Nov. 29, 2012 - InfoWars Nightly News
37:49
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| It's time for humanity to stand up in the end of the war. | |
| You want to fight? | |
| You better believe? | |
| You can't win! | |
| The End Good evening and welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the InfoWars Nightly News. | |
| I'm your host, Aaron Dykes. | |
| Today is Thursday, November 29th, 2012. | |
| Tonight on the InfoWars Nightly News, the Senate of Illinois defeats the governor's sneaky attempt to ban assault weapons. | |
| Then, Al Qaeda's Pentagon dinner guest was part of a catch and release program. | |
| And a sheriff becomes an internet icon for standing up for the Bill of Rights. | |
| All that and more coming up on the InfoWars Nightly News. | |
| Last week, of course, was Thanksgiving, a time for Americans across the country to recall and give thanks for their family, their many blessings, a time for Americans across the country to recall and give thanks for their family, their many blessings, for the freedoms we were granted in | |
| But of course, during that opt-out week at the TSA, it was also a time to scratch our heads and wonder why we still have to go through these ridiculous security measures being patted down, Hands being put into pants, genitals being grabbed, all supposedly to catch a terrorist. | |
| And that just brings us to our top story tonight, which may have a lot of you scratching your head a bit dizzied. | |
| New documents show that Al Qaeda's Pentagon dinner guest was part of a catch-and-release program that of course is Anwar al-Awlaki. | |
| A new judicial watch lawsuit reveals evidence that Bush, Obama, Clinton for that matter operated shady deals with terrorists and so Steve Watson has the story explaining how these documents were obtained by the accountability group Judicial Watch and confirmed that the US-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, said to be the former leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was arrested and held in Yemen at the behest of the embassy before being released again. | |
| Further, He was invited to the U.S. | |
| Embassy in Yemen March 24, 2011, just six months before he was allegedly killed in a drone strike. | |
| Now these documents also corroborate reports that suggest al-Awlaki had been arrested around that time in connection with an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. | |
| government official. | |
| However, his arrest in 2006 was followed by a release in 2007. | |
| And you go back in time and follow the crazy history around Anwar al-Awlaki and other alleged hijackers, alleged terrorists, as they're again released, as they're let into the country despite being on watch lists, as they're granted visas, as they're allowed to travel back and forth All while Americans and regular tourists are treated like criminals and scum in prison lines at airports and now increasingly at bus stations, train depots, you name it. | |
| Now this report about al-Awlaki being officially invited to the U.S. | |
| Embassy in Yemen, of course, follows the revelations that were revealed in October of 2010 at Fox News. | |
| Exclusive al-Qaeda leader dined at the Pentagon just months after 9-11. | |
| Now, that was in early 2002, just a little bit after the September 11 attacks, when Al-Awlaki had been interviewed multiple times by the FBI and other investigative authorities because of his connections to at least three of the 9-11 hijackers. | |
| Now, he was detained, he was questioned, but he was let go, and this happened over and over again. | |
| There's just several rounds of this. | |
| I believe the latest time was in September 2007, when FBI agents had him Under their detainment, but decide to let him go. | |
| Just something we can expect from these terrorists. | |
| And the reason for it is because people like Tony Schaefer, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Schaefer, who helped blow the whistle on much of the intelligence behind 9-11, he said that Al Lockhee was a triple agent. | |
| Webster Tarpley, the historian, has called him a patsy and a double agent, and on and on. | |
| These people work for the Pentagon. | |
| They work for the actual appearance that there's terrorism around the world. | |
| They play out these roles in their fictional scenarios. | |
| They pose for the pictures to help spread the xenophobia and Islamic fear while conditioning Americans for the real attack, the assault on our Bill of Rights, on our freedom here in this country. | |
| And I'm thankful for every freedom we still have. | |
| And I'm outraged at the fact that this is how real terrorists get treated. | |
| And Americans are considered scum. | |
| I could go on, but I won't, but it's important news to check out at InfoWars.com. | |
| Meanwhile, the Illinois Senate has defeated the governor's sneaky attack to introduce an assault weapons ban into legislation in the state of Illinois, where Barack Obama is from. | |
| It is Governor Pat Quinn who attempted to rewrite a Senate bill without letting the measure first be heard by the legislature, but it was stopped by State Senator David Luchfield Who is a Republican and so they've been battling there in the Illinois Statehouse. | |
| Today's a good day for the Second Amendment in Illinois. | |
| We have scored a victory against short-sighted Chicago anti-gun policies, Luchfield said in the Illinois Review on Wednesday. | |
| The governor overstepped his reach when he decided to rewrite that Senate bill and impose an assault weapons ban without the measure first being heard by the legislature. | |
| It was supposed to be legislation to allow FOID cardholders to mail order ammunition from licensed dealers. | |
| But instead, he tried to sneak in bans on ammunition magazines and assault weapons. | |
| That is just in the footsteps of the federal moves from people like Obama, who at the debate said he wanted to push for assault weapons ban in his second term, for people like Senator Feinstein from San Francisco, who's been meeting with the ATF, to work out new legislation, new regulations through the executive branch to work out new legislation, new regulations through the executive branch that they can impose, and all the other gun grabbers just ignoring By the way, our latest issue of InfoWars Magazine is in. | |
| It is the cover story, This Man Wants Your Guns, so do the other gun grabbers in Washington, in the international system, at the United Nations, you name it. | |
| But this is a great InfoWars Magazine issue. | |
| You can get a subscription for $59.95. | |
| You've got other great copies like this, the Zombies issue. | |
| But let's just look at the gun story. | |
| Let me find that page here. | |
| So here is that spread in this latest December issue. | |
| Obama wants your guns and the rest of your freedoms. | |
| It's a big write-up from Alex with the help of the staff. | |
| And you've got a lot of history here for people to learn from. | |
| These colorful graphics. | |
| We must get rid of all the guns. | |
| That's a Sarah Brady quote. | |
| You heard about Obama saying he was going to get in legislation to attack the Second Amendment, quote, under the radar. | |
| You got Eric Holder talking about brainwashing people on guns. | |
| And oh, you have quotes from Adolf Hitler and other actual dictators who openly targeted gun rights, in that case against Jews. | |
| And you got this pull-out quote, how true it is, the history of gun control is the history of tyranny. | |
| It's the whole The idea behind the founding of this country is that it was supposed to be a stopgap against tyranny. | |
| Tyranny is natural. | |
| Whenever you give someone power, people in power naturally try to abuse it, take over things, and rule. | |
| That's why we implemented separation of powers into the U.S. | |
| Constitution. | |
| But that wasn't enough. | |
| They weren't going to ratify the Constitution until a bunch of well-meaning founding fathers pushed for and eventually got the Bill of Rights, which gave It didn't give individual rights. | |
| It didn't give them, but it enumerated them and guaranteed them under that Constitution, their God-given rights. | |
| But among them were the Second Amendment that all should have the right to bear arms and that it shall not be infringed. | |
| Why? | |
| Because it keeps back tyranny. | |
| If the separation of the legislature, of the Congress, of the judicial branch, of the executive branch isn't enough, if the separation of the federal and state governments aren't enough, the individuals still have the power to hold off tyranny. | |
| That's all the more reason why this tyrannical system wants your guns here and now in this day and age. | |
| Definitely need to keep an eye on that. | |
| Meanwhile, jumping off the fiscal cliff, Tim Kelly writes for InfoWars today on how the American people are once again being warned that we're going to jump off the fiscal cliff, that we have to give Congress the power to raise the debt infinitely, to borrow so that they can raise that debt, so they can keep spending us into oblivion. | |
| You got people like Bernanke, Warning us and lecturing the American people. | |
| People like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin who helped design the whole derivative scam and drive this country's economy into global catastrophe. | |
| You got people like JP Morgan predicting that we're gonna fall headfirst into a meat grinder if Congress doesn't, quote, do something. | |
| And what is it all about? | |
| It's from the Budget Control Act of 2011, the agreement where they raised the debt limit by $2.1 trillion, but found that unless they work things out, there would be automatic budget cuts and tax increases by January 2013. | |
| And now they're freaking out because they have no plan for a sustainable budget. | |
| They only have a plan to keep spending and spending and borrowing and piling on the debt. | |
| And they're trying to freak everyone out so they can get a mandate to do that. | |
| Well, the whole thing is not only cooked books. | |
| It's double cooked books. | |
| It's like refried beans. | |
| It's like a deep fried Twinkie. | |
| It's a double dose of lies as we borrow from the Federal Reserve to pay off the budget, which is borrowed on debt, while that actual financial instrument from the Federal Reserve puts us in even more debt dollar for dollar, which they then give to the mega banks so that they can borrow at 0% which they then give to the mega banks so that they can borrow at 0% interest, less than 0% interest under quantitative easing and loan it What a system, folks. | |
| What a system. | |
| I hope we see the light of day and figure that one out. | |
| Meanwhile, some good news. | |
| You've heard all the police abuse stories. | |
| We've showed videos. | |
| There's a lot of cops who are out of their jurisdiction, out of bounds on a complete power trip. | |
| But there's still some cops who care, and this man from the NYPD force was profiled after he was pictured supposedly randomly buying and giving boots to a homeless man who literally had no shoes as the weather started to get rather freezing in New York. | |
| He asked the man his size and went into a store, bought him boots and then brought them back to him. | |
| And that was officer Larry DiPrimo. | |
| That's all detailed in a Don Salazar's article at Infowars.com. | |
| It was spread around on the web besides that otherwise and it It helped the NYPD's public image. | |
| It increased their Facebook memberships many fold because people are tired of seeing these abusive, out of control, wannabe tyrant cops. | |
| They want to see cops who still remember that they're servants, public officials, and that they're supposed to be helping the public, not harming them. | |
| But that kind of hero cop is one type of cop. | |
| The kind of hero cop I really want to encourage, that I want to call out and salute, is the First Amendment cop who has now become an internet icon. | |
| We've had Jason Bermas on and the others who've done these TSA protests throughout the week. | |
| We covered this the last couple days. | |
| Now it's been picked up in the Albany media about the sheriff's deputy. | |
| At the Albany Airport, Linnick, Deputy Linnick, who told Doug Meyer, who was running the Albany Airport, tried to imply that Jason Burmas and Ashley Jessica were blocking escalators and somehow preventing travelers when nothing of the sort was going on. | |
| It was a pretty blatant Intimidation attempt from those airport officials, and you've got the sheriff's deputy who told him to back off, told him his job is to uphold the Constitution, that these people handing out flyers and filming were doing nothing wrong, nothing illegal, and now he's not only been recognized for that by the Albany news outlet Channel 13, he's also received a commendation from his department, and that department has had a flood of positive responses | |
| Great emails thanking him for upholding the Constitution, for recognizing the First Amendment and free speech rights of these critics of the TSA, Jason Bermas, who of course produced several films here at Infowars.com. | |
| And so we just want to commend Sheriff's Deputy Stan Linick and encourage all law enforcement officers out there, whether you're police department, sheriff's department, or some other outfit, You uphold the Constitution, too. | |
| You stand up for someone's freedom of speech, and we'll salute you right here at InfoWars every time, at least, that we hear about it. | |
| Meanwhile, medical tyranny is here, and we can't say we weren't warned. | |
| That's Daniel Taylor of Old Thinker News, also published at InfoWars.com today, and he profiles Benjamin Rush, who warned back in 1787 that We better put protection for medical freedom in the Constitution, even though it is already implied by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as a number of other provisions in the Constitution. | |
| The very spirit of it is that you should have your own control of your own life, especially When it only affects your own body, and yet look how captured we've become today under the current medical system, under the way they've forced people into expensive chemotherapy treatments that debatably don't work, into all these pharmaceutical prescription drugs that only make profits for the big pharma giants but don't usually help people. | |
| They just suck out money and everything else that's wrong with this medical system. | |
| Well, look at the words of Benjamin Rush back in 1787, one of our greatest founding fathers, The Constitution of this Republic should make special provision for medical freedom. | |
| To restrict the art of healing to one class will constitute the bestill of medical science. | |
| All such laws are un-American and despotic. | |
| Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship. | |
| And force people who wish doctors and treatment of their own choice to submit to only what the dictating outfit offers. | |
| And that's what we're getting under Obamacare. | |
| They're trying to put in that socialized health care everywhere else in the world. | |
| You've got people like the World Health Organization in bed with the United Nations trying to implement universal health care everywhere. | |
| And again, it's ration treatment. | |
| You only see the doctors they want. | |
| You only get the kind of treatments they want. | |
| treatments that again are provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, by Big Pharma Outfits. | |
| And if you study the history of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, all these big foundations going back to the turn of the 20th century, they changed this medical system. | |
| They infiltrated universities, put in their professors, their mentality, changed the way medicine and science were studied, and just did away with as much natural cure as they could in favor of big-time, interventionalist, profit-driven motives. | |
| and it's just destroying people. | |
| And then Dan Taylor details some of the cases where when you refuse chemotherapy for your 8-year-old because you're pursuing natural medicine or that you don't want to vaccinate your child, CPS comes or the mother's arrested or other forms of intimidation come down the line. | |
| So anyone paying any attention at all has seen how drones have taken over the skies in America. | |
| Indeed, worldwide, more than 30,000 drones are scheduled to take flight under one auspice or another in the next 10 years. | |
| And we've got to fight back against this tyranny. | |
| We've got to somehow resist that system. | |
| And it's fight or flight. | |
| In this instance, we're going to give a different meaning to flight. | |
| We're calling on hashtag drone mob for people to gather December 8th at Zilker Park right here in Austin. | |
| If you're anywhere in the Texas area, come join us and we're going to fly drones. | |
| We've got prizes, we've got giveaways, and we're trying to just raise attention about this issue. | |
| So we can shine a light on what the system is doing with drones through our own actions and I'm sure it'll be fun too. | |
| So we're announcing the first ever InfoWars drone mob and video contest. | |
| Check that out at InfoWars.com and here's a look at that hashtag drone mob video right now. | |
| I'm Melissa Melvin. | |
| And I'm Jakari Jackson for the Info Wars Nightly News. | |
| Now you've heard us talk about drones. | |
| Hashtag Drone Mob. | |
| We have set a date. | |
| It will be December 8th, Zilker Park in Austin, Texas. | |
| Now as you can see before us, we have here our very own Black Ops 2 drone. | |
| We've had this thing for a few weeks because of various things. | |
| We haven't had a chance to open it yet. | |
| So we're very excited. | |
| We're going to open it right now to show you what we have and what we're dealing with. | |
| So let's take a look. - Oh, here we go. | |
| Ah, there it is. | |
| Oh, we get a medal. | |
| Oh. | |
| You already get a medal. | |
| Yeah, you're a winner when you open the box. | |
| Okay. | |
| I think before you try to operate this, I think you might want to take a look at this instructional booklet to tell you how to do that because this is how many instructions there are just for this. | |
| I don't know how many. | |
| Wow. | |
| Do you have a magnifying glass? | |
| No. | |
| Woo! | |
| Shoot! | |
| Come on! | |
| When InfoWars last used drones, they were shot down. | |
| Not this time. | |
| This is a peaceful flying contest meant for fun and awareness. | |
| For excellence in drone piloting, you've been awarded right here with the medal. | |
| You're going to be the next one to be dropped. | |
| I'm now on the records. | |
| Official drone pilot. | |
| You were already on the NSA database records anyway. | |
| Oh, that's true. | |
| Meanwhile, we've got some of the most powerful drone videos from recent times, different coverage we've done here at InfoWars, and a huge roundup of just dozens and dozens of drone-related news that's just hit the wires in the past year. | |
| So check that out, please. | |
| We turn now to The Daily Quote. | |
| It comes from Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451. | |
| He said, living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down. | |
| I guess that's kind of an allusion to what Congress is doing right now with the big fiscal situation. | |
| Anyway, that's it for the news segment of InfoWars Nightly News. | |
| We'll be back with an interview. | |
| David Knight on the other side. | |
| Stay tuned. | |
| Alex Jones here with a message that could revolutionize health in this country. | |
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| Erin Dykes lost 92 pounds. | |
| We're going to show you some before and afters. | |
| Aaron, break down what happened. | |
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| Sign up as a distributor and get wholesale pricing discounts at InfoWarsTeam.com. | |
| Recently, the Harvard School of Health looked at more than a dozen scientific studies concerning fluoride and confirmed what countless other scientists have been documenting for decades. | |
| Sodium fluoride in the body reduces IQ and increases cancers. | |
| You see, the aluminum industry and the fertilizer industries would have to pay to store all the toxic waste they produce. | |
| But instead, they get our counties and cities to pay to put the poison in our water. | |
| It's not just fluoride we're getting, but lead, mercury, arsenic, the list goes on and on. | |
| And a lot of this toxic waste comes from China. | |
| Unfortunately, fluoride and its derivatives are only one of hundreds of toxins being added to our drinking water. | |
| We're battling the globalists on so many fronts. | |
| Yes. | |
| Health is an area where we can all take control of our lives. | |
| And it all starts with that basic building block of water. | |
| It is time to purify our family's water. | |
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| Welcome back. | |
| Aaron Dykes covered the news tonight. | |
| I'm David Knight, and I've got a very special guest tonight. | |
| Eric Stanley from the Alliance for Defending Freedom. | |
| Now, all kinds of people, from potheads to pastors, are rebelling against usurpations against their freedoms by the federal government. | |
| And a group of pastors, encouraged by Alliance for Defending Freedom, has engaged in something called Pulpit Freedom Sunday. | |
| And it started back in 2008. | |
| They only had 33 pastors who did this. | |
| Basically, it's civil disobedience. | |
| Where they record a sermon that would not fall under the new IRS guidelines. | |
| And they record that and send it to the IRS. | |
| And that started out with just 33 people in 2008. | |
| It jumped to 80 the next year, 100 the next year, 500 in 2011. | |
| year 100 the next year 500 in 2011 and this last year it exploded to 1500 pastors and there's been a little bit of pushback Another organization, the Foundation for Freedom from Religion, has filed suit now with the IRS trying to get them to do something about it because the IRS is not trying to enforce this regulation that goes back to 1954. | |
| So without any further ado, I'm going to let Eric Stanley kind of fill us in on the details. | |
| Eric, welcome. | |
| Well, it's great to be with you today. | |
| Tell us a little bit about what you're trying to accomplish with this campaign. | |
| Well, Pulpit Freedom Sunday is really all about ensuring a pastor's right to speak freely from the pulpit and to not be intimidated or censored by the government in any way when he does so. | |
| A lot of people may not realize it, but since 1954, with the passage of the Johnson Amendment, Which was added to the Internal Revenue Code in 1954. | |
| The IRS has been censoring what a pastor can and cannot say from the pulpit when it comes to the issue of candidates in elections. | |
| And we believe that's unconstitutional, that a pastor has a right to speak freely from the pulpit, that it's the job of the pastor to determine what's said from the pulpit, not the IRS. | |
| And so we launched Pulpit Freedom Sunday really as a means of challenging the Johnson Amendment head-on and to have it hopefully declared unconstitutional. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, when I look at the First Amendment, it talks about freedom of religion and it talks about freedom of speech. | |
| I don't think you can separate those two. | |
| I think they're inseparable. | |
| You've either got one or the other, don't you? | |
| Well, yeah, absolutely. | |
| And that's really formed the basis of what our challenge is to the Johnson Amendment. | |
| It relates to both freedom of religion and freedom of speech. | |
| The freedom of religion, really both clauses of the religion clauses, which say free exercise of religion for the church to be able to decide on its own what can and cannot be said from the pulpit, but also related to the establishment clause. | |
| We don't usually like to use the phrase separation of church and state. | |
| It's been overused and abused over the years. | |
| But I think in this instance it might be appropriate to use that. | |
| There should be a healthy separation between church and state where the state does not intrude into the internal workings of the church. | |
| And since 1954, the Johnson Amendment has set up this scheme where the IRS has essentially become a pulpit police. | |
| They have been determining the content of pastor sermons as to whether it violates the rule or not. | |
| And that violates the Establishment Clause. | |
| Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote that phrase, separation of church and state in 1802, had this type of situation in mind where the state was intruding into the internal workings of the church. | |
| And so, that really forms the basis of what we're trying to do here, is to protect the constitutional rights of pastors. | |
| That's right, and it's important. | |
| Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Johnson Amendment in 1954, Lyndon Johnson, we've got highways unfortunately named after him here in Austin, he was upset about a couple of non-profits who had attacked him, and neither of those were churches, is that correct? | |
| Well, that's right. | |
| Yeah, this is related. | |
| In 1954, Johnson was running for re-election to the U.S. | |
| Senate, and he was being opposed by two secular non-profit organizations. | |
| One was run by H.L. | |
| Hunt, who was a Texas oil billionaire, and the other one was run by Frank Gannett, the publishing mogul. | |
| Gannett Media is still around today. | |
| And they just thought that Johnson was soft on communism. | |
| They didn't like his views on that. | |
| This was back during the era of McCarthyism when we were fighting the Cold War. | |
| And so they were distributing thousands of pieces of literature in opposition to his campaign. | |
| And when Johnson couldn't find a way to silence these groups, he hit on an idea. | |
| In July 2, 1954, in the midst of this campaign, he showed up on the floor of the Senate, and he offered this amendment, which we call the Johnson Amendment, to an existing bill that was pending before the Senate at the time. | |
| It was a massive modernization, overhaul of the tax code. | |
| In 1954. | |
| In the legislative history of the Johnson Amendment, it's really only a couple of paragraphs long, and it just shows that Johnson had already greased the wheels with the sponsor of this massive bill. | |
| The amendment was agreed to by a voice vote. | |
| It went through the conference process, and President Eisenhower signed it into law on August 16, 1954. | |
| And there was no discussion of what this might do to the constitutional rights of pastors and churches. | |
| In fact, Johnson's chief legislative aide, named George Reedy, a few years after the fact, really admitted that they didn't really have churches in mind. | |
| They were trying to silence these two non-profit organizations that were opposing Johnson's candidacy, but churches just kind of got swept up into this because they occupy the same 501c3 status as the non-profit organizations that Johnson was really after. | |
| This was really an illegitimate law from the beginning. | |
| It was unconstitutional then, it's unconstitutional now, and it needs to go. | |
| Yeah, yeah, and of course we need to go back and remember that one of the primary sources shaping the vision of freedom and independence in the American Revolution were the clergy at the time. | |
| They even called them the Black Regiment, didn't they? | |
| Well, they did, yeah. | |
| In fact, historians have said that we owe our independence in great degree to the moral force of the pulpit. | |
| And pastors have always led the way, even beyond independence, in the great social and moral movements in America. | |
| Ending child labor, promoting women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, on and on and on it goes. | |
| Pastors have always been at the forefront of that. | |
| But yeah, this law, since 1954, has really placed a chill on pastors in their speech from the pulpit. | |
| The IRS has done a lot over the years to fuzzy up the line as to what is permitted and what is not. | |
| And what has ended up happening is when pastors don't know where that line is, they back away from the line. | |
| And that gap in there is called self-censorship. | |
| And that's a chill on speech. | |
| And it's unconstitutional. | |
| It's just that nowhere, no court has ever had the opportunity to decide whether the IRS's censorship of the pastor's sermon is constitutional. | |
| And so that's something we want to change because we think once we get it to a federal court, it's not going to take long for a court to strike that down as unconstitutional. | |
| Now the Alliance, or the, let's see, it's the Foundation for the Freedom, the Freedom from Religion Foundation. | |
| Right. | |
| And actually, their name actually seems to imply that they don't get the First Amendment right. | |
| You know, it's the freedom of religion, you know, not freedom from religion. | |
| But the argument that they've put up is that, you know, churches should not, you know, get a tax deduction, you know, once they engage in politics. | |
| But the wage tax was enacted quite a bit after the, it was enacted before this Johnson Amendment went in. | |
| So even before the Johnson Amendment went in, right, people were still getting, you know, the churches were able to speak freely and people were able to get tax deductions for their donations once the income tax was spread out to wages during World War II. | |
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | |
| In fact, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, their argument just really ignores history. | |
| Churches have always been tax-exempt from the very beginning of our country, and in every iteration of the tax code from the very beginning up until now, churches have been exempt from taxation. | |
| And the reason for that is because of what the Supreme Court said many years ago. | |
| It said the power to tax involves the power to destroy. | |
| And there's no sure way to destroy the free exercise of religion than to begin taxing. | |
| So our country made the determination that churches needed to be tax-exempt to protect that constitutional structure and to protect the free exercise of religion. | |
| And for 166 years, from the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights until 1954, there was absolutely no restriction on what pastors could and could not say from the pulpit. | |
| In fact, we've got sermons going back all the way to the election of 1800, when Thomas Jefferson was running for president, where pastors were speaking out both for and against his candidacy for the presidency from the pulpit. | |
| Nobody questioned whether they ought to be exempt, or people ought to get deductions. | |
| At that time, there weren't. | |
| But nobody questioned whether exemption was an issue. | |
| Pastors had the right to speak freely. | |
| It was only when the Johnson Amendment was illegitimately added to the tax code, kind of snuck through by Lyndon Johnson, who was just a powerful politician bent on silencing some opponents, that this speech restriction came into play. | |
| And the problem has become over the years is the IRS holds all the cards as to who it gets into court with, when, and how. | |
| And it has studiously avoided any court confrontation over this issue for the last 58 years. | |
| No court anywhere in the country has ever had the opportunity to decide if it's constitutional for the IRS to censor a pastor's sermon. | |
| And so Pulpit Freedom Sunday is really a means of testing that and of putting that forward to say, we believe that pastors have a constitutional right to speak freely from their pulpit. | |
| And if the IRS doesn't agree with us, then let's submit it to a court. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| We're going to win. | |
| And there have been issues all along with various churches have spoken out, have endorsed candidates, have had people come and speak from their podium. | |
| And it seems to be kind of up to the – like you said, the IRS hasn't enforced that against anybody. | |
| But this is something where you're trying to clarify this and there have been murmurs and intimidations and that sort of thing, depending on who's in power, whether they want conservative or liberal churches to have politicians to speak there. | |
| So there's been kind of a – Behind-the-scenes intimidation and threat going on there. | |
| But you're trying to get this out in the open. | |
| Now you mentioned that it's a power to destroy. | |
| Tell us, most churches are set up as 501c organizations, except for some home churches and that sort of thing. | |
| But most are set up that way. | |
| What would it do to a church if the IRS were to come against them for their tax deduction stuff? | |
| Is there retroactive issues involved for donations? | |
| Well, that's the interesting part, because really, the IRS, when it comes right down to it, is more bark than bite when it comes to churches. | |
| There was a case involving a church that had its tax-exempt letter revoked several years ago, but it never had its tax-exempt status revoked. | |
| And churches occupy a unique position in the tax code where they don't need a letter of determination from the IRS to be considered tax-exempt. | |
| The tax code grants churches an automatic exemption from income taxation. | |
| And so, you know, no church has ever had its status revoked. | |
| But even assuming the IRS could do something like that, the appeals court in that one case that dealt with the church's letter being revoked said, well, it really might not matter much because churches have, they survive on donations, which are considered gifts, which are not considered, which is not considered income under the tax code. | |
| So most churches don't even have any income to be taxed in the first place. | |
| The deductions for contributions may be an issue for donors to the church. | |
| But, you know, statistics tell us that about 60% of American taxpayers don't even itemize their deductions. | |
| They just take the standard deduction. | |
| And so, you know, for 60% of churchgoers, that's really not an issue. | |
| So really, when it comes down to it, it's more bark than bite. | |
| There's not a whole lot the IRS can do to churches. | |
| Oh, that's interesting. | |
| Churches have really built up the IRS to be something that it's not, and have given it a lot of power over churches. | |
| And our message from the very beginning when we started Pulpit Freedom Sunday has been, no pastor should ever fear the IRS when he stands in his pulpit to proclaim biblical truth. | |
| And we shouldn't give the IRS that amount of power over what can and cannot be said from the pulpit. | |
| Oh, absolutely. | |
| I couldn't agree more. | |
| I think a lot of pastors have an incorrect understanding of Romans 13 as well, where they almost attribute the divine right of kings to whoever happens to be an authority. | |
| And there's a lot of different things that set up somebody's legitimate authority, according to Romans 13. | |
| It's not just the fact that they're occupying an office or that they're wearing a uniform or something like that. | |
| What do you think that This organization hopes to accomplish this Freedom From Religion Foundation with this lawsuit against the IRS. | |
| And what do you think is going to happen from this point out? | |
| Well, to put it bluntly, the only thing they want to accomplish is publicity. | |
| The lawsuit, I've taken a look at it. | |
| It's meritless. | |
| I'm betting that it'll get thrown out of court fairly quickly. | |
| What the Freedom From Religion Foundation has done is to sue the IRS and to say, you're not enforcing this against churches. | |
| In reality, the IRS is enforcing this against churches. | |
| The Freedom From Religion Foundation can't show how it has been harmed by the IRS's refusal to enforce against some churches and not others. | |
| This is the kind of lawsuit that's not going to go anywhere. | |
| It's a publicity stunt to bring attention to the fact That, you know, what we're doing with Pulpit Freedom Sunday, basically, is to take on the IRS. | |
| Now, so far the IRS has not taken the bait, so to speak, with Pulpit Freedom Sunday. | |
| It's still possible that it could, and we'll continue to push forward until we either get a test case that will have the Johnson Amendment declared unconstitutional, or until maybe enough pastors start to speak out that it becomes a catalyst for some sort of legislative change in Congress to remove the Johnson Amendment once and for all. | |
| That's great. | |
| Well, I certainly hope it does get some kind of publicity because I certainly hope your organization gets publicity and helps pastors understand they need to stop being censored and intimidated by this paper tiger, you know, that we call the IRS. | |
| I mean, these are fundamental freedoms that are too important to give up and it's too important for us to just allow the government to Well, thank you so much. | |
| areas of our life, whether it's in religion or whether it's at the airport, you know, searching us and that sort of thing. | |
| We need to stand by these constitutional freedoms that we have. | |
| And like I said at the start of the program, the First Amendment talks about both freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and you cannot separate both of those. | |
| Well, thank you very much, Eric. | |
| Thank you for talking to us, and thank you for the work that you're doing. | |
| Well, thank you so much. | |
| It's been good to be with you. | |
| Appreciate it. | |
| Thanks. | |
| Bye-bye. | |
| Well, that's it for tonight's news. | |
| Join us tomorrow night at 7 p.m. | |
| Central, 8 p.m. | |
| Eastern. |
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