furniture,

00:21:30.280 all the connectivity, all the clean water, all the clean food.

00:21:35.240 It is astounding how Western civilization, with a rate of scientific discovery of amateur dabblers in science who were drawn by the desire to expand human knowledge and human progress,

00:21:53.280 have transformed human existence from what was millennia of squalor and poverty and death and premature death and childbirth, child death,

00:22:08.720 into something that is literally unrecognizable for somebody that was living 200 years ago.

00:22:15.760 And other, of course, other civilizations have created wonderful monuments, wonderful traditions of literature and theater and art.

00:22:28.860 But the fact of the matter is, is that Western civilization, with its dedication to the scientific method and to tolerance and freedom,

00:22:39.380 is the driver of world progress today.

00:22:44.020 And yet you have these college students abetted by their professors mouthing empty bromides about, you know, colonialism and oppression.

00:22:55.700 They know nothing about what was accomplished with the Enlightenment, with the long evolution of constitutional history.

00:23:05.180 They take it all for granted and want to throw it away, confident as they are, that nobody will ever destroy their own standard of living.

00:23:14.020 You know, I, to my knowledge, I've never met a white supremacist.

00:23:18.640 But I have met plenty of virtue supremacists of late who tell me that because they are leftists,

00:23:28.660 because they are, they live in a world of advanced degrees in academia, that they know better.

00:23:38.260 And suddenly, I'm finding the same thing in the Democratic Party.

00:23:42.560 We will have mandates.

00:23:44.080 We will not discuss.

00:23:45.620 We will not persuade.

00:23:46.620 We will not lead.

00:23:47.500 We will not seek the consensus of the governed.

00:23:50.020 We will issue mandates, fiat, dicta.

00:23:54.520 And I can't find much of a difference between that kind of thinking on the part of our globalist elites in this country right now,

00:24:01.660 and the Stalinists and the Soviet in the Soviet era.

00:24:07.420 Well, I ask myself that all the time.

00:24:10.260 Is it, can we be certain that liberty and a respect for the First Amendment and free speech is enough in our DNA as Americans to prevent us from sliding into Soviet-style totalitarianism?

00:24:28.940 And I don't have the answer to that question.

00:24:31.160 But when I see the censorship that's being exercised now in the private sphere with the obvious sub-Rosa encouragement of the Democratic Party, it is very, very worrisome.

00:24:48.780 And, you know, John Stuart Mill got it right.

00:24:53.060 The marketplace of ideas is the best way to arrive at truth.

00:24:57.520 If you think an idea is wrong, the solution is not to suppress it.

00:25:01.420 It's to come up with a better idea.

00:25:03.400 And that's not what's going on now.

00:25:05.960 It isn't.

00:25:07.160 And to your earlier assessment on the elites and their concerns about not being able to find a satisfactory explanation for enlarged gaps,

00:25:20.840 when they have spent trillions of dollars trying to narrow them and to do so in ways in which they can create some sort of politically, sociologically acceptable veneer that doesn't disturb anyone.

00:25:37.740 The fact of the matter is our meritocracy that was America, a public school education that was the greatest equalizer in our society, period, all now threatened by the madness of the left and the coalescence of corporate power, academic power, and the political Marxist left in this country.

00:26:02.320 Well, standards have disparate impact.

00:26:05.700 The most pernicious concept in our world today is disparate impact.

00:26:09.740 It holds that any academic standard, any behavioral standard that has a disparate impact on blacks is by definition racist.

00:26:19.240 So if you have, you know, high standards for admission to a selective high school, whether it's Stuyvesant High School in New York or some of the schools in Boston or Virginia,

00:26:31.120 and that results in a student population that is not equally distributed demographically by population groups,

00:26:40.980 then those standards have to go down because they're racist or if the standards for scientific laboratory work or for medical research have a disparate impact and they don't result in a team doing cancer research that is 50 percent female and 13 percent black and 15 percent Hispanic,

00:27:01.860 then those standards have to go because they have disparate impact and, you know, that is, that is what's tearing everything down and it is very scary to live in a world where meritocracy is so destroyed because as you say,

00:27:20.660 meritocracy is the key to, to, to progress and to human striving.

00:27:26.020 But, but, but here's the dirty secret.

00:27:28.820 You can have meritocracy or you can have diversity.

00:27:33.080 You cannot have both given the academic skills gap.

00:27:40.120 You can choose, you can choose one or the other, but, but they are, and, and diversity, they are, they are mutually exclusive.

00:27:48.880 Diversity is simply a code word for racial preferences.

00:27:53.160 It has become such, I think you're exactly right.

00:27:56.020 And we are also in a society that is no longer talking about equal opportunity and, and finding a way forward where there is great advancement.

