Tucker at American Principles Project
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Summary
In this episode, I sit down with a group of friends to talk about a variety of topics, including abortion, abortion, and the trans issue. We talk about our own experiences with abortion and the church, and what it means to be a Christian in the 21st century. And we talk about why we should care about trans issues, and why we shouldn t care at all. It's a good one, and it's a really good one. Thank you so much for being here, and we hope you enjoy it! Music: "In Need of a Savior (feat. Andrea Thomas)". Words and Music by Andrea Thomas and the Vigil Project. All rights reserved. Used w/ permission from Andrea Thomas. The opinions expressed here are our own, not those of our companies, unless otherwise specified. We do not own the rights to any music used in this episode. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art by Jeff Kaale. This episode was produced and edited by Riley Gaines. Additional production by Kaitlyn Orlaith Smith. Please take care of the sound quality is better than that of the original music used on this episode of the podcast. It was produced by Bobby Lord. Thanks to Lizzie Hopkins. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, we'll be listening to the music we've produced by a good friend of yours! We'll be looking out for you in the next week on the next episode of this week's episode of Good Morning America, Badass, Good Morning, Good Life, Bad Girl, Good Boy, Good Girl, Bad Boy, and Good Girl Bad Girl. and Good Lady, Good Lady Good Girl Good Lady. Thank You. -- Thank you for your support and Good Vibes, Good Lord Bless You, Thank You, Good Day, Good Love, Good Thing, Good Blessings, Good Things, Good Night, Good Relationships, Good Work, Good Week, Good God Bless, etc. -- Thank You and Much More! -- Good Morning God, Blessings and Good Morning Blessings. -- -- Please Like That, Good Nuff, Good Luck, Good Kidding Me, Good Ol Nights, etc., etc., Good Morning Friend, Goodnight, Good Gotta Good Morning Love,
Transcript
00:00:17.180
This is how I normally dress, but I tried to up the game a little bit this morning as
00:00:22.240
I left my house and realized I had no suit pants.
00:00:31.700
So it's a measure of how just totally off the grid I am.
00:00:34.380
So it's a blessing to be in a room full of people I know like half the room.
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So it's been a long time since I've been around this many people I like.
00:00:50.780
It makes me ashamed to be a Protestant, honestly, when I hear that.
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I don't care if you are sentenced to life without parole and lead a disgraceful life.
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If you have seven kids, you beat me in some fundamental way.
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And by the way, you know, if you're in a church that doesn't encourage you to have seven children,
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I mean, I grew up in a world where, and in a church that maybe not explicitly, but there's
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If you had seven pups and tried to show up to an Episcopal Church service, they'd be like,
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If you're not reproducing, then you're not, well, you're missing the point of life, for
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one thing, but you're also, there is a way in which you're dying, and, well, not a way
00:02:01.540
And so it's very dark, and it's taken me so long to realize that, you know, you have
00:02:06.180
to overcome all kinds of, as you age, all kinds of ingrained assumptions that are rooted
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only in, like, the dumbest possible justifications, like, I grew up that way.
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Anyway, but to be in a room full of people with lots of kids and to see children in the
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room, I don't know why it always makes me emotional, but I love it.
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Anyway, I just feel really welcome, so thank you.
00:02:27.760
By the way, none of that's pandering, since I guess a lot of you are Catholic.
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So I loved what Terry said about, you know, staying cheerful in a moment like this, and
00:02:47.780
it really is a moment like this, and the issue that you all are the most famous for really
00:02:51.280
tells you everything, the trans issue, which I've thought an awful lot about.
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I didn't sort of expect to make it to midlife and be thinking about trans stuff.
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But the main question I've had from the very beginning is, like, what is the point of this?
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I mean, I grew up in a world where there were, you know, I grew up in Southern California
00:03:07.200
in an affluent zip code where, like, everybody had a freaky personal life, like, everybody.
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And I was sort of taught not to judge them, and I'll just be totally honest with you.
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I'm just not that interested in getting involved in other people's stuff, even if I disapprove
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But they have made it impossible for me to live the life I hope to lead, which is just
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like leaving other people alone because they're way up on my face with, you know, I'm a girl.
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And I'd be happy to even leave it there, but it's like we're going to punish you unless
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And you have to ask yourself, like, what is that?
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Joe Biden announced, I think I just saw a piece in which Riley Gaines, who I love, is responding
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to Joe Biden's declaration that trans issues are non-negotiable.
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Really, of all the issues that this kind of—this is a sincere question, especially in a country
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When you have this weird convergence of, like, 19 different irresolvable crises, why the
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Certainly every Christian believer has to be offended by it.
