CrossTalk: Ex-Freemason SPEAKS Out About Satanic Agenda to Deceive Christians
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Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm Edward Zoll.
Today I have quite a special interview for you.
You've probably met someone who's a Freemason, a ring knocker, someone who likes secrets, likes illusions, likes to be part of secret societies.
Well, guess what?
If you're a Christian, you shouldn't be a Freemason.
We're going to talk about it today and a lot more on Crosslock News.
Crosslock News.
Welcome to CrossTech News.
I'm Edward Zoll.
Lauren is not in today.
She'll be back next week.
But I tell you, today I've got a very special interview.
Michael Whitcoff.
Michael Whitcoff is known to many in, I say, the dissident right or the white-pilled right, the Christian right, as someone many look to as a theologian.
He's an ortho bro, of course, but more than that, he's a brother in Christ.
He's got some interesting things to say about Freemasonry.
He was one of them, okay?
He's got the inside details.
Now during the summer of rage, statues of statesmen were ripped down throughout the country.
You remember this, right?
He had presidents, he had authors, he had anyone who wrote something that made others angry in this modern age.
Among the great slabs of rock ripped down was Confederate General Albert Pike.
Unlike the other historical figures not considered too racist for modern society, Albert Pike found great support among the D.C. elite because of his leadership role in the cult of Freemasonry.
Pike's body is buried at the D.C. headquarters of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, and their members also paid for the statue.
President Trump even tried to intervene to rebuild Pike's image in the Beltway.
Now, if you've been paying attention, Freemasons have long garnered great influence in our country.
And though their power seems to be waning, as lodges become more like retirement communities than halls of power and backroom deals, The legacy continues, and our brothers and sisters in Christ continue to get caught in this web of sorcery.
Now, as you can tell, I'm not a fan of Freemasonry, and neither is my guest, who will be joining me in one moment.
But I tell you this, for many people in this country, they're trying to find ways to hedge, get away from, to prosper at times, but at least to preserve their future.
It's not joining a free Mason Lodge, I can tell you that.
There's no secret society that's going to help you if you're listening to this program.
You're not part of the club, okay?
That's a good thing.
But I'll tell you this, if you've built up retirement for much of your life, one of the reasons we're able to do these interviews, no crazy ads, nothing too wild in here, is because of our sponsor, Golco.
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Now, of course, the sponsors we have, they do like the very interesting content that Crosstalk produces.
And among them, I've been looking for something to do on this subject for quite some time.
Not a fan of Freemasonry, but I tell you this, I've been looking for an expert, and I found him.
Michael Whitcoff used to be a Freemason, but came out of the secret society and now focuses on freeing others from the bondage of magic and illusion.
On Telegram and Twitter, Roth, Kim, and YouTube, he's known as Brother Augustine.
He's also the author of On the Masons and Their Lies, Whatever Christian Needs to Know, which you can find on Amazon.
Please do get a copy of this after the interview, by the way.
Help him out while he joins me now.
Well, welcome to Crosstalk News, sir.
So this topic is of great intrigue.
And I'll tell you this, there are going to be many people watching this interview this year, even 10 years from now, because what I hope we accomplish here is a comprehensive response from a Christian perspective of why people should not join a Freemason Lodge.
But welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Happy to be here.
Well, it's a pleasure after hearing about you.
Of course, I knew you from your telegram, your telegram name, Brother Augustine.
You're someone I've seen shared by Andrew Torba.
And Torba, he's a visionary.
I love him.
He's an ally in the fight.
And for sure, anything that is shared by him is something that I figure is of great value.
And this now led me to seeing a telegram post.
Of course, you were saying, I want to do a tell-all about Freemasonry.
I was like, hey, I have a show.
I'd love to speak to another Christian about this.
My background, Michael, is that I came from the military.
I was in the military eight years.
Freemasonry is rampant in the military.
Actually, they call them ring knockers.
I've got a ring on my finger now because I'm married.
Married under God.
Ring knockers would wear it for promotion.
It'd be the Freemasonry ring.
They'd sell all kinds of stories about how it's a Christian fraternity.
Can you start by explaining how you got involved in Freemasonry?
Sure.
So back in 2014, I lived in San Diego.
I had moved there from Hawaii, which I had moved to from North Carolina.
My 20s were kind of a blur of drifting and being a rootless cosmopolitan, as some people on Gab and other areas of the internet might say.
And I was working at Greenpeace at the time.
I was not a conservative.
I was not really politically active in any way, shape, or form.
I was raised in a reformed Jewish household, a liberal household, but I hadn't put any thought into politics.
So I thought Greenpeace, okay, saving the environment, whatever, that's a good cause.
Saving animals, saving the orangutans from burning in Indonesia when they're, you know, chopping all the trees down for palm oil.
Why not?
It's a good cause.
So every day on the way to and from work in San Diego, I would pass by this big, what I now know is the Scottish Rite Center.
In San Diego, in Mission Valley, with the big G, the square and compass on the side of the building.
And I'd heard a little bit about it because I was a New Ager.
I was into light occultism, I would say, at the time that got darker and heavier as time went on.
And when I started at Greenpeace, I was on the door team, which means that instead of standing at a mall or outside a grocery store, which I would eventually do, I started on the door team knocking on doors.
They would give us a map of the neighborhood, say this guy's a donor, go get more money from him or thank him for signing up.
These people are cold prospects, go get them to subscribe to Greenpeace for a monthly fee, whatever.
And there was an individual, a man that I canvassed at his house and he had the square and compass on his door frame.
And I said to him, so what is this symbol?
You know, I see this on this building on the way to work, but I don't really know much about it.
And he said, it's Freemasonry.
I said, okay, well, what is Freemasonry?
And he said, it's the world's oldest and largest fraternity.
I said, okay, but like, what kind of stuff do you do?
And he was very cryptic.
You know, he wouldn't give me many answers.
He was saying, you know, that's, we do stuff that you kind of have to be part of the fraternity to understand the rituals and whatnot.
And so immediately this intrigued my curiosity.
I thought, oh, someone has secrets.
Someone has secret knowledge.
And as a very prideful person, even more then than I am now, hard to believe I know, but it's true, you know, I wanted to have secret knowledge and find the truth and know what all about reality, and I'd already been deep into the pickup artist world for many years, so I was all about finding the truth and taking the red pill in whatever way I could possibly do.
