... ta- talk about that.

Yeah, yeah.

Hap- uh, happy to.

This continues to be one of my favorite subjects.

At the Consti- at the Constitutional Convention, there were 55 men there.

55 men.

Jefferson wasn't one of them.

How, how do those two things fit together?"

Yes.

Uh, that is a prohibition of f- uh, religious test oaths for federal office, for federal office.

When the Constitution was ratified, it was ratified by the states.

Massachusetts, at the time they voted for ratification, had an official Christian denomination that was the Church of Massachusetts.

Connecticut had an official Christian denomination that was the Church of Connecticut.

New Hampshire had a Church of New Hampshire, like the Church of Denmark, like the Church of England.

Those states had hard establishment.

Is that a mischaracterization?

Greyfriars Hall, Wilson's seminary, was established a few years after New St. Andrew's College.

We live in times of turmoil and division, times that require holy and faithful churches led by mature pastors who preach God's Word with courage and clarity.

But many seminaries are in the business of training soft men in loser theology, teaching their students to unhitch from the Old Testament, drift with the cultural current, and live beneath the progressive gaze.

Not to mention the progressive gays.

Gross.

And while he and Isker didn't agree on everything while Isker was at Greyfriars Hall, in recent years

Something happened where he really flipped on that, abandoned libertarianism and adopted the sort of conservatism that he embraces now.

He, along with a number of alt-right or radical right younger guys, part of this is a generational thing, part of it is an ideological thing.

Doug, what's your perspective from Idaho?

Yeah, my, my perspective is the central duty of the Church in this hour is to fight the commies.

Um, and it's n- it's not because compassion, generosity, uh, open-handedness are wrong.

They're obviously Christian.

Uh, ba- basically an overflow of generosity and, uh, James tells us that pure and undefiled religion is to visit the widow and the orphan in their affliction.

So Christians should be very much about ministering to the downtrodden.

But that is, um, as the Father said, that is a voluntary thing.

Beast, Doug Wilson, uh, Doug, what, do you wanna starve children?

So Doug, how, how many years have you had in the welding trade?

I was adding it up.

It's getting plus or minus 30 years now.

It's quite a while.

So it's funny, I grew up as a carpenter and, uh, the big joke was when I was working at RSD Instruments, geotechnical, my boss is always joking about, uh, "Do you wanna go back to carpentry?" And I'm like, "No.

Oh, I, I love this," you know? And I've...

Over the years, you've, you gain skills and you learn from people or you go to school, whatever.

Uh, so Doug, you mentioned when we started out here that you were teaching welding at some point.

Mm-hmm.

And, and this goes back to the point I made earlier about worship.

Um, I've, I've seen...

I don't think that Christian schools can flourish outside of a worshiping community.

Um, the...

So the kids need to be going to school taught by teachers who are going to the same church that the parents and many of the kids are going to, and they're worshiping God, and what they're doing on Monday and Tuesday is consistent with what they're hearing on Sunday-

Right.

Right? And, uh, you have to do the research yourself.

Right.

Um, and, uh, I'm grateful that our kids went through logos and our grandkids have all gone through logos.

I'm very, it's a, it's a parent, um, Parents are represented on the board.

It's a parent-controlled school through the board.

And our educational philosophy is we want to serve parents who are doing their job, engaged parents.

So parents who can be, is plugged in in helping out at the school as they want to be.

We have programs where if we don't ever want to turn anybody away because of money, if they're committed to the form of education.

So

So why are you hopeful that the Almighty God is going to show mercy on this country? Like, I appreciate the fact that you are hopeful, but why are you hopeful? What's the

evidence for you? So I'm hopeful for the world because I'm a post-millennialist, because of my eschatology.

I believe the kingdom of God is going to grow and flourish until the earth is as full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

So my eschatology says the kingdom of God is going to conquer.

But my eschatology doesn't say anything about America.

So my judgment that America is going to survive is based on things that I see, the cultural trends that I see, the way people are talking and responding to proclamations of the truth.

So, for example, we've been saying some of the fundamental things we've been saying for 40 years.

So I

What about the church and your teachings appeal to Secretary Hegseth, do you think?

So there's a, there's a little bit of history, uh, there.

Um, when, uh, Pete Hegseth was still with Fox News as a correspondent anchor type, he did a, he, he did a documentary on the state of American education and was so impressed at what he saw about this classical Christian school movement that he moved to Tennessee to put his kids in, uh, a school like that.

He was still a correspondent with, uh, Fox, so he was flying in and out of Nashville, um, uh, because of his job, and he would fly in to Nashville on Sunday and not in time for church.

There was one church in the area that was meeting in the afternoon because they didn't have a facility, and that was Pilgrim Hill, uh, Church, which is pastored by my friend Brooks Pottinger, um, and he, he's part of our denomination, the CREC.

Uh, so and it's...

There, there are connections between the classical school movement and the CREC, the denomination, and it was there that he made all the connections before he was the secretary of war.

Mm-hmm

What do you remember about 79 and that whole time with Iran? Do you remember?

The most vivid thing about it is the hostages being released two minutes after reagan was sworn in it's like quick don't well no it was i'm serious i think i think i remember a split screen of reagan being sworn in and the plane's taking off okay we're done yeah okay carter's out Reagan's being sworn in, we're not going to mess with Reagan.

And it was about as calculated an insult as you could imagine aimed at Jimmy Carter.

And the other thing I remember is the ill-fated helicopter raid where Carter finally launched a raid to rescue the hostages.

and they had mechanical problems and a sandstorm and so you know it was a botched um aborted mission whole thing was a disaster and anybody who knows anything about complicated operations like that knows that the things that trump's done like the extraction of maduro from venezuela 105 things could go wrong and yeah and the so far uh jimmy carter was snake bit just just snake bit and trump is thus far is leading a charmed ex a charmed existence the raid on the nuke facilities yeah was exquisitely done to just craft competence yeah well

Do you have any interesting or unanswered China questions for somebody who's been there for 15 years, anything that you're curious about?

Yeah, my question would be, I'm not even sure how to formulate it.

When the Christian missionaries were forced out under Mao, and then when China opened up again, and we come back in, and now there's millions of Christians.

So can you just talk a little bit a- about that? Were those, like, figures I tossed out there correct? And is it the case that a lot of farmers, like, kind of end up in this cycle where they are leasing their equipment from a dealer, and that kind of limits, like, what they can do with their machines?

You're right.

In Canada at least, tractors do get over a million dollars.

I don't know...

Obviously, there's a, there's a, an exchange rate between the Canadian and the US dollar, so maybe in the US they don't.

At any rateYour question was regarding, uh, lease deals, um, contracts that they're signing.

I, I understand there has been some gains on right to repair, but, uh, basically the, the farmer is signing on to a lease.

And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about, like, what are, what are farmers doing with their tractors most of the time?

What's wrong with that?

R- yeah, it, it's sorta like saying, if you'll forgive me for being transparent again, that you want squares to have the liberty to be triangles.

Um, men and women are different, and this is a creational design thing.

This is not a matter of all of us being bipedal carbon units, and then we can be whatever we choose to be.

That is the, um, that is a, an approach to the world that we disagree with being Christians.

So, um, but that Christianity does not require us to condemn people who have, um, a, a sinful past, because frankly, we all have a sinful past.

The sinful, the sins are different.

That, I mean, that just seems wrong, actually.

He can also sound very rational, as you're gonna hear, and we're talking to him because he's gaining influence in a country where many people are disappointed by what secular liberal democracy has gotten us.

There's a character in one of Hemingway's, uh, stories I've heard who said, who was asked how he went bankrupt.

And he said, "Well, at first gradually, and then suddenly." So what happened is when COVID hit, was sort of the pressure test or the, a stress test, uh, for us.

All the wheels came off, and for a lot of, I call them normies and grillers, a lot of normal Americans were looking around and say, "What just happened? Uh, this is crazy.

What do you mean drag queen story hour? What do you mean...

Uh, y- what are you talking about? Uh, this is not what I was, this is not what I signed up for." So the things that we'd been talking about for some decades, um, back to the Bible, Christ is Lord, Christ is risen, and that has political implications.

That sounded crazy 20 years ago.

How are you planning to regulate homosexuality, to regulate adultery, and keep it in line with what the Bible wants?

How should we live in a world we know isn't going to last, but we are?

Yeah, that's a great question.

Basically, I think someone once said, and I forget where I picked this up first, there are only two things that you deal with on a day-to-day basis that are forever.

And one is the Word of God.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of the Lord is forever.

That's one thing.

And the other thing is your neighbor.

my fat face keeps hitting my phone is the problem.