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I know Christianity Today is not, but it's not Christian magazine anymore.
00:04:14.760
So, but an actual Christian is going to be like, no, I'm not going to repeat that.
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Why would you want to offend people on purpose?
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That issue is appealing to the people who promote it, most of whom are not trans and
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wouldn't wish that on their children, because why would you not want grandchildren?
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Why would you want to wreck the lives of your own children?
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But the people who are pushing it are pushing it precisely because it is so offensive to
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Well, it's, like, foretold in some detail in documents I could refer to called the New
00:05:05.480
I mean, this is, like, kind of the core promise of the religion that you will be
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Like, it kind of says that in black and white several times.
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If you believe this, you'll be punished for believing it.
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And so, once you sort of remember that, and I'm hardly a Bible scholar, but because that
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is so often repeated and emphasized, I don't know if there are exclamation points in the
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original text, but it certainly jumps right off the page, sign up!
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It's not like this is going to make you lose 30 pounds and cure your ED.
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It's like, no, you'll probably be beheaded, actually.
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And actually, if you think about it, virtually everything that is happening in this country,
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and also I would say around the world, and I'm not getting into foreign policy because
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I'm sure everyone disagrees with me, but if you look carefully, Christians have borne the
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brunt of a lot of what's happening around the world in conflicts that we fund.
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Did the State Department not notice when all the Christians in Iraq had genocided?
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A lot of them are dead, but they don't live in Iraq anymore.
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Well, the U.S. government was, like, in charge of that.
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Because, by the way, they are a religious minority, but they're also Christians, as is the
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The country was founded by Christians, and no one noticed it.
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The same in a lot of countries, including Syria.
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I'm not getting into my eccentric views, but I'm just saying this thread, whether you agree
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with me or not on specific conflicts around the world, if you decide to assess what's
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happening in this country and around the world through that one lens, how does it affect
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In fact, you will find yourself taking the position that's the mirror image of the position
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you're being told to take in every country and on every issue in the United States.
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And just when you're alone, and don't tell anybody because you're going to have forbidden
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The most forbidden of all is, like, you're allowed to care about what happens to other
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Christians around the world, which you've been told relentlessly, whether you know it
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or not, that you're not allowed to care about, and sorry, with respect, most of your churches
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We've got some mission to people who, you know, and I'm totally in favor of missions
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to people who aren't believers and who aren't Americans and all that.
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I'm just saying, why does no one ever mention this?
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And it does sort of point up the core problem, which is that people who are upset about what's
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I know a guy called Bill Ackman, who's a hedge fund manager, center left, very smart.
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He's very mad about the way pro-Israel students are treated.
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And that's good for him, as far as I'm concerned.
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And I'm strongly in favor of people giving to things they agree with and withholding funding
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So Bill Ackman is in a total, you know, he's very upset about what Harvard is doing to
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But you have to sort of wonder, like, where, okay, so because he cares about this issue.
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Like, try being, like, a Bible-believing Christian at Harvard.
00:09:06.960
Not that there are any, because they're not allowed there, actually.
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And a lot of us have ancestors who, like, helped build Harvard, actually.
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And they all take it as just, like, well, it's just kind of part of the course.
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Yeah, of course you can't, like, talk about the Bible or express views that reflect what's
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written in the Bible, because then you're, like, a freak, and you just sort of put up
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And so everyone winds up at Hillsdale, which I strongly support, because I love Hillsdale.
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But you do sort of wonder, and I think Hillsdale is thriving and will continue to thrive.
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Some of my smartest people I've ever hired came from Hillsdale.
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But you sort of wonder, like, what happened to every other school, like the ones your
00:09:58.900
Your kids are definitely not welcome there if they're out of step with the prevailing view,
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which is very different from the view of the people who founded it, who may or may not
00:10:08.760
And, like, conservative Christians are not welcome, and nobody says anything about it.
00:10:13.260
So I guess my point is not to attack Bill Ackman.
00:10:18.040
I want to be a little bit more like you as I resist what's happening to people who share
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And that kind of is the problem, is that people with our views, and particularly Christians,
00:10:34.080
Now, I actually believe in the Christian nonviolence stuff.
00:10:37.320
I believe in self-defense completely and would exercise it unhesitatingly and sleep like an
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So I'm not in any way, and I'm a gun lunatic, so obviously I feel that way, but I don't think
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In the Old Testament, too, which is incredibly violent, David committed a lot of violence,
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and he felt really bad about it and asked God for forgiveness for it.