00:28:10.060 It's happening because we have the momentum of this country's history and, and our system of government, but it is being eroded almost, almost every day by whether it be a government program, whether it be a new edict emanating from the white house,

00:28:28.380 or we look to the Southern border, or we look to the Southern border where 2 million illegal immigrants have crossed over in the course of the past year.

00:28:36.440 Not all of them will stay in the country, but many, if not most will. 0.98

00:28:40.300 And there is an open border for sex trafficking, human smuggling, drug smuggling, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans to overdoses because of those drugs, whether it be fentanyl, heroin, marijuana, cocaine.

00:28:57.060 I mean, that is upon us, is our government does not perform the basic fundamental functions of government, which is to preserve and protect the Republic.

00:29:10.120 Well, Lou, I'm, I'm surprised to hear you using a sort of a utilitarian argument for border control, which is this, you know, drawing upon, well, the criminals are coming and the drugs are coming or the, or the terrorists are coming.

00:29:23.240 That is all true, but it is also simply, even without that, it is a demographic change that is going to transform, is transforming our culture.

00:29:34.860 I'm a Los Angeles native, I'm a Los Angeles native, I can tell you the city has changed immeasurably and unrecognizably since I grew up there in the 50s and 60s, because of large scale mass immigration, it is now a third world city, we are importing poverty, we are importing a poverty culture. 0.98

00:29:55.840 And what's going on, and what's going on in the border now is absolutely terrifying, and, and we probably will not be able to, you know, have anything to, to counter that.

00:30:10.680 The only counter I know, Heather, at this point is, and this, this podcast is dedicated to the Great America Show.

00:30:21.680 I believe this is a great country, we are always becoming, but we have been great for centuries now, and we have to make certain that we are credited appropriately with the reality that we experience, and not be persuaded by such nonsense as being spewed by some academicians who more, are more in the business of indoctrination than education.

00:30:50.080 And to understand that if we don't take control of our communities, our neighborhoods, our lives, the rest of this country will be very difficult for anyone to change, unless we begin at home, begin in our hometowns, to, to govern ourselves once again, and demand that right and responsibility for all Americans.

00:31:14.560 Heather, Heather, you are always instructive, you are always fascinating, and always brilliant and spot on.

00:31:25.180 So thanks for being with us, you get the last word here, as does each guest, I just want to say first and foremost, thanks so much for what has been an engaging conversation.

00:31:36.560 You get the last word.

00:31:38.220 Well, thank you so much.

00:31:39.460 And it's been an absolute pleasure to be able to get to these profound ideas with you.

00:31:45.000 And I would just add to your observations about opportunity, that is the key.

00:31:50.920 And people have to be armed with American values, with bourgeois values, in order to

00:31:55.940 seize opportunity.

00:31:57.040 We have to support self-reliance, deferred gratification, hard work, self-discipline.

00:32:04.880 Those are the keys that have made America prosper.

00:32:07.820 And we should not be ashamed of embracing those bourgeois American values as the legacy

00:32:15.480 and birthright of all Americans.

00:32:17.760 If we can do so and point out the fact that people who exercise those values and virtues

00:32:24.620 will get ahead, there is hope for the country after all, Lou.

00:32:29.400 Absolutely.

00:32:30.560 Heather, I couldn't agree with you more.

00:32:32.380 And I thank you so much for being with us and hope you will come back with us very, very

00:32:36.600 soon.

00:32:37.820 I hope so, too.

00:32:38.960 Thanks so much.

00:32:39.740 Heather McDonald.

00:32:40.840 We will continue in just one moment.

00:32:42.960 Stay with us.

00:32:44.840 And now let's do something we do, perhaps not frequently, but certainly regularly on this

00:32:50.200 podcast.

00:32:51.240 Let's talk about religious liberty, the First Amendment, the freedom of religion, not the 0.97

00:32:56.820 freedom from religion, as many on the left like to think about it.

00:33:00.580 It's freedom of religion enshrined in the First Amendment, as I said.

00:33:04.940 And as you know, the Marxist left in this country has tried to drive God from the public

00:33:10.280 square, to drive God out of classrooms and to deny public school students prayer and even

00:33:17.300 silent worship.

00:33:18.140 There is a cultural crisis in this country that's worsening because the leadership in America is,

00:33:25.000 in my opinion, worsening.

00:33:26.560 And certainly the President Biden agenda reflects deepening threats against our constitutional

00:33:32.380 rights.

00:33:33.000 I want to take up all of this with radio talk show host, bestselling author, columnist, and

00:33:38.760 Christian conservative, Salem Radio's Eric Metaxas, who, by the way, has a new bestseller

00:33:45.940 book just out.

00:33:47.080 And we recommend it to you highly.

00:33:49.840 The title is Atheism Dead.

00:33:53.520 Congratulations on the book, Eric, and a delight to have you with us.

