The NXR Podcast - THE LIVESTREAM - If This Fails, America LOSES BIGLY.

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00:00:26.800 Before the income tax was ratified in 1913, the U.S. government funded itself the old-fashioned way,

00:00:35.020 almost entirely, through tariffs. For over a century, duties on foreign goods weren't a last

00:00:41.860 resort. They were the default. Now, in a global economy where everything from lettuce to lithium

00:00:48.220 is imported, the word tariff triggers panic in boardrooms and headlines across cable news.

00:00:54.860 And this month, that panic is starting to look justified.

00:00:58.720 Markets have swung wildly.

00:01:00.440 Smaller nations are blinking and falling in line with Trump's tariff threats.

00:01:04.940 But China and a handful of economic powers are digging in.

00:01:09.340 This standoff could drag on for months.

00:01:12.040 And if it does, the impact won't just hit portfolios.

00:01:16.000 It'll hit paychecks.

00:01:17.460 It'll hit grocery prices.

00:01:19.480 And come November, it could hit the ballot box.

00:01:23.420 Here's the reality.

00:01:24.860 If this strategy works, it could rewire global trade in America's favor. 0.76

00:01:30.680 But if it backfires, working families will be left holding the bag,

00:01:35.160 and Republicans will get crushed in the midterms.

00:01:39.220 This episode is brought to you by our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and Reese Fund,

00:01:45.700 as well as our Patreon members and our faithful donors.

00:01:49.020 You can join our Patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries or you

00:01:57.360 can donate by going to right response ministries.com forward slash donate. To help us break this down

00:02:05.280 we're joined by Ron Dodson, someone who actually understands the mechanics behind tariffs,

00:02:11.600 the fragility of modern markets, and what's really at stake in this economic tug of war.

00:02:18.240 So, let's dive in.

00:02:29.260 All right, GA, good afternoon.

00:02:31.780 We're glad to be back in the studio.

00:02:34.160 We took a little bit of a break for our conference, Christ is King, How to Defeat Trash World.

00:02:38.960 I had a thousand people who came out to participate in that conference.

00:02:42.540 It was incredibly encouraging.

00:02:44.420 And we're back and we're ready to go.

00:02:46.140 And as soon as we got back, we've got plenty of news every single, basically every 30 minutes from the White House with Donald J. Trump.

00:02:55.620 And so today, as we already announced, we have a special guest, Ron Dodson, who actually knows what he's talking about.

00:03:01.460 I don't on this subject, but I'm here along for the ride and I've got a few thoughts.

00:03:05.580 We're going to be bringing him in, but quickly, because we want to get to our guests as quickly as possible.

00:03:10.140 Michael and Wesley have prepared some charts because if you're not chart maxing we all know

00:03:16.240 charts save lives right Donald Trump that chart saved his life so if you're not chart maxing

00:03:21.180 it's like what are you even doing on your podcast so we're going to show some charts and try to talk

00:03:24.420 a little bit about historically what tariffs you know what we've had in the past and what we have

00:03:29.340 now and we're going to try to do that in just a couple minutes and then hand it over to Ron so

00:03:33.220 Michael you want to start absolutely the one thing I want to say before we dive into some of this

00:03:37.140 historical evidence and charts is that the world is not what it was when the country founded or

00:03:43.800 even leading through the 1800s. That's obvious, right? Like the government did not need as much

00:03:49.020 money just as a simple one-to-one comparison. The government did not claim that it needed as

00:03:55.620 much money to function as it claims it needs now. And so it is a little bit of comparing apples to

00:04:01.540 oranges if you account for the fact that what the government says it needs is spending for

00:04:06.720 entitlement, spending for Social Security, all of these things. Nevertheless, I think we all know

00:04:12.780 it was President Trump who said, well, you know, when President McKinley was president, tariffs were

00:04:17.780 the main way that we funded our government. And it's true. For most of U.S. history, tariffs have

00:04:23.400 accounted for all or most, I can't even say most, but for the first couple, you know, 150 years of

00:04:29.340 U.S. history, tariffs accounted for all or most of the money that the U.S. government brought in.

00:04:34.740 So, Nate, let's go ahead and start with graph number one.

00:04:38.180 This is a graph that shows tariffs revenue as a share of total federal receipts, right?

00:04:45.520 And so you can see that from the very beginning, from the very first Congress where they passed the first law that taxed foreign goods coming in,

00:04:54.960 it was 100% of our income, the federal government's income.

00:04:58.740 And then it actually stayed about that high until the late 1800s.

00:05:03.520 1800s. And then it dropped precipitously. And then we had the Civil War, of course, during that time.

00:05:10.300 And then a variety of historical trends. And now you see the yellow on the end. And of course,

00:05:18.080 tariffs account for almost none of the percentage of U.S. federal receipts, which whatever you think

00:05:25.760 about tariffs or your position on them is they have been a primary way that the U.S. has funded

00:05:32.060 itself for a very long time. Nate, let's look at number two. I find this one particularly

00:05:39.640 interesting because it shows the tax revenue as percent of the GDP. Now, I realize that we are

00:05:47.800 suspicious of measuring all financial stability by just the GDP metric. Nevertheless,

00:05:54.040 nevertheless, this was federal GDP. And what's interesting to me is that when tariffs were a

00:06:01.420 much higher percentage of the money that the U.S. government was bringing in, it was, as far as the

00:06:07.080 entire GDP, a much lower percent. You look all the way to the right there, and most of the GDP

00:06:13.800 is accounted for by U.S. government spending or taxing of some sort, whether it's some tariffs

00:06:21.260 or whether it's income tax or whether it's payroll tax, which for those of you who are

00:06:25.360 watching, payroll tax is things like Social Security, Medicare, that's not income tax.

00:06:31.400 It's what your employee or employer is withholding from your paycheck to go for some of these

00:06:37.340 social welfare programs.

00:06:39.700 And so the surprising thing about this is not just that taxes, payroll tax and income

00:06:46.580 tax have overtaken the tariff.

00:06:48.360 It's the percentage of total GDP that is accounted for by U.S. government taxation of some point of some sort.

00:06:56.580 And I'm sure with with Ron, we can get into the question of, you know, is GDP the best metric to measure the the health of a nation's economy?

00:07:07.240 But nevertheless, it's surprising. I wanted to show Nathan, I wanted to show just these last three images quickly.

00:07:13.120 You can just scroll through them as I'm talking.

00:07:16.000 But this was from the very first Congress, and this was the list of things that they

00:07:21.260 allowed the federal government to put taxes on.

00:07:24.700 So essentially, those would be tariffs.

00:07:27.000 They called them duties at the time.

00:07:29.660 But they have a very specific list here, and I'm not going to read through all of it.

00:07:33.760 But for the listener, they have things like distilled spirits from Jamaica, other distilled

00:07:38.600 spirits, molasses, Madera wine, malt, all sorts of things.

00:07:42.540 These are products that were coming in from other countries.

00:07:45.720 And as I understand it, kind of the last bit of historical data that I'll give here, initially, Alexander Hamilton especially was in favor of tariffs because he saw that the U.S. needed protection to build up its manufacturing base.

00:08:01.040 Even though they had been a colony of Great Britain, they didn't actually have all the manufacturing facilities that they needed to be self-sufficient.

00:08:10.980 And it would be probable that if goods were available from other countries that already had those manufacturing productivity plants set up, that what we would do is we would just import them all from other countries.

00:08:23.560 And so Hamilton and others, this first Congress, they passed quite a few tariffs, which was allowed in the Constitution and Article one.

00:08:31.520 But it was so that America would be incentivized to build up its manufacturing.

00:08:37.000 So it would be cheaper for the country and for Americans to build a factory and then sell their goods in America.

00:08:43.480 And it was really quite well thought out that they thought we can't just rely on Jamaica's rum.

00:08:51.600 We should have rum distilleries here.

00:08:53.560 And so they put tariffs on foreign goods so that it would kind of cause and incentivize Americans to build factories here and sell their goods here and get the best possible cost for it.

00:09:03.960 So, Wes, anything you wanted to add about this?

00:09:05.460 I was just going to say the brilliance of that is you still get the rum.

00:09:08.260 There's obviously more more necessary items on that list, like shoes, for example.

00:09:12.300 You're bringing them in.

00:09:13.200 But what you're offering then to those that are onshore is opportunity.

00:09:16.460 So, all right, we're having to bring in these spirits or to bring these shoes.

00:09:19.220 And it's costing.

00:09:20.140 It's just more expensive to do so.

00:09:21.720 You've got to ship them.

00:09:22.540 That's not as safe.

00:09:23.560 here's an opportunity we're providing the advantage for you to do it here and even still

00:09:28.420 today i know in a global economy it's very easy to not think about nations and boundaries and

00:09:33.160 manufacturing but if you think about something is made exclusively in china like for an example

00:09:37.540 creatine very popular sports product i don't believe it's manufactured anywhere else in the

00:09:42.520 world except for it might be germany or either china so you have one place where it's manufactured

00:09:47.240 you begin to think about that especially with tariffs wait if it's being taxed big time as

00:09:52.340 coming in that's a huge opportunity for me to do it and have no tariff whatsoever and so i think

00:09:57.160 it's a really brilliant plan that again you're not without creatine you're not without these

00:10:01.360 things that can still come in but it's it's giving the people of a nation the opportunity to do it at

00:10:06.600 a much better cost with much less overhead because you don't have to ship it you don't have to pay

00:10:10.600 tariffs all of that all right super helpful let's go to the expert now ron dodson thanks for coming

00:10:17.020 on the show what do you think about uh is this going to be like one of those billy madison

00:10:21.380 scenes where like you were awarded zero points everything that you've said is not

00:10:24.980 are we on track so far what do you think joel may god have mercy on your soul

00:10:30.500 go ahead well thanks for having me guys uh i mean you we went through quite a bit in that open so

00:10:41.080 there's a lot to talk about i think the thing i'd love to mention first is we went originally from

00:10:48.520 economics as being a descriptive social science to, in the last hundred years or so,

00:10:58.260 it turning into this prescriptive hard science, and it has failed. And the reason it has failed

00:11:04.520 is because it denies a biblical truth. It assumes that the individual human is fungible,

00:11:12.920 as opposed to uniquely created by God and bearing his image. 0.74

00:11:17.720 And we know that that is the case.

00:11:22.080 And so economics in this gets to your question of is GDP a good way to measure the health of a country?

00:11:31.520 And the answer is no, because it assumes this fungibility, this aggregate measure of humanity.

00:11:39.460 And especially as we've turned into with mass immigration and so on and so forth, a factionalized salad bowl rather than a well-heated melting pot, that's impossible.

00:11:59.220 So the assumptions are wrong. So that's my, I think Charles Haywood wrote an absolutely

00:12:06.680 excoriating piece against GDP as a national measure about a month ago. And if you're not

00:12:14.040 familiar with The Worthy House, I highly recommend the work of Charles Haywood. But he did a very

00:12:20.780 good, oh, if you listen to it, half hour, 45 minute takedown of GDP as a measure. So I really

00:12:28.900 recommend that. However, you've got to measure certain things somehow, and it does give

00:12:35.720 whether or not the federal government should be that which is doing it is, I think, a valid

00:12:42.960 question. I think these measures would be much better served coming from private sources or

00:12:51.640 even the states, but it is what it is and it's what we have. With regards to tariffs and the

00:13:00.240 percentage of income, I think the key thing is, wow, the amount of money our government takes in

00:13:08.860 is enough. It needs no more. It could do with a lot less. It's just mind-blowing that our

00:13:18.420 federal government, and this isn't even including the states, that our federal government takes in

00:13:26.100 over 20, was it close to 25% there at the end of total, if you're going to look at GDP, of total

00:13:35.200 GDP is sponged up by the federal government. And make no mistake, you know, income taxes and payroll

00:13:44.980 taxes, it's all coming out of your back pocket. So they can, you know, Social Security, this

00:13:53.280 quote unquote IOU, don't look too hard into that system or you'll get blackpilled really quick.

00:14:00.800 It's all just taxes. It goes into the general fund one way or the other and our deep state

00:14:06.900 spends it. With regards to tariffs as a means to generating income, you know, the world has

00:14:20.480 gone to a system over the last hundred years following our lead largely in taxing productivity.

00:14:29.260 Whether or not that's the, I would argue that that's just simply immoral, that the role that's taxing a person's blessing and productivity is the role of the church, or at least the kingdom, the churches being the mechanism of that.

00:14:52.960 Now, I don't even like calling it a tax. Our tithes are a voluntary free will offering. We've been given this guideline by God. But it is in the taxing of transnational transfers that is the role of the state, because the state is there to protect the borders and protect the safety within.

00:15:15.340 So I just find it somewhat immoral that the federal government that is distant from us, and we are a collection of states of different peoples, that the federal government would choose to raise its income by taxing us, taxing what we make and disincentivizing income.

00:15:38.460 That seems strange to me, but we all know the real reason is, well, number one, they could collect a lot more money that way.