00:11:07.220
So, like, we shouldn't be enthusiastic about killing people.
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Maybe use cluster bombs because you have no choice, but you're not acting as an evangelical
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You're a violence worshiper, and that's, like, one of the oldest forms of sin.
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So anyway, the point I'm saying is I don't think Christians should ever be violent, ever,
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unless they're forced to, to defend themselves and their families.
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And I don't think that they should say, well, you know, everyone hates us.
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We're not putting up with that for one freaking second.
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You can't tell my children that they're evil because of the way they look.
00:12:02.020
You can't try to convince my children to adopt, you know, sexual practices that result in
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People don't think that was the end of my family.
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I met the Shillings today, like one-third of the entire family.
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First of all, it's like the world's most handsome family ever.
00:12:24.500
I said, Terry, what happens when you go into restaurants?
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He's like, they're afraid, but we tip, so it's cool.
00:12:32.020
I was just like, oh, this is just, this is what abundance is.
00:12:39.300
So, in other words, they're trying to take everything from you of value, and not through
00:12:44.640
higher capital gains taxes, but through extinction, which is a little worse.
00:12:54.100
So, really quick, I want to go right to the, before I get so radical that I get arrested,
00:13:03.260
I just want to, just a couple of things, some of them are sort of inchoate, but that I've
00:13:12.600
been thinking about, about how to respond to all this.
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I got here in, you know, mid-high school and left at 50.
00:13:21.240
And so, I'm, you know, not an expert in D.C., but I've certainly watched it closely, and
00:13:25.300
I've watched the whole non-profit constellation, of which I have been a part.
00:13:30.920
I've always been on the right, never had one of those liberal phases.
00:13:33.620
If you have a heart, you're a little, no, actually.
00:13:36.260
If you're cruel, you're a liberal, because you can justify hurting people by claiming
00:13:43.900
But I've watched the whole thing, and I, one of my conclusions is, and I mean no disrespect,
00:13:47.360
is that we might emphasize a little bit too much legislative change and winning elections.
00:13:51.920
And the only reason I say that, I think elections are super important, and occasionally I get
00:13:54.860
whipped into a frenzy and, like, try to help somebody.
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It always doesn't work, because I should not be around politics at all, obviously.
00:14:01.620
But I'm totally for that, and those are levers of power, and good people should use them to
00:14:08.300
But that is hardly the most important thing you can do.
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The most important thing you can do, by far, is become strong.
00:14:17.120
And especially now, because Terry alluded to this, and I won't go into detail, because
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everybody here knows, but, like, we are entering a period.
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And there's just absolutely no chance that this country will be the same country a year
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December 7th, 2024, a lot of things will be different, and one hopes they'll be better,
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You know, there's only one election between now and then.
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Its outcome can't be controlled by any single person in this room, or even the room collectively.
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What is in control is how we behave and live, and that's the most important thing.
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If you thought you had to run an Iron Man a year from now, you'd probably stop eating
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I mean, I wouldn't, which is why I would never make it.
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Well, the first thing, the first way to become strong, I believe, and I mean in your soul,
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not in your body, though I think that's worthwhile, too, is to tell the truth.
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It is an observable phenomenon that you will experience if you do it.
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It clearly has supernatural roots, in my opinion.
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Words are the most powerful and enduring thing, far more than cluster bombs.
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So, if you say something true, that has a greater effect.
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And I think Terry or someone else, wise, maybe it was Brent, said that tonight.
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Telling the truth out loud is the most important thing you can do.
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Even though it seems like you're shouting into the wind so often, if you're wondering if that
00:15:59.580
is true, reverse engineer it and ask yourself, what's the one thing that they don't want me
00:16:05.380
What's the one thing the founders decided I had an absolute right to do first on the list?
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And that's, of course, to speak what you think is true.
00:16:12.060
And if you do that, you will find yourself becoming bolder and stronger and harder to
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And I mean real truth, actual truth, not simply in your public life.
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I mean, by the way, I'm not calling for confrontation.
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I think it's awful because I'm the recipient very often of, like, hassling people in restaurants
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You see, you know, Chuck Schumer on a subway platform and scream at him.
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Obviously, I mean telling the truth in a way that is courageous and doing it, again,
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I think part of the key is to, honestly, if I'm being honest, become a better person.
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And I'm not accusing anyone of being a bad person.
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And so this is something that I think about quite a bit in my own life.
00:17:04.940
If you want to be strong, live a life that you are not ashamed of.
00:17:15.880
Every time you do something that you know is wrong, you become weaker.
