Capital Hills to Die On

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Father, thank you for this time. Thank you that we live in a country where we can talk about these things inside of a church. Two people without fear of retribution. Help us to honor you and what we see and what we think. And convict us if we don’t. And I just thank you that to be a part of a church like this and that here we’re talking about this where this is the first time I’ve been in a church where this has even been thought about. I mean, yeah, thought about and done much less the way it is today. So help us to honor you in what we say and what we do. Amen. My title that was thought up was Capital or Hills to Die On, or Capital Hills to Die On.

So you have capital and you could have an A in there or you could have capital with an O in there. So capital building or capital to spend on or to collect the hills to die on. what it was, they knew that I’d say stuff that maybe the other guys didn’t want to say. So I…

So first thing I have to tell you is these are my personal opinions, okay? Not necessarily am I speaking for the Elder Board or Trinity Evangel Church, but the four of us do make up a unique blend and I love it that each one of us is strong enough to have those opinions and keep having them and the way that it shuffles together and makes this church I think is really good and it’s a tough thing to do normally speaking and all of us have been parts of other churches where that’s not the case. Everybody’s kind of tippy-toeing around what they’re going to say or how they’re going to say it. Maybe not theologically, but certainly politically or involved in the community, stuff like that.

We are not that way. We want to be involved. We want our people involved. So I have been involved in politics ever since I can remember, basically, as a kid. My father was very political. And my grandfather on my mother’s side was politically involved in the politics in Los Angeles, but more in the religious groups. But they still exerted political influence in LA in the 50s and 40s. Then we moved to Arizona. And my dad and his brother started a bearing business. and it got to be successful. And when Barry Goldwater, who was the senator from Arizona, ran for the presidency in 64, my dad was Goldwater’s advance man.

And what that meant was he went to all the big stadiums in the countries and organized those so that when the candidate would come, 50,000 people or whatever would be in the stadium, and he would arrange that the police would meet him and all of that kind of stuff and see to it that all the legions that were setting up chairs or doing whatever, all those things got organized. This was the 1964 presidency for the campaign against Lyndon Johnson. And I was able to come with my dad at that time. I was a senior in high school and my dad would let me come on certain of the trips that were close to Arizona, so I got to go to the Dodger Stadium rally and another event in California with him, and I got to follow him around, and he would take me into the meeting rooms and stuff, and I got to sit behind him as they would all sit around, you know, with their notebooks and papers, and what are we gonna do?

You know, the police chief is only gonna send 100 police, and how are we gonna arrange that? So I got to be sitting there. I didn’t say anything, but I got to listen to a lot of those meetings. As part of that, I got to be in a meeting where Walter Annenberg told Ronald Reagan that he was going to run for governor. And Reagan said, I do not want to run for governor. I like the GE theater. I don’t want to do that. I’m very comfortable where I am. And Annenberg said, you’re going to run for governor the next time. And I thought, whoa, dude, who’s that guy? So we got out of the room. I asked my dad, and he said, that’s the guy that owns TV Guide, and he owns a big publishing firm.

And he’s really rich, and he knows what’s going on. Oh, OK. So that was kind of interesting to look back on that. And during that campaign, my dad spent a lot of his own personal money to travel around and do different things. And as the campaign went on, it was really apparent that Goldwater was going to lose in a landslide. And they had a lot of political dirt on Johnson that they had films of him so drunk that he had his face in the plate at political dinners in New Mexico and stuff. And they wanted to run it, but they wouldn’t run it. And my dad kept saying, what the heck? Why don’t you run it? Because on their side, they were running articles in national newspapers that Goldwater was nuts, that there is a law called the Goldwater rule that you cannot, as a psychiatrist, declare a political candidate insane unless you have examined him.

They have now tried that on Trump, and that Goldwater Rule came up. But they had like 1,100 psychiatrists all testify. And they wrote a book in what was the National Republic or what magazine put it all in. It’s in this book, and this is the recommendation I have for you guys if you haven’t seen it. It’s really interesting if you think I’m just blowing smoke about this stuff. So during that, when they realized they weren’t going to win, Goldwater and one of the meetings just said, well, you know, we gave it a good try. And so what? So what? And my dad, when he came home, he went, they knew they weren’t going to win all along.