00:33:57.920 I can't wait to have a conversation and to begin, if we may, with what is a cultural crisis

00:34:06.760 that has risen to levels I don't think, even at our most despairing, either you or I would

00:34:13.700 have anticipated 20 years ago.

00:34:16.000 Your thoughts on where we are and the forces at work in our society.

00:34:22.360 Well, first of all, a joy to be with you, Lou, very longtime fan.

00:34:27.420 And I want to say that when you say we're at a moment culturally that we couldn't have

00:34:33.460 dreamed of 20 years ago, I think that's the first point that needs to be made, is that

00:34:38.820 we have to recognize that what we're going through now is lunacy.

00:34:44.720 And I think we have to encourage other Americans that if you think this is lunacy, it's because

00:34:51.340 you're sane and there are more Americans who see the lunacy as lunacy than you would ever

00:34:57.480 believe.

00:34:57.960 They may not have voices in the media, but the fact is people see what is happening.

00:35:05.920 And in some ways, I will say it is a great thing because it is waking us up.

00:35:13.100 Many of us have been asleep.

00:35:15.000 We need to wake up.

00:35:16.420 Keeping the republic is something that takes effort.

00:35:21.140 And sometimes things have to get even this bad before some people realize, oh, maybe I

00:35:27.680 better do something.

00:35:28.600 So I am cautiously encouraged.

00:35:32.060 Well, I'm glad to hear that.

00:35:33.680 And a note to our audience.

00:35:36.060 The reason we call this the Great America Show is because we truly believe America is

00:35:42.180 great.

00:35:43.180 It is about a great America and not a sullen or oppressive nation.

00:35:50.660 But as to use your word, Eric, a joyous and free nation and free people.

00:35:58.000 All of that freedom is under threat.

00:36:00.200 It seems almost daily, but we are still a great nation and we have nothing to apologize

00:36:06.380 for in being a great nation.

00:36:10.480 I want to turn to the wokeness that you reference.

00:36:15.940 I love the fact that the Marxist left in this country is talking about woke, which is sort

00:36:25.580 of fitting that they would be upside down on the language and in verse to.

00:36:30.200 The semantics and the actual meaning of language, what they mean is they want us to continue

00:36:36.180 to slumber and to give them free reign to attack our national institutions, to destroy

00:36:44.860 our American values and to deny us and our children and our grandchildren the promise of

00:36:53.120 the American destiny.

00:36:54.940 Well, you say, you know, I mean, the irony is that wokeness.

00:37:00.200 Wokeness is the opiate of the masses.

00:37:04.140 That's, you know, obviously an inversion of Marx's infamous statement that religion

00:37:10.340 is the opiate of the masses.

00:37:11.600 But in fact, wokeness is the opiate of the masses because it tells them things that maybe

00:37:17.500 they want to believe, but that can never be true in any universe.

00:37:21.940 We don't need to talk about it now, but my new book is called Is Atheism Dead?

00:37:28.640 And we have to remember that at the heart of everything that is true and good, not least

00:37:36.500 American style freedom and self-government, this thing we call liberty, at the heart of

00:37:41.700 it all, is the idea that our rights come from God and that he made us to be free.

00:37:49.340 Marxism, cultural Marxism, wokeness is the antithesis of that.

00:37:55.260 It is explicitly, usually not explicitly, but often explicitly anti-God.

00:38:04.160 So whether it's BLM or Antifa or Nancy Pelosi's party, you have people that have pushed God

00:38:12.540 out.

00:38:13.440 They have created a, they're in the process of creating a secular utopia, just as Lenin was

00:38:21.300 trying to create it and Stalin was and Mao and that they can't do it.

00:38:26.960 It's like, I mean, again, there's great irony.

00:38:29.940 It's, it's like the tower of Babel, right? 0.61

00:38:32.760 We're going to build a tower to reach heaven.

00:38:35.140 Hey, guess what?

00:38:36.280 You can build for the rest of your life.

00:38:38.000 You'll never get there.

00:38:39.500 It has to come to you.

00:38:41.580 And so anybody who thinks that they can get what they want and they don't need God, that

00:38:48.600 is antithetical to the founder's idea.

00:38:52.340 The founders all understood this, but what's, what's comical in a way.

00:38:56.960 If you, if you want to say how good is America, America is so good that its own idea of religious

00:39:03.780 liberty, which is at the heart of everything, even says to the atheist, even though what

00:39:09.880 you would do ultimately would undermine all of this, nonetheless, we're such a free country

00:39:16.640 that we give you religious liberty.

00:39:19.320 The question is, will the atheists and the cultural Marxists give everyone else religious

00:39:24.000 liberty?

00:39:24.380 And the answer is an emphatic no.

00:39:26.960 But we're waking up to what is really happening and to understanding how it's happening.

00:39:33.700 And so, as I say, all of that is a good thing, but we do need to really understand it.

00:39:39.560 Absolutely.

00:39:40.200 And, and it's simply, it is simply an assault now.

00:39:46.940 This wokeness is just an expression of the assault that the left in this country has undertaken

00:39:54.520 against our institutions, our values, but against indeed the very idea of America itself.

00:40:01.140 Right.

00:40:01.640 I wish, I wish I were comfortable with the thought or confident in the thought that, oh,

00:40:08.140 these, these, these folks who want to deny conservatives access to the student bodies of universities and

00:40:17.400 their campuses, you know, that's just a misunderstanding.

00:40:20.420 Those who want to control the language in the public arena and by, and thereby control thought.

00:40:29.600 At every turning point, there is an effort to remove freedom, to destroy liberties, not just simply

00:40:39.520 minimize, they want to eliminate freedom of speech and thought.

00:40:43.280 Right.

00:40:43.880 The academia at one time in this country was hallowed ground for individual liberty, for free speech,

00:40:54.400 free thought and expression.

00:40:56.320 It has become something constricted and suffocating, denying expression of whether it be liberty,

00:41:05.860 whether it be freedom of speech, whether it be freedom of religion.

00:41:11.320 It is all under assault.

00:41:13.280 That's right.

00:41:13.480 By the left.

00:41:14.920 The, the thing that is, it's almost funny.

00:41:17.980 I, I gave a speech at the university of the South in Suwannee.

00:41:23.780 I don't know if it was five or six years ago.

00:41:25.840 They, they invited me there to give me an honorary doctorate and it was very formal.

00:41:31.920 And I was the convocation speaker and I knew that they had gone pretty woke already then.

00:41:38.020 And so I said, I'm going to take this opportunity to deliver a speech very, very anodyne in tone.

00:41:47.300 But I said, I want to talk about free speech and the vital importance of having a conversation

00:41:54.780 with people who are on the other side of various issues.

00:41:59.580 And it could not have been more measured and civilized.

00:42:03.960 I went out of my way to make this point as kindly and gently as I could, but to make the point.

00:42:10.880 The firestorm that came out of it, some student wrote to the paper, he says,

00:42:15.160 this was the most hateful thing he'd ever heard in his life.

00:42:18.300 You know, he was probably 19.1 years old, but he thought he would use that.

00:42:22.420 And then after that, it was almost funnier.

00:42:28.660 They are now threatening to revoke the honorary doctorate.

00:42:32.820 So simply talking about free speech, what does it tell us?

00:42:35.640 It tells us we're at war.

00:42:36.960 If you can't agree on these super basics like freedom and speech and the Constitution, you're at war.

00:42:48.080 And it's a war that right now, we're at mid pitch of the battle, it seems.

00:42:55.440 We are neither winning nor entirely losing, but we know what's at stake.

00:43:00.900 And now we have a government that is in league with forces in our society, whether it be the

00:43:11.020 doctrinaire efforts of the left on college campuses, universities, whether it be labor unions,

00:43:19.760 whether it be the Democratic Party or the radical left itself.

00:43:24.300 There is sometimes a difference between the Democratic Party and the radical left,

00:43:28.200 not often as there used to be, but sometimes it's it's starting to to we're starting to see people

00:43:36.100 actually afraid in this country.

00:43:38.240 Yes.

00:43:38.460 Afraid to say something that might be considered offensive.

00:43:42.700 I say good.

00:43:43.840 Good on you for your your speech at the University of the South.

00:43:48.180 Well, again, that was a wonderful thing to do.

00:43:50.740 Or six years ago.

00:43:51.860 But I thought to myself, listen, I you know, you may know I wrote a 600 page biography of

00:43:57.900 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the great heroes of 20th century who stood up to the Nazis as

00:44:03.480 a Christian, felt an obligation to God to speak out for the Jews, to speak against the Nazi

00:44:10.720 doctrine.

00:44:12.020 Most Christians who were actually just churchgoers calling themselves Christians, they they they 0.59

00:44:18.440 look the other way.

00:44:19.360 They didn't want to get in trouble.

00:44:21.140 That's, of course, where we are in America today.

00:44:23.760 Are enough people going to wake up and be willing to use the freedom that we still have

00:44:30.660 to speak up, to defy nonsense, to encourage those who see the madness?

00:44:39.000 Are we going to do that or are we going to say not yet?

00:44:41.600 I don't want to lose my job.

00:44:42.760 I'm just going to go with the flow.

00:44:44.220 So if you tell me to get a vaccine shot that I don't think is going to do me any good or

00:44:49.520 might do me harm, I can't think about that.

00:44:52.920 I want my job.

00:44:54.060 I'm just going to do it.

00:44:54.960 The government says do it.

00:44:56.360 I'm feeling this pressure.

00:44:57.960 That's precisely what the good Germans were feeling in Germany.

00:45:02.440 They were not some evil tribe.

00:45:03.980 My mother came from there.

00:45:05.240 My my family is from there.

00:45:07.380 These are good people who simply lacked courage in the moment when it was needed.

00:45:14.600 We are in such a moment in the United States.

00:45:16.900 If people do not stand up and live out their freedom and spend what you've got now in this

00:45:23.880 war tomorrow, what you thought you could spend will be taken away from you.

00:45:29.040 And I don't just mean money.

00:45:30.240 I mean your voice.

00:45:32.380 So this is really, really serious.

00:45:34.220 And we did not, of course, declare war once somebody says to you, free speech is out.

00:45:40.020 What you say is hate speech and we're going to come after you once that happens and people

00:45:46.280 go along with it. 0.68

00:45:47.000 And of course, many Republicans, craven as they are, have gone along with it. 0.97

00:45:50.680 Corporate America, ultra craven. 0.95

00:45:52.780 They have gone along with it.

00:45:54.320 The few of us willing to speak can make the difference between whether we go down the path

00:45:59.700 that Germany went down or whether we remain free.

00:46:03.440 I believe God's hand is on this country.

00:46:06.920 We couldn't have lasted or come into existence if that weren't the case.

00:46:11.520 But he doesn't force us to do the right thing.

00:46:14.100 Right now, we have to exercise our courage.

00:46:18.080 Everybody has to do that.

00:46:20.520 It is absolutely vital.

00:46:22.120 We do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past.

00:46:26.360 I do believe we are unique.

00:46:28.840 There has never been a country like America, and I don't think it's our time to vanish.

00:46:34.760 But sometimes things really need to get horrible for a lot of good people to finally wake up.

00:46:42.180 And one of the most important things I wanted to talk to you today about, of course,

00:46:50.500 is the role of religion and the reception of the current American society to religion.

00:46:58.020 Because, and I do so with the full knowledge that there are some people listening in the audience

00:47:04.020 who may not believe in God or are agnostic, who do not want to talk about religion in a secular sense

00:47:12.520 where we're talking politics and economics and other issues that certainly involve religion.

00:47:21.760 Religion is involved in all our lives whether we acknowledge it or not.

00:47:25.840 But to see, and I want to speak, I want to get your opinion on this, because I'm starting

00:47:33.380 to see signs, whether it be in our church or whether it be our pastor or just across the

00:47:41.440 country.

00:47:42.160 I'm seeing evangelicals, Christians certainly, starting to stand up and say, you know, this

00:47:51.880 is wrong, and President Biden, let's pray for him.

00:47:56.920 But what are we praying for?

00:47:59.020 And there was a time where it would be the pastor would just simply say, let's pray for

00:48:02.880 our leaders.

00:48:04.360 Now we are praying for guidance by Almighty God and being very clear about the direction

00:48:12.620 that we want to go, preserving freedom, preserving the right of worship, and preserving this great

00:48:22.760 nation.

00:48:23.500 I see an awakening, and I find it exhilarating to hear these words now from the pulpit.

00:48:33.720 Well, again, these are rare churches that are waking up, but they don't all need to wake

00:48:40.020 up.

00:48:40.580 The handful that are waking up and that are defying preposterous government mandates, there

00:48:47.760 are a number of churches, I've actually spoken at them in California, Jack Hibbs' church in

00:48:51.980 Chino Hills, and Rob McCoy's church in Thousand Oaks, and a number of them around the country

00:48:57.060 where they have said, we refuse to bow the knee to the state.

00:49:03.540 We are free.

00:49:04.780 We have freedom of religion in America.

00:49:08.140 These are heroes, these folks.

00:49:09.660 And I'll tell you something, they're so inspiring that atheists are going to these churches.

00:49:14.920 Atheists are saying, whatever they have, I'm attracted to it.

00:49:19.380 That freedom, that courage, these churches are growing.

00:49:23.780 And the churches that continue to speak in a mealy-mouthed way and take as their text

00:49:30.900 the editorial page of the New York Times, those churches have been shrinking for about

00:49:36.200 100 years, but they're shrinking the more dramatically.

00:49:40.800 There's no way around it.

00:49:42.920 America has always been about, we respect differences.

00:49:48.100 You can never force someone to have faith or to not have faith.

00:49:52.380 That's the whole point of religious liberty.

00:49:55.040 The founders said, we need faith in this country to make people virtuous and to make them on

00:50:01.720 their own do the right thing so we can have limited government, we can govern ourselves.

00:50:06.700 But we understand that it has to be free.

00:50:09.480 No one can force anyone to go to a church or go to a mosque or whatever.