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Not just vulnerable to blackmail, but weaker inside.
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And if you resolve to do that, and it's not complicated.
00:17:43.780
It's like, you know, you read these talk people who've been to prison or whatever.
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And there are some people in prison who get hassled immediately and sold for a pack of cigarettes
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And there are other people that nobody messes with.
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And if you are a truth teller, people can feel it.
00:18:05.220
The second thing is, remember where your strength lies.
00:18:12.980
But in this world, it's in the people around you.
00:18:16.380
I have to say, Riley Gaines came to visit us in Maine last summer or two summers ago
00:18:21.980
And we always have people coming up who are like in the heart of some controversy.
00:18:24.460
And I really hate interviewing college students because it's what we call on television stunt
00:18:31.060
And, you know, we should interview this person.
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And they're reading talking points or whatever.
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And that's such a rare thing at a person that age.
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It's much easier when you have no mortgage and your kids are out of the house.
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But Riley Gaines is at the beginning of her life.
00:19:03.540
And that's the first thing I said when I started her tonight.
00:19:08.940
In our world, actually, no one outside this room is married anymore.
00:19:10.960
But young people don't get married at that age.
00:19:22.160
And the reason that's significant, first of all, it's good for a whole bunch of other reasons.
00:19:26.300
But it makes you so much stronger to have a teammate, to have that core at home.
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I literally couldn't, I'd be terrified if I didn't have my wife.
00:19:38.200
Not that she's going to, like, protect me in a fistfight or something.
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But because when I go home, I know there's one other person who understands me completely and is on my side totally and forever.
00:19:50.040
And that assurance right there will allow you to walk right through a wall.
00:19:55.560
And I do think that's one of the reasons that Riley Gaines had this vibe like, no, I'm not joking.
00:20:05.440
No, I'm not reading talking points that some foundation gave me.
00:20:08.860
You can't intimidate me, congressperson, whatever your name is.
00:20:12.060
So, focus on your spouse and on your children and on your employees and on your parents and your siblings and your cousins and the people in the immediate orbit around you.
00:20:25.860
The people who are put there by God for you to serve and commune with.
00:20:29.720
It's not an accident you find yourself coming into contact with people.
00:20:35.460
And those are the people from whom you draw strength and who get it from you.
00:20:39.460
And if you focus on that first, you will become immensely stronger, immensely stronger.
00:20:46.460
And the third thing I would say is to, as Terry, I thought, wisely said, stay cheerful.
00:20:56.660
I think that's important in all circumstances, especially when it's fake.
00:21:04.740
I've given this lecture to my children many times.
00:21:06.700
You know, because I was saying, you know, don't lie, be authentic, and always pretend to be happy.
00:21:14.220
And some of them caught the internal contradiction there.
00:21:22.500
It doesn't make sense right at first, but meditate on that and you'll get it.
00:21:36.080
The most obvious is, if you pretend to be cheerful, guess what happens after a while?
00:21:47.860
The second thing you do is you elevate the spirits of everyone around you.
00:21:52.100
And by the way, you don't bore them, because there's nothing more tiresome than listening to someone complain about himself.
00:21:56.840
You're the only person ever to be sick or bankrupt or fired?
00:22:12.720
And close family members are very, you know, of course, it's incredibly sad.
00:22:15.740
But I will say, and there are older people who come from a different time, both women.
00:22:19.600
And I would say the thing that distinguished both of them in the end, and I was there, was that both of them, both of them maintained their dignity.
00:22:35.860
They were always going to force a smile, look you straight in the eye, even when their eyes were cloudy.
00:22:41.200
And it had such a remarkable, I saw one of them right before death, looking straight in the eye, and was just unbowed by the whole thing.
00:22:50.240
And I think that's where their strength came from.
00:22:52.220
But the effect on me, seeing someone facing something like that, which I don't care how deep your religious faith is.
00:22:58.760
Everybody's afraid to die at some point, on some level.
00:23:02.320
Watching that filled me with courage and strength.
00:23:07.820
And left their dignity intact in the toughest, I mean, everyone here, most older people here have seen what I'm talking about, in the toughest possible circumstances.
00:23:18.740
And it was, honestly, an act of will and a gift from God.
00:23:25.980
And I think we should maintain that at all times.
00:23:28.560
There is nothing worse than hearing someone bitch and complain.
00:23:34.180
I mean, I grew up in an affluent family in an affluent world, but my father was, you know, raised in an orphanage, and his legs are bent from rickets.
00:23:43.620
My brother and I were having breakfast one morning in the town we grew up in in California called La Jolla.