00:15:45.340 But the real reason is, is they can exert a tremendous amount of influence over what we do.

00:15:54.640 The tax code, if it were simply about raising money, it would tax our top line, not the bottom line.

00:16:02.060 There would be no all these manipulative exemptions and and deductions, and it would be a low flat percentage.

00:16:14.280 But instead, we see a tax code that would fill up this room in all its rulings and regulations.

00:16:20.640 So it's Talmudic. And even that's probably gracious. So show me voting nay against the

00:16:31.520 entire system. And I think personally, I think the current it's due for a massive rethink. And

00:16:37.500 I think Trump is serious when he says, look, let's let's have the federal government tax

00:16:43.900 the world for the opportunity to do business here. And let's not tax at the federal level,

00:16:50.020 the productivity of the citizens of what a tremendous unlocking of value and talent that

00:16:55.080 would be. How many people, how many smart, capable, talented people, their entire lives

00:17:02.620 are given to tax preparation as a way to make a living? And how would they be unlocked if they

00:17:10.060 were allowed to go into productive industries. I think the questions that have been raised

00:17:25.000 by the president in bringing tariffs to bear and questioning the income tax is set up to unlock

00:17:33.840 tremendous amounts of talent and value within the American economy. Now, that can't be done

00:17:40.080 overnight. It is a transformative process. And anytime you transform things, there are eggs that

00:17:47.500 are broken when you're making that new omelet. And we need to be sensitive to that. I really

00:17:55.380 believe that collateral damage in any kind of liquidity event is real. I know some people in

00:18:01.620 banking, you know, last night, the basis trade about locked up. And there were some people in

00:18:06.600 my business that were not sleeping well last night, but, and we need to, and we need, you know,

00:18:13.940 not that we need to be too concerned with the health of hedge fund managers. You know, we all

00:18:19.720 do pretty good. Most of us do, but collateral damage is a real thing. And we, and we need to

00:18:26.800 think about that. But that being said, I'm a huge fan of what's going on. I'm a big fan of what

00:18:33.580 Besant's doing. I think he's very impressive, even though I might disagree with some of his

00:18:38.580 life choices. I think he is a guy who talks like a trader. He was a very successful macro trader.

00:18:47.700 He knows the levers to pull. And show me voting eye on all this. I'm very impressed.

00:18:56.800 yeah cool thank you um so can you this is pretty basic but could you talk just for a moment about

00:19:05.340 you know i i think the temptation sometimes of uh christians especially post-millennial christians

00:19:12.060 is well free trade you know and and all taxes are bad you know and um you know somebody makes

00:19:18.320 something you know a widget on the other side of the world and he wants to sell it here and why

00:19:21.960 should we have to pay any taxes you know but but as you start to think about these things a little

00:19:26.680 bit more it's um like it it destroys at some level like unfettered free trade without any

00:19:34.340 regulations whatsoever is an enemy of national sovereignty uh that's impossible to um to really

00:19:42.800 be america first if um if there's you know financial incentives for us to export all of

00:19:48.900 our manufacturing and all of our jobs and all these kinds of things to where you know future 0.52

00:19:53.060 generations don't have any opportunities that uh they can buy cheap things you know from china that 0.99

00:19:59.440 break you know in six months but uh but they can't actually get a job with livable wages 0.72

00:20:04.540 their wife has to enter the workforce every single household is two income uh then the kids have to

00:20:10.340 be pawned off on the state you know in public schools and grow up to be democrats and you know

00:20:15.800 rinse and repeat and do it all over again and that's kind of where we've been for a while and

00:20:19.900 so i you know i i appreciate free trade as much as you know the next guy but um but as i've you

00:20:27.360 know looked into these things further a lot of my opinions have started to change and um you know

00:20:33.880 even you know there there are some streams of post-millennial reformed christians where

00:20:39.000 you know they have a bible verse you know i'm not saying that they don't have any exegesis to

00:20:45.260 support what they're doing i i know that they do and i'm friends with some of these individuals but

00:20:49.680 at some level it just becomes financial libertarianism walking around in a christian

00:20:54.980 skin suit and uh you know like the like the famous gk chesterton quote you know if man will

00:21:00.400 not have 10 commandments he will have 10 000 to which i would respond yes and amen i i that you

00:21:06.080 know the spirit of that quote i appreciate and resonate with very much but i can see certain

00:21:11.520 guys in the industry of finance you know appealing to mosaic laws and these kinds of things but the

00:21:18.180 real appeal for them is not necessarily the glory of god and the good of his people but

00:21:23.160 less regulation so that um we can continue to be really rich so all that being said i guess my

00:21:30.400 question is with all these tariffs it's like yeah it's going to hurt your 401k at least temporarily

00:21:36.600 and um and we've already seen the volatility you know things bouncing back even this afternoon

00:21:41.300 or late this morning when trump announced a 90-day pause um with all the countries that

00:21:47.060 were willing to come to the table and bargain a little bit and play ball. And then increased

00:21:52.640 tariffs were threatened to China because of their refusal to play ball. And so these things can go

00:22:02.660 back and forth. The pain could be long term. The pain could also be very temporary and there could

00:22:08.500 be a V-shaped recovery. All these things are possible. But for me, as a novice, and I admit

00:22:13.500 that looking in uh i you know i have some investments they're not doing great uh but i

00:22:19.460 would rather my investments not do great but my son be able to grow up and get a job and feed his

00:22:23.680 family and so for me i'm pretty pro tariffs and so i guess my question is like like if we just

00:22:32.120 have unfettered free trade i don't know how to do that without also fully embracing globalism

00:22:37.620 It seems like sovereign nations are just not possible.

00:22:42.880 How should we think about that?

00:22:45.880 Tariffs and nationalism.

00:22:47.580 I think it's a great question, Joel.

00:22:50.920 We go back, you know, the godfather of all this is Adam.

00:22:54.060 Well, God is the author of what really is we call free trade, but it's free price discovery.

00:23:03.720 even Jesus when he talks about one anothering the the arm length the arms length transaction

00:23:12.440 where both people are able to say thank you both people are blessed that is a manifestation of

00:23:19.940 of this free price discovery but it reflects the will of God that men should be

00:23:25.340 economics in that sense is a God-given thing you know and and ancient but when Adam Smith was

00:23:32.520 talking about it in a transnational standpoint and he spoke of wealth of nations

00:23:39.000 what most people don't realize is smith uh was assuming he wrote in the context of christendom

00:23:47.240 and he assumed uh common presuppositions with your trading partners and what does that mean

00:23:53.640 presuppositions well these are just common the common uh basic values we would say some people

00:24:01.800 you know in uh we used to have a you know worldview was kind of there's problems with

00:24:07.160 that term but but you'd say we have common worldview view of the world of why what is

00:24:14.040 what conservatives would say need to be conserved we we hold none of that in common

00:24:20.920 with the chinese communist party and i've got absolutely let me be perfectly clear before i

00:24:27.240 go down this road because because i'm going to say some pretty direct things but i have

00:24:33.240 no quarrel with the chinese people my uh we used to host uh we used to host chinese exchange

00:24:41.320 students i had i had the daughter of a communist party official stay in my house she came to faith

00:24:48.360 in Christ while staying with us. I have my two goddaughters are Chinese. I have a great love

00:24:56.580 for the people. The Han are an incredibly gifted people. That being said, you know, through no

00:25:09.060 help of ours, because we abandoned Chiang Kai-shek and may have been prudent, I don't know.

00:25:17.900 I don't think it was. But the communist Mao took over and the communists won that deal. And these are not the regime that rules China. These are not our presuppositional partners. These are not people who would agree with what we would consider should be the basics of life and should be conserved.

00:25:41.740 So Adam Smith would think it crazy that that China, number one, was admitted to the, you know, to the World Economic Forum and given full trading partner status, even understanding why why Nixon did certain things back in the 70s.

00:26:04.460 I'm speaking of the of the changes that came about in the later on in the 90s. Adam Smith would have would have never countenanced that. And so so our understanding of free trade is is is a is kind of a bastardization of of of what would be Christian wealth of nation understanding.

00:26:27.840 So let's take that. Should the United States have a commonwealth with other Christian nations 0.61

00:26:36.820 eventually to where we generally have open trade among the Christian brotherhood, so to speak?

00:26:45.180 I'm great with that. Absolutely. But free trade in its modern understanding of frictionless

00:26:53.620 capital movements at light speed that are borderless does nothing but hollow out,

00:27:03.440 as you said, national sovereignty. And again, hey, look, my industry is largely based on this

00:27:12.980 of finding arbitrage across national boundaries, setting up a rentier relationship there and then

00:27:22.760 levering it to the hilt. It's not what I do, but that is hedge fund 101, but it's not good.

00:27:32.960 Just for disclosure purposes, I do statistical volatility arbitrage. So I basically sell

00:27:40.460 insurance into the market. So I would like to think of myself as a good guy, but just for

00:27:49.560 For clarity's sake, but Nick Land, I don't know if you're familiar with Nick Land, if

00:27:55.760 your listeners and viewers, Nick Land, continental English philosopher, prominent in the last,

00:28:04.460 probably one of the more prominent philosophers of the last 30 years or so. Nick's a couple

00:28:10.460 years older than me, 60, has written a ton on this about how these capital being able to move

00:28:21.440 across borders, what that has done, and I'm going to simplify, Nick is a very esoteric writer,

00:28:29.180 but what he said is, is that has basically meant that dollars are now that have a truer

00:28:38.560 citizens have the true rights of citizenship more than the citizens themselves because dollars have

00:28:46.700 more rights than citizens okay so that and that's a it's it's very much related to corporate

00:28:54.160 personhood and we can talk about that as well but these things absolutely erode as as international

00:29:02.360 frictionless capital movements, free trade, we can call it that, as that has risen in importance

00:29:10.060 and the Eurodollar market has risen, and those are just dollars that are created by banks

00:29:16.460 offshore with no supervision of the U.S. Federal Reserve, whether you're a fan or not of the

00:29:23.460 Federal Reserve, it's the system we have. Those notes are Federal Reserve notes. And so the

00:29:28.640 federal, we should have some governing authority over them. But as this is all moved, you've seen

00:29:34.140 with it the erosion of the rights of U.S. citizens. So this whole process is known as, in a way,

00:29:44.740 as financial Dutch disease. And the Dutch disease is named after, in Holland in the late 60s,

00:29:54.380 early 70s they found in in in dutch territorial waters they found tremendous reserves of natural

00:30:00.760 gas and and traditionally holland is one of the bread baskets of europe uh it was really a farming

00:30:07.500 nation and uh you know the the the the netherlands the the hot the lowlands of europe which is in

00:30:16.740 very well watered and very fertile soil but when these natural gas reserves were found the entire

00:30:22.880 economy pivoted and all the talent went towards natural gas and it hollowed out the rest of the

00:30:29.240 nation. Well, we've seen that in the United States with the financialization, this financialization

00:30:36.980 of the U.S. economy to where if you're a smart, if you're very, very smart and you go to a top

00:30:44.200 university, you're going to study finance and you're going to go into this industry to where

00:30:50.800 all of the other industries are hollowed out and what is our dutch disease what's the if it was

00:30:57.900 natural gas for holland what's our dutch disease it's the dollar itself and so um even to the point

00:31:05.280 of you say well hey the country makes uh has always produced great art and entertainment

00:31:10.520 our movie business is the greatest in the world when was the last time you went and saw a something

00:31:16.300 that was a uniquely american uh comedy for instance it's all this you know now we have

00:31:24.300 superhero movies that are slop that that are slop exactly it's and so so i completely agree now

00:31:34.460 again if we have common a commonwealth of nations that agree with with us and are

00:31:42.780 something we need to get in later on the show, geographically tied to us, would it be great

00:31:51.200 if Canada and Mexico and Ecuador could rise up and be great Christian nations and together we had a

00:32:02.100 true Christian commonwealth that was tied to us geographically that we could have some level

00:32:08.500 of freer trade with? Well, sure, I'm great with that. We're a long ways from that right now. I

00:32:14.520 mean, Canada has turned into a, you know, communism light. And I have lots of friends. By the way,

00:32:20.420 my wife's from Canada. My kids have, you know, in theory, have Canadian citizenship. They don't

00:32:26.000 want, I mean, you know, whatever. But I have a real love for the people and traditional Canadian

00:32:33.480 culture up there it was a great christian nation at once upon a time but we're far from that now 0.99

00:32:38.920 and in mexico is a one step away from a failed narco state so so but but that would be that

00:32:46.680 would be the goal is is is moving towards something like that okay i've talked long

00:32:52.600 enough i'm sure y'all have some thoughts no that's good west you got some thoughts i was

00:32:57.000 gonna say that's profound that point that you made about being the dollar being the citizen

00:33:01.640 of the world the 70s and the 80s and 90s you have a market that 24 7 is awake now it wouldn't

00:33:08.640 necessarily be the stock exchange but all across the world you have trade happening you have money

00:33:13.180 that can move at the speed of light this is a profound technological turning that our grandparents

