Speaker A: I got a letter from my lawyer which said, dear Cross examiner, thought I saw you on the street the other day, crossed over to say hello, but it wasn’t you. So I went back one 10th of an hour. $25.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. Here, our host uses his experience as both an attorney and an atheist to put religion on trial. We solemnly swear that it is the most informative, educational, and entertaining jury duty you will ever do. And now it’s time for the cross examiner.

Speaker A: Welcome. Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast. I am your host, the Cross examiner. I am an atheist, I am an attorney, and I am alarmed. I’m alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States. And more importantly, I’m alarmed by the massive amount of misinformation that’s powering that rise. I started this podcast to try to bring my experience as an atheist, as an attorney, to help educate so that you could push back against that misinformation when you encounter it in the world. So this is my first episode back after a long family vacation. Thank you for your patience, but we have two kids of high school age, and we’re running out of time to have family vacations before they disperse around the world. So we took a nice vacation. We went down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I was born and raised in Charleston. My dad was in the Navy, so Navy base there, and then Connecticut and Scotland back to Charleston. We went all over the world, went to Myrtle Beach to see my mother in law. My wife’s family is from West Virginia, and I think there’s a federal law that says if you retire while you’re in West Virginia, you have to move to Myrtle Beach, because that’s everybody there flies the West Virginia flag. Had a lot of fun down there. The state is definitely in the clutches, uh, of Christian nationalism. I tried to experience more of it every time I go down there. I experience a lot. I’ll post a video on my website@thecrossexaminer.net of a guy next to me on the beach that was really in the spirit of things. I suggest you go take a look at that ten second video. Fun. We didn’t, uh, interact with them, let’s put it that way. But I tried to take my family to the Golden Egg in Southern Myrtle Beach near Merles Inlet. Golden Egg, it’s one of these breakfast spots you find in any beach town that will serve you pancakes at any hour of the day. Right? And the Golden Egg, I go there every time we go down because it’s special.

Speaker C: Ah.