And so one day, later on the street team, I decided to go to that lodge, that Scottish Rite Center, and just ask questions and just see what was going on.
So I went there with a co-worker, a female co-worker.
And so we got in there.
There's all these guys wearing suits and looking all fancy.
And we walked in wearing our Greenpeace shirts.
I had long hair at the time.
We probably smelled like marijuana.
And I said, hey, I'm curious about this place.
Can you tell me more about it?
And the first words out of his mouth, the guy looked at her and said, well, you're a woman, so you can't join.
And this woman was a hyperfeminist, and her face turned bright red, and it was epic.
So immediately, I was like, okay, yeah, it was pretty great.
Because even though I wasn't conservative or politically active, I was already starting to find my way out of the whole feminism thing.
There was a channel called Girl Writes What, a woman named Karen Strawn, that I'd been consuming all of her videos and being like, whoa, I never heard words like this before, dynamics like this before.
So this guy that ended up being a mentor to me in masonry was sitting there explaining it to me in the way that they can explain to outsiders.
You know, it's a progressive system of morality veiled in symbols and told by allegory or something similar to that phrase.
And I said, okay, I hear there's like 33 degrees, like what are the degrees about?
And he said, well, the third degree is higher than the 33rd degree.
So once again, I'm being presented with this very cryptic puzzle that I don't understand and naturally want to learn more about.
And so I said, okay, well, how do you join?
They said, well, you have to have been in California for a year.
And I said, I think it was one year.
This was like, this was in 2014.
So I don't remember if they said one year or two years.
I think it was one year.
And I'd been to Hawaii, but I lived in California earlier because I went to college in California and they kind of finagled it and let me join.
So in November of 2014, I became what's called an Entered Apprentice Mason, which is the first degree of Freemasonry.
And immediately I was, it was like a new world.
And I want to start by saying that I had, I didn't have any like bad experiences there.
It's not like sometimes when people leave a group and speak out against it, something happened, some personal thing happened, and they're pretending they left because of the other reasons, but it's really about a personal thing.
Nothing like that happened.
I had a really good time.
I learned really important lessons.
I really liked being there.
I liked most of the guys.
There was like two guys I didn't get along with.
I had never really had roots in a group before.
Like I said, I was a drifter through most of my 20s, after college anyway.
And all of a sudden, I was an officer, right?
I had the rings.
The lapel pins.
I was important.
I had responsibilities.
I learned about hierarchy and how a group of men works.
You know, which might sound kind of like a default thing to understand for someone like you, Edward, who's come out of the military, but for someone who's just been a drifter and doing everything on my own for my whole adult life, I didn't really understand how a male hierarchy works, how a group works, the levels, and each guy obeys the guy above him.
So I was introduced to this- They offered brotherhood and structure.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Brotherhood and structure, which I really appreciated, and it's a very important part of life, whether it's the lodge or not.
Obviously, these days, I'm saying not so much.
You can find that elsewhere.
But just being introduced to those concepts was very important to my growth as a man.
And then I was reading about philosophy and There's all these degrees to get and the Master Craftsman program, the Scottish Rite, where you really get into the history of masonry.
And I just found it very fascinating.
And that word is important.
Fascinating, not just being interested, but almost like consuming.
Fascinating in a way that it kind of sucks your attention and then draws you in deeper and deeper.
I think I use this phrase in my book, On the Masons and Their Lives, which I got an old version of right here.
Thank you.
It's a very good book.
I've gone two-thirds of the way through.
I knew even before reading it, this was going to be a great read because I could tell you came from it from the perspective of you learned.
You learned not just as someone who's been awoken to the inner workings of masonry, but the Holy Spirit showed you what you needed to learn from this also to help others.
I mean, what better way?
It's not just getting yourself out of it, but you're trying to help others come out of this bondage.
Yes, and then looking back on it, I see that's where God's hand was in it.
He allowed me and my stupidity to go through something dark so that later when I converted, I could testify against it and help bring other people out of that darkness.
And I still think that my joining was based on an inherently good trait, which is a search for truth, not the pride part and wanting the fancy jewelry and being part of a secret society.
All that's obviously bad.
But my desire to learn more about reality and the truth, I feel, is an inherently good thing, which eventually did lead me to God and to Orthodox Christianity, where I am now and have been for, let's see, over four and a half years of an Orthodox Christian.
But at the time, it was just all new to me.
I liked it, and like I said, fascination because it sucks you in, and occultism is like a chew toy for intelligent people.
There's no end to it.
I don't know if you've gotten to that part of the audiobook yet, where I talk about symbols, meaning numbers, meaning animals, meaning a zodiac sign, meaning a special medal, meaning the quote-unquote deity of a planet.
Like, it just kind of goes around and around and around.
You're just chewing on this chew toy.
It doesn't get you anywhere.
But that's, for someone with an overactive mind, that was really, really interesting to me.
And so I really devoted myself wholeheartedly to it.
And so that is a short-ish version of the story of how I joined.
Well, I appreciate you sharing the short-ish version.
The version is probably a mirror of many young men's journeys, whether it be Freemasonry or any search for something outside of the church.
So many men are lacking community.
So many men are isolated.
Some by design.
You could say society itself is organized in a manner now that you and I are going to turn to government.
We're going to turn to idolization of certain figures like Andrew Tate and others that we're going to follow him, the pickup artist.
The smart ones, the wise ones will go the way of Roosh.
I'm a big fan of Roosh.
I know he came out of pickup artistry to realize it's not about him.
It's not about him.
He was, in a sense, a rebellion against his own creator.
Roosh is such a beautiful guy.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with Roosh's work.
You probably are.
But I'd say he's so humble.
He doesn't stream it all, for example, because he doesn't want to make it about him because of how he spent 10, 20 years before to make it about him.
In regard to making it about you, my understanding of Freemasonry is in a form of ignorance.
I have an amateurish understanding because I've heard a lot of rumors.
I know in your book, you've addressed the dispel some of these rumors.
And specifically, you wrote it not just for the laity, but for priests.
Because you have an example, I believe, a congregation where you started attending a Wesleyan church, if I remember reading this correctly.
Most of the men in the congregation were Freemasons in a church.
Okay.