00:33:19.000 just didn't live through never before in human history would you know what's happening in china 0.77

00:33:24.100 would you be aware of their impending real estate crash would you then be as you think i used to

00:33:29.000 work for like biotechs when i worked in consulting and i mean in their mind is do we do manufacturing

00:33:34.200 in the netherlands do we do it in india never before in human history would you have this kind

00:33:38.580 of global frame of things and i don't think it's at all a coincidence that you have these global

00:33:42.960 markets you have instant money moving you have your question of i can get this labor i can get

00:33:47.520 these parts i can get this done for pennies on the dollar and as that happens as that grows and

00:33:52.880 people see of course the margins on it that all of a sudden we come to a place where americans have

00:33:56.760 no identity of themselves and it's of course we're interconnected in so many ways to the rest of the

00:34:01.400 world in a way that's probably not possible for human beings to do well it's impossible to be a

00:34:06.340 citizen of the world to appreciate every culture to know every place to track every market we're

00:34:10.820 just we're human we're limited not as a result of the fall so something like the fall creaturely

00:34:15.520 exactly introduces to us like oh now we couldn't contain or comprehend all this information we're

00:34:21.260 just we're creatures and we weren't meant i don't think to be interconnected to eight million people

00:34:26.180 to dozens of financial markets 8 billion people dozens of financial markets billions of dollars

00:34:31.540 of transaction all the news all the events everything going on and trying to do so has

00:34:36.500 eroded i mean in many ways for one a sense of place this is home these are my people but we

00:34:42.980 can do what i love you're forgetting there's 330 million americans and then there's you know like

00:34:49.380 eight billion potential americans right so we're all american these are all our neighbors we can

00:34:55.140 him do it being a little bit sarcastic there michael i want to hear your thoughts and then

00:34:59.500 real quickly i want to hit a couple super chats and one question from neville that i thought was

00:35:03.900 insightful and let ron answer that question but what are your thoughts well my thought is maybe

00:35:07.840 it's actually just a follow-up for ron maybe you could touch on briefly um you know we on the on

00:35:13.220 the show we often talk about what we think would be the ideal but what it what would be a viable

00:35:19.840 alternative is tariffs the viable alternative to this sort of globalist free trade that still is

00:35:26.560 global markets it's just controlled global markets and so is there any returning like i agree with

00:35:32.640 what wes is saying but there's also the the statement that we come back to all the time well

00:35:37.420 the tubes out of the toothpaste uh you know what is there a viable years or decades long alternative

00:35:46.220 that we ought to be building towards that would be something different than the almighty dollar

00:35:53.640 working 24-7 global markets, tracking stock exchanges in Japan, all of these things that

00:36:01.680 we're talking about? I understand what we say, this is not ideal, but what do we do about that?

00:36:07.440 What are alternatives that could be built towards?

00:36:10.280 well that's a that's a big question i again i i don't have a problem with for instance uh

00:36:19.280 certain rare earths and certain uh other minerals are only god only put in certain places i mean if

00:36:26.580 you're gonna you know uh uh although i think there's a quite a bit of titanium maybe in

00:36:33.120 tennessee we've made it to where it's almost impossible to mine in this country so if you're

00:36:38.180 to get titanium i think you got to go to russia right now uh for instance in rare earths uh well

00:36:44.260 that's uh you know that's eastern ukraine uh a lot of the rare earth minerals in in china uh if

00:36:51.380 you're gonna so so uh you know copper and beryllium i think it's uh south america somewhere again

00:36:57.380 mining's not my game but but god distributed these things i mean forever you know all the

00:37:03.700 petrochemicals that was in uh the persian gulf now now they're all in my state uh texas um but uh

00:37:11.700 they're the so so i i think the the goal isn't hey we do away with trade

00:37:19.220 that's not the idea that the idea is that is that

00:37:25.060 is that you is that you can't have frictionless capital movements without having

00:37:34.640 the erasure of borders and again this is coming from somebody who grew up I mean I was a member

00:37:41.180 of the Ludwig von Mises society you know I grew up reading uh Hayek and von Mises you know I have

00:37:48.280 price and theory on my bookshelf at home. I really came to a modern understanding. This

00:37:55.760 is in the early 90s. Yes, I was a nerd. I was reading Hans Hermann Hoppe, who I still find

00:38:03.300 absolutely breathtakingly brilliant. I think that movement went off the rails when it went

00:38:10.240 the anarcho-capitalist way because because because the the idea moved from the trading of goods to

00:38:24.320 to which is good trade is not a bad thing i believe god wants us to trade the problem is

00:38:32.720 is that if is that if i only have to move this fiat currency then i'm not really invested

00:38:44.080 i am i i am i am just playing a game and and this i mean this is going to get philosophical and i

00:38:50.800 don't mean to get pie in the sky but it's it's think about how our capital markets work in the

00:38:56.560 the U.S. now. Everybody owns everything. No one, very few people buy individual stocks anymore.

00:39:06.040 You go and buy the S&P and you buy the NASDAQ. We're buying the spiders and we're buying the

00:39:11.640 cubes and we're so on and so forth. Well, I used to think that everybody owning everything was

00:39:17.800 called communism and so there's no there's no there's no responsibility and investment just

00:39:27.240 isn't my dollars it's not just rentier rentier just means i have dollars that i can use to

00:39:34.640 without work soak up value okay it's not a good thing traditionally you want as little rentier

00:39:42.240 opportunity and an effective economy as possible. What you want is, because there was a certain

00:39:49.640 faction that found rentier opportunities and levered those up with usurious rates and you

00:39:57.540 create these massive returns. That's not really, you're never going to get completely rid of it.

00:40:03.100 Europe fought wars over this kind of stuff. And again, I don't want to get weird, but-

00:40:10.920 No, no, no, no, no. You're speaking our language.

00:40:12.940 Yeah, I think you know what I'm talking about. 0.88

00:40:14.860 So anyway, the point is, is that you want to encourage, for instance, there are opportunities right now for American smart, hardworking young guys to go make a killing in Africa right now.

00:40:31.880 That's not free trade. That's investment.

00:40:34.920 You are going and actually because because there's there's minerals and there's stuff in the ground and there's some, you know, hardworking people who you give them some opportunity to work hard and they will.

00:40:52.820 OK, unless they have a different set of gifted. Do they have a different set of giftedness than the average American?

00:40:59.800 Sure. I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about that's a different thing than me just sending, oh, look, there's this African ETF and I'll just throw some dollars at it at light speed.

00:41:12.820 And now, you know, again, and I'm not, I don't want to paint with a mop here, but the former is good.

00:41:26.520 That is God taking his people with different giftedness and using them to minister to one another.

00:41:33.260 The latter is saying that what's most important is just this, is just these, you know, is just, it's almost like this phantom reality that's going.

00:41:46.720 And again, I really recommend if you've got the horsepower and wherewithal to read some philosophy, Nick Land is great on this stuff.

00:41:56.200 uh xenocosmography is his twitter too and he's a fun he's a he's he's healthy again and he's active

00:42:03.280 on twitter and he's a fun he's a fun follow and absolutely brilliant i mean the guy nick's got to

00:42:10.060 be 160 iq kind of guy but um but uh oh you asked about something else golly uh how do we get off

00:42:19.180 you asked one other thing uh that i meant to answer no i think i think you hit i think you

00:42:23.800 hit on what i was getting at so yeah thank you let's let's do this real quick i want to get to

00:42:27.760 the super chats i want to uh to try to address a couple questions and then we need to go to a

00:42:32.900 commercial break so first um this is from ben huffsteadler who is almost single-handedly keeping

00:42:39.220 right response ministries afloat he gave us a 200 super chat god bless you um i don't i don't want to

00:42:46.020 i don't want to just grift here but i'd like to think you know that somebody today could beat

00:42:52.600 Ben Huffsteadler for the largest super chat. I think somebody's got it in them. They can do it,

00:42:58.500 but if not, he's the reigning champ. So this is Ben Huffsteadler, a regular giver towards our

00:43:04.140 ministry. Incredibly grateful for you. Thanks, Ben. He said, stay bold, gents. People are being

00:43:09.400 changed by your work. Attended the conference via online this year. Already bought tickets for the

00:43:15.240 next year. See you in June this year, though. So I imagine he's going to the new Christendom

00:43:19.940 conference. I'll be there speaking. I'm excited about that. And then he said, smash the like

00:43:24.320 button or Trump will put personal tariffs on you. Amen. So true, King. Yep. If you are not liking

00:43:31.600 this video, if you're hiding out in the chat and you haven't given us a thumbs up and you haven't

00:43:35.180 liked it, Trump will personally, he will come to your house, 125% tariff and your entire family

00:43:41.280 will starve. We don't make the rules, but under Christian nationalism, you will like this video

00:43:45.020 or you will starve all right simple as that okay this is chase cormick he gave us a hundred dollars

00:43:50.140 super chat that's pretty big pretty generous we appreciate you chase thanks so much he says

00:43:55.540 thank you for these streams they've been really helping my new wife and i and new wife we're

00:44:02.540 going to assume he's newly married and not that he got rid of his old wife and trader

00:44:05.920 so newly married uh my new wife and i has been helping us tremendously and he said joel i have

00:44:12.100 a question about your sunday sermon uh-oh let's see what did i say uh my wife was confused when

00:44:18.900 you were talking about the small g gods lowercase g gods uh being real gods i think i know what you

00:44:26.580 mean but you can you help expound on that a little uh since it's not the topic for today

00:44:30.820 um i'm not going to talk about a whole lot but because you gave a hundred dollar super chat i'm

00:44:34.960 going to talk about it briefly so um this uh this is what i meant i was simply saying that i think a

00:44:40.240 lot of the Old Testament gods, that they weren't just, you know, carvings on a piece of wood,

00:44:45.780 that it wasn't just... They weren't figments of their imagination. They weren't figments of their

00:44:48.580 imagination. Now, Paul does talk about, you know, that an idol is no God at all in the New Testament.

00:44:54.120 So Paul does say this, but I really believe that during Old Testament times, I think there's still

00:44:58.880 remnants of this truth, even to this day, and especially during the interim period between

00:45:03.740 the, you know, the first coming of Christ and then AD 70. I think, you know, these things were

00:45:08.060 being wrapped up but especially in the old testament pre-incarnation of christ is life

00:45:12.820 death resurrection and ascension before that happened uh these were real gods and so what

00:45:18.560 i was saying is that uh when when you're talking about molek or you know the asherah poles or

00:45:22.700 you know the ball uh balls whatever you may be looking at i i really do believe that these were

00:45:28.560 real gods lowercase g uh meaning that they're not um they're not the one true triune gods

00:45:35.040 They're not the creators, so they're still creatures, but angelic beings that were gods,

00:45:42.300 sons of God, Job.

00:45:44.400 Fallen, right?

00:45:45.280 Yeah, fallen gods.

00:45:46.440 But Job, the first two chapters of Job talk about that, this divine council where there

00:45:50.900 are the sons of God, and I take that to mean angelic beings that are present, and the Satan,

00:45:56.160 Satan, he's one of them.

00:45:57.840 And I would hold that he was one of the chief of these fallen gods.

