Dec. 16, 2023 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
50:39
20231216_Hour_3
|
Time
Text
You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, going across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the political cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
One more show before Christmas, two more shows before the end of the year, and then God knows what in 2024.
But I am thankful for the time we've got right now with you and with Sam Bushman, who is back on with us right now.
Sam, Merry Christmas.
Another year almost in the books together, and it has been a wonderful one as they all have been.
And a Merry Christmas to you and all of our listeners.
And let's make sure we keep Merry in Christmas.
And I mean Merry in terms of the mother of Christ.
Let's keep Christ in Christmas.
Let's keep Mary as in cheerful in Christmas.
And let's not let them destroy that lexicon either.
James, welcome.
Amen.
And thank you.
And it's great to have you back.
We are going to, as I was sharing with people earlier in the program tonight, we're going to begin to look ahead and forecast 2024, maybe the last show of the year, first couple of shows of January, and then you'll be in primary season.
I think Iowa has moved up the Iowa caucuses so much they're going to take place before the end of this year almost.
I think it's like the second week of January.
You're going to have the third presidential primary.
What's that?
Why don't I just, when I turn 18, just vote for the rest of my life all at once?
All I'd do is just put in my favorite character hashtag, and then that would just be filled in with whoever they think that they're going to go ahead and, you know, fraudulently elect anyways.
So they can select from my, it'll just be like a variable, right?
Sam's vote is the variable.
Then they'll just fill it in and did it, and I can just vote once at the 18th birthday celebration and I'm done.
I mean, isn't that what it really come to?
Certainly save you time at the polls, but if they move these things up anymore, it'll start at the end of election night of the previous cycle.
But anyway, I say all that to say this, is that it won't be long before the forecasting will be over and we'll be well into 2024 and it'll start playing itself out in real time.
I don't want to get that far ahead yet, but you have some things coming up in early January, so we wanted to be sure to get you on here tonight to do a little bit of that.
And we were just talking about a topic during the break.
I want to get to that maybe in the next segment because first you called me last night and you said, hey, here's kind of what I want to talk about.
And I just want you to let it rip.
Let's go back to 2016 and look at this in widescreen between then and now.
This will be our third presidential cycle with Donald Trump.
Can you believe that?
It's amazing.
Let me just be very, very clear.
And I'm going to say this to Donald Trump, any Donald Trump supporter and or surrogate out there.
I have been very clear.
When Donald Trump's right, I praise him to the high heavens.
When he's wrong, I tell you that he's wrong, and I tell you why.
I have not played favorites with Trump, but I've been very nice to him because he's been right on many things, and he's the best president we've ever had in my lifetime.
I'll be the first to say that.
I agree with Vivek Ramaswamy and everybody else.
Now we have Kevin McCarthy and MAGA Mike Johnson both endorsing Donald Trump.
The big money's trying to go behind Nikki Haley to see if she can compete.
She can't.
She won't.
It's a failure already.
I predict Donald Trump will not go to jail.
I predict he will be president of the United States of America.
But I want to make this very clear.
When Donald Trump Jr. came on Liberty Roundtable Live with Sam Bushman and James Edwards for the 2016 election, the fact is he won.
And when he failed to do that in 2020, he lost.
Now, I'm not trying to take singular credit for that.
I don't think Sam Bushman is the reason.
And I'm not trying to even insinuate that.
But here's what I am trying to extrapolate.
If you, Donald, take in the average American, the common citizen, we the people, the new media takes center stage.
If you include the new media, then you will likely win.
Okay?
That's who elected you, whether you realize it or not.
And if you pull away from that crowd and you make Nikki Haley as part of your, quote, whatever advisors, posse, deep government, deep state apparatus, like you did Jared Kushner and clowns, okay, you're going to go down in flames.
Either one, not get elected or two, you'll be a shame when you do.
So what you need to do is go back to your base.
You need to go back, and I hate to say this, but I'm going to do it anyway.
You need to go back to the Christian white majority that elected you.
Now, blacks and all kinds of other races are coming to the table too because they're learning the truth about Trump and they realize they've been betrayed by the liars.
That's all fine.
I'm not trying to make this a racial issue, but what I'm telling you is that is your base.
And if you don't bring surrogates to the table for Sam Bushman to interview, and when I say Sam Bushman, I'm talking about the new media.
So that doesn't just mean me.
It means James.
It means me.
It means, I mean, a host of other people.
If you don't bring us into the mix, you will fail miserably, whether it's at the ballot box or after the fact.
If you bring us in and surround yourself with the right kind of advisors and reject the Nikki Haleys of the world, then you will absolutely have incredible success.
The question is, did you learn your lesson?
James?