So I have to correct a little bit of your story because First of all, as to Roush, I've known Roush since before either of us was Christian.
I actually used to write for Return of Kings back in the day.
So it's been really cool to grow in this way.
And I talk to him all the time about our past and growing from it and being married now myself, coming out of that pickup backpack.
Wow.
Praise the Lord.
Yeah.
He just got back from Mount Athos, actually, which is for Orthodox Christians.
Is that what he's been doing?
We always wonder.
Don't hear from him.
I see his articles, but I'm wondering.
Yeah.
No, he's doing well.
He's following his journey.
So when I became a Protestant, I went to a Wesleyan congregation.
However, what you're referring to was actually an Antiochian Orthodox priest who told me that in his parish, almost all of the adult men at one point were Freemasons.
When I was a Wesleyan, actually, there were guys in that congregation that confronted me about it because sometimes I would show up to church wearing my Masonic jewelry because I didn't know at the time that these were incompatible.
I'd go to the lodge, and then I would go there afterwards.
And a couple guys—it was actually one guy and his father—confronted me about it, told me it was evil and Luciferian and Illuminati.
And I totally dismissed it.
I blew them off.
Said, you guys don't know what you're talking about.
That's just propaganda.
And looking back, they were completely right.
So I just wanted to throw that quick correction out there.
Oh, sure.
Not just a correction.
It's a clarification.
I appreciate you.
Because I know part of your journey is you went from a Wesleyan Protestant church to now Orthodoxy.
I think this is happening across the board.
We're not going to be speaking about this per se now, but I've started myself on this journey, this journey of getting deeper to learn about what the church fathers really said.
For me, I was saved out of a Protestant church in Chicago that didn't even have crosses up.
But you know what?
Holy Spirit touched me there, spoke to me there.
And of course, my wife, my wife being a very strong believer out of this church, we now are much deeper in our faith.
But I know many brothers, many brothers, what we would call dissident right, or I like to call it the Christian right, the white-pilled right, okay?
It's not about red pills, it's about white pills.
Try to save people from the black pills, okay?
But I'll tell you this, people are on this journey to deepen their faith and they're finding Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy.
And I'm not one to get in the middle of the fights between the two doctrines.
I do understand them.
But what I do also understand is that we are fighting a coalition of evil.
A coalition of evil with a devil, as you noted, I believe, in your book.
He can never be redeemed.
And the angels that fought alongside him, the one-third that rebelled against the Lord, they can never be redeemed either.
And I believe you said misery likes company.
Well, that's who my enemy is.
Not my brothers and sisters in Christ, of course.
Well, I want to get into this.
So I've run across, and you've run across probably thousands now of people that may be messaging you about this subject.
Why shouldn't a Christian be a Freemason?
I mean, you came out of it.
You came out of it because people confronted the Holy Spirit spoke to you.
But what is the most convincing argument for why a Christian should avoid a Freemason launch?
Can I address your comment about the devil very briefly first?
Yeah, sure.
Go ahead.
So when you say can't be redeemed, if that's a quote from my book, and I think it is, I just want to clarify And I would have to check with the church fathers on this because I submit to them as my authorities on these topics now.
I don't know if it's that he can't be redeemed or it's that he will never humble himself and therefore be redeemed.
So I think if he can't be redeemed, it's because of his own fault and refusal to humble himself.
I would defer to, and I do ponder that.
Is the devil redeemable?
That's probably a very deep theological question.
I think if he would repent, then you could...
Well, I don't know.
If the devil repented...
I don't know.
We're getting into way different topics now.
No, it's a good theological discussion.
If you want to delve it, we can delve it.
And my mistakes.
I'm a young Christian.
I'm just looking at what I've read on this.
Me too.
You know, it's an interesting question.
And I'd say, one, so the devil is responsible for society, mankind, being corrupted, right?
And we know what's said...
Go ahead.
I wouldn't entirely agree with that, actually.
I would say man's falling away from God and giving into the deception of the devil.
Because the devil can tempt you, but he can't force you to give into it.
It's ultimately us that turns away from God and brings sin into our lives, right?
And what I'd point to maybe is the book of Revelation.
I believe in the text, in the Revelation of John, it speaks about the devil being cast into the lake of fire.
So as that is almost a foregone conclusion.
And I suppose you could go the direction of saying, okay, Did the devil have a chance at redemption?
Some might look at it.
Some theologians might look at it.
I'm sure the church maybe has a very strong opinion on this.
Some may say that the chance at redemption was prior to the revolution in heaven, right?
The second he said, I wanted to be like God.
I want to rebel against God and lead one-third of the angels against God and two-thirds of the angels.
That may have been the moment.
When he was cast down to earth to be separated, that's another example.
I mean, he tried to tempt Jesus.
We know this from the New Testament.
We know that the devil tried to tempt Jesus and give him all the kingdoms of the earth, which he spoke as which he has authority over, right?
But maybe I'd point to the book of Revelation.
And I know that you studied the scripture, so this is why it's a treat.
I do want to entertain these.
I want to hear your opinion on this.
I don't know, because I want to think, maybe I'm just being optimistic and charitable, but I would like to think that if the devil repented, God would give him a second chance.
But given what the devil is, I don't think he's ever going to.
I believe the devil and his angels are going to be forever in the lake of fire, as you've said.
I'm just wondering as a point of pure speculation, but what if he repented?
But I don't know.
I can't speak on it.
I'm not a theologian, and I don't know what the Father said.
We might have to readdress this at some future time.
Well, definitely, and I'm sure people in the comments will.
I wouldn't dare throw another Molotov in the mix here and say, okay, did Judas repent?
Did Judas repent when Jesus went down to Hades and preached the gospel in Hades before resurrection?
It's another interesting question.
Maybe not one we're addressing today, but Through for thought.
If you have thoughts on this, and maybe ask Ruch on this.
Ruch, I'm sure we'll have some opinions on this.
And maybe that's the follow-up.
The follow-up interview.
Can the devil be redeemed if in theory?
And two, did Judas repent?
Okay.
Good questions.
They're really good questions.
Well, on the subject of Freemasonry, why should a Christian not become a brother, a brother in a lodge?
Okay, so I have to answer that question in terms of anthropology and worldview.
Doing the big, big picture answer here.