00:46:01.800 psalm 82 1 for example god has taken his place in the divine council in the midst of the gods he

00:46:07.380 passes judgment that's right so when we say we're not saying equal to the triune god so there's only

00:46:11.960 one creator only one creator so every other lowercase lowercase g god is a creature um but

00:46:19.840 if we if we're under the impression uh that there weren't fallen angelic beings uh lowercase g

00:46:26.480 gods that they that they were just figments of people's imagination or if we just say that

00:46:30.900 because they're creatures and they were creatures and are creatures uh that they're equal to us and

00:46:36.060 not vastly superior in terms of their capabilities their intelligence and their power then we're

00:46:41.340 we're being naive uh satan in the book of job had the power even over weather he caused a great wind

00:46:48.140 to blow and the house of job's children fell upon them and killed them um and so i believe that even

00:46:54.520 jesus uh throughout the gospel narratives and that's the particular text that uh that we were

00:46:59.180 preaching jesus casting out uh the the demons but that comes on the heels of him crossing the sea

00:47:05.080 where there was a great storm and i think that that was a demonically um cultivated uh storm i

00:47:11.000 believe that there were old gods ball one he was known for many things but one of the things that

00:47:14.980 he was known as was the storm god and asherah was also known as the god of the sea um and in

00:47:22.100 different cultures they went by different names you know old neptune you know or or poseidon you

00:47:27.180 know different gods for different cultures but i think they all actually represented a real being

00:47:32.040 a created being but a powerful being and and had power over different regions so principalities

00:47:37.780 were regions princes demonic princes were the actual powers the actual angelic fallen angelic

00:47:44.100 being themselves and so i believe over different earthly regions including the sea and the mountains

00:47:48.460 and this place and that place you know the prince of persia that we see in the book of daniel

00:47:52.560 uh that there were certain gods uh lowercase g gods angelic beings fallen that had rebelled

00:47:58.720 against god that were assigned to these different domains had real capabilities real intelligence

00:48:03.860 real powers uh but jesus he came into the house the earth the devil has been cast down to you he

00:48:10.200 bound the strong man and now we as the new testament church um are are plundering the house

00:48:16.100 and um but i i do believe that you know that there still is demonic activity today but it's not like

00:48:22.360 it once was so that's what i was when i said they're real gods what i meant is um that it's

00:48:27.060 not just you know just carved images i believe that especially in old testament times uh that

00:48:33.060 these were real creatures powerful creatures underneath the ultimate sovereignty of god they

00:48:38.820 weren't the creator they were creatures uh but but they were real that people were actually

00:48:42.880 worshiping real gods and there was a reason why people would give their first child to molek

00:48:47.600 because they would actually um they would actually get 10 children in return um that the real really

00:48:54.240 were fertility gods they really were gods of harvest they were gods of the hunt they were

00:48:58.980 gods of the sea they were gods of all these different things so that's what i meant uh and

00:49:02.820 here's the question we'll turn it back to uh ron and then we'll go to our commercial break

00:49:06.520 uh the question is from neville and he says matthew 17 25 and he admits you know he says

00:49:13.400 is this relevant he admits that this is not necessarily the chief uh purpose um or interpretation

00:49:18.680 of the text but but i think that that there are implications i think it's insightful he says

00:49:23.560 of whom do kings of the earth take custom or tribute their own children or strangers that's

00:49:30.200 verse 25 and then verse 26 matthew 17 26 peter saith unto him of strangers jesus saith unto him

00:49:38.600 appreciate that king james there um then the children are free and so he's asking ron uh

00:49:45.100 neville's asking is there some kind of implication that we could take for kings of the earth today

00:49:50.460 when it comes to sovereign nations and saying no um as a civil father as matthew henry and many

00:49:56.820 many you know reformers would say as a and and certainly before the reformers uh whether it be

00:50:01.880 you know to truly or or whether it be you know augustine or different guys that um no as a civil

00:50:07.500 father there's a particular special duty to your citizens the natural citizens of of your country

00:50:14.680 where god has appointed you and and that you're not going to extort them and you're not going to 0.98

00:50:20.640 put the primary burden on them but that you would deal with different measures with foreigners that

00:50:26.400 if they want to benefit from your people and your resources and your land then they're going to have 0.95

00:50:32.240 to pay a different price than what you would charge to your own natural citizens.

00:50:36.940 Could we take that away from that text in Matthew 17, 25, and 26?

00:50:40.860 Ron, what do you think?

00:50:42.400 Man, amen.

00:50:43.560 What a great application, a terrific verse, one that I wasn't thinking of immediately.

00:50:48.460 But yeah, a king owes, a state owes its first loyalty to its own citizens.

00:51:00.720 and tribute comes from outsiders. You see this with Abram and Melchizedek where Abram gives a

00:51:11.880 tithe to the king of Salem, Melchizedek, Melchizedek, king righteous. And what does

00:51:19.520 Melchizedek give him in return? He gives him bread and wine. That's probably nothing to do with 0.68

00:51:26.060 this. I wanted to say, so that's absolutely a perfect application of this. It is the domain

00:51:34.200 of, it is not the domain of the earthly state to tax its citizens this way. Everybody goes to Rome,

00:51:43.640 give to Caesar what is Caesar. Jesus was specifically talking to Pharisee, to the 0.90

00:51:51.400 Pharisees who he knew would pledge their loyalty to Caesar rather than him. So, I mean, that gets

00:52:04.060 misapplied. But I wanted to mention about your sermon, amen. Great stuff, Joel. Michael Heiser

00:52:11.920 is great in speaking on this stuff about the divine counsel. And in just the Hebrew word,

00:52:19.800 elohim has the sense of both gods and judge you see this uh uh paul mentions this idea a little bit

00:52:29.000 on mars hill at the area pagos um so uh great stuff uh and i would you know also uh the idea

00:52:38.920 of stoicheia of the elemental principles or the old you know the old um means of the the old the

00:52:47.320 old covenant the old world was administrated by uh we know by angels and paul says you know the new

00:52:54.040 the the manifestation of the new covenant is that men now rule the world um don't you know that you

00:52:59.480 will that's right one day judge the angels right so absolutely fantastic application all the way

00:53:04.920 around somebody's been uh jim jordan maxine huh ron when you know it angels and now men rule the

00:53:13.560 world hey that's i i can i cannot uh i cannot escape my uh mentor uh who has had an immense

00:53:22.360 impact on me god bless you jim jordan uh biblical horizons.com go there now you will not be sad

00:53:30.600 don't go there right now i mean now after you've after you've finished listening to me and joel

00:53:38.840 of course of course well uh well said yeah jim jordan is great um let's go ahead and go to our

00:53:44.160 first commercial break and then we'll come back and uh we'll deal some more with the chat if you

00:53:48.140 guys have questions for us go ahead and put your questions in um it doesn't have to be a super chat

00:53:53.120 we try to prioritize the people you know who are being generous but uh if you just want to put a

00:53:57.120 question in just make it clear say question colon mark you know and then da da da da you know so

00:54:02.240 make it clear there's a question we're going to go ahead and bifurcate those in the chat over

00:54:05.440 and try to deal with those

00:54:07.060 and give as many of those questions as we can

00:54:09.600 while we still have Ron on the line

00:54:11.400 because we'll be able to answer some of them

00:54:14.760 and he'll probably be able to answer more of them.

00:54:16.560 Especially if they're finance related.

00:54:17.500 Yes, especially if they're finance related.

00:54:19.640 Yes, exactly.

00:54:20.960 And I would love, because I'm a sucker for this

00:54:23.080 and I did not tell Ron ahead of time

00:54:26.140 because sometimes you just ask forgiveness

00:54:28.760 instead of permission.

00:54:30.100 But I just like to just be a little bit

00:54:33.600 of uh just a degenerate predictor concluder uh what's going to happen so i'm going to try to ask

00:54:40.440 ron a little bit of you know what what do you what do you foresee what do you what do you think

00:54:44.700 is going to happen you know as we as we start to broaden you know out and think like are we coming

00:54:49.520 into a recession what's that going to look like you know and and obviously all that will be

00:54:53.780 alleged with a grain of salt you know none of us are a prophet or the son of a prophet but it's

00:54:57.720 still fun to to look ahead and see uh see what might be coming down the pipeline all right so

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00:56:40.900 all right we are back uh mr ron dodson would you do me the great honor of just trashing all of

00:56:54.020 your credibility right here live on the show and making some degenerate predictions of what might

00:56:58.820 happen in the future what do you think well uh you can say allegedly as many times as you need

00:57:07.660 to say it. No, it's okay. I mean, I don't, I, uh, I, I'm not worried about anything. Uh, past

00:57:15.560 performance is no indication of the future. It actually is, but go ahead. Anyway. Uh, if you,

00:57:24.400 if you look at the delinquency rates in, in the, uh, in the market, uh, or in the, in the economy

00:57:32.180 right now, then you'll see that we've probably been headed towards some type of shallow recession

00:57:39.620 since late Q3 last year. And what am I talking about? Well, if you look at delinquency rates

00:57:49.380 on credit card loans. Well, that number has risen from a low in the third quarter of 2021

00:58:03.620 and is now about 2x what the long-term trend is. If you look at, and by the way, a lot of the

00:58:17.560 numbers, the employment numbers and everything seem to have been pretty cooked because the

00:58:21.480 revisions have just been ridiculous lately. That shouldn't surprise us. The deep state

00:58:26.760 collects and runs a lot of this stuff, and they sure didn't want Trump elected.

00:58:32.500 If you look on the delinquency rate on single-family residential mortgages booked in domestic

00:58:40.500 offices, that has actually been down. So I don't think we're looking at a, or has been

00:58:47.200 uh hasn't risen so you're not talking about a deeper section where people are a lot of people

00:58:53.300 are losing their homes you know like we had in uh uh you know late 07 through a 08 and early 09

00:59:01.360 which was just a real disaster if you look at the delinquency rates on consumer loans all commercial

00:59:08.620 banks and so these are consumer loans uh you're you're talking about a tremendous rise again since

00:59:16.320 a trough in the third quarter of 2021 those have risen precipitously if you're looking

00:59:23.200 at the delinquency rate on commercial real estate loans uh uh those have been rising uh over the

00:59:32.320 past uh 18 months um delinquency rate on credit card loans not among the hundred largest in size

00:59:41.920 by assets. So you're talking about the lower credit quality. Those have been greatly elevated.

00:59:50.380 Delinquency rate up close to 8%, which doesn't sound crazy, but it's much higher than normal.

00:59:59.940 And then delinquency rate on all other consumer loans. And by the way, you can look at this data.

01:00:08.520 you don't have to be a professional hedge fund manager like me you can go to the federal reserve

01:00:13.800 bank of st louis which is the fed federal reserve bank that uh that collates all this data um and

01:00:21.560 uh again since the trough in quarter three of 2021 that number is accelerating and going up so

01:00:29.880 so you're seeing this the the lowest quality of of consumer credit really performing poorly

01:00:38.520 These are leading indicators as far as possibly a shallow recession. And then, you know, changing any type of regime in an economic sense is going to have, like we said before, it's going to have a certain amount of collateral damage that harms liquidity.

01:00:58.800 And so I think that is a I wouldn't be shocked if if I don't think that, for instance, Joe Sixpack, this the tariffs are not going to impact him nearly as much as as the doomsayers are saying.

01:01:17.080 Why do I say that? Well, I mean, if he wants to go buy a 75 inch TV screen, I mean, that might be impacted, although those are mostly made in South Korea.

01:01:27.280 Um, the, the, what, but the, the, there's a, there's a, there is a concept in, in economics

01:01:37.660 called the elasticity of demand that is, that is poorly appreciated.

01:01:44.940 I'll put it that way.

01:01:46.080 So medicine, for instance, and we do have a problem.

01:01:49.600 Most of our medicines are made overseas and that's, we'd make some of them here, but,

01:01:53.820 But we need to reshore that in a bad way.

01:01:58.200 But that's inelasticity of demand.

01:02:00.880 If you need medicine, you've got to have that medicine.

01:02:05.760 But consumer goods are largely, these are washing machines or TV screens or whatever it is, guitars.

01:02:17.780 We're right back here, over there.

01:02:20.940 A lot of those are made overseas.

01:02:23.820 but these are economic decisions, purchase decisions that are made by choice and not by

01:02:32.740 need. And that's a very elastic demand. So due to elasticity of demand, a lot of these

01:02:39.340 tariffs won't be inflationary in that sense. We make our own fuel and we make our own food.

01:02:48.080 Those are the things you've got to have. We make our own housing because it's got to go here.

01:02:53.060 So, you know, there's an issue with lumber, although we ought to be, we've got the world's

01:02:58.660 biggest forests, so we ought to make them, you know, that you can still farm the, you

01:03:05.040 know, we ought to have no problem sourcing lumber.

01:03:08.380 That tends to be a regulatory issue, but I think Trump is all over that.

01:03:12.780 So, anyway, elasticity of demand, I think will be okay, but I do see a high likelihood

01:03:20.080 of at least a shallow recession, hopefully only one or two quarters. Now, that's domestic.

01:03:31.260 What do I see middle term? Well, if this continues, there could be, we could push,

01:03:38.000 we really could push the Chinese into a corner. I think that is part of what's being intended, 1.00

01:03:45.240 actually, because for a lot of reasons, but there's a chance that China could move on Taiwan.

01:03:56.540 Now, do I think that they will attempt a very dangerous invasion? I kind of doubt it. That's a,

01:04:05.500 although if anybody's seen the latest pictures of the ramp ships they've built,

01:04:10.200 very, very impressive, the engineering on that, where they can send tons of soldiers and material

01:04:17.820 on shore really quickly. But I wouldn't be surprised if in late Q3, early Q4, if we haven't

01:04:27.880 come to some kind of understanding, if there wasn't some type of blockade of Taiwan, and then

01:04:32.840 the U.S. would have some real decisions to make. How important to us is Taiwan? Now, you know,

01:04:40.960 I tend to follow the John Mersheimer School of Geopolitics, which is the realist school. And

01:04:49.420 Taiwan sits right off, you know, 40 miles off the coast of China. And we, again, we abandoned

01:04:59.120 Chiang Kai-shek way back in the day. I think Taiwan eventually is going to be Chinese. 0.99

01:05:06.380 It's culturally and linguistically and genetically China. The hope for Taiwan is us helping to 0.98

01:05:17.240 reform China, not somehow miraculously defending. I wouldn't be real happy if I had sons. I have

01:05:24.480 two daughters, but if they got drafted and sent to defend Taiwan, I wouldn't be real happy with

01:05:28.700 that, just to be perfectly honest. So we've got to be real smart about, you know, I published a

01:05:36.560 paper internally during the first Trump administration about suggesting that West

01:05:43.000 Texas is pretty open and empty. We could move all of Taiwan's semiconductors, people and practices

01:05:49.740 here. Give them all citizenship. Give them free land. And we should have a Texan Shenzhen 1.00

01:05:58.000 build a couple of nuclear plants to power it and let's go.

