NXR Podcast - THEOLOGY APPLIED - Proof That Covid Policy Harmed More People Than Covid
Aired: 2022-04-05
Duration: 01:04:02


=== Florida Mask Mandates Debate (13:12) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey guys, real quick before we get started, I have a small request.
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[00:00:18]  Hi, this is Pastor Joel Webman with Right Response Ministries.
[00:00:20]  You're listening to our flagship podcast, Theology Applied.
[00:00:23]  And today I am very privileged to have Jeff Childers.
[00:00:26]  He's returning second time now as a guest on the show.
[00:00:29]  We talk about COVID policies.
[00:00:33]  And the deaths that have ensued versus actual COVID deaths.
[00:00:39]  And what I like about Jeff Childers, this is not mere speculation.
[00:00:42]  You'll hear me speculate from time to time, and I usually try to label that as speculation so that people know I don't have a crystal ball and I'm not saying this is definitively true.
[00:00:51]  But Jeff Childers is a very gifted and successful lawyer.
[00:00:56]  And he has shifted to constitutional law and he has won some serious, significant lawsuits against the state of Florida where he resides and in regards to.
[00:01:08]  COVID type policies.
[00:01:10]  And so pushing back on lockdowns, pushing back on masks.
[00:01:14]  And so his personality, his disposition, and his training really hold his feet to the fire in terms of evidence, evidence, evidence.
[00:01:24]  It needs to be objective, it needs to be definitive.
[00:01:27]  And so he has done a ton of research in regards to the deaths and side effects, harmful side effects that have resulted, not because of COVID, but are crazy.
[00:01:39]  Insane response to COVID.
[00:01:42]  And this is one of the most interesting episodes we've done.
[00:01:46]  That said, at the end, we talk a little bit about Russia, Ukraine, what needs to happen there, and the possibility, the real possibility of global wide food shortages and what Christians need to do to prepare.
[00:01:58]  All right, without further ado, let's go ahead and get started with this episode of Theology Applied.
[00:02:05]  Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
[00:02:08]  This is Theology Applied.
[00:02:16]  All right, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
[00:02:18]  I am your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
[00:02:21]  And today I am privileged to have, for a second time, a returning guest, Jeff Childers.
[00:02:27]  Jeff Childers, welcome to the show.
[00:02:29]  Please introduce yourself.
[00:02:30]  Tell our listeners who you are.
[00:02:32]  Thanks, Pastor Joel.
[00:02:33]  My name, as you said, is Jeff Childers.
[00:02:35]  I'm, well, formerly a commercial litigation attorney.
[00:02:39]  I live in north central Florida.
[00:02:42]  I've been practicing law for a while.
[00:02:46]  In May of 2020, I felt compelled.
[00:02:50]  I think the Holy Spirit just sort of grabbed me and shook me like a rag doll, and I started filing lawsuits related to mask mandates and vaccine mandates.
[00:03:01]  We were successful in our lawsuits.
[00:03:05]  I think that's pretty rare.
[00:03:07]  As far as I know, we have the only appellate decision in the country finding that mask mandates are presumptively unconstitutional.
[00:03:15]  We got that out of the first district court of appeal in Florida, which sits over 33 counties.
[00:03:21]  They deliberately did not take me up to the Supreme Court, I think because they knew that they would lose and then it would have been the law for the whole state.
[00:03:31]  We also got the first broad injunction against a vaccine mandate against the city of Gainesville, Florida.
[00:03:39]  Subsequent to that, I've been involved in school board litigation.
[00:03:42]  We've removed a school board member, we've gotten a superintendent removed.
[00:03:48]  And I've been advising other attorneys all around the country.
[00:03:51]  We have a list of allied attorneys.
[00:03:55]  I've been writing a daily blog called Coffee and COVID.
[00:03:59]  It's a platform that I think God gave me to use to push back against the forces that I see are working against us.
[00:04:11]  And I'm sure I'm leaving some things out, but we've been very, very busy in this space.
[00:04:15]  Yeah, great.
[00:04:16]  Well, I'm glad that you're back on the show.
[00:04:18]  Without wasting any time, let's just go ahead and hop right in.
[00:04:21]  So, one of the first questions that I had for you related to COVID, because I want to kind of cover the gambit with.
[00:04:26]  Russia and Ukraine.
[00:04:27]  I want to talk about the potential of supply chain issues that we already have, but then that may be affecting food shortages, all these different things.
[00:04:34]  We can talk about Florida, where you're at with Ron DeSantis and Disney and the showdown there with this agenda to trans kids and to push ideology on children.
[00:04:44]  And really, the proverbial question of who do children belong to?
[00:04:46]  Ultimately, we know they belong to God, but who has God assigned children to?
[00:04:50]  Do they belong to the state or do they belong to parents and to the home?
[00:04:54]  And so we can talk about all those things, but let's start with COVID.
[00:04:58]  We've seen kind of, it's like COVID disappeared, right?
[00:05:00]  Putin, love him, hate him, you know, most people hate him, but we got to give him credit for curing COVID, is what it seems like.
[00:05:06]  The political, the science didn't change, but the political sciences seem to change.
[00:05:09]  And so, my question is, you know, that we've seen the Democrats moving off of our presidential administration, moving off of restrictions, lockdowns, mask mandates, all these kinds of things.
[00:05:20]  But is this maybe too good to be true?
[00:05:24]  Is this maybe just they realize that those policies are killing them in the polls?
[00:05:29]  And can we expect some of these things maybe to return?
[00:05:32]  After the midterms, what are your thoughts?
[00:05:35]  So, I think that the election in Virginia was extremely influential on Democrats, as it was on many of us, right?
[00:05:48]  To see that a bright blue or deep blue state like Virginia could go Republican across the board.
[00:05:56]  And remember, the Republicans didn't just win at the state level, they got the governorship, they got the AG, they, you know, all those offices, but also.
[00:06:06]  Right down to the local levels, down to school boards and probably even Dogcatcher.
[00:06:15]  And it was a wake up call.
[00:06:17]  And when you read some of the internal messaging that we've seen coming out of the DNC and at the White House, some of that stuff's been leaked.
[00:06:27]  And they're looking at that particular election cycle and using it as a predictor for what might happen in the 2022 congressional elections.
[00:06:38]  And that's Terrifying to Democrats.
[00:06:40]  And you even have a lot of the traditional left wing publications writing open letters to Democrat leaders saying, hey, you guys have got to pay attention to this.
[00:06:53]  Because what Virginia proved is that, number one, Republicans are super motivated.
[00:07:00]  They really hate these mandates.
[00:07:03]  And that's driving them to the polls in record numbers.
[00:07:07]  And a lot of Democrats, There was an article, I want to say it was in the New York Times, where they surveyed Democrats.
[00:07:19]  And it was very interesting.
[00:07:21]  They asked Democrats to self rate on a scale of liberalism, right?
[00:07:28]  From very liberal to moderately liberal to not very liberal, but still a Democrat voter.
[00:07:37]  And what they found is that only the very liberal cohort.
[00:07:43]  We were in favor of mandates.
[00:07:45]  And all the other groups of Democrats on that self rating scale were opposed to mandates.
[00:07:53]  And so the article didn't say this, but what jumped out to me immediately is that those other voting groups, the ones, the Democrats who don't like mandates, are likely to vote with Republicans, right?
[00:08:06]  Against a candidate who is a pro mandate candidate.
[00:08:10]  Now, it's a thorny problem for Democrats because.
[00:08:13]  What else they know about that group of very liberal folks who are still pro mandate is that those are their most active volunteers and voters.
[00:08:23]  Right.
[00:08:24]  Right.
[00:08:25]  So they can't afford to lose that group.
[00:08:28]  They can't upset the regime.
[00:08:29]  Yeah.
[00:08:30]  And they also can't afford to lose the moderate and more conservative Democrats.
[00:08:37]  So that's a problem.
[00:08:39]  Right.
[00:08:39]  And I think what we saw on March 1st when Joe Biden gave his State of the Union address is that attempt to thread the needle.
[00:08:45]  Right.
[00:08:45]  Right.
[00:08:46]  To say that the pandemic is over without really saying it's over and to lift the mandates without lifting the mandates.
[00:08:53]  And if you've been following the rules, sorry, if you've been following the news, then you probably noticed that in the last few days, Florida and 20 other states sued the CDC over the transportation mandate, which is one of the remaining mask mandates, right?
[00:09:13]  The one that requires you to wear a mask on airplanes, it requires school kids to wear masks on school buses.
[00:09:21]  And I think it's very interesting the timing because my guess is that the Biden administration wanted to lift that transportation mandate anyway.
[00:09:31]  If you look at the financial disclosures from the airlines, travel is way down.
[00:09:40]  And part of it is because of jab mandates, and you can't go somewhere if you're not jabbed, right?
[00:09:46]  But that's a smaller group because I think in the US, 68% of adults are vaccinated now.
[00:09:55]  Um, but I thought it was real quick.
[00:09:56]  I thought it was higher than that, about 68%.
[00:09:59]  Is that fully well, quote unquote, fully vaccinated?
[00:10:02]  Oh, gotcha.
[00:10:02]  So maybe higher that got like one shot or two shots and fully vaccinated.
[00:10:06]  Just for the record, that is now three shots at two of Johnson Johnson, but three of Moderna and Pfizer.
[00:10:11]  Is that correct?
[00:10:13]  Um, I don't know.
[00:10:14]  Is it four now or is it 17 now?
[00:10:17]  Or what is fully vaccinated now?
[00:10:19]  I think it's going to depend on who you're asking, right?
[00:10:21]  Um, that definition has gotten very fluid.
[00:10:26]  Um, And I think they're also different.
[00:10:30]  They're using it differently for different purposes, right?
[00:10:33]  So, without getting into all of that, sticking with the airline thing, their numbers are way down.
[00:10:42]  And one thing we know for sure is people hate those mask mandates.
[00:10:46]  Everybody knows that.
[00:10:47]  And the airlines have more or less at their management level indicated to Congress and the administration that they want those mandates removed.
[00:10:58]  With the combination of the political pressures and the combination of the pressures from the airlines themselves and the general population, I think Biden would have lifted those.
[00:11:10]  I don't know why they've been slow.
[00:11:13]  That's sort of the last one.
[00:11:15]  But I think it's to deal with that group of very liberal Democrat voters and to give them a Recognition, right?
[00:11:30]  Tip of the hat.
[00:11:31]  Their concerns are important too.
[00:11:33]  And so they were slow to lift the airplane mandates.
[00:11:36]  But DeSantis was very clever in filing this lawsuit now because Biden would have lifted the mandate anyway.
[00:11:45]  And so if he does it, it'll look like he's done it because Florida sued.
[00:11:50]  Yeah, that's good.
[00:11:50]  That's shrewd.
[00:11:51]  Jesus, you know, sometimes Christians, it's like, yeah, we want to be as innocent as doves, but we're called to be also as shrewd as vipers.
[00:11:58]  And Jesus even, you know, he tells the parable of the steward, the manager in his master's house, and his master goes on a long trip and he knows that he's probably about to be fired.
[00:12:08]  And so he's trying to give himself an off ramp.
[00:12:11]  And so he goes to all these people who are debtors to his master and he lowers their debt.
[00:12:16]  Do you owe my master 100 bushels of wheat?
[00:12:19]  Go ahead and make it 70.
[00:12:21]  And he's down the line.
[00:12:22]  And so he's creating relationships and network for himself so that when the master puts down the hammer and he no longer has a good rapport with the master, he has a good rapport with other people.
[00:12:32]  And you would think, isn't he stealing from his master?
[00:12:35]  But what's surprising about the end of the parable when Jesus kind of reveals the moral is that Jesus uses this.
[00:12:41]  Parable to illustrate the principle of shrewdness.
[00:12:44]  And he says, The sons of darkness are more shrewd than the sons of light.
[00:12:49]  And what he's saying ultimately is that Christians should be shrewd.
[00:12:53]  And it takes a lot of discernment and a lot of spiritual maturity and understanding of the word of God to find this razor edge line in between deception and shrewdness.
[00:13:05]  Christians are not called to be deceitful, but we are called to be shrewd.
[00:13:09]  I like Doug Wilson.
[00:13:10]  He's had a really helpful commentary throughout.

=== Paying The Piper For Excess Deaths (15:28) ===

[00:13:12]  The last two years of madness with cultural commentary.
[00:13:15]  And one of the things he talks about is well, is it a sin to wear camouflage in battle?
[00:13:20]  Isn't that a deception?
[00:13:21]  Isn't that a lie?
[00:13:22]  You're telling somebody that I'm not here when you actually are here.
[00:13:25]  And so he just is trying to show that there are ways of being shrewd, but that is not immoral.
[00:13:31]  That's not an outright falsehood or a lie that would be a sin.
[00:13:36]  And so, yeah, I think that all that, back to Ron DeSantis, I think that that is a shrewd play.
[00:13:42]  That is not wrong but commendable.
[00:13:45]  So, all that being said, a couple of stats that have stood out to me lately.
[00:13:48]  CDC, I think they said like 85% of all COVID deaths were people who had not one, not two, not three, but four simultaneously, four comorbidities.
[00:13:57]  So, with the question of dying from COVID versus of COVID, 85% of these deaths.
[00:14:03]  And then the CDC recently lowered the overall, all that being as it is, still in addition to that, they lowered by, I think, 72,000 all of the COVID deaths in America and said, whoops, you know, I guess we overcounted.
[00:14:17]  So, 85% of them are these people with four comorbidities, which seems to heavily imply these are deaths with COVID rather than of COVID.
[00:14:26]  Then you got 72,000 just taken right off of the number.
[00:14:30]  And then another stat recently came out that for those who are under the age of 65, that in 2020, in the year 2020, there were more alcohol related deaths than COVID deaths for those under the age of 65.
[00:14:46]  And that doesn't even begin.
[00:14:47]  And we know that, I mean, that was, I think it was a 25% bump.
[00:14:52]  Alcohol related deaths have, for multiple years running, have increased by about 3% to 4% each year, but it bumped all of a sudden from 2019 to 2020 by 25%.
[00:15:02]  And so you have more alcohol related deaths than COVID deaths in 2020 for those who are under the age of 65.
[00:15:09]  And that doesn't even account for suicide deaths, other drug related overdose deaths, and then things that are not deaths but still detrimental in terms of depression and anxiety, child development being delayed, you know, because you can't learn how to talk when you're two if you can't see.
[00:15:26]  Adults' faces, you know, because they're covered in masks.
[00:15:28]  And so it just seems like the verdict is coming back in in wave after wave after wave of not feelings or not hunches, but hard, cold evidence that we did more harm than good.
[00:15:42]  Do you have any thoughts on that?
[00:15:45]  Yeah.
[00:15:47]  I don't think there is any dispute that the lockdowns cause deaths and injuries.
[00:15:57]  Even today, I'm pretty sure I've been busy, but I.
[00:16:00]  I keep tabs on the news throughout the day because I have to write for my blog.
[00:16:05]  And Fauci was on an interview.
[00:16:08]  And if I'm remembering correctly, the quote that was attributed to him today was, We'll never know the true cost of lockdowns.
[00:16:17]  That's what he's saying today.
[00:16:19]  Fauci said that.
[00:16:20]  Fauci said that.
[00:16:21]  Wow.
[00:16:22]  Right.
[00:16:22]  Exactly.
[00:16:23]  So if Fauci's acknowledging that, right, you know, it's got to be a lot worse than he's suggesting for him to even go that far.
[00:16:32]  Right.
[00:16:34]  The other thing I would add to your comments is, and I try to stay away from conspiracy theories.
[00:16:40]  I'm a lawyer, right?
[00:16:41]  And what I mean by conspiracy theory, I don't mean anything negative about that because we've seen a lot of conspiracy theories like the Wuhan lab leak theory, right?
[00:16:50]  Turn into fact.
[00:16:51]  Right.
[00:16:52]  And even the bio labs in Ukraine.
[00:16:53]  So, yeah, the difference between a conspiracy and the truth is usually three to six months.
[00:16:57]  But I know, I think what you mean is you try to stick away from making assertions based off of speculation.
[00:17:02]  You want to have evidence.
[00:17:04]  You're a lawyer.
[00:17:05]  Is that what you're saying?
[00:17:06]  Yeah.
[00:17:06]  Could I, I usually, my litmus test is could I prove this in court?
[00:17:09]  Good.
[00:17:10]  Right.
[00:17:11]  And by proving court, you don't have to have 100% proof.
[00:17:14]  You just have to meet the standard of proof, right?
[00:17:17]  So you can prove things that you can't conclusively prove, but you can prove it to a level in court that satisfies a judge or a jury.
[00:17:27]  So one of the things that we know is true and that I could prove in court, and I could prove this one conclusively, is that excess deaths in the US are high.
[00:17:37]  Right.
[00:17:37]  And so what excess deaths means is they look at the number of the average number of deaths from all causes.
[00:17:47]  Okay.
[00:17:47]  Whatever, whatever cause it is, they just don't worry about the cause, but somebody died.
[00:17:52]  And then they compare that to a baseline.
[00:17:54]  And the baseline is the aggregate, you know, the average from all the years in the 10 or 20 years previous, depending on what model you're looking at.
[00:18:03]  And you can either be above or below that baseline.
[00:18:05]  Right.
[00:18:06]  And so this is an important statistic.
[00:18:09]  So you might have a, A really bad flu season.
[00:18:13]  And we're not perfect at keeping track of people who die from flu.
[00:18:17]  So you just want to let's just look and see where we are in excess deaths, right?
[00:18:21]  The overall increase.
[00:18:23]  Right, exactly.
[00:18:24]  So during that flu season, hey, 100,000 people died more than in that regular fall season.
[00:18:31]  And so now we can say, well, you know, we probably circumstantially, a lot of those are related to this hard flu season because we don't have any other.
[00:18:43]  For why there should be excess deaths.
[00:18:46]  Well, what we know is that during the pandemic, there have been two inflection points on excess deaths, right?
[00:18:52]  So there was a spike in excess deaths in March of 2020.
[00:18:57]  And those are probably related to COVID.
[00:18:59]  And especially as COVID moved through the nursing homes and the elderly and at risk populations, right?
[00:19:04]  You saw a lot of.
[00:19:06]  We would call those Andrew Cuomo deaths.
[00:19:09]  Plus, yeah.
[00:19:13]  And Gretchen Whitmer, and a bunch of others that haven't had to pay the piper yet.
[00:19:18]  But in addition, those would be your lockdown deaths, right?
[00:19:22]  So, your suicides and, you know, in particular moving through 2020.
[00:19:26]  Well, there was a second inflection point, and that was in December of 2020.
[00:19:34]  And again, we don't know for sure, right?
[00:19:37]  But it wasn't COVID because at that time, you know, all you had was a lot of immunity that was built up by COVID survivors.
[00:19:45]  And plus in December of 2020, you had the rollout of the vaccines, which is supposed to reduce COVID mortality, right?
[00:19:54]  That's what they tell us.
[00:19:55]  They tell us that.
[00:19:56]  Hey, you know, they now admit another conspiracy theory, which is that the vaccines don't prevent transmission.
[00:20:03]  Okay, maybe they don't prevent transmission, they say, but they reduce serious illness and death.
[00:20:08]  Okay, so as the vaccines are deployed in December of 2020, you're expecting to see excess deaths coming down, right?
[00:20:18]  But in fact, what we see is an increasing trend of excess deaths from December 2020.
[00:20:25]  There's a spike in the summer.
[00:20:28]  Of 21.
[00:20:29]  And then where we are now is we're on an increasing trajectory.
[00:20:34]  We don't know where it's going to peak, if it'll come back down again, but we're substantially above the baseline as we sit today, right now, right?
[00:20:44]  A huge, huge amount of excess deaths.
[00:20:47]  And I think probably all your viewers are familiar by now.
[00:20:51]  It was widely reported.
[00:20:53]  One of the executives at one of the insurance companies came out and said that what they're looking at is a mortality event that is.
[00:21:02]  Consistent with three gigantic natural disasters combined.
[00:21:09]  And what he was referring to, they're paying claims, right?
[00:21:12]  Right.
[00:21:13]  They're way above the average level of claims that they plan for, even allowing for three natural disasters.
[00:21:21]  That's where they are.
[00:21:23]  So, what he's referring to is that level of excess deaths.
[00:21:27]  I mean, you can find that in the government statistics right now.
[00:21:30]  It's not controversial, but it's not widely reported in the media.
[00:21:35]  And right.
[00:21:36]  So we have this excess deaths, real quick, just to recap, we have this not just the spike.
[00:21:40]  So we had the spike in March 2020, and we're willing to say, okay, some of that was COVID probably, and some of that also was related to lockdowns, maybe suicide or, you know, anxiety induced or alcohol induced or whatever.
[00:21:51]  But then there's this other spike that happens in December 2020, but then it doesn't go back down to the baseline because by the summer of 2021, it's just not just one month, but month after month from 2021 to where we sit today.
[00:22:05]  Just consistently above the baseline of excess deaths.
[00:22:10]  And simultaneously, what we have to factor in is that we have more vaccinated individuals than ever before.
[00:22:16]  And we also have the effects of Omicron, which was mild, did not produce a lot of deaths, but also pervasive, very, very transmissible, which means that we should have, just from time passing by, two years, but then with Omicron also, and then with the vaccine, we should have the highest immunity.
[00:22:38]  Today than ever before.
[00:22:40]  And yet you're saying that the excess deaths are still there.
[00:22:43]  Therefore, it must be related to something else.
[00:22:47]  What would you think?
[00:22:48]  Right.
[00:22:48]  So that raises the question what is causing the excess deaths?
[00:22:53]  And so there are two things that I can observe.
[00:22:57]  I don't have an answer, nobody has an answer.
[00:23:00]  And as a lawyer, I don't even have any evidence to put on in court, but I can observe a couple of things.
[00:23:06]  So the first thing I observe is a widespread lack of media curiosity.
[00:23:11]  In the reason for historic levels of excess deaths.
[00:23:17]  So that means something.
[00:23:20]  I could speculate as to what it means based on the way I've seen the media behave in the past, but that would be speculation.
[00:23:28]  I'm just observing that.
[00:23:31]  It's curious that given how interested the media was in COVID deaths, the media has a corresponding lack of curiosity in the mysterious cause of all of these excess deaths that we're seeing.
[00:23:46]  Yeah, good observation.
[00:23:48]  So that's observation number one.
[00:23:50]  Then the second one is that when there have been articles, Related to the excess deaths, the, you know, I would call mild curiosity that's been expressed has resulted in a set of guesses that typically reduce to,
[00:24:11]  and this goes to your original point, that typically reduce to speculation by the experts that are interviewed for these news articles saying that it might be.
[00:24:24]  Again, just they're speculating too.
[00:24:26]  It might be deferred medical care that is causing all of the excess deaths that we're seeing.
[00:24:35]  Like elective surgeries and things like that that were all postponed?
[00:24:38]  Correct.
[00:24:39]  So during lockdowns, when you weren't allowed to go to the hospital or you were too afraid to go to the hospital because the fear of getting COVID was greater than the fear of deferring your treatment, those people put off their health care.
[00:24:53]  And so now, We're paying the piper from all this deferred health care, right?
[00:24:58]  So, right.
[00:24:59]  And real quick, just for our listeners, elective surgeries doesn't just mean like you know, getting plastic surgery and a facelift.
[00:25:06]  Elective surgeries, many of them are very serious things, things that are life threatening that a person has to have surgery, but it's just not immediate, immediately urgent.
[00:25:14]  But that doesn't mean that the surgery is not necessary.
[00:25:17]  It is a surgery that must happen, um, eventually or the person could die.
[00:25:23]  And so, even an elective surgery that sounds like an insignificant, unnecessary surgery.
[00:25:28]  But these, many of them are necessary surgeries.
[00:25:31]  There's just a longer time gap, but that time gap is not indefinite.
[00:25:35]  And if it's pushed off too long, it really could cost the person's life.
[00:25:39]  Is that correct?
[00:25:40]  Sure.
[00:25:41]  Yeah.
[00:25:41]  And a good example, I think, would be somebody whose doctor recommends that they get a stent put in, a cardiac stent, but it's not mandatory, right?
[00:25:52]  So it's just something you need to do soon, as soon as you can get it scheduled to fit with your calendar.
[00:25:58]  And so that's something that can easily be deferred by that person.
[00:26:03]  The other one that you see discussed a lot are deferred screenings, right?
[00:26:08]  So, cancer screenings, breast cancer, prostate cancer screenings, things like that.
[00:26:15]  And so, there's some speculation that people having deferred those screenings now they're getting the cancers that would have been caught and treated had they not deferred those examinations.
[00:26:29]  So, there's a lot you could say about that.
[00:26:32]  Right.
[00:26:32]  So if they're correct, then these would be additional casualties of the lockdowns that you were referring to before.
[00:26:39]  That's right.
[00:26:40]  And if that trend line continues and that delta, the gap, right, of excess deaths, that bolus of excess deaths is going to continue to increase the casualties that are directly attributable to lockdowns.
[00:26:55]  And it is conceivable that we will pass the COVID mortality, which is, as you also pointed out correctly, the COVID mortality is currently.
[00:27:04]  Decreasing as the CDC is now tightening the standards on what can be considered a COVID death, it's resulting in a reduction of the total.
[00:27:13]  So, I think it's down over 12% now from the maximum.
[00:27:18]  So, while the COVID deaths are coming down, the lockdown related or deferred medical care related, if that's the explanation, are increasing and they may cross at some point.
[00:27:29]  Right.
[00:27:30]  And that's just one factor from the lockdowns in terms of deferred health care.
[00:27:34]  And then there's also, we can draw a pretty straight correlation to substance abuse, alcoholism, suicide.
[00:27:41]  We wouldn't necessarily count all suicides, but again, we look at the baseline from previous years and then we look at the spike that the excess.
[00:27:47]  Suicide deaths.
[00:27:48]  And we could probably say, well, what novel thing happened in 2020 and 2021 that would cause this excess?
[00:27:55]  And COVID lockdowns and those kinds of things are a pretty sound explanation.
[00:27:59]  And then I think, I'm curious to pick your brain on this, but it seems like there's deferred healthcare, but then there's also the possibility of just did we at some level as a society weaken our immune system?
[00:28:10]  Are we paying the piper with deferred healthcare, but are we also paying the piper by just having everybody in isolation and quarantine for a long time?
[00:28:18]  And then other sicknesses apart from COVID are now.
[00:28:22]  Maybe hitting us all at once or hitting us harder?
[00:28:25]  Did we, in order to avoid COVID, did we build up a wave of flu or other kinds of things that are going to affect us more severely now because we weakened our immune systems by not living a normal life?

=== Vaccine Side Effects And Original Antigenic Sin (15:12) ===

[00:28:40]  Do you have any thoughts on that?
[00:28:42]  Yeah, I think that there's something to that.
[00:28:46]  I mean, you know, all of the excessive cleaning and hand washing and isolation.
[00:28:54]  And that sort of thing certainly reduced the normal exercise that our immune systems get from just being exposed to pathogens in the world.
[00:29:06]  And, you know, what we know, you get there's this thing called, you know, bubble boy syndrome, where you overprotect and your immune system atrophies and you become susceptible to illnesses that other people wouldn't be.
[00:29:20]  But there's another issue that's related to that that's worth discussion, and that is.
[00:29:25]  We're seeing more and more a discussion of a syndrome known as original antigenic sin.
[00:29:35]  So it's a reference to the biblical concept of original sin with the insertion of that word antigenic.
[00:29:42]  So OAS is the acronym that you see in the medical literature.
[00:29:46]  And this refers to a side effect of the vaccines.
[00:29:51]  And it's a side effect that's been known in vaccinology long predating the COVID vaccines.
[00:29:59]  And what it Refers to is a curious artifact that when a person is exposed to a vaccine, they develop antibodies for that pathogen,
[00:30:16]  but also specific antibodies, highly specific antibodies for that particular variant, is the simple explanation, as opposed to someone whose immune system encounters the variant in the environment and they develop a more broad antibody response.
[00:30:34]  And so, what happens in the original antigenic sin, the OAS scenario, is that the person then subsequently encounters a variant of the original pathogen to which the antibodies are not effective.
[00:30:47]  But the body continues producing the original antibodies and is not aware that they're ineffective against the variant.
[00:30:57]  That is, the body's normal system to detect that are defeated by this particular syndrome that's related to vaccines.
[00:31:04]  And in previous pandemics and epidemics, there has been a consensus among scientists that you don't begin vaccination until after the main activity of the pandemic has resolved and you've got a well known established variant that you can treat because of this OAS problem.
[00:31:29]  And so there is a lot of speculation in the literature more and more all the time that one of the reasons we're seeing negative.
[00:31:39]  Vaccine efficacy, meaning that vaccinated people now appear to be more likely to be infected with COVID than unvaccinated people.
[00:31:48]  And so, one of the hypotheses to explain this is that we're starting to see the product of original antigenic sin due to vaccinating too early in the pandemic and people's immune systems getting locked into those original variants and antibodies for those original variants, Wuhan 1, what they call that original COVID variant.
[00:32:13]  And they're unable to deal with variants like Omicron or what they're now calling BA2, which is the newer, more infectious form of Omicron.
[00:32:27]  Yeah, which is crazy to think that Alpha or Wuhan 1, and then to Delta, and Delta was about two times as transmissible.
[00:32:34]  And then they said Omicron was 70 times Delta, so 140 times the transmissibility than the original variant.
[00:32:41]  And then we're saying that is it A2?
[00:32:44]  Is that what it is?
[00:32:45]  BA2.
[00:32:46]  BA2 is, I think people are saying, you know, anywhere from 40 to 70% more transmissible than Omicron.
[00:32:52]  So if you do the math, you're basically saying that now we have a variant that is legitimately 200 times plus, you know, the original variant in terms of transmissibility.
[00:33:03]  And the whole rhetoric from the very beginning was that COVID to begin with, with the original variant, was the most transmissible, you know, that the R naught was through the roof and all these kinds of things.
[00:33:14]  And so it's like, yeah, I don't feel like we helped ourselves very much.
[00:33:20]  So, yeah, there's a lot of head scratchers as we get, you know, later in the pandemic, which is another reason for the politicians to go ahead and let's move past it, right?
[00:33:32]  And stop talking about it so much.
[00:33:35]  So, that was my next question.
[00:33:36]  You kind of already covered some of it, but I want to, you know, throw the question out there regardless because you might have something else that you want to add.
[00:33:43]  But I have written here Do you think there will be any long term side effects to the vaccine?
[00:33:48]  If so, what do you think these side effects are?
[00:33:49]  And you already mentioned the original antigenic.
[00:33:54]  Say that again.
[00:33:55]  Pronounce that, please.
[00:33:56]  Original antigenic sin.
[00:33:57]  Okay.
[00:33:58]  Original antigenic sin.
[00:33:59]  So that would be one potential side effect of the vaccine.
[00:34:03]  Are there any other ones that you've read in your ongoing research?
[00:34:09]  So let me start by saying what we were saying in our lawsuits related to the vaccines going back to last summer.
[00:34:18]  Okay.
[00:34:18]  And that is by definition, by definition, it is impossible to know.
[00:34:24]  What are the long term effects?
[00:34:26]  Right, because it hasn't been a long term.
[00:34:30]  You can't study something that hasn't happened.
[00:34:34]  Right, so just put that on burner number one, okay?
[00:34:38]  Yeah.
[00:34:39]  And that everything we say after this is speculative because by definition, we can't know what the long term effects of a brand new drug are.
[00:34:49]  All right.
[00:34:51]  But we're starting to get some history, right?
[00:34:54]  So, we've passed the one year anniversary of the deployment of the COVID vaccines.
[00:35:00]  Now, the main thrust of the vaccinations when they really started to pick up steam didn't happen until June or July of last year.
[00:35:11]  So, we haven't really reached the one year anniversary yet of the largest cohort of vaccinees.
[00:35:22]  You'll probably remember all the criticism of the slow rollout.
[00:35:25]  Of the vaccines and the trouble getting them to people and having to set up, you know, deals with publics and CVS and other locations to the private, public private partnerships to get the vaccines out and all of that.
[00:35:39]  So, those, you know, first few months of 21, it was a lower volume.
[00:35:45]  Anyway, so we really don't have that much experience yet with a large number of vaccines into a one year horizon, but we are starting to see more.
[00:36:00]  Moving through December, January, February of 21, now into December 21, January, February 22, and so forth.
[00:36:09]  We're starting to see that.
[00:36:10]  And what I observe as a lawyer, as a person who's looking for facts that I could present to a judge or jury, I notice that all of the news about adverse effects and longer term effects is bad, is negative for the vaccines.
[00:36:29]  And there's very little good news about that.
[00:36:33]  So, what I mean by that is that if I'm looking for a trend, right?
[00:36:39]  And so there are a couple of possibilities.
[00:36:42]  One possibility is that as we get news about the efficacy of the vaccines and the longer term implications and the health issues people are dealing with, that we see good news, right?
[00:36:53]  We could see that people are doing great that have been on the vaccines, that their health has improved, that the death rates in vaccinated cohorts are declining relative to unvaccinated and so forth.
[00:37:06]  But we're not seeing that.
[00:37:09]  The second possibility is the news is mixed, right?
[00:37:11]  So there's some areas where we're seeing some really good news related to the vaccines over the space of that first year, and then some bad news.
[00:37:20]  And it would be hard to net it out.
[00:37:23]  We're not seeing that either.
[00:37:24]  What we're seeing is that almost all of the news relentlessly is negative for side effects related to the vaccines.
[00:37:31]  And there's a concept of subclinicality that you don't hear talked about.
[00:37:41]  Much, but I think it is very important related to this issue.
[00:37:45]  And what subclinicality is about is, you know, right now we know that there are side effects, adverse effects related to the vaccines that are related to cardiac issues, right?
[00:38:01]  So myocarditis, pericarditis, that kind of thing.
[00:38:05]  And so we're learning about that because people are going into the hospital with these conditions or, you know, having blood clots and strokes.
[00:38:14]  Cardiac events and things like that.
[00:38:16]  But what we don't know about are how many people who are having cardiac related injuries that are below a level requiring hospitalization or direct treatment, right?
[00:38:29]  So they may have some AFib, but it's not bad enough that they're feeling like they have to go into the hospital or talk to their doctor or something.
[00:38:41]  We have no way to measure that.
[00:38:44]  One of the unfortunate byproducts of the, you know, sort of the tools that the government used to create artificial levels of fear and anxiety about the vaccines in order to encourage people to take them that we now know about, that they, you know, were using these techniques to essentially propaganda techniques to encourage higher levels of vaccination.
[00:39:11]  It's made people reluctant to talk about adverse effects.
[00:39:16]  And so there's a, it's made it very difficult to measure the true level of adverse effects, in particular in that subclinical cohort where they don't need medical attention because they're unwilling to self report to some degree, right?
[00:39:36]  We can't measure to what degree, and we can't measure how many of them are having those subclinical effects, but it is reasonable to think that they are out there in greater numbers.
[00:39:47]  Than the numbers that we know about who are going into the hospital for treatment.
[00:39:52]  Right.
[00:39:53]  Okay.
[00:39:54]  And so then the question, I think, where you were going is what will the harvest be from all of those folks who are experiencing right now these subclinical levels?
[00:40:06]  Is it going to shorten their lives?
[00:40:08]  Right.
[00:40:09]  Are they more likely to have cardiac events when they have extreme stress or high levels of exercise or things like that?
[00:40:19]  So, It's impossible to say, but it's not looking good right now.
[00:40:26]  And I don't mean that to frighten anybody who's had the vaccine.
[00:40:30]  The numbers of people who are experiencing adverse events is still very small as a proportion to the total number of people who have been vaccinated.
[00:40:40]  It's much higher than any drug that should have ever been approved by the FDA.
[00:40:46]  Yeah.
[00:40:47]  Right.
[00:40:47]  So, what Dr. McCullough does a really good job of explaining this and You know, before the COVID vaccines, if in a clinical trial they had hit 50 deaths, they would have pulled the drug and they would have stopped the clinical trial.
[00:41:03]  Now, what we've seen in recent document dumps from Pfizer, ordered by the court, that in the Pfizer clinical trials, they hit 1,223 deaths.
[00:41:14]  What, 1,223?
[00:41:16]  Correct.
[00:41:17]  Wow.
[00:41:18]  And the FDA approved it anyway.
[00:41:21]  So, again, it's far, far above any level.
[00:41:25]  Historically, that would have required a drug to be pulled.
[00:41:28]  Yeah.
[00:41:29]  And what's so nonsensical to me is like, so early, you know, to back up just a little bit, you said some of our listeners might be, you know, might have heard you the way that I did.
[00:41:38]  It's like, well, you know, these side effects, you know, that are cardiac related, it's a minority report, it's a sliver, you know, of all those who have received the vaccine.
[00:41:48]  But I think what we need to remind each other about and remind the listeners about is that those who would die of COVID was also a small.
[00:41:56]  Sliver, you know, so where so when when it's like, well, yeah, that's side effect is you know, uh, yeah, it's real and yeah, it's there, but it's uh, it's a minority of those who receive the vaccine, yeah.
[00:42:07]  But what we're talking about is using this vaccine to combat a virus that has a my very minority, small less than one percent, you know, that killed so so you know what I mean.
[00:42:19]  So that that's you know, if this was if this vaccine had a small level of of of uh, a side effect that would result in cardiac death.
[00:42:28]  But we employed this vaccine to combat the bubonic plague, you know, or to combat some kind of, you know, serious historic plague that would wipe out a third of the population or half the population, then that's a different matter.
[00:42:43]  But when you're talking about a vaccine that has not been tested, and people, you know, people say, well, yeah, you know, but I mean, look at the sample group, you know, 68% of the entire population, millions of people, right?
[00:42:54]  Millions of people.
[00:42:55]  So there's a lot of people who've gotten it.
[00:42:57]  But like you said earlier, there is not one test of someone who's had the vaccine for more than one year.
[00:43:04]  That's it.
[00:43:04]  So millions of people have had, we've tested the vaccine on millions of people.
[00:43:07]  But all we've tested is we've tested the side effects of the vaccine within a very short period of time on millions of people.
[00:43:15]  We've tested the side effects of the vaccine for a long period of time on no one, on no one.
[00:43:20]  And we approve this, right?
[00:43:21]  So it's like desperate times call for desperate measures.
[00:43:24]  And I think what I would assert is say this is certainly a desperate measure by every standard of testing and side effects and deaths, like what you just said, Peter McAuliffe and all those.
[00:43:33]  This is certainly a desperate measure by the standard that's always been used in the past.
[00:43:40]  The question, though, is but was this really that desperate of a time?
[00:43:43]  Was COVID that serious of a virus?
[00:43:47]  And that's where I would have to say personally, no.
[00:43:50]  I think it was an overreaction.

=== Was COVID Really An Overreaction (02:57) ===

[00:43:52]  Do you have any further thoughts that you want to add on that?
[00:43:55]  Yeah, I want to be clear that if the adverse effect problem was so insignificant that You know, like for example, Tylenol, there are people who die from Tylenol every year, right?
[00:44:10]  There's adverse effects to every drug.
[00:44:12]  And if we were talking about something like that, where there's some baseline level of adverse effects from any medication, then I wouldn't be spending so much time talking to you about this.
[00:44:22]  But the reason that I'm concerned about it and the reason that I'm spending so much time explaining it and talking about it is that there is a very real possibility that the number of folks injured or killed from the medication could exceed.
[00:44:37]  The number who were injured or killed from the disease.
[00:44:40]  And that is unthinkable, right?
[00:44:42]  I mean, that is a healthcare disaster of titanic proportions that would affect society in more ways than we can imagine.
[00:44:58]  I pray that that's not the case.
[00:45:01]  Right.
[00:45:01]  It's unfortunate that the trend line is going the wrong direction right now.
[00:45:06]  We really need that trend line to reverse, that the people who have had the Injections need to start showing better health indicators than what we're seeing as a group.
[00:45:19]  And the numbers, as small as they are, so that should be reassuring to people who have had the injection.
[00:45:26]  It's still small numbers of people who are seeing these adverse events, but they're unacceptably high from any kind of healthcare perspective.
[00:45:36]  So that's the landscape that we're looking at right now.
[00:45:39]  And again, I hope and I pray that these are transient numbers that they're going to start looking better soon.
[00:45:45]  Yeah, well, I'll second that.
[00:45:47]  Okay, well, I think all of that has been tremendously helpful of just getting the lay of the land with COVID and COVID policies and what, you know, was the cure worse than the disease?
[00:45:57]  But shifting gears now, you know, to just keep you a little bit longer, let's talk.
[00:46:02]  I think one of the big issues that our listeners would be interested in that I'm interested in is, you know, there's a lot of opinions about the Russia Ukraine.
[00:46:09]  Now, obviously, there's the dominant view that, you know, you're allowed to have, and then there are counter views, and some of them are maybe conspiracy, and then some of them have, you know, some basis and reason.
[00:46:19]  But my question is, you know, with Russia and Ukraine, apart from, you know, the potential of World War III or nuclear threats and all these kind of things, what about just your average, you know, Joe Blow American in terms of the supply chain issues?
[00:46:37]  You know, Ukraine produces a massive amount of fertilizer for the entire world that can make the difference, you know, in what percentage of crops are produced, not just by Ukraine or Russia, but multiple countries all throughout the world.

=== Food Shortages And Supply Demand Laws (04:46) ===

[00:46:49]  It could limit.
[00:46:51]  The harvest among farmers in multiple countries, nations all around the world by 40, 50, 60 percent.
[00:47:00]  So, what would you say in terms of the question of food shortages?
[00:47:06]  Is that something that is reasonable that actually might happen?
[00:47:10]  And would it affect America?
[00:47:12]  Would we actually have food shortages, or would we just have further inflation, higher grocery prices?
[00:47:17]  And with all of that, what are some things that Americans and specifically Christians can do?
[00:47:22]  Because we want to be prepared to take care of ourselves, our families, our churches.
[00:47:25]  But also to be generous to those in need.
[00:47:28]  What do you think?
[00:47:30]  So, with regard to food shortages, we're looking at global economic issues, right?
[00:47:38]  And the bigger, the more macro you get in economics, the simpler the rules are, right?
[00:47:45]  So, what we're talking about is something called the law of supply and demand.
[00:47:51]  And I always like to point out, by the way, my undergraduate degree is in economics, and I loved it.
[00:47:57]  And either you love economics or you hate economics.
[00:47:59]  There's no.
[00:48:00]  Middle ground.
[00:48:02]  And I guess I was one of the nerdy ones that really liked it.
[00:48:05]  But they call it the law of supply and demand, the law, not the theory of supply and demand.
[00:48:12]  You can't beat the law of supply and demand.
[00:48:17]  It's like gravity.
[00:48:18]  Okay.
[00:48:19]  So when you have a shortage of anything, but food is in a special category of things that people can't live without.
[00:48:30]  Right.
[00:48:30]  So there's some goods like yachts.
[00:48:32]  Right.
[00:48:33]  And so if the supply of yachts goes down, not many people are hurt by that.
[00:48:38]  And not many people freak out or do something else.
[00:48:40]  And there's other substitutes, right?
[00:48:42]  So you can go on a cruise ship instead of buying a yacht or, you know, do other things.
[00:48:46]  But for food, food is something that people can't live without.
[00:48:52]  And there aren't any good substitutes for it.
[00:48:55]  Okay.
[00:48:56]  So if you don't have food, it's not like you can watch it on TV or something like that.
[00:49:01]  I mean, you know, or wait until you put it off for a few months.
[00:49:04]  You've got to have it.
[00:49:06]  So, when we talk about a shortage, what we're saying is that the supply is reduced.
[00:49:12]  We have a reduced supply of whatever that good is.
[00:49:14]  So, in the case of a food shortage, we have less supply of food.
[00:49:17]  And that all makes sense.
[00:49:18]  And there's nothing particularly interesting or controversial about that.
[00:49:22]  But what the law of supply and demand says is that when the supply goes down, the price goes up.
[00:49:30]  There's a famous graph, and it's got an X in the middle of it.
[00:49:33]  And it has to do with supply.
[00:49:34]  And so, when you have high supply, prices are low.
[00:49:39]  Right?
[00:49:39]  High supply, low prices.
[00:49:41]  When supply is low, prices are high.
[00:49:45]  There's an inverse relationship in supply and demand.
[00:49:48]  And those lines get more extreme the less able people are to find substitutes for a good.
[00:49:57]  Gotcha.
[00:49:58]  And since food is one of those goods where it's very difficult to find a substitute or impossible to find a substitute, that inverse relationship is very extreme.
[00:50:08]  So as the food shortage becomes more pronounced, as the supply gets more.
[00:50:13]  Less and less, the prices spike.
[00:50:16]  They go astronomical.
[00:50:18]  Okay.
[00:50:19]  So the first thing that people should observe about that is that food shortages will hurt lower income countries more than higher income countries.
[00:50:31]  Now, they're going to hurt higher income countries because a greater proportion of your budget is going to go to buy food, which means that the way you're going to handle substitutions is you're going to buy less of other things because more of your budget is consumed by foods.
[00:50:46]  But you're probably not going to go without food.
[00:50:48]  Mm hmm.
[00:50:50]  But in third world countries, they don't have room in their budget.
[00:50:57]  They can't take away from their vacation and from that new car that they're not going to buy.
[00:51:01]  And other places like higher income, first world countries can.
[00:51:06]  They're just not going to buy food and they're going to starve if the food shortages are bad enough.
[00:51:12]  And so the people who are going to be hurt the worst by these food shortages are the people less able to accommodate those increased prices.
[00:51:22]  They won't have any choice.
[00:51:24]  And so the food will go to the countries with money to pay for it.
[00:51:30]  You know, if it gets to the point where Americans are starving, then the rest of the world is going to get wiped out.

=== The True Cost Of Conflict In Ukraine (11:51) ===

[00:51:36]  Yeah.
[00:51:36]  It's going to be starvation on a scale you've never seen before.
[00:51:40]  So we're going to pay a lot more for food, and third world countries, people are going to be starving.
[00:51:45]  And then the question is are we accounting for those potential deaths in whatever calculation we're making and how we approach?
[00:51:57]  The Ukraine Russia conflict.
[00:52:00]  And when I say Ukraine Russia conflict, I'm not implying that I don't believe it's a war or whatever.
[00:52:07]  That's not it.
[00:52:09]  What's happening to the Ukrainian people is horrible.
[00:52:12]  It needs to stop.
[00:52:13]  Russia needs to get out of Ukraine.
[00:52:14]  But the question is diplomatically, politically, geopolitically, how do we as the United States of America respond?
[00:52:23]  Should we be having our president going out and saying that Putin can't remain in office and essentially threatening regime change?
[00:52:31]  In Russia.
[00:52:32]  And I know Biden came out recently and denied that he meant that he was calling for regime change.
[00:52:39]  But the question is not what he meant.
[00:52:41]  The question, the more significant question is how did Russia take it?
[00:52:47]  Right.
[00:52:47]  Not what Biden said, but what did Putin hear?
[00:52:50]  And when you're talking about Putin, you're talking about a guy who is.
[00:52:54]  So, on the one hand, I'll say a couple of things that are unpopular.
[00:52:58]  Putin is a nationalist.
[00:53:00]  And I prefer a nationalist to a globalist.
[00:53:02]  That said, I think he's a nationalist war thug.
[00:53:05]  So, I don't think he's a good guy by any stretch of the imagination.
[00:53:08]  Putin, in some ways, reminds me of Trump a little bit that he's not the kind of guy that you want to tick off.
[00:53:15]  He's desperate and he's already been shocked by the lack of success.
[00:53:20]  And you have to hand it to Ukrainians the fact that they have held off troops that far outnumber their own.
[00:53:30]  I think Putin really thought that this was going to be, they say Rome wasn't conquered in a day.
[00:53:35]  Well, I think Putin thought that Ukraine was going to be conquered in a day, at least certain parts of it.
[00:53:40]  Has been remarkably, he's been remarkably unsuccessful with his invasion, which means you already have a guy who seems to have some problems, some insecurity, fragile, you know, kind of problems, just his personality, his disposition.
[00:53:55]  And then that coupled with situationally being unsuccessful.
[00:53:59]  And then you have, he's got to report back.
[00:54:01]  He can't, he can't, he's the kind of guy, it seems as though he's the kind of guy, both by disposition and circumstantially, what's happening that cannot afford to lose.
[00:54:11]  He has to have some kind of win.
[00:54:14]  And so, if you challenge a guy like that, it's like a guy standing on a ledge, you know.
[00:54:19]  If you're trying to de escalate the situation, and it's not just a guy standing on a ledge, you know, threatening his own life with suicide.
[00:54:25]  I should, to make the illustration more accurate, it's a guy standing on a ledge holding two children, you know, who would die also.
[00:54:32]  And if you're at the bottom, you don't want to say, you know, you drop those children or we'll shoot you in the head.
[00:54:40]  Like, that's not your first, you know what I mean?
[00:54:42]  You don't want to necessarily lead with that.
[00:54:44]  Putin needs some kind of.
[00:54:46]  Off ramp, and you're absolutely right.
[00:54:47]  There, you know, nobody I believe in sovereign nations, I believe in Ukraine's right to defend itself.
[00:54:53]  I believe that they have a right to police their borders.
[00:54:55]  Um, all the Democrats, you know, in our nation believe that.
[00:54:57]  I wish they believed about our nation policing our borders and everything that they believe about Ukraine.
[00:55:02]  I wish they believed about America.
[00:55:03]  But all that being said, I do think those are biblical principles.
[00:55:06]  God sets up nations, God's idea, the nations eventually are their Jesus inheritance.
[00:55:11]  He's coming back for the nations.
[00:55:13]  Uh, God appoints borders and times and all these different things.
[00:55:17]  Um, so I support Ukraine in all that regard.
[00:55:20]  Um, But liberals always think in terms of solutions, free ice cream for everyone.
[00:55:24]  And that's just not the way the world works.
[00:55:27]  The world typically works in terms of liberties and cost, not just solutions, but cost and concessions.
[00:55:34]  And you're absolutely right to say there may be a cost to Ukraine in order to counter a larger cost of global starvation.
[00:55:43]  Is that some of what you're getting at?
[00:55:46]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:55:46]  I mean, I think that we would hope that our leaders, Are considering the entire picture and not just teaching Putin a lesson or winning a war or whatever.
[00:56:04]  The diplomats should be working full out on both sides.
[00:56:10]  Putin's got some.
[00:56:11]  And by the way, I'm an anti communist since I was a fetus.
[00:56:17]  And Putin is a former KGB czar and the person I would least trust in the entire world.
[00:56:25]  And I don't like communists.
[00:56:27]  I don't trust them and I don't trust Putin.
[00:56:30]  But he has enunciated some legitimate grievances, right?
[00:56:34]  So he doesn't want NATO in Ukraine.
[00:56:38]  He doesn't want Ukraine to become a NATO country and he doesn't want NATO military assets in Ukraine right on his border.
[00:56:44]  And you know what?
[00:56:45]  All of us can understand that.
[00:56:46]  We wouldn't want China entering into some strategic military partnership with Mexico and moving Chinese military assets in there.
[00:56:54]  Right.
[00:56:54]  We would probably do something about that.
[00:56:57]  Right.
[00:56:57]  Okay.
[00:56:57]  So.
[00:56:58]  So, I'm going to put that one under the category of a legitimate grievance that Putin has.
[00:57:02]  Now, he's also complained about these biolabs to the UN, which is where he's supposed to take it, right?
[00:57:11]  And the UN didn't do anything.
[00:57:13]  And the media first fact checked that biolab story as false and then had to admit that it's true because we do have biolabs in Ukraine.
[00:57:23]  And you know what?
[00:57:24]  Again, if China was building biolabs in Mexico, we probably wouldn't be happy about that.
[00:57:29]  Right.
[00:57:30]  Okay, so that's a legitimate grievance that Putin has.
[00:57:32]  Now, are we negotiating in good faith to reassure the Russians hey, okay, we don't want global starvation.
[00:57:40]  We will agree not to put NATO assets in Ukraine.
[00:57:44]  And you know what?
[00:57:45]  It was a bad idea for us to open up those bio labs.
[00:57:48]  You're right.
[00:57:48]  We're sorry.
[00:57:49]  We're closing them.
[00:57:50]  We'll never do it again.
[00:57:52]  Okay, is that on the table?
[00:57:53]  Because, and it may be, I hope that it is behind the scenes, right?
[00:57:57]  I hope that it's a need to know thing and we don't know because we don't need to know.
[00:58:01]  I'm not sensing that.
[00:58:03]  Instead, I'm sensing kind of a lot of bellicose rhetoric and escalation.
[00:58:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:58:09]  Yeah.
[00:58:10]  Rather than, hey, let's let's defuse this situation and let's help Russia get out of Ukraine as quickly as possible.
[00:58:19]  But let's, you know, let's address some of these legitimate things that the Russians not let's just, you know, right now it seems like we just want to call the Russians evil and like there's no justification or explanation for what they're doing.
[00:58:33]  When a child could see that Putin's got some legitimate issues, right?
[00:58:38]  Let's deal with those issues.
[00:58:39]  That's that's all I'm saying.
[00:58:41]  I completely agree.
[00:58:41]  And I think part of the reason, so it's like it seems, you know, like common sense.
[00:58:46]  Let's diffuse the situation, not just for the sake.
[00:58:48]  And diffusing the situation, just to be clear, I'm aware of liberties and costs.
[00:58:53]  I'm aware of, you know, cost benefit analysis.
[00:58:56]  So I understand when I say diffuse the situation, I understand that diffusing the situation includes in that a cost to Ukraine and perhaps an unfair cost to Ukraine.
[00:59:07]  And I'm aware of that, but I'm talking about the cost to Ukraine.
[00:59:11]  As an American who's not in Ukraine, who won't pay that cost.
[00:59:14]  And so I recognize the dilemma here, but a cost to Ukraine in order to avoid a global cost of food shortages and energy crisis and all these other, and of course the potential of outright war, worldwide war.
[00:59:32]  And so.
[00:59:33]  Thermonuclear destruction.
[00:59:34]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:59:35]  So that's something that seems like a pretty big deal that even Ukraine would benefit by not having, there not being a global nuclear war.
[00:59:42]  So all that being said, cost and benefits.
[00:59:46]  And my point is to say, it seems like common sense would suggest we need to diffuse here.
[00:59:52]  And I wonder sometimes if, you know, part of it, I think, you know, Biden is senile.
[00:59:56]  And I think, you know, like there's, I think some of it really is just he doesn't know where he is and he doesn't know what he's saying.
[01:00:02]  But then part of it, you know, I also wonder is some of this intentional, right?
[01:00:07]  So I think it was Chesterton that said, you know, never attribute to malice what can be, you know, easily explained by stupidity.
[01:00:15]  But even stupidity, Gets things right occasionally, just by the laws of average.
[01:00:21]  But when you get everything wrong and you're never right on anything ever, like the fact that Biden has never been right in 48 years of his government career on any foreign policy, then at that point, stupidity can't even explain that level of failure.
[01:00:36]  And it seems as though maybe there is some kind of malice.
[01:00:40]  And when I think of what the motives might be there, and of course, this is speculation, I admit that.
[01:00:45]  I wonder if there's maybe a hidden motive not to diffuse.
[01:00:50]  Global tensions and what's corresponding right now between Russia and Ukraine.
[01:00:55]  Because if we diffuse that, then the focus has to shift back to what's going on at home.
[01:01:00]  And none of it's good.
[01:01:02]  And none of it bides well for Democrats heading up to midterm election.
[01:01:07]  And so I wonder if there's a procrastination in diffusing the situation over here in order to distract people, namely American citizens, long enough to get through November at home.
[01:01:21]  That's one of my thoughts, at least.
[01:01:23]  Yeah.
[01:01:24]  And, you know, again, you're inviting me to enter into that realm of speculation.
[01:01:27]  You don't have to.
[01:01:29]  I'm throwing it out there myself.
[01:01:30]  You don't have to join me if you don't want to.
[01:01:33]  Yeah.
[01:01:34]  There are obviously a lot of theories floating around.
[01:01:37]  And what I found it more profitable to do, and we're not going to be able to do it this time because I have a plane waiting on me and they just gave me the.
[01:01:43]  Okay, good.
[01:01:44]  That it's ready.
[01:01:45]  But we can do it another time.
[01:01:48]  And that is, I find it much more profitable to look at what.
[01:01:53]  Groups have incentives based on the existence of this conflict, right?
[01:02:00]  And we can say we hope that these, like, you know, for example, the U.S. defense industry.
[01:02:06]  Okay.
[01:02:06]  So they profit.
[01:02:09]  When the Congress talks about sending a $14 billion aid package to Ukraine, they're not talking about shipping them pallets of cash like the Iranians got, right?
[01:02:18]  They're talking about sending them war material.
[01:02:21]  And that war material is going to be purchased from U.S. defense contractors like General Electric, Raytheon, you know, and so forth.
[01:02:29]  And that's fine.
[01:02:30]  And that's what they.
[01:02:32]  They exist for, right?
[01:02:34]  They're legal.
[01:02:35]  They make bombs and tanks and guns and things like that, and that's fine.
[01:02:40]  But we need to be winning and aware of the fact that their incentives are sort of on the opposite side of diffusing the conflict.
[01:02:49]  That's a good point.
[01:02:51]  And we hope that they do the right thing and we hope that they make the right choices, but they're also facing counter incentives.
[01:02:59]  And then we can start to look at some other groups in the current geopolitical.
[01:03:04]  Landscape, who are other groups that have incentives for further conflict instead of less conflict?
[01:03:12]  And I think we can have a pretty productive conversation about that because we can all agree, no matter what side you're on, that we need to reduce those negative conflicts wherever we can, or negative incentives wherever we can, right?
[01:03:23]  In order to then reduce the conflict.
[01:03:26]  Absolutely.

=== Geopolitical Incentives Driving Global Conflict (00:35) ===

[01:03:27]  Jeff Childers, you got to catch a plane, but this has been very helpful.
[01:03:31]  It's always a pleasure getting to have you on twice.
[01:03:33]  And I think third time's a charm.
[01:03:35]  So I'd love to have you again sometime and maybe we can talk more about, well, We'll see what's going on in our crazy world at that time.
[01:03:41]  But thank you for coming on the show.
[01:03:43]  Thanks, Pastor.
[01:03:43]  Good talking to you.
[01:03:44]  All right.
[01:03:45]  God bless.
[01:03:46]  Thanks so much for listening.
[01:03:47]  But, real quick, before you go, do us a small favor take a moment and leave us a five star review if you enjoyed the show.
[01:03:54]  This is undoubtedly the best way that you can help us get this biblically faithful content to as many people as possible.
[01:04:01]  Thanks so much.