00:23:49.540
There's always bugs in all the, yeah, it's lovely, decadent, creepy also, but whatever, lovely.
00:23:56.360
And don't get me going on why money is bad for people, but I have a PhD in that, but, and we lived just with my dad or some three of us, we ate breakfast cereal like three meals a day.
00:24:05.060
And I remember one time, maybe it was dinner, we were eating breakfast cereal, Cap'n Crunch, of course, and my brother goes, Pop, to my dad, Pop, there are bugs floating in my cereal.
00:24:13.760
My father's like, you know, gave us the rich kid lecture.
00:24:16.960
They always, oh, kids in La Jolla, like you're imagining bugs in your cereal.
00:24:20.900
And my brother's like, no, they're actually, they're bugs in the cereal.
00:24:23.720
And he holds it over to my father and all these little bugs floating around in the milk.
00:24:30.540
And he ate the whole thing looking at us like that.
00:24:43.800
He was the only person in La Jolla who had those attitudes.
00:24:50.420
But anyway, it's not just that it's tiresome to complain.
00:25:01.360
People who have succeeded or who know that they're right or who know that they have some great reward
00:25:11.860
And so you have an obligation, in my opinion, an obligation to assume that posture of cheerfulness
00:25:28.220
We have tens of millions of military-aged men wandering around the country.
00:25:48.220
Not only am I going to get the brass band to play a song, I'm going to dance to it.
00:26:14.020
And if that vibe comes off you, nobody can stop you.
00:26:19.160
And you will scare the crap out of the other side.
00:26:24.400
And one of the reasons you know they're weak and dying inside in an agony, one of the things
00:26:29.320
we forget about evil, it doesn't just destroy people, it destroys the conduit through which
00:26:33.500
It destroys the person who conducts it every time.
00:26:52.540
And the destructive category, which is reigning supreme on the earth right now, in every area,
00:26:59.560
not just of our lives, but of global affairs, is purely destructive.
00:27:02.580
And the people who are its servants are themselves being destroyed.
00:27:10.600
And one of the reasons you know they're weak is that they will never apologize for anything.
00:27:20.740
Like, the one thing every monotheistic religion has in common is you begin with,
00:27:29.500
That's also, by the way, the first thing you do in AA.
00:27:31.700
Where in any program or theology that uplifts people or gives you any chance of becoming
00:27:37.620
fully human and knowing God, the first step is admitting you're not him and that you are
00:27:44.360
So if you find people who are unwilling to admit what they've done wrong under any circumstances,
00:27:49.000
you're looking at people who are serving the other team, no question about it, and you're
00:27:53.980
looking at people who are being destroyed by their service to the other team, and they're
00:28:00.840
I interviewed a congressman the other day, and Thomas Massey from Kentucky is one of my
00:28:04.480
all-time favorite members of Congress, and he's such a math geek that he doesn't even
00:28:07.620
realize, I think, that a lot of things he says are controversial.
00:28:15.200
And people are like, shut up, Thomas Massey, you bigot.
00:28:22.360
But anyway, we're having this conversation, and he's like, yeah, I was at a classified
00:28:24.820
briefing the other day with Toria Nuland, and she said, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa,
00:28:28.740
Toria Nuland is giving classified briefings to Congress?
00:28:31.160
I last saw Toria Nuland in, say, 2002, when she was in Dick Cheney's office.
00:28:34.860
And at the time, she's the person that she is now, no interest in the United States of
00:28:41.840
In fact, a very obvious latent hostility to the United States, no interest at all in this
00:28:47.220
And she is the, I don't know, she's the originator of every bad idea, but she's certainly one
00:28:53.320
of the architects of something that really hurt the country.
00:28:55.460
Now, trust me, you know, I've gotten behind all kinds of bad ideas, but the different,
00:29:00.160
and I hope I've admitted every single one and repented for it.
00:29:02.640
But Toria Nuland, like everybody else, she's just one example, in this city, they wreck
00:29:08.520
something, they get promoted, and they move on to the next thing.
00:29:13.100
Now, I would hire, and I have hired, a bunch of convicted felons, because I like redemption
00:29:23.460
As a former drinker who's been sober 21 years, I love that.
00:29:27.340
But I'm telling you, the one group I would never hire or allow in my house is the
00:29:32.560
person who commits a crime and never admits it, because that person is scary, damaged,
00:29:37.720
also very boring, because everything that person says is about hiding the lie.
00:29:48.500
So I'll just end on this, and then I'll take your hostile questions.
00:29:52.000
If you want to survive this moment and protect what you have and have even a possibility of
00:30:01.200
making this country and the world better, you can do a lot.
00:30:07.680
And you do it by telling the truth in a way that's completely unashamed at every possible
00:30:13.480
opportunity in a gentle, polite, thoughtful, compassionate, maybe even empathetic way to
00:30:19.780
the people around you, but without ever stopping, without ever being embarrassed for a minute,
00:30:25.580
without ever not smiling, without a single scowl or any hostility.
00:30:43.360
I am not going to say that men can become women by wishing it so, because that's a lie.
00:30:48.900
It won't take many people to adopt that position before the entire system comes crumbling down,
00:30:59.260
And not just lies that are politically expedient or in some way make the people who tell them richer.
00:31:11.160
Oh, everyone who's lying is doing so because they're making money.
00:31:13.880
Yeah, a lot of people are making money on scams.
00:32:05.640
this man has a hostile one why are you wearing khaki trousers at a black tie event okay i'll
00:32:20.100
admit it yeah just a short question oh dave hey how you doing good to see you brother
00:32:26.480
hey uh do you like melania do i like oh i was like i was like gelato flavor uh you mean the
00:32:35.080
former first lady of course yeah i like her i don't know her really i've met her a couple of
00:32:39.400
times i mean her counsel this week about you'd be an excellent vp okay
00:32:46.620
i mean i'm quite well suited to politics as you can see
00:32:55.200
i'm sorry i know there are politicians here i just can't help it and i know you're not none of you
00:33:01.440
are in this category but i just hate anyone who wants power i just think it's a super ugly thing
00:33:05.620
to want and increasingly as i get older i hate anyone who wants too much money too i think i
00:33:10.860
think greed i think greed's a category sorry i think that remember that when they were like oh you know
00:33:15.900
you're not allowed to say greed is real what do you mean it's not real it's totally real i don't have
00:33:19.820
greed i do have gluttony so but whatever it's all kind of i think you'd be great well thank you i i
00:33:28.140
don't i mean i don't know if it's on camera or not but i god would have to yell at me very loud
00:33:35.660
to do that like i mean you know i mean my four kids are gone and i live the most idyllic life
00:33:44.580
you know with my wife and her many dogs and in nature and everything and i just the idea of being
00:33:50.040
around politicians no no offense and by the way i support your congressional victory but um
00:33:54.380
it's so repulsive to me they're so awful not all of them i mean i just i was a huge fan of yours and
00:34:04.820
massey and there are a couple others i really like um and i have family members work in politics and
00:34:10.220
all that i'm not it's but but most of them are just the worst so sleazy and the other thing i will
00:34:16.040
say about it is it's a hall of mirrors everyone's got like nine different motives but only declaring
00:34:21.660
one it's like what is even going on everything's some weird bank shot trying to manipulate this
00:34:26.360
person to get that and it's like that's exactly the environment i detest i wouldn't have a single
00:34:32.360
person like that in my life not one person every person you know i don't in washington intelligence
00:34:37.320
is considered a moral category in my life it's not like i think my dogs are fine people and i mean that
00:34:42.240
and they're not geniuses by human standards probably you know probably go to like elon not columbia
00:34:49.360
you know what i mean um so it's not like a matter of cleverness who's smart or not
00:34:56.540
it's who's straightforward if you have to question a person's motive for a single second i don't want
00:35:02.560
to have dinner with you in fact i won't i can't even deal with it and politics is like every creepy
00:35:09.320
weird sexually ambiguous high school class president comes to the same city and then starts attacking each
00:35:15.800
other no no you know what i mean yeah you serve there talk about weird personal lives holy smokes
00:35:29.860
and it's totally and i'm coming out of a lifetime in television where people have like you know i was
00:35:36.400
polygamous or whatever it's pretty dark but it's nothing compared to the congress oh my gosh
00:35:41.400
and it's not even fun you know it doesn't even look that fun anyway so to answer your question
00:35:47.800
excuse me well i would never look i i have no interest in that i'll just be totally clear i've
00:35:54.900
no interest i've no interest in that i've never been in politics the other thing i i really believe in
00:35:58.540
if you know anyone who works for me i only give one lecture which is stay in your freaking lane
00:36:03.840
and i really believe that stay in your freaking lane and that is a theological point for me as well as
00:36:10.000
a matter of observed reality i don't think you can be whatever you want to be i think that's like
00:36:14.040
the most ridiculous lie ever it's some post-war fantasy that comes out of the gi bill
00:36:17.620
like so many bad things and that's just not true i believe in human nature which is immutable
00:36:23.880
it never changes and if you're interested in reading books from 2 000 years ago you will see
00:36:28.620
people are motivated by the same they're the same people they're just like babylonian but they're
00:36:32.940
recognizably people because that people don't change and so that's what i believe and i believe
00:36:38.800
every person is made with strengths and weaknesses skills and deficits and i certainly see it in my
00:36:46.380
life there are some things i'm really good at and some things i can't do at all parallel park do my
00:36:50.100
taxes like i wouldn't even attempt either one of those things you know i'm dyslexic and or whatever so
00:36:55.920
do the thing that you were made to do and when you do that you'll be happy you'll probably make some
00:37:01.820
money doing it because high skill tends to produce in this country success but the last thing you should
00:37:07.740
ever do is decide because you're good in one thing you'd be good in another but what i really
00:37:12.720
want to do is direct said the girl who wins best actress no act you're good at it you know what i
00:37:17.500
mean lebron james just bounce your little ball or whatever stop telling me about the vax you know
00:37:22.840
like stay in your freaking lane and so the idea of going from pun god i'm i'm out of control and i know
00:37:29.980
that i know that i know that um but the idea of going from my job which is like say whatever you
00:37:37.160
want especially now since i have i'm unemployed you know it's like awesome uh but to go from being
00:37:44.820
like a well-paid street corner schizophrenic to like a politician like just kind of hard to envision
00:37:51.160
you know last question oh make it a good one well this is a tactical question for you since
00:38:02.420
you've talked so much about truth first of all hold on let me get his in okay sorry sorry sorry
00:38:07.300
no no no no no but now that we're getting into tactics i'm going to need some chemical assistance
00:38:11.780
okay it's not a sin zin is not a sin i'm just saying i already told you i'm not a theologian i'm
00:38:16.580
going to pronounce it anyway okay okay ready well first of all thank you terry so much for your
00:38:20.920
leadership so grateful um so i'm a mom of five kids uh and we're actually i went to uc san diego
00:38:28.660
in la jolla we moved here from california about four years ago we went into the fairfax county
00:38:34.100
public schools because we were told when we moved here that fairfax county was the best schools that
00:38:38.660
you could be in so coming from california trust me it was actually a little bit better that being said
00:38:44.860
um covid really opened our eyes to the curriculum right and so like many parents we moved our kids
00:38:50.840
to a private catholic school in mcclain and um what's happened is the schools are still failing
00:38:57.560
our kids the education is not very good and when you question you're you're kind of stuck because
00:39:04.780
the same teachers that are not being held accountable are the ones who give your kids the
00:39:10.940
recommendation on the next school that they will go to well i know how it works right so you have
00:39:15.820
like my kid who was a superstar in math ended up failing her grade on the on the state uh test last
00:39:25.100
year she in fifth grade she was on trend to be in honors math she wanted to be an architect sixth grade
00:39:32.340
she failed her class i had to spend the entire summer tutoring her through math class we were debating
00:39:38.240
whether or not we were to put our kids out of catholic schools to homeschool them and so now
00:39:44.000
i'm just thinking like what do we do if i go back to the school and say i want to hold you accountable
00:39:49.920
the recommendation i'm going to get from my kids to get to another private school is going to be
00:39:53.600
terrible so the tactical question is what do you do you have the public school system that wants to
00:39:57.840
mask your kids uh enforce the vaccines uh keep them out of the schools indoctrinate them and then i have
00:40:03.520
the catholic school who's basically not holding their teachers accountable what is the answer how
00:40:08.400
do you hold this establishment the elitist of the education system accountable for what they're doing
00:40:13.520
to our kids it's such a great question it's the obsession of every parent with kids at home and i just
00:40:18.880
have the true blessing of having missed a lot of it my our youngest is 21 our fourth child is 21
00:40:27.440
our oldest is 29 so they you know it was bad but it wasn't like now we're going to destroy your kids lives
00:40:33.920
which is where you know where it is especially in the private schools and i'll just be honest we
00:40:38.000
send our kids we literally send our kids all our kids the same high school that we went to my wife
00:40:42.720
and i so you know i'll be honest we didn't really think about it that much because we you know we
00:40:49.280
were we educated our kids the same way we were educated the same way our parents our grandparents
00:40:52.560
educated it's like we just followed a template that we're only now in midlife realizing was like insane
00:40:58.480
and and we're just so grateful that all four of our kids turned out as well as they did and they're
00:41:03.760
as close to each other and to us as they are but it could have ended very very differently and so
00:41:07.920
i think the first thing is knowing you clearly already do know that this matters really more than
00:41:13.600
anything with a child not simply because of the material they'll learn or not learn but because
00:41:18.000
they're molded as people by their peers in these schools away from your attention all day long
00:41:23.120
um and we just didn't really fully understand the stakes of that at the time again because of the
00:41:28.960
circumstance we were in just like repeating the same formula that had been applied to us as children
00:41:33.520
um so i would just remember that the recommendations of other parents mean nothing
00:41:39.040
because 90 of the parents in the affluent zip codes i've lived my whole life in care mostly about
00:41:44.720
prestige doesn't mean they're bad people but they're trained to care about the brand name oh
00:41:49.520
my daughter goes to ncs you know or sidwell are you serious you freak you literally sent your kid
00:41:57.600
to sidwell friends no come on now you're joking i'd rather send my kid to like work in the carnival
00:42:05.600
i'm serious go be a carny i'll see you next spring when it rolls through town like the outcome is better
00:42:13.840
than sending him to some place like national cathedral school or and that in the world i lived in almost
00:42:18.720
like a hundred percent of that and so you know other parents are not a lot not because they're
00:42:26.640
bad people who don't love their kids but because they don't get they're not thoughtful and they're
00:42:31.360
the way that schools are set up in the united states particularly private schools and colleges
00:42:36.800
it's the it's a prestige system it doesn't no one even knows what happens at princeton and nobody
00:42:42.400
even cares if little dylan gets into princeton that's a massive win
00:42:45.200
and if little dylan like becomes a you know complete self-hating freak or trans or something
00:42:51.840
at princeton at least he went to princeton then you can tell your friends i mean that is literally
00:42:55.680
the attitude among good people who love their children they're not evil at all they're just
00:43:01.440
thoughtless and shallow like most people and my feeling is especially now that i've reflected on it
00:43:06.880
i've already told you that i was thoughtless and shallow just like oh you know we went to boarding
00:43:10.320
school you're going too that's not a good route that's not a good reason and my children are so
00:43:14.960
nice to me that they never throw it at me or not very often occasionally there's too much wine that
00:43:20.560
it does come up but um but be thoughtful and i think it's really simple like your kids are your treasure
00:43:30.640
the most important act of creation you'll ever commit is having a child is reproducing
00:43:35.520
and the most sacred duty you will ever have is to protect and guide that child through childhood
00:43:40.480
and everyone knows that of course that's not a controversial statement but how many feel it
00:43:45.760
and now i think more feel it because the the stakes are obviously so so high and the perils are so
00:43:50.560
out in the open now so out in the open get molested in the bathroom and fairfax county and
00:43:55.920
then you know you get arrested for for saying something about anyway last thing i'll say is
00:44:00.880
here's what i don't understand why don't parents get together i don't know what a catholic school
00:44:06.000
tuition in fairfax county is but you know it's a lot per kid and certainly private schools a lot
00:44:11.840
why don't they get together like like three like-minded families and just hire a tutor
00:44:16.800
and teach all the kids i don't understand that i mean homeschooling is obviously the best they went
00:44:22.720
all the spelling bees that's all i need to know and schools are terrible homeschooling the reason we
00:44:29.840
never did is we didn't have time and but we if we had taken the tuition that we spent on saint
00:44:35.920
patrick's episcopal day school in washington dc probably the worst school in this country
00:44:40.800
all four of my kids went there if we taken the money we spent i worked a second job to pay for
00:44:45.360
that i hosted a morning show oh try that for four years okay um to pay for that if we'd taken that
00:44:52.720
money and just said we're gonna hire like three bright kids just out of college to you know
00:44:58.560
i don't know read the iliad aloud or whatever i'm serious it's like how about read the bible
00:45:05.120
we would have been so much better off and we could have gotten like an awesome hunting
00:45:14.000
why don't people do that i mean that's not like a super creative solution is it
00:45:19.840
if you find a parent in this room who lives in your county and you have roughly similar views
00:45:24.960
why don't you get together be honest about how much you're spending in education
00:45:27.840
ask yourself oh wow we're spending 114 000 or whatever it is this year could we hire a smart
00:45:33.600
person to teach our kids together they wouldn't be weird and isolated like those homeschoolers
00:45:37.520
supposedly are i don't think that's true by the way teachers union propaganda but whatever just to
00:45:41.600
ensure that they don't become weird they're all together in your kitchen learning great stuff
00:45:45.360
why is that bad why is that hard why does no one do that because people aren't radical enough in
00:45:50.400
defense of their own children that's why ha thank you