01:06:04.560 Why something like that hasn't been pursued, I don't know. Politically, maybe it's difficult,

01:06:10.940 but it seems like that would be smart. So that's what I foresee in the middle term and how we

01:06:19.260 respond to that is it would drive a lot of our economic, you know, economics. I'm not a big fan

01:06:27.260 of, you know, the realities of what's happening in geopolitics with regards to the reason we have

01:06:35.060 this global globalization is the United States had the world's most magnificent, I sound like Trump,

01:06:42.180 the most magnificent Navy in the world. And we could police all these shipping lanes. And you're

01:06:48.760 seeing now that policing Malacca, the Malacca Strait, which is there at Singapore, and I love

01:06:54.600 Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, a real hero. But we can't police Malacca and the Dardanelles and the

01:07:02.060 Bosporus. We can't police the Suez and we can possibly police and retake the influence over 0.97

01:07:10.420 the Panama Canal. But these other choke points, due to the change in calculus of war, it's just

01:07:15.940 too hard to defend a carrier battle group against drone and hypersonics now. So you're going to see

01:07:22.760 a regionalization of the world. I just wrote about this in the American Mind, the Claremont

01:07:28.780 Institute publication that was published yesterday. And so I think regionalization is

01:07:36.160 just what's going to, that's the new reality. So even if we weren't concerned about our own

01:07:42.160 citizens even if we weren't concerned about this dollarization and dutch disease we'd still be 0.89

01:07:47.880 pursuing a lot of these same exact goals because it's the new reality uh that that is facing us

01:07:55.080 the worldwide global hegemony is uh i think we're uh seeing the waning uh days of that

01:08:04.480 yeah yeah yeah it does it seems like the whole world is there's a snapback to nationalism go

01:08:11.980 i was going to say i i like the chinese tariffs for one reason in that we just get a bunch of

01:08:17.820 junk again about sheen and timu those have discipled in many ways the american consumer 0.51

01:08:23.740 to want to buy just cheap mass produced we couldn't make it here there's no way we could

01:08:28.540 make those products here at price pay a livable wage all of that but we have gotten almost

01:08:33.420 addicted i would feel like in a sense to just some of it's even straight up toxic it has metals and

01:08:38.780 lead in it it's cheap it's toxic it's made in sweatshops and factories and manufacturing

01:08:44.320 conditions that are terrible but we've become become addicted to it you think of like a kid

01:08:48.400 that has a sugar addiction that's what we've become and so i would love to see especially

01:08:53.540 these go on long term it'll have all of its other ramifications like ron you just talked about

01:08:57.820 but it'd be really good for americans to start thinking about well actually maybe the my priority

01:09:02.740 shouldn't be can i get this for the lowest possible price and i don't care if it's just

01:09:07.000 rebranded for the same plant as everything else comes from and i don't care no like start thinking

01:09:12.180 about can i buy american who's actually making this are they being being paid a livable wage

01:09:17.940 am i just exporting you know just big pennies on the dollar so at least as far as china is concerned

01:09:22.880 specifically because the service we give them it's not military we're not protecting their borders

01:09:27.380 we give them 300 million people that are consumers at the end of the day that's one of our big

01:09:33.020 exports so i'm excited for that it's the it's the mcdonald's happy meal toy that your kid plays with

01:09:39.980 at mcdonald's and then you throw away at the gas station on the way home right well a lot of the

01:09:45.920 a lot of the chinese products that you're speaking of are actually stolen u.s tech

01:09:50.700 there's countless countless stories of uh innovation and uh and engineering prowess 0.91

01:09:59.840 on these consumables, and I did a Twitter thread on this today, or no, I wrote on my

01:10:07.440 substack today about this, of these American ideas, and then you form a company, you have

01:10:16.600 a good idea, you have this amazing product, and then you go to try to manufacture it here,

01:10:21.080 and due to regulation and other things, it's not just because Americans, you can't afford

01:10:27.060 a living wage. I think you can pay a living wage and still make, maybe not cheap, but not

01:10:33.860 ridiculously expensive products. But the issue is that you have the regulatory hurdles to opening

01:10:41.220 a manufacturing business, to powering that business and having the real estate is ridiculous.

01:10:50.600 And by the time you jump through all those hurdles, you could have already just contracted 1.00

01:10:54.220 a chinese factory uh to do it for you the problem is is uh they then steal the idea uh they turn 0.89

01:11:03.040 off their phones uh you have no recourse and you turn around and three day uh you know three weeks 0.94

01:11:09.400 later you see your product under some new name uh being uh uh marketed on amazon and timu so

01:11:17.460 uh so that is a real problem swiss and how many watchmakers there have spent 100 200 300 years

01:11:26.920 perfecting beautiful watches that i think bring glory to god like rolex and then china they'll

01:11:32.400 go and they'll make and everything externally about it like internally obviously it's not

01:11:35.980 machined to that caliber it's not precise it's not going to last as long but hey it gives the

01:11:40.860 american consumer it's 98 similar and exactly like you said you have you have a trade you have

01:11:45.480 something good you have something beautiful that people work really hard for and then they say well

01:11:49.440 we can make that for pennies on the dollar and just slap a logo on it obviously literally copying

01:11:53.700 it with the logo there's copyright laws and stuff but they they still get to america if not knock

01:11:58.660 offs that look very much similar but have maybe a different brand yeah yeah i was just showing you

01:12:03.260 talking about swiss watch i was just showing my vintage breitling here nice yeah the i when i

01:12:10.100 became a pilot. That was my gift to myself. So 33 years ago, y'all. One day you'll be able to say

01:12:19.760 you're old. All right. Well, let's see if we can get to some of the questions. I have a question

01:12:27.020 about tariffs, though, if you don't mind, Joel. Ron, there's been some speculation, and the Trump

01:12:34.240 administration has been holding their cards pretty close to the vest. There's been some speculation

01:12:39.220 about what Trump is actually doing with this tariff.

01:12:42.480 And I've heard three, actually four,

01:12:44.820 you mentioned the one already, 0.92

01:12:45.780 which is just trying to kind of put China back in its place. 0.96

01:12:48.860 So that's one. 0.89

01:12:49.460 But the other three are,

01:12:50.880 he is trying to revive American production.

01:12:54.180 He's trying to generate an alternative revenue stream,

01:12:58.160 either to pay off the debt

01:12:59.500 or to pave the way for getting rid of the income tax.

01:13:02.780 And then the other potential option

01:13:05.360 is that he is simply trying to negotiate

01:13:09.000 more actual fair trade deals with other countries.

01:13:13.540 And the thing about it is some of those are mutually exclusive

01:13:16.720 because if it's about production,

01:13:18.520 then he doesn't care about the fair trade deals as much.

01:13:21.380 If it's about generating revenue for the United States,

01:13:26.420 then maybe it's not so much about building up U.S. production.

01:13:29.840 So if you were to take your guess based on even,

01:13:32.660 I know it changes every day.

01:13:33.880 Like I prepared the outline for the episode last night

01:13:36.000 And then today things changed with with the 90 day hiatus on the tax on the tariffs.

01:13:43.060 So if you were to take a guess, what do you think the Trump administration is actually about?

01:13:48.760 What are they trying to do with this whole process?

01:13:53.300 Well, I think it's a rebalancing of all of it.

01:13:56.020 I don't think it's a linear relationship.

01:13:57.800 I think it's a you know, it's a it's an optimization on multiple axes.

01:14:06.000 So, you know, like old linear programming, a Lindo issue.

01:14:09.700 So you are, I think that you are trying to create a different revenue stream for the

01:14:17.020 government that isn't taxing your own people.

01:14:20.280 I think you're trying to create some friction for capital flows because that ultimately

01:14:29.840 increases the value of nationhood, citizenship, all these non, I say non-financial,

01:14:39.420 uh, uh, everything, uh, you know, in the modern sense is, is, is financialized, but these,

01:14:46.260 these non-financial issues, uh, can be heightened in value by creating some friction for dollars.

01:14:55.040 and also you kill you help kill the euro dollar market so um and you know uh what that does is

01:15:05.160 if there's more i mean i would i'm not a monetarist a strict monetarist but i do think

01:15:11.380 milton friedman was correct when he said uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary

01:15:17.020 phenomenon if you have no ability to control dollars created offshore then you really are

01:15:23.660 going to have far less control over inflation when you need to have it. So part of this is

01:15:31.220 a greater control over your own money supply, a heightened value for what it means to be a

01:15:43.220 citizen of the United States rather than a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, which is

01:15:47.580 really meaningless all that does is uh is is create we we believe i think we're all on the

01:15:54.300 same page here that we believe that pareto is reality that generally because of the differences

01:16:01.380 in giftedness and and the differences in opportunity 80 percent of resources tend to

01:16:07.680 go to about 20 of the people that's and and and there's not a lot you can do to fix that

01:16:13.680 We don't live in a, that, that raw, complete and utter egalitarianism is a lie. And, uh, you would have to strip people of identity and borders and all these things in pursuing that. And you're still going to get, so, so I think we all agree that, or at least I would think we agree that some level of Pareto is, is just reality.

01:16:34.340 But if you have, again, without any resource friction, you get Pareto times rentier times leverage.

01:16:45.820 And so instead of 80-20, you get 99-1.

01:16:49.760 And that's obscene.

01:16:52.140 So we don't want that.

01:16:54.900 I don't think God's really happy with that.

01:16:57.940 And so creating some friction and people, very smart people in the market after, if you all remember the flash crash from 2011, some smart people suggested perhaps a tiny, very tiny transactional tax for stocks would help prevent this.

01:17:19.360 I tend to agree with that.

01:17:21.720 I, you know, where you would do away with some of the high frequency trading, which all that does is, is it robs market makers.

01:17:28.720 So now you don't really have market makers anymore.

01:17:30.900 You just have. Now, again, I don't want to get into a big argument on on on that level of liquidity, but it's the same idea that if you have if you have some level of friction that you you increase investedness.

01:17:47.860 So do I think Trump is ultimately for increasing the importance of American markets to Americans for the benefit of American citizens? Yes.

01:18:02.540 Do I think he's trying to increase the level of U.S. control over the currency? Yes. Do I think he's trying to have an alternate source of revenue for the federal government that is less than income tax? Yes, I do.

01:18:22.040 um and uh so i think all the and do i think that for the trade that is going to be there do i think

01:18:30.640 he wants a level playing field for all uh parties yes and all you can't maximize one of the you the

01:18:40.620 idea isn't to maximize one over the other it's to increase the efficient frontier if you remember

01:18:46.920 from, you know, your microeconomics, your efficient frontier of risk and return.

01:18:55.220 Well, it's similar among multiple fronts.

01:18:57.520 You're just trying to get as far onto that frontier while realizing there's multiple goals at play.

01:19:04.780 That's really helpful. Thanks.

01:19:06.560 All right. Let's go check out some of the questions.

01:19:10.260 Nathan's going to take us over.