In terms of anthropology, we have to start with what is a human being?
What is our purpose and what is our origin, right?
We know Christ, the Alpha and the Omega.
He is the beginning and the end.
And for us Orthodox Christians, that means he is both the blueprint on which we are built as human beings, our beginning in that sense, And our end as in what we are supposed to become in the sense of what we call theosis, growing in union with God, becoming Christ-like, restoring the tarnished likeness of God that we all have through our sins.
So I believe it was Saint Athanasius that described this in the way that the Orthodox usually do, which is to say that our goal is to become by grace what Christ is by nature.
So for us, salvation is not necessarily a moment of conversion so much as a lifelong deepening and growing in union with God and growing into what He is, but by grace for us, because we are ontologically human and not divine, right?
Christ is ontologically divine.
He is God.
We are human.
We can grow to be what we say will be called deified or divinized, as the Roman Catholics might say, but it means the same thing.
In some respects, it means the same thing.
At least it used to before they split up.
A whole different conversation.
We become by grace what Christ is by nature.
So the end point of a human being for a Christian is to become Christ-like in terms of mastering our passions, inculcating the virtues.
Of course, there are saints that have achieved some level of omniscience because they can tell what someone's sins are before the person speaks.
In Mount Athos, where St.
Roos just visited, for example, you'll find many stories Of someone going just to visit a monk, and before the person even opens his mouth in confession, the monk tells them what their sins are.
So we believe that through this lifelong process of theosis, we can take on some of these more divine qualities, like it says in the scripture, partaking of the divine nature.
So for a Christian, that's the point, right?
Is to become like Christ.
So we have to compare that to what Freemasonry wants you to become.
Because if these two are different, then we have to Make a distinction, and this is where worldview comes into place.
So Christians believe that matter is created out of nothing, right?
There's an uncreated world, which is just the Trinity, essentially.
I'm using the word world in a way that people might nitpick, but there's the uncreated, and for the Orthodox Christians, which is the Trinity.
There's God.
Everything else is created, whether it's visible or invisible, whether it's like the things in my room or the angels.
This is all created stuff, but it's all created out of nothing.
We don't believe that matter itself is divine, that matter itself is God in any way.
Now, if you look at the actual philosophy of Freemasonry, and this is where Masons will disagree, either because they don't know, which is probably the main issue, Or because they're intentionally lying, which I think is a much smaller minority of Masons that talk about this.
Freemasonry is built on Kabbalah.
I often call Freemasonry Kabbalah for Gentiles because that really is what it is.
In the rituals, you have these two pillars that they say represent Solomon's Temple, but then in the fourth degree of the Scottish Rite, called Secret Master, They show you the Tree of Life glyph with the Sephiroth from the Kabbalah and say, this is what the pillars are actually representing.
Is Kabbalah magic?
Kabbalah is a worldview and there are ways to do sorcery from within the world of Kabbalah.
Is it Jewish in origin?
Well, I would say it's satanic, but yes, it's Jewish in origin.
I've heard it referred to as the voodoo that Jews do.
Judo?
Sure, sure.
Let's go with that.
Yeah.
Yes.
Carry on.
Kabbalah is Judo.
And Freemasonry tells you, like I said, in the Scottish Rite that it's built on Kabbalah, and that's what these pillars represent.
It's not Joachim and Boaz, pillars in Solomon's Temple.
It's actually mercy and severity.
And they give you this whole thing.
Where I saw the fourth degree of the Scottish Rite, they put this big Image on the wall showing you the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.
But Kabbalah is a very different worldview than creation out of nothing.
Kabbalah is the worldview that at the top, this limitless light or iron and so forth, layers of matter until you get to the very bottom, which is Earthly creation, right?
What they call Malkuth, if I'm remembering correctly.
I haven't looked at this stuff in a long time, but I believe that's what they call the lowest level.
And so for them, Everything is inherently divine and the growth of a person is essentially to walk your way back out of these lower layers of density towards we're basically remembering that you are actually god that's that's more or less what kabbalah is it's seeing and they say this in the 32nd degree of the scottish right that you are a ray of the divine light Right?
So that you are ontologically divine, just like everything else, because all matter is actually God.
And this is a worldview called pantheism, that God is the world, which is not what Christians believe.
So now if God is the world, or I guess the world is God would be a more accurate way of putting it in a cabalistic worldview.
Well, first of all, becoming Christ-like is completely irrelevant.
What they want you to do is become God without God.
That's the distinction here, right?
This was the offer made to Adam and Eve by the devil.
You can become like God, but without God.
Whereas for Orthodox Christians, we become gods by grace, but not by nature.
And it's only by submission to God and union with him that we become the God with a little g.
So becoming God with God or without God is the distinction.
You cannot be a Christian and believe in the Christian concept of anthropology and what creation is, what the cosmos is, And also in the Kabbalistic view of man and creation.
That's the very, very high-level overview.
Now, as to what's said in these specific rituals and what 33rd-degree Masons have said, that's kind of chunking down a bit, but that's the big-picture view, is that it's a completely different religion and a completely different outlook on mankind and creation itself.
So, of course, the lore that man can be like God, man can be as powerful as God, man can manifest and create, which you and I both know is not something that is reality.
You know, I used to joke the only two things- No, the law of attraction stuff.
Yeah, Law of Attraction.
Yeah, you know this from the Pick Up Artistry days.
There's a joke.
The only two things that man can even remotely create is music and codes, actually.
Coding.
Coding itself, it's not really creation.
I would be cheapening the majesty of God's creation.
In respect to Freemasonry, I believe in your book you noted that the weirdest part, so you didn't call it weird, I found it a little weird thinking about it in this way, is that Freemasonry, the concepts which people have adopted, These ideas are not new individually, separately.
They've been addressed by church fathers in the past.
So when Freemasonry came about, people who knew their history had read the works of brothers and sisters who have passed.
They knew, okay, this is just like these past heresies which we've confronted.
Speak to this because, again, I know many people are going to watch this, Michael.
They're going to say, well, you know, like Michael.
Michael was in a church.
Maybe Michael just wasn't practicing for racism the same way I am.
I don't follow Albert Pike, for example.
I'm just doing it for brotherhood or community.
It's like a bowling team, a bowling club.
Why is it not that?
Well, I think for most guys, that is exactly what it is.
And they don't really dive deeper into the philosophy.
And there's also a degree, no pun intended, to which the quality of a person's mind either gets or doesn't get what masonry is.
And Albert Pike refers to the people that get it as the elect or the adepts, is a phrase he likes to use in Morals of Dogma.
So not everyone has the sort of mind that is kind of tenable to the occult.
And if you don't have the sort of mind that is, like mine was, then you're not really going to get what's happening.
So it's not that most Masons are lying when they say that, you know, for them it's just charity and brotherhood and maybe business networking opportunities, who knows?
They just kind of don't get the bigger picture.
My counter-argument to that would be, first of all, Albert Pike essentially designed the entire 32 At least the first 32 degrees of the Scottish Rite that we use in America.
So why would you say that you understand these rituals better than the guy who put them together in the first place?
That's kind of strange, right?
And I would also say, why is it that all the 33rd degree Masons, these guys who have attained this specific honor that Masonry itself has elevated as, you know, examples of really good Masons, why is it that none of them appear to be just traditional Christians?
They're all into either Kabbalah or outright heretical things or occultism or sorcery.
I mean, in my book, I go through J.D. Buck and his book Mystic Masonry.
I go through Manly P. Hall, Secret Teaching of All Ages, Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma.
If it's a perfectly good thing for Christians to be part of, why is it that the guys at the highest levels of the fraternity In some cases, like J.D. Buck, openly say this is not Christians, and we consider Christians to basically be dumb rubes who don't understand the real philosophical root of their religion, right?
Because they're convinced they understand the religions better than people who are actually faithful practitioners of those religions.
This is a philosophical view called perennialism, and it's part of Kabbalah, or at least it's a corollary to Kabbalah, where basically what they believe Is that all the different religions are all pointing to the same truth at the end of the day, and all those little differences are just kind of irrelevant.
Or, you know, the same God that they would say gave the New Testament to Christians at this point in time, in this place, and the Koran to Muslims at this time and place, and this other book to this other people at this time and place, but really it's all leading in the same direction.
And in order to believe that, you have to not actually know anything about what any of them teach.
I mentioned in my book early on, a quote from Father Andrew Stephen Damick's book, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, where he says, to tell people that all their religions are the same is really to do violence to what any of these people believe.
Because a Muslim trying to get to his version of heaven is not doing the same thing a Hindu is doing, trying to attain their version of the highest realization of mankind.
Right?
It's not the same as a yogi.
It's not the same as an occultist.
It's not the same as a Jew.
All of these religions are very different.
They have very different outcomes.
They have different paths to those outcomes.
And so to say that you understand them better than those people and they all say the same thing is really just to say that you're prideful and ignorant because you can't look at these books of different religions and conclude that they're all the same.
It requires a certain sort of Arrogance and almost intentional stupidity, forgive me for using such a strong word, an intentional stupidity of not actually diving into what the religions teach.
Now, in Albert Pike's case as to, you know, why Christians can't be Freemasons, in Morals and Dogma, he is constantly quoting from people that, like you were talking about the Church Fathers, that the Church Fathers have condemned as heretics, right?
He's quoting from Basilides, he's quoting from Arius.
He upholds Arius One of the first arch-villains in all of Christian history, condemned at the First Ecumenical Council as this example of a guy that really got it.
He understood.
The Church Fathers, he was unjustly vilified, I think Pike might suggest.
But you have hundreds of bishops coming together to denounce Arius for his views, and Pike saying, no, look, he really got it.
And if you read through, I mean, it's a gigantic book.
Saint Irenaeus wrote a book Almost 2,000 entire years ago called Against Heresies.
That's actually the short title.
The full title is Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-called, which just rolls right off the tongue, I know.
That's why most people call it Against Heresies.
He was trying to be full of the title.
I wanted to make sure we understood the contents.
Yes, yes.
He goes through all the heresies that had arisen by his time and goes through them in the tiniest minutiae nitpicking detail.
And a lot of that stuff is condemned.
And to use a modern example, some people are going to be upset about me for saying this, but it's okay because it's true.
And like St.
John Chrysostom says, we can't mind offending man if by not offending man, we offend God.
So sometimes we have to say the truth, even if it upsets people.
We look at Mormonism, for example.
Mormons consider themselves to not just be Christians, but to be the restoration of the true original church.
This is the way they conceive it to themselves.
The more you look into their religion, however, the more you see that it has very little to do with what Christians have ever taught.
It's not a monotheistic religion from what Mormons that I know have explained it to me.
They believe God the Father started as a human being.
We certainly don't believe that.
And if you look at their idea of anthropology, this idea that human souls pre-existed in heaven with God and then kind of became matter later, well, this is what Origen taught and was anathematized for 1500 years ago.
So there really is nothing new under the sun.
All the heresies in today's world are pretty much just reiterations or mishmashes of earlier heresies, which you might call heresy build-a-bears, where you just take an arm from this heretic and a leg from this one, the stuffed head from this one, and then, yeah, you throw some originism in.
Like we said, nothing new under the sun.
And so when you go through the things that masonry That the Masons teach who have reached the high levels, the 33 degrees, the guys considered the pillars and philosophers of Masonry.
All they're saying is stuff that Christianity has condemned and condemned a long time ago, which is why in the back of my book, I have a chapter called Masonry in the Churches, where I go through statements different Christian organizations have made about Freemasonry.
And pretty much every single one of them that's ever studied the topic in depth has made two conclusions.
First conclusion, Freemasonry is its own religion.
They tell you it's not.
Everyone who looks at it in depth says, yes, this is actually its own religion with its own dogma, with its own rituals and pseudo-sacraments even in the Scottish Rite.
And not only is it its own religion, it's a religion that is anathema to Christianity.
It's a separate religion, an irreconcilable religion.
So if a Freemason believes that it's compatible with Christianity, he has to ask himself, well, why is it that not only all the Christians who have ever looked at it disagree, that have looked at it as a corporate body in depth, but why is it that all the highest level Freemasons also disagree with me that you can't be a Freemason and a Christian at the same time?
Now, the Scottish Rite has always maintained that Albert Pike was a Christian for his entire life, But then you have to get into questions of, well, what do you mean by Christian, right?
Not to sound like Jordan Peterson, but in this particular case, you have to ask, what do you mean?