What the heck? We wasted all this money. We did all this stuff. And as he was coming home from that meeting, they told him, look out from now on, in your life you will be audited by the IRS. One of the political ploys of that time was that they would turn the Internal Revenue Service, the winning party, would give all the names of the people that worked for the losing party to the IRS and then they would be investigated. So that whole thing was not a surprise to me when Obama’s IRS, when they put that guy up, when he went after the Tea Party advocates, it was just standard history in the United States. Another thing that’s shown in this book, because a lot of these people think, oh, this using the government this way has just never been done in the FBI and all that nonsense.

That has always been done. Any president that got elected when J. Edgar Hoover was the leader of the FBI, he would show up with files on that particular guy and put those files on the desk with the president and look at him and say, I’m the director of the FBI and these are your files. So, you know, and that’s the end of that discussion. If you want these files out, then come after me. If you don’t, don’t come after me. So, at that point, not until he died, did the FBI change. Then they changed all the laws, and what happened just in this last situation, the FBI has gone way out of bounds, and you’re gonna see that a lot of this, well, they’ve already admitted that they illegally spied on Trump, and they put the stuff out illegally, and formed it with Hillary Clinton’s paid for stuff.

And you’ll see as time goes on that they’ve already admitted that, and now it’s in the court system, and so it’ll drag on here, and you’ll see how that works. But that’s not a big surprise. The winning party has always used those tools for that. That’s wrong. It shouldn’t be, but that’s the way it works. So as you see these things, you wonder, what am I going to do as a little guy? And I have a, you know, what hill to die on? Who do I vote for? All these guys are a bunch of scumbags. All they want to do is get money for themselves and everything else. And that’s true. And that’s because we haven’t involved ourselves right from the bottom line.

The bottom line is all politics is local, right? So we go to the local school board meetings were the council meetings here in Marysville. And like Jonathan was saying the other day, he went to a coffee clatch and ran over a chuck hole to get there. That chuck hole got brought up. That’s politics. They are there to serve the public. They should fill the chuck hole. It should be done right. And you hold them accountable that way. When it gets to Washington, we have so convoluted it and so made it so big, if you go and see your senator when you have something you want to display to him or your congressman, say you go to your congressman first because he’s kind of lower on the level, display your problem.

He represents a couple hundred thousand people. He didn’t care. You’re one vote. And yeah, I’ll turn you over to this staff member or this staff member and we all know how that works when you try to get the machinery of the government to help you in how big it is, which gets into the whole discussion of the deep state and how do we really change anything. So you become the president just like we see, and you’re now the executive officer, you’re in charge of foreign diplomacy, and what happens? The diplomat says, well, I don’t like what you’re doing, I’m not gonna do what you’re doing. You serve at the pleasure of the president, he can can you get somebody in there to do what he wants done.

But if he does that, now he’s invading that great civil servant that’s been there 30 years and da da da da da, and I’ve been an ambassador to here and there and all of that. Where was that guy trained? What was he trained in? What kind of thinking does he have? Is it the thinking that you wanna see there? Or is it the thinking of a scholar at Harvard that then goes over and he’s a Rhodes scholar in Europe. He’s learned all the one world ways. They all think, you know, one world, we’re just a part of that world, we’re just a piece of it, the declining United States. That’s their thinking. You get in, you say, no, no, no, we’re gonna run this, we’re gonna do it our way.

Oh, well, that just isn’t done. We don’t tell people that. It’s like when Trump said, well, why aren’t they paying their fair share at the UN? Well, they never have. Oh, well, we’re gonna stop that. Pay your fair share. You can’t say that. You know, what do you mean you can’t say that? All of a sudden they started paying. And the guy that runs the UN came back to Trump just last month and said, the dues are being paid on such an incredible rate that we now have an abundance of money from what we had before. Just because those countries that never paid, and we let them get away with it, didn’t pay. So there is a whole thinking that has just never happened since World War II.

When Marshall rebuilt Europe, we let them all slide, and those presidents since then never fulfilled that. And what did they do? They built up a huge, as it said, swamp in DC, where the lobbyists are paying them to get the laws fixed. They write the laws, then they pay it. And then we’re wondering, well, how did they get all these laws? And what did these laws say? There’s a couple of books written, and Alan Dershowitz wrote a newer version of the book that was written back in the 60s on how many laws there are in the United States. It’s figured in the book in the 60s, well, I think that book was written in the 80s now, 80s, that there are every day a citizen of the United States breaks five to six federal laws.