01:19:11.300 um okay all right uh darth amalgamate uh amalgamation he asked did you manage to sell

01:19:20.700 enough of the cigars at the conference so that you didn't have to bring them home and kill yourself

01:19:24.400 by smoking all of them so it's a thoughtful question because i would have done that uh yeah

01:19:29.120 we sold them all i actually didn't get a single cigar i didn't either yeah so they're gone you

01:19:34.180 guys did well thank you uh we appreciate it this is jeff halfley he gave us a couple super chats

01:19:39.060 thanks jeff we appreciate he said great meeting um oh nope starting up higher uh great meeting

01:19:45.580 y'all at the right response conference your staff is great uh thanks jeff and then he also followed

01:19:52.120 up he said that a certain group of individuals reformed christians they're not actually arguing

01:19:57.100 with you they are instead arguing with their own parents generation and then he has some other

01:20:02.920 comments uh back on the main thread to kind of flesh that out uh if you can go back real quick

01:20:08.000 nathan uh scroll up yep scroll down there it is he said 1950s 60s christian right wingers were

01:20:14.820 anti-feminism anti-crm anti-mlk martin luther king anti-egalitarianism and they were race

01:20:22.140 realist so i think what jeff is saying is that there is a certain uh sector within the reformed

01:20:29.240 world that um aren't really arguing with you um they're actually arguing with their dad

01:20:34.580 uh their dad is probably uh dead at this point uh but he's basically talking about some of the

01:20:40.700 older guys that are um they're you know they say that you're extreme or you're novel you're

01:20:46.020 different or you know this that and the other uh but in reality um it's really just kind of

01:20:51.500 skipping the immediate uh earthly fathers to get back to ancient fathers matthew henry talks about

01:20:57.380 this you know ancient fathers civil fathers familial there are different kinds of fathers

01:21:01.600 ecclesiastical or spiritual fathers um oh no i'm sorry that's thomas watson uh but um i think what

01:21:08.080 jeff haffley is saying is there was a comment uh for all the listeners who weren't at the conference

01:21:12.160 or haven't had a chance to sign up for our patreon to watch the live stream which i need to remind

01:21:17.080 you guys about here in just a moment but um there was a moment where basically i i was saying yes

01:21:23.040 we want to obey the fifth commandment we want to honor our fathers but what do you do um what do

01:21:28.520 you do if if your immediate fathers meaning the the immediate preceding

01:21:34.280 generation to your own happens to be a generation that of course there are

01:21:40.040 always exceptions there are some guys who stood the test of time they went

01:21:44.060 against the grain they were faithful they were countercultural and and

01:21:48.740 obedient to God and we praise God for them but on the whole speaking in

01:21:52.280 generalities the boomer generation in general not universal but in general what 0.99

01:21:58.460 do you do if that immediate preceding generation to your own is demanding that you honor them

01:22:04.180 in keeping with the fifth commandment but by honoring them if that honor means agreement

01:22:10.480 like unfettered allegiance and fidelity and full agreement if agreeing with that immediately

01:22:17.780 preceding generation to yours would would then necessarily it would automatically you know

01:22:25.340 translate to a full-fledged rebellion and disagreement with every single other generation

01:22:30.520 in the history of all humankind because that's kind of where we're at so i think that's what

01:22:37.040 jeff halfley is getting at i talked about that at the conference briefly but just saying that

01:22:41.120 yes we want to honor our immediate familial fathers especially your father like your earthly

01:22:47.100 your literal debt uh we want to honor our fathers as best we can um but um in general um a lot of

01:22:56.080 a lot of honoring fathers uh what it's going to require is is respectfully but but steadfastly

01:23:05.080 disagreeing with um the immediate preceding generation to ours because um they dishonored

01:23:13.260 all of their fathers it's i i didn't you know i didn't do this i didn't i don't want it to be 0.72

01:23:18.000 this way i'm not trying to pick on anybody i'm not trying to be disrespectful but um the hippie

01:23:24.120 free love movement of the 60s i mean that's literally what it was founded on it was it was

01:23:29.900 literally founded on rebelling against dad that's literally what it was it was i'm gonna if i'm a

01:23:36.420 dude i'm gonna grow my hair out you know just to stick it to the man i'm gonna have long hair just 0.91

01:23:40.580 as a sign of rebellion if i'm a chick i'm going to cut it short we're going to do drugs um you

01:23:45.300 know drugs rock and roll all this kind of you know whatever and but the whole thing is um we're

01:23:50.300 raging against the machine we're going against our fathers and their fathers and their fathers

01:23:54.600 and their fathers and their fathers so yeah so if if the if the train is gonna you know it's been

01:23:59.760 derailed if it's going to get put back on the tracks um you can do it respectfully you don't 0.96

01:24:04.080 have to be a jerk about it you shouldn't be a jerk about it uh but what it's going to look like 0.97

01:24:08.020 is telling an entire generation no that's what it's going to look like and you do that respectfully 1.00

01:24:14.520 but it's going to look like saying i'm sorry uh but your your gay race communism is not going to 0.95

01:24:21.640 be uh distilled down to my children like it stops the buck stops here stopping with my generation 0.97

01:24:27.060 um that was gay that was wrong i'm not rebellious you're rebellious you literally had t-shirts made 0.85

01:24:34.740 about rebellion you your your generation you were proud of it the rebellious generation so for me to 0.99

01:24:42.180 not be rebellious i have to rebel against the rebellious generation i'm sorry i don't make

01:24:47.320 the rules but under christian nationalism the boomer mindset will be defeated so i think that's

01:24:54.980 what jeff halfley's talking about nothing to do with our conversation today but he gave a super

01:24:59.300 chat trying to honor it jeremy kearns he gave a super chat he said great conference right response

01:25:03.940 glad that god uh has put y'all in our lives i uh believe your conference will be talked about

01:25:09.840 uh in the history books probably not but i appreciate that uh the tide is turning and i

01:25:14.600 think that's true uh it will be taught probably not in the history books but it will be talked

01:25:18.460 about in the twitter streets i guarantee you it already has been i saw the form uh going around

01:25:23.820 did you guys see this somebody was saying uh it was a church disciplinary form and it was saying

01:25:29.380 If you have anyone that you personally know who is at the Christ is King Right Response Conference, here's a form, and you need to write down their name, and there's two boxes that you could check.

01:25:45.600 Is that real?

01:25:46.120 That sounds like fake news to me.

01:25:47.300 No, it was real.

01:25:47.500 No, he made it for real.

01:25:49.380 Absolutely real.

01:25:50.680 Yep, you can check the box if the person's repentant, but if they're unrepentant, then you need to check that box.

01:25:56.640 they're an impenitent ongoing sin because they attended uh the white nationalist conference that

01:26:02.080 had uh calvin robinson we're not doing very good you know if that's the goal um you know calvin was

01:26:07.860 you know he was there and it was funny in the green room he was like now i know i know it's

01:26:12.060 tough uh you know with me being an anglo-catholic and i said no man it's it's tough because you're

01:26:16.060 half black and he laughed you know so but but this was a real form and he's saying fill it out

01:26:23.460 and find what church people go to

01:26:25.720 and send it to their elders,

01:26:27.420 send it to their pastors.

01:26:28.540 So we're already getting,

01:26:30.140 my point is, yeah,

01:26:31.040 it's not going to be talked about

01:26:32.260 in the history books

01:26:32.860 because there are better men than us.

01:26:34.240 And hopefully they'll make the history books

01:26:35.840 and maybe we'll be a footnote,

01:26:37.080 you know, or in the appendix

01:26:38.680 or something like that.

01:26:39.520 An honorable mention,

01:26:40.620 you know, maybe that,

01:26:41.740 probably not even that.

01:26:42.900 But it will be talked about

01:26:44.220 in the Twitter streets

01:26:46.640 and what we're doing,

01:26:47.720 just so you guys know,

01:26:48.440 so this is where I'll make the plug.

01:26:50.020 We're going to put out

01:26:50.880 one piece of content.

01:26:51.980 So there were seven main sessions

01:26:53.200 and three panels two of those were panels where we're just having a conversation and then one of

01:26:58.580 those was a discussion slash debate there was some formality with open statements closing statements

01:27:03.940 but then in the cross-examination we made it more conversational but that was between uh pastor

01:27:08.100 david reese and dr stephen wolf um predominantly focusing on theonomy versus natural law and i

01:27:14.940 think that they actually did a fantastic job getting to the crux of the argument because

01:27:19.180 everybody's like what are we where do we disagree where do we disagree with it like what is the

01:27:23.260 crux of the argument and they nailed it with this 90 minute debate um four minutes before the end

01:27:29.160 they got to the crux it was four minutes before the end where they finally they got to this point

01:27:34.700 and this is where i think the crux of the debate was and it was literally four minutes until i had

01:27:38.400 to go up and stop it and so it was it was kind of a bummer but um they finally got to the point

01:27:42.240 where it was stephen his position was uh that he believes that civil government is an institution

01:27:49.660 that would have existed in a pre-lapsarian world and that the obligation the duties that god has

01:27:55.500 given to the civil magistrate um is not just to punish bad guys but to promote the good earthly

01:28:02.020 good for the heavenly good and that's basically his so his premise when he thinks of the civil

01:28:07.340 magistrate he's not just thinking about tamping down on crime and and punishing bad behavior but

01:28:13.420 he's thinking about incentivizing and structuring and even rewarding positive behavior uh temporal

01:28:19.060 earthly goods and and promoting that in such a way that it serves the heavenly good whereas uh for

01:28:24.820 david reese he feels like that's that's a noteworthy calling but he believes that that belongs to

01:28:30.240 churches in the family and if you want that role uh to be to be done poorly promoting the earthly

01:28:36.020 good that leads towards heavenly good then give it to the the stair um and that's in a nutshell

01:28:40.280 that's his position is you know if you want a job done done poorly um then go ahead and make sure

01:28:45.180 the government does it and so for him he believes uh that it's the Noahic covenant genesis chapter

01:28:50.160 nine that that's where the civil magistrate really comes into the picture that there wouldn't really

01:28:54.000 be a government a civil role in a pre-lapsarian you know if there had been no fall pre-lapsarian

01:28:59.540 no fall no sin entering the world um and so this is actually a post-lapsarian it's because of sin

01:29:04.920 And it's instituted in the Noahic Covenant, and it's strictly to punish evil.

01:29:10.840 And yes, Romans 13 says praise the good, but not so much incentivizing or rewarding or promoting the good.

01:29:19.200 And so for Stephen, government would exist whether there was sin in the world or not,

01:29:23.460 because it's not just to punish sin, sin particularly that becomes in the realm of crime.

01:29:28.400 It would have been in a pre-lapse area.

01:29:30.280 If sin had never entered the world, it still would have existed.

01:29:32.740 And it's a larger, broader banner.

01:29:34.640 it's not just uh get the bad guys but it's promote the public earthly good and even the heavenly

01:29:40.160 good in such a way that it orient uh the temporal orients towards the eternal and uh for david

01:29:45.680 reese he's saying yeah that's an important job and and to be fair to to you know to pastor reese

01:29:50.800 he's saying it's got to be done but i trust households and the and families and churches to

01:29:55.200 do that and and the state is going to to make a mess of that he just needs to get the bad guys

01:30:00.560 and it's a post lapsarian uh type of government and we and and i think like that was the clearest

01:30:06.060 i ever heard it was like oh here's the difference and they they nailed it they got right down

01:30:11.140 to brass tacks um after 86 minutes and so uh with you know with four minutes to go so that's

01:30:17.780 that was the debate all these what i was going to say all these are going to be posted

01:30:21.300 um and they're going to be you know p p o a s they're going to be posted and uh and they're

01:30:27.760 going to be weekly so we're going to put it out but we got to we got to take a couple weeks because

01:30:31.460 nathan literally just set the studio back up like an hour before we started live streaming and uh

01:30:36.220 and has been unloading and all this kind of stuff for the conference there's a lot of logistics on

01:30:39.980 the back side so it's going to be a couple weeks before we start doing it but it's going to be

01:30:43.420 seven main sessions three panels one of them being the debate that i just summarized um and it's

01:30:48.200 going to be weekly so probably expect i would say two to three weeks from now expect one once a week

01:30:53.560 we'll drop a piece of content from the conference but if you want to see it all ahead of time

01:30:58.560 you can go to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries patreon.com forward slash

01:31:05.280 right response ministries we are reserving us for our gold tier members and so you will have to sign

01:31:11.060 up to be a gold member but for 10 bucks and believe it or not i know it sounds like it like

01:31:17.020 is that even possible i've been reliably informed that it is possible it's not probable but it is

01:31:22.480 possible to subscribe to something and to make use of it and then cancel the subscription

01:31:27.660 afterwards so it is possible um but not probable but you actually can spend ten dollars and only

01:31:34.780 ten dollars and get all the comp uh all the conference content and have 30 days to watch it

01:31:39.140 so go to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries you'll get it all um and you get early

01:31:44.420 access and you'll be able to watch it now and uh but when we start posting it uh i think i think

01:31:49.920 ron dodson would uh be able to confirm that this is true and not hyperbole uh once it starts coming

01:31:55.680 out publicly uh there will be screeching and wailing and gnashing of teeth people will just

01:32:02.000 be like i can't believe it i can't believe that these these heretics did this conference and i

01:32:06.320 just i just don't know what to do there will be pearl clutching uh people will you know hide your

01:32:10.560 wife hide your kids uh they did they did a conference where they believed that christ

01:32:14.160 should actually be king it's crazy so all right that's my that's my pitch joel we have lots of

01:32:18.720 of questions but some at the bottom that are specifically financial related do you want to

01:32:22.240 yeah sure let's let's give it to ron you ask it michael and give it to ron uh from colin erb ron

01:32:28.000 uh colin says does the upcoming recession that you guys foresee impact thoughts on starting a business

01:32:36.640 what's the business i'm not opening my consulting uh shop today but i mean i mean that's dependent

01:32:45.200 upon that's dependent upon uh what's your financing source uh do you you know is it a typical operating

01:32:53.600 operator and capital partner type of relationship are you just doing bank financing or is it you

01:33:00.400 know savings uh that kind of thing what what's your uh what what need are you you know before

01:33:08.000 you open any business you're you're you're trying to meet a need that isn't currently being met

01:33:12.880 or meeting it in a more efficient or better way.

01:33:17.280 And then you have to decide how elastic, see full circle,

01:33:24.100 how elastic the demand is for that need.

01:33:27.700 So is it a want?

01:33:29.260 Is it a luxury good?

01:33:30.280 Is it meeting an actual need?

01:33:33.000 And all those things play into a business plan

01:33:36.960 that you either determine is resilient or not

01:33:41.100 to uh recessionary concerns so um that's that's about the best i can do on that i did want to say

01:33:49.340 i did want to say that regarding uh one thing i forgot about matthew 17 when we're talking about

01:33:55.000 tribute you know solomon when he solomon split ended up because of his actions split the kingdom

01:34:01.940 and what was it over he taxed the people uh uh uh over and above the tithe to the temple

01:34:10.040 to go and do certain things. And that's why the northern tribes left. And so you see,

01:34:17.520 and God never judges the northern tribe. God judges the northern tribes because of their 0.73

01:34:22.520 unfaithfulness, not because they left due to that. And so I think that's a, we can get some 1.00

01:34:29.520 principles from that about the right relationship of the righteous king. And then regarding what

01:34:35.420 you were saying, Joe, by the way, very good distillation of that. I caught up with Isker

01:34:41.160 about this stuff. With the theonomy debate? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, it's really good

01:34:46.140 because, you know, but, you know, you have to ask yourself, was Jesus not going to, in a prelapsed

01:34:52.520 area, if Adam had not fallen, would Jesus have ever been king? And so is there an eternal purpose

01:34:59.360 king. And who reformed the priesthood? Was it a prophet? Was it the high priest or was it the

01:35:05.960 king? It was David. David reformed the priesthood and David was no sinless man. He was just the king

01:35:12.400 and he had the authority to do so. And even if you look at the geography of Jerusalem, it is

01:35:17.300 not Mount Moriah that is tallest. It is Mount Zion, the traditional home of the Davidic king.

01:35:23.740 And so you have to look at some of these eternal purposes and not just think sometimes in our reformed zeal to be forensic about everything.

01:35:34.500 We lose some of the some of the more exciting topological insights that come from a literary reading of Scripture.

01:35:48.100 Yep. Well said.

01:35:49.220 Sorry, I'm a finance guy doing biblical theology.

01:35:51.980 so no no no we do tariffs we do we know we spent some time with you ron ron knows his bible you

01:35:58.860 can speak to the bible ron this is a question that is beyond at least my pay grade probably all of

01:36:03.820 our pay grade this is cory he says do you think china will dump bonds in response to the tariffs

01:36:09.340 if so how would affect how would that affect the us well they don't know nearly as many bonds as

01:36:16.220 has been advertised but sure they could dump bonds the question is is uh is how else are

01:36:22.700 they gonna i mean uh there are some they don't have complete and utter freedom because their

01:36:30.860 their buying of bonds has to do with the fact that they take in dollars if they take in fewer dollars

01:36:35.820 then they're gonna buy fewer bonds the the the issue is though is that is we had a we had a

01:36:42.860 uh, uh, everybody was very, very concerned about the treasury auction today, and it was so

01:36:49.780 oversubscribed. So there's no, there's no lessening demand for, uh, treasury notes and

01:36:58.820 bonds. The issue that the reason rates have risen over the last three or four days, it has to do

01:37:04.440 with, uh, the breakdown of the basis trade, uh, because the, that gets real arcane. It's kind of

01:37:11.540 Beyond this discussion, you can look it up.

01:37:13.400 If you look up hedge fund basis, treasury basis trading and probably get a, you know,

01:37:18.820 have Chad GPT or Garak explain it to you.

01:37:22.660 Great.

01:37:24.600 Deacon St. John asks, as of an hour ago, there's reporting that today the S&P rose 2,900 points,

01:37:30.960 over 10% best day ever recorded, allegedly.

01:37:34.320 Is MAGA winning?

01:37:35.820 The market was great here towards the end.

01:37:39.320 What do you make of that, Ron?

01:37:41.540 Well, it wouldn't be the S&P rising 2,900 points. That would be the Dow, I believe it was 2,900

01:37:49.200 points. Well, I mean, then the Dow is cap-weighted and the S&P is, I mean, the Dow is price-weighted

01:37:56.180 and the S&P is cap-weighted. They're just different instruments. One's 30 stocks, one's 500.

01:38:02.040 What do I make of the reaction today? I think the reaction, what we're seeing is you better

01:38:06.780 have your big boy pants on if you're trying to trade this market because it's not acting

01:38:11.340 stochastically so guys like me who are quant oriented we trade based upon that which we can

01:38:18.320 model and you can't model it's very similar to the uh latter half of 2008 where it's really based

01:38:28.160 upon the market is trading upon policy decisions and there's no way to model that unless you can

01:38:33.880 read minds or you know have inside information into policy decisions so personally i believe

01:38:41.960 that uh sorry we got some kind of noise going on here in the uh in the worldwide offices of

01:38:46.360 dodson incorporated here um anyway the uh uh i what i take away from the response today is is that

01:38:56.360 is that the people who make decisions at the margin of whether to buy or sell stocks

01:39:03.320 are doing so on on short to middle term risk and that short term short to middle term risk

01:39:11.720 was set aside for the collateral damage that is absolutely part and parcel of a tariff regime

01:39:19.000 mostly with europe and other uh other stuff uh other nations not china so it this was a response

01:39:27.800 simply to that. And I don't think this, it goes beyond much of that. And then you have momentum

01:39:36.500 that comes with just people suddenly feeling, oh, okay, it's okay to buy again. Maybe the mess is

01:39:42.440 over. I think this whole year is going to be choppy. The quantitative look at the markets

01:39:49.340 going into January 1st, before all this stuff happened, tend to suggest that the market was

01:39:58.680 going to close the year somewhere between six up and six down, six percentage points up,

01:40:03.240 six percentage points down. That's kind of what if you have a year like last year and you have

01:40:09.840 the first year of a presidential cycle and so on and so forth, that doesn't mean that's what's

01:40:15.420 going to happen, but that's kind of where the big fat part of the bell curve is for a year,

01:40:19.640 you know, going into the year. Now, I would tend to stick with that, except maybe widen that out

01:40:25.700 a little bit because of some of the boldness of our president. And I think that boldness is good,

01:40:32.940 but it's going to cause some volatility. And, you know, I'm not dodging the question. I'm just

01:40:38.540 being honest. I've been out of the equity markets other than what I'm mandated in my family office

01:40:44.180 to be. I'm at my lowest percentage in my family office. I'm only 25% invested in stocks there.

01:40:53.220 And I have zero vol-arb positions on right now in my hedge fund. So that tells you my view

01:41:02.580 of the volatility in the market. I think it's going to continue. If I'd been short any calls

01:41:08.980 today i would have had my head ripped off so um but i'm in and out of the market

01:41:15.780 i i i analyze the market uh for something called stochasticity which is is it performing in a

01:41:22.820 pseudo random way and that's what you know i'll put all your watchers to sleep on that but but

01:41:28.260 that's what i'm looking at and we're outside of a stochastic a pseudo stochastic market

01:41:33.700 with a bounce like today ron i'm curious do you um because it like you said i think there's

01:41:38.660 going to be a lot of volatility and um i don't i don't see a v-shaped recovery happening at least

01:41:46.180 at least for a while um so with a bounce like we had today do you think uh do you think we go up

01:41:51.780 from here or do you think we touch back down well i i am not a day trader uh and i don't you know

01:42:01.220 my stock portfolio will rebalance uh at the first of next month um and my vol arb so what what vol

01:42:10.740 arb does in a very concise way i'll try to be very quick about this is i try to take i try to

01:42:18.500 arb out the difference between uh implied and realized volatility that's called the volatility

01:42:24.180 risk premium. But I saw, you know, due to some quantitative things that there is not going to

01:42:32.360 be an ARB. And thank goodness, because realized has been way beyond implied over the last three

01:42:38.700 weeks. So that's very good. Thank you, Lord Jesus, for good models. But as far as what it does in

01:42:49.940 the next few days. Generally, these things sort themselves out in three-day cycles. Traditionally,

01:42:57.560 I would look at, I mean, if you want to get real technical, you can look at, you know, put three

01:43:02.080 percentage point bands around a 21-day moving average around the S&P 500. And if the market

01:43:08.720 trades outside of that, good luck trading it. If the market is inside of that, then you can kind of

01:43:14.960 have some level of normalcy. The problem is we moved back into those bands at the close today,

01:43:21.320 but off of a almost 10 percentage point move up, well, that in and of itself is that's

01:43:28.120 five sigma probably move up on the S&P. So I'm probably not even jumping in the vol-arb space

01:43:38.100 until the first of next week. And that's if things calm way down. So that's where my mind is

01:43:43.140 As far as what it does in the next few days, that's not really my knitting.

01:43:48.740 I trade on a longer timescale than that.

01:43:52.020 Yeah.

01:43:52.600 Okay.

01:43:53.600 Joel, I don't know if legally I hear all the cool podcasts do it,

01:43:57.020 if we have to say something about how this is a guest and we're talking opinions

01:44:01.140 and none of this is legal advice or trading advice or, you know.

01:44:05.420 No, this is financial advice.

01:44:07.260 No, it's not.

01:44:08.000 None of this is financial advice.

01:44:09.500 Ron is not your financial advisor.

01:44:10.900 Neither are we.

01:44:13.140 But no, I want to make some. I am not a I am not a day trader. I trade in and out of stocks for my family office account once a month and I rebalance. I am a I'm a I'm a you. You want advice on volarb? Then you're my competitor and I'm not giving it. So.

01:44:33.940 fair enough uh any other questions that look worth addressing jesse s he says what's the

01:44:43.720 theme for next year's conference honestly i couldn't tell you i you know not that you won't

01:44:50.200 you couldn't i couldn't tell you i would tell you um no like i'll say this um i just think

01:44:58.680 everything is shifting and changing so quickly there's been so many fractures um in the world

01:45:05.180 in our in our country politically and ecclesiologically um ecclesiastically like

01:45:11.600 within the church um that it's it's hard to predict honestly it's it's hard to predict um

01:45:18.160 what the lord may be doing what would be most useful what would be most helpful and it's perhaps

01:45:23.900 even exponentially more difficult to predict who to invite i think that that's in in some sense

01:45:32.360 that's one of the mistakes that i've made in previous years is trying to solidify our conference

01:45:39.780 you know too soon well ahead of time it's nice for people to plan but then but then something

01:45:46.840 happens and all of a sudden you know the person that you know one of the people that you invited

01:45:53.540 it's like uh you know like maybe he doesn't doesn't really like you anymore you know and so

01:45:59.360 it feels like every six months there's like some earth shattering you know transition and uh change

01:46:05.580 that's uh happening and so i i don't really know if i had to guess today one one of the things i'll

01:46:12.900 say this um i don't know what you know a year from now what what what will happen we'll start

01:46:17.640 you know making plans and and as we make plans we'll make announcements and uh and make that

01:46:22.700 you know public information but for now um the biggest my biggest takeaway from the conference

01:46:29.000 and and it's not really because of anything that somebody specifically said at the conference but

01:46:33.080 i've just been feeling this leading up to the conference and i feel like it's all the more

01:46:36.660 confirmed um after the conference uh just in conversations that i've had with people um i i

01:46:43.640 think dan burkholder and i had a conversation on wednesday night and i thought it was really

01:46:49.500 insightful um it was it was the two of us and um and you know the other ogden boys were there eric

01:46:56.520 and ben and so you know so the four of us were talking but dan and i were primarily you know

01:47:01.160 going back and forth and we're talking about like the next four years now that we've had a trump

01:47:04.760 victory and these kinds of things and the first thing that dan said was um that because we've had

01:47:10.440 this victory you know which is far from perfect and there's a ton more work to do and honestly

01:47:15.860 in my opinion you know not not speaking about finances or tariffs or the i i'm i those things

01:47:21.520 i'm i'm i'm pretty pleased but there's some other issues where i'm like i think the verdict's still

01:47:26.460 out whether or not uh how much of a victory this is actually going to be right like if if

01:47:31.380 if all of a sudden you know income tax is done away with and you know america enters you know

01:47:38.420 financially a golden age but um but i i have to think about how to plan my prison ministry

01:47:44.640 um because trump's greatest contribute contribution is um anti-anti-semitism laws

01:47:53.060 and palantir's facial recognition puts me in jail then you know i don't know for me personally i

01:48:01.660 don't know if it uh you know if i'd be looking back and say yeah that was a victory all right

01:48:05.080 yeah we're winning you know i'm like at that point i'd be like yeah i think i am sick of

01:48:10.640 winning because winning threw me in jail but um uh so here's my point dan was kind of saying like

01:48:16.820 i think it's gonna be harder for for ministries and and different you know media companies and

01:48:22.080 stuff like that to distinguish themselves in the next four years on the backdrop of victory whereas

01:48:27.920 the last four years there were so many headwinds and now we may have some tailwinds but there were

01:48:32.780 so many headwinds that it was really easy to distinguish yourself and i know what he's saying

01:48:37.660 And I generally agree. He was talking about COVID. He was talking about, you know, mostly peaceful riots, you know, in the summer of love and George Floyd and BLM, you know, and all these different things. And saying that, like, you know, if you just, if you had some courage, then you could, you know, you could distinguish yourself from all of Big Eva and all, you know, this group. And all of a sudden you start to, you start to stand out. And I think that's a generally right instinct. I think he's correct.