Well, to Sam's point, what he's saying here is, and we've talked about this exhaustively over the course of the last eight years.
And can you believe it's been eight years, Sam?
I mean, eight years since I got the credentials to go and broadcast live.
And then, you know, that was the thing that people forget is that the Trump campaign solicited that interview, but not knowing that I wasn't on the air Monday.
And then they pretended they didn't.
And they've been doing it.
And then they lied and I released emails and caught them at the lie.
And then they backed away and they won't touch it with a 10-foot pull ever since.
See, okay.
That wasn't the point.
The point is, though, is that from that Super Tuesday in March of 2016, that interview with Trump Jr., all the way through the end of the election in November, up to and culminating with Hillary Clinton launching her last major campaign offensive, making mention of that interview and an ad against Trump, they got tens of millions of dollars in media coverage just from that.
And what that signaled, because what the people were already beginning to know was, hey, you know, when somebody calls somebody a racist, that doesn't mean anything.
That just means they're conservative or whatever.
They're like me.
And people began to see through that and it helped Trump.
To your point, when Trump was trotting out surrogate after surrogate after surrogate, remember after Donald Trump came on, Eric Trump came on.
I wish I interviewed more Trump surrogates than anybody on the planet, buddy.
That last month or two in 2016, there was one after another.
Eric Trump, I mean, the very top, everybody but Trump himself, basically.
And Trump won that election.
And Trump hangs out right now on Twitter with Musk.
He hangs out with all these people, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and all these guys.
Vivek's taking a pee on air, all kinds of crazy stuff, and they're afraid to come on Little Roundtable Live.
Come on now.
Well, but so what happened was Trump won in a huge upset by the scantest of margins.
Now you fast forward to 2020, and this really is where Sam's going with this point.
By the numbers that they used, Trump lost very scantily in a lot of these swing states.
Now, you could say vote fraud.
I'm not discounting that.
It very well could have happened.
We'll never know because they never investigated it.
I can't say definitively it did or it didn't.
It wouldn't surprise me if I had to bet on it.
It probably did.
But what I do know for sure.
Trump probably did.
The vote fraud.
But vote fraud.
We know the FBI literally tampered with the media, suppressed one candidate, and promoted another.
There's no debate.
That's not vote fraud.
Now, whether you say that changed the outcome might be debatable, but you can't say it's not vote fraud.
Well, what you have in addition to that is the absolute fact that 3 to 5 percent of the white Republican voter who voted for Trump in 2016 did not vote for him in 2020 because he was doing all the platinum plan nonsense and Jared Kushner was running the campaign.
3 to 5 percent.
We digress.
Well, there's such a lot of stuff that, you know, 3 to 5 percent of his white voting base stayed at home in 2020.
And if they, if he had gotten the exact same number of white votes in 2020 that he got in 2016, he would have won again, even using the numbers that they used on election day.
Now, maybe they would have cheated a little more.
Who knows?
But I'm just saying he did alienate enough of his white voting base with all of this stuff.
And as you said, the difference was he was feeding surrogates to alternative media outlets, the new media as you like to call it, not just us, but across the board that he really didn't do in 2020.
He lost touch of all of that.
Again, Kushner running the campaign.
He's got a lot of vault media, which is the fake new media.
And then you've got the real new media.
We're the real new media, James.
The fake new media is all the different people from CNN and Fox and everybody else that got fired, and now they're starting up their own gigs.
Right, because there was a purge back in COVID.
They couldn't afford to keep all of these so-called journalists employed.
You hate to see it.
It was the world healing itself, as I think what they were calling it in nature.
But yeah, so we'll see what kind of campaign he runs.
Now, you're probably in the minority saying he won't go to prison.
I was talking with Lauren Whiskey earlier this week.
He said people will be voting on Election Day to get him out of prison.
I think he probably, I don't see how he couldn't go to prison is the thing.
I mean, in these jurisdictions, in these jurisdictions, he's an all-Democrat, all-black Democrat base in Washington.
You've got to remember this guy cut his teeth in New York working with the mob of the Democrats his whole life, buddy.
All right, but how's that going to, I mean, you're in a Washington DC courtroom where it's like 92% Democrat, black.
I just don't see them letting him go.
I just don't, I don't, I don't, I don't see that.
But either way, I do think he'll probably bring out information like Ammon Bundy did so much on the record that they got to throw the case to bury it and lock it up so that the American people don't find out the real truth.
And Trump's lawyers are good enough to do that.
Amon Bundy got that done.
He put so much on the public record, they flat out declared a mistrial, claimed the government was corrupt.
Really did it to stop Ammon from getting the facts out of who all the snitches were and who all the government FBI provocateurs were.
And Ammon Bunny was getting so much out of the public record, they crapped their pants and shut the whole thing down, let him go and said, my hell, the government's corrupt.
They didn't do that because they wanted to.
They did that because they had no choice.
Donald is smart enough to do the same thing.
So it won't be a matter of a black jury saying Donald's free to go.
It'll be a matter of technicality.
It'll be a matter of issues behind the scenes that you may or may not get whole story of this.
Write it down.
I hadn't considered that.
All right.
There you go.
There's your first prediction for 2024.
We're going to do a whole show on this.
Last show of the year, two weeks from tonight.
Next week, Pastor Brett McAtee with the Christmas story.
Then the last show before the end of the year, we're going to start forecasting this thing.
And then first week in January, we're like right on the cusp of the Iowa caucus and the presidential nominating season will have begun.
It's three weeks away.
I told you that back when we were literally at his convention.
I told you he was the mom pause, right?
Well, he is the best president in your lifetime.
You've also said, but again, you've got to understand how little of a compliment that is compared to what he's been up against.
I mean, it'd be hard to be worse than the people that have been there in the last 50, 60 years.
The moms right now are the good guys.
Well, compared to our government, it'd be hard to be bad.
That's what I'm talking about.
So anyway, this is coming up.
Let's talk about this very quickly.
I want to get into one media-related story.
Predictions for 2024 above and beyond.
And again, we're working Sam in early on this because he's got conflict first week in January.
May or may not be able to come on on that particular show as we continue to forecast because we can't forecast much later than that because the year will already start playing itself out.
So we've got to get these on the records before stuff happens.
My next prediction, James and Sam are going to not be mentioned one bit by anybody at all in the media.
I'm joking.
We're going to play center role like we always have.
Well, you know, it was a really, you know, obviously 2016, they couldn't keep us out of the papers.
They thought that it hurt Trump.
It probably helped him.
That's the thing.
It probably helped him with his voting base to be associated with people like us.
And so they sort of tampered it down in 2020.
We didn't get a lot of the same mentions.
They could have easily resumed.
I think I've got to see the buddies at the Rolling Stone and the Southern Party Lost Center and the New York Times and a few places.
And I'll make sure we can write some stories.
Don't worry.
Well, I mean, you know, yeah, so how do you factor in the new Rolling Stone and the new little flurry of media attention?
Do you think that portends anything for the year to come with regards to how they're going to choose to cover the work that's being done here on this network?
Or is it just a little bit more?
What if I get the sheriff's organization to have a bunch of sheriffs meet with Donald?
Ooh.
Oh, man.
If you could arrange that, because they are really out to get the CSP away.
They are really out to get that organization.
If you could get them to all of this.
Now that would do it.
I tell you what, Sam can do it.
Now you realize one of our sheriffs, Mark Lamb, he owns a sister organization, and he's been alongside the CSPA for a long time.
Mark Lamb's running for Senate now in Arizona, right?
Well, he was actually on the Donald Trump Dream Team tour back last summer that was barnstorming the nation.
He was one of the speakers that they carried along.
I got him and about 20 or 30 other people with some interesting connections.
We'll see what's going to happen.
But I'm telling you right now, we will blow this thing up.
Write it down.
All right.
So two hardcore predictions right there that leave no room for interpretation.
Donald, well, three.
Donald Trump will not go to prison.
He will be elected president.
And Sam Bushman, Liberty News Radio, the political cesspool, the collection of the new media take center stage will need to be part of his re-election or he will not make it because there's nobody else that'll speak truth to power and really tell people what's really going on.
Trump has no way to get the word out without us.
Look at his social media platform.
Every one of the people that has any power on Donald Trump's social media platform, True Social, is our people.
Well, and you're thinking that there's going to be that the press isn't going to, they're going to go back to 2016 and give a lot of coverage as opposed to the 2020 thing of ignoring when in 2020 it worked out for him.
2016 it didn't.
And that's interesting.
They will try not to cover him.
The problem is that that's why this is.
No, no, I'm talking about covering us or trying to make this real or imagined.
Yeah, go ahead.
They'll be forced to.
Because remember, Stuart Rhodes wrote an article from prison saying that they're doing the same thing to Donald that they did to Stuart.
Now we find out after the fact that Stuart was working with the Secret Service.
Did you know that?
And then they killed the clowns over at Rolling Stone.
Yeah, it's a fact.
The clowns over at the Rolling Stone tried to say, Sam, you were part of the terrorism on January 6th.
You interviewed Stuart Rhodes the day before it all went down.
And Stuart Rhodes now is in prison.
What do you say to that?
And my response is, me and the Secret Service are both working with Stuart Rhodes.
How about you?
So if a journalist interviews Ted Bundy, then he's a mass murderer.
I mean, this whole links and time.
That's what will keep us in the media.
That's right.
Well, like I said, what's so cool about this at this point is— See, the thing is, we've learned we can trigger them anytime we want to, James, and they can't stop themselves.
Well, they do have that lack of discipline.
And it was really because of their lack of discipline that Trump got elected in the first place.
I mean, they so overreacted.
And that Sam and James were promoted so hard.
Look, we literally got focused on by Bill Clinton.
We literally got written up and submitted to Congress.
Okay, it goes on and on.
Now, believe it or not, I have confirmed through my congressman that the letter against me and you that were the nexus of hate, anti-government, and white supremacy in America, that is read into the congressional record.
I have proof now.
That's all.
And now my congressman is digging into saying, hey, Sam, are you under investigation by the FBI?
The FBI writes back and says, no, we can't tell you if Sam Bushman's under investigation because we don't want to compromise an arrest that may be imminent.
What does that mean, James?
It won't pay to find out.
I'll tell you.
I mean, who knows what they're doing?
I mean, it is a criminally corrupt organization in and of itself.
What if Trump pardons me?
Well, he did it to your buddy Steve Stockman, great guy.
He also did it to my buddy Dinesh D'Souza.
Did Dinesh go to prison?
I didn't know that.
Yeah, Dinesh went to prison.
He should have gone to prison for what he did to Sam Francis.
But what did he actually go to prison for?
That's a whole long story.
Supposedly money fiascos.
But see, it's always some sort of like accounting type of problem when it's one of our guys.
They always get him on that.
It's like the Capone deal.
It's always some sort of financial impropriety, whether it's you see it time and time again.
Traffickant Stockman.
Oh, you didn't file this.
But Stuartman, dear friend of mine, I did everything that I could to help him get out of prison.
The Hammonds, we worked hard to get out of prison too.
Donald pardoned them both.
And this is why I tell you, I'm not happy when Donald wants to promote the vaccine, okay?
I'll be honest.
But I give Donald credit where credit's due.
And Donald did pardon some very important people who deserved to be pardoned.
Dinesh was one of them.
Well, and he pardoned some clowns, too.
He was one of them.
Right.
But I mean, if you get anything good, it's more good you're going to get it out of anybody else.
And that was always sort of the thing there.
And the fact that he certainly upsets the apple cart and He triggers the left into making mistakes.
And I think that that is a great, that is, that is more than we will get from anyone else.
There is all that.
So, a couple of minutes remaining.
We're about to go to Chuck Baldwin.
This is another guy who's paying for it.
Matt Staver is suing the Southern Poverty Law Center right this very second.
And he is taking my information right now to review to see if I'm going to become part of that lawsuit.
Ooh.
Ooh, now that's a scoop.
That's a scoop.
Now, remind everybody who Matt Staver is.
If they don't know, Matt Staver is the leader of Liberty Council, the chief attorney over at Liberty Council.
He's been around forever.
He sued everybody and their dog.
He's the guy that says if you reject Jesus in school, then the ACLU will be your friend.
If you promote Jesus in school, the ACL will sue you.
He says, I'll sue you if you don't allow freedom.
So this guy is huge.
He's a huge attorney and he's suing the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Now, everybody else who sues the SPLC gets shut down.
Believe it or not, Matt Staver's already passed the shutdown stage.
He's in discovery with the Southern Reality Law Center right now, and he's called my information in front of him.
Color me shocked.
Yeah, I mean, that's something.
That's not nothing.
We're starting to ratchet it up, buddy.
Telling you right now.
Wherever 2004 leads, Sam Bushman will be there in the middle of it somewhere.
24.
2004 is long gone, buddy.
We were thinking 20, yeah, 20 years ago.
How long we've been already tearing it up then, too, buddy.
Yeah, we sure were.
We sure were.
Wherever Sam goes, I will be holding it on to his coattails as tightly as my fist can clench.
You know, Sam, I love you.
Honest men are going to stick together as brothers under Christ, and we're going to stand for the sacred cause of liberty.
And Merry Christmas to you all.
Merry Christmas to you.
We've got another such guy, Dr. Chuck Baldwin, coming on right after this.
Stay tuned.
You're listening to Liberty News Radio. USA News.
I'm Corey Myers.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took part in a CNN town hall meeting last night in Iowa and just could not help himself from hitting Donald Trump every chance he got.
I think, though, one thing in this race that I think is important to point out is Donald Trump flip-flopping on the right to life.
More than 190 governments at the United Nations Climate Conference agreed for the first time to transition away from fossil fuels, bridging differences between big producers and countries that want a total phase-out.
Ukrainian President Vlodymir Zelensky is appealing directly to lawmakers for increased aid in the country's battle against Russia.
Dave Collins has more.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer describes the meeting on Capitol Hill as impactful.
He outlined in some great detail the kind of help he needs and how it will help him win.
However, Republicans and Democrats are deadlocked over additional funding for Kiev, with Republicans demanding tougher border policies as a condition for supporting President Biden's proposed aid package.
A number of economists anticipating the Federal Reserve initiating interest rate cuts as soon as June.
In a recent CNBC Fed survey, over half of the 35 participating experts share this view, a figure expected to reach nearly 70% by July.
The Government Accountability Office report says government agencies are already using AI.
The office adding, the report says, given the rapid growth in capabilities and widespread adoption of AI, the federal government must manage its use of AI in a responsible way to minimize risk, achieve intended outcomes, and avoid unintended consequences.
This is USA News.
Attention.
This is a public notice from the Social Security Disability Helpline.
If you're one of the millions of Americans who are disabled and unable to work, you may be eligible for disability benefits from Social Security.
Receiving benefits is your right.
If you suffer from physical or mental disability, whether you're applying for the first time or you've already been denied, we can help.
We'll evaluate your situation and deal with Social Security on your behalf.
Best of all, there's no fee until you receive your benefits.
Remember, we only get paid if you win your case.
There are many reasons and conditions that may make you eligible for disability benefits.
Many of them you may not be aware of.
So if you're disabled and unable to work, call now to get started with your free no-obligation consultation.
Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day to save us all from Satan's power and we were gone astray.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.
Ladies and gentlemen, real honor to welcome back to the broadcast this evening Dr. Chuck Baldwin, a pastor with 48 years of pastoral experience.
He is currently the pastor of the Liberty Fellowship in Kalispell, Montana.
Dr. Baldwin is a syndicated columnist whose columns appear in papers and periodicals nationwide, as well as online.
Radio talk show host for eight years with the Chuck Baldwin Live Show.
He was the Constitution Party's presidential candidate in 2008, famously endorsed that year by Ron Paul.
He has authored and produced several books, and we'll be sure to give you all the contact information for that and more.
But let's first say hello to Dr. Baldwin.
Great to have you back on the show tonight.
James, it's good to be with you again.
Thank you.
Just two things.
If you'll indulge me in the exchange of pleasantries, I want you to know that if my vote alone could have elected the president, you would have won the White House in 2008.
I still remember voting for you in Darrell Castle that year.
Well, thank you very much.
We had hundreds of thousands of people that did that, and it was an experience that I'll never forget.
I won't do it again, but I'm glad I did it.
It was very enlightening.
And I think the major takeaway from the campaign, since you brought it up, is the reality of how America absolutely positively does not have free and fair elections.
I got a first-hand, up-close, and personal look at the crookedness of the media and the political process and how that voices that are not controlled by the mainstream are deliberately and purposely not allowed to be broadcast.
And that was, I mean, I think I maybe knew that to a degree theoretically, but to actually be in the process and see it in operation was a real eye-opener.
Well, I can tell you, this isn't, of course, what we brought you on to talk about, but just one more thing in this spirit.
My first three votes for president, my first presidential election year was 2000.
I was born in 1980.
And my first three votes for president were in 2004 and 2008.
Pat Buchanan and Michael Perutka, you were actually his vice presidential pick in that campaign.
And then, of course, you in 2008, each of whom, those three men, I'm happy to say have made multiple appearances as guests on this program.
But, you know, Dr. Baldwin, you were a regular guest on this show in its early years back in the mid-2000s.
And then for whatever reason, really no reason, when you moved from the deep south to the Pacific Northwest, we just lost touch.
But I went back to the archives earlier today to find out when the last time we spoke on the air was.
It actually was March of 2007, 16 years ago.
It seems like yesterday.
So I would just ask you this.
How have you been?
Still keeping the flame alive in a darkening world, no doubt.
Oh, well, you know, actually, I'm busier now than I've ever been in my life.
And of course, I've had such a wonderful experience up here, and the Lord has dealt with my heart about a lot of things biblically.
And so it's allowed me the opportunity to be a voice in a dark world.
And after we went through all the COVID tyranny, and now we're into the war mongering again, and the evangelicals are crying for blood and all this kind of thing.
It gives me the opportunity to, again, extol the virtues and the glory of the new covenant, gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel of peace.
And I tell you, the hearts of the people I believe are ripe for the Holy Spirit.
And I'm seeing in the last three to four years an awakening, not due to any particular church or pastor or television program or anything like that.
But I think the Holy Spirit is just talking to people and ministering to their hearts, illuminating their hearts.
And they're coming to the awareness of the Lord's New Covenant and how it's being violated by the vast majority of evangelicals and how the Israel worship has replaced the worship of the truth about the coming of Christ.
And as a result, I think people are turning away from the traditional church in large numbers, and they are seeking fellowship from alternative sources.
And one of those is Liberty Fellowship.
And our online audience has grown exponentially over the last three and a half, four years.
And I just marvel at God's grace and goodness in that regard.
You certainly seem to have that touch over the course of your career, just reading about how the fellowship that you pastored in Pensacola just went from a couple of families, handful of families, to this just thriving fellowship.
And then you move and doing it again now in a different way.
But I'd like to stick with that for a moment, what you were just mentioning, because I think you are in a unique position to give an assessment or an audit of the state of the faith right now here on the cusp of Christmas 2023.
You know, it's easy to look around and you see the natural leaders of families, the natural spiritual leaders of families, men in a sports or entertainment-driven stupor, or, you know, and even if they're professing Christians, it seems as though they're much more afraid of the world's wrath than they are of God's wrath.
So again, after 50 years in ministry, how would you assess the current state of Christianity on this continent?
Because you're saying you see some silver linings there, that there are some good things happening, too.
I think there's some really good things happening, but it's in the background.
It's not up front.
It's not happening through the mainstream churches.
I think overall, evangelicalism as a whole is dead.
It's a dying corpse, and I don't think there's any reviving it.
I think that God is raising up alternative sources of spiritual leadership, and that's the way he always does work.
I mean, you look back in the history of Old Testament Israel, and how many times did we see the situation that the established priests and spiritual leaders of Israel had totally and completely capitulated their convictions to the powers that be, whatever king happened to be on the throne at the time.
And they had no mind of God whatsoever.
In fact, they were reprobate in that area.
So God raised up independent men to come along and to challenge the traditional leadership of, if you want to say, the church of Israel.
And, of course, they were a thorn in the side of both the clergy and the political establishment.
Some of them suffered great persecution as a result of that.
But they were God's men that touched the hearts of God's people.
And God used them when he could not use the established ministers of that day.
And I think that we're seeing that in the United States.
The churches have, you mentioned the sports idea.
I mean, I know so many evangelical pastors that literally worship college football teams or perhaps professional football teams.
And I can think of a couple of pastors right now in my mind.
I see their offices.
Their offices are just filled with paraphernalia from their favorite football team.
I mean, you look like you're walking into a gift shop or a museum of that particular college football team.
I mean, they're wrapped up.
It consumes a lot of their preaching and they just extol the virtues of the team.
And that is all over the country.
And we have seen our pastors that have left, I think, the love of the faith, the love of the truth, the love of Christ, the love of the gospel, and they have become entertainers.
They're more concerned about the bottom line and building a building and getting a bigger offering and adding more staff and having more programs and doing all these quote-unquote successful things and being regarded in the world as significant and making their services worldly friendly.
I mean, it's really hard to tell the difference between a worship service and a rock concert in churches today.
None of that glorifies the Lord.
The power of God is not there.
You can have excitement.
You can have a lot of music and you can have people jumping up and down with emotion and all that kind of thing.
That's not the Holy Spirit.
So I think your analysis is dead right, but I think it's far deeper than that.
I think it's theological as well as experiential.
But the result is that I think overall, God's taking his hand a blessing off of the evangelical church by and large.
Of course, there's exceptions.
Let's don't forget that.
But by and large, I think he has.
And I think God is judging America because he's judging the church.
The judgment on America is simply a byproduct of God's judgment on the church.
Pastor, I couldn't agree with you more.
We could sit and talk about this particular topic for the entire three-hour broadcast, and it wouldn't be enough.
This is something I'm very passionate about.
It's a foundational pillar of the program here.
But I would share this just very quickly.
I run the risk of running out of time, and I want to pivot and talk a little bit about your feature erasing Palestine, because that's certainly the big hot topic in global news and in politics.
And you address these things as well from a Christian perspective.
But just to the point you were making here, I cannot resist that, like a catfish down here in southern waters.
I can't resist this bait.
I have spoken and written often about what a wonderful upbringing it was in my boyhood to have been born into a family that attended the small Southern Baptist Church.
I was born in 1980, and even then, it seems like a world apart from where we are now.
But within the last decade, you've seen and you've called out a lot of these people, the self-appointed or media-designated leaders of these denominations.
But in this particular instance, the Southern Baptist Convention leadership at the time, Russell Moore, claimed you can't be a Christian and vote for Trump.
I guess Hillary Clinton would have been the preferred choice.
The Confederate flag cannot coexist next to a Bible.
Just really crazy, unbiblical things in an attempt to, what, virtue signal and curry favor from their oppressors, people who wish to see Christianity done away with in the public square.
Whereas you have never backed down from certain truths, and whether it be the war for southern independence, the attack on the USS Liberty, especially Zionism, which we're about to pivot to, as I said, and I'm not asking yourself to pat yourself on the back, but I think I would ask you to just give a quick answer to men listening: how some men can take such a stand while so many others are content to drift with the prevailing flow.
You know, I had to make a conscious decision, and I think every man of God has to do this at some point in his ministry, and some of them never do, or they make the wrong decision.
But I had to make a decision.
Our church at the time was flourishing.
You know, we started with six people.
We had grown into a congregation of several hundred regular attendees and over a thousand members.
And, you know, we had the buildings and we had all the traditional programs and everything.
You know, I got a personal letter from Ronald Reagan about the church and how wonderful it was, the growth and all that.
You know, and so I had a lot of this kind of thing going on.
And, you know, it came to me one night that no matter what it would cost me in terms of my ministry, if it meant people leaving the congregation, if it meant money was not there anymore, if it meant that buildings were not built, if it meant, you know, laying off staff,
if it meant I didn't have a 401k insurance program anymore, you know, if it meant I couldn't travel.
I had to go through all these things in my mind.
I felt so burdened because I was feeling the pressure of being non-controversial.
I was beginning to get to that point where church growth was more important than truth.
And church growth became the overall motivation.
It excused, you know, well, we're reaching people, you know, is what they say.
Oh, yeah, well, look how many people we're reaching.
You know, look how we're growing.
You know, this is God's blessing.
You know, if we preach controversial messages, we're going to lose half of our audience, and you will.
And, you know, we're going to lose offerings.
And, you know, that can't be God's will.
And so they justify their cowardice with all of these material blessings, quote unquote.
And I was beginning to feel the pressure of that.
It was beginning to kind of come down on me.
And I knew I had to make a decision.
I'd been in the ministry about 15 years at that point.
And I knew I was either going to go that way.
I was either going to bend with whatever flow it was, and I was going to avoid the controversial truths of the Word of God.
And I was going to preach the soft, easy messages that everybody wanted to hear and be the cheerleader up there and the entertainer.
Or I was going to give my life to teaching the truth no matter what it cost me.
And I had to wrestle with that for several, I'll say several days.
I don't think it was weeks.
But for several days, I wrestled with that in my prayer time alone with God.
And finally, I made the decision in my heart that no matter what it cost me, I was going to teach the truth.
I don't care how unpopular it was, how many people didn't like it, how many people left, and how much money we lost, how many friends I lost.
I didn't care.
I was going to preach the truth no matter what.
That was a conscious decision that I made.
And to make the point, on a particular Sunday night service, I came to the pulpit with a suitcase.
There was nothing in it.
It was just a prop.
But I brought my suitcase to the pulpit.
I set it down right next to the pulpit.
And then I preached.
And basically the message was, I'm prepared to lose everything.
I'm prepared to leave.
I'm prepared to pack up and go.
And if you fire me, then you fire me.
But I am not going to mince words.
I'm going to tell you what I believe is the truth for the rest of my ministry.
And if you don't like it, then that's between you and God.
But this is my decision.
And I preached the message.
What a testimony.
And that changed my life.
And I went on to do exactly what I said.
And guess what?
People left and money dropped.
And at first it was okay.
You know, if this is the price, so be it.
But then, James, I've got to tell you, just the opposite started happening.
Once people began to hear this message, then they were so thirsty for it because it was so unusual that they began to be attracted.
And my radio program just took off.
And then the church began to take off even more than it had before.
And since we came here to Calispel and started, same way, virtually with nothing.
And of course, this time I'm up in my 50s now.
I'm not a 20-year-old young man anymore.
And to move 2,600 miles and start a brand new fellowship in a place you've never lived, in a part of the country you've never lived, and no one knows you, and just start all over from scratch at that age is, most people would say.
People.
But I felt God wanted us to do it.
And we did it.
And it's been amazing.
It's just the Lord is blessed.
And the message has, on our online sermons every Sunday afternoon, we have thousands and thousands of people that watch all over the country and the world, literally.
And, you know, we've become a source of blessing to a lot of people that are looking for the truth.
And what I try to tell some pastors is, look, you know, whatever you lose to teach the truth, you're going to gain so much more that you'll wish you had made the decision a long time earlier.
No, I did.
Because God's truth is more powerful than all of the entertainment, all of the, you know, the clowns and the circuses and the spokes and the mirror and all that kind of stuff.
The truth of the word of God is more exciting and more real than any of that.
And when you begin to deliver that with conviction and power, people respond.
And so I believe that that is beginning to happen across the country.
And I don't know God's will and timing for all of this, James, of course.
But I just sense, I've sensed it in my own ministry, that the receptivity of the hearts of people to this message of the new covenant gospel of Christ is greater now than I have ever seen it in my 40-plus years of.
Well, that's wonderful to hear you say that because we don't all have the perspective that you do, obviously.
And that was a fantastic and inspiring testimony as well.
Lean on the word, lean on God, lean on the truth, and let the rest of the world crash around you if it must.
But it won't.
That's the thing.
Now, we only have about five minutes remaining, and we could have spent the entire time on any one of these topics.
But you, what makes you so refreshingly unique is as a Baptist minister, you have a very clear dissenting view on the situation in Israel, on so-called Christian Zionism, on all of these heresies.
I joke sometimes.
How did Christians ever make it until Israel was a state in the 1940s?
It seems as though.
But anyway, erasing Palestine is something that you've come up with.
One of your features at ChuckBaldwinLive.com.
Five minutes remaining, not nearly enough time, but what should be the biblical perspective on the situation in the Middle East?
Again, from a Christian perspective, of course.
You know, James, five minutes is really a tough period of time to get into this.
I hope we can do another show to discuss this more at length.
But, you know, I went through a major, just like I said about my, you know, my decision to preach the truth regardless.
Well, that decision led me to the truth about Israel.
I had been taught from, you know, my college days the doctrines of Christian Zionism.
I didn't hear that term when I was in Bible college.
I went to two Bible colleges and both of them were Christian Zionists in nature.
The idea that the Zionist state of Israel today is the resurrection of prophetic Israel and that the blessing of Genesis 12, 3 is upon the Zionist state of Israel.
And that if America is going to be blessed of God, if Christians are going to be blessed of God, they have to bless the nation of Israel, which is, of course, the Zionist state.
And I was raised with that teaching.
That's all I knew.
And for over 30 years, that's what I preached.
And then, again, God did this work in my heart where it just became obvious to me that that was not the truth.
And then it took me several years of praying and studying to try and find out, well, what was the truth?
Because if what I'm speaking is not the truth, I want to know what is.
But I had no baseline.
I had nowhere to begin.
So I just went to the Lord in prayer and I opened my Bible.
I put away all my books, all my materials, all the things that I had resources built up for 30 years that I could have fallen back on and say, well, what does this doctor say?
What does this reverend say?
And I didn't do that.
I just went straight to the scripture and prayed the Holy Spirit to guide me in truth.
And he led me to study the subject of Israel itself before I ever got into the subject of prophecy.
I studied the subject of Israel.
And I think that's the big mistake that evangelicals have made over the years.
A new Christian comes along, and one of the first things they want to do is study the book of Revelation.
And Revelation does not stand by itself.
Revelation is not some book that just is out there hanging along by itself with its own set of principles and ideals, etc.
Revelation is the final book of the New Testament that teaches the new covenant of the Lord Jesus Christ.
It started with the book of Romans and then the book of Galatians, the book of Hebrews.
And the book of Revelation was the final book to put the exclamation point, so to speak, on the doctrine of Christ's new covenant.
And so Revelation is built upon the foundation of these other wonderful books of the Word of God.
And so before I could begin to study prophecy, and I'm so glad the Lord led me this way, he led me to study Israel itself.
What is the truth about biblical Israel?
And I started with the Gospels, and I studied the Gospels.
As I was studying, I say, you know, this is amazing.
I never saw before 30 years of preaching and teaching, and I never saw the warfare between the Pharisees and Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels.
All four of them, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
You take away the conflict between the Pharisees and Jesus from the Gospels, and you're going to take away a sizable percentage of the entire passages because it's filled.
It's inundated with this terminal conflict between the Pharisees and Jesus.
So that's where I started.
Our Israel packages that we have, three of them, 31 messages in total, began with three messages on Christ and the Pharisees.
And so that became the springboard for the rest of the study.
And I began to study what the Bible says about Israel.
That led, of course, to the new covenant truth.
And then that led to the understanding, proper understanding of the book of Revelation, which I'm in the prophecy series right now.
Ladies and gentlemen, read more about it at ChuckBaldwinLive.com.
You can dive deep into his speeches, his interviews, his sermons, his articles, his columns.
And you should do that if you want to understand the situation in the Middle East from a Christian perspective.
Dr. Baldwin, great to talk to you again.
By all means, let's do it again far more quickly than another 16 years.
Let's do it in the early parts of 2024 and continue this conversation because I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Israel is going to be a topic in the coming year as well.
And it would be our honor to be able to do that with you.
Merry Christmas and thanks again for giving us the time tonight.