Because again, like we find the Church Fathers saying, St.
Jerome saying, heretics always have the word Christ on their lips.
They use the same words, but they mean something different by those words.
So Pike may well have believed he was a Christian his whole life, but his understanding of what that means is wildly different and anathema to what the Church has always taught.
It makes me think of Simon the Sorcerer.
It makes me think of Simon the Sorcerer in the Book of Acts.
Oh, he's quoted in Morals and Dogma, too.
Oh, he is.
Interesting.
Because he was condemned by the apostles for wanting to make money off the Holy Spirit, remember?
He's like, oh, this is an interesting thing you apostles have.
Oh, how can we use this to make money?
And this man known as Simon the Sorcerer, someone doing magic, doing these things, he knew part of the gospel, right?
That's one of the interesting aspects of that.
John Koshostrom, you mentioned Golden Tongue.
I'm a big fan of Golden Tongue.
He's a man like you and I who spend a lot of time reading.
I wish we had more time to read.
Read, read, read.
I know it was early in your book.
You noted one of the reasons that people just want to be, I guess, just selfish about this.
You have a zero-sum day.
So you only have 24 hours in the day.
You're sleeping for about eight of them, hopefully.
You only got so many hours in the day to work, maybe two to three hours now these days to read and consume information, ponder it.
Do you ponder the Lord or do you ponder what you're noting is a completely separate religion?
Now, I want to point out that I know from, again, my interaction with Freemasonry, you were in it, I was around him.
They offered me to join.
I didn't join, I'll tell you this, Michael, because they were doing some very odd things.
They were holding certain parties where you would...
Yes, you know what I might be talking about.
So they were holding certain parties and I was a non-commissioned officer.
I kept trying to make sure my soldiers wouldn't get sucked into these forms of sexual debauchery.
I said, I don't want my soldiers getting tricked into going with these parties and some sergeant major, some captain who's a mason, would then say, hey, well, if you want to join, there's an initiation.
It's kind of like a gang, right?
But I know this.
There was always a darkness around it.
Even before I was a Christian, I knew it was like something weird, okay?
Then I became a Christian.
I said, okay, I got to stay away from this.
I know you spoke about this in your book, and I think many of our brothers would greatly benefit from hearing your perspective on this, your experience specifically.
There is something very dark about the study of Freemasonry.
Even preparing for your book, you noted that you had to take breaks in studying the works of these people like Albert Pike, okay?
Because it is evil.
It's satanic.
It's something that has a power around it.
How would you address this to our brethren?
Because many of us, we have access to the internet now.
Many of us will spend hours on end.
I mean, people know about pornography addiction and digital fentanyl in this respect, but they don't think about bad information, evil information, as being potentially as poisonous, as poisonous as looking to things like Freemasonry.
Can you speak to this?
Yeah.
I'm going to read you a quote from Manly P. Hall from his book, The Lost Keys of Freemasonry.
He says, and again, this is a 33rd degree, Freemason considered one of their utmost and highest philosophers, says, quote, when the Mason learns that the key to the warrior on the block is the proper application of the dynamo of living power, he has learned the mystery of his craft, the seething energies of Lucifer are in his hands.
That is a quote from Manly P. Hall, the seething energies of Lucifer.
Now, Masonry will tell its candidates and members, That Masonry is all about the search for light and the lost word.
And I talk about this in my book as well, in the chapter, which I think is called light and the lost word.
You have to search for Masonic light and the lost word of God.
Well, wait a second.
I thought Christ was the light.
I thought Christ was the word of God.
So what are we talking about?
What light is it that Masons are following?
Well, this goes back to our conversation about Satan.
What does the Bible say about Satan?
How does he appear?
As an angel of light.
Satan presents himself as a good guy.
That's one of his most powerful tools.
When he presents himself as a bad guy, for example, in what are called like left-handed occult groups, groups that practice sorcery and black magic intentionally on purpose, you know, that's very on the nose for Satan.
Much more effective to say, you know, this group is totally cool for Christians.
You just join.
You learn some philosophy.
There's brotherhood.
We do all this charity.
Isn't this amazing?
That's way more effective.
Then the dark and evil join this group and be an evil Satanist, right?
Way too on the nose.
Way more guys are going to get caught in the net if the net appears to be something good.
And that's what Freemasonry is.
You just heard it from Manly P. Hall, that the Mason has learned his craft when the seething energies of Lucifer are in his hands.
Now this energy is everywhere.
That's the darkness that you're feeling, the darkness that falsely calls itself light.
It's in their books.
It's when you're around them.
This is hard to explain.
You understand because of what you said, but there are people you can be around that have something very unsettling about them.
They're not saying something evil.
They're not doing something evil, but there's something about the essence of what they are that's just off-putting and you're like, something smells wrong here.
They're unsettled.
Those are the kinds of people.
Yeah, exactly.
They themselves are unsettled.
Those are the kind of people that are everywhere in masonry.
Where back then, I thought it was really cool.
I was like, wow, they have this really subtle power It's almost like they have this control over their environment, over their conduct, over the people around them.
Like, where do I learn this power?
Right?
Not from a Jedi.
Where do I learn this power?
Now that I'm a Christian, I go, oh, that power, that is literally the seething energies of Lucifer.
That's what I was feeling.
That's what I was seeking at the time.
That's what I wanted.
Until I realized that there's no price worth selling your soul for.
And I started to become Christian, and as I got deeper and deeper into it, realized, okay, I have to choose.
I can't be both.
I tried to be both for a while, to walk the line, have one foot on each side of the fence.
I ended up as some kind of Gnostic Christian for a while, and I was trying to convince myself that I could still do both.
I even briefly considered myself a cather, this ancient medieval Christian heresy group, like a Christian hermetic.
In France, right?
Yes.
They were French, right?
Yes, yes, yes.
And they were, and they were very brutally stamped out.
Slaughter, in fact.
I think that was actually the incident.
I forgot the guy who killed them.
I think that's where the phrase, kill them all and let God sort them out, comes from.
Because if I remember right, some of his soldiers were like, well, we don't know who's a Catholic and who's a Catholic.
And he was like, well, I'll just kill them all and God will figure it out.
I think that's where that comes from.
But I might be wrong with that.
Brutal.