00:50:13.480 Once you start forcing people, either it's a theocracy or it's what they were fleeing from

00:50:19.080 in Europe or it's an atheist tyranny. 0.95

00:50:25.460 And we see that unless you have freedom of religion, religion can't really flourish.

00:50:30.700 And the reason freedom has flourished in America is because religion has flourished.

00:50:33.940 Tocqueville saw this 50 years after the revolution and was astonished because in France, it was just

00:50:39.640 the opposite.

00:50:40.040 The church was married to the state.

00:50:42.500 It was this monolith of power that they wanted to get rid of.

00:50:47.440 But in America, the faith of the people made them freer.

00:50:51.980 The churches were free to speak whatever they liked.

00:50:55.320 So it's a dramatic experiment in liberty, this United States that we have been privileged

00:51:02.740 to live in.

00:51:04.180 And I simply think that it's part of the theme of my book is Atheism Dead, is that in the 0.95

00:51:11.120 last 60 or so years, we've taken our eye off the ball.

00:51:15.180 We believed that secularization was the answer. 0.70

00:51:20.240 In other words, rather than say we can't force religion on people and we have to have separation

00:51:24.500 of church and state, we took that fatal step and said, we're going to secularize everything.

00:51:28.680 We're going to take God out of everything.

00:51:30.220 Well, that's no different than imposing God.

00:51:34.020 Imposing secularism or an atheist view is no different than imposing a certain kind of

00:51:39.580 Christian view or a Muslim view.

00:51:41.420 We've really blown that, and it has ultimately led to where we are today.

00:51:46.540 One of the, I think, great achievements of the Trump administration was restoring religion

00:51:54.580 to the public square.

00:51:57.040 And I think he doesn't get sufficient credit.

00:51:59.800 In some cases, that contribution is ignored altogether.

00:52:03.260 But no president in recent history has done more to restore the church and religion to the

00:52:10.100 public square, the public arena, and political debate in the country.

00:52:14.700 Well, it's one of the reasons so many love him.

00:52:18.140 Yeah, it's such a critically important turning point in our history that I believe sets the

00:52:25.400 groundwork, if you will, for even more achievements as we confront the tests, the challenges, and

00:52:34.680 threats to religion in this country.

00:52:37.640 Your book, Atheism is Dead, I recommend it. 0.97

00:52:41.920 Actually, it's a question.

00:52:43.320 I'm trying to frame it.

00:52:47.220 Time magazine said it's God dead, so I put it as atheism dead.

00:52:51.180 Right.

00:52:51.400 I think that they hated using that question mark.

00:52:57.180 They were asserting something, I thought, rather emphatic rather than interrogatory.

00:53:02.160 Yeah.

00:53:02.560 And I happen to believe atheism is certainly alive and well.

00:53:08.620 But is it dying?

00:53:10.940 Is it dead?

00:53:12.360 You know, no better person to answer that question than Eric Metaxas, in my view.

00:53:18.520 So is atheism, is it dead?

00:53:22.840 Okay.

00:53:23.020 Anyway, the reason I asked that question, the book is really not so much about atheism.

00:53:28.860 The last third of the book deals more directly with atheism.

00:53:31.740 But here's what happened.

00:53:34.420 I, over the years, I became very serious about my faith around my 25th birthday.

00:53:40.300 And since then, you know, I went to Yale and I grew up in a very secular environment.

00:53:45.560 You know, even though we went to church on Sundays, nobody was reading the Bible and praying

00:53:50.140 at meals or anything.

00:53:51.120 So I had this experience at age 25 and I started reading books.

00:53:55.100 And I was astonished to see that, you know, there's no reason to say that science is the enemy of faith.

00:54:05.880 And I was reading these books over the years and reading what, you know, we call apologetics,

00:54:10.480 realizing that there's nothing more reasonable than the Judeo-Christian faith.

00:54:16.320 It has led to every kind of great thing.

00:54:18.900 Well, as we know, in 1966, the Cognoscenti, the powers that be, decided to put this idea

00:54:26.280 of the death of God in America's living rooms.

00:54:29.580 It had been in the universities.

00:54:33.420 It had been in certain areas.

00:54:36.420 But now it comes into America's living room.

00:54:39.080 And they ask, is God dead?

00:54:40.560 Of course, it comes from Nietzsche, who declared God is dead and then promptly went insane, right?

00:54:45.740 Well, I think over the decades, the evidence, this is very surprising to people.

00:54:54.680 And I'm not surprised that people almost find it hard to believe.

00:54:57.660 But the facts are in the book.

00:55:00.140 And it is surprising.

00:55:01.820 But that since that Time Magazine article came out, it's 1966, roughly since then, the evidence

00:55:08.960 from science, from various disciplines in science, has been absolutely clearly pointing to the

00:55:18.980 existence of a creator to the point where it's an open and shut case.

00:55:24.800 You can hate the idea, but science has been steadily pointing more and more clearly to the

00:55:31.220 idea that there is zero chance that everything emerged randomly, that the Earth just happened

00:55:38.980 to be perfectly tuned for life, and that the first cells emerged 4 billion years ago.

00:55:45.580 A cell is an unbelievably complex thing.

00:55:48.100 The idea that it emerged out of the random sloshing of the primordial soup.

00:55:52.760 We now know enough from science to know those things are preposterous.

00:55:57.080 So the question is, what do you do with it?

00:55:58.560 Well, I bumped into a scientist in Houston, where I'm going tomorrow, actually.

00:56:03.340 And he gave me yet another piece of information on this.

00:56:08.360 And I said, you know what?

00:56:09.640 I've got to write a book because people can't believe that we haven't been hearing this information.

00:56:15.820 It's been piling up like snow overnight.

00:56:18.200 You're sleeping and you wake up and you can't even open the front door.

00:56:21.800 It's drifting.

00:56:22.500 It's just, it's unbelievable.

00:56:25.240 And you've been sleeping.

00:56:26.140 And I feel like we've been sleeping in this secular dream, forgetting that, first of all,

00:56:33.160 science was never the enemy of faith.

00:56:35.720 It was Christian faith in the 16th and 17th centuries that led to the rise of modern science,

00:56:41.480 which is a great irony.

00:56:43.120 And suddenly there's all this information from science.

00:56:46.080 There's been outrageous evidence from the world of archaeology that points to the historical

00:56:51.880 accuracy of the Bible.

00:56:53.640 And it piled up so much.

00:56:55.240 I said, I've got to write a book.

00:56:56.500 And I thought, you know what?

00:56:58.180 The question now is, is atheism dead?

00:57:00.460 Because I will say, I will answer and say that atheists may insist that, no, we're not

00:57:07.260 dead.

00:57:07.520 We're here.

00:57:08.480 Well, I'm here to tell you flat earthers are also here.

00:57:11.440 But it doesn't mean that the theory of flat earth is not dead. 0.97

00:57:16.480 And if you want to be an agnostic, if you want to say, listen, I hate Christians. 1.00

00:57:22.040 I hate religion. 1.00

00:57:23.320 I don't like it. 0.99

00:57:24.180 That's fine.

00:57:25.280 That's it's a free country.

00:57:26.560 But to make the statement, there is no God.

00:57:28.720 And to be a committed atheist based on what's in this book and, of course, much else.

00:57:33.340 But I say it is intellectually untenable.

00:57:38.080 The science has, over the last, let's say, five decades, piled up quietly.

00:57:43.660 People haven't looked at it.

00:57:44.860 They bought the thesis that God is dead.

00:57:47.660 And they just moved on.

00:57:48.620 They said, you know, even when evidence comes up, and I make the case later in the book,

00:57:53.100 that those atheists who look most rigorously, unflinchingly at the idea of atheism, both

00:58:03.280 ended up coming to faith in God, which to me is a gigantic headline.

00:58:08.560 And no one has ever heard about it.

00:58:10.440 And when I discovered it, I fell out of my chair.

00:58:12.560 I said, this also has to go in the book because it tells you everything.

00:58:17.340 You mentioned archaeology.

00:58:18.500 One of the most exciting to me, because I'm interested in space and the technology of imagery

00:58:27.560 from space, particularly when the cameras are trained on the Middle East in particular,

00:58:36.080 for there to be the, and we'll call this the possibility of Sodom having been discovered.

00:58:44.700 And fitting in the place where the Bible suggests it would be.

00:58:54.540 Also, the Ark.

00:58:56.680 Now there is a very real possibility that they have discovered the actual Ark.

00:59:02.260 I know that there have been claims before, but this has the rigor of science and technology

00:59:09.120 and imagery to back it up.

00:59:11.920 It is a very promising find.

00:59:13.700 And suddenly there are a number, I would say at least a half dozen of these examples

00:59:21.860 to support your view on the evidence that is becoming significant and perhaps compelling

00:59:30.880 to the point of conclusion that, my gosh, the book is actually throughout far more than allegory

00:59:40.520 and metaphor, there is demonstrable evidence of the events and places that occurred in the Bible.

00:59:50.220 I mean, that's exciting.

00:59:51.980 I dare anyone to look into it.

00:59:55.680 They will be stunned.

00:59:58.520 Just in my book, the middle section is in archaeology, and of course, I don't list everything.

01:00:02.920 But first of all, the discovery of biblical Sodom, there is zero question, zero.

01:00:09.860 When you look into it, there was an article in Nature, 21 scientists analyzed the data from this site.

01:00:17.500 It is simply open and shut.

01:00:20.780 So to say that we found something from 1700 BC that's talked about in the Bible, and 21 scientists were so astonished

01:00:28.060 that in a peer-reviewed, you know, probably one of the most prestigious, certainly one of the most prestigious academic journals on the planet,

01:00:36.860 they refer to Sodom and the destruction of Sodom because it's so uncanny that they have to mention it.

01:00:42.580 And when I discovered this, and then, you know, first you're shocked because, I mean, I really looked into it with skepticism.

01:00:50.480 And then I said to myself, and not only is this true, no one knows this.

01:00:55.580 This is, there's no headlines.

01:00:57.480 There's no, I said, this is gigantic news.

01:01:01.660 And the same thing is true of, Christopher Hitchens was asked once, what's the strongest argument for God?

01:01:06.920 And in a very rare moment of candor, honestly, he said, oh, the fine-tuned universe.

01:01:13.760 And the argument for the fine-tuned universe that the more science discovers about the nature of the earth, the nature of the universe,

01:01:21.920 the more science discovers that if anything were ever so slightly different, just a tiny, tiny bit different, no life would exist.

01:01:33.700 And this is discovered daily, more and more.

01:01:37.720 In other words, the more science discovers, the more it points to the idea that there's zero chance this was not created by some infinitely intelligent designer.

01:01:50.020 This narrative has not been out there.

01:01:52.780 And that's why I wrote the book.

01:01:53.800 I said, we've got to get people to look at the facts.

01:01:56.780 You don't have to agree with everything, but boy, you're going to be surprised.

01:02:00.620 You'll probably be shocked, frankly.

01:02:03.700 Eric, we thank you for being with us.

01:02:07.480 We thank you for writing the book.

01:02:09.120 We recommend your book to the audience wholeheartedly.

01:02:14.200 The book is, is Atheism Dead?

01:02:19.400 Atheism is Dead?

01:02:22.280 Question mark.

01:02:24.160 It's terrific.

01:02:25.600 And we, again, recommend it to you.

01:02:29.020 We thank you so much for being with us, Eric.

01:02:30.820 And as our custom, you get the last word here.

01:02:35.300 Well, first of all, I do want to say again, you are a treasure and I have admired your work for years.

01:02:42.560 And I'm just so grateful for you.

01:02:44.160 And I'm thrilled you have found this new medium and honored that I get to be on it.

01:02:48.860 And I just want to say that the title of the book is Atheism Dead really postulates that we have been living with a narrative and that narrative leads to socialism and Marxism.

01:03:02.980 The idea that we can get rid of God and we all have to discover that it cannot work.

01:03:12.760 It simply cannot work.

01:03:15.320 It won't work.

01:03:16.200 We can try and try and try and try.

01:03:18.360 It doesn't work.

01:03:19.400 What works is a free market with virtue.

01:03:24.580 What works is a republic of self-governing individuals who have virtue.

01:03:30.060 That is what the founders, by the grace of God, were able to give us.

01:03:34.840 And so many people died for that.

01:03:37.800 And if we have to get to this level of wokeness and madness, you know, to the build back Brandon, you know, theme that we're just going to destroy everything and we're going to start afresh.

01:03:53.440 I think, ironically, the opposite is happening.

01:03:57.160 People are waking up to the things that, you know, we took them for granted.

01:04:02.140 Well, now we realize we better not.

01:04:03.940 So, as I say now, I said in the beginning, I am cautiously but very seriously hopeful for this nation, not least because of folks like you.

01:04:16.700 So, thank you very much, Lou Dobbs.

01:04:18.620 Very kind, Eric.

01:04:19.440 Thank you so much, Eric Metaxas.

01:04:21.660 We thank you and all of you listening.

01:04:25.780 I would just like to say we'll see you next time and God bless you all.

01:04:30.440 Join us again tomorrow for the Great America Podcast.

01:04:34.200 Stay in the fight.

01:04:35.160 Truth, justice, and the American way will prevail against all enemies, against all odds.

01:04:40.580 Let's cristians play it. 0.92

01:04:45.960 Truth, justice, and the American way will prevail against all Lopez City. 0.99

01:04:48.260 Thank you.

01:04:49.260 This year we live in a world of Bertrand, our parents who havepelточ beim vasper.

01:04:53.260 Where can we never be a Quaterina again? 0.92

01:04:56.460 You have to have a privilege, but we do have to be a 관�iner.

01:04:59.980 It's in here in 30 minutes.

01:05:02.780 You have to have an opportunity.

01:05:03.980 Please do a Friends of This Human Way.

01:05:04.960 This box is great to see you in the comment section, a flyproduct.

The Great America Show - December 30, 2021

MARXISTS MEAN TO KILL THE FREE WORLD AND GOD

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