So you could be put in jail for laws that have been written, but they aren’t enforced. And they keep writing more laws. Well, wait just a second. If we’re already breaking five laws, how come we aren’t in jail, and why don’t they enforce those laws? But what they do is go write another law. How crazy is that? And that’s what we’re living under. And everybody says, well, they ought to make a law for that. They ought to make a law for that. Well, most of the time, if you investigate it, There is a law for that, you know, don’t do that, you know, so don’t steal that money. Oh, well, it’s You can’t do that. That kind needs that money or whatever. It’s crazy. I mean we live under a crazy system. So Instead of making more laws. Let’s get rid of some of them instead of voting in some why don’t they all have a thing?

And get rid of all these laws. They don’t Even enforce or look at you know The IRS, it’s a great one. They do not know what the IRS law says. They just get away with whatever they interpret it as. So when your accountant goes and meets with them, he knows it’s a big mess. So he just goes in there to make a deal for you. So they’re satisfied they’re getting some money and you’re paying and you’re not squawking all that much. So it’s great. Just keep it up. They don’t know what the IRS tax code is. I mean, you know, this high with all these sub paragraphs and all that stuff, it’s crazy, it’s absolutely crazy. And that’s what we live under.

And so when you, how do you get a handle on all this? What is a hill to even die on? What’s important? How do you even attack this thing? Or who do you decide to vote into office? Most of the time in my life, you always were voting just for the lesser of two evils or a guy that was just gonna do it slower than the last guy. Because think about it, if I’m a congressman, I go and I get, I don’t know what the salary of a congressman is these days. Is it 270? 170 a year or something. Well these guys serve for a couple years, five years, 10 years, and all of a sudden they’re living in five million dollar houses and they got all these things and where does this money come from?

How did they get this money? Well, they get it because the lobbyist comes in and says, you vote for my drug bill. We’ll set you up in this, and we’ll give you a stock option, and we’ll do this. They get to do all that because they don’t live under the laws we live under. If you did nothing else but got a law passed that said, everybody that’s in the federal government has to live under the same laws that the citizens have to live under, there’d be a whole different change. All these people live under a different health care system than we do. You think they really care about your healthcare? Like Nancy Pelosi, they pass the bill.

We gotta pass the bill to know what’s in it. What? Just think about that. We gotta pass the bill to know what’s in it. Well, don’t pass it till you know what’s in it. Well, we can’t do that. We have to get this done. What? Hello. It’s just incredible. And we just sit there day after day and listen to that and let it happen. But it’s time for us to stand up and say, enough. That’s enough. No more of this. This is silly. You can’t be done that way. It shouldn’t be done that way. I met a lot of people in my life. After the Go Water debacle, that campaign, I ended up going to college. I did not do well because I drank a lot.

I don’t think I had a sober breath from the moment I arrived to the moment they kicked me out. And they kicked me out mid-semester my first year. And then, it was a bad time not to go to college because if you didn’t go to college, you got to go to Vietnam. And so I said, oh my goodness, I do not wanna go to Vietnam and be in a ditch and have people shooting at me. So I’ll join the Navy, I’ll beat that system.

So that’s what I did. But when I did that, they sent me to electronic school on the east coast and I ended up hitchhiking all over the east coast going to museums and stuff because I had an interest in art. And I met a guy in New York that was a sponsor of one of the people that I’d bought art that I made. And he took a liking to me. He owned a restaurant up in the Upper East Side. And I didn’t really know who this guy was other than he knew these people. He told me, come back to New York hitchhike up here next week, and I’ll take you up to meet this artist. And then I’ll introduce you to these other people, and that kind of thing.

Well, I ended up meeting people like Norman Cousins, Mortimer Adler, at lunches that this guy would have at his restaurant. I didn’t really know who these people were at the time. I just thought they were old dudes that were, you know, they were supposed to be educated. I didn’t know who they were. And I would argue with these guys, and he thought it was hysterical that this stupid sailor would hitchhike up from Norfolk and talk to these people. And so he kept introducing me around. And so got to know them. And then I realized, oh my goodness, these are the big muckety mucks. And then one time, Dr. Spock was there.

And this was during when he was protesting the Vietnam War. So I had lunch with him, and at this point, I’d already been to Vietnam, and I realized what a disaster it was. We were there, but we weren’t there to win. And we would go and shell a village right near the DMZ, and then we’d come back. The next, we’d wait about a week and a half. We’d come back, shell them against. And when we’d look at the range finder from the five-inch guns, you could see all the villagers. They’d go up on this hill over here, and then we’d shell the village, and then they’d be standing on the hill looking at us, and then we’d back up and not shoot anymore.

They’d just wander down the hill, go back and build their little grass shacks. I’m saying to the weapons officer, I said, what the heck are we doing here? He says, oh well, they’re on the other side, or they’re right near the DMZ. We really don’t wanna do anything. We think they’re a bad village, but we’re really not sure. So we shell them, and then we let them go back in, and then we shell them again next week. And I said, well, how about that ground pounder that’s up there actually having to go into that village? Oh, that’s not our worry. You know, that’s that guy’s worry that your orders are now going there and check it out.

Ridiculous, we weren’t there to win. And obviously, it was a disaster. And an undeclared war, as Jonathan said. So all of a sudden it came on me, I said, wait a minute. I thought, I read all these books. I was a big, you know, I’d read the books about World War II and everything. We’re there to win. You know, we’re going to kill those Nazis. We’re going to, you know, uh-uh. We didn’t do that. What do we do? We got to a point, and then we just went, OK, we’re done. Declared winners, and we leave. And out goes the helicopters, the buddy hanging on. You know, take me too, you know. And crazy. So anyway, during 1968, when this time period is, I started protesting the Vietnam War in New York Dr. Spock and these kind of people Norman Cousins and then Friends of mine who was a friend of a guy on the ship. He was teaching grade school in in Oh shoot, what’s the upper?

Queens and He would go to school. He’s teaching the fourth grade. This is 1968. This guy’s about 23 years old He’d go to school with a 38 in his coat pocket, loaded to Queens to teach these kids in the fourth grade. And I said, that’s kind of a rough school you’re in. He said, you better believe it is. Now this is 1968. Now it’s just not even nuttier than that. Well, he said, I got this guy, Mark Rudd. He’s up at Columbia and I met him and we need to go to these meetings. He’s really interesting. So off we go. And this started the SDS, which is the Students for Democratic Society, which ended up to be the people that built the dynamite and blew up the townhomes and all of that.

I was in the first meetings of those guys. I’m listening to this guy and he’s going, I’m declared war and this and that and that’s bad and we’re not there to win. And I went, yeah, he makes a lot of sense. I agree with that. Luckily, I didn’t get further involved in it or I would have been let off to prison somehow. But anyway, I got out of the Navy, went back and started a steakhouse in northern Arizona. But anyway, that’s my kind of mixture into the government like that. I ran a steakhouse for a year, then I moved back to New York City, knew all these people got involved in the art business, knew a lot of the crazies and that kind of thing.

So as that’s going along, I’m watching New York City government and City Council government of New York from really left-wing people like Herman de Bedeo. He was one of the first Latino powerhouses in New York. David Dinkins was another one that would hang with these people. And I’m sitting there listening to these guys, and they’re all saying, the government has to be responsible to us. And I said, yeah, it should be, but it’s really not happening that way. And these are all left-wing crazy people. And I’m sitting there listening to them, knowing I’m conservative, but they’re saying kind of the same thing I’m saying.

So I’m trying to figure out what’s going on here. And what’s going on is we built this big machinery and it doesn’t respond to the people at all. Because the people that are in the machinery and in the little bureaucratic slots, they’re just part of this big machine and all they’re worried about is now I’m a GS10, I just got to get to GS12 and then I’m set for life. So don’t, you know, just keep pushing the paper and don’t worry about it and don’t get in trouble. And that’s crazy because there’s no way you can’t fire them. They’re in the system and you can’t do anything about it. So how does the government respond to us?

And what do we do, you know, as Christians? Now at this point, I’m not a Christian. I’m just wandering around trying to do business and all the rest of it. Once I got saved, to me it was, oh, just the gospel. And so I realized that these are godless people, and all they’re doing is suppressing the truth, and that’s their problem. What they need is the gospel, and that’s all there was to it. And so I just realized, politics is just bad. It’s just only this. So I went through all of that, and then all of a sudden I realize, OK, well, I got this stuff down. I studied this theology. That’s good. But what are we going to do with all this information?

How do we get it done? We should be changing the world. Because everybody is not going to respond to the gospel, but we do have an influence. And we do have a good influence that even people that may not accept the gospel, they like the fruit of what we’re doing. We make nice stuff. We’re honest. We don’t cheat them. We don’t kill them or whatever. So we’re good citizens. So why wouldn’t I want this to be better and better? I had no idea that that could happen. And the people I hung with, they didn’t really know. They kind of would talk about, oh, this guy’s bad. We should vote for that guy or whatever. But to actually go out and take a stand and everything, didn’t really come along until we discovered Kuiper and the whole idea that if he’s lowered over all, he’s lowered over politics, he’s lowered over your business, all of that stuff.

So once you get that in mind, now you realize, wait a minute, then we should be able to participate in this in a right way. And that’s a big realization. Once you know that, now you’re a strong weapon to be had. So what do you do with that? Then you start discovering where are the hills I want to die on? Where are the hills I want to fight on? And the whole idea, first you’ve got to do, is study what is this system? And I think Jim and Jonathan have kind of introduced you to the first things of it is that at first, you know, do we want a strong central government or a weak central government, federalist, anti-federalist?

And you have to study a little bit and understand. But there are a lot of good sources to listen to. If none of you have listened to it yet, get on Hillsdale College, sign up for their free course and take their course on the Constitution. It’s really stupidly simple. You just put your earbuds in and listen to the guy lecture to you about the Constitution and they’ll take you through all the amendments of it and everything and have a nice discussion and take you on and then you can delve deeper and have another guy expound on this thing. Pretty soon you build on this foundation and you have something to talk about and And what you quickly realize is that we are not running this government like it was set up to be run.

We’ve gone amuck. It’s time to start trimming it back and getting it back in the hands of the people. And then you’re going to start to realize at certain steps in the United States that government took way more power and gathered it to itself so that they could have the power and take it away from you, the citizen, to get it changed if you don’t like what’s going to happen. So one of the big things that happened is Woodwell Wilson comes along, and he is the first of the modern day progressives, and he takes and rips the whole thing up. This book has a whole two page part of the speech that he made in 1907 before he became president, when he was still president of Princeton University.

And he was a Calvinist Presbyterian, And he started to talk about how the Constitution and the whole setup of the government is fluid and flexible, and how we need to twist it around for the modern day world. And he’s the guy that brought us the League of Nations after World War I. Well, he didn’t do it. His wife did, because he had a stroke. And she actually ran the government into World War I. But it’s an interesting thing to study. He’s the one that pushed that. He’s also the one that brought us income tax and the federal banking system. And when you start studying that, you go, oh my goodness, how do they make money?

Who’s behind this money? How’s this done? Get done. You’re going to learn a lot of stuff that you’re going to go, well, that’s not right. Something ought to be done about that, or this ought to be done about that. So once you become informed on that, then you realize, OK, how can we turn this monster ship that’s going along this way, how do you even turn it? How do you stop all this stuff? And what you do is one thing at a time. And the crazy thing that’s happened in the past three years is this crazy candidate that comes along to run for president and is absolutely outside of the whole Washington establishment.

All Trump ever did was pay politicians to make sure that he would get shipments of his building materials to build his building or pay that politician to make sure that his building permit got signed or whatever. I mean, you hear him always talk about Schumer and Nadler and stuff. He’s, ah, I’ve known Jerry Nadler for years. I used to pay him off to get this done, and I used to pay him off to get that done. And he was just talking like a businessman. That’s what you got to do. I mean, I’ll never forget in New York, I’m sitting at his art gallery, And the garbage truck comes up, and I was alone in the gallery. The owner was out to lunch with another guy.

And the garbage man comes in. Now, the guy pulls the garbage truck up, tries it. This is right at Madison Avenue in 64th Street. It’s a very swanky neighborhood. Pulls this very fancy garbage truck up. The mafia kind of all painted nice. Gets out of the garbage truck, walks in the thing, and says, where’s our Christmas gift? Now, I’m working in this place. And the guy, he’s asking me, where’s my Christmas gift? And I said, I’m sorry, I just work here. I’m not sure. Well, where’s Deona? And I said, well, he’s at the lunch right now. Will you tell him I’ll be back in a couple hours? I want the Christmas gift. And so he goes back and gets in the garbage truck.

Now, this guy’s picking up the garbage, right? So an hour later, I’m standing there and up in the front. And the guy comes, oh, I’m sorry I wasn’t there. This is the guy that owned the gallery. This guy had been the print teacher at Harvard University everything before he started this ark gallery. I mean this guy was a real muck in the muck.

He is kissing this guy’s butt. I mean, what can I do for you? I’m sorry I wasn’t here for the Christmas. He hands him an envelope. Guy says, that’ll be all right, thanks. He gets in the truck and drives off. I said, what’s going on there? He says, well, if I don’t make that payment, the garbage never gets picked up. And I said, I’m sorry, you pay the garbage bill to have the garbage man pick it. And I said, oh no, you don’t understand that’s part of the payment that goes to the mafia and I said What and he said that’s just part of the way businesses done here. That’s just the way it is Now at that point you go wait a minute something’s wrong here, but that’s just part of the action in 1969 in New York City, that’s the way it’s done and you go this something’s really screwball here Well, it goes on and on and on I’m some of you that lived in big cities You know could tell this story We have a funny story about Gail’s mom. She voted three times for Roosevelt and got paid What a dime each time she voted again, right?

Yeah, or 50 cent she said Yeah And that’s Chicago politics all along I mean it’s a well-known story that daily delivered Chicago for Kennedy and West Virginia was delivered to him because of Joe Kennedy Kennedy paying off West Virginians. And that’s just the way it is. That stuff needs to be stopped. We can stop that. We could be part of the stuff to stop that. And we are now in a point where the crazies that have allowed this to happen, they’re getting filled up to here with people pooping on the street, living on the street, taking their stuff. I mean, Los Angeles now, you’ve got to study. You got to steal $900 in the state of California for they’ll arrest you.

Now if you have a little store and somebody comes in and steals something from you, 900 bucks worth of stuff, that ruins your day. You’re not gonna make much money if that happens to you. And that guy, they won’t even come and arrest him. Or if they do, they just give him a ticket. He doesn’t go to jail for that. That’s crazy. That’s nuts. And so, you know, it’s time that the boat gets turned around, so we need to be into that. So the things too, when you study, you have to understand there’s theocracy. That’s gonna happen. Sean talked about that happening this morning. Who’s gonna come with the rod of iron breaking the pot shards and run the show?

We believe Jesus Christ is gonna do that in the millennium. He’s gonna run the show. He’s gonna take over. That’s a theocracy. Israel had a theocracy, what did they say? Give us a king, give us a king. So they got a king, who’d they get? Saul, ooh, not too good. Oh my goodness, now we got kings. You wanted a king, God said, well I’ll give you a king. So on it goes, kings go on and on and on, then we got the British and then we got European stuff and then America comes along after all these times and they keep evolving and they make this system like we have that has allowed us to progress as we have in a Christian Calvinistic type nation.

Unbelievable progress, even with all the messes. This is an amazing system that pumps this out. I mean, the capitalistic system with all its abuses, look what’s happened in the American economy just in three years worth of taking the limitations off, just allowing the natural resources we have to be produced to where we are energy independent. We no longer depend on Saudi Arabia for oil. In fact, we’re exporting natural gas. We have three big plants that are being built in New Orleans to bring natural gas to Europe, which then cuts out the Russian pipeline that feeds Eastern Europe. So if they get that up and running and everything done, Now, that part of Europe is not dependent on Russia.

Uh-oh, that means Donald Trump just ruined Putin’s business. Oh, they must not be all that big of friends. Something’s wrong there. So it’s crazy. I mean, and the people, you know, oh, we can’t have all these crazy fuels and all that kind of stuff. The air coming out of a coal-fired power plant, when they have the scrubbers going and everything, is cleaner than the air going in. I know that because the people that make that packing, we do business with them. And they cleaned that up back, my goodness, 15 years ago. And everybody’s screaming, oh, coal is so dirty. No, it isn’t. When it’s burned properly and cleaned properly in the stacks.

But now we don’t even need that because we’ve got so much natural gas, we can just make it with natural gas, which is the cleanest burning fuel that you have. So it’s all just crazy what’s going on. So anyway, as you study all of that, politics are local. So then, remember, we are not a democracy. We are a republic, which means we vote on people to go to Washington to vote for us, and they’re responsible to us, and then we can drag them back. Good old Woodrow Wilson, he took the Senate out of our state’s hands in 1913. The senators in each state used to be elected by the state legislatures. The state legislature would send the senator to Washington.

If the senator wasn’t doing the state’s business properly, they could call him back right away. I mean, they heard he did something they didn’t like. They could vote and call him back and put another guy in his place. Now we have just created a super Congress where the senators have voted for six years and the congressmen are only voted for two years. But they’re only responsible of the people that are electing them. It doesn’t work anymore. So the state gets cut out of the action. So if the state was that way, your state representative would have a lot of power on the state’s business and controlling that business instead of everything being centralized in Washington, DC, where they have K Street where all the lobbyists live and all they do is come in and help the senators and all the people write the laws.

Most of the time staffers and lobbyists are actually writing the laws that get passed. And they pass these laws and they’re like this. You know, how do you ever pass a law like this that has all these little clauses in it? What are they doing? You know, if this tax is 10%, you pay 10%. That didn’t take me long to say that. 10% tax, you pay 10%. Okay, and you know, it’s crazy. It’s just nuts. And you know, the lawyers get involved and they write this and they write that and it comes up with stuff like Jonathan was saying there. There’s the right to privacy. Where is it? Well, you’ve got to understand this to know that.

OK. Nuts. All right. So the next one that needs to be pointed out, borders language culture. If you don’t have borders language culture, you don’t have a nation. If we don’t have people that are citizens of the United States and responsible to the United States, what are they doing here? Hello, you’re a visitor. You know, you’re not a citizen just because you walked across the border. You’re a citizen because you were born here or you immigrated here and that kind of thing. You’re either legal or illegal. How this ever got, I mean, talk about redoing words. It’s 1984 all the time. They just have another word for something.

That person is illegal. And then they’re on some board on a TV show talking about their rights. Well, you don’t have any rights. You’re not even a citizen. Get off the TV show. I don’t care what you got to say. Go and apply for citizenship. It’s just nuts. And off we go. And now they want free stuff for them, free stuff for this, and free college. Just give everything away. Well, somebody’s got to pay for that. Who’s that going to be? I don’t know. People pay taxes, I guess. I don’t know. Come on, man. I mean, somebody’s got to pay for something somewhere. All this stuff is just basic. And it is so nutty that they can even have these discussions.

It’s amazing to me. Anyway, all of this stuff, you don’t really need to study it that long as you understand the big system. Just use your common sense. Somebody’s got to pay for stuff. Somebody’s got to do something. If you do something wrong, you should be arrested. You should go to jail. You should do this. You should do that. And it should be applied to everybody. And just because you’re the muckety muck in charge of this, you don’t get to lie about that or use your power to come down on somebody else or that kind of thing. It’s so blatantly obvious that just do that. And the golden rule for us that are Christians, do unto others as you’d have them do to you, would be really well put, okay?

And this is an interesting comment that Gail saw on Facebook. I don’t do Facebook, but she does, and this guy put this out. He has been a Christian missionary in South Africa for 25 years. He came from Grace Community Church. He left for South Africa just before I became an elder and got on the elders council for handling outreach or something. There were a bunch of elders down there. And anyway, about five of us oversaw all the missionaries and there was like 35 of them out there. This guy, my first year, he bucked the system. He said, okay, you sent me over here, here are the problems and we can fix this by doing this, this and this.

Well, it bucked the political system at Grace Community Church. And they said, we need to call this guy back and he needs to stop being a missionary. And I raised my hand. I was new and I thought, well, that’s what you do. You raise and ask a question. And I said, what did he do wrong? He’s asking a really good question. Why can’t we answer that question for him? Well, that’s just the way it is down there. Well, I said, if that’s just the way it is, somebody needs to go over there and change it because that’s wrong.

You don’t understand, Dave. You need to just, you know, sit down and shut up, basically. And so I realized, well, the vote was going to be four to one, and I was the one, so that wasn’t going to happen. So I sat down and shut up. The guy came home for a little while. He met with two other guys. He got it straightened out, and they sent him back. I hope that, you know, some of it was maybe me saying, well, it seems like he’s got a good point. But anyway, they sent him back to South Africa, and he’s now been there 25 years. So he wrote this commentary on American politics from an American that’s lived outside of America for 25 years.

I keep hearing and reading what Donald Trump is the cause for America’s great divide. That is how almost is now almost reached fever pitch. I dispute that thinking. Here is why. Because we’ve lived abroad in South Africa for 25 years now. We have noticed every time we return to the states that division there was incrementally more noticeable than the time before. Under Obama, we observed that the pace and extent of division quickened significantly. The truth is that it has been happening for decades ever since the counterculture revolution in the 1960s, and it has been imperceptibly leavening the whole of American culture and society ever since.

Because the gangreed of the counter-cultural revolution is now so far advanced, someone like Trump comes along and calls a spade a spade, and is like spraying luminol on a blood-spattered wall, all of which is why I keep telling people that Trump is like luminol. He is not the author of the division. He is like the truth. He is the agent that is exposing the division that has been resident for the duration of my nearly 60 years on Earth. Of course, it goes without saying, The media has played an enormous role in fanning the flames of discord division with wholesale journalistic activism and with the left firmly in control of the vessels of public education, they are now able to recruit brainwashed legions of young skulls full of mush for their revolutionary aims of fundamentally reshaping the country to conform to their Marxist utopia.

Never forget that one of the cardinal tools of Marxist ideology is to divide and conquer. This is why the left naturally gravitates to the orbit of identity politics because it drives the wedge of division even deeper into the psyche of this society. This is why we are daily subject to the ceaseless chance of class divided, race divided, and sexually orientated divide rhetoric as it serves the valuable purpose of maintaining and advancing the existing divides. So when I hear someone sniveling wine or complain, well, both sides have their problems, I really do want to shake them with some common sense is jarred loose and moves them closer to the land of conscious reality.

Of course, both sides have their problems, but only one side is on a quest to destroy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and place it with a tyrannical totalitarianism that is at anti-God is as anti-liberty. It is the essence of naivete to think that we can make a nice and just get along. Yes, be civil, be charitable, but also be firm in your convictions as expressing them, and this without apology. At its core, the division we now see is first and foremost a spiritual battle before it is a political or cultural battle, and so the weapons of our warfare extend beyond the ballot box and a political contribution to include the whole armor of God as detailed in Ephesians 6, 10 through 20.

For this reason, above all else, we must pray and proclaim the whole counsel of God until his son returns and lets the chips fall where they may. I thought that was really a good thing. And then last but not least, this book is full of the whole myth of the unfreedom of the press and the idea that the news media needs to be even-handed and all of that. This book shows you the news media has never, ever been even handed. Since the founding of the colonies in 1790 newspapers were founded to put out their position against another position. If you just look at the names of the newspapers, the Arizona Republic was a Republican newspaper. Other ones are the Democratic Gazette. That was a Democratic newspaper, that kind of thing. They always were there to express their opinion, they were elements of their opinion.

They aren’t there to be fair and balanced and all that nonsense. These people, obviously they have a point of opinion. Anybody that studied apologetics knows. Everybody comes with a certain bias. That’s just the way things are. And then once you recognize that bias, you listen to that side and you go, OK, that’s good, but what about this? And you have the discussion. But don’t think that somebody’s going to be able to magically turn somewhere and find this magical cure that, oh, look at that, they’re telling me the truth all the time. Everybody’s working their own deal. So with that, we can eat, get stronger, fight them.

Let’s pray. Father, thank you for, again, the ability to have this meeting. Help us to, each one, be involved. For those of us that feel that they’re called, have them be involved in politics. Have them write better laws. Have us be better citizens. Have us be involved in a way that honors you, though. And help us to constantly think of those things and do unto others as we would have them do unto us. So we thank you for all of these things and we thank you, of course, most of all, for your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.