Brutal mankind, I'll tell you what.
Yes.
But that's what the dark energy is.
That's why if you start to feel sick, Reading morals and dogma, for example, because even if you can't articulate why, you know, if you read the scriptures with any sort of regularity and that's kind of seeped into your mind and the way you think and perceive and experience, something's going to feel off to you.
And I think a good analogy, I've never been a police officer myself, but I'm told that the way they learn to identify counterfeit money is just by handling real dollar bills, like just Doing this, like feeling it, feeling it, feeling it so much that when they feel a counterfeit veil, even if they can't tell you, oh yes, it comes from the wrong kind of textile or something is off about the fabric, even if they can't verbalize it, they can just immediately tell this is not the real thing.
So if you read the scriptures in the Church Fathers and then you read Morals and Dogma, it's not going to feel like the real thing.
And the answer is that it's not.
It's counterfeit.
It's fake light.
It's searching for the lost word, who is not lost, who is everywhere around us, right?
Who is in the scriptures, who is in the fathers, who is in the saints, who is in our lives.
That Christ is not lost.
The word of God is not lost.
He might be lost to some individuals, right?
He wants to find them.
Really, they're the ones that are lost to him and not the other way around.
But how could a Christian join the lodge, and as he's entering his first degree, Identify himself as someone who has long been in darkness and now seeks the light.
Well, wait a second.
And I wasn't a Christian when I joined, but if you're a Christian joining the Lodge, how can you identify yourself as having long been in darkness?
What is the darkness that you feel your Christian confession was?
And if you really pay attention to the wording of the rituals, I think it becomes very, very obvious that you can't be a Mason and a Christian.
For example, in one of the oaths, you take an oath in each degree.
Certain promises that come with certain gruesome, brutal penalties.
And one of the oaths you vow, on pain of torture, to cover for the secrets and crimes of other Freemasons, murder and treason accepted.
Those are the only two exceptions.
So what does that mean?
That means that if one of your Masonic brothers says, I'm involved in sex trafficking, gang rape, drug trafficking, whatever, child trafficking, Well, those aren't murder or treason directly anyway, so you have to lie for them, right?
Well, what if you're a lawyer?
What if you're a lawyer and the person you're supposed to be prosecuting is a Freemason and you're also a Freemason?
Well, you swore an oath on pain of death that you would put that loyalty to your brother in Masonry above the truth, above the laws of the country, and above God who tells us not to be liars.
So now we create this very competing loyalty within Freemasons.
And again, it comes back to what kind of person does Christ want us to be versus what kind of person is Freemasonry trying to make us into?
Why would I swear to hide someone else's crimes when God saw what happened anyway?
When now not only is that guy going to get punished, but now I'm going to get punished for lying and covering for him.
So that's basically what it boils down to.
First of all, you can't be yoked with unbelievers.
I should say, first of all, it's like eighth of all at this point.
The Bible says, don't be yoked with unbelievers.
There you are, concelebrating religious rituals with people of all kinds of other religions.
You're yoking yourself to unbelievers.
Not only unbelievers in Christ, but in some cases, open Luciferians.
We're not supposed to tell lies.
Christians are not supposed to tell lies.
Masonry is saying, actually, you should tell lies, depending on the situation, right?
For your brother, your Masonic brother.
And there's just no question, once you look into both systems deeply enough, that they are incompatible, which is why, again, everyone who looks into it concludes that.
The individuals who think Masonry and Christianity are compatible, again, are people that tend not to know that much about what either one teaches.
And this might not be their fault.
They might be busy family men with a business to run or working 70 hours a week to put food on their family's table.
Maybe they don't have time to read morals and dogma.
It's almost a thousand pages.
Maybe they don't have time to read the church fathers, right?
Maybe they don't have time to read the scriptures.
That's not necessarily their fault.
They don't know it's incompatible.
So they're not lying when they tell you that.
Some are lying.
I think most are not lying.
They're just misled and haven't been exposed to enough information.
Well, it seems to be partially the tyranny of distraction.
Still, still a tyranny and an evil.
The devil certainly wants to keep us separated, distracted, and not dedicated to the faith which has saved us.
I tell you, I thank Jesus every single day for what he's done in my life.
I posed this question to Brother Rush, our mutual friend now.
It's wonderful to hear that Rush is doing well.
I posed the same question to him when I interviewed him last.
If you were going into a building, About a 20-story building.
You're going into an elevator.
You look to your right.
You're probably going to the 20th floor.
You've got about maybe a minute, let's say two minutes.
There it is.
There's a man wearing the shirt.
He's got the pin.
You see the ring.
What would you say to that Freemason to help him get out of that cult?
You know, I can use a real-life example, actually.
I went to a wedding...
In San Diego, I'm trying to remember the date.
It was sometime last year.
I don't remember exactly when it was.
A friend of mine, two friends of mine, Orthodox Christians, got married.
I went to their wedding in San Diego, in Carlsbad, more specifically.
And a guy shows up to the wedding with a COVID mask with a square and compass on it.
And so here I am, seeing this demonic logo inside the temple of God, and I'm faced with a choice, right?
Do I not say anything and remember that, you know, this is a wedding, it's a celebration, I shouldn't cause problems, or do I cause a problem because this is important and maybe this is just a quirk of my own personality.
It's quite a double-edged sword.
I decided I'm going to confront the guy and try and do something about this.
So I went up to him and I said, excuse me, do you have another mask that you could wear?
And he said, why?
What's the problem?
I said, well, that's a Masonic logo and we're in an Orthodox church and that doesn't belong here.
And he said, well, I've been in other churches with this just fine.
I was at a Catholic church.
I was in this.
I was like, it's okay what other people have done, but I'm asking you if you have another mask that you could wear.
I'd like you to take it off.
And so he's like huffing and puffing, but he eventually does give in.
And I walked with him back to his car, escorted him to make sure he was actually going to change the mask.
And he took the mask off and I realized it was actually a guy that I knew from the lodge.
A guy that once upon a time, my baptismal Orthodox priest had brought me to his place of work to try and convince him to leave masonry.
But I didn't recognize him until he took the mask off, this guy.
It turned out he was my friend's uncle, the bride's uncle, which I didn't know.
But I saw him, I was like, wait a second, I know you, and I said his name and everything.
So, you know, I didn't feel great about causing a scene in the middle of my friend's wedding, but at the same time, I didn't want to see that there, and it didn't belong there, and I don't regret doing it.
My friend did not get upset.
I'm sure when she heard from her uncle that some guy, some jerk, asked him to take his mask off because masonry is bad, I'm sure she knew exactly who it was, and it's okay.
It's okay.
Thank God that he actually did it and didn't turn it into a bigger scene than it could have been, right?
It could have turned into a bad scene, but he complied with my Polite request, let's say.
So if I was in an elevator, excuse me, I might say something like, hmm.
See, it's hard to think of what exactly I would say because it would depend on so many factors like my mood at the time and if I was distracted and what this guy's energy was, I would probably just say, oh, I used to be part of that and then I became Christian.
Something like that, just to throw something out, test the waters, And maybe have a two-minute confrontation.
Ideally a conversation, but you know, people are going to get defensive when you confront them about stuff like this and it is probably going to become a confrontation.
But I would say something.
I can't tell you exactly what I would say because I'm an in-the-moment kind of guy, but I would definitely say something.
Amen.
That's a courageous story that you shared.
You don't realize you're probably going to be emboldening many of our brothers to say something in these situations.
I applaud you.
Many people would back off in that situation.
You did not.
Well, that's what those guys at the Wesleyan Church had done to me, right?
When I showed up with my stuff, they confronted me.
I just passed it forward, in a sense.
And you think that father had to set an example for his son.
I think you mentioned both had come to you, right?
The father and the son.
Well, I'll tell you this, Michael, you've set quite an example today.
I know personally I'll be sending this interview to many of my friends in the military.
Some of them are part of the Black Freemason Lodges.
There's many people that have fallen into this.
So many more that need to hear this.
I hope it makes it around.
I think it will.
I think the Lord has breathed on this.
Thank you so much for joining us for today's edition of Crosstalk News.
Thank you for your time, of course.
It wasn't hard running you down.
It wasn't hard finding you.
I think that's part of the Lord being in this.
And of course, I think I will invite you back on to have another discussion on the plethora of different topics that we can discuss about our shared faith.
But thank you so much for joining us.
God bless you and take care.
Thank you.
You too.
Please share this interview with your friends and family.
And consider getting a copy of Michael's book for yourself.
You need these things to be able to refute many of the heresies which pop up.
And it's worse now.
People have the internet.
They're studying heresies all day long, thanks to Google.
Now, it's called On the Masons and Their Lies.
What every Christian needs to know.
I got my copy of the Audible book on Audible.
You can also get it on Amazon.
You can get a copy of the book.
Get a copy, put it on the shelf.
I'm telling you, it's going to be worth it.
In addition to this, this was a white pill.
A great white pill.
I love talking to Christians.
I hate talking about the news.
I mean, what do you want me to talk about?
We'll talk about Vladimir Zelensky threatening for NATO to do a preemptive strike on Moscow.
I mean, people are nuts.
They really are.
They're losing their mind.
But not everybody.
Not everybody.
See, Michael, he's a man who supports families.
Michael is someone who wants people to start families.
And I want to talk today about fathers.
Now, it's not Father's Day yet, or I hope not.
I would have missed getting my dad again.
But listen, fathers, throughout history, they've protected their kids, good ones at least.
Many fathers do what they can to provide for their family, provide for their wives, provide for their kids, teach them in the way they must go.
That's what Jesus told us to do.
Alright, but I'll tell you this.
I found an interesting story today.
I said I'm trying to share light pills at the end of these episodes of Crosstalk, and I'm not going to leave you disappointed this week.
So I came across this video here.
Alright, yes, that is a baby girl dangling from a window.
Okay, look right there.
And guess what that is?
That's a heroic father saying, I am not letting this kid drop.
That man is balancing himself on a windowsill.
Actually, a piece of glass on a window that extends out.
And he saves the kid.
Isn't that amazing?
Isn't that amazing?
I mean, a lot of people are sitting on edge here.
A lot of people are sitting on edge here.
Trust me, that father was going to make sure, no matter what, he would have fallen before that kid did.
I tell you, you have a father who watches out for you always, eternally.
It's your father in heaven, God Almighty.
He also made sure you had a father here on earth.
Make sure you respect him.
Respect your old man.
Because you know what?
He's not always going to be around.
I've gotten two stories just this past week.
Two friends of mine lost their fathers.
It's a terrible thing.
But I tell you this.
Hug your dad.
Love your parents.
Respect them.
You don't have to red pill them.
People tell people to do that.
It's not smart.
Love them.
Okay?
Respect them.
If you need to, witness to them.
But be respectful.
And this man, that kid, she's going to love her dad.
Okay?
I tell you that.
She's going to listen.
We need more young women who will listen to their dads, okay?
In addition to the saving of the kids, as I said, dads prepare for the future.
And I bet you this is the kind of dad, I'll tell you, that probably shops at HeavensHarvest.com.
If you go to HeavensHarvest.com, you can get some survival food, especially food for hunting.
But more than that, great, high-quality buckets of freeze-dried food.
If you use promo code CROSSTALK, You get a good discount.
And the best food.
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It's worth it.
Please do consider investing with HeavensHarvest.com.
Getting ready for the winter.
Getting ready for the craziness.
As I said, the war in Ukraine, it hasn't ended.
But you listened.
If you listened to us, you got food.
You prepared.
You did fine.
Also, you didn't lose your mind.
HeavensHarvest.com can make sure even if the apocalypse doesn't come.
And I know it won't.
There's not a joke about this.
The world will only end when Jesus Christ comes to judge the living and the dead.
That's the final day.
We know that we go into famines.
We know we go into cycles of war.
These are things which are guaranteed.
It's not a question.
But if you do prepare, and you can prepare through HeavensHarvest.com, you're going to be just fine.
You're going to be able to endure.
And those endure until the end.
Remember, those are saved.
Well, God bless you so much for joining us for this edition of Crosstalk News.
If you have someone else you think would be great to interview, I love doing the interviews on topics of religion, on our faith, the faith that saves, the faith that really secures us.
Please send it to crosstalknews at protomail.com.
But other than that, we're praying for you.
Without you, the audience, we're nothing.
And I'll tell you, without my Father in Heaven, I'm nothing either.