01:49:04.940 but i actually i told him and and he ended up agreeing with me i i think it won't be harder

01:49:10.660 to distinguish ourselves in the next four years i think it'll actually be far easier and the reason

01:49:15.940 why is is not because you know after careful consideration i've decided to become worse

01:49:20.540 it's not that scenario although i have after careful consideration i have decided to become

01:49:24.520 worse but without becoming worse this is my point you will not have to step forward this is my

01:49:30.940 prediction for the next four years. You will not have to step forward. All you have to do is stay

01:49:35.220 put in terms of courage and what you're talking about and what you're willing to address. You

01:49:39.880 don't have to take it up a notch. You don't have to step forward. You just stay put and you will

01:49:44.920 distinguish yourself because all of your friends are going to be taking 10 steps back. And I'm

01:49:49.480 watching that happen in real time. I'm watching that happen in real time. I'm watching, you know

01:49:55.060 what, now that we've had this win, I'm doing the calculus. And for me personally, you know, my

01:49:59.840 goals are really more suited towards this and i don't know if i really want to go after this issue

01:50:04.340 you know that gets you in trouble and i don't really know like this is enough like a lot of 0.64

01:50:09.420 people right now are and i'm not talking about you know a bunch of heathens i'm talking about

01:50:13.660 i'm talking about reformed ministers i'm talking about christians um and i think a lot of them are

01:50:21.160 doing the calculus and they actually are saying um it's enough winning for me uh this is enough

01:50:27.520 winning for me i've i've won enough and um and for me i'm i'm looking at that and um and it's not

01:50:35.460 enough winning for me um i think that there are formidable enemies of christ that are still at

01:50:42.200 large in the world there's been um zero threat posed to them they're walking around uh free as 0.87

01:50:49.120 bird uh terrorizing a whole swaths of the church and uh and i plan to go for their throats and um

01:50:59.920 and i plan to talk about those kinds of issues and um and it's not really so much a change for

01:51:07.440 me but it's just i'm going to continue doing what i'm doing and i have lots of friends that i

01:51:12.280 respect and i'm not even saying they're wrong so i'm not even saying hear me i'm not saying this

01:51:16.260 it's objectively compromised and this person is in sin or this person is selling out or i'm not

01:51:21.280 saying any of those things everybody has to decide individually but the reason why ogden and i

01:51:25.600 georgetown and ogden are so aligned part of it to just to be frank it's it's not just conviction

01:51:31.320 it's not just theological um but but there is there's a practical calculus ogden in addition

01:51:37.700 to you know like they're insulated like who's going to fire brian so they

01:51:41.860 their elder rule they're not a part of a presbytery right like like all the the guys

01:51:50.120 who became presbyterian you know in the last five years it's like well are you presbyterian 0.83

01:51:54.420 because kind of the key word there is presbytery you like you're just paedo baptist you're john

01:51:58.180 owen you're a congregationalist you know who baptized babies and that's great i'm here for

01:52:01.960 it that's you know i support you but my point is in just in terms of their church polity they're

01:52:05.900 not a part of presbytery it's it's um it's it's inside it's autonomous it's elder rule

01:52:13.580 um brian is bulletproof and i'm glad he is i'm not saying any of that is a bad thing i

01:52:20.140 thank god that that brian survey and eric khan um that they actually can't be canceled they can't

01:52:27.820 they are bulletproof they are uncanceable and and outside of their church life pastorally what

01:52:33.680 they're doing there and that's and that's first and foremost and that has to be the priority but

01:52:37.760 beyond that um what are they doing as they're making the calculus for the next four years what

01:52:42.280 are they trying to do um they're they're starting a media company and so in starting a media company

01:52:48.880 they have every incentive to distinguish themselves and not just be big con ink you know and like

01:52:56.860 you know daily wire 2.0 yeah daily wire you know you know the israeli wire 2.0 like they're no

01:53:02.840 they're going to want to distinguish themselves and exercise, for them, courage is currency.

01:53:11.300 For them, it is in their practical best interest. Aside from theological convictions and their

01:53:16.300 fidelity to the Lord Jesus Christ, they have every practical incentive to exercise courage.

01:53:22.200 There are plenty of other guys that we love, guys who are on the broader team. So what I hope

01:53:26.120 doesn't happen, I'll add this disclaimer, is we don't need any more fracturing. We don't need any

01:53:30.760 more divisions we don't need to go we don't need any more brother wars i really hope that we could

01:53:35.080 be done with that so what i foresee is actually more divisions but more charitable divisions

01:53:39.920 where we can have a broader team where we genuinely love each other but it may get to the

01:53:44.760 point where where there's still enough separation distinction between us where it's simply not

01:53:50.780 advantageous for instance for someone like william wolf who i admire and respect uh but it just may

01:53:58.040 not make if if he's trying to unseat the erlc and brent leatherwood with cbl um and win normies

01:54:06.800 in the sbc that is a noble and honorable cause and it just may not suit his practical purposes

01:54:12.840 to speak at our next conference right and get blacklisted you know like and so that's just a

01:54:19.920 practical calculus that doesn't say anything about william compromising anything that's that's my

01:54:24.940 point so i don't want anybody to read it like think like this is cryptic what's he actually

01:54:28.820 saying is there another brother war you know brewing behind the scenes not that i'm aware of

01:54:33.340 i'm sure there is but not that i'm aware of um i'm not saying any of that what i am saying is

01:54:37.780 um there have been the brother wars where it's like it's the reformed you know they call it the

01:54:41.840 reformed longhouse i i think in some ways there is that but there's also the reformed deep state

01:54:46.460 where it's like this is a hit job we're trying to take somebody out like we're literally trying

01:54:50.540 to destroy you um and i i think that we'll probably get a little bit less of that because

01:54:55.840 i think a lot of those dividing lines have already fallen and people just kind of you know let bygones

01:55:01.200 be bygone and go in their separate ways right i think a lot of that dust is settling hopefully

01:55:05.880 by god's grace we don't have that like just full-on shootouts but i do think we'll still

01:55:10.480 have fractures they don't have to be they can be i think they'll be amicable fractures i don't think

01:55:16.520 they have to be mean spirited i don't think they have to be bloody um but but i do think we're

01:55:21.780 gonna have fractures where it's like this group that two years ago we might have partnered on

01:55:26.320 something or this group that you know six months ago we might have been doing this or he might have

01:55:31.400 come on the podcast and and now he's not going to and it's not because he's not an ally it's not

01:55:38.260 because he's not a part of this broader um banner of like a co-belligerent and it's not even because

01:55:43.460 he's not a friend i can still pick up the phone and call him privately i could get counsel uh he

01:55:48.360 loves me i love him even behind the scenes there might still be some partnering there might even

01:55:52.820 be a donation from someone you know from time to time but in terms of public facing everybody's

01:55:59.620 doing the personal calculus now that we have some some tailwinds um all we've had is headwinds

01:56:05.920 forever forever like we as conservatives we didn't think tailwinds were a thing we forgot that like

01:56:11.460 that that could actually happen so now that like we we actually have some tailwinds people are

01:56:16.780 going to be making the calculus of what to do with those tailwinds which chart to course or which

01:56:21.740 course to to chart and and they're going to be you know and some of the guys are going to say

01:56:25.280 these tailwinds are enough to to to get me what i'm trying to do i'm trying to start a business

01:56:31.540 i'm trying to win the sbc i'm trying to just pastor a church and and and it's a bunch of

01:56:39.480 normies or a bunch of boomers or a bunch of you know whatever and they're not they're not ready

01:56:42.760 for a conversation about x y and z and and so there's going to be a lot of people making that

01:56:48.660 calculus based off of what their ministry is what is their vocation what are they doing what are

01:56:53.740 their goals um ogden and georgetown are unique in the sense that um we're both highly insulated

01:57:00.980 um just like ogden uh you know our church covenant bible church is independent um

01:57:08.340 and and in terms of internally with the church um people can drop whatever hit piece they want

01:57:15.760 and because i've been honest and forthright um the church is not caught off guard they're not

01:57:21.000 surprised and they're for me they're in my corner and so uh brian silvey and eric khan are bullet

01:57:27.480 proof. Joel Webin is bulletproof. And in addition to our local church ministries, we both also have

01:57:33.740 the same practical goals of we're both starting media companies. And in that world, when that's

01:57:41.780 your objective, we have every practical, like everybody else who's going to be taking five

01:57:48.480 steps back or 10 steps back or 20 steps back saying that it's please, Mr. President, it's

01:57:54.000 enough winning this is all i need for me my family my vocation my goals um and they're going to play

01:57:59.520 ball a little bit and just say hey it's good you know this is this meets my goals and what i'm

01:58:04.540 trying to achieve for for guys like ogden and guys like us um that actually is counterintuitive to

01:58:12.260 our goals we do that if we do that uh we lose our entire listening base and for all those who are

01:58:19.680 listening right now i would say kudos well done you should leave if uh if if i back down you

01:58:26.380 should leave you should stop watching you should stop supporting um if i back down you have you

01:58:32.260 have my unadulterated blessing to absolutely abandon me and uh and it's the same ogden is

01:58:40.340 the same calculus with him like eric and i you know we talked just yesterday morning and we're

01:58:44.700 like yeah um everybody's still our friend we love them wish them the best privately if there's

01:58:51.520 anything we can do to help them serve them um absolutely 100 no public counter signaling

01:58:57.020 right no no you know uh subtweeting and uh you know like no we're not doing that

01:59:03.440 but uh for ourselves individually and what what we're overseeing after careful consideration

01:59:11.600 we've decided to become worse so anyways all that back to the conference question you know what's

01:59:17.340 what's the theme of next year's conference um tbd it's to be determined uh but it'll probably

01:59:25.940 if i had to guess if anything it'll probably be something along those lines it'll be um it'll be

01:59:31.940 identifying what are the dragons right because lots of people like to lark they like to go to

01:59:37.980 the dead carcass of the dragon that was killed 50 years ago you know like racism you know and

01:59:42.580 they just they kick it you know and hit it with their pretend wooden toy swords you know and

01:59:47.080 pretend to be you know you know knights in shining armor fighting a dead dragon that somebody else

01:59:51.960 slayed 50 years before they were born um that's that's not what i'm gonna do that's not what

01:59:57.420 ogden's gonna do so for us i think you know in in looking at future themes and things that we're

02:00:03.120 going to address it's going to be um it's going to be whatever the reigning terror whatever the

02:00:08.800 leviathan is um presently not the leviathan of 50 years ago not the leviathan of four years ago

02:00:15.380 it's not just going to be rehashing crt and wokeness um like you know like we're not we're

02:00:21.080 not going to larp anymore wokeness um no there's plenty of people who are not putting the woke

02:00:25.880 away but a lot of people are like a lot of people are putting the woke away even if they didn't want

02:00:31.020 to because because just capitalism is is saying no to wokeness and um and so a lot of people are

02:00:37.620 putting so we're not we're not going to just go and and uh address wokeness while fully embodying

02:00:44.560 woke light you know like no we're we're gonna we're gonna keep pushing the ball forward you

02:00:50.600 know what's what's the next thing and um and i have some ideas and we'll probably have to save

02:00:55.840 that for another episode but i think there are at least three three pillars um formidable enemies

02:01:03.440 of the church in our american context that must be must be addressed and um and i'm going to

02:01:11.940 address them and i'm talking about you know doing series on these topics and there's a lot of things

02:01:17.440 that we'll be announcing in the near future that i'm excited about so uh that's it for a conference

02:01:22.400 question that's it for all the questions that's all the time we have ron do you have any final

02:01:26.300 thoughts or final words that you'd like to leave the audience with where can we find you too oh

02:01:30.600 yeah how can we follow uh i'm uh ronald dodson on uh twitter at ron dodson uh and then i have a

02:01:39.020 sub stack the eyes of apilles uh which is uh ron dodson sub dot sub stack however that works

02:01:46.500 uh then i write for american reformer uh i was just published uh as i mentioned in uh the american

02:01:54.480 mind yesterday uh i think i'll have another piece coming out with them in the next week or so uh

02:02:02.000 and uh you know i uh oh i'm on with con the guys contramundum often and uh and with several other

02:02:12.220 I've been on, I got an appearance with Pete Canona's coming out in the next day or two.

02:02:18.460 Nice.

02:02:19.080 And so you can find me if you just put Ron Dodson or Ronald Dodson in, I'm out there.

02:02:28.240 All right.

02:02:29.060 Great.

02:02:29.680 Well, thanks for coming on the show.

02:02:30.900 We appreciate your expertise and your willingness to address this topic that was a little bit

02:02:36.760 above our pay grade, but we did our best and it helped to have you on the show.

02:02:40.660 Thank you.

02:02:41.160 well thank you guys appreciate it all right thanks to the listeners thanks for

02:02:46.020 tuning in and we will see you Lord willing on Friday God bless

The NXR Podcast - April 09, 2025

THE LIVESTREAM - If This Fails, America LOSES BIGLY.

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