Speaker A: As soon as you walk in, plastered on the wall are a bunch of Bible quotes, and then you get your menu, and there’s, uh, like, the first, you know, those big plastic laminated menu, one sheeters you get at IHOP and those sorts of places for your breakfast stuff. The top left corner of the front page of the menu is all about Jesus and coming back and Christian nationalism, how this is a Christian nation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And there’s paraphernalia. You can buy mugs and T shirts that are all about God. So I took my family there, and it was all gone. It was all gone. I miss it. So there was not a sign of it left. So I don’t know if it’s new owners or if somebody has seen the light, so to speak, and realized that either it’s bad for business or it just ain’t true. But either way, that’s my minor news of progress in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, that the golden egg is no longer Jesus. Uh, breakfast center. So today, to get me back in the saddle for my post summer vacation stint, I thought we would do another episode of Why We Care. So Why We care is my episodes, where I talk about the answer to the question that follows. And the question is, if you’re an atheist and you don’t believe in God, why are you doing this? Why are you so passionate? It seems like you’re all worked up because you really do believe and you’re trying to mentally make a safe space for yourself. So the answer is, if you’re an atheist, why do you care so much that’s these episodes? And my response is, I wouldn’t care, except all of these things happen in our world, and they are acts committed by religious people, people who believe they’re doing something because of God or because of more generically misinformation, uh, pseudoscience, those sorts of things. I care because those people can hurt me. They can hurt my family, my friends, the planet. My best example is we have United States congressman on the Energy Committee, on the floor of Congress saying we don’t even need to research climate science because God promised that he would never flood the Earth again. That’s a congressman saying we should not even research a potential threat to humanity because of my religious beliefs. That’s why we care. So this episode, I just go through my inbox. I’ve got people sending me ideas you can always send me ideas at ideas@thecrossexaminer.net for news stories that happen that are related to this topic somehow. I will say, before we get going, these are unscripted. I just sort of go through my inbox and talk about the news items that are there and stuff that have may have saved that I want to talk about. So I think this is going to be a long episode because a lot of stuff has piled up while I’m gone, but please forgive the unscripted nature. I just wing it. So here we go. First up, we’ve got, uh, a doozy. You may have heard of this group. They are called Moms for Liberty. Or as I heard, somebody on the Internet describe them? Uh, once clanned. Uh, Karenhood, this is a group of busy body moms. Christian. Of course they’re Christian. And they aren’t for liberty. They are for liberty the same way that in the novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth was for truth, and the Ministry for Peace was for peace, right? They weren’t. The Ministry for Peace was the War Department. The Ministry for Truth was the false propaganda department of the government, of the fascist regime. That’s who these people are. They are double speaking, anti liberty Moms for Liberty. So what they do, and you may have heard of this this is a phenomenon that’s been going on for a couple of years now is around the country. They create chapters, and they go to local government. And that’s something that I’ve said a lot on this podcast. Local government’s, where the action at? They go to local government, and they object to school curriculums and book buying and book stocking decisions at school libraries. They love focusing on anything that has to do with LGBT. They love focusing on anything that has to do with race or discrimination. If you want to talk about that in school, in a public school, moms for Liberty is going to come and protest and pick it and do whatever they can to get your school to stop m doing that. It was founded back in 2021, so not that long ago, in a reaction to mask mandates at school. Moms for Liberty, that’s where the name came from. Give us the liberty to infect other kids, right? We don’t want our kids wearing masks, and we’re going to make them pawns in our sort of psychological issue war, where we are sick of putting up with our kids at home, and we want to send them back to school during a pandemic. So don’t make them wear masks and make sure you open the schools. That’s where they came from, was that and naturally, they evolve into what all sort of pseudo religious organizations turn into, which is Thought Police, which is, I want to control everything that’s going on. So that’s who they are. So they were in the news in Indiana. They’ve grown to 285 chapters as of this month. There was a new study this month, 285 chapters across 45 states in two years time, they’ve done this, okay? It’s like a disease. This story that I’m going to talk about is coming out of Indiana. There is a chapter in Indiana that is doing the whole let’s get all of the books taken out of the teen and kids section of our library. They publish newsletters and their newsletter for June. On the left, you see what’s in this chapter. You see how to live as a Biblical citizen, something like that. Biblical citizenship. And the next one was, um what the gays are up to. I forget what the headline was, but that’s basically it. Those are the bullet points in their newsletter. So this is Christian. This is Thought police. This is Christian Nationalism newsletter. And on the right, there was a quote. And the quote said, he alone who owns the youth gains the future. So for, uh, those of us who are students of history, that is a quote from Adolf Hitler in one of his rallies, talking about how we have to form what, the Hitler Youth. Nazis, right. Hitler Youth. And you might think, okay, so some intern found this, or some mom, most likely. They don’t have interns. I’ve got 200 whatever chapters in two years. They’re all running this out of their homes. Somebody found this quote, didn’t know who it was attributed to, and put it on their newsletter. And it’s prominent. Let me make clear. This is a prominent it’s in a big call out bubble, a big blue background, white text call out. That’s the quote. But to dispel any notions that they were confused about who they were praising or who they were quoting, here they put right there, adolf Hitler quote, he who alone who owns the youth gains the future. Close quote. And then in italics, adolf Hitler on the front page of their June newsletter. So they’re saying the quiet part out loud, right? That’s what they’re doing. So that alone is bad enough. I would say it’s got you in journalism for people to go after them if they didn’t cite it as being an Adolf Hitler quote. But they put Adolf Hitler there, so it’s fair game. But the real story is what they’re doing to their library. They have somehow forced the library to do a manual review of all the books in the teen section. That’s going to cost that county $330,000. The press is reporting that most of the books are off of the shelves while this review is taking place. So they’re basically shutting down the library for teen subject matter while people are reviewing books, this book burning N*** type of s*** that they want to do. And again, that would be par for the course of what they’re doing, and we need to push back against that. But that’s, again, not the whole story. The real story is the board of the library has public meetings, much like city council meetings or town council meetings, where the board will hear from members of the public, and you get X number of minutes, two or three minutes to say your piece at the podium and then move on. And a man appeared a few days after this newsletter showed up, a man appeared and spoke out about this issue and told the board, hey, these guys are quoting Adolf Hitler. They’re the ones that you are cowtowing to. And doing this review of the books, I would like to take 30 seconds of my allotted time, whatever his allotted time was two or three minutes, and do a moment of silence in memory of Holocaust survivors and Holocaust victims so that we can really reflect upon this group and what they’re doing to our libraries and what’s behind it. I’d like us to all just take a moment to have a moment of silence for Holocaust victims. Here’s a recording of him, uh, saying that and what happened, and I’m going.

Speaker D: To use the rest of my time for a moment of silence in response to Moms for Liberty, who I think a few of the guys have already left, so it must not be that important to be here. Ah. Who quoted Adolf Hitler yesterday in their newsletter saying that he who controls the youth controls the world. Disgusting moment of silence to think about what that means today.

Speaker A: Hear that coughing going on? That’s Moms for Liberty, of course, disrupting this moment of silence. That’s objecting to what they’re doing, objecting to the fact that they’re quoting Adolf Hitler and remembering, uh, Holocaust victims. Let’s m continue.

Speaker C: Oh, that’s pathetic.

Speaker A: You’re right. Random person in the audience. That is pathetic. So who you guess got thrown out of the meeting? And if I’m asking the question, you know the answer. Of course, it was the speaker who got thrown out of the meeting. So, M, let’s hear how that plays out.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: No, I’m not my time up.

Speaker C: I can’t be.

Speaker D: I can’t either. I’m speaking. You guys are grabbing, so I might.

Speaker A: Take that time back.

Speaker D: Please don’t address me like you’re asking me not to address you.

Speaker C: Can you please go ahead with your comment and then take your seat?

Speaker D: I’m going to need an extra 30 minutes because I keep being interrupted.

Speaker C: Okay, can you please take your seat? Please take your seat, sir.

Speaker D: I asked for 30 more seconds because I was interrupted rudely by the board. Um, you’re going to escort me out as I’m asking a moment of silence for Holocaust? No, he did not.

Speaker C: Okay. Officer there’s. Officer Cunningham, can you please escape?

Speaker A: And the Moms for Liberty applaud the man being denied the liberty to take advantage of his allotted time to speak about how horrible it is that they are quoting Hitler and trying to ban books. This is the world we live in. This is why we care. This is Christian Nationalism 101. Go in, control the local school boards, control the libraries, shut down education, shut down, uh, any sort of information that disagrees with your point of view. That’s what these people are doing. If this was the 1950s and 60s, these women would be the same ones you see in the footage from school integrations. The white women that were out there screaming bloody murder with a look of murderous intent on their face as young black children were escorted by National Guard troops into schools, forcing integration. That’s who these people are. The modern day version of this. I’m not exaggerating when I think that the Internet guy on reddit who called them Clanned karen Hood is f****** 100% right. This is why we care. People are doing this based on misinformation. They believe that there’s a God. They believe that they know the mind of that God, and they believe that the mind of that God approves of what they’re doing, and it gives them justification to commit atrocities small and big. So as to why we care. This is why we care. This is why I’m donating my time to try to educate people about what’s going on and especially how to fight back against it. Right? Go and elect school board members, library board members who won’t put up with this bullshit. Okay? It sounds like looking at the video and listening to the words, it sounds like the board person, she was in over her head. She sounded like a nice old lady who was very confused. And it’s like, oh, you’re not talking, so let’s just move on type of thing, which is always what gets bureaucrats in trouble with the law. Okay? This is a side note again, stream of consciousness. The thing that gets government in trouble is when government officials in trouble is when they choose the expedient option over the Constitutional option. I’m not saying there’s necessarily Constitutional rights involved here. You could make some arguments that it was a public forum. He was denied his time based on content. Right? That’s a First Amendment violation. You are letting some people speak in the public forum that you sponsored, and you’re allowing their content. You’re not allowing his content. Right. Nothing he was saying was obscene. He was holding a moment of silence, which the courts have said is speech. It’s not like being silent is not speech. When you say, I am going to have a moment of silence for this purpose. So you could make that constitutional argument here. Okay? I’m not talking about that. I’m just talking about generally. If you’re a government official and you have this frustration, there’s somebody here who’s bugging you and you don’t like what they’re doing because they’re making you do things by the book. Don’t try to get around the book. The book’s there for a reason. It’s the officials who take the shortcuts and just say, just shut up and sit down. That’s what gets people into trouble. And that’s what the Mobs for Liberty were applauding. A person not giving this guy his due time. It’s kind of like the Tinker case from the Vietnam War. Famous, uh, first amendment speech. Student is wearing black armband in high school to protest the Vietnam War. Administration officials hate that because they’re war mongering hawks. So they discipline her some way. I believe it was a suspension to kick her out of school. And what did they cite? She was disrupting the school, so we just made her go away. Well, you can argue the facts of whether there was any disruption or not, right? I’m sure there were people on both sides and people p***** off and all that sort of stuff, but they took the quick approach of let’s just ban her because she’s participating in the speech we don’t like, rather than going through any sort of process. And the Supreme Court said, no, students don’t give up their rights at the school door. Students still can speak. The court held that it has to be a substantial disruption in order for a school to be able to do anything about it. And it was a minor disruption. The administration officials were minorly inconvenienced that they got some protests from people about this person wearing the black armband and they brought the hammer down on it. This board member of the library was minorly inconvenienced that this person was asserting their rights. Like, hey, you’re having a public forum. You’re a government entity. I get to speak and, uh, I’m not being allowed to speak. And she kicks them out. Now, to be fair, the cop who has to escort him out, if you take a look at the video, is hanging his head down and shaking it like, oh man, I’m so sorry, dude. And the speaker is like, he’s fine with it, but we have to keep in mind what these people are all about. Okay? So when you recite the facts, it’s crazy. Moms for Liberty, whom the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that keeps track of extremists and terrorist groups. SPLC has classified them as a far right extremist organization. So a far right extremist organization cites Hitler on their newsletter as they are forcing the school, the local, excuse me, library board to pull books from the shelves. All the reporters from the area were saying that the shelves were nearly empty in the teen section of the library and spend over $330,000 manually reviewing those books after citing Hitler and all of that protest a moment of silence for Holocaust victims by disrupting it and then cheer when man, who was conducting Moment of Silence, is kicked out of meeting. Those are the facts of the case. That’s what’s going on in this country. That’s why we care. These religious nut jobs are really seeking to change the very core nature of our country. All right, enough about that. Let’s move on to the next one. What else do I have? Okay, this one is disturbing. So it started out with this story. Former Christian missionary convicted of sexual abuse and incest after victim under the age of twelve contracts. Gonorrhea, that’s where I started with this story. But this rabbit hole goes pretty deep, so strap in. So the man’s name is Jordan D. Andrew Webb from, uh, Fort Dodge, Iowa. And what he was convicted of, So we have all the facts on the table here. He was found guilty by a jury trial of sexual abuse with a person under the age of twelve, child endangerment and incest. So that while they don’t say who the victim was, that all leads me to believe it was his daughter. Incest is somebody that you’re closely related to, right? But child endangerment is somebody that you’re responsible for. So either it’s his daughter or some close relative, depending on the incest laws in Iowa. Some close relative that he was put in charge of. Because you don’t get child endangerment without being responsible for the child, right? So that in and of itself is a horrible story. And we can have conversations let’s touch on that for just a moment. If this was just the story, it would be bad enough. And we can have conversations about what kind of God lets children get raped, right? What kind of God makes that physically possible? Because you get all of these Christians, all of these religious people, god is great, god is all loving, God cares, and all of this. Why does this happen if there is a real powerful, loving God? And, uh, you may remember one of my favorite moments in the history of the show, the Atheist Experience, where Tracy Harris is having a conversation with a caller about this topic, right? And she points out the difference between me and your God is I would make it impossible for anybody to rape a child. It would just be physically impossible. Like, I can’t fly, I can’t read minds, I can’t hurt people with my thoughts even if I want to. None of that is physically possible. We could have designed people in a way that it was physically impossible. Either you never have the urge or physically things don’t happen, so you can’t do it. I, as a god, would make that an effect of life. You can’t rape a child. Your God says, you go ahead and rape that child. I’m going to close the door. You rape that child, do whatever you want, but I’m going to be very cross with you afterwards and you better apologize for it or I’m going to not let you come into heaven. That’s the difference between them and the caller responds by saying, you’re assuming that that girl isn’t a sinner. At which point they hang up on the monster caller. Uh, and that’s a great example. My favorite example in the history of the show, possibly it’s one of their most famous clips.

Speaker C: Um.

Speaker A: The best example of how people who are that caller is probably a good person. They don’t go around raping people. Maybe they do, I don’t know, but they’re probably a good person. But because they’re so invested in their religion, it causes them to twist any sort of reality, to settle any sort of cognitive dissonance they may have. On one hand, I believe my God is loving and cares for people and wouldn’t just let innocent people suffer for no reason. On the other hand, I’ve got a parent raping a child and God is letting that happen. Well, the only way I can resolve that is to assume that the girl has a sinner and deserves what she’s getting. That’s where religion takes people when they really want, uh, to believe the premises, right. They have to twist the conclusion in order to accept the premise. So that’s a conversation we could have if this story was all that there was. The way the guy that got caught is girl gets diagnosed with Gonorrhea, he had Gonorrhea. Now, additionally, the reason it’s relevant to religion is because he is a missionary. He was sent by the Harvest Baptist Bible College and Church to St. Lucia as part of their Christ in the Caribbean project from 2019 through 2022. Now, this year, I’m not sure, actually. Let’s see. He was arrested in April 22. Okay, so when he comes back, let’s put it together. Um, I don’t have to spell it out for you. He goes to the Caribbean as a missionary, has sex with prostitutes or whomever, and contracts gonorrhea, comes home, has sex with his daughter, twelve year old daughter, and only gets caught because the daughter contracts gonorrhea, goes to the doctor, gets diagnosed, and the doctor’s like a twelve year old with Gonorrhea. We know what’s going on here. A search warrant was executed on the church in addition to his residence, I believe. I know it was at the church. I assume they, uh, executed a warrant at his residence. He was arrested and was convicted, and faces up to 32 years in prison. So the second conversation regarding why we care, right? The reