Podcasts about before trump

The Justice system and WOKE judges now want to run Trump's Administration. NOT! Republican lawmakers who oppose DOGE budget cuts should be primaried and replaced. Lawmakers who went too far to find 'mediocrity', have gone too far. Decisive actions are needed now. The U.S. Congress sat silently on the sidelines BEFORE Trump and dropped the ball. Congress did not move so Trump did! Elon Musk leaves today saving BILLIONS of dollars for all taxpayers, in just 120 days! Shame on the U.S. Congress for doing nothing on this budget causing Trump to bring in Elon in the first place to solve our financial woes. The speed of the transition is unprecedented, and now Congress wants unprecedented cuts overnight? Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury, has put together a strategy at 'light speed' by any standard BUT, let him transition over two years so as not to hemorrhage the stock market. Separately, most BLUE STATES have a state income tax. ALL want to be able to deduct the taxes paid to the state, as an expense deduction on the federal tax return, to reduce the federal taxable income. NOT FAIR.WMXI Episode 168: Secure Trump's Budget ~ Get Rid of Rino's!Originally Aired on WMXI Radio on Friday, May 30, 2025Special thanks to the following source(s) for the image(s) used in this content: The Fallible Man LLC➡️ Join the Conversation: https://GeneValentino.com➡️ WMXI Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRadio981➡️ More WMXI Interviews: https://genevalentino.com/wmxi-interviews/➡️ More GrassRoots TruthCast Episodes: https://genevalentino.com/grassroots-truthcast-with-gene-valentino/➡️ More Broadcasts with Gene as the Guest: https://genevalentino.com/america-beyond-the-noise/ ➡️ More About Gene Valentino: https://genevalentino.com/about-gene-valentino/

Send us a textIt's been a dire year for global health. Almost as soon as he took office as president of the United States, Donald Trump said he would withdraw the country from membership in the World Health Organization (WHO), he fired almost everyone at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and slashed staffing and budgets at U.S. health agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The United States government also says it plans to end funding for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and has cut some funding for the United Nations World Food Program's efforts to feed millions of people in 14 countries.Before Trump, the United States was the largest donor to global health in the world, contributing about US$12 billion in funding. That's less than 1 percent of the United States federal budget. But the new administration claimed these efforts were wasteful, did not serve the country's interests, and cost too much. It's not clear who can or will fill the gaps.“I think we are going through a very dark time,” says Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and president of the One Health Trust. But Dr. Laxminarayan, an epidemiologist and economist, does see some hope. He doubts the United States will permanently end its robust support of global health and he sees opportunities for organizations such as WHO to streamline and become more efficient.Listen as he chats with One World, One Health host Maggie Fox about the immediate effects of the startling new United States government policies and how he sees things shaking out in the long term.

*this was recorded BEFORE Trump paused military aid, if you're wondering why we don't mention it* This week Pierre Novellie joins me to ask if the Oval Office bust-up is a 'I remember where I was when' moment. We discuss the micro-fibres of the exchange and wonder if it's only natural that the guy defending his country might be a little defensive. Then we discuss whether this is Keir Starmer's moment and if so, can he only do it away from home.  In the Patreon only section we react to the news young women now earn considerably more than young men - do we need DEI for young blokes?!?! Watch my STAND-UP SPECIAL 'Basic Bloke' on ITVX:  https://www.itv.com/watch/geoff-norcott:-basic-bloke/10a6363a0001B/10a6363a0001 Order the PAPERBACK EDITION of my book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Bloke-Decoded-Everything-explained/dp/1800961308/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= JOIN the Podcast Patreon and receive each episode early, AD-FREE & with bonus content https://www.patreon.com/geoffnorcott?fan_landing=true  Join my MAILING LIST for priority Tour booking & special offers https://signup.ymlp.com/xgyueuwbgmgb Watch my COMEDY SPECIAL on YouTube https://youtu.be/YaxhuZGtDLs  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get all our episodes and show notes ad-free at wickedproblems.earth.Professor Dana R. Fisher of American University is one of the most astute analysts of two things going through a huge stress test right now in the US - climate science, and democracy.Wicked Problems is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The necessity of today's outro track will become obvious, and with apologies for my slandering of Flava Flav:She spoke to us from near Washington, where Elon Musk and his merry band of DOGE incels is being cheered on by Donald Trump as they ignore court orders and systematically gut research on the climate.She joined us at the end of last year, to talk about her book Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action. We planned to talk for maybe 20 minutes today about her recent work researching and documenting the vandalism to American science underway. Then she told us about her new research surveying attendees at the “People's March” who were 75% female, overwhelmingly moderate, middle-aged, mainstream Democratic voters, she found that 33% of people surveyed thought violence was justified to protect American democracy. And that was BEFORE Trump's inauguration and his pardon of those convicted of violently trying to overturn the results of the 2020 US election on Jan 6 2021.So we went over time. For nearly an hour.Come walk with us.Outro TracksChapters05:33 Introduction and Guest Welcome05:52 Discussing the Current State of the Apocalypse06:22 Field Work and Resistance Movements08:37 The People's March and Data Collection10:02 Media Misrepresentation and Crowd Sizes15:00 Political Violence and Survey Findings23:32 Impact on Federal Funding and Research29:06 Government Actions and Future Implications34:06 National Guard and Rising Tensions34:49 Impact on Jobs and Development35:39 USAID and Soft Power37:51 Theories on Government Dismantling38:38 Civil War and Martial Law Concerns39:02 Military's Role and January 6th Reflections48:20 Normalization of Violence51:00 Climate Change and Democracy52:36 Future Uncertainties and Personal ReflectionsThanksAppreciate you listening/watching/reading us. As we also get into it's more important than ever that we get voices like Prof. Fisher's to you to make sense of what's happening. And what might be coming. We hope you'd consider helping us continue the work by becoming a material supporter of Wicked Problems - and maybe even share the love by gifting a subscription to someone who appreciates apocalyptic optimsm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With all of the new Senate confirmations and executive orders from the past week, the 2025 stock market predictions continue! We explore how higher interest rates make borrowing more expensive and how a strong dollar challenges multinational corporations by making U.S. goods more expensive abroad. Rising oil prices further strain businesses by increasing transportation and production costs. Despite these fundamental factors, the market often disregards traditional economic signals, making price the ultimate determinant of value. Today we discuss... The week's news cycle was dominated by Trump's executive orders and political theater in Senate confirmations. Senators grilling Kennedy on vaccine policies were top recipients of pharmaceutical industry donations. Stanley Druckenmiller outlined three major risks to markets: rising interest rates, a strong dollar, and rising oil prices. Before Trump took office, all three risk factors were in play, but they have since moderated. Higher interest rates increase borrowing costs and lower corporate profits, especially for debt-reliant industries. Tech companies have used low-interest debt for stock buybacks, artificially boosting valuations. A strong U.S. dollar negatively impacts multinational corporations by making exports more expensive. Emerging markets struggle with dollar-denominated debt when the U.S. dollar strengthens. The market doesn't care about your opinion and can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Even if you're ultimately right, being wrong for 20 years still means you were wrong in practice. The best investors acknowledge when the market disagrees with them and pivot accordingly. Most people lack familiarity with risk management beyond simply buying bonds. The largest oil reserves aren't necessarily the most valuable due to quality differences in crude. Corporate cycles alternate between aggressive acquisitions and strategic spinoffs. Investment return data gets distorted over time as underperforming funds disappear. The extravagant corporate culture at Nabisco before and after the buyout. Cultural shifts, like the rise of the iPhone, have happened rapidly in recent years. The housing market is in a challenging state due to high interest rates and low supply.   Today's Panelists: Kirk Chisholm | Innovative Wealth Phil Weiss | Apprise Wealth Management Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/moneytreepodcast Follow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/money-tree-investing-podcast Follow on Twitter/X: https://x.com/MTIPodcast For more information, visit the show notes at https://moneytreepodcast.com/2025-predictions-continue-683  

Before Trump, before Russiagate, before the entire media-industrial complex turned into a weapon of mass deception, there was Deflategate—a prequel to the modern information war. In The Book of Trump: Chapter 4 - Narrative Seeding, GhostofBPH, Burning Bright, and Jon Herold break down how the corporate media's playbook was perfected on Tom Brady long before they aimed it at Trump. From fabricated science to a sham investigation, the NFL and its media cronies colluded to take down Brady in a scandal that eerily mirrors Trump's political persecution. But what they didn't count on? The rise of Barstool Sports—a decentralized, first-principles media outlet that broke ESPN's monopoly and set the stage for outlets like Badlands Media. Join us as we connect the dots between sports, media warfare, and the ongoing battle for truth. Oh, and yes—Peyton Manning was the NFL's golden boy, and no, ESPN still doesn't want you to have fun.

"I return to the presidency, confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success," Trump said after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. In an inaugural address where he outlined a number of policy proposals, Trump called for sending the U.S. military to the border with Mexico to curb illegal immigration, said the government would only recognize two genders, male and female, and reiterated a desire to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.Before Trump took office, the outgoing president, Joe Biden, issued a number of preemptive pardons, including for members of his own family, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and members & staff of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.This episode: political correspondent Sarah McCammon, senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political correspondent Susan Davis, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Before Trump even took office - it appears as though he may have leveraged his influence as the incoming President to end the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Is this a real peace deal, or a smokescreen? Scott Horton of Antiwar.com joins us TONIGHT on NIGHTLY OFFENSIVE! __ ⇩SUPPORT THE SHOW⇩➤ JOIN THE PRIVATE LIVE COMMUNITY: https://elijahschaffer.locals.com/➤ NOTICER T-SHIRTS / MERCH: https://slightlyoffensive.com/__⇩ SHOW SPONSORS⇩➤ MYPILLOW: A large retail store canceled a huge order, leaving MyPillow with extra stock, which means you can now get MyPillows at wholesale prices for the first time ever. Standard classic MyPillows are just $14.98, Queen size for $18.88, King size for $19.98, body pillows for $29.98, and multi-use pillows for $9.88. Go to https://www.mypillow.com or call 800-210-8491 and use promo code ELIJAH to take advantage of these prices, with free shipping on orders over $75. Limited quantities are available, so act fast before they're gone!​➤ THE WELLNESS COMPANY: Be prepared for what is coming next! Order your MEDICAL EMERGENCY KIT ASAP at https://www.twc.health/offensive and enter code OFFENSIVE for 10% off. The Wellness Company and their licensed doctors are medical professionals you can trust, and their medical emergency kits are the gold standard to keeping you safe! Again, that's https://www.twc.health/offensive, promo code OFFENSIVE.➤ AURA: Have you ever Googled yourself and been shocked at how much personal information is out there? That's why this video is sponsored by Aura. Aura helps remove your data from broker sites, monitors for identity theft, provides $1 million in identity theft insurance per adult, and includes tools like a secure VPN, antivirus, and password manager—all in one affordable app. Don't leave yourself vulnerable. Go to https://www.aura.com/slightly to try Aura free for 14 days and see if your data has been exposed! Take the quiz and see if you're as savvy as you think: https://bit.ly/aurasts___⇩ELIJAH'S SOCIAL MEDIA ⇩➤ X: https://X.com/ElijahSchaffer➤ RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/SlightlyOffensive➤ INSTA: https://www.instagram.com/slightlyoffensive.tv➤ TELEGRAM https://t.me/SlightlyOffensive➤ GAB: https://gab.com/elijahschaffer__⇩FOLLOW MICHAEL HENNESSEY (SNOWFLAKE NEWS) ⇩➤ X: https://x.com/scotthortonshow  ➤ IG: https://www.antiwar.com  __➤BOOKINGS + BUSINESS INQUIRIES: MIKE@SLIGHTLYOFFENSIVE.COMSupport the show

Before Trump, there were four presidential elections that were contested. These are their stories.The first one happened in 1876 between Republican Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat New York Governor Samuel Tilden.The second one happened in 1888 between Democratic President Grover Cleveland and Republican Benjamin Harrison.The third one happened in 1960 between Republican Vice President Richard Nixon and Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy.The fourth one happened in 2000 between Republican Governor George Bush and Democratic Vice President Al Gore.****REFERENCES: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rigged-vote-four-us-presidential-elections-contested-results-180961033/ ***You can check out Ladies Love Politics website to read a transcript/references of this episode at www.ladieslovepolitics.com.Be sure to follow the Ladies Love Politics channel on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Truth Social, Brighteon Social, Threads, and Twitter. Content also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you stream podcasts.

President Donald Trump's narrow escape from death has put something of the fear of God into the American people. References to God's providence and divine intervention have come from unexpected sources. Does God control every wind gust and every nod of the head? We discuss reasons for the shocking scene that played out last Saturday in a Pennsylvania fairgrounds.This program includes: 1. The World View in 5 Minutes with Adam McManus (The pagan prayer at the GOP Convention, Secret Service knew BEFORE Trump took the stage there was a threat, The evangelistic outreach during the Paris Summer Olympics)2. Generations with Kevin Swanson 

It's Thursday, July 18th, A.D. 2024. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard at www.TheWorldview.com. I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Jonathan Clark and Adam McManus Persecution of Christians in Turkey Protestant churches in Turkey are facing increasing hostility from the government. In a recent example, officials prohibited the Diyarbakir Protestant Church Foundation from acquiring land already zoned for religious buildings.  Alliance Defending Freedom International is defending the church.  Kelsey Zorzi with ADF International said, “What we are seeing in Türkiye is a troubling display of blatant, faith-based discrimination against Christians. … Authorities keep finding ways to deny their request since they are Christians. … The discrimination must stop.” According to Open Doors, Turkey is the 50th most difficult nation worldwide in which to be a Christian. The evangelistic outreach during the Paris Summer Olympics (audio of Olympic theme song) The 2024 Summer Olympics begin later this month in Paris, France. A network of Evangelical churches are working to share Christ during the international event. Ensemble 2024 is a “coalition of churches, ministries and individuals all seeking to make Christ known in word and deed during the Olympics.” Matthew Glock is the group's national coordinator. He told Evangelical Focus people can pray for prepared hearts: “May God be pleased to use our efforts to bring the truth [of the] Gospel to those He has prepared. May many come to faith.”  Secret Service knew BEFORE Trump took the stage there was a threat In the United States, another brutal development in the Trump assassination attempt investigation. Fox News reports that federal agents knew there was a threat to the former president's life ten minutes before he took the stage. But they still allowed him to proceed with the rally. Plus, they had identified the shooter a full hour before the assassination attempt because he was spotted with a rangefinder by authorities. Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted, “I just got off a briefing with the Secret Service and FBI. I am appalled to learn that the Secret Service knew about a threat prior to President Trump walking on stage. I have no confidence in the leadership of Director [Kimberly] Cheatle and believe it is in the best interest of our nation if she steps down from her position.” The pagan prayer at the GOP Convention Bible-believing Christians were understandably irate that a pagan prayer was part of the opening night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week. Republican attorney Harmeet Dhillon of San Francisco, California chanted a prayer to Waheguru, the god of Sikhism, an Indian religion founded in the 15th century. Listen to how she explained the prayer. DHILLON: “I come from a family of Sikh immigrants. I am honored to share with you, my fellow Republicans and guests tonight, a prayer from my faith tradition, practiced by over 25 million worldwide. “We recite the Ardās prayer before any new endeavor, giving thanks to god and asking for his protection and help to uphold the values of humility, truth, courage, service, and justice for all.” Ironically, Sikhism claims to be both monotheistic and pantheistic. Sikhs believe that their false god is simultaneously within everything and is all-encompassing.  Before Dhillon translated her pagan prayer into English, she sang it. Here is how the first nine seconds sounded. (audio of a portion of the sung prayer) Harmeet Dhillon then translated the whole prayer, the first four sentences of which follow. DHILLON: “Dear Waheguru, our one true god. We thank you for creating America as a unique haven on this Earth, where all people are free to worship according to their faith. We seek your blessings and guidance for our beloved country. Please bless our people with wisdom as they vote in the upcoming election.” Truth be told, Waheguru is absolutely not the one true God! Ben Zeisloft, editor of the Republic Sentinel, declared, “America must turn to the Triune God. Not to Allah. Not to Vishnu. Not to ‘Waheguru.' Jesus Christ alone is Lord, King, and Judge of all the Earth. We must repent and trust in Him or else expect His righteous judgments.” 1 Timothy 2:5 says, “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”  According to the Christian Research Institute, Sikhs teach that the nature of humanity is essentially good. By contrast, Christians teach that the nature of humanity is sinful. Sikhism emphasizes good works as the way to attain liberation from the cycle of reincarnation. By contrast, Christians emphasize that we are saved by grace alone, through faith in Christ alone, as explained in Ephesians 2:8-9. Salvation is the free gift of God for the undeserving sinner because of Christ's redeeming work on the cross. California teachers allowed to hide student's transgenderism from parents This week, California became the first state to allow teachers to keep a students' so-called gender identity or sexually perverted preference hidden from parents. Tech billionaire Elon Musk called it the last straw. He said, “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its Headquarters from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”  Musk also plans to relocate X, formerly known as Twitter, from San Francisco to Austin, Texas. Senator Bob Menendez guilty of taking gold and cash bribes On Tuesday, a Manhattan jury convicted U.S. Democrat Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey in a corruption trial. Menendez faced accusations of receiving bribes in the form of gold and cash from New Jersey businessmen as well as being an agent for the Egyptian government.  The Associated Press reports the jury found him guilty of bribery, extortion, honest services fraud, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy. Menendez denied the charges and said he would appeal.  Anniversary of beheadings of 12 bold North African Christian martyrs And finally, this week is the anniversary of the deaths of the Scillitan Martyrs. They were a group of 12 North African Christians who died for the faith in Christ on A.D. July 17, 180. A Roman proconsul put them on trial in Carthage. They were carrying the books and letters of the Apostle Paul. When asked to swear by the name of the emperor, one of the Christians said, “I recognize not the empire of this world; but rather do I serve that God whom no man hath seen, nor with these eyes can see.”  He was referencing 1 Timothy 6:16 which says of God: “Who alone has immortality, Who dwells in unapproachable light, Whom no one has ever seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.” The courageous seven men and five women were beheaded for refusing to deny their Savior.  Close And that's The Worldview in 5 Minutes on this Thursday, July 18th, in the year of our Lord 2024. Join me Adam McManus, and my two sons, Honor and Valor, at the Colorado Father-Son retreat Thursday, August 15th through Sunday, August 18th. Go to ColoradoFatherSon.com. Subscribe by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com. Or get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ.

President Donald Trump's narrow escape from death has put something of the fear of God into the American people. References to God's providence and divine intervention have come from unexpected sources. Does God control every wind gust and every nod of the head-- We discuss reasons for the shocking scene that played out last Saturday in a Pennsylvania fairgrounds.--This program includes- --1. The World View in 5 Minutes with Adam McManus -The pagan prayer at the GOP Convention, Secret Service knew BEFORE Trump took the stage there was a threat, The evangelistic outreach during the Paris Summer Olympics---2. Generations with Kevin Swanson

The latest court developments in the Trump hush money case have been nothing short of explosive. Cohen's testimony placed Trump at the center of a scheme to win the 2016 election corruptly. According to Cohen, Trump was fully briefed on the $130,000 payment to Daniels and was in the room when the plan was hatched to conceal the transactions through false invoices to the Trump Organization. Cohen also revealed that Trump's main concern was delaying the story until after the election, allegedly saying, "Just get past the election, because if I win, it will have no relevance, and if I lose, I don't even care." If true, this testimony provides the clearest evidence yet that Trump was an active participant in the hush money scheme and the subsequent cover-up. Cohen's account suggests it was all about protecting Trump's electoral chances. In this week's episode, I shine a light on another troubling aspect of the Trump-David Pecker pact at the center of the trial. I note that the pact existed a year and a half before the August 2016 meeting that led to the Hush Money trial, when a catch-and-kill agreement was made between Trump and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker.  Indeed it seems likely a pact already existed in January 2015 and may have resulted in a disinformation campaign targeting Bill Clinton with untrue stories published in The Enquirer about Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein. Before Trump launched his 2016 White House bid there's evidence to suggest Pecker and Trump were coordinating efforts to smear Bill Clinton, Given Pecker's practice of sharing stories with Trump in advance, and his subsequent efforts to "catch and kill" Trump's sex scandals, this raises alarming questions about the level of coordination between Trump and the tabloid. This week's developments paint a picture of a candidate and a campaign willing to do anything to win—even if it meant breaking the law and deceiving the American people. The hush money scheme, the hints at Clinton dirt, the catch-and-kill operation—it all points to a sophisticated operation designed to manipulate and deceive Americans  A felony conviction for Donald Trump would be unprecedented in American history, and the jury has had unenviable tasks before them. However, regardless of the outcome, the trial exposed a political network whose entire operational basis is lying, concealing, and cheating. And that is a reality the entire nation must now confront.  In this sense, the Trump Hush Money trial is not just about campaign finance violations or salacious scandals. It's about completely rejecting an ideology of moral decline in which the only solution to any national problem is even more corruption. This is an untenable outcome for a nation built on so much hope and promise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The latest court developments in the Trump hush money case have been nothing short of explosive. Cohen's testimony placed Trump at the center of a scheme to win the 2016 election corruptly. According to Cohen, Trump was fully briefed on the $130,000 payment to Daniels and was in the room when the plan was hatched to conceal the transactions through false invoices to the Trump Organization. Cohen also revealed that Trump's main concern was delaying the story until after the election, allegedly saying, "Just get past the election, because if I win, it will have no relevance, and if I lose, I don't even care." If true, this testimony provides the clearest evidence yet that Trump was an active participant in the hush money scheme and the subsequent cover-up. Cohen's account suggests it was all about protecting Trump's electoral chances. In this week's episode, I shine a light on another troubling aspect of the Trump-David Pecker pact at the center of the trial. I note that the pact existed a year and a half before the August 2016 meeting that led to the Hush Money trial, when a catch-and-kill agreement was made between Trump and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker.  Indeed it seems likely a pact already existed in January 2015 and may have resulted in a disinformation campaign targeting Bill Clinton with untrue stories published in The Enquirer about Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein. Before Trump launched his 2016 White House bid there's evidence to suggest Pecker and Trump were coordinating efforts to smear Bill Clinton, Given Pecker's practice of sharing stories with Trump in advance, and his subsequent efforts to "catch and kill" Trump's sex scandals, this raises alarming questions about the level of coordination between Trump and the tabloid. This week's developments paint a picture of a candidate and a campaign willing to do anything to win—even if it meant breaking the law and deceiving the American people. The hush money scheme, the hints at Clinton dirt, the catch-and-kill operation—it all points to a sophisticated operation designed to manipulate and deceive Americans  A felony conviction for Donald Trump would be unprecedented in American history, and the jury has had unenviable tasks before them. However, regardless of the outcome, the trial exposed a political network whose entire operational basis is lying, concealing, and cheating. And that is a reality the entire nation must now confront.  In this sense, the Trump Hush Money trial is not just about campaign finance violations or salacious scandals. It's about completely rejecting an ideology of moral decline in which the only solution to any national problem is even more corruption. This is an untenable outcome for a nation built on so much hope and promise.

This week on Ring of Fire! Donald Trump's lawyers were finally forced to admit in a court filing on Monday that he does not have the cash available to pay the $464 million bond for the fraud judgement against him in order to appeal the verdict. The lawyers are asking for the judge to simply postpone the posting of the bond until after the appeal, but that's not how things work. Due to the fact that he was rejected by at least 30 underwriters, it is apparent that Trump is a risk for paying at all. During a recent speech, Donald Trump referred to the imprisoned Capitol Rioters "hostages," echoing a claim that he's made before and one that has been made by lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene for years. Trump also admitted that he'll pardon these people, and these two statements were the breaking point for Trump's former Vice President Mike Pence. In an interview on Fox News, Pence not only trashed Trump for calling these people "hostages," but said that he will not be endorsing Trump. During a podcast interview this week, Trump lawyer Alina Habba said that she is confident that she will get the $464 million fraud verdict against Donald Trump dismissed upon appeal. Ironically, this interview was conducted BEFORE Trump's lawyers had to tell the court that he's not able to pay the bond, which means that the appeal might not even be able to happen. There's a good chance that Trump could see his properties be taken away from him, all while the arrogant Habba swears everything will be ok. And Judge Aileen Cannon delivered an absolutely insane ruling on Monday evening as part of her jury instructions to both federal prosecutors and Trump's legal team. The ruling says that members of the jury have to be given access to the highly sensitive classified documents that were uncovered at Mar-a-Lago - and if Jack Smith doesn't allow that, then they jury will be instructed to assume that they were all personal documents that rightfully belonged to Donald Trump. All that, and much more, on this week's Ring of Fire Podcast!

Guest Bios Show Transcript How did loving your enemies—a command of Jesus—suddenly become a sign that you're “woke”? And why is “owning the libs” now the answer to “What would Jesus do?”  On this edition of The Roys Report, bestselling author and journalist Tim Alberta joins host Julie Roys to explore a disturbing phenomenon in American evangelicalism. Though once evangelicals understood that the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of man were separate, now the two are being combined into an unholy mix. And sadly, for millions of conservative Christians, America is their kingdom—and proper adherence to their political ideology is their litmus test for Christian orthodoxy! On this podcast, you'll hear Julie's compelling conversation with Tim, exploring how evangelicals got into this mess—and if, and how, we can get ourselves out. Yet Tim doesn't speak as an outside critic passing judgment, but as a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor.  Tim spent years sifting through the wreckage of American evangelicalism, interviewing pastors, evangelical/political activists, congregants, and scholars. The result is his new book, The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory, which tells story after illuminating story of major players and institutions within the evangelical movement that have succumbed to political idolatry.  One example is Liberty University, founded in 1971 by Jerry Falwell Sr. Recent headlines have exposed how Senior's now-disgraced son, Jerry Falwell, Jr., made Liberty into a far-right, culture warring, money-making powerhouse. But is this mixing of the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man a corruption of Senior's vision—or, is it the culmination of it? And what does it say that everyone—the administration, board, and Liberty supporters—were all fine with it, as long as the money was coming in?  Tim also shares stunning admissions he got during one-on-one interviews with major evangelical/political figures, like Robert Jeffress and Ralph Reed. In private, these men confessed that they know mixing political advocacy with the gospel is misleading and wrong. Yet, as Tim documents, these men keep doing it! Yet Tim also offers stories of hope—like his chapter on Rev. Dr. John Dickson, who teaches at the flagship evangelical school, Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill. In it, Tim explains why Dickson has become a missionary to America—and how Christians can lose the culture wars yet live joyfully and winsomely among unbelievers. Tim's book also includes a chapter on exposing abuse and corruption, featuring Rachel Denhollander's work and our work at The Roys Report. On the podcast, we discuss why our reporting is so important and why this chapter is Tim's mother's favorite! This is such an important podcast for Christians wanting to remain true to their calling to worship God first and foremost, rather than succumb to political idolatry.  Guests Tim Alberta Tim Alberta is a staff writer for The Atlantic and has written for dozens of other publications, including the Wall Street Journal and National Review. He is the author of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism and the New York Times bestseller American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. He lives in southeast Michigan with his wife and three sons. Show Transcript SPEAKERS TIM ALBERTA, Julie Roys Julie Roys  00:04 How did loving your enemies, a command of Jesus, suddenly become a sign that you're woke? And why is owning the libs now the answer to what would Jesus do? Welcome to The Roys Report, a podcast dedicated to reporting the truth and restoring the church. I'm Julie Roys and joining me on this podcast is New York Times bestselling author Tim Alberta, whose latest book explores what happened to American evangelicalism. Decades ago, Americans viewed evangelicalism favorably. In 1976, author and historian Gary Wills called evangelicalism, the major religious force in America, both in numbers and an impact. And leading evangelical thinkers claimed that evangelicalism could no longer be regarded as reactionary but was vigorously and sometimes creatively speaking to the needs of the contemporary world. Fast forward to today and evangelicalism has become synonymous with Donald Trump, a thrice married vulgar opportunist who said he doesn't need to repent or ask for forgiveness. A recent poll by Pew Research found that the only religious group that views evangelicals favorably are evangelicals. And as Tim Alberta notes in his book in 1991 90% of Americans identified as Christians, but today, only 63% do. What happened to this once vibrant movement? And can it be saved, or has it passed beyond the point of no return? Un his new book, The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory. Tim Alberta does a masterful job of exploring these questions, but he doesn't do it as an outside critic passing judgment. But as a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor. I found Tim's book eye opening on many levels, and I'm so excited to share this interview with you. Julie Roys  01:47 But before I do, I want to thank the sponsors of this podcast, Judson University, and Marquardt of Barrington. If you're looking for a top ranked Christian University, providing a caring community and an excellent college experience, Judson University is for you. Judson is located on 90 acres just 40 miles west of Chicago in Elgin, Illinois. The school offers more than 60 majors, great leadership opportunities, and strong financial aid. Plus, you can take classes online as well as in person. Judson University is shaping lives that shaped the world. For more information, just go to JUDSONU.EDU. Also, if you're looking for a quality new or used car, I highly recommend my friends at Marquardt of Barrington. Marquardt is a Buick GMC dealership where you can expect honesty, integrity, and transparency. That's because the owners there Dan and Kurt Marquardt, are men of integrity, to check them out, just go to BUYACAR123.COM. Julie Roys  02:51 Well, again, joining me is Tim Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic and the former chief political correspondent for Politico. Tim also is the author of The New York Times best seller American Carnage on the Frontlines of the Republican Civil War, and the Rise of President Trump. And his latest book, The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory, explores American evangelicals in an age of extremism. So, Tim, welcome. It is just such a pleasure to be with you again. TIM ALBERTA  03:16 Yes, Julie, it is. It's great to catch up with you and come sort of full circle from where we were a couple of years ago talking about all of this. Julie Roys  03:24 That's right. We spent a couple of well, more than a couple of hours. I think it was supposed to be like maybe an hour and a half, and we got so into our discussion. I think we closed down one coffee shop and went to another. TIM ALBERTA  03:35 We did. I hijacked your whole day. Julie Roys  03:38 Oh, it was fantastic. And so, encouraging to me, but always fun to talk to a fellow journalist with similar convictions. And I was excited about this book when we had our discussion. I'm so honored, I have to say, you know, to get the galley of the book, and I figured because we spent so much time that I'd be in it, but you know, just what you wrote, and the way that you captured some things just so honored to be featured in a chapter with Rachel den Hollander. So, thank you so much for that. I just really appreciate it. TIM ALBERTA  04:07 I should tell you that is my mother's favorite chapter of the book. Oh, for what it's worth, because she's big into strong feminine Christian leadership. And so, she was particularly smitten with you and with Rachel. So, I thought you should know that. Julie Roys  04:21 Oh, wow. Well, I'm honored. I really am. And I should mention that we are offering your book as a premium to anybody who gives $50 or more to The Roys Report in this month. Again, this is just a way that you're able to support the work that we do, but also get this fantastic book. Just go to JULIEROYS.COM/DONATE if you're able to help us out and continue the work that we do, and also get what could be a great Christmas present for somebody or for yourself. So anyway, encourage you to do that. Well, Tim, as I mentioned in the open, you're not writing this book as sort of an outsider critiquing evangelicalism. You grew up evangelical, your dad was an evangelical pastor. And oddly enough, it was at your dad's funeral in 2019, that something sort of awakened you to the severity of what's happening right now within evangelicalism. Tell us a bit about that story. TIM ALBERTA  05:17 Yeah, so my dad, Reverend Richard Alberta, was an amazing, amazing guy. We were very close. And he had a pretty crazy come to Jesus story himself where he was actually kind of a hotshot New York finance guy. And my mom was kind of a hotshot, young journalist with ABC Radio. They lived in New York and my dad, despite having all of this worldly material success, just felt this emptiness. And he was an atheist. He grew up in an unbelieving home. And he, one day stumbled into this church in the Hudson Valley, and heard the gospel and he gave his life to Christ. And it was already a pretty dramatic conversion because he became completely unrecognizable to people around him, including my mom, who was not yet a Christian. Everybody who knew him just thought he was sort of losing it. Suddenly, he's waking up at four in the morning to read his Bible and meditate in prayer for hours. And they're all like, what is this guy doing? And then pretty soon after that, he feels the Lord calling him to ministry. And now they all think he's like certifiable, right? You know, but he follows the Lord's calling. And, you know, he and my mom who became a Christian, they sell all the possessions so he can go to seminary, and they basically they give up this pretty lavish lifestyle they'd had. And for the next like, 20 years, they just work in small churches and live on food stamps and serve the Lord that way. And then when I come along, some years later, we eventually settle in Brighton, which is a suburb of Detroit. And my dad builds this kind of small startup church there into kind of a mega church. And that was my home. It was my community. It was my whole life, really. My mom was on the staff there at the church as well. It was called Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church. I was raised physically, literally, inside of that church. TIM ALBERTA  07:11 And so, my dad dies a few years back. And when I came back to the church for the funeral, because of the work I've done in politics, and because I had just recently written this book about Trumpism and his takeover of the Republican Party, I was kind of in the crosshairs of right-wing media at that time, because of the book. And so, at the funeral or at the wake during the visitation, I had a bunch of people at the church kind of confronting me and wanting to argue about politics and about Trump and asking me if I was still a Christian and how I could be criticizing him this way. And it was pretty ugly. And as you said, sort of a wakeup call. Julie Roys  07:52 Yeah. And it is something isn't it when you don't support these people that certain evangelicalism believe you have to your, you know, I've got people praying for my salvation, because I've taken on John MacArthur, you know, It's craziness. But there is this tribalism now, within evangelicalism, and it's probably at its very worst when it comes to former President Trump and what he typified. It's interesting to me, you know, as I look at the evangelical movement, you know, I was a card-carrying conservative right? Before Trump came along, and then something really happened. And I feel like I was going back and reading a little bit of Chuck Colson's, Kingdoms in Conflict. Do you remember that book? TIM ALBERTA  08:34 I do. Yeah. Julie Roys  08:35 I mean, he was pretty even handed. I mean, he's very clear in there that being in the kingdom of heaven means it's not about ruling others, it's about being under God's rule. And yet something has tripped, where we're not saying that anymore. We're really become about this whole Dominionism. And he talks about the cultural mandate and things like that, but it's from a very, very different perspective. So here we are dealing with all of this Christian nationalism, and according to your book, a lot of this began, and it's funny because now, Lynchburg Virginia has become synonymous with the Falwell's and with Liberty University. But I've got to say, growing up in the 80s, you know, I knew about the Moral Majority, and some of that, but it just wasn't that big to me. And yet it has grown and grown, and I guess I wasn't even aware of the influence it had. But talk about how a lot of this has its roots really there, in Lynchburg, Virginia, and with what Jerry Falwell Senior. started in, like the late 70s, early 80s. TIM ALBERTA  09:42 Sure, in the context of the American church experience, it is Lynchburg, Virginia. It is the mid-1970s. And it is Jerry Falwell Senior who was a brilliant businessman who, you know, this guy could sell anyone on anything, and he was kind of a master entrepreneur, also a master manipulator. And what Falwell Senior. effectively did, he had already built out Thomas Road Baptist Church into a massive congregation. And then he had tapped into the relatively new medium of television to broadcast his sermons around the country. At one point, he became the single most telecasted program in the entire country. And so, he's reaching millions of people and he's raising a lot of money. This is pretty cutting-edge stuff at the time, but he's building out a mailing list with like more than 10 million names on it, and they are raking in money. So, then he already has his church. But Falwell, Senior is really almost the early archetype of the Christian nationalist. He believes that sort of fighting for God and fighting for America is one in the same and that if America falls, then almost God's kingdom on earth will fall. And so he recognizes that he needs something more than a church; that he needs kind of a cultural stronghold. So, he does two things. First, he takes this little Baptist College Lynchburg Baptist College, and at the time of the bicentennial in 1976, he rebrands it to Liberty University, and he changes the colors from green and gold to red, white, and blue. And basically, they do this whole patriotic rebranding exercise, which is aimed at tapping into not only patriotism in the church, but also tapping into the percolating low simmering at the time, fear in the church and grievance in the church. This sense that, you know, abortion is now legal. Pornography is prevalent, the drug culture is out of control. Prayer is banned in public schools. Secularism is on the march and they're coming for us like they are coming for Christianity in America. And so, Jerry Falwell turns Liberty University into this cause, and then piggybacks onto that with this new organization, The Moral Majority. So suddenly, he's got these three cogs. And he builds out this machine, Falwell Senior does, and it is incredibly effective. They mobilize 10s of millions of voters and sort of bring them under this banner of not just, you know, Christianity, not just following Jesus, but a very particular type of Christianity, a sort of subculture of a subculture. And in many ways, those seeds planted by Falwell 50 years ago, we are harvesting them now. And what we are dealing with, you know, the fracturing of the modern evangelical movement, I think you can trace it directly back to that period. Julie Roys  12:36 It's so interesting, because I think when you talk about Jerry Falwell Senior, and I've talked to a lot of people from Liberty, I've done a lot of reporting about Liberty. And a lot of folks look very wistfully back to the early days, and these are good people, you know, I've talked extensively to them. They're really good people, sincere believers. They look at what's happened to Liberty, and they're like, this isn't Senior. Like Senior loved the Lord and he really was sincere in his walk with the Lord and Junior just was like, we don't know how Junior happened, right? I mean, that's how they often talk about it. I'm going to have you come back to that, because I think what you present is a very, very different picture and honestly, one that I've begun to suspect myself. But let's talk about what happens with you know, Senior dies pretty abruptly right of a heart attack. And then Jerry Falwell, Junior, who is the lawyer, right? He takes over not Jonathan Falwell, who's the pastor, much more of the spiritual leader, but Jerry Falwell, Junior takes over. Very clearly, I'm not a spiritual leader. I mean, he really assued that whole entire title. But when he takes over, despite all the success that his dad had, the school was on the brink of bankruptcy at this point, right? And he kind of turns it around. 13:57 So, Falwell, Junior. is the yes, the UVA trained lawyer, businessman, real estate developer, who is a smart guy. He knows business. And he had really kept the church and organized religion at arm's length. His younger brother Jonathan was the preacher in the family. But Jerry Junior, he'd gone to Liberty for his undergraduate studies. And he says that, you know, he believes in the teachings of Jesus but rejects a lot of the other stuff that comes with it, including Liberty itself. Jerry Junior never wanted to really be a part of Liberty. And suddenly as he's working in the private sector, the school is about to go under. Jerry Senior has really badly mismanaged the finances and he tells his son that basically the school is on the brink of insolvency. And so, Jerry Junior kind of reluctantly comes aboard and he helps to stabilize everything, and he makes a lot of drastic cuts to the different programs and kind of rejiggers the whole balance sheet operation. And he saves Liberty in a lot of ways that, you know, his father gave him credit for that. And it's interesting though, Julie, that when Jerry Falwell senior dies, it's not an accident that Jerry Junior. takes over. That was the plan of succession. It's notable that here is Jerry Falwell senior, who is both businessman and culture warrior, but also a preacher. And he's got these two sons that exemplify one of each, right? He's got the son who's a preacher. And he's got the other son who's the kind of culture warrior businessman. And he appoints the latter to take over Liberty after he's gone. And that in and of itself, I think, speaks volumes. And then more to the point, Jerry Junior, as you said, he comes in and he tells anybody who will listen, look, I'm not a religious leader, I'm not here charged with the spiritual well-being of this school. I'm here to turn us into a powerhouse, I'm here to turn us into a highly profitable, highly influential organization that can sort of, you know, push back against the forces of secularism in the left in this country. But he doesn't, to his credit, I suppose. Falwell Junior, he doesn't pretend that he's something that he's not. And the irony of it all, Julie is that everybody was fine with it. They were fine with it. Right? They were, as you know, when the money was coming in, and the buildings were going up at a rapid clip, and the endowment was bulging, everybody was fine with it. Because he's Jerry Senior's namesake, and he's a Falwell, and the school is doing great. Clearly God is blessing this project. So, what's not to like? Julie Roys  16:47 Well, and you say everyone was fine with it. And it's true on a public face, everyone was fine with it. I will say I started hearing from a lot of people who weren't fine with it from I mean, obviously the Jane DOE's and now we know about who were victims of sexual assault, and their cases got just horribly mismanaged. In fact, not even reported. And you know, now we have the Department of Education looking into how badly Liberty bungled these cases and violated Title Nine mandates, and they could face like a 30 some million dollar fine, which could be one of the largest ever. So, this was percolating under the surface, but nobody knew about it at the time. And I also talked to a lot of professors who were like, the way this place is being run is abysmal. There's nothing Christian about it. The way the administration handles things, there's nothing Christian about it. And we know too, from some of the people you interviewed, it was less like a religious institution and more like a mafia like a mob boss. Like Jerry turned into I think Jerry is very, he's very likable when you meet him. I mean, obviously very socially gifted, even though he's an introvert. He seems like this kind of your good old boy that, you know, everybody likes. But he began to become very controlling, and lock that place down where Jerry ruled with really an iron fist. And by the time some of the stuff started coming out about him, that place I mean, am I right, that it was a lot less like a Christian institution a lot more like the organized crime syndicate? TIM ALBERTA  18:24 Yeah, well, and listen like this is so Julie. It's funny, because obviously, you and I are in the same line of work. We're coming at this from pretty similar worldviews, and we're having similar conversations, with some of the same people. And you're exactly right when they're using the term family business. You know, Liberty is a family business. They're not just talking about like the Falwell family. There's, you know, the implication there is like very clearly that there is almost a mafioso-esque quality to, you don't cross the Falwell's, the power is concentrated in a few hands here. If you get a seat at the table, you are just lucky to be there and you nod and you know, at one point, I think I make sort of an offhand smart aleck comparison to like the North Korean military where, you know, you stand and salute the dear leader and don't dare step out of line. And of course, that's tragic on a number of levels, one of them being that Liberty has been filled over the years with really good and godly students and good and godly professors who are there for the right reasons. Some of these professors who started to really see the rot from the inside., they chose to stick around because on the one hand, they could see the success around them. The kind of observable material success that you know that the campus is absolutely stunning. Maybe God is doing something really marvelous here and I just have to kind of see my way through this part of it. But I also think that there's a level of devotion, and a feeling for some of these people that they wanted to help right the ship, that they wanted to be a part of the solution. And obviously, those are some of the characters I talk to in the book who now have finally gotten to a breaking point where they say, you know what? I just can't do it anymore. And not only can I not do it anymore, but the world needs to know, the whistle needs to be blown here that like this is not okay. Julie Roys  20:21 What does it say about evangelicalism, Tim, that when the money was coming in, and the money still is coming in, that everybody was okay with how godless this place was? And anybody that was in administration knew and saw it. The Board, who it's astounding to me that when Jerry Falwell Junior, got embroiled in this big sex scandal, and he gets fired, that Jerry Prevo takes over. And we think that that is a change of the guard. This was the man who was the chairman of the board the whole time that Jerry was doing all of this stuff. It's shocking to me, but yet I see it so much in so many different Christian organizations. And so, what is it about us that we're okay with these things, with really what is just absolute rampant hypocrisy? TIM ALBERTA  21:15 I'm afraid that in many ways, we're actually worse than some of those secular institutions. Because of this idea of the prosperity gospel, it's almost become like this proper noun. And so, people feel like well, those are those people are crazy. I'm not one of them, I'm not a part of that, right? But the idea inherent to the prosperity gospel, right is that, well, if you give to the Lord, and if you serve the Lord, if you follow the Lord, then you will be blessed. But that is so conveniently and so easily reverse engineered by a lot of Christians, either at a conscious or at a subconscious level, where when you see any sort of material success around you, you then say, well, clearly, I'm blessed. Clearly, the Lord is blessing this project. And that creates a kind of a permission structure, I think, for a lot of us to then turn a blind eye to things that are very obviously wrong, or kind of downplay things that you otherwise would never downplay. And whether that's an individual church congregation, whether that's a big college campus, whether it's the President of the United States, this can manifest in a lot of different ways. It's so much based on that kind of material thinking that I think we are particularly vulnerable, particularly susceptible to it here in the American church. I think the saddest part about it is that many of us just don't see it, or maybe don't want to see it. I don't know. Julie Roys  22:44 Your book has a stunning quote, stunning quote by a former professor, Dr. Aaron Warner. And he says, and I quote, Jerry, Senior, was always a bit of a scoundrel, and Jerry Junior, perfected the art of using fear and hatred as a growth strategy. Christianity happens to be the thing that they used to build a multibillion-dollar institution. It could have been anything else. It could have been moonshine, but they chose Christianity. And it's gained them a lot of power and a lot of money; the two things these people truly worship. You talked to a lot of people, interviewed a lot of people at Liberty. Is that characterization fair? Or do you think it's a little too harsh? TIM ALBERTA  23:23 It's harsh, that's for sure. It might contain some traces of hyperbole. But I will say this, Aaron Werner is another guy who knows that institution very well. Went there as an undergraduate, has deep longstanding ties to Liberty And the stories he tells from the inside are stunning. One of the other quotes, actually, I thought it might be the one that you're going to read because it kind of runs right along in parallel to that one is from a current professor. Now, at the time of this recording, he's a current professor. My sense is that when the book releases and when this gets back to the administration that he could be dismissed and he's expecting that that will happen. But his name is Nick Olsen, and he's an English professor, very popular English professor there. Brilliant, godly young guy. And he's a legacy at Liberty. His dad was one of the first students at Liberty and a contemporary of Falwell Senior. And Nick has sort of agonized in recent years with this inheritance at Liberty and everything that he's seen and struggled with there. And he says to me, this is not quite verbatim, but he says this to me in the final chapter of the book, he says, Jerry Junior, thought that he was fulfilling his father's vision by assuing spiritual stuff and by building out this massive multibillion dollar like culture warring Republican institution. And he says, and it is heartbreaking, because that's exactly what he's done, and he did fulfill Jerry Senior's vision. And I think that piece of it, Julie is not hyperbole. I think that when you spend enough time digging through the archives and talking to people who were there in the room where it happened, so to speak, it becomes pretty self-evident. And by the way, you know, you mentioned earlier that there are people who will say, Yeah, but you know, Jerry Senior, he really loved the Lord. Yeah, well, these things aren't mutually exclusive. I mean, I'm not suggesting that he didn't love the Lord. But I'm suggesting that like many people who love the Lord, he got his priorities out of whack. And by the way, we are all susceptible to this. But it's very hard to evaluate the history of Liberty University, the decisions made there, the structure of the place and the personnel and how they've treated people and what the benchmarks have been. It's very hard to assess all of that and reach any other conclusion than the one that Nick Olsen reaches at the end of the book. Julie Roys  25:41 And yet Liberty continues to be the largest Christian university in the country. It still has this dominance, there's still a lot of people that I know sending their kids there. And it's heartbreaking to me. I mean, I just wonder at what point do we say enough, and we stand up to this? And I'm glad that people are starting to speak out. But sometimes I wonder if it's too little too late, when we have just these juggernaut organizations and it really has been a marrying of two kingdoms that should be in conflict, and we're trying to say that they can be married together the kingdom of this world, the kingdom, the political realm, and the kingdom of Christ. And Jesus never became a political leader. It's stunning to me some of these quotes that are in your book, that are just like you expect a lightning to fall out of the sky, the way that scripture and Jesus are being misrepresented. It's just so awful. Julie Roys  26:37 In your first section, though, I have to say there's always some redeeming thing in each section, which I'm like, Thank You, Lord. It's like a palate cleanser in a lot of just awful stuff. But you have this beautiful chapter. And it's on a guy, John Dixon, who I actually got to know in my reporting on Ravi Zacharias, because John used to be a speaker for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. And he was one of those who, you know, pretty early in the game as things were starting to come out, recognized that there were some lies being told by the institution he had been a part of, and he quickly made a break, and he boldly took a stand. I mean, I really respected him for that, that he didn't seem to have this Oh, fear of, if I say something, what's going to happen to me? I mean, he just said what was right, and what was what was true. And now he's at Wheaton College, which is right in my backyard. And what I love is that he's so joyfully on the losing team. You know, we've got all of these people, all these Christians out there telling us we have to be on the winning team, we got to take America back. And here's John Dixon saying, No, we're on the losing team right now. I mean, eventually, when Christ comes back, we'll be you know, he will set things right, and we'll be on the winning team. But for now, we're kind of on the losing team. And it's okay, people. So, talk about John and what we can learn from him and his example, because again, he's from Australia, which is probably about 10 or 15 years ahead of us in sort of this post Christian era that, you know, is beginning to happen here as well. Julie Roys  28:16 And that is so tough for us. I mean, it's not tough for Chinese Christians to get this, right? I mean they get it right away. Because to be a believer means you have to get rid of everything, you can't hold on to anything, you're gonna lose all your power, all your position. But I think we've been, actually it's the curse of being prosperous. And being in a country where Christians have had the majority and where it actually was a plus, probably for my parents to be believers. I think it won't be for my children. But maybe that'll be a good thing. And maybe that's precisely what the church needs. We already think we're being persecuted, which is funny. We really aren't. But we may see it. And right now, I think most of the persecution we're getting is because of what you said that we're not because we're so holy, but because we're actually worse than the world in so many different ways. And we deserve it. TIM ALBERTA  28:16 John is really one of my favorite people I've met in all of the journeys that I was on, and one of my favorite characters in the book for exactly the reasons that you mentioned there. And the fact that he is not an American is, I think, a big part of his perspective, right? But I think also, there's something deeper embedded in the American psyche, about winning, about the need to dominate. I have a funny quote somewhere else in the book from somebody who had spent years living and studying and teaching in Canada, who talks about how Canadians just want fourth place, and then when they get the bronze, they're thrilled. And in America, if you don't get the gold, you're a total loser, right? And so, there's something, you know, about the American Christian experience that's so different. And so, John, one of my favorite scenes in all of this reporting that I did was, we're sitting in the cafeteria there at Wheaton College, surrounded by the flags of the world all around us in the cafeteria. And I say, Why did you come here? Like, really? Why did you come here? And he says, like, this is my mission field now, like the US is my mission field because of this, this stuff. Everything you and I are discussing right now. He said this stuff is like so toxic and so unhealthy. And the church is caught in this terrible pattern. That, by the way, is not new. Right? You go back to Constantine, there has been this obsession with worldly power this inclination to merge two kingdoms into one. So, what we're living through here is not new, in a lot of ways. And I think John is so brilliant in kind of illuminating the appropriate Christian perspective here, which is to say that if you care so much about winning and losing, then the good news is you've already won, right? The tomb is empty, Jesus conquered death, and you believe in him. So therefore, you're already a part of the kingdom. But this place, which is meant to be ephemeral, and unimportant ultimately, and just, you know, a step among the stairs, that if your identity here is wrapped up in winning and losing, then you can't really have your identity there. And he says, ultimately, you know, we're the death and resurrection people. Like losing, and losing well, is a part of the Christian experience. TIM ALBERTA  31:24 John Dixon talks about how there's sort of this inverse relationship historically, between the amount of cultural and social and political power held by Christians in a society and the health of Christianity in that society, right? In other words, when you hold the commanding heights, the Christian influence it actually tends to be pretty weak and pretty corrupted and pretty compromised. When you are at the margins and when you are truly countercultural, the witness thrives. And we've seen that throughout history. Another favorite character of mine in the book, Brian Zahnd, who's the pastor of a church out in Missouri, he talks about how difficult it is for American Christians to really appreciate how the Bible is written from the perspective of the underdog, right? The Hebrew slaves fleeing Egypt, and the first century Christians living under a brutal Roman occupation. Like they had no power, they had no influence. And yet they were so joyful, and they were so content because they had their kingdom, right? And it does give me unease even in my own personal life, just the things I enjoy the materials, the prosperity, the comforts; can I fully appreciate the baby born in a manger? can I fully identify with the vagrant preacher from the ghettos of Nazareth? You know, it's a hard thing. Julie Roys  32:42 And here's the reality; that message, which is Christ's message really doesn't sell well in America. Having your best life now sells in America. And what we're seeing right now, and this, you know, brings me to the second section in your book dealing with power, which again, we've got to take back, America, has become sort of the mantra that we're hearing from so many of these, you know, political rights. And it has just morphed into something where, and again, I said at the outset, I used to be very much politically engaged with the conservative movement. I am not anymore because I can't stomach it and what it's become. I felt like we were being salt. But now it's about dominating and doing it by any means possible, where we just get rid of our morality. And I was always brought up to believe and I think this is what Scripture teaches, that the means is as important as the end. And so, if we achieve a righteous end through an unrighteous means, then we've lost. We've completely lost because we have given up what makes us unique, and what makes us God honoring for something that we're saying is a God honoring, you know end. But again, this is what has happened in our country. And, and what's interesting in this section that just captured my imagination. I mean, I've wondered this, like, you take a Robert Jeffress, right? This guy's not dumb. He's a smart Southern Baptist preacher, clearly a savvy guy. He has built this mega church, but the things that came out of his mouth, especially when Trump was in power, but it's still there. The things that come out of his mouth, and I think, he's got to know that this is not in line with the Gospels. He's got to see this. And yet, publicly, you wouldn't hear that. But when you met with him privately, you began to hear some doubt in there and allowing you to see a little bit of vulnerability, although it didn't seem to last all that long. But talk about that, because I'm not sensing much doubt in the masses that follow these men. But when you get them one on one, tell me what you see. TIM ALBERTA  34:50 And it's not just Robert Jeffress, Greg Locke, Greg Locke, Ralph Reed. Yeah, yeah, a lot of these guys. It's the pastor who in my hometown, grew his church tenfold by basically turning Sunday morning worship services into Fox news segments. And giving a Nazi salute to Gretchen Whitmer from his pulpit. I mean, but then you get them one on one. And you press them a little bit. I mean, you know, politely, respectfully, but you press them. Suddenly, they not only back off a little bit, but they do a little bit of like winking and nodding at you to basically say, like, you're right, I'm definitely putting on a bit of a song and dance here for the masses. But I think that they will ultimately justify it by saying, Well, yeah, but look at all these people who are coming in and look at the opportunity, we have to reach them now with the gospel? So, you know, those ends really do justify the means. I think the problem with that, as you hinted it, is but look, I mean, there's a lot of problems with it. You know, Mark 8:36 is not a rhetorical question, right? Like, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world yet forfeit his soul? But I think for some of these people, some of these leaders, the thing that really grates at me and I know it grates at you, Julie, is like, they're the shepherds, they're the ones who are supposed to know better, because a lot of their flock, you know, and I'm not being condescending or patronizing when I say this, they don't necessarily know better, they are the sheep, right? They need to be shepherded. And instead of shepherding, a lot of these people have just themselves become wolves. And they become wolves for what? So that you can have a seat at the table? So that you can get on Fox News? So that you can raise some money? So that for what ultimately? You're so right, when you press them on it almost to a person, they will acknowledge at some level that what they're doing is kind of gross, and kind of anti-biblical, and then they just keep on doing it. Julie Roys  36:46 So, speak to the person who is listening. And we probably don't have a ton of these. But there may be some who are listening, who have bought this hook, line, and sinker that we do need to take America back. And Franklin Graham told us it's all for the Supreme Court justices, and we got the Supreme Court justices and Roe v. Wade was just overturned and, you know, look at what was accomplished. So, you know, politics is a dirty business, Tim. I mean, come on, if we're gonna win in politics, which, you know, we're talking about babies here, babies are being slaughtered left and right. And then, you know, some of these people would allow a baby to be born alive and kill it. You know, that's who these people are. So, I mean, come on. This is the world we live in, and we've got to fight the way that the world fights. What do you say? TIM ALBERTA  37:35 I'd say a couple of things. I think you can go round and round about Roe v. Wade, and about Trump and about Supreme Court justices. But be careful what you wish for in this space. Because the fact of the matter is that Roe v Wade fell, and the total number of abortions in this country went up. I live in Michigan, where prior to Roe v Wade falling, there were pretty tight abortion restrictions in Michigan. Now, it is the wild west. It is some of the most liberalized abortion laws in the country. And that is true in seven or eight other states that have had ballot initiatives passed since Roe v. Wade, dramatically liberalizing abortion laws, and it's going to happen in a number of other states next year. So, let's be really clear eyed and fact based when we talk about what our political involvement does and what it doesn't do. At the end of the day, if you want to win hearts and minds to stop the scourge of abortion, if you are a Christian, and you view this as your great crusade, then is voting for a candidate or putting a bumper sticker on your car, is that the way to win those hearts and minds? Because the fact is, if American evangelicals had put a fraction of the energy into the social side of abortion, of doing the hard work in the clinics, and helping the single mothers and doing the foster care that is needed to address this at its root, if they had been willing to do that over the last 50 years, my guess is that public opinion would be dramatically different as it pertains to abortion. And we wouldn't even be talking about Roe v. Wade, because the number of abortions would be so low in this country that it wouldn't even register. But we've sort of self-selected into this alternate universe where politicians are our savior, and that politics is the mechanism by which we right the wrongs in this country. And I'm sorry, but if you are citizens of another kingdom?, then you can't possibly believe that. You can't possibly believe that Donald Trump or that any other politician is the person who's going to ultimately right these great moral wrongs. But unfortunately, I think that's the trap we've fallen into. Julie Roys  39:51 You know, I used to be very involved in the prolife movement. I will say, almost all of the people that I knew when I was involved in the pro-life movement, were actually involved in reaching out to single moms and caring for them and caring for their unborn children. But I think what we've forgotten so much is that politics is downstream of culture. So, if you're losing the culture, which we clearly are to change the politics, if you've got a kid that's rebellious, a teenager who's rebellious in your home, locking down all the windows and the doors in your house, that's not going to keep your kid from sinning. What's going to keep your kid from sinning, is if you can winsomely love your child into relationship with Jesus Christ and to want to be like you and to want to adopt your values. But we've forgotten about that, we've become this, you know, Midas right. And I remember in 2016, writing a commentary, The Rise of Trump, The Fall of Evangelicalism, and I said, we may win this one, but we will lose in the long run, if we throw our convictions out the window, and we alienate everyone around us, by our you know, the way that we talk and the way that we relate to people. This is not how you win people to the Lord. That fell on, you know, really deaf ears. It actually lost me some key supporters too. But I just was stunned because I did not know who these people were that I thought believed the same way that I did and had the same values. And then I went, Wow, we are just on different planets, we really don't have that. Julie Roys  41:29 I want to look at one person, again, you have these palate cleansers within all of these sections. And one of them to me is Cal Thomas, who was very much a part of the right and so I can relate to that, because that was I mean, I used to be emceeing the banquet to raise money for you know, the political cause, or whatever it was. I don't do that anymore. Cal Thomas doesn't do that anymore. What changed Cal? TIM ALBERTA  41:58 It's so funny, Julie, because just a minute ago, when you were talking about what are the weapons of our warfare? I was thinking about Cal., because Cal for those who don't know his story, you know, he was Jerry Falwell Senior's lieutenant in the Moral Majority. And he was their spokesman for the Moral Majority. And the vice president of that organization, and, you know, was really heavily involved in the kind of crusading era of the Religious Right, he was a central figure. And then Cal really started to feel uneasy with what he was seeing around him. And he doesn't even sugarcoat it. We have this very raw conversation in the book where he talks about, you know, the corruption and the greed and the grift. And how he just couldn't justify it. He justified it for a while by saying, Well, look how many people we're reaching, and look at all this money coming in. So clearly, you know, God must be doing something here. And then he eventually just gets to a point where he says, No, this is a scam. It's just immoral. And he finally walks away. And then years later, he writes this book called Blinded by Might, where he kind of tries to atone. And he just says, Listen, I was a total believer in winning the culture war to protect Christian America, as you know, part of our duty, you know, to God's kingdom. And in fact, not only has it failed, but it has backfired spectacularly, that we have driven away so many people who need Jesus, but who won't have anything to do with us anymore, They won't even let us in the door to have a conversation because of the way we've treated them because of the way we've treated the culture. So, to your point about locking down the teenager in the house, right? Cal really eloquently and powerfully was giving voice to this when he wrote that book. And then, you know, in our interviews for this book, he's an older guy now he's 80. And he's looking back with such regret on those years and thinking about how did he in some way contribute to laying the groundwork for Trump ism as this kind of sub cult in the evangelical world. And what's most interesting to me from that whole conversation, and I said this to him, is that the more things have changed, the more they've stayed the exact same. I mean, this break that he's describing in the 1980s. And this kind of crisis of conscience that he's feeling is exactly what we're trying to address today. What I'm trying to address in the book now, which is that, listen, it doesn't have to be this way. You have a choice, right? We all have a choice. It was so incredibly unpleasant for me to write this book in a lot of ways, Julie. If I'm being totally honest, I probably couldn't have written it while my dad was still alive. It would have been too hard. Like I've had some people writing me emails this past week saying, oh, like thank you for your courage. Thank you for your brave, I don't feel courageous. I don't feel brave. I feel like a coward in a lot of ways that it took me so long and that a lot of ways took my dad dying and having those experiences at his funeral to finally be willing to acknowledge and use my platform, my relatively high profile journalistically speaking to address this thing that has been so clearly wrong for such a long time. And so, for anybody listening, whether it's in your individual congregation, your faith community, your family, whatever it is like, it doesn't have to be this way. And it takes people like Cal Thomas, kind of blowing up his own life, blowing up his tribal affiliations and walking away. It takes Pastor Brian Zahnd, who I write about in Chapter 15, who had a mega church of 5000 people, and they were making money hand over fist. And then he just woke up one day and had this like epiphany from the Lord that it was all wrong, and that it was so shallow, and it was doing such a disservice to the Gospel. And he blew up his mega church. He's got like 150 people who come every Sunday now and the sanctuary seats like 2000. And he made a choice, right? Cal Thomas made a choice. You've made a choice, Julie. And I just think like, at the end of the day, the people who make that choice and who decide to reckon with what this has become? I don't think they're going to regret it. I really don't. Julie Roys  46:05 I have not regretted it once being free of the whole evangelical industrial complex as it's called, and just being free to follow your conscience without thinking, what are the consequences if I speak the truth publicly? Like what's going to happen to me? Like I see so many Christians just living in fear that if they speak out, or they tell the truth that they know that something, you know, there will be bad consequences for me, and it just makes me wonder, do we believe the gospel, like do we believe the gospel? What gospel are we living on day-to-day basis? And I love Pastor Zahnd's story that was like one of my favorite stories. And it reminded me of the book because I just interviewed Scott McKnight and Laura Behringer and their book pivot, which talks about similar things, other churches that realized church is toxic. It's huge, it's successful, but I feel empty inside, you know, and I feel thin, and they made that pivot. And it may be to smaller church, it may be and it's interesting, though, you were saying how Zahnd's church is now starting to maybe even start to grow and become a little bit healthier. And so, when I hear that I say, it's going to take a while. But in this, you know, these ashes, do you see something growing that's beautiful there that can replace this ugliness that quite frankly, I think I just think it's doomed. I think it's coming down. I don't know that it will come down quickly. This complex that we've built, but I think it will come down eventually. It may take decades. But I think there will be a Christianity I hope this was my prayer that replaces it. And it's more organic and more Grassroots less big leadership and more the Body of Christ. TIM ALBERTA  47:48 Yes,  I do see something rising from the ashes. I can sense it, particularly among the younger generation. One of the things that consistently surprised me in all of my reporting, and it was a pleasant surprise, to be clear, was spending time with younger believers. They ideologically, culturally, politically, like they're really no different from their parents, like they check those boxes on paper. But then you kind of get into some of this with them. And they want nothing to do with Trumpism. They want nothing to do with Charlie Kirk, and I'm talking about like the serious believers. I'm not talking about like the very casual kids who identify as Christian, but then go to a Turning Point USA event. I mean, like, you spend time around Liberty, and like, yes, there are some MAGA kids at Liberty. But most of the kids you spend time with  at Liberty, including those who would self-identify as like, sure I guess on paper, I would be a Republican, because of abortion because of other issues, they will really eloquently and gracefully speak to these schisms. And they're so perceptive. I think that's the big thing, Julie, is that they can see it. Right? My generation, I kind of think of us as like the children of the Moral Majority. And we can now very clearly diagnose this in a way that my dad's generation probably couldn't, they were too close to it. They were too wrapped up in it. And I think, you know, in some ways, they almost I kind of tend to maybe just give them a little bit of a pass for that because they didn't have the appropriate distance to really assess it and analyze it in the way that I think I'm able to, and certainly in the way that the generations behind me are able to. They see what this is doing to the church, and they are saying no, thank you. Even at my home church, the guy who took over for my dad, almost run out of the place. He came very close to just quitting because it got so bad for him because he hears this young guy taking over this, this mega church congregation in a very conservative Republican community. And he's not particularly a conservative Republican. He's not like some big Democrat either. He's just a guy who like loves Jesus and who processes news events through the eyes of like the gospel, right? What's so interesting is that he lost a ton of his congregation. And then this past summer, I went back for the first time since my dad's funeral, and the place was packed, and I didn't recognize anybody there. And he comes out and gives this sort of fire and brimstone sermon, challenging them on the culture wars, challenging them on like, where are your priorities, really? What kingdom do you really belong to? And so that actually, I didn't aim to end the book on that optimistic note, but I was so encouraged by it, because it makes me think that in this market of supply and demand that you and I have talked about, and mostly we focused on the perverted nature of the supply and demand, that there is also maybe more demand out there than we realize for that true, pure form of the gospel. And so that is my hope, moving forward, and particularly with these younger Christians, who will demand something better than what we've seen so far. Julie Roys  50:53 I loved that I don't often read the epilogue, but in your book I did. And that was beautiful to read about Pastor Winans and the way that, you know, you kind of left them in the early chapters really disillusioned and discouraged. And then he comes back invigorated for the gospel, and preaching it so boldly and that really, pastors like that give me hope. And I know that there's probably a lot more of them than I encounter in you know, the line of work that I do, which usually means I hear about the worst of the worst all the time. Julie Roys  51:28 Let me just ask you about this most of your chapters are about political power and about the way that these kingdoms  and the power has sort of become an idolatrous thing. And then you turn your eye to corruption going on in the church and the abuse, the abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, how that's been addressed recently, how Rachel den Hollander stood up to it and she went, you know, most people I'm sure listening know Rachel's story. But you know, one of the first gymnasts who came forward and told her story about Larry Nasser, and how he had abused so much of the, you know, US Olympic gymnasts team. And she went from being just Joan of Arc, I think you call it to being Jezebel, right? Or from Esther to Jezebel, because she spoke out about the evil in the church. And that's what I found. When I was at Moody Radio I was allowed to speak about Joel Osteen, right? Or I was allowed to speak about the liberals in politics. But when I turned my critique on our own tribe, man, I would get shut down, you know. That's one of the reasons I left Moody besides the others that I talked about. I couldn't speak out about the evil in our own house. And I feel that at this point, we have no moral platform as Christians to be speaking about the evil out in the world anymore, until we deal with the evil in our own house and the way that it's crept in. You know, judgment begins with the house of God. He doesn't expect, you know, the people who don't know him, to act any differently than they're acting, but He expects us to, and we're not. So, I appreciated that you put this chapter in the book, dealing with some of the abuse and the corruption within the church. But you could have easily left it out and just talked about the way that politics has, you know, really usurped the gospel. Why did you put this chapter in? TIM ALBERTA  53:28 One of the things that really bugs me, is how the New Testament model here and you were just alluding to this a moment ago. The New Testament model is not ambiguous. We are to treat outsiders with unlimited grace and kindness and compassion and forgiveness, because they don't know God, and they don't know any better. That is clear. And what is also clear is that we are to treat the insiders with the utmost accountability, and they are to be held to the highest standard because they do know God, and they do know better. That is the New Testament model. And we in the American church have completely flipped it. We have nothing but hostility, and animus and enmity towards the outside world. And we practice nothing but grace and forgiveness and cheap grace and cheap forgiveness inside the church. Right? And it drives me a little bit nuts. Because if you are the person out there in the world, who is sort of curious about Jesus, and you feel something missing in your life, what are the odds today that you're going to go to a local church and try to learn a little bit more? I mean, you know, you might say, Well, some people will, some people do Sure. But the statistics here don't lie, Julie. Like when you look back 30 or 40 years, the perception of the church among unbelievers in this country was incredibly positive. People who did not know Jesus looked at the church as a beacon of moral rectitude, of compassion, of social good. Even if they were never going to sit in the pews with us, even if they didn't believe any of the doctrine, they respected the church and they admire the church. And that has completely changed. It's just completely fallen apart. There are some people who will tell you like Robert Jeffers and I go back and forth on this in the book, he said, Well, that it doesn't matter, right? Those people aren't looking for the Lord. I completely disagree. I think the credibility of the church matters enormously. TIM ALBERTA  55:37 To your question of why did I feel compelled to include that chapter? Well, who's going to hold the church accountable? Is the church going to hold itself accountable? No, I mean, typically, institutions are not very good at self-policing. We know that from working in journalism, right? By the way, the media is not very good at self-policing. Actually, I could argue the media is terrible at self-policing. I mean, any big institution, it can't be expected to hold itself accountable. Okay, so what are the mechanisms for accountability here? If we care about the Bride of Christ, if we care about the credibility of the church, if we care about how the outside world perceives the church, which I think matters enormously, then what do we do to ensure that the church is on the up and up and is doing its duty before God and it's carrying out its purpose and its mission? You know, journalism has to play a role in that. I think, you know, the law has to play a role in that. I think that there are external forces, even, you know, gasp secular forces that have to play a role in that, because otherwise, we just leave these churches, these pastors to their own devices. And I'm sorry, but you don't need to read any other source then the Bible itself. You pick up the Bible itself, read from Old Testament to new and see how well that works out. We see it time and again. I there are not accountability structures in place, then things go very badly, very quickly. And so that's a long answer to your question. Julie Roys  57:06 Hmm. Well, I appreciate that. And I appreciate your book. And I know you're getting interviews all over the country. I saw you on CBS, Good Morning America; that was so exciting to see but really wonderful that you've gotten this platform to winsomely speak to the rest of society who I remember a couple of times, I got to be on NPR. They would ask me about evangelicalism, and they are always amazed, I think that I could even string two sentences together. And I was actually an evangelical right? But I am so thrilled that you are representing evangelicals because you're a face that and I don't know, do you still identify as Evangelical? TIM ALBERTA  57:49 not really, I don't fight the label, but I would not volunteer it for myself just because of exactly what we just described, you know. Somebody outside the church hears it, and they quickly shut down the conversation, because they don't really want anything to do with you. Julie Roys  58:01 I don't know if I would take that term, either. I'm kind of where you are, as well. But you're a Christian, and you love Jesus. And even when I heard you in that one interview recently said, How's your faith? and you're like, it's as strong as it's ever been. I thank you for that and for your witness, and for this book, and for giving me so much of your time. I really appreciate it. So, thank you, TIM ALBERTA  58:21 Thank you for all that you're doing. And thank you for saying that. It's very kind of you. We're ultimately playing some small part here in trying to get this thing back on track and doing it as humbly as possible. I hope that we can make a difference. Thank you for having me on. And I know that we'll continue to talk. Julie Roys  58:39 Absolutely. And thanks so much for listening to The Roys Report, a podcast dedicated to reporting the truth and restoring the church. I'm Julie Roys. And just a quick reminder, if you'd like a copy of Tim Alberta's book, The Kingdome, The Power, and The Glory, we'd be happy to send you one for a gift of $50 or more to The Roys Report this month. Again, we don't have any large donors or advertising, we simply have you, the people who care about exposing evil and restoring the church. So, if you'd like to support our work and get Tim's book, just go to JULIEROYS.COM/DONATE. Also, I want to let you know that next week, I'll be releasing another talk from the RESTORE conference. This one is by veteran church planter Lance Ford, who gave an amazing talk on the Christian addiction to leadership and why it's so toxic. I love this talk and I think you will too. So be watching for that. We'll release the talk as both an audio podcast and as a video at my YouTube channel. Also, just a quick reminder to subscribe to The Roys Report on Apple podcast, Google podcasts or Spotify. That way you'll never miss an episode. And while you're at it, I'd really appreciate it if you'd help us spread the word about the podcast by leaving a review. And then please share the podcast on social media. So, more people can hear about this great content. Again, thanks so much for joining me today hope you are blessed and encouraged. Read more

“If this idea… the idea of overcoming one fear a day scares you, then keep reading.”I wrote this line three years ago.I was doing a photo challenge. I asked Chase Jarvis, one of the best photographers in the world and the founder of Creative Live, “What should I do?”I wanted to know how to take a good photo.He asked me what I liked.I said, “Sad people.”So he told me to shoot through the lens of “connection.” So I went inside. And looked for my inner compass.I went to eat.Then I saw the man. He was a balding guy in his 60s waiting to be served. He told me he just arrived after a 17-hour trip from Italy. He said, "I am tired."And I shot him.I shot him before my daughter left for college. Before I became a stepdad. Before stand-up comedy. Before Trump. Before #metoo. Before phone addiction (sort of). Before a lot of things.“That photograph is evidence,” Chase said. “It's evidence that we're all creative… Wildy.”But not everyone believes that.Because they've blocked it for too many years.But you can get it back.Chase explains how in his book, “Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life.”And he explains the DNA of creativity on my podcast. Here's a list of everything we talk about. Including quotes from Chase and tips on how to start your daily creative process today:I introduce Chase Jarvis, one of the best photographers in the world and founder of Creative Live – [3:35]How Chase helped me hone my creative muscle three years ago – [4:32]“We're all creative, wildly” – Chase Jarvis – [8:18]The wrong way to think about creativity – [8:48]“When you're in your purest element of creativity, you're not judging. You can't be creative and judging at the same time.” – Chase Jarvis – [10:20]Three key principles of Chase's book:1. Everyone is creative2. Creativity is not a skill. It's a habit. It's a process, not a product.3. Creativity is a muscle. – [13:08]How creating in small ways every day leads to the habit of creativity – [15:29]The myth of creativity: some people are creative and some people aren't. Chase explains where this myth came from – [16:49]Proof that we are “self-expression machines.” And proof that society makes us scared to be creative – [19:11]I ask Chase about mastery – [21:19]Chase tells us what Creative Live is and what kind of classes they have available for you – [23:56]I ask Chase about fear and self-doubt- [24:51]How to get to know the things you're supposed to be doing in this world. And how Chase figured this out for himself, too – [25:25]I ask Chase if building a business made him fearful of losing his roots in photography -[27:22]How to know if something is the right path for you – [28:05]Know when to shift directions. How to know if you're following the flame in your life. Or not – [29:45]Why you're loved ones don't support your dreams and want you to do what's safe…- [30:14]“Now is the riskiest time in human history to do the thing that has always been safe. Because the world is changing so fast. If you don't have a life and connection and a passion for what you're doing, you're going to be isolated. You're going to be lonely. You're going to be sick. It's not safe to do what everybody else wants. The safest thing, in your journey, is to be inexcusable unapologetically you.” – Chase Jarvis – [31:00]We look at how Chase combined two passions and became the best in the world at the intersection of his two passions – [32:22]Why society doesn't teach us to be creative – [34:01]The power of experimentation – [35:21]I ask Chase how he initially started developing his internal flame and love for photography – [36:00]Why Chase doesn't give The A-Z steps to find your path… because everyone's path is different and unique. – [39:40]How a teacher killed Chase's dreams. And shift led to his identity. – [42:00]How Chase rediscovered his creativity 20 years after his teacher crushed him – [44:00]How to be more in tune with yourself. Chase says how he realized he was denying his creative self – [47:40]How Chase taught himself how to take pictures – [48:20]Tip: learn from virtual mentors – [50:29]Why do you have to document your work and analyze it for improvement? – [52:40]Chase talks about trading food for the ability to learn – [55:00]“Learning gets easy when you're doing something that resonates internally” – Chase Jarvis – [55:56]When you start anything, you're going to suck. Embrace this. – [57:03]Measure how much you love something. vs how much you're frustrated by something. Then use this to know where the flame is for you – [58:24]The importance of having the right community… one where you feel welcome – [1:00:14]How to develop a community around your work – [1:01:18]Article recommendation: “A Thousand True Fans” by Kevin Kelly – [1:01:46]Every path is different. The best time to start a new creative endeavor is 10 years ago. And today – [1:02:28]The advantage and danger of having competition in your community – [1:03:25]The importance of asking yourself, “How does this make me feel?” about a person or community or task, job, creative project, etc. – [1:04:21]Why not paying attention to how people and situations can make you feel leads you down the wrong path – [1:05:12]How to tell who your people are. And who they aren't. – [1:06:09]Listen to your calling. “It's not always a trumpet,” Chase said. “It's a whisper and that whisper is inside of you. And it doesn't look like a map. Because a map shows you, ‘I'm here and I'm going to follow this path and I'm going to end up here.' It's way more a compass. And a compass is just an arrow that gets you in a direction.” – [1:07:15]How Chase dealt with burnout at the peak of his career – [1:08:23]The first photo-sharing app was created by Chase. He said, “That ended up being one of my biggest professional successes and failures at the same time” –  [1:10:18]I ask Chase what mistakes he made in creating his photo-sharing app – [1:11:38]Six critical lessons to learn from Chase – [1:14:30]I ask Chris how someone who's 40, 50, 60 years old can start to listen to their inner compass when it's been blocked for so long – [1:15:24]Step 1: call yourself a creative. Math is creative. Science is creative. No matter what you do, somehow you're creating in small ways – [1:17:08]Chase gives some experiments that you can do to start today – [1:18:42]Why this book resonated with me – [1:21:45]Rejection therapy. Try this to advance in ability faster – [1:22:34]“Being willing to be uncomfortable is a huge opportunity.” – Chase Jarvis – [1:24:42]Proof that “people want to help you when you do crazy shit”- [1:26:46]The one exercise Chase does every morning to make himself get out of his comfort zone – [1:28:22]I thank Chase for coming on the show and breaking down the DNA of creativity. And why his book is the Bible of creativity – [1:29:05]-----------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltucher.com/podcast.------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe  to “The James Altucher Show” wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsStitcheriHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on Social Media:YouTubeTwitterFacebook

"If this idea... the idea of overcoming one fear a day scares you, then keep reading."I wrote this line three years ago.I was doing a photo challenge. I asked Chase Jarvis, one of the best photographers in the world and the founder of Creative Live, "What should I do?"I wanted to know how to take a good photo.He asked me what I liked.I said, "Sad people."So he told me to shoot through the lens of "connection." So I went inside. And looked for my inner compass.I went to eat.Then I saw the man. He was a balding guy in his 60s waiting to be served. He told me he just arrived after a 17-hour trip from Italy. He said, "I am tired."And I shot him.I shot him before my daughter left for college. Before I became a stepdad. Before stand-up comedy. Before Trump. Before #metoo. Before phone addiction (sort of). Before a lot of things."That photograph is evidence," Chase said. "It's evidence that we're all creative... Wildy."But not everyone believes that.Because they've blocked it for too many years.But you can get it back.Chase explains how in his book, "Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life."And he explains the DNA of creativity on my podcast. Here's a list of everything we talk about. Including quotes from Chase and tips on how to start your daily creative process today:I introduce Chase Jarvis, one of the best photographers in the world and founder of Creative Live - [3:35]How Chase helped me hone my creative muscle three years ago - [4:32]"We're all creative, wildly" - Chase Jarvis - [8:18]The wrong way to think about creativity - [8:48]"When you're in your purest element of creativity, you're not judging. You can't be creative and judging at the same time." - Chase Jarvis - [10:20]Three key principles of Chase's book:1. Everyone is creative2. Creativity is not a skill. It's a habit. It's a process, not a product.3. Creativity is a muscle. - [13:08]How creating in small ways every day leads to the habit of creativity - [15:29]The myth of creativity: some people are creative and some people aren't. Chase explains where this myth came from - [16:49]Proof that we are "self-expression machines." And proof that society makes us scared to be creative - [19:11]I ask Chase about mastery - [21:19]Chase tells us what Creative Live is and what kind of classes they have available for you - [23:56]I ask Chase about fear and self-doubt- [24:51]How to get to know the things you're supposed to be doing in this world. And how Chase figured this out for himself, too - [25:25]I ask Chase if building a business made him fearful of losing his roots in photography -[27:22]How to know if something is the right path for you - [28:05]Know when to shift directions. How to know if you're following the flame in your life. Or not - [29:45]Why you're loved ones don't support your dreams and want you to do what's safe...- [30:14]"Now is the riskiest time in human history to do the thing that has always been safe. Because the world is changing so fast. If you don't have a life and connection and a passion for what you're doing, you're going to be isolated. You're going to be lonely. You're going to be sick. It's not safe to do what everybody else wants. The safest thing, in your journey, is to be inexcusable unapologetically you." - Chase Jarvis - [31:00]We look at how Chase combined two passions and became the best in the world at the intersection of his two passions - [32:22]Why society doesn't teach us to be creative - [34:01]The power of experimentation - [35:21]I ask Chase how he initially started developing his internal flame and love for photography - [36:00]Why Chase doesn't give The A-Z steps to find your path... because everyone's path is different and unique. - [39:40]How a teacher killed Chase's dreams. And shift led to his identity. - [42:00]How Chase rediscovered his creativity 20 years after...

On Monday's Mark Levin Show, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is going behind the back of Congress, and the Israelis to try and negotiate a two-state solution. But Hamas isn't interested in that, they want an Islamic caliphate. And what would this other State look like? How would it be different from the Gaza Strip which was the two-state solution? This two-state solution is a disaster but President Biden pushes it anyway. A two-state solution would lead to the annihilation of the Jewish people and so-called moderate Arab states – this must be opposed. Later, Biden keeps trying to pressure PM Benjamin Netanyahu for a humanitarian pause. Netanyahu should turn the tables and pressure Biden. He should say when you shut off the oil money going to Iran and enforce the Trump sanctions we can start talking about a humanitarian pause. When you pledge that you are prepared to prevent Iran from getting nukes then we can start talking about a humanitarian pause. Rep Chip Roy calls in and explains that it's in America's national security interest to have a strong Israel holding the line against terrorists. One idea to help Israel could be to cut the $12 billion a year going to the U.N. and give it to Israel. Also, this Judge in Donald Trump's civil case in NY should have been disbarred a long time ago. Before Trump even walked into the courtroom the Judge found him guilty of violating a statue that has never been used against anyone in the state of NY. Finally, there is an off-year election in Virginia this Tuesday. There tends to be low voter turnout, so your vote is especially effective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before Trump, Joe Trippi & I used to fight about tax rates & energy policy on TV. Now we're on the same team, the defending democracy team. Interesting conversation with him here on how the next 16-17 months will play out. Also fascinating insight from Trippi on how Trump, RFK Jr, & No Labels are all connected. Have a listen.

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group wrap up their joint spring meetings, where the focus is on restructuring debt for low-income countries; expected Republican presidential candidates convene at a National Rifle Association Leadership Forum amid ongoing mass shooting concerns; and the United Nations discusses the prospects for national elections in Libya, as the country continues to grapple with sharp divisions.   Mentioned on the Podcast   “A Conversation With David Malpass”    Brad W. Setser, “The World Bank Stepped Up During the Pandemic,” CFR.org   Ian Shapira, “Before Trump's Wild Shifts on the NRA, Ronald Reagan Took on the Gun Lobby,” Washington Post   “The IMF Faces a Nightmarish Identity Crisis,” The Economist   For an episode transcript and show notes, visit us at: https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/imf-and-world-bank-spring-meetings-nra-ila-leadership-forum-un-libya-and-more

OUTLINE of today's show with TIMECODESFrom MacDonald's layoffs to "Mammoth Meat" that even its creators don't want to taste 3:40Reparations: Pork Barrel for TODAY's Government Slaves Desc: Biden adds info for reparations to the census so that no one sees the current and COMING slavery, and to create division & grievances for a 2nd Civil War 11:10Biden ignores all pleas for help from genuine refugees — 63 Christians facing deportation to China which means prison, torture & worse. Would he turn a blind eye to LGBT refugees being sent back to a hostile government? 26:44Strawberries & the Marburg Virus How the CDC, FDA handles a strawberry "hepatitis" threat vs how they handled "safety" with the mRNA TrumpShots. And, WHO sounds the alarm over Marburg — and bats! Same bat time, same bat channel. 33:54Vax mandate just upheld by Massachusetts Supreme Court. But the people themselves have made it a moot point by vetoing it themselves, refusing to comply 41:53WHO removes jab recommendation for 6 months to 17 years. They're still killing people. 46:58New op-ed looks at how Trump was "deceived" into lockdown. NO, he wasn't. The people around him each have different stories to defend themselves. They're lying. 48:39Jon Rappoport reminds us of what we KNEW about COVID hasn't changed — and we knew it all BEFORE Trump locked down. The March 2020 reports from Italy before the Trump lockdown 53:20Vulnerable Infrastructure Wide Open to Hacking If you can program your DVR, you can program the railroad at the moment — maliciously. Government and corporations aren't interested in the problem. Are you? Is this why we're seeing so many train derailments, especially of one company? 1:08:12 Update on Palestine — CDC research team got sick, too & recent derailments 1:11:16 An example of hacking "infrastructure" — roadway portable signs 1:15:55 What the equipment does (sensors and control) YouTube channel — "That's Railroading" 1:22:20 Goattree joins — manuals online that anyone can download, passwords openly available and the potential for harmAI, Artificial Intelligence, and the Elon Musk (and 1,000 co-signers) asking for 6 month freeze on research. Do you realize you're being played? How is AI a threat? 1:58:17How Elon Musk is reinventing himself as an anti-establishment anti- establishment. 2:25:07What will be the antenna for brain chips? Devices and techniques already completed by DARPA 2:32:16Trans days of vengeance and demonstrations: What did and did not happen over the weekend. 2:46:54Now 21, a severely damaged woman, harmed by "gender affirming healthcare" speaks in anger of "what happened to me as a mentally ill teenager" 2:52:17Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here:SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation through Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silver

OUTLINE of today's show with TIMECODESFrom MacDonald's layoffs to "Mammoth Meat" that even its creators don't want to taste 3:40Reparations: Pork Barrel for TODAY's Government Slaves Desc: Biden adds info for reparations to the census so that no one sees the current and COMING slavery, and to create division & grievances for a 2nd Civil War 11:10Biden ignores all pleas for help from genuine refugees — 63 Christians facing deportation to China which means prison, torture & worse. Would he turn a blind eye to LGBT refugees being sent back to a hostile government? 26:44Strawberries & the Marburg Virus How the CDC, FDA handles a strawberry "hepatitis" threat vs how they handled "safety" with the mRNA TrumpShots. And, WHO sounds the alarm over Marburg — and bats! Same bat time, same bat channel. 33:54Vax mandate just upheld by Massachusetts Supreme Court. But the people themselves have made it a moot point by vetoing it themselves, refusing to comply 41:53WHO removes jab recommendation for 6 months to 17 years. They're still killing people. 46:58New op-ed looks at how Trump was "deceived" into lockdown. NO, he wasn't. The people around him each have different stories to defend themselves. They're lying. 48:39Jon Rappoport reminds us of what we KNEW about COVID hasn't changed — and we knew it all BEFORE Trump locked down. The March 2020 reports from Italy before the Trump lockdown 53:20Vulnerable Infrastructure Wide Open to Hacking If you can program your DVR, you can program the railroad at the moment — maliciously. Government and corporations aren't interested in the problem. Are you? Is this why we're seeing so many train derailments, especially of one company? 1:08:12 Update on Palestine — CDC research team got sick, too & recent derailments 1:11:16 An example of hacking "infrastructure" — roadway portable signs 1:15:55 What the equipment does (sensors and control) YouTube channel — "That's Railroading" 1:22:20 Goattree joins — manuals online that anyone can download, passwords openly available and the potential for harmAI, Artificial Intelligence, and the Elon Musk (and 1,000 co-signers) asking for 6 month freeze on research. Do you realize you're being played? How is AI a threat? 1:58:17How Elon Musk is reinventing himself as an anti-establishment anti- establishment. 2:25:07What will be the antenna for brain chips? Devices and techniques already completed by DARPA 2:32:16Trans days of vengeance and demonstrations: What did and did not happen over the weekend. 2:46:54Now 21, a severely damaged woman, harmed by "gender affirming healthcare" speaks in anger of "what happened to me as a mentally ill teenager" 2:52:17Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here:SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation through Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silver

Before Trump campaigned on building a wall along the Mexico border, in 2014 President Danilo Medina wanted to build one across the Dominican Republic and Haiti. It's part of the country's decades-long pattern of xenophobia and racism against Haitians migrants. Around this time last year, the Dominican Republic government also started deporting Haitian pregnant women. This practice has received immediate criticism from the UN and other human right organizations. Both practices are part of a larger crackdown in the Dominican Republic that is radically pushing the boundaries of anti-immigration policies. Producer Mariana traveled to the Dominican Republic to investigate how women are being affected.This story was reported by Mariana Zuñiga. It was produced by Adriana Tapia and edited by Annie Avilés. This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. The Spanish version was released by El Hilo, a co-production between Radio Ambulante and VICE News. VICE News Reports is produced by Sam Eagan, Sophie Kazis, Adreanna (Ay-Dree-Anna) Rodriguez and Adriana Tapia. Our senior producers are Jesse Alejandro Cottrell, Janice Llamoca and Julia Nutter. Our supervising producer is Ashley Cleek. Our associate producer is Steph Brown. Sound design and music composition by Steve Bone, Pran Bandi, and Kyle Murdock. Our Exec Producers are Adizah Eghan and Stephanie Kariuki.Annie Aviles is our Executive Editor and Janet Lee is Senior Production Manager for VICE Audio. Fact Checking by Nicole Pasulka. Our theme music is by Steve Bone. Our host is Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the last hour of MCMS, we get to fire up your Monday with Jessie Jane Duff, Former U.S. Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant, as she and Marc discuss Biden's attempt to point the finger at Republicans and politicize the attack on Paul Pelosi. Before Trump was ever put in office, Ted Cruz recognized the corruption that would try to discredit him. Marc talks with Tom Ackerman, KMOX Sports Director, about baseball and hockey. Later, Marc reminds us that tomorrow is the start of our Responder Rescue Raffle! 

Friends,One of the most horrific legacies of Trump is the unwillingness of Republican candidates to commit to being bound by election results. Senate candidates who have refused to commit to accepting the results are Republicans Ted Budd in North Carolina, Blake Masters in Arizona, Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska, and J.D. Vance in Ohio, according to news reports. Two candidates for governor have also refused to be bound: Tudor Dixon, the Republican nominee for the governor of Michigan, and Geoff Diehl, the Republican nominee for governor of Massachusetts.It's one thing to reserve the right to call for recounts if elections are close and irregularities are evident and to appeal the results through the courts. But that was not Trump's circumstance in the 2020 presidential election. Recounts were taken but showed the same results; Trump's appeals through the courts were rejected. And that's not what these Republican candidates are asserting now, in Trump's shameful wake. But tell me: If these Republican candidates are not bound by the election results, what are they bound to? These candidates are in effect issuing open invitations to their supporters to contest electoral losses in the streets.American democracy is based on our commitments to be bound by the outcomes of elections. These are commitments we make to democracy over any specific outcomes we may want. The peaceful transition of power depends on these commitments.Before Trump, these commitments were assumed. And at least since the Civil War they have been honored. When losing candidates congratulate winners and deliver gracious concession speeches, they demonstrate their commitment to democracy over the electoral victory they sought.And that demonstration is itself a means of reasserting and reestablishing civility. It sends an unambiguous message to all the candidate's supporters that the process can be trusted.Think of Al Gore's concession speech to George W. Bush in 2000, after five weeks of a bitterly contested election and just one day after the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of Bush: “I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of the country …. Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came, and now it has ended resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy. Now the Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. … And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”Gore made the same moral choice made by his predecessors who lost elections, and for the same reason: The democratic process (even one that included the judgements of Supreme Court justices) was more important than winning a specific election. This all changed in September 2020 when Trump refused to commit to be bound to the results of the upcoming 2020 presidential election.“Well, we're going to have to see what happens,” he said when asked whether he'd commit to a peaceful transition of power. “You know that I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster,” Trump added, presumably referring to mail-in ballots -- which he baselessly claimed would lead to voter fraud.This is when his poison began seeping directly into the bedrock of American democracy.That poison spread deeper and faster after he lost the election, when he refused to concede – claiming, again without any basis in fact, that it had been “stolen” from him.The poison came to the surface on January 6, 2021, when a group of his supporters – wielding weapons of war – invaded the U.S. Capitol and threatened the lives of members of Congress. Five people were killed. The same poison has now spread to senatorial and gubernatorial candidates who refuse to commit to November's election results. The commitment to be bound by the results of an election is the most important commitment in a democracy. It is also the most important qualification for public office. It is the equivalent of an oath to uphold the Constitution.Candidates who refuse to commit to being bound by the results of elections should be presumed disqualified to hold public office. ***[Exactly one year ago today I began my daily communications with you. Thank you again for your support, your interest, and your thoughtful comments. The road ahead is filled with potholes, such as election deniers and candidates who won't commit to being bound by election results. But if we make the journey toward a stronger democracy together, we have a better chance of achieving it.] This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends,Much of today's Republican Party is treacherous and treasonous. So why are Democrats facing midterm elections that, according to most political observers, they're likely to lose? Having been a loyal Democrat for some seventy years (my father liked Ike but my mother and I were for Adlai), including a stint as a cabinet secretary, it pains me to say this, but the Democratic Party has lost its way. How? Some commentators think Democrats have moved too far to the left — too far from the so-called “center.” This is utter rubbish. Where's the center between democracy and authoritarianism and why would Democrats want to be there? Others think Biden hasn't been sufficiently angry or outraged. Please. What good would that do? And after four years of Trump, why would anyone want more anger and outrage?The biggest failure of the Democratic Party — a disease that threatens the very life of the party — has been its loss of the American working class. As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded after the 2016 election, “Democrats don't have a ‘white working-class' problem. They have a ‘working class problem' which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate.”The working class used to be the bedrock of the Democratic Party. What happened? Before Trump's election, Democrats had occupied the White House for 16 of 24 years. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress during the first two years of the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations. During those years, Democrats scored some important victories for working families: the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. I take pride in being part of a Democratic administration during that time. But I'd be lying to you if I didn't also share my anger and frustration from those years — battles inside the White House with Wall Street Democrats and battles with corporate Democrats in Congress, all refusing to do more for the working class, all failing to see (or quietly encouraging) the rise of authoritarianism if the middle class continued to shrink. (I offer the following video clip not in the spirit of “I told you so” but as a way of sharing my frustrations and fears at the time.)The tragic reality is that even when they've been in charge, Democrats have not altered the vicious cycle that has shifted wealth and power to the top, rigging the economy for the affluent and undermining the working class. Clinton used his political capital to pass free trade agreements, without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs the means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. His North American Free Trade Agreement and plan for China to join the World Trade Organization undermined the wages and economic security of manufacturing workers across America, hollowing out vast swaths of the Rust Belt. Clinton also deregulated Wall Street. This indirectly led to the financial crisis of 2008 — in which Obama bailed out the biggest banks and bankers but did nothing for homeowners, many of whom owed more on their homes than their homes were worth. Obama didn't demand as a condition for being bailed out that the banks refrain from foreclosing on underwater homeowners. Nor did Obama demand an overhaul of the banking system. Instead, he allowed Wall Street to water down attempts at re-regulation. Both Clinton and Obama stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the working class. They failed to reform labor laws to allow workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down majority vote, or even to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated labor protections. Biden has supported labor law reform but hasn't fought for it, leaving the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act to die inside the ill-fated Build Back Better Act. At the same time, Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify, enabling large corporations to grow far larger and major industries to become more concentrated. Biden is trying to revive antitrust enforcement but hasn't made it a centerpiece of his administration. Both Clinton and Obama depended on big money from corporations and the wealthy. Both turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns, and he never followed up on his re-election promise to pursue a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United vs FEC, the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics. Throughout these years, Democrats drank from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy. “Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we're the majority,” crowed Democratic representative Tony Coelho, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s when Democrats assumed they'd continue to run the House for years. Coelho's Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but the deal proved a Faustian bargain. Democrats became financially dependent on big corporations and the Street.By the 2016 election, the richest 100th of 1 percent of Americans – 24,949 extraordinarily wealthy people – accounted for a record-breaking 40 percent of all campaign contributions. That same year, corporations flooded the presidential, Senate and House elections with $3.4 billion in donations. Labor unions no longer provided any countervailing power, contributing only $213 million – one union dollar for every 16 corporate dollars. **Joe Biden has tried to regain the trust of the working class, but Democratic lawmakers (most obviously and conspicuously, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) have blocked measures that would have lowered the costs of childcare, eldercare, prescription drugs, healthcare, and education. They've blocked raising the minimum wage and paid family leave. They've blocked labor law reforms. Yet neither Manchin nor Sinema nor any other Democrat who has failed to support Biden's agenda has suffered any consequences. Why does Manchin still hold leadership positions in the Senate? Why is Manchin's West Virginia benefitting from the discretionary funds doled out by the administration? Why hasn't Biden done more to rally the working class and build a coalition to grab back power from the emerging oligarchy? Presumably for the same reasons Clinton and Obama didn't: The Democratic Party still prioritizes the votes of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes. And, as noted, the party depends on big money for its campaigns. Hence, it has turned it back on the working class. The most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. There is no longer a left or right. There is no longer a moderate “center.” The real choice is either Republican authoritarian populism (see here, here, and here) or Democratic progressive populism. Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform — an anti-establishment movement. Democrats must stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy. They must form a unified coalition of people of all races, genders, and classes to unrig the system. Trumpism is not the cause of our divided nation. It is the symptom of a rigged system that was already dividing us. Please consider a paid or gift subscription to help sustain this work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe to Reactionary Minds: Apple Podcasts | SpotifyWelcome to the inaugural episode of Reactionary Minds, a podcast from The UnPopulist that I’ll be hosting every month. This is a show about why some people reject liberalism and what the rest of us can do about it. This first episode is all about introducing the problem Reactionary Minds exists to address. In it, Shikha Dalmia, the editor of The UnPopulist and fellow at the Mercatus Center's Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange, discusses the biggest challenge of our times: The resurgent threat of populist authoritarianism here and abroad. Every regime has its pathologies and populist demagoguery is the pathology of democracies. The “liberal” in liberal democracies is supposed to keep this genie in the bottle, but now that it is out, can we put it back in?This transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarityAaron Ross Powell: Welcome to the show.Shikha Dalmia: Thanks for having me, Aaron.Aaron: What is populism?Shikha: It's a good question, and as you've noticed, the name of my newsletter is The UnPopulist, and its addressed at the authoritarian currents we are seeing around the world. Then the question arises why am I calling it The UnPopulist and not the anti-authoritarian or something like that? Partly, because it's cuter, but the more serious reason is that the kind of illiberalism and the kind of authoritarianism we are seeing around the world has what is essentially a populist element.Now there's a lot of confusion around the word populism, and there is actually a great deal of effort on the left to try and take back this word which it thinks has been unfairly characterized in the last six years with the rise of the Trump era and the MAGA era. I, in some ways, feel for some of the left-wing writers, like Thomas Frank who's a public intellectual and an author and something of a Bernie Sanders progressive. He wrote a book not too long ago defending the term populism because he sees populism as essentially a movement of the people. Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, similarly wrote in 2018, shortly after Trump, where he also was lamenting the fact that the term populism has acquired this negative connotation.Now, I actually feel for some of these liberals because, as you and I know, we are still grieving the loss of the term liberal. However, I think they fundamentally misunderstand what populism really means and why it has a bad connotation.To some extent, it's a semantic issue, you can give any phenomenon any name, but populism, for the longest time has had a bad odor. They [Frank et al] see populism as essentially a popular movement that is supposed to do the most good for the most people, and those most people are not the rich people. They are generally lower or middle-income people who are the vast majority of the population.But that's not what populism really is. It's not a popular movement. A populist movement, if you read the literature on it, which admittedly is murky, it's about pitting the “real” people against some other entity, and that entity is the elites. The elites are considered to be these corrupt oligarchs, and the people are supposed to be something pure, representing something good.There is instantly this division between the elite, which controls “the establishment,” and the pure people whose interests are being avoided. Now, even that exactly doesn't capture the problem with the term populism. The term populism gets its bad odor from the fact that it's not just that the real people are trying to get their way and have their preferred policies enacted, it is more that they want to flatten certain elements of liberalism, the deliberative process, the representative process, because they believe it's been captured by some bad people, by The Establishment which is not representing them.It's an effort to flatten certain institutions of liberalism, not improve them, not reform them, but simply to either side step them or do an end-run around them, or even just get rid of them so that the real people can have their will.Now, obviously, the real people can't govern. There are too many of them, somebody has to govern for them. So in some senses populist and authoritarian seem like anti-poles. But inevitably they come together because whenever you have a populist movement some authoritarian figure or demagogue arises who will say they're representing the people. And we saw very clearly with Trump, we the people became me the people…they are not representing the people, they are the people. Populism inevitably goes hand-in-hand with a certain kind of authoritarianism, and so therefore, the term unpopulist and therefore why populism is something to be worried about.Aaron: I think that's one of the interesting things about watching the rise of populism in the U.S over the last five or six or seven years, has been that it's framed as an anti-elite movement and “drain the swamp” is an anti-elite thing. We're constantly hearing about these coastal cities where these out-of-touch elites who don't understand the real people are. The real Americans in this context really just means rural working class whites. But then you look at their leadership and it is fantastically wealthy, though we don't know quite how wealthy [in Trump’s case], because his finances are a little sketchy, but a fantastically wealthy businessman.Then in Congress the figureheads for this movement, or at least people trying to claim that mantle, tend to be Ivy league law school educated, pretenders to the common-man identity. You're right, it is this odd thing what begins as a movement framing itself as of the people turns into a personality cult that's no longer about the people's identity, it’s about the people building their identity through fealty to this strong-man leader, which is then how it can very quickly turn into an authoritarian movement, because either that leader's power when he has to do something is seen as absolute, because he's the embodiment of our hopes and dreams and cultural identity, or when that leader's position is threatened, as we saw when Trump lost the election, it can morph quickly into violence in defense of that leader's status. Not so much the working class or the common man status, but defending that leader from perceived failure.Shikha: That's right. Now, populism can be of both the left wing and the right wing varieties, and we have seen them throughout history. Latin America has had populism of every strain. In every instance it has led to the cult of the personality, but there are two things in populism. There is a cult of personality, which is the leader, and then there is a cult of the people too. There is a certain deification of the people that they are true owners of the society, their will needs to be respected.The two, the cult of the leader and the cult of the people, build on each other, they both deify each other. Whether it is Hugo Chavez, whether it is Bolsonaro right now. The Bolsonaro is interesting and he's losing some of his popularity, but Trump is a classic phenomenon of a cult leader, of a demagogue who is leading in the name of the real people, and then the real people deify him. He really was a deity in certain MAGA circles, and he in turn deifies them in his rallies.If you watched some of his rallies, which I tried to avoid as much as possible, but he was constantly flattering the people there. It was, "You people are great, and you are being ignored." Yes, there is this mutual cult of the leader and the cult of the people that goes hand-in-hand in a populist movement.Nomenclature and TaxonomyAaron: I want to stay for a moment on our terms and taxonomies, because the purpose of this show, ultimately, is not just to critique illiberal and populist ideas, but to try to understand them, to try to understand where these people are coming from, what the philosophies and personality traits and historical perspectives that inform them because it's hard to challenge ideas without understanding them deeply and, to the extent you can, fairly.We've talked about what populism is, but this show is not called the authoritarian mind, it's not called the populist mind, it is called Reactionary Minds. Where does the term reactionary fit into all this?Shikha: Aaron, this is your show! You and I both talked about why we like Reactionary Minds. I'll give you my side and perhaps you can say something about why you like it. The textbook definition of reactionary is a person or a sensibility that is opposed to economic or political liberalization of any kind. Usually, it goes along with a certain conservative mentality.I think there's another element to the reactionary sensibility, and that is, it is also anti-ideas, and it's anti-intellectual. The reason is ideas and intellectual theories can lead to change. They require a certain amount of openness to the world and to knowledge, and those can be intensely threatening to existing cultural orders. In that sense, reactionary minds, I think, is a good way to describe the show because you and I are both quite troubled and perturbed by the last six years.Things are happening in America that we never thought would be possible. We think that there needs to be some kind of a response to this, but we can't really fight these ideologies unless we understand them. We do want to understand the reactionary movement that's brewing in America on its own terms. That's the reason I like the term reactionary minds.Aaron: Yes, I agree with all that. What I would add is, I think that you can make the case that political ideology, moral ideology, and so on is, to some extent, downstream of personality, that we tend to have different personal and personality preferences, and then we sometimes look around for theories or intellectual edifices that provide structure to them or support them or don't really challenge them.In that regard, reactionary it is a personality type that says I am turned off by, sometimes threatened by diversity, by change, by things being different than the way that I'm used to, or people who aren't like me being more prominent than they used to be, or higher status than they used to be, or the way we talk about language is changing and that bugs me, and I don't like these kids asking me to use different pronouns or different terminology. There is this set-in-my-ways-ness that drives a lot of this.It's not an accident that Trump when he was first running for president, he led with anti-immigration, with a xenophobic perspective and a nationalism that was the corollary of that, because for a lot of his most faithful followers, it's “America is looking different than either the way I was used to it being, or the way that I imagined it being, or the way that I would like it to look demographic.”On the far fringes of the populace, we get the Great Replacement Theory about they're trying to change the demographics of the country to make it less white than it used to be. There is this very “I don't like difference” and then reacting strongly against that, then that feeds into political preferences, which is, "I'm going to vote for the person who will stop the change, whether that's preventing immigrants who don't look and talk like me from coming into the country, or will elevate the status of the people who have the same preferences I do against the people with the diverse preferences that I dislike."That's another thing that I want to dig into on the show is the way that there is such a thing, I think, as a populist or an authoritarian or reactionary psychology as well. There are ideas that inform it, but there's also just beliefs and values and attitudes and they end up mixing together into this very toxic political outcome. That was the attraction to me of the reactionary minds, because it gets both the notion that this is an ideological perspective, but also that this is just an attitudinal perspective.Shikha: Right. That's very well stated, Aaron. I would, however, push back just slightly in that we do want to make a distinction between the conservative mind and the reactionary mind. Bill Buckley's very famous statement when he launched the National Review was he wants to stand athwart history screaming or yelling stop. There is a way in which, even though I am not a conservative, never have been, never will be, I can understand the urge to be careful about change and reform, and to be a little deliberative. You don't want to simply throw out existing social arrangements just because some fad has taken hold of the land.There is a way in which the conservatives, even though I'm not a conservative, they can be incrementalists, but not completely opposed to reform. Reactionaries, I think, is conservatism on steroids in that sense. Reactionaries simply don't want change because they don't like change. Usually, reactionariness is a phenomenon that's associated with conservatism, but to the extent that it's not just any change that reactionaries are opposed to, it's actually liberalism that they are opposed to. To the extent its liberalization they are opposed to, they can even come from the progressive side.Like communists when China liberalized its economy, there were reactionaries in China who wanted the communist order to hold and they didn't want liberalization. In that sense, I like the term reactionary because potentially, it will even capture the leftist reactionaries.Leftist ExcessesAaron: I think that often manifests in the contemporary American left as an intolerance of difference. That is, it's not the same as the intolerance of difference that we see from the right, which is obviously very much there, but rather, the left thinks we have advanced, we have liberalized, so certain behaviors that used to be socially unacceptable are now considered normal, or certain underprivileged groups that used to be underprivileged are now considered no different than everyone else.That liberalization is good. That's the kind of liberalization we want, but there is a tendency among some people on the left to then to be incredibly intolerant not of difference in the political realm. It's one thing to say yes, we should — people who want to re-criminalize gay marriage or gay relationships that's bad, but it's people who themselves in their own lives are not affirmatively supportive of these things need to be stamped out, need to be punished.This often can manifest in the lefts wanting to punish businesses that weren't supportive of gay weddings, baking cakes for gay weddings. The small conservative baker says, "That's against my conscience. I don't want to bake a cake for your wedding." In a genuinely liberal society the answer to that is, "Okay." Like, "I will go somewhere else and get a cake from somewhere else and no harm, no foul."The liberalism that manifests on the left is like, "No." It's not enough that you are just saying, "Hey, I don't want to participate." You have to participate and embrace, or we are going to, in this case, try to use the state to punish you, to destroy your business, to find you, to drive you out, because you're not one of us. That ends up with this ratcheting up of the reactionariness because then what that says to the people who are more culturally conservative is, "I need to dig in even deeper because if the culture drifts in a more liberal direction, that's even more ground for me to be punished often with state force. I need to fight even harder because  I won't be tolerated.Shikha: That's exactly the dynamic we are in right now. The problem with the left is that it's too impatient and, to some extent, one can understand its impatience. I think systemic injustices are prevalent, systemic racism is a thing! We all do need to grapple with legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, all of that is correct. But the left doesn't want to do the real hard work of changing hearts and minds. It wants to grab power nodes and exercise and push on them to engineer change.It's not just the levers of the state that they are using, it's also the levers of corporate power and what have you. Not all of [these tactics] are illicit. Some of them are perfectly acceptable. Certain kinds of boycotts against views clearly beyond the pale are probably acceptable. But they have lost the capacity of making distinctions between good-natured fear of what they are asking for — and a reactionary fear, I guess.It's this lack of calibration and this lack of finesse in their techniques, which is a big problem. This, in some ways, is driving a more reactionary attitude on the part of the conservatives, bringing out their worst tendencies.But I actually don't want to simply blame the left . I think the conservatives always wanted — there was a certain kind of conservative mind that was always uncomfortable with certain social changes, gay marriage, what have you. They've also been looking for a pretext to dig in. I think to some extent, the left is giving them a pretext [by its excesses]. It's not a reason, it's a pretext for their reactionariness. It's hard to untangle all of this, I admit, but all these currents are right now with us.Aaron: At their core they're all ultimately a rejection of genuine liberalism, which is if nothing else, it is a belief in a social tolerance and social pluralism. If we're going to live together in a big society, commonly governed, we have to get along with each other. The way that you get along with each other given our diversity of viewpoints and values and preferences and backgrounds and so on is to tolerate difference. To say: "I'm going to let you live the way that you want to live and I'm going to live the way that I want to live. Even if I'm not celebrating the choices that you make, I'm accepting them as part of this liberal consensus."So much of what we're seeing now seems to be a rejection of that liberal consensus of saying, "No, it's not just that I think I am right in… All of us think we're right in our own preferences and values or we wouldn't hold them. It's not just that, it's saying, Therefore, anyone who differs from my preferences and values is wrong and is wrong to an extent that they are dangerous or a threat or impure, or in some other way, need to be, whether it's with the state or other mechanisms, need to be shut down, excluded, punished so that we can have a higher degree of uniformity that happens to align with my preferences.Shikha: When Obama became president he was against gay marriage. He was against all kinds of pro-gay policies, and then, of course, during the course of his presidency he changed his mind. I wonder if there is any room for Obama in the current left. Room for evolution of thinking.Now I think Obama was always there and he was holding back for strategic reasons, which turned out to actually be not bad reasons. You can see the growing intolerance of the left in that it's not just being censorious against the right, but it's also being censorious toward its own. That’s why, in a way, I'm a little less worried about the left, because the left, in its demand for purity and consistency, in a way is becoming less united and is at that stage of devouring its own.The left is now generating healthy pushback. I actually think if Trump had not arrived on the horizon, there was so much concern within the left about the left that right now we would be in a much better position with respect to the left. But with Trump arriving on the scene, I feel myself pivoting. I think there is no bigger threat in this country than the right because it has become so completely not just reactionary, but authoritarian and illiberal in 30 different ways that I've had to drop my attention on the left and now right is the big problem.Before Trump arrived, I remember Vox, very much a progressive publication, had published a piece by a liberal professor saying something to the effect, "My liberal students terrify me." This piece went on to say that conservative students his class, this was a professor who's in a liberal arts college, who said the conservative students in his class will push back, might not like his ideas, but are still willing to discuss them. Liberal students were not willing to do that.Now what we are seeing on the other hand is that the right is no longer simply pushing back against what were legitimately called left-wing excesses. It wants to just crush them. Now you are seeing bills banning the teaching of critical race theory. That's where the reactionariness comes in. This is no longer now about calibrating the pace of the change, it's not about that. Now we are only going to impose our vision from like 200 years ago. Now it’s in a completely different orbit.The Roots of Modern Day Right-Wing PopulistsAaron: We talked about Trumpism as exemplary of the kind of populism that we are concerned about, but is Trump the major figure, or who are the other figures that are important to understand when looking at the lay of the land on American populism, left or right, the main, I guess, influencers, as the kids say?Shikha: Well, populism in America, depending upon how you use the term, has a long history. The first populist movement was the People's Party in 1890, which was a third party. It was this agrarian movement and labor movement against the industrialization that was happening. In the building of the railroads, lots of people were dispossessed; traditional livelihoods were lost. That is generally regarded as the first populist movement in this country. It got co-opted by the Democratic Party, which became the labor union party. The People's Party put it's a lot behind William Bryan Jennings. When he lost the election that year, it spelled the end of that party, but it got co-opted by Democrats.You've seen certain other populist movements arguably whether George Wallace, he was a populist phenomenon, very much appealing to the same kinds of anxieties that Trump now appeals to. In between, you had The Tea Party movement, you also had the Occupy Wall Street movement.The difference is that the Tea Party, I think, was the beginning of the turn towards MAGAism. Although interestingly, the Tea Party movement was very much pitching itself as this constitutional movement. It wanted to return to the Founders. It wanted to limit the scope of the government, all of which went out of the window when Trump came along.I think Trump is not sui generis. Partly, the Tea Party is behind him but partly, I think we had the phenomenon of right-wing radio with the advent of Rush Limbaugh who started pushing all kinds of populist tropes. He was a nativist. He was anti-left. The preoccupation with the leftist enemy is a huge, huge part of the right, right now. I think that's the single biggest motivating force. Even the anti-immigration and the anti-immigrant animus is not quite as powerful a force as the fear and anger and the hatred of the left, actually.I think Rush Limbaugh started stoking that, and then you had a whole slew of copycats on the right. That paved the way for Trump. The right was primed for a populist takeover, and then Trump came along with his MAGA message and at that stage, all the right wanted to do was use the levers of the state to smash the left and impose its vision of a insular, insulated, closed America polity.Aaron: This isn't new, even with Trump, even with Rush Limbaugh, this is what we watched in the '50s and '60s with anti-communism, was the Soviet Union was a legitimate threat, although maybe in retrospect, not as big of a threat as we thought it was at the time. There were communists in the country, although they weren't going to win out. America was not going to turn communist, but they did exist, and communism was very bad.The American right used that as a way to exert the power of the federal government to punish particularly culturally left people or people who were calling for liberalization of the positions of Blacks or gays or women and so on. That the urge to define an enemy and then use a potentially an inflated threat of that enemy — or mischaracterizations of that enemy or strawman version of that enemy — to justify a reactionary turn is very strong.A moment ago we were talking about Trump and you said had Trump not come along the left would have fractured more than it did. What's interesting about Trump is that he unified both the right and the left into these deeply tribally opposed camps. For decades, the conservative movement was split between — there was the base that looked very much like Trumpism does now. The conservative right’s reactionary base has been around as long as there has been a right. But you had the elites, the Bill Buckley types or the Ronald Reagan or the Paul Ryan who controlled the GOP and pushed it in a more, if not liberal, at least more liberal-adjacent on its best days direction.That went away with Trump and suddenly the elites all either swore fealty, or at least shut up about their criticisms of the really reactionary right. And then on the left, you had exactly that, that the left, those fault lines went away because we had a unified enemy. Trump won't be around forever, and so there's a sense in which that potentially gives a way out when that enemy has gone away.There are other people like what DeSantis is doing in Florida right now, he's clearly trying to tee himself up as the inheritor of the Trump mantel. But it's questionable whether any of the people trying to do that have Trump's — I'm going to call it — charisma, but a lot of people think of it as such, but Trump's showmanship. There's something about him and his celebrity and all of that that made him successful in the way that someone who had just spouted the same views probably would not have been. Is there cause for hope there that if the populist leader goes away, then the sides will become more pluralistic than they are now?MAGA’s Ugly Progeny: Integralists and NationalistsShikha: It's a good question. No, I'm actually not optimistic about that. Look, what Trump did was he didn't really unite the Republican Party, what he did was he united a certain element within the Republican Party, and the rest of those who didn't agree with him were either purged — Paul Ryan didn't last a year after Trump came on the scene — or became persona non grata within the party.That's actually a classic populist move. It's not just that they don't respect parliamentary institutions and they don't respect the opposition, they actually turn their own party into an embodiment of themselves, and you've seen that with Trump. It's literally classic populism. In that sense, I think he's been hugely damaging to the Republican Party in a way that I'm not sure the Republican Party can recover from it for a very long time. Or at least I think it has to be in the political wilderness for a very long time. It has to be punished at the polls repeatedly before it will give up this populist formula.I think even though there may not be a charismatic figure like Trump, and the reason I was laughing when you said charismatic, because I know to you and me, he's just so utterly not charismatic. It's hard for us to see his appeal, but there'll be other populists who will try and copy him. They may not be successful, but their very presence is going to be damaging. That's one.The bigger danger of Trump is not Trump but Trumpism. Trumpism is essentially an illiberal mindset that doesn't respect the checks on executive power. It gives various factions within the conservative right, therefore, the permission to use the levers of the state to promote their own vision. You've written about this, the integralist movement. Why is that emerging now? The national conservative movement, why is that emerging now?He's actually fractured whatever little uneasy fusion/consensus there was in the right and allowed these illiberal monster children of MAGAism now to assert themselves. I actually think things are going to get much worse before they get better.Aaron: Let's turn briefly to the integralist movement and the national conservatism movement which somehow overlap but are distinct in other ways because they represent an interesting move on the part of the conservative elite to try to take on the energy of Trump's populism, but intellectualize it too because, Trumpism is basically all id.There's not an intellectual philosophical through-line there, but the national conservatives and the integralist are saying, "No, there is a philosophical case against liberalism, that liberalism has failed for reasons inherent to it, and that we need to embrace non-liberal, well thought out philosophical positions." If Trump is spouting id, the integralists and the national conservatives have legitimately thoughtful and often interesting thinkers articulating these views in ways that are I think they're wrong and I think they're often dangerously wrong, but they're not stupid and they're worth wrestling with.It is interesting watching these very elites. These are law professors and philosophy professors and theologians trying to take this energy and reapply the intellectual veneer that used to exist with Buckley, the National Review but was shed under Trump.Shikha: The difference between Buckley and the [Adrian] Vermeules of the day is that Buckley was still trying to promote a certain conservatism within a broadly liberal framework and a broadly liberal understanding. He agreed that checks and balances were a good thing, checks on executive power were a good thing. All of that is now out of the window with these new movements.Discontents with liberalism are always there because liberalism is an uneasy equilibrium between all kinds of different interests that don't comfortably fit together. Minorities are not happy with liberalism because liberalism doesn't give them the levers of power to instantly correct all the injustices against them. They are always unhappy. Of course, the majority is unhappy because, especially in a liberal democratic society, if pure majoritarian rule were to exist, it would get its way far more frequently.Everybody is always unhappy with liberalism. But there has always been this understanding there that life on the other side of liberalism is nasty, brutish, and short, so we better stick with liberalism. That consensus that liberalism may be wanting, but there is no other real alternative, that understanding is completely gone because some people have come to believe, thanks to Trump's assault on liberalism, that they can have the whole cake.The integralists, and you wrote great stuff about this — integralists, as you've pointed out, are a really weird movement because they're Catholics, they are actually a minority, and integralists within Catholicism are a really small minority, so why would you want to give up liberalism? The answer is that they think that any conservative state will give them more of what they want than they'll get from a liberal state.Ultimately, even a reactionary like Trump will give them more than anybody else will. Hence they have turned on liberalism because they feel they're getting less out of it. Every faction within conservatism I think is making a similar bet. You have national conservatism, which is a very, very diverse movement. You have Yoram Hazony who's an Israeli intellectual, who's the godfather of this movement, weirdly enough. You also have standard nationalists who just feel like there should be more flag-waving in the United States. You have somebody like Rich Lowry, who was actually [initially] a Never Trumper, and now feels that there needs to be some kind of America First-ism in America. He's flirting with something like blood and soil nationalism based on geography and ancestry. That will rule me out as a robust American citizen, I'm not sure about you. Geography it means Americans need to love the landscape of this country. The Shenandoah Valley is something that every American should do a pilgrimage to. It's all goofy stuff. They all feel whatever was missing in the liberal arrangement in America now they feel it's up for grabs, and they're all trying to make a bid for it very quickly to get what they can.Aaron: In the time that we have left, I want to turn to the future of this podcast. This is the inaugural episode of Reactionary Minds, we plan to do a lot more of these. Our goals, why we created this show, and what we're hoping to get out of it. I can start on this one. I touched on this a bit earlier, but I think my goal is this rise of liberalism is really troubling. As someone who has dedicated his career to advancing a quite radical conception of individual and economic liberty and individual autonomy and self-authorship, this is a direct assault on the values that not only I hold, but I think are the ones that lead to the best world for everyone.This has always been with us, but it has ramped up considerably. We're seeing some of it on the left, we are seeing one of the two major parties, more or less, entirely overtaken by it. We have seen it embodied in a president, we are seeing an increasing number of intellectuals come out in support of it in one form or another. This is a real threat. The value of a show like this is in trying to understand where that's all coming from, and what it is the people who hold these views actually want, why they want it? What are the ideas that are leading them to it or providing support for it?I don't want this to be a superficial understanding or a dismissive or they're all just evil kind of way because that's easy and ultimately uninteresting. My goal is to really try to understand them on their own terms and then to critique it from the perspective of the value of radical liberty.Shikha: That's exactly right, Aaron. That's why I'm excited that you are doing this. I think this is going to be a great podcast. As you've said, the plan is to understand this illiberalism and its appeal at every level, psychological, social, political. I'm sure you will be having guests that address all of it. Marxism makes this distinction between theory and praxis. You and I, we both have a penchant for an intellectual understanding of things. We like to understand things at a theoretical level, it's almost an end in itself. But in this case, we cannot fight this phenomenon without actually understanding it. [On the praxis side], The UnPopulist is not going to shy away calling the right reactionary and taking on specific political figures who are behaving in an illiberal fashion. It’s not going to shy away from taking sides. We know what we are opposing. But to me the theory of Reactionary Minds is going to inform the praxis of The UnPopulist. So there is a yin and yang here that I’m super excited about. I really look forward to this. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunpopulist.substack.com

What can possibly explain Manchin's and Sinema's votes against voting rights this week? Why did they create a false narrative that the legislation had to be “bipartisan” when everyone -- themselves included -- knew bipartisanship was impossible? Why did they say they couldn't support changing the filibuster rules when only last month they voted for an exception to the filibuster that allowed debt ceiling legislation to pass with only Democratic votes? Why did they co-sponsor voting rights legislation and then vote to kill the very same legislation? Why did Manchin vote for the “talking filibuster” in 2011 yet vote against it now?I've suggested that the answer to all these questions could be found in the giant wads of corporate cash flowing into their campaign coffers. But as I've watched the two senators closely and spoken about them with members of Congress as well as Hill staff, I've come to the conclusion this isn't it – or at least not all of it.The corporate money explanation leaves out the single biggest factor affecting almost all national politicians I've dealt with: Big egos. Manchin's and Sinema's are now among the biggest. Before February of last year, almost no one outside West Virginia had ever heard of Joe Manchin, and almost no one outside of Arizona (and probably few within the state) had ever heard of Kyrsten Sinema. Now, they're notorious. They're Washington celebrities. Their photos grace every major news outlet in America.This sort of attention is addictive. Once it seeps into the bloodstream, it becomes an all-consuming force. I've known politicians who have become permanently and irrevocably intoxicated by it.I'm not talking simply about power, although that's certainly part of it. I'm talking about narcissism – the primal force driving so much of modern America, but whose essence is concentrated in certain places such as Wall Street, Hollywood, and the United States Senate. Once addicted, the pathologically narcissistic politician can become petty in the extreme, taking every slight as a deep personal insult. I'm told that Manchin asked Biden's staff not to blame him for the delay of “Build Back Better,” and was then infuriated when Biden suggested Manchin bore some of the responsibility. “You want to understand why Manchin stabbed Biden in the back on voting rights?” one House member told me this week. “It's because he's so pissed off at Ron Klain [Biden's chief of staff].” I'm also told that if Biden wants to restart negotiations with Manchin on “Build Back Better,” he's got to rename the package because Manchin is so angry he won't vote for anything going by that name. Paradoxically, a large enough slight played out on the national stage can also enthrall a pathologically narcissistic politician. Several people on the Hill who have watched Sinema at close range since she became a senator tell me she relished all the negative attention she got when she gave her very theatrical thumbs down to increasing the minimum wage, and since then has thrilled at her burgeoning role as a spoiler. The Senate is not the world's greatest deliberative body, but it is the world's greatest stew of egos battling for attention. Every senator believes he or she has what it takes to be president. Most believe they're far more competent than whoever occupies the Oval Office. Yet out of one hundred senators, only a handful are chosen for interviews on the Sunday talk shows, only one or two are lampooned on SNL, and very few get a realistic shot at the presidency. The result is intense competition for national attention. Again and again, I've watched worthy legislation sink because particular senators didn't feel they were getting enough credit, or enough personal attention from a president, or insufficient press attention, or unwanted press attention, or that another senator (sometimes from the same party) was getting too much attention.Barack Obama didn't enjoy glad-handing senators, even though he got to the presidency through that august body — which proved a huge handicap when it came to legislating. Bill Clinton would talk to senators (or, for that matter, to almost anyone else) all the time, but Clinton had too much confidence in his own charm to give individual senators the ego boosts they wanted — thereby rubbing the most narcissistic of them the wrong way (Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey voted against Clinton's healthcare plan because he wanted more attention; New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was lukewarm on it because he felt he wasn't adequately consulted). Some senators get so whacky in the national limelight that they can't function without it. Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsay Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham's way — transmogrifying Graham into a bizarro creature who'd say anything Trump wanted in order to keep the attention coming.Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. I had the good fortune to work closely with the late Paul Wellstone, who was always eager to give others credit while being the first to take any blame. I know several now serving who have their egos firmly in check — including Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock, Sherrod Brown, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Most of the rest lie on an ego spectrum ranging from inflated to pathological. Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. As I said, neither had much national attention prior to the last February. But once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn't let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did this week — shafting American democracy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

The Biden Administration brought an Obama-era program back to life that was nearly another casualty of Trump’s restrictive immigration actions. Biden reversed Trump’s elimination of the International Entrepreneur Rule (IER - also known as International Entrepreneur Parole or the “Startup Visa”) in May 2021 in the hopes of fostering economic development and job growth in the United States. The rule provides an additional path for international entrepreneurs to grow their companies in the U.S., providing critical jobs and boosting the U.S. economy as a result. Before Trump slashed the program, few foreign nationals in the startup industry were able to take advantage of the program, but attorneys Elise Fialkowski and Drew Zeltner have been tracking this program from the start and can offer insights on how best international entrepreneurs can leverage the program. Who can benefit from this program? What role does the foreign national need to have in the startup company? What is the background of this rule? What are the requirements and qualifications? What round of funding is this viable at? Is there a path to a green card? The referenced companion episodes can found here: Episode 2: Avoiding the EB-5 China Backlog with a Grenada Citizenship and E-2 Visa Episode 12: Avoiding Status Violations in the Side Gig Economy Episode 16: The Latest on E-2 Visa with Citizenship-by-Investment Speakers in this episode are: William Stock Elise Fialkowski Andrew Zeltner Stay connected with us: Email questions to podcast@klaskolaw.com Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and WeChat Sign up for newsletter and email updates See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before Trump left office, he made a statement “Nobody can stop what is coming.” What has the deep state dirty swamp in such a panic? Is it Trump / DeSantis 2024 perhaps?

Trump supporter: Before Trump, nobody knew about mail-in “cheating”. Trump intensifies attacks on election: “not sure” it can be honest. FBI chief: Not seen evidence of national voter fraud by mail. Trump supporters: if Trump loses, it will be a rigged election. Louisville braces for second night of protests after no officers charged directly with death of Breonna Taylor. Protesters face off with apparent armed vigilantes in Louisville. Trump, FBI Chief at odds over scale of foreign election meddling. Trump holds rally with few masks, little social distancing as CDC projects up to 226K coronavirus deaths by October 17th as data shows new case counts are rising in 21 states. HHS & FDA Chiefs vow science, not politics, will guide vaccine approval after Trump threatens to override new guidance. New York Gov., Michigan Gov. call for congressional probe into Trump’s “politicization” of coronavirus. Gov. Cuomo: “I’m not going to trust the federal government’s opinion” on vaccine, New York will perform its own review. Louisville mayor extends curfew through the weekend. Trump booed as he pays respects to Ginsburg at court. Sen. Susan Collins faces toughest reelection yet. Maine’s Sen. Collins fights to keep seat as vote to back Trump’s previous SCOTUS pick may come back to haunt her. Maine Voter: I never would vote for Collins after Kavanaugh vote.To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

Episode 008 - The boys are back talking about all the madness going on in this country. This monster THREE HOUR conversation was recorded on Monday night 7/27 (the night BEFORE Trump's tweets about the looney “demon sperm” doctor and delaying the election... too bad we missed THAT). Once again a LOT of subjects are discussed: nazi facemasks, cops tackling children, totalitarian & fascist tendencies in Trump's America, questionable Covid vaccines, the questionable strategy of reopening schools, potential VP candidates, the old left vs the new left, the logistics of a modern civil war, Joe Biden & the Democratic Party, conspiracy theories, MLB stupidity and much much more!          #theupgrade #theupgradepodcast #podcast #landminestudios #billyclubsandwich #hardcoremusic #politics #trumpsterfire #covidmadness #donaldtrumptweets #news #currentevents #baseball #joebiden #democrats #fascism #trailerparkoftheworld     ------------------------     Upgrade your mind - Hosts Len Carmichael & Gary Muttley talk about music, politics, MMA, pro wrestling and all kinds of pop culture. We will also connect with guests from around world to talk, share experiences and probably make fun of people.     ------------------------      http://www.theupgradepodcast.net     ------------------------     http://www.facebook.com/theupgradepodcast      ------------------------     http://www.instagram.com/theupgradepodcast      ------------------------     

On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Nino Brown, an activist with the Boston Teachers Union, Terra Oliveira, a Philadelphia-based writer, the founder and editor of Recenter Press, and an organizer with the Philadelphia Liberation Center, and producers Walter Smolarek and Nicole Roussell, join the show.Major demonstrations are expected this weekend in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Washington DC, and elsewhere as the protest movement against police in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder expands. Tens of thousands--and perhaps hundreds of thousands--of people will march in New York and Philadelphia, while Washington’s chief of police said yesterday that the city expects one of the largest demonstrations in its history on Saturday. Before Trump’s public announcement that he would be sending U.S. military into U.S. states, he had a private conference call with the country’s governors. Trump showed his true colors there, as did Attorney General Barr, Secretary of Defense Esper, and several Democratic political leaders. And as a result, the burgeoning movement for racial justice and against racist and brutal policing has only grown. Mara Verheyden Hilliard joins the show, the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. It’s Friday! So it’s time for the week’s worst and most misleading headlines. Brian and John speak with Steve Patt, an independent journalist whose critiques of the mainstream media have been a feature of his site Left I on the News and on twitter @leftiblog, and Sputnik producer Nicole Roussell. Friday is Loud & Clear’s weekly hour-long segment The Week in Review, about the week in politics, policy, and international affairs. Today they focus on the historic mass protest movement sweeping the country and the world against racist police violence. Donald Trump and Democratic Party city officials alike are cracking down on the movement, but the protests continue to gain huge momentum. Brian and John speak with Sputnik News analysts and producers Walter Smolarek and Nicole Roussell.

* Kentucky storm sweeps horse and buggy away leaving 4 Amish children dead, 1 missing. * Swedish town uses chicken manure to help stop spread of coronavirus – Reuters. * Open-air classes for Denmark’s students. * How accurate is the US coronavirus death count? Some experts say it’s off by ‘tens of thousands’ To get an accurate picture of the pandemic, US needs to test more of the dead. * Alaska School Board Bans ‘The Great Gatsby’ and Other ‘Harmful’ Books. * Board bans books from school for profanity, racism, sex – 1 identified for having ‘anti-white’ messaging. * Catholic university offers free semester to new students due to COVID-19 – College to tap into reserves to fund endeavor. * Juanita Broaddrick Blasts Hillary’s Biden Endorsement: Has ‘Decades of Experience’ Enabling ‘Sexual Predator’ Bill. * Kobach: The Tenth Circuit Wrongly Strikes Down Kansas’s Proof-of-Citizenship Election Requiremen. * Before Trump, there was Congressman Steve Stockman – John Griffing updates readers on efforts to release politically prosecuted prisoner. * YouTube and Twitter Censor Pharma Company Researching UV Light Treatment for Chinese Virus. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/loving-liberty/support

* Kentucky storm sweeps horse and buggy away leaving 4 Amish children dead, 1 missing. * Swedish town uses chicken manure to help stop spread of coronavirus - Reuters. * Open-air classes for Denmark's students. * How accurate is the US coronavirus death count? Some experts say it's off by 'tens of thousands' To get an accurate picture of the pandemic, US needs to test more of the dead. * Alaska School Board Bans ‘The Great Gatsby’ and Other ‘Harmful’ Books. * Board bans books from school for profanity, racism, sex - 1 identified for having 'anti-white' messaging. * Catholic university offers free semester to new students due to COVID-19 - College to tap into reserves to fund endeavor. * Juanita Broaddrick Blasts Hillary’s Biden Endorsement: Has ‘Decades of Experience’ Enabling ‘Sexual Predator’ Bill. * Kobach: The Tenth Circuit Wrongly Strikes Down Kansas’s Proof-of-Citizenship Election Requiremen. * Before Trump, there was Congressman Steve Stockman - John Griffing updates readers on efforts to release politically prosecuted prisoner. * YouTube and Twitter Censor Pharma Company Researching UV Light Treatment for Chinese Virus.

* Kentucky storm sweeps horse and buggy away leaving 4 Amish children dead, 1 missing. * Swedish town uses chicken manure to help stop spread of coronavirus – Reuters. * Open-air classes for Denmark’s students. * How accurate is the US coronavirus death count? Some experts say it’s off by ‘tens of thousands’ To get an accurate picture of the pandemic, US needs to test more of the dead. * Alaska School Board Bans ‘The Great Gatsby’ and Other ‘Harmful’ Books. * Board bans books from school for profanity, racism, sex – 1 identified for having ‘anti-white’ messaging. * Catholic university offers free semester to new students due to COVID-19 – College to tap into reserves to fund endeavor. * Juanita Broaddrick Blasts Hillary’s Biden Endorsement: Has ‘Decades of Experience’ Enabling ‘Sexual Predator’ Bill. * Kobach: The Tenth Circuit Wrongly Strikes Down Kansas’s Proof-of-Citizenship Election Requiremen. * Before Trump, there was Congressman Steve Stockman – John Griffing updates readers on efforts to release politically prosecuted prisoner. * YouTube and Twitter Censor Pharma Company Researching UV Light Treatment for Chinese Virus. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/loving-liberty/support

House Democrats are wrapping up three days of opening arguments in the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. Before Trump’s defense lawyers take the mic on Saturday, we’ll take a look at how Democrats laid out the case, and whether it changed anyone’s minds. Then, President Trump became the first sitting president to speak at the March for Life rally today in DC. We’ll explain why his timing is everything. Also on today’s show: how drama over the head of the Recording Academy is overshadowing the biggest night in music.

There are 180,000 people who claim Iranian ancestry living across California, according to the most recent census data. Many left Iran around the time of the revolution in 1979. SF Weekly's Ida Mojadad's parents came to the U.S. around this time as students. The U.S. and Iranian governments have remained adversaries since the revolution. This political relationship has shaped the way Mojadad thinks about her Iranian-American identity. And after the U.S. killed Iran's top general, she's once again thinking through some difficult questions. Interview Highlights You were with your mom at the time. What was her reaction? She didn't really seem to think it was something larger. She just said "I don't really care if it's some commander; I just care if something happens to any people." Later, when we were talking with my dad, we realized it was something bigger. There was obviously a lot of reaction to this on social media. I think "World War III" was actually trending. You tweeted out this tweet (warning: contains strong language). What was going through your head when you wrote that tweet? As long as I've known Iran, all the news that comes out around it — it's just the country, the government — and no one thinks about the people inside of it. And that rings true for other conflicts that we're in. Regular, everyday people. Maybe they own businesses, maybe they want to do more science breakthroughs... it's a highly educated country with a lot of middle-class folks, and they just want the regular things that everyday people want all around the world, and they just get so lost in these news bursts. I want to talk about the last few years. You told us before we started recording that the Trump presidency felt like this turning point for you. How has it felt like a turning point? Before Trump became president, we had President Obama and it felt like the two [countries] could come together because of this nuclear deal, this landmark nuclear deal. This was really the first case of real diplomacy since the hostage crisis [1979-1981]. There's no embassy in Iran. So that level of communication is not there, and it came together under Obama. And it felt like, finally, the two could be... well, not friends — that would take a while — but that the two could have a relationship again, that there could be this free-flowing of family visits, and I could finally visit and see my parents' hometown again. There was this kind of hopeful moment that there would be more of an exchange, and that the two parts of my family could exchange fluidly. And then after Trump, it became obvious that with the travel ban, and with him ripping up the nuclear deal, that it would be a very long time before that could happen again. I'm curious if there's any part of you that wishes you were in Iran with family that you have there. Yeah, I do, actually. One of the biggest things I want for myself is to be able to go over there and bask in this place that shaped me, and be with family that I don't even know. There are so many family members, and I've met them before but it was so long ago. Sometimes, when my family talks about them, I don't even know who they're talking about. And I want to at least on base level know who they're talking about, because I don't even know them anymore. You can kind of not think about it most of the time, but when the reminder comes, like my aunt being able to visit, it really shows you what you're missing out on the rest of the time. When I hear you talk about the struggle that you have living here, and these two identities that you hold, it seems like what's happening, politically, between the U.S. and Iran, is symbolic to you. Symbolic of the tension between the two identities that you hold. Oh,

Johnny Enlow: God Is Using Trump to Separate History into Before Trump and After Trump Eras   Nepal’s mass animal slaughter begins despite outcry   Federal agency will be run by man who tried to ban feeding homeless   Buffalo’s Bishop Richard Malone resigns after a year of pressure and Buffalo Bishop Resigns After Scandal... The post Episode 500 Celebration first appeared on Cognitive Dissonance the Podcast.

Prayer and intercession have always been an integral part of Mary Colbert's life. Before Trump was elected, she not only believed the prophetic words that Trump would be elected, but she boldly told others about it and prayed according to the prophecies.  Listen as Mary goes in-depth about the prophetic confirmations she received and how it led her to start a prayer movement via conference call that quickly spread nationwide.

Before Trump or Bernie, Congressman Jim Traficant was the original bombastic populist, but with "son-of-a-truck driver" street cred. As a mob-busting sheriff in Youngstown, Ohio, his refusal to evict steelworkers from their homes made him a folk hero. In Congress, his outlandish behavior and profanity-laced tirades made him a target. Ultimately, Traficant unraveled and spent 7+ years in prisonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, I discuss the eccentric and transformational figure Ross Perot.  Perot's 1992 campaign is widely considered the most successful 3rd party campaign in modern presidential history.  Before Trump, there was Perot.  Take a listen, you might here a giant sucking sound :)  (7 min)

In episode 307, Jack and Miles are joined by comedian Candice Thompson to discuss the Bezos divorce, the government shutdown continuing and the Trump Administrations lack of understanding about it, Steve King's idiotic comments about white nationalism, the prediction that the US will drop to the third biggest economy, Facebook no longer being the best place to work, the Oscars deciding to go host-less, Taco Bell cleaning up their act, and more! FOOTNOTES: 1. THE INNER BEZOS 2. Why the Bezos Divorce Is So Riveting 3. Jeff Bezos, Newly Divorcing, Now Seeing Lauren Sanchez-Whitesell 4. Who Is Lauren Sanchez? All About the News Anchor Dating Billionaire Jeff Bezos 5. Trump walks out of shutdown negotiations after Democrats reject wall money, calls meeting ‘total waste of time’ 6. The 'doomsday' scenario: Here's what happens if the shutdown drags on 7. Before Trump, Steve King Set the Agenda for the Wall and Anti-Immigrant Politics 8. United States will drop to become the world's THIRD biggest economy behind China and India by 2030, new financial rankings suggest 9. Projected GDP Ranking (2018-2023) 10. Facebook employees are reportedly outraged at exec appearing at Kavanaugh hearing 11. Facebook is no longer the 'Best Place to Work,' according to new Glassdoor survey 12. After Kevin Hart Debacle, Oscars Forge Ahead Hostless 13. A Hostless Oscars? The Last Time the Academy Tried That, Things Got Ugly 14. Oscars Team Scrambling to Reunite 'Avengers' on Telecast (Exclusive) 15. WATCH: The 11 minutes that ruined Hollywood producer Allan Carr's career forever 16. Taco Bell to test vegetarian menu this year 17. WATCH: Kaina - Cry Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

Upcoming congressional votes to avoid a partial government shutdown. Democrats are not in favor to create more funds. Before Trump was elected into office Democrats; Pelosi, Schumer and Clinton talked about a border wall and security need and funding the project. Show #23

This week, Stephan, along with panelists Josh Trupin (Democratic Chair of Washington's 8th Congressional District) and Chris Petzold (founder and head of Indivisible Washington's 8th District) discuss Thursday's passage of the GOP tax bill through the House, and how it might be a losing proposition for Republicans no matter what happens next. They also break down the shift in the balance of power in Olympia now that the Democrats officially have a one-vote majority in the senate, and lay out what we can expect to get done (as well as what likely won't, at least not right away). And last, they discuss the Senate race in Alabama. Plus, they each confess what they didn't know BT (or, "Before Trump").

It's Scott's 3rd time on the podcast. In the first interview, he was "the creator of Dilbert." A famous cartoonist. The second time he was still "the creator of Dilbert" and a hypnosis/persuasion student. Now (appearance #3), Scott Adams is something new. He's reinvented. And no longer standing on the footbridge between old self and new self. He's the author of "Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter" and infamous for predicting Trump's win... two years before election day. His prediction was spot on. Before Trump raced Hillary. Before he beat Ted Cruz in the primaries. And before he beat 18 other "more experienced" Republican candidates (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, and the ones who's names I can't remember.) Scott could name each persuasion trick Trump was using. His tone, the stories he told, the way he made you remember him, his thoughts, plans, policies, tweets. And how he's still doing it to us today. I wanted to know how he knew. But I also wanted to know how he changes his career. And his life. "I came in through the side entrance," he said. "Why?" ""Look how hard it is to change to fields. And so so dramatically. The hardest sell is convincing someone you're not what you've been for decades... Or convincing them that you have more to offer," he said. "Right." And then I realized we hadn't even talked about cartooning. And the interview was almost done. He taught me the most important rule for persuading anyone of anything: facts don't matter. "What makes news and what makes people care is if you do something in a different way," he said. New doesn't matter. New and different matters. "In this case, I'm talking about politics, but I'm talking about persuasion. That was a different way. That immediately gets people's attention. And they say, 'Oh a new thing. Finally, there's a new thing. Let's talk about the new thing." In this episode, Scott teaches you that it's possible change someone's perspective of you. That you can break free of the titles and jobs you hold and become who you really feel you are. He'll walk you through how he did it... how President Trump did it, and how you can do it, too. Thanks for reading! Make sure to check out the show notes here: https://jamesaltucher.com/2017/11/scott-adams-3/ And don't forget to subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" on Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts! ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn

It’s Scott’s 3rd time on the podcast. In the first interview, he was “the creator of Dilbert.” A famous cartoonist. The second time he was still “the creator of Dilbert” and a hypnosis/persuasion student. Now (appearance #3), Scott Adams is something new. He’s reinvented. And no longer standing on the footbridge between old self and new self. He’s the author of “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter” and infamous for predicting Trump’s win… two years before election day. His prediction was spot on. Before Trump raced Hillary. Before he beat Ted Cruz in the primaries. And before he beat 18 other "more experienced" Republican candidates (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, and the ones who’s names I can’t remember.) Scott could name each persuasion trick Trump was using. His tone, the stories he told, the way he made you remember him, his thoughts, plans, policies, tweets. And how he's still doing it to us today. I wanted to know how he knew. But I also wanted to know how he changes his career. And his life. “I came in through the side entrance,” he said. “Why?” ““Look how hard it is to change to fields. And so so dramatically. The hardest sell is convincing someone you’re not what you’ve been for decades… Or convincing them that you have more to offer,” he said. “Right.” And then I realized we hadn’t even talked about cartooning. And the interview was almost done. He taught me the most important rule for persuading anyone of anything: facts don’t matter. “What makes news and what makes people care is if you do something in a different way,” he said. New doesn’t matter. New and different matters. “In this case, I’m talking about politics, but I'm talking about persuasion. That was a different way. That immediately gets people’s attention. And they say, ‘Oh a new thing. Finally, there’s a new thing. Let’s talk about the new thing.” In this episode, Scott teaches you that it’s possible change someone's perspective of you. That you can break free of the titles and jobs you hold and become who you really feel you are. He’ll walk you through how he did it… how President Trump did it, and how you can do it, too. Thanks for reading! Make sure to check out the show notes here: https://jamesaltucher.com/2017/11/scott-adams-3/ And don't forget to subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" on Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before Trump’s travel ban for Syrians, we sat down with Orwa Nyrabia at the Sundance Film Festival where he was attending workshops. Three years ago, he produced “Return to Homs,” directed by Talal Derki, about the resistance movement in his hometown. The film won Sundance’s Jury Prize for World Documentary and is now available on […] The post PN 35: Syrian Filmmaker Orwa Nyrabia In Exile appeared first on Pure Nonfiction.

Before Trump, there was Kyle Hadley -- the spoiled, insecure narcissistic billionaire of WRITTEN ON THE WIND. Kyle (Robert Stack) and sis Marylee (Dorothy Malone) are troubled oil brats, whose lives of decadent luxury are just not enough! Kyle loves Lucy (Lauren Bacall), but Lucy probably loves sexually passive Mitch (Rock Hudson), who is idolised but hated by Kyle who is truly hated by Marylee, who also hates Lucy but definitely loves Mitch. Got it? For the next installment of The Male Gayz, we bring you Douglas Sirk's story of oil, emasculation, and bongo drums. Sumptuous Technicolor can't bring warmth to these characters, but knockout performances, broiling tension and burning desire make this 1956 melodrama into a tour de force of masculinity in crisis. Who else but Sirk? All clips from the film presented according to fair use policy. Podcast Theme: "Pipeline" by CyberSDF (https://soundcloud.com/cybersdf/tracks)

The drones/UAP's above New Jersey and spreading across the rest of the world have been going on for weeks now.... Before Trump gets into office and "exposes the truth"... Lets explore what we know about them already...You can get in touch with Josh and Pirate to tell them YOUR spooky stories at: paranormality.uk@gmail.comOR visit our website for all your Paranormality UK needs: https://paranormalityuk.co.ukAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy