Donald Trump and Elon Musk clash over Epstein files and ketamine accusations amidst a $2.4 trillion bill funding deportations while restricting AI regulation for a decade. Hosts argue the US faces self-imposed limitations compared to China's rapid industrialization, suggesting protectionist policies akin to post-WWI Germany are necessary to avoid hyperinflation. The discussion also addresses biblical grounds for divorce regarding sexual immorality versus adultery and contrasts ancient modesty with modern norms, concluding that while principles exist, their application requires ecclesiastical discernment amidst cultural shifts. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Why We Need Positive Reviews00:02:42
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I get it.
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Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds.
You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
In May of 2022, Elon Musk announced that he would no longer support the Democrat Party.
Citing them as having become the party of division and hate.
The richest man in the world would go on to purchase Twitter and invest over two hundred and ninety million dollars into the 2024 election to get Donald Trump and Republican candidates elected.
These two acts alone likely changed the course of the right wing movement here in America forever.
After the elections, he then left his businesses to work on cutting wasteful spending in the government via the Department of Government Efficiency.
Doge, which went on to cost Elon's companies millions in boycotts, arson, and negative press.
Tesla alone has lost about a hundred billion dollars since these endeavors.
But that honeymoon period is now over.
Fed up with the proposed deficit increases and perceived snubs of Tesla and Starlink in the massive spending bill working its way through Congress, Elon Musk began to lash out at the bill and those Republicans who supported it.
Never one to let an insult slide, Donald Trump quickly became critical of Elon and his subsidies, and it devolved rapidly from there.
Now, two of the most important individuals in the world are at bitter odds with one another.
Elon accused Trump of appearing in the Epstein files.
Trump fired back that Elon is a ketamine addict who should go back to Africa.
No one can chart a path through the ticking time bombs of out of control spending, mass immigration, And trying to fund a government that currently spends over $200,000 per second.
This episode is brought to you by our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and Reese Fund, as well as our Patreon members and our faithful donors.
You can join our Patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries, or you can donate by going to right response ministries.com forward slash donate.
Final Stages of Our Republic00:15:26
We very well may be in the final stages of our republic.
Tune in now as we discuss.
The final stages of our republic, Anakin, insert Anakin face.
Right.
Right.
But not the final stages of the new monarchy that will come and replace it.
250 years of a good republic, and that's about how long people should be in charge before you realize wait a second.
We don't want these people in charge.
You remember the video?
It's some Muslim imam or something.
He's like, democracy is government for the people, by the people, of the people.
And he's like, but the people are retarded.
And so democracy is a government.
By the retarded $435,000.
Yeah, things are so hot right now.
The romance between Trump and Elon has come to a bitter end.
I've kind of oscillated back and forth earlier on on this issue with the big, beautiful bill.
But honestly, I've gotten to the point where, and we'll talk about this today, I'm going to give it to Wes here in just a moment, but I think you just got to pass it.
I think at the end of the day, when I think of America's solvency, I don't just think of economics, which matter, but it's the people.
Like, we have to be like the solution is it's the people of our country.
We have to be able to deport millions of people.
That is, in large part, a big part of the problem.
And the debt crisis and all these kinds of things, believe it or not, I know it feels impossible, but it actually can be sorted out by innovation and producing.
More if we can bring industry home.
But the big problem, as I see it, is the idea of globalism and that we're just importing the world and exporting all of our manufacturing and industry and these kinds of things.
And if we could solve that, then I really think that the debt would follow.
I don't think it's going to be, let's solve the debt problem and then one day we'll stop the invasion into our country.
Right.
It's no, let's actually care about the American people.
And to do that, the first thing you have to do is answer the question, what is an American?
We can't even answer that question.
So, if the passing of this bill in any way is hindering Trump from making good on his promises of mass deportations, then I say pass the bill.
Yep.
Well, before we jump into Wes and to just go off what you said there, Joel, there maybe is a silver lining here because I heard even Senator Johnson from Wisconsin, who is completely opposed to the bill, even he said, look, we're not going to default on our debt.
We'll pay our debt before we pay anything else.
So, maybe the way we actually cut entitlement spending.
Is we get so much that we have to pay in our debt that we have nothing left for the entitlement spending.
Maybe this is 70 chess that we're playing here.
I'm kidding.
We get so much in debt that we pay with congressmen's salaries.
That's right.
Can you imagine that?
That'd be great.
Let me frame out the foundation for why it's just even one big beautiful bill?
Why that framing?
Presidents typically have, unless you're Barack Obama, but even then, the 2010, the Tea Party kind of wave, most presidents, they'll get in, the House and the Senate, they're going to get kind of one big Piece of legislation.
So with Joe Biden, this was the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act.
That's basically about all you're going to get for the midterms.
What typically happens is, I mean, obviously the presidency, four years, senators, four years, but it's kind of staggered.
Those houses, those chambers, they're just resistant to change.
You can't come in and replace the president except for every four years.
And so people could be as mad as possible, but unless he does a Watergate or unless he does a Bill Clinton, practically speaking, he's not going to get taken out of office.
But the chamber that really can be influenced and through which the people have a voice more quickly is.
The House of Representatives, where there's just more representatives, 438, I believe, and you could elect out, you could get out of office 10, 15, and quickly change the balance.
And then all bills and legislation, not executive orders, but legislation, because it has to pass through the House, you could then go ahead and bar up the president for the second half of his term.
And it's every two years.
And it's every two years.
Yep.
So this election is every two years.
And this is exactly what happened and kind of saved us with Joe Biden.
So they had the Senate and they had the House and they obviously had the presidency.
They passed the Inflation Reduction Act.
And really, I mean, that was it.
Those were the pieces he got for his presidency and what he had to campaign on.
So this is Trump's.
It's very likely in 2026.
That in the midterms, the Democrats will take back the House.
We have like a two or three seat majority.
We have a very slim majority.
Democrats, whoever's in office, are always unpopular, right?
Grass is greener on the other side.
You have the Democrats in office and Republicans, and everyone in the middle are like, get these guys out.
They're terrible.
Republicans come in, get these guys out.
They're terrible.
For the record, I agree with both of them.
Both sides are terrible.
So this is basically Trump's one chance.
And one of the difficulties that we're up against, I already see some frequent commenters, some great guys saying, I hate this bill.
Some of you guys, you're probably in the middle.
Joel, you just said, I think we should pass it.
Here's the dynamic that won me over.
Because initially, and we'll get into Elon Musk's criticisms, initially, I was pretty critical of it too.
I said, This adds, it depends on how all of it plays out.
It adds 2.4 to about 3.8 trillion to our deficit.
Now, that's not the entirety that you would add across those 10 years.
That's on top of the deficit that the full budget itself is already running.
So the budget itself is running a deficit.
We had a continuing resolution for that.
That goes until September 30th, at which point we either continue the spending at the current level, we pass a new bill.
That doesn't seem very likely.
So, you have all the deficit that's building up there.
I think it's about $2 trillion a year.
So, we're all these 30 trillion, some in debt.
We're adding $2 trillion annually just through a regular budget.
Yeah, this would bring us about $40 trillion in debt.
This would bring us about $40 trillion.
And this bill would add another $2.4 to $3.8 trillion in the deficit.
That's not in spending, that's in just deficit.
Because what it does is it actually does a lot of tax cuts.
So, when you cut taxes, which is good for us, you also get less money for the greedy government to play around with.
So, this is basically Trump's shot at enacting his legislative agenda.
And a huge part of this, and almost a single issue, why you were just talking about Joel, at some level, I think there's something in it to support, is that this would provide the funds for the mass deportations that President Trump campaigned on.
The president cannot just pick up his pen and give billions and billions of dollars and print them to give them to ICE to expand their budget, to expand their officers, and to carry out these operations.
That just simply can't be done.
Practically speaking, there are limits.
And in this current system, The only way we get this practical outcome is going to be it funded through a measure of Congress.
Right.
I want to play this video.
This is Stephen Miller.
He came on to Charlie Kirk's show, which this is probably the first time you're going to hear a Charlie Kirk clip.
But he had a really good explanation of why this is so important right now.
So we'll go ahead.
We'll play, Nate.
This is that second video I sent you.
That's what brings us to this moment.
I have waited my entire life.
And if I was older, it would be, I would say, I've been waiting for 100 years because there's never been.
A bill like this bill since there has been a conservative movement.
This represents the culmination in the case of the MAGA movement of 10 years of hard work.
This bill would have been unthinkable in 2017 in the Paul Ryan era.
In this bill is the codification of President Trump's most important campaign promises.
It is done through a process known as reconciliation, which allows us to enact them into law with 50 votes, not 60.
No Democrats are involved.
There's no trading with Democrats.
No Democrats are involved.
In the writing or crafting of this bill, nor is it written by the Appropriations Committee.
This bill is written by the most conservative lawmakers in Congress, people like Jim Jordan.
It is written out of the policy making committees by the Republican members there.
So, for example, as has been much discussed, it fully funds the deportation agenda.
It fully funds massive expansions in the number of ICE deportation officers, ICE beds, ICE deportation flights, and the complete physical, permanent physical sealing of the entire Southwest border.
All of that money, all of that funding is provided up front.
This was a 10 year plan.
In other words, going back to 2017, when Paul Ryan didn't give us the money for the immigration project, for 10 years, we thought, given the chance to do it again, we would put all of the immigration money in the first bill out of the chute up front.
That's what this bill does.
I love Stephen Miller.
Me too.
I was going to say, because there have been plenty of times where it's somebody that we do not love, and we will point out the Wikipedia early life and say, all right, this person is Jewish.
I'm going to go on record publicly.
Stephen Miller is a Jew and I love him.
He literally dedicated his life.
His emails leaked from Breitbart in like 2018 or so.
All they found was hundreds of emails of him emailing practically everybody he knew all these updated crime statistics about illegal immigrants.
Like again and again.
Did you see this?
Did you see that?
Like literally, there was one point where he's like, I don't have a life.
I don't have a family.
This is everything I do.
And he's married now at this point.
But so that's Stephen Miller, one of the most influential men in the Trump administration.
And Everyone's saying, hey, AI, hey, the pork spending, hey, we don't cut the deficit enough.
And Stephen Miller would probably agree with you, but he's saying, listen to me.
We've got a once in a lifetime chance to fund with billions and billions of dollars.
He says later on in the interview, ICE has not seen its budget expanded since the Obama era.
Wow.
So your budget for your deportations, your budget for enforcement, your budget for tracking individuals, that budget has not been expanded since 2007, 2008.
And just for the record, costs have gone up since then.
So it's not as though your dollar is going far.
And how much are we spending on all the immigrants?
Right.
Right.
I mean, so to me, you know, you got to spend some money to make some money, you know, like, which that's kind of been the motto for a long time, and we're in a mess.
But, you know, I'm just sitting here as a peon thinking, and man, if we have to pass a bill that's going to put us more in debt, I mean, what's 40 trillion when we're already at 32, 33 trillion?
Uh, so you pass something that's gonna increase the deficit, yes, I get that, and I don't want to trivialize it, but I'm saying by comparison, so that's not small potatoes sitting by itself going to further debt, right?
Um, but we're comparing it to getting rid of people who are not Americans, like guys, millions of them, millions, guys.
We have to take our country back, we have to, and when we think of it, we're not just talking about um, taking back the GDP, we're not just talking about taking back you know, America as an economic zone that's you know.
That's fiscally solvable.
We're talking about the people.
America first means Americans.
It should mean Americans first.
And Americans, answering that question, who is an American?
Heritage Americans, this is not just the person who's been here for 15 minutes that said the magic words and touched the magic soil.
No, like the citizenship exam in Spanish or something.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And is now going to the voting booth and reading off the options in Spanish.
No, we need.
America is for Americans, and everybody else has to go back because we don't have anywhere to go back to.
This is our home.
And so, yes, there are a few things that I'd be willing to go into debt over, but this is one of them, absolutely one of them.
And so, if this is what's hamstringing Trump, then I say go for it.
And in terms of getting into, you know, we'll get into this more, but the personalities here, you know, the particular feud between Trump and Elon, I like Trump has his faults, no doubt.
And I am, you know, looking, you know, further ahead, kind of shifting gears for just a second.
I am concerned about.
Um, you know, just if you're a new listener and you're like, these guys are normies and they don't know anything that's going on, uh, we're aware of Palantir, we're aware of Peter, uh, Peter Thiel, we're aware of Alex Karp, who is Jewish, um, we're aware of Peter Thiel, who is not Jewish but is a homosexual.
Um, Alex Karp is a Democrat, right?
He's right wing when it comes to immigration and only deporting one type of person, namely a Palestinian who's negative towards Israel, right?
You know, but that technology, Palantir, if you're not familiar with it, is it's not like the hardware like NVIDIA, you know, CPUs and chips and things like that, it's the software.
AI intelligence that specializes in interpreting in record speed, interpreting wide swaths of data.
So it has the ability to scour the internet and to hone in on one person and create a profile that includes their bank account number and their social security number and all these things.
Well, that's what was just let in with Elon Musk.
So as part of his cost cutting efforts, software was used, supposedly administrated.
And now has probably profiles on all of us.
You're talking social security.
Yes.
And so even though, yeah, Elon Musk is not directly associated with.
Palantir, they're all part of the PayPal mafia.
Now, Elon Musk might, at a personal level, not like Peter Thiel because Peter Thiel allegedly was involved with David Sachs and others when I think Elon Musk was on his honeymoon.
Yep.
And they booted him out of the CEO position of PayPal.
So I'm not sitting here saying that they're best friends, but they're all the same strain.
And I get it.
If we don't do AI, China will.
I get it.
I understand that it's a little bit complex, but there are real concerns with artificial intelligence.
And my point is, You couple that with what is being developed right now by Palantir in terms of facial recognition software and then their ability to interpret data, create profiles.
And sure, this is being used in the Middle East for the top 10% threats they deem as threats against our greatest ally, Israel.
But guys like Alex Karp have been outspoken, who's currently the CEO of Palantir, outspokenly hostile against what he considers to be far right extremists, right?
He's not conservative, not really, not even close.
And so, all this can be you know, it's already been kind of infiltrated into the government through Elon and Doge and using that process.
And so, it's like, oh, well, we have a constitution, you know, we have the constitution to protect our rights.
Well, the software that's being used right now in the Middle East could easily be used on free American citizens, those deemed to be too far right wing.
And it's like, well, this is America, we have the constitution, they're not going to penalize, you know.
People for dissenting political opinions.
Surveillance and Political Dissent00:09:17
And it's like, yeah, sure.
But they'll just create NGOs, non governmental organizations, and use Palantir technology and work with them and create profiles.
And yeah, you won't go to jail.
You'll just be unemployable.
You just won't be able to feed.
You don't go to jail, just your wife and kids starve.
So I'm saying all those to the only reason I'm mentioning that is to kind of quickly show my bona fides because there might be people who are listening in who are like, these guys, Don't have a clue.
We actually do.
I too am familiar with the back alleys of the internet.
And I think there's a lot of legitimacy there.
And yes, we're also very much aware of Peter Thiel and his ties to Vance.
And we like Vance.
We like Vance.
But that is.
I want to like Vance.
That's what I'll save myself.
I want to like him.
Yeah.
But he has multiple crossroads.
It's so weird.
It's like on one hand, with venture capitalists and those kinds of things and the Peter Thiel connections, he's going to have an inclination.
Peter Thiel, $15 million to.
Biggest Senate campaign donation in history.
Right.
No, it's big.
That's why he is a senator and that's why he is the vice president of the United States.
Right.
Because you're talking about a never trumper who kind of flipped on a dime.
And it's like, how did that happen?
Well, a lot of money is part of it and a lot of influential people behind the scenes and Peter Thiel being one of the premier individuals.
So he's going to have a crossroads and probably already is experiencing it because, on one hand, it's like hillbilly elegy and a real rags to riches, blue collar, Appalachia.
Scots Irish.
Yeah, Heart of America type guy.
But on the other hand, his ties to big tech and the venture capitalist world and Peter Thiel and those beholden to some of these guys.
So there's going to be a tug of war between his childhood and his early adulthood.
And then also, he seems to understand the Order of Morris and Heritage Americans and these kinds of things.
But he's also married to an Indian wife and she seems like a peach, right?
So I don't have anything bad to say, but she seems like a wonderful woman.
And from what I've heard, it seems as though she's embracing Catholicism and backing away from Hinduism.
That's good.
Praise God.
But she is not a heritage American.
And so he's both on the nationhood issue of who is an American and on the issue of is it salt of the earth blue collar Americans or is it the big tech overlords that I'm beholden to?
Vance, I'm not trying to disparage him.
I like him.
I'll go on record and say I like Vance.
But he's going to have some massive temptations.
And I want to acknowledge that.
So here's the point: there's, yes, Vance is vice president.
He's closely connected to Trump and he has connections to Peter Thiel.
And there's Palantir on the horizon and all these kinds of concerns over here.
I wanted to get that out.
That said, to boil it down to the current feud that erupted yesterday online between Elon and Trump, despite Vance and despite Thiel and all these things, for me, I didn't vote for Elon Musk.
I didn't, Elon Musk didn't take a bullet.
For me, you didn't vote for the African to be president.
Yeah, I didn't vote for the African.
I voted for the American.
And so, for me, if it's a battle between Elon Musk and Trump, it's a no brainer.
I'm going to side with Trump.
I know that Trump is not a perfect man by any stretch.
We'll talk about the claim of him being on the Epstein list a little bit later on.
But despite all of Trump's flaws, if it comes down to what's good for America, Passing the bill and Trump saying, We've got to pass the bill so that I can do what I've promised.
And Elon saying, We can't pass the bill because it doesn't contain the subsidies for my electric cars.
You know, or like, I mean, it puts us into too much debt.
And I really am concerned about this country that I've lived in for 15 minutes.
Yeah, I'm going to go with the American who's currently holding the office of the presidency that I voted for.
Yeah.
And not the foreigner who has done a lot of good things.
And I appreciate it.
But is, I mean, the distance between Elon Musk and a Peter Thiel is like, can we even see?
Is it, yeah, is it even discernible by the naked eye?
Like, I mean, how different are they?
I will throw out Jeff Childress of Coffee and COVID.
He had a good, we would be naive to think that Palantir's technology cannot and likely will not be used for just what you're saying, Jewel.
However, Jeff Childress's sub stack this week at some point, I forget which day, had a good breakdown pointing out what actually is being allowed with Palantir right now.
And it's not the doom and gloom, although it very well could be.
His point largely was it's being used to do things like.
He said there's currently no communication between departments.
So if someone dies, that never gets notified to the Social Security Administration to stop paying Social Security benefits to that.
So he said the current contract with Palantir is aimed at those sorts of things.
I agree, Joel, 100%.
The technology is there.
It most likely will be used.
Yeah, I have no doubt that it's currently being used in many positive ways.
Yes.
My concern is just the Trojan horse is coming in the gates and eventually.
And this is what's tough.
This is what's tough about the bill.
I kind of espoused the positives, played that clip from Miller.
We're going to get to some other ones from Massey, Cosmic Treasons, pointing out the AI, and that's a huge problem.
But if you have a relatively godly, submissive wife and you guys just have differences, she probably has a point, and you probably have a point.
Like with Trump and Elon, it's not as though Elon Musk has no point whatsoever.
The deficit is fine.
You actually are caught in this very difficult, you know, rock and a hard place.
And so, Elon Musk, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he's bringing up the very valid point.
That I mean, back in 2013, 14, 15, he's retweeting what Trump was saying back then.
And Trump was all about we need to cut the deficit.
We need to balance the budget.
We need to stop this out of control spending.
Mike Johnson in 2023, before he was Speaker of the House, was saying the same thing.
We got to get in here.
We got to cut all of this.
The crazy thing, though, is that's 10 years ago, which isn't that long, but 10 years ago, we didn't have 50 million.
You have to put that into perspective.
In the last 10 years that we had just under the last administration, in four years, 40 million.
Right.
In terms of what they counted, about they said like maybe like 9 million that were legal and 11 million that were illegal, but that doesn't even account for all the gotaways and everybody who just slipped through the system.
It was never counted.
So you got 20 million on the record and over half of that being illegal immigrants just in four years of Biden's administration.
And so I think I'm being conservative when I say 30 to 40 million, if you count also the gotaways.
And then that's just the last four years.
And so then I'm only tacking on for the previous six years.
Seven years, going back to 2013, 10 million total for those six or seven years.
And that's how I'm just for the listener, that's how I'm getting to my 50 million number.
And so, my point is, as a defense of Trump, I mean, I've said plenty of things at a certain time that were true, but then things change.
Things change.
And in 10 years, one of the big things that changed is there's a whole lot of people in America who are not Americans and do not belong here and are a financial black hole.
On the country.
And it's not like, oh, you know, like if we finally gave them enough, then no, there is no enough.
It doesn't matter what.
I saw a video just today, like Mr. Beast, you know, a year ago put water wells in, you know, in some African village.
And in less than a year, none of them were.
And he also brought instructors to teach them how to maintain it, taught them the maintenance.
And every single one of the water wells is now abandoned.
The reality is, it's not just a matter of resources, it's a matter of the heart.
It's a matter of people and having an entire, importing an entire class of people here that are not Americans and that continue to be a strain on Americans financially and then also our physical health in terms of crime statistics and all these kinds of things.
15 minutes that way.
That's the baseline.
18 wheeler piloted by an illegal immigrant who was drunk or intoxicated, plowed into a family, killed two kids and three adults.
Like 15 miles that way.
And then just over the weekend, I think it was up in Dallas once again, I think it was at the beach or something like that.
Legal immigrant killed a girl who's celebrating her birthday.
Like, this is not just ethereally somewhere, someplace.
Three years ago, someone did a bad thing.
Everywhere, economically, fiscally.
I've gotten to the point where, in many ways, it's kind of, in many ways, yeah.
Like, I've kind of become a single issue, politically minded immigrant.
You've become Stephen Miller with a beard.
We have to do whatever it takes to get rid of these people.
We have to.
Governing Heart and Enterprise00:02:57
Let's hit our first commercial break and we'll talk about the AI provisions and more about Musk and Trump.
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The Gold Rush of Debt00:14:46
So go and get On Ruling now from Western Front Books at the link below.
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All right, here we are.
Okay, so I know we mentioned briefly the debt and the deficit problem, but I think one thing to bring home when we talk about it, we agree it's a problem.
All else being equal, it is not ideal to outspend your GDP.
To run the deficit up, let's go ahead and pull up graph number one, Nate.
We are far from the only country in the world, though, that is doing this.
I think this is global trade.
This is globalism.
This is the ease of financial markets where you can trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
And so, this is a graph, if you're listening, of the most indebted countries in the world.
It's a little bit older, but it's the best kind of comparison that you can see.
And in the yellow, so the bar underneath, you've got 2007.
It's the ratio, the percentage of GDP to government, general government debt.
So, yellow bar, 2007.
Blue bar, 2017.
Every single country on this list, the ratio has increased.
United Kingdom, Canada, France, Spain, United States, Japan, Greece, every single country that's on this list of the most indebted countries in the world, all of them have been increasing their debt to GDP ratio.
This is the 10 years, 2007, 2017.
The United States, at least on this list, is the fifth.
I think it actually might be about the sixth or seventh now at this point.
But the United States is behind Japan, Greece, Italy, Portugal, but we're also the biggest economy in.
The world.
So, practically speaking, we are not the most in debt nation, nor are we the only nation that is running up the deficit as a measure of our GDP.
Your GDP, your gross domestic product, is basically a measure of your output.
If you have a nation and basically it's producing nothing, well, you can't take on much debt at all.
But if you're producing a lot, then your debt is not as necessarily a big deal.
If you have debt that's a quarter of what you produce, your exports, your money that you're bringing in in a given year, I mean, that's no problem at all.
If you make $100,000, $25,000 in debt, that's not that bad.
You make $100,000, you're paying off $125,000 in debt.
All of a sudden, you have a much bigger problem.
So the United States is far from alone.
China has its debt.
Japan has tons of debt.
All of these European nations have debt.
And in many ways, it's kind of like a system that it's in everybody's best interest to keep going.
We worry about defaulting on debt.
We worry about, well, what happens if the American dollar doesn't kind of become the standard abroad?
Those are real possibilities.
But practically speaking, at the end of the day, like Joel said, we need to get these people out.
And ultimately, You can just do things also.
Like, there are measures of just the big part of our debt and spending, it's entitlements.
Yes.
Elon Musk was never going to be able to cut Medicare.
Congress is never going to cut Medicare.
Congress is never going to cut Social Security.
Trump ran on not cutting it.
Trump ran on not cutting it.
Exactly.
So, practically speaking, the debts here, like with Doge, he was very ambitious.
Like, we want to cut this.
We want to cut this.
Nate, you can pull up graph two to just kind of show the flow.
Guys, most of the spending is in health care, it's in pensions, it's in Social Security.
You can see here, this is the 2023 fiscal year.
It's in defense and veterans.
So it's paying up a veterans benefit.
Let me tell you what no congressman is coming back to his district with a big smile and a thumbs up and says, Hey, veterans, I voted to take away some of your benefits.
The change that's going to have to happen is not going to come within this system if we're going to get rid of this.
So, practically speaking, just looking around like, where are we?
What are our actual, real, legitimate options?
This is the situation, and there are just much more important things.
Now, let's get to AI though.
One of the provisions, this is a huge bill, these bills, because it's kind of called the one big, beautiful bill.
It's over a thousand pages.
It's over 1,000 pages, and it's kind of done to avoid getting bogged down with bills that can fail individually.
So you take maybe the immigration thing, and senators start hemming and hawing, I don't know, and then it doesn't get passed.
The goal of this, for one, is to do it as budget reconciliation.
So that means, and Stephen Miller alluded to it on the call, you need 50 votes instead of 60.
So the filibuster is in place in the Senate, meaning you need 60 out of 100 senators to vote for something to approve to pass it.
Republicans only have a 53 vote majority.
So that means seven Democrats have to join you.
And if they're going to join you and they're going to vote for a Republican bill, they're going to need concessions.
Now, the budget reconciliation process is a process by which you only need a simple majority.
And that simple majority, then, you're very much so able to pass things that are related to budget.
There's debate over because there are provisions in this bill to get rid of tax permits for silencers.
So, if you want to buy a silencer for your firearm, you don't have to get a tax stamp anymore.
There's also taking away Medicare and Medicaid money from Planned Parenthood that they can't be used to.
Go to Planned Parenthood to procure abortions like that.
There's also then, and this is the big one, an AI provision.
Now, there's something called the Bird Rule, which says that, hey, the changes being made have to be relevant to the budget.
In this case, funding ICE and funding deportation efforts.
So the changes made had to be relevant to the budget.
But as politicians do, they'll throw their pork in, they'll throw their spending, they'll throw this, they'll throw that and the other.
Because again, this is going to be one of the only chances they have to actually really probably pass most of Trump's agenda.
But a really concerning one is a provision that says, Local states cannot regulate, cannot slow down, cannot hamper the development of AI for 10 years.
We're going to do an episode.
I've already got it planned out for next week, talking about AI and the things that it's doing.
But think about 10 years.
10 years ago from right now was 2015.
I mean, podcasts were barely becoming a thing.
All sorts of social media platforms didn't exist or even in their infancy.
So we're saying in that bill, 10 years, hey, You can't regulate this whatsoever.
And it even goes even farther than that and it gets into local zoning.
So I'm going to play a clip from this is Laura Loomer's show with Thomas Massey talking about, or it's Daniel Loesch talking about these AI provisions and what he's seeing in the bill.
I am prefacing what I'm about to tell you because I'm almost embarrassed to tell you this.
I went back and read that provision of the bill knowing that you might ask about it on the show.
And I found something I didn't find the first time.
Which is, they say in that bill, not only are they going to override state laws, they want to override state or local zoning laws.
Now, what does this mean?
You know, when you think of AI, okay, well, we're not going to regulate the software that runs on somebody's computer.
No, what they're talking about are these data centers that could be located in your neighborhood.
And there's been a lot of contention over these data centers.
I think that's what the real intent of this part of the bill is.
You know, Facebook and some of these other big tech companies.
Companies have met the not in my backyard, the NIMBY resistance in areas, and AI wants to make sure that they don't run into that.
These data facilities can use a lot of water, use a lot of energy, and they don't want the locals telling them where they can and can't put these data centers.
They're going to want the data centers closest to where the consumers are, and so you're going to have that tension.
I think, I know, I went back and read the bill before I came on your show.
This specific part says that they want to expedite the zoning.
And the routing that the reason they put this law in there is to expedite zoning and routing.
Rounding also is basically code for imminent domain, running those wires, fiber optic cables through anybody's yard they want to.
I think it's really dangerous to take that power away.
This has been an issue in my congressional district, and the local authorities were able to get a planned data center relocated away from the residential neighborhoods, but they wouldn't have that power if this bill passes.
Yeah, interesting.
So there you have it.
Yep.
The bill is big.
It is a bill.
I don't know about beautiful, but that's basically what you're dealing with.
You have all sorts of different things, you have hands in the pot.
You have Elon Musk's solar and Tesla subsidies.
He's angry about those being taken away.
You have tax cuts for Americans.
You have money being spent on immigration, but you also have things like that, AI, which it looks like the pressure on that will probably get that provision stripped from the bill, which is an awesome example of public pressure on your lawmakers.
But that's kind of where we are right now.
And I hope, as we've talked about politics more recently and everything like that, You guys just realize how complicated and how difficult and how slow the system moves.
Like, practically speaking, it's just hard to do.
Activism, I think you said it maybe, Michael, even on the show.
You want to get a bill passed in Congress, millions of dollars in about 10 years worth of work, of lobbying, of efforts, of donating to campaigns, of meeting with lawmakers.
And that's for like non controversial.
Like, you want a water fountain renamed in your district.
That's right.
But practically speaking, we're looking at our one chance in the last.
Trump's first term four years, Biden's term four years this year.
Our first chance since nine years ago, one more shot to at least get money, very much so for deportations.
So that's the mix of it.
We'll get into Trump and Trump and Musk here in a second.
Anything else to add to that?
Yeah, I mean, the AI thing will come up more next week with that episode.
It's a tough thing right now because, in some ways, this is kind of like a global arms race with AI.
That's what it is.
Yeah.
And so.
It's tricky because when you're in that kind of, and we're already behind to China at least, at least supposedly, if you trust anything that comes out of China.
I don't.
But I heard on the All In podcast, they were saying that China currently produces 20 times more energy than we do.
Now they have a much larger population.
Yeah, the infrastructure for energy.
Yeah, that's where we're falling behind.
That's where there's all these companies springing up to do micro nuclear, and then quantum computing is becoming.
That's what it needs it for, is for their.
The AI, the quantum.
If you look at like some of the quantum computing companies like QBTS and IonQ, just in the last, those are the ticker handles, but just like two weeks ago, they exploded.
Yeah, exploded.
Like jumped up like, you know, close to 50%.
So that's like, that's one of the big things with this AI rush.
Like, think of it like the gold rush.
You know, like some people struck gold, you know, literally and were rich, but most people did not.
Uh, but the people who uh definitely got rich were the people who were you know selling the shovels and the picks, you know, and the gloves.
Um, you know, those people did really well.
And when you think of that as it relates to this AI rush, because that's what it is, it's a global race.
Um, in the you know, the AI rush, um, a lot of the people who um are needed uh tremendously is not just you know your NVIDIA's, like they've done exceedingly well, but uh, and they're and they're continuing to do incredibly well with like their new you know.
CPUs and GPUs and stuff that are coming out that are just continuing to break every record.
But there's a certain point where there are 3 million, you know, or 3 trillion market cap, and, you know, maybe they could triple over the next, you know, 10 years, you know, to be the first $10 trillion company.
And that's possible.
But the ones that are like going like bonkers are less of like the gold itself and more of the infrastructure.
They do like cooling and parts for the cooling.
Exactly.
There's cooling fans, like there's quantum, there's nuclear, there's, All these other energy sources, like energy is going to be the massive demand.
And so I have no doubt that China, their infrastructure in terms of energy is probably higher than ours and maybe by a multiple, you know, by 20 times.
I don't know if that's true, but I'm prone to believe that they're ahead in that regard just because of immense state power to just make things happen.
Where I can guarantee you they're not ahead is when it comes to just raw innovation.
Yeah.
Right.
Nobody is ahead of America in terms of innovation.
They're not.
And that doesn't mean that you can't find geniuses other places, but America, China, and all of the things that it's done, you can look at every single invention and every piece of innovation, and it's like, oh, they, and you read into it, and it's like, they got that from this American, and got that from this American, and got that from this American.
And so, like, we really are leading the way in the actual technology, the actual innovation, the gold itself.
But you're going to need a ton of picks and shovels and gloves and hard hats.
And that's where we're falling behind as opposed to China.
So you're right, Michael.
Like back to the global arms race, in this case, global AI race, that's where it's difficult because it's like, yeah, for this to be untethered and there to be no restraints is deeply, deeply troubling.
But at the same time, China's not going to stop.
Right.
You know, like they're just.
You know, and so it's like trying to build babies in test tubes, they don't care, right?
They don't care, they're just gonna like if they can do it.
The only thing that's ever held back China is what they can do.
America holds itself back at times, uh, based off of what we should do, what we should do.
Uh, but uh, most countries are limited by what they can do.
Um, America doesn't have nearly as many limits in that regard because um, Americans are phenomenal, um, and and capable, and we're a fourth of their size too.
Like, comparing the GDP, it's incredible, right.
Because you would think, like, well, these are nations with the same amount of land mass and the same amount of people.
No, China, for all their centralized authorities, centralized in the government, the massive amount of people they have, fewer labor laws, fewer restrictions, all of that, bigger land, still can't rival America.
Well, that's the whole thing with H 1Bs and stuff, like with India.
It's like, well, India really does, Joel.
Don't hate on India.
They really do have some remarkable people and geniuses.
It's like, yeah, there's 1.3 billion people there.
Of course, they have just laws of averages.
They have some geniuses.
And that's true, but it's because it's 1.3 billion.
And I love India so much, I want them to keep those geniuses.
That's right.
That makes India better.
Trade Wars and H1B Workers00:15:41
Yeah.
Well, no, that's the thing.
We keep extracting the best and brightest from every single country.
And then we become morally dependent, or at least think we are, for being the moneybags of the world.
That is part of the problem.
And so we're replacing our own population because now instead of competing with 330 million fellow Americans, I have to actually compete with the entire world because they're going to bring the best and brightest here and they're going to hamstring that country.
So, number one, I could have got that promotion, but I lost it to whatever.
What's the name of the Simpsons character who works the Quickie Mart?
I'm trying to think of an Indian name.
Nah, Pooh.
Nah, Pooh.
Yeah.
So I lost the promotion.
So, I could have been making 20% more and I lost out on that.
And I'm going to get 20% more taxed on the lower wage that I actually have because I have to support India because we took their best and brightest.
So, anyway, so that's a huge problem.
But aside from that, we are leading the way in innovation.
That was my point.
But when it comes to other countries like China, the Chinese Communist Party, and their ability to just, by rule of law, we're going to make this many energy plants and we're going to nuclear.
Well, do we have any concerns about nuclear?
Nope, who cares?
Do it.
So, nuclear and this and that.
We blow up a town, we blow up a town.
We blow up a town, we blow up a town.
I know for a fact that to hit a carbon requirement from the UN, they built a dam and flooded a city of 200,000 people pretty much like within a matter of months.
And they just, okay.
You got to do what you got to do.
So, that's the thing is like when you're competing against hostile countries like China and they.
There's nothing restraining them.
Right.
There's no self restraint, I should say.
Then at that point, it's like, yeah, like I understand the sentiment.
At the same time, I completely understand no restraints, no guardrails for 10 years, for a decade.
You know, and it's like a fever dream of your open AI, your Sam Altman, your Grok, your whatever.
It's absolutely terrifying.
The problem is that, like, to me, both alternatives are terrifying.
Right.
So, like, so China does it.
And we're at their mercy because we're.
And we keep all of our immigrants here.
And we keep all of our immigrants here because we don't want to keep all of our immigrants.
And so China is light years.
Because you have to understand that the way that history works is when it rains, it pours.
So there are wide swaths of history where not much happened.
That doesn't mean that those people aren't important in the sight of God.
There's families and mothers and fathers.
But in terms of development and innovation and discovery, You think of like Stone Age and Bronze Age.
And we've been living kind of in the age of silicon for the last, I don't know, like 50 to 80 years or so.
So you think of like screens and TVs and phones and transistors and chargers.
Yeah, that kind of stuff.
And now we're entering into, you're not, my point is like what you'll see for like 80 years, there'll be a discovery that turns a chapter.
And then it's just further applications of that discovery that turn a page.
Right.
It's like TVs, and then it's like phones, and then it's smartphones.
It's like, whoa, this is incredible.
But these are just like turning pages, but you're still in the same chapter.
But right now, we are, I really believe, we are on the cusp of turning a chapter, not just a page.
And so when we say, look at what happened in the last 10 years, and it could be like that.
I don't think it'll be anything like that.
I think it'll be exponentially more than that.
I think there are going to be the discoveries and inventions and applications that come out of.
Artificial intelligence and quantum computing and nuclear, and all these kinds of things that are all kind of teeing up at the same time.
To say, we're going to basically run a race against China, but we're going to put weights on our ankles and our chest for the first 10 years of this race, like a marathon for the 26 miles, the first 10 miles, we're going to let China start at the 10 mile line and only have to run 16 miles.
So it's just both are terrifying.
Both options are terrifying.
And the answer, obviously, is a little bit of a pipetrain, but the original envisioning of America and its national policy was protectionist and nationalist.
Right.
And so ultimately, what's going to have to happen with all of this debt and everything?
You're just going to have to come in.
And this happened after World War I with Germany.
They just said, we're not paying it.
They sacked them at the Treaty of Versailles with millions and millions.
It destroyed their economy.
And they just literally said, we're not paying it.
And so, for the same thing for the United States, we're going to have to say, we've prioritized foreign trade, we've prioritized foreign markets and importing all of these goods.
We're going to stop doing it.
And you're not going to be happy with us.
We're not competing with you as far as AI and making AI movies and AI this and AI that.
We exist for America.
Our borders are closed.
We're closed as far as a capitalist market.
We make stuff for our citizens and it stays here.
Ultimately, that's probably the only real turning pages, turning chapters.
That's going to have to be the next chapter.
There's not going to be some 20 year plan to balance the budget.
It's all going to keep spending.
We're all going to do these arms races until you get to the point where the citizens of the nation say, and it doesn't even have to be all of them say, I just don't really care.
I don't really care about getting slop from China.
I don't really care about importing junk manufactured in Bangladesh.
We can do it here and it's going to be better for us and it'll hurt in the short term.
But we'll never pay off all this debt we have.
And I kind of just want America to be for Americans.
I think that's going to have to be the next chapter.
Anything less than that, you're in the same boat.
You're in the same boat of debt.
You're in the same boat of trade.
You're in the same boat of just being reliant on foreign production and everything like that.
We can make it here.
We should do it here.
We should work towards that as much as possible.
And at a certain point, you rip the bandaid off and say, we're not paying that debt.
That's the idealistic 30 year old.
I don't know.
Because a lot of our debt is owed to our.
It's not all owned by foreigners.
Well, it's not even all owned by allies.
A lot of it's owned by Americans, like bonds, and we've loaned money to the Social Security.
Yep.
And those internally you deal with differently.
But as far as external debts, and they most certainly owe us money too.
So at the same time, we cancel.
Hey, you owe us 15 trillion.
We owe you 20.
We're kind of going to call it a wash because we're just for ourselves.
Something like that is, I think, going to have to be the future.
Or you're looking at global destabilization of all currency.
None of these options are great.
Hyperinflation, global destabilization.
Of course, your allies are going to be pissed.
But here's the deal what are you going to do?
Cross the ocean, go to war with us?
How did that work out?
Britain tried it, Japan tried it.
It didn't work.
Yeah.
Right.
The problem, the difficulty, I hear you.
The difficulty is we've just made such a mess that it's hard to get out of it.
Like it would be immensely painful in the short run to isolate and say America's for America.
Listen.
If I can't get my Guatemalan coffee, I am not going to live right.
So, that is a good point.
Well, that's first.
We have the recipes, but first, we don't have the climate, that's true.
But the first thing that you would have to do is you'd have to bring a ton of stuff back.
Um, and starting with you know, essentials like medicine, I mean, the fact that like right now, if we enter into World War III, yeah, it's not just the casualties of war, but there'd be a ton of people who can't get their insulin, you know, and things like that.
So, I trust American ingenuity to build these things.
There were people who were saying it'll take.
Three years to build the infrastructure and the scale to manufacture the COVID vaccines.
They had those bad boys on the assembly line in three months.
Killed everyone.
Come down to it, that's a bad example.
But come down to it, 50 million Americans need insulin.
We could make it happen.
Yeah, probably.
To your point, it would be difficult, not easy.
But if push came to shove, I think we could do it.
Yeah, chips and medicine are chips and chips.
Well, we're working on the chips.
I mean, we are starting to build plants here.
So, right.
But yeah, those are the things that Trump is like, And that's what Trump's best at.
He's kind of heading that direction.
That's the point of all the tariffs.
It's like, well, look at the stock market is down, whatever.
It's already made a pretty good recovery.
And I admit, you know, part of the recovery is due to the fact that Trump has backed off on tariffs substantially to where, you know, typically, typical Trump, his bark has been bigger than his bite.
But the point is, there's just so many different pieces.
And the easiest piece, the first piece, before, you know, trying to get all of your manufacturing back where everything's made here and then cutting off, you know, to where like we're, you know, not beholden to all these other countries.
The first thing is, before you bring industry back, Send the people out, get the people out.
And that would right there take care of a lot.
But you're right.
Like, I think, you know, long term in terms of the debt and those kinds of things, like, we're beholden to so many people because we've just helped to create this globalist system and we're a part of it and we're codependent.
Like, I want my children to own and I'm working on owning too real assets, owning your real estate, owning businesses that actually do something.
So it's not your SaaS, it's not software as a service.
But it's real businesses, real real estate, real tangible assets, your food, your beans, your bullets, your bandages, owning those things as much as possible, hedging against, we've talked about before, just the instability of the American dollar.
There comes a certain point where people say, You've printed so many of these things, and we are printing more of them, and this bill will print more of them.
This thing is just not worth anything.
Before we move on, there was Ben Huffstetler entered the chat with a major super chat.
So, Joel, you need to at least hit that before we.
Yeah, we've got a lot of super chats on this one.
Let's start at the top.
We have one more commercial break that we're going to go to in a minute.
Okay, we'll start with Ben.
Ben Hufstedler, faithful.
As surely as the sun will rise, Ben Hufstedler is single handedly supporting this ministry.
$300 super chat from Ben.
Thank you.
We appreciate it.
He said, Stay strong, brothers.
We need men called to the front lines in the battle of life.
Keep it up.
Moving to Kentucky next week and looking to start a reformed borough there.
Prayers appreciated for the journey.
Praise the one true King for the grace that we have daily.
Amen.
Let me pray for Ben real quick.
Father, I pray that you would bless his move, that it would be a good transition for him and his family, and that you would indeed help him to be able to consolidate with other brothers and sisters in Christ who fear you, who are like minded, who love your word, and love our country, and want to see America bow the knee to King Jesus and for us to live according to his law.
And Lord, I pray that he'd be able to find a solid church and a solid community.
We pray this in Jesus' name.
Amen.
A couple more super chats, Nathan.
If you could go to the top.
Let's hit our last ad.
I got one thing on Trump and Elon, and then we'll hit all of these.
Okay.
All right.
We'll do the super chats last.
Hang with us.
We're going to go to one more commercial break.
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Elon, Trump, and Half-Truths00:14:49
All right, we're back.
So let's talk a little bit more about Trump and Elon and then we'll get to the super chats.
We've got some good ones today.
I have a graph too that'll help once you get a second.
Okay.
In terms of the Epstein comment, right?
Here's the big one Trump's name, you know, the reason he won't release the Epstein files is because his name is on it.
Have a nice day, DJ.
Right, that's right.
Pretty petty and immature.
This is why foreigners have to go back.
Send them back.
But I do, like, do we think that's legitimate?
My opinion, I'd love to hear Michael and Wes.
I think absolutely not.
I just, I think there's no way Biden had access to this.
You know, the Biden administration, I mean, Biden was, you know, eating applesauce and taking naps, but whoever was running the country for four years, Dems were in charge.
They had a majority in the House and the Senate for a while.
And so I think anything that would have, I mean, they threw everything, including the kitchen sink at Trump, I think it would have been used.
So, like, is he in the document?
Well, like, we know, we've known for 10 years at this point that, you know, that, He's in the Epstein files in the sense that he had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein was part of the Mar a Lago club.
Trump kicked him out.
But there's a far cry between, it's a pretty wide spectrum between I'm friends with Jeffrey Epstein versus I'm actually committing heinous acts that are unspeakable against children.
I don't think that any bombshell like that, if Trump had actually engaged in any illegal activity, we would have heard about it.
So I think Elon's being cute.
And, like, I don't think it's a bold faced lie in the sense that, like, Trump's name is nowhere to be found.
Right.
But I think he's basically saying a half truth.
Like, he's in the files.
And technically, he is, but not in any incriminating way.
Again, if it was, we would have heard it.
I mean, that would have been used against him already.
So, that to me is just one more reason.
Like, when I saw that, it's like I was already, you know, going to take Trump's side.
Again, Trump has faults.
Given those two choices, Elon and Trump.
And then when I saw that, I was like, oh man, this is just like pretty, pretty actually, it kind of surprised me, like pretty low.
Yeah.
Pretty low.
So I, you know, I understand that Elon's frustrated.
Like from his perspective, it's like, look, I came in and worked hard.
He didn't work well, you know, it wasn't successful, but I came in to cut waste, right?
Doge, you know, and the original promise was $2 trillion.
You know, and then they cut that down to one trillion and it ended up being like 160 billion.
And they couldn't even produce, you know, tax like or receipts for the 160 billion.
I think the only receipts and even it was like 65 billion.
So you're talking about at that point, so from two trillion down to 65 billion.
So you're talking about like 0.325 percent of what was originally promised.
And then even in that, they found question marks.
So you're talking about a guy who, yes, he did work at cutting waste.
And cutting the spending, but it wasn't super successful.
But the point is, he wants to cut all this spending.
And then he finds out that, you know, like you're actually going to spend even more.
You're going to not only cut debt, but accrue more debt.
And the cherry on top is, you know, for him, it's probably a personal slight.
Is like, I worked to help you get elected.
Now, whether or not Trump still would have been elected without Elon's influence is, you know, nobody knows.
I think he still would have been elected.
I think the number one thing that got him elected was fight, fight, fight.
You know, that moment was iconic.
But the point is that from Elon's perspective, it's like you brought me in to cut waste.
I did the best I could.
And then you present a bill that actually takes on even more debt.
But the one thing that you are able to cut is the thing that affects my companies.
And I put my company, and I've already taken a huge hit.
People are bombing Tesla factories.
Right.
You know, and I mean, it's like in terms of his stock stock, yeah.
He's lost $100 billion.
He cut more from his own companies than he cut from.
That's the national budget.
That's really sad when you put it like so.
They did shut down USAID.
Yep.
They did.
They did.
Until a judge in like Alabama undoes it.
Yeah, we'll see.
But which is why we need the bill to pass.
We need Trump to be able to have the power to push forward his agenda.
But that's the point is that, like, I understand at the personal level for Elon, it's like, so you're going to accrue even more debt.
And I paid this price, like, an actual, you know, I don't know many people who have paid $100 billion to try to help the country.
And he's like, you know, and you're going to cut the spending.
On, you know, the tax credits and all that kind of stuff for EV that directly affects my company, but all these other things you're not going to cut.
So you're like, you're perfectly comfortable with debt, but just not the debt that helps me after I've already paid this price.
So I understand why Elon is mad, but in terms of like legitimacy of what needs to happen, um, yeah, the American people, uh, do not need to be forced to buy hybrid cars.
Um, we should be able to buy, um, Whatever car we want to buy, we should be able to use, you know, like that way.
The government is not subsidizing the purchase, as in the only reason people buy them is because the government's coming in and plugging you checks to purchase them.
Yeah, at some point, like Tesla and some of these companies, you have to be able to stand on your own two legs.
I understand if you're a startup, you know, you're two years in or something like that, but you're talking about a company that's been around for quite a while.
And if you're not profitable apart from government subsidies, then you're not profitable.
Like you're just, it's not.
That's good of a company.
Elon did come out and tweet and said, fine, keep the EV vehicles the way it is, just cut the wasteful spending.
I don't care.
Well, good on him for that.
But my point is, I don't think that that was a personal slight on Trump's part towards Elon.
I think he's just, I think that, you know, it's not just his decision, but everybody who's involved in the writing of this bill, I think that was the right decision to take away subsidies from all the EV stuff.
And I also think it's the right decision.
Even if it accrues more debt, to make those financial concessions that have to be made in order for the bill to pass so that they can save the country and get rid of millions of people.
So, in terms of policy, I'm 100% on Trump's side.
In terms of the personal feud between them, I'm sympathetic.
I understand where Elon's coming from.
But again, nobody voted for Elon.
And I think he's in principle wrong.
Yeah, my two comments on this are number one, if Trump is involved at the Level of the Epstein files that is, you know, pedophilia and all that sort of thing.
He doesn't get a pass, right?
Just because he's the Republican.
Like, if that were to come out, we would roundly condemn and call for his impeachment and criminal punishment, execution, depending on, you know, all of that.
He doesn't get a pass just because he's Republican or the president.
Second, though, I heard, I forget who I heard saying, Elon Musk is like the 20 year old who joins a political campaign for the first time.
Right.
Right.
And so he comes in all, we're going to change the world.
Right.
And his response is similar to a lot of ideological 20 year olds who find out that they're not going to change the world in six months.
And it just, it looks really terrible on a whatever 50 year old man as opposed to like a.
Who is the richest man.
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah.
It looks bad.
If you read Eric Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, he definitely traces this pattern of behavior.
It's his ambition that makes him so powerful.
We're going to come in and we're going to cut $2 trillion of government spending.
Like.
Hats off.
And sometimes SpaceX rockets, Tesla, literally just sheer willpower, he accomplishes it.
But it's also his greatest downfall.
So set goals that are just, they're all practically impossible.
And then when they become impossible, and he gets it from his father, and I'm sympathetic to it, but it's definitely something that he does not take lightly.
I mean, the guy who's trying to take us to Mars, like he's not the kind of guy who's like super soft spoken and he gets, you know, insulted.
He's like, well, that's water off a duck's back.
Like, no, I mean, guys, it's Elon Musk.
So I know John Dupre and Cameron Stevenson, they both suggested, is this maybe the Uniparty kind of playing, they're kind of like playing, you know, back and forth, or is this to get the Epstein files out?
I think the Epstein files have been incinerated, shredded, destroyed.
Everything that's left is stuff we already know.
We already know the ties to Mossad.
We already know about the blackmail.
We already know Trump visited with Epstein.
I just don't think there's any bombshells left.
Yeah, I don't think so either.
I think there were, but yeah, I think it's never going to see the light of day.
Right.
Did you have a graph you were going to show, Wes?
Nope.
I'm just looking for a Bible passage.
Okay, let's go ahead and deal with some of the super chats.
And then, Nathan, you could also start to formulate other questions outside of super chats.
If we have time, we'll get to them.
Evan Davies gave five pounds.
He said, praying, both men come to the Lord and reconcile.
May we see more of Psalm 133, 1.
Keep up the great work, guys.
Christ is King.
Amen.
Thank you.
We appreciate that.
Yeah, it would be great if Elon became a Christian and Trump, if he's not already, if he became a Christian, Trump is either a professing Christian or a nominal Christian.
It'd be great to see that happen for both of them.
Cool Dude gave us $10.
Thank you, Cool Dude.
He says, It annoys me that Thiel and Co. Name all their wicked tech after Tolkien lore.
Tolkien would despise it all.
Sick.
Great show, RRM.
Thanks, cool dude.
Appreciate that.
Great stuff.
Yeah, it is funny how many people, there's so many libs that are trying to hijack C.S. Lewis, for instance.
C.S. Lewis was a liberal.
What are you talking about?
And it gives the cover, too, because the thing about Alex Carp and Peter Thiel, they're not woke in the traditional sense.
And so it kind of creates a faux, Kind of right wing movement.
That's been kind of the point is that you have these guys, be it from Claremont or be it the Peter Thiels or be it even Bronze Age Pervert, and they look like they're on the right wing and they're based and they're this, that, or the other.
But then you get down to it and, like, wait, you say that share the same technocratic assumptions about the malleability of what it means to be a human being.
And you use all this language and you're against wokeness.
And so, if most conservatives, like, that's all we need to see, this is our guy.
What we're trying to say is look a little deeper.
What is the fundamental orientation, priority?
What's their stance on Israel?
How do they actually feel about all of these things before you just sign up and you say, This is great?
Yeah.
Let's see.
Nick or Appeal to Heaven.
Yep.
Appeal to Heaven seven.
Super chat, $2.
We appreciate it.
He says, Elon is a lol Bert at heart.
Hate to say it.
I think just somebody who just incurs laughs, you know, like a lol cow.
But he's the richest man in the world.
Yeah.
I'd be a lol Bert.
If I got to be the richest man in the world, I'd take all the.
I'd take it for free at this point, pretty much.
Yeah.
Right.
Yep.
Thanks, Nick.
We appreciate that.
Luke McLam, $20.
Luke McLam, he says, an illegal immigrant with no insurance rear ended my 94 Celica last week.
I support the big, beautiful bill more than ever.
Time for the lads to go.
Agreed.
Yeah.
I agree.
And for those of you listening, a 94 Celica sounds like a really old car.
I think that's like.
A really nice car that people try to get their hands on.
So, not a Toyota Camry.
Right.
Okay, this one is from Neville.
Neville says Do you think AI is a net negative for humanity?
How do you think AI plays into eschatology?
It's a great question for next week's episode.
Yeah, we're going to do an episode on it.
Yeah.
My, you know, just brief one is, you know, in terms of narrow AI, which is all we have right now, it's not actually sentient.
It's not actually conscience.
It's not human or thinking for itself.
It appears to be thinking for itself, but it's just, you know, scouring the internet and putting, you know, it's patterns.
And so, like, true artificial intelligence that's, you know, sentient.
I personally don't think that it's possible, is my position.
So I think that that's something that would be terrible and incredibly dangerous, and something that's outside of the bounds of the world that God created in his natural order.
So I don't think it's possible, just like pigs flying or something like that.
So the type of AI that we're talking about, narrow AI, is a tool.
It's a really, really powerful tool.
And so I think, just like with the invention of every tool, Whether it be a hammer or whether it be an AR or whatever the tool is, with tools come incredible abilities to produce things and also incredible risks and dangers.
So the question is not inherently, is AI good or bad?
I think the question remains, will we wield it well?
Can we use it well?
I don't know.
We might have to debate it next week.
Yeah, I don't know either.
I mean, I don't feel great about our leadership class here, much less, you know.
There are fundamental assumptions, definitions of utility that are built into AI.
Like it's only possible for something to be built at the internet, which is built upon, you know, be it the industrial revolution and ultimately the printing press, like the mass production of recording of words and all of that.
So, this is kind of in some ways, it feels like the end stage.
Like, if we're going to do the internet and we're going to have data available, then why not take a lot of data?
Why not have jobs that relate to collating data?
And then, if we're going to collate data, why don't we do it faster?
And we do it faster, ultimately, not by doing it by humans, but by machines.
And that's what it means to be productive, is to collate.
Pornography as Grounds for Divorce00:12:39
So, we'll have to explore more of that next week.
Yeah.
All right.
We've got one more super chat.
We got Nick Boner, quick Bonner.
Bonner, slip of the tongue there.
$20 super chat from Nick, great brother.
I'd like to export a few worthless Canadian dollars to write response for being based.
He said, Canadian 20, which, what is that?
$3, $4, America?
$3 or $4.
The way we keep printing, I don't know.
They might beat us.
Thanks, Nick.
We appreciate that.
And then Kevin Ellis is our last super chat for today.
Kevin Ice.
$10.
You think it's.
Oh, there's no L. My bad.
Kevin Ice.
$10 from Kevin.
Thank you.
He said, Is habitual.
All right.
So this is a topic change, but we'll do our best to address it.
If you have kids, probably not.
Yep.
Don't finish it out.
Yeah.
Listening, warning for the children.
He's asking a question about marital fidelity.
Is habitual porn use grounds for divorce?
What are your thoughts on a wife who catches her husband watching porn again and again, asking him to leave their home until he shows signs of change?
Delicious change.
Yeah.
Let me add some context here in the Greek because it's important.
So, Matthew chapter five is the premier teaching on what pornography would relate to.
This would be adultery.
19.9 is a sister verse.
It's almost like adultery.
Yeah.
But there's a little bit of a difference in the words that he has here.
So, this is where it's the same in both.
Oh, it is?
Okay.
Yeah.
So, Matthew 5.27, you have heard it said, you shall not commit adultery.
And so, adultery there is a Greek word.
It's, I don't know how to pronounce it very well, but mokeu?
It starts with an M and it's a different Greek word.
You shall not commit adultery.
And it's referencing there the literal actual act of adultery.
You can fill in what that means.
But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery, same word with her in his heart.
If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it off you, for it is better you to lose one part of your body than your whole body to be thrown into hell.
And he follows that up.
So that was verse 27, follows that up in verse 31.
Whoever sends his wife away, that'll give her a certificate of divorce.
But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of And he uses a different word here, not the word that starts with an M, but the Greek word pornea.
Whoever divorces his wife except for the reason of unchastity makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
A couple years ago, I did think that it was more narrowly, simply adultery that's in reference.
So Jesus says, look, there's physical adultery, there's adultery of the heart, but only the physical one is what technically would qualify as grounds for divorce.
But the word that Jesus does use in his teaching in Matthew, Matthew 5 and Matthew 19, whoever divorces his wife except on grounds of Sexual immorality, that Greek word pornea, it has the idea of immorality, of lewdness, of lasciviousness, of visiting brothels and prostitution.
So it's kind of a big catch all for fornication and uncleanness, except on these grounds.
Unless someone does that, he himself then commits adultery.
He's betrayed his marital vows.
And so you have to be really careful because if you tie it back to that verse 27, just a couple of verses ago, what you could say is every man ever that has just looked, we're not even talking pornography at this point, but has looked at a woman lustfully.
Jesus says that, and it is a sin.
Who has looked at a woman lustfully has committed adultery in his heart.
So, because he's committed that act, then therefore there's sexual immorality.
And so, any wife ever, if his eyes linger too long on Buffalo Wildlings, there it is.
He was unfaithful in his marriage.
That is not categorically what is in view what Jesus is saying.
Now, I don't think he strictly limits it to, well, technically, we literally didn't sleep together, but we did X and Y and Z, and I've been using pornography and masturbation and all of that.
No, Jesus is saying, no.
These are uncleanness and they are grounds for divorce.
However, I think your keys would be unrepentant and long term.
I want to open it up, but so kind of in that question, you're talking to a husband again and again and again.
I would add to that repentant.
I think there's cause for separation.
That's what you start with first.
Separation with the aim of restoration.
You are, of course, involving the church.
The church is calling to him to repent and then not just repent in word.
Okay, I'm sorry, I won't do it again.
Action.
Get rid of your laptop.
Get rid of your phone.
Put covenant eyes on.
Maybe where you work, whatever it is like this, the people you surround yourself with.
So, the church, they're calling him to repentance in word and in deed.
And then, if it gets to the point where there's not that separation for the safety of the wife, the safety of the children, with the aim not being separation towards divorce, but separation for a time for him to come to his senses and say, I need to get this under control.
God's going to throw me in hell, first of all, but I'm also going to lose my marriage and my family.
I think that's the best framing.
It's most faithful to Jesus' words and what Jesus is conveying in the Gospel of Matthew.
What do you think, Michael?
I don't, it's not that I disagree.
It's just that it does come down at a certain point to a determination by elders of a church to at what point it has been unrepentant or repentant or etc.
And if it does come down to a wisdom determination, a discernment determination, ironically, I'm arguing the opposite of what I said in the little break between the commercials.
There's not an objective standard there anymore, right?
Because at some point it is.
We as elders have determined that this is X amount or X lack of repentance or.
You did it 10 times in one month.
Yes.
And so I think clearly there is a point where using pornography becomes grounds for divorce.
But what's really tricky is with adultery, like a physical act, there's an objective, it either happened or it didn't.
And that's what I used to think until the word Jesus does use there and all of its context and all of its broader usage, Paul and his epistles, it is broader.
And I think Jesus' intention is to say, again, like a man couldn't come in and be like, well, technically I didn't.
Like, no, he's living in a sexually immoral lifestyle that's destroying his body.
Destroying his wife and their family.
It's at a certain point dangerous to be around.
So Jesus says these would be grounds if persisted in.
Because the context is it seems like there's a man or probably a man who wants to divorce his wife frivolously.
Right.
Right.
And Jesus is saying, you were told if you're going to do that, if you're just going to get rid of her, get a new wife or whatever, you have to give her a certificate of divorce.
But I tell you.
But I tell you that no, the intention is that you stay married and only upon the grounds of.
Sexual immorality, can you get divorced?
And so the appealer here, or the person that Jesus is arguing against, is looking for how can I get out of a marriage?
Right.
We have to start this conversation too with the statement that ideally, even in the case of adultery, I'm not saying it would be easy or quick, but ideally, if the man would repent or the woman would repent, and there can be a reunification, like even there, It would be ideal he repents or she repents fully, they come back together.
What Jesus is saying is, what can get you out of a marriage?
Right.
What makes it permissible?
What makes it permissible for you to leave?
The ideal is almost always reconciliation.
Yes.
And so then, with the pornography question, it does come down to a discernment and wisdom and help from elders.
And so I'm not saying that it's not grounds for divorce.
I'm saying it is a little bit of a.
It becomes a discernment question that a local body of elders has to navigate through very carefully.
Yeah, what's difficult with it is in the case of adultery, indeed, not just the matter of the heart, not just the spirit of adultery, but action, behavior.
In the case of full blown adultery, it could be a scenario where it is a one off event, where a man or a woman gives into that temptation and commits that specific, right?
It's very tangible and objective, specific.
Behavior and then you know is either caught, or here's the thing about because it's an argument for permissibility.
It could be that, uh, that the individual even comes and confesses and is repentant, and it only happened one time.
Yep, and biblically speaking, the wife can still divorce that, or the husband, the other spouse, yeah, could divorce them, yeah, and because it's an argument from permissibility.
So it's not about the ideal, like we as elders, you know, Michael and I, um, that guy confesses, that guy comes and he's brokenhearted, he's in tears.
I love you, I'm so sorry.
Like, we would counsel that wife all day long.
Um, to do her best to forgive her husband and to reconcile the marriage, but if she uh was determined that she wanted a divorce, we would not place her under church discipline, right?
She wouldn't be uh disciplined for it.
So, when I compare that to the broader context of you know pornania and thinking of all forms of sexual immorality, um, if a guy looked at pornography one time, right, and same scenario confesses to his wife and is truly repentant and in tears, um.
And that wife said, I forgive him.
He's asked for my forgiveness.
I forgive him, but I do not trust him and I'd like to divorce him.
We would say, You're not permitted to divorce him.
Right.
So that's where all of a sudden the subjective comes in, where Wes, you have to begin making the argument of, well, but that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about if it's this number of times, or if there's no repentance, or if it's habitual, or if it's been for a month, or for a year, or for a decade.
But it's categorically different in the sense that in the case of adultery, to me, this is the big objective difference.
In the case of actual adultery, it could be one time.
And the person could immediately confess and be truly repentant, and that spouse could divorce them without any ecclesiastical consequences.
We would not put their spouse under church discipline.
Whereas in the other case, and I've literally pastored a case like this a few years back, where there was no adultery in actuality, indeed, but an individual who struggled with lust and masturbation.
And confessed.
Yep.
Was not caught, confessed, and was repentant.
And the wife literally used that argument to divorce her husband.
And in the state of Texas, it could be just one side.
And so she went all the way through with it.
We pleaded with her for months to change her mind, not to do it.
And she divorced her husband.
And I believe that that was absolutely right.
A sin, and that's in our whole church.
It was one of those matters that rose to the level where we had to tell it to the church, per Matthew 18.
And the church agreed unanimously that she was in sin and that it was not a lawful divorce because the man was repentant, he confessed, and he changed repentant in word and in deed.
He changed his behavior.
But I'm just saying that the key difference is if it was that exact same scenario, but instead of lust and masturbation, insert.
Adultery, we would have said, we think this is the wrong decision, and gosh, we wish that you would seek to reconcile.
Like, please don't do this.
But she wouldn't be placed under church discipline.
She would not be penalized for the decision of that divorce.
I think that's the categorical difference.
Yeah, so it's really tough.
And then the last thing I was going to say that further complicates it is kind of getting back to something that we've talked about in the past, and that we actually.
I'm going to talk about a little bit next week when we do an episode on gambling and how part of what makes gambling so difficult today is that gambling is almost like the oldest profession, like prostitution.
I mean, it's pretty old, but used to, you had to do the walk of shame.
Premeditated Crime vs Passion00:02:38
You got to walk to the bad part of town and go to the casino or whatever, or the den of thieves, the back room, and everybody knows what you're doing.
And you're paying a social consequence.
And it's just in terms of aside from just the shame, you know, culturally shameful, societal shame, it's also just practically inconvenient.
You got to put on pants, you got to walk down the street or hop in your car.
And then even when you think of, you know, modern times here in the United States, it's like I've got to fly all the way to Vegas, you know, and take time off of work and do this and make arrangements and get a hotel.
But now with sports gambling, being able to just.
On your phone, anytime, you know, and you can bet on anything.
You can bet on politics.
You can bet on anything.
And so, you can bet on anything and you can bet any amount.
Any amount from the click of a button, laying in bed at night.
Well, same kind of concept applied to Pornania.
Like, there was a time where it's like when you think of the premeditated, when I, you know, like we have these categories even when it comes to murder.
There's a crime of passion, you know, and then there's premeditated murder.
Like, this person has been, he's been noodling, right?
We like that word.
He's been noodling on this murder for quite some time.
I mean, he even busted out the whiteboard, you know, the charts, you know, he was plotting, he was scheming, he was playing.
He was at the range.
And we would all agree that, like, that is another level of malice.
Right.
Now, regardless of whether it incurs a different punishment, because biblically speaking, there's not three categories of, you know, third degree manslaughter and then second degree crime of passion and then first degree premeditated.
Biblically, there's only two categories, not three.
There's manslaughter, so it was an accident, accidental death, and then intentional.
And that intent could be in the moment, crime of passion, or it could be premeditated.
But both of those cases merit capital punishment.
So the punishment is the same.
So, and I'm going to go with the Bible.
So, I agree with that in terms of the punishment for second degree crime of passion and premeditated.
I think both should be capital punishment.
But even though I agree, of course, with the Bible and the penalties it ascribes, I think that there's nothing biblically to argue against the fact that the point that I'm making right now, which is both merit the death penalty.
But I think that one does still involve a higher degree of animus and malice and wickedness.
The one that was plotted and schemed.
Capital Punishment for All Crimes00:15:37
And it's not just I lost self control in a moment.
It's like I've been sitting here for months or even a couple of years plotting and scheming.
I think that's a greater wickedness.
So, that being said, when it comes to Punania, there is a different degree of wickedness.
The guy who waits till his wife is on a trip out of town, you know.
And then he saves up his money.
He has to pay for it.
And then he's going across town or he has to leave the state or the province, the area and go somewhere else and find a brothel.
That's different.
I think of biblical times in the first century.
And I think in their culture, if there was a man who on a daily basis was seeing women.
In their undergarments, they would say, Yeah, this man is riddled with porn in EA.
And in our context, I think, Well, that's a man who goes to the public park.
Right.
Right.
During the summer.
Yeah.
Like shorts that are literally somehow, I don't know, it defies the laws of physics, but shorts that are actually shorter than underwear itself.
Right.
You know, or like, what's the difference between a woman covering herself, you know, like, ah, you know, in her underwear versus a woman who is perfectly comfortable?
Well, if it's a swimsuit.
Right.
You know, and then all of a sudden it becomes socially acceptable, you know, to wear your underwear in public.
And so my point is like, when you think of technology, the cell phone, the access to porn, you think of the culture and the lack of modesty and just the way that, you know, people dress, if you just even go into the grocery store, you know, like you could make an argument.
We've made this argument that, yeah, you in our culture today probably shouldn't go to public pools.
We've made that argument.
But these days it's like, Because they're playing rap music, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
Oh, the other reason.
Both.
The rap music and the skimpy bathing suits.
But these days, you could just about make that same argument for why you can't go to Whole Foods.
Right.
You see what I'm saying?
The Costco would still be okay because there you've got full Hajib or whatever it is.
Right.
There you actually, but even in that case, you still got the midriff, right?
That 80 year old, it's crazy, dude, but the 80 year old Indian women.
I don't think there's a lot of risk.
They're just going to stay.
Porn AF.
Yeah, I don't know if that counts.
I'm not at risk.
I'm just that way.
But I'm saying, we live in Texas and this is like a weekly occurrence.
We go to Costco and I'm like, here.
You got to go to a different Costco.
I'm just going to put that out there.
No, it's not.
Not the one that we go to.
No.
Really?
Yeah.
Nathan, is it Sam's Club that you go to?
No, we go to the one up in Georgetown.
The North Georgetown one.
Yeah, we go to the one in Round Rock.
Nathan, do you go to the Georgetown Costco?
Yeah, you don't go to.
There isn't a Costco in Round Rock.
Yeah, my bad.
I don't know these things.
Have you been to the Georgetown one?
Yeah.
Is it better?
There's more diversity there.
I'll give it that.
I've been to both.
Nathan won't even answer the question.
He's like, the way I phrase it, better.
He knows what I mean.
But, anyways, the point is, you get my point.
So, Costco, who knows what the attire is going to be because you have every nation in the world represented.
But, seriously, the point is, it's not just the swimming pool anymore, it's the public park.
It's, you know, it's, can I go on a walk in my neighborhood?
You know, and there's some girl with like, Booty shorts jogging, you know.
And so, so, anyways, my point is just when I think of like what you're arguing, Wesley, like it was very well articulated, and especially, of course, you know, using the scripture that it's an actual different word.
You're right.
But my concern is, you know, with what Michael was saying, like in terms of like, how do we execute this?
How do we carry it out as a church and like as elders?
And I'm thinking, yeah, like it's, it's, I would never make that argument.
This guy looked at porn once and confessed and is deeply repentant, and it is now permissible for the wife to divorce him.
Or this guy went to the swimming pool with his family and his wife caught him looking too long at some teenage girl.
But he repented of it.
And it's like, yeah, if she wants, she can wreck the marriage.
I mean, that to me would be insane.
And so it's just crazy.
Like when I think of.
When I think of like this world, our culture today, technologically, the accessibility, the lack of modesty in real life, and coupling those two things together.
And then you couple that also with feminism.
So it's already, as it pertains, if it's the man who's failing, it's already ingrained in the hearts of not all, but many women to want out of the marriage.
And here's the biblical clause so I can maintain my Christian hat, you know, my Christian card.
And then, so that's feminism, churches, the average church plays a feminism, the technology, porn in your pocket, the culture, porn in the driveway, going for a jog.
And then, lastly, the courts.
And so, not only can she leave the marriage, but she can leave the marriage, and chances are she will get the kids and the house and this and that.
And so, I look at that, and that's why I'm slow.
I'm just slower to answer because I just.
Like the whole deck is rigged against, particularly against men.
Yeah.
The church needs to be involved, whether you would agree with Joel or you would say go broader.
There are, unfortunately, there are a lot of marriages, wives writing into like groups like Covenant Eyes, like, what do I do?
My husband has a habit and he just won't stop.
And so, Kevin also brought up that was on grounds for divorce, leaving the home.
So, a type of separation.
Yes.
Right.
Counsel the elders, but that would be a good step of this is serious.
This is not just, oh, I slipped up.
No, this is serious.
You need to leave the home and think twice who you want to be committed to.
Are you following Christ or following yourself?
Are you committed to this family or to your own pleasure?
Yeah.
I've counseled that before.
And that's, I'm glad you brought that up because even in cases of abuse, like physical abuse, people, There's a lot of Christians, like theologians, modern theologians, it's not a historic position, but modern theologians who want to add this third clause, a third A.
So, traditionally, there's a lot of guys on the side of adultery only, and then there are a lot of guys throughout church history on the side of adultery and abandonment.
But then there are modern guys who want to say adultery, abandonment, and abuse.
And that's the same kind of scenario where, in the case of abuse, we would never counsel anything that would physically endanger.
A wife and her children.
So we would immediately counsel separation.
And you might even call the police.
And if it's a crime, we would also call the state because that falls under their jurisdiction and that's biblically proper.
So involving the state.
So the church is now dealing with it as a discipline case, not yet risen to the point of excommunication, but we're telling it to the church.
We're dealing with this.
We've also informed the state.
So it's been presented to the proper authorities there.
If there's any crimes committed, then that man is subject to the penalties for those crimes.
And we've counseled immediate separation.
And it could even be that in the midst of separation, if he's particularly hostile, he's not repentant, then, number one, ecclesiastically, we would excommunicate him from the church.
And then, legally, civilly, with the state, we would immediately counsel that wife to file a restraining order against him.
But my point is we wouldn't just jump to, well, my husband has been.
Abusive, as terrible as that is.
And therefore, the Bible lets me divorce him.
And like, I'm not aware of that verse.
And the Bible matters.
So that's not, we're not saying we're going to endanger women and children.
We would make sure they're safe.
So to me, it's just a really, the whole, because the whole thrust, I like Michael that you brought in the larger context, the whole thrust of that text is to say, quit turning your wives away.
Right?
Quit divorcing lightly.
Right.
You know, I tell you like, You know, Moses said, offer a certificate of divorce, but I tell you, in the beginning, it was not so.
Right.
And so he's saying, this is not God's heart for marriage.
And it's a really, really big deal to end the covenant of marriage apart from anything but death.
And so then he's putting very strong guardrails.
He says, there's only one reason.
Jesus only gives one reason.
Now, you can argue that there's a second if you look at the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 7, but Jesus only gives one reason, and it is adultery, and then later uses the word pornania, which is broader.
But how that gets defined and how that gets applied, I think I personally could not apply it to he did it once, he repented, he confessed, and it's still permissible to divorce.
Whereas if it's full blown adultery, even in that scenario, we would never counsel divorce.
We'd say, please forgive and reconcile.
But she could divorce if it was even one time, not caught, confessed, repented.
All those things, if it was adultery.
And to be clear from the beginning, and I said it then, I'm not ever implying a single use time.
I'm talking about a literal adam who refuses to give it up.
I would think, my interpretation is, it sounds like we disagree.
I would think that's caught in what Jesus is saying of sexual immorality being that.
No, you made that very clear, and I completely agree.
I'm just saying that, to me, that's the categorical distinction is that you're saying no way would I counsel divorce with a one off off offense.
What I'm saying though is over here, a one off offense may not merit the counseling divorce, but the permissibility is there.
Yep.
Whereas you, correct me if I'm wrong, but you, not only would you not counsel it as the ideal, but you wouldn't even allow for it as a permissibility.
Nope.
If it was one time pornea.
Nope.
And even if it was repentant practically.
And again, repentant got to the point where you have to get rid of your phone.
Like, okay, I'm willing to do it.
And they somehow find it on a friend's phone.
But even there, no, I want to be done with this.
I want to be through with it.
Okay, you need to cut that friend off now.
So as long as they're even stepping in that, I don't think you're talking about, because that idea with pornea is a lifestyle.
That's some of the applications of it.
So, like at that point, he's saying, This could be defining me as a lifestyle, but I'm fighting by God's grace.
I'm attempting to put sin to death.
I have accountability partners.
The church is rallying around me.
I don't want to be defined by this.
I appreciate that.
So, you're saying like adultery is an act, pornea is a life, a sexually immoral life.
So, it's not just a moral, like he's drinking or partying or drugs.
It's not sexually immoral.
It's a way of life.
Whereas adultery actually is just an action, it could also be a way of life.
But it also can just simply be an action.
And because the covenant, the two shall become one.
In marriage, the act is the two becoming one.
And adultery, same thing with death, is it breaks the two apart.
That a man then binds to another woman, or a woman goes and breaks that bond and binds to another man.
But through sexual immorality, I think is Jesus' teaching, whether it be only the act of adultery, is that so broken by sexual immorality, by wickedness, by perversion, that nothing exists of it anymore.
So we say recognizing it in divorce is the final formal step.
For something that's already broken apart.
A man commits adultery, sleeps with another woman.
Divorce is simply recognizing that he already broke what was broken months prior.
It still runs into the at what point question.
And the Bible neglects often, even with church discipline for other things, it neglects to give us a list.
Yeah, it does.
Like we're talking about not having provided for eight months and unemployment ran out two months ago.
It always foregoes, says wisdom over let me give you the exact specifications for you to get Talmudic with it.
And that honestly, but that's how it is.
I appreciate you saying that because that is kind of the heart of the difference is like trying to predict every single scenario that could ever happen to where like there's so many rules and regulations that you're choked versus the Bible.
It's not that it doesn't offer anything that's tangible and concrete, but the heart of it is the spirit of the law.
Well, check out with Steve Lawson, and I'm not going to give a ton of details, but I think he technically maintained we didn't literally do the full and final act of consummation.
And so, technically, did he commit adultery?
But you would be able to say, no, you were sexually immoral with, even if you didn't literally technically do this, you did X and Y and Z with someone who is not your wife and you broke the covenant of marriage consciously and unrepentantly.
And for five years.
You don't get out of it because, well, technically, I actually.
But I think combined with that is also the fact that it was ongoing.
It was five years and he got caught.
Yep.
Steve Lawson did not confess.
Yeah.
And at.
It was questionable whether or not he was even repentant at first for a while there.
For a while, yeah.
And so, yeah, so I'm with you.
So let's say it was a one off in that scenario.
And he's like, well, technically, I didn't, you know, X, Y, and Z, but we were, you know, we were unclothed together and touching each other and those kinds of things.
Then, like, we would say, yeah, that's, we think that's adultery.
Yep.
Because that is a human inclination is to get out of it and be like, well, actually, like, no, you don't understand.
I didn't do this, the technical letter of the law versus this.
Right.
Yeah.
Bottom line is, I think, you know, we've answered the question, but bottom line here at the end is, It does.
Like, it's inescapable.
Like, I remember, you know, having more of a bent towards biblicism, right?
I mean, that sounds great, right?
Biblicism.
How's that?
Like, that's the best doctrine in the world.
Yeah.
And, like, and so, you know, but like, and I didn't, I wouldn't even use the word.
I wasn't even familiar necessarily with what that was.
But I recognize now, like, looking back, like, yeah, there were seasons of my life where I was a biblicist.
But the problem with biblicism is that the Bible doesn't work that way, the Bible is not biblicist.
What I mean by that is the Bible does not offer to us exact prescriptions for every scenario possibly imaginable under the sun to where we could just follow the formula.
The Bible gives us principles, and then what it requires is prudence.
It absolutely requires prudence.
And I understand that, like, yes, we don't want to rest on the wisdom of man, right?
So we have concerns, and rightfully so, towards man's reason versus God's wisdom.
But God's wisdom.
Prudence in Applying Biblical Principles00:02:14
In order to apply it properly, it requires regenerate man's reason.
It does.
That's inescapable.
You will never, whether it's politics or whether it's church life or whether it's family or whether it's personal virtue and piety and holiness at every single level, the Bible is not a formula.
It requires prudence and wisdom, and hopefully, prudence and wisdom from a regenerate, born again person who has a new nature.
And who is being conformed more and more into the image of Christ and has the mind of Christ and is thinking in godly ways.
But there's no escaping that.
If you're looking to escape that because you're like, well, but man is bad and totally depraved.
And yeah, but we're talking about Christians in this case.
But if you're still like, well, yeah, but Christians still sin.
Yes, and amen, that's true.
But if you're trying to find some kind of system, religious system, to avoid any element of man's wisdom because you know that there's the presence of sin.
Then may I direct you to Islam?
May I direct you to Judaism?
But the Bible actually is going to frustrate you.
All right.
That's it for today.
We have one last super chat from J Dog.
J Dog, thank you.
$2.
I actually don't know the answer to this question.
Did you guys receive the Deport Feminism stickers?
We did.
I have them over here.
Nathan, you want to bring me one real quick?
Oh, my goodness.
That doesn't work.
All right.
Here we go Deport Feminism.
Nathan's going to serve it real quick.
It needs to be by your face.
I like this.
Are these available, J Dog, for people to buy?
Deport feminism.
See if he may have already signed off, but we'll give him five seconds.
Are they available for people to purchase?
Yeah, just leave a comment.
So, J Dog, if you watch this later on, we gave you a shout out.
And if you want to leave a link, we won't treat it as spam.
We'll leave it up in the comment section if you want to leave a link where people can purchase that.
We would like to deport feminism.
So, all right, thanks for tuning in, and we will see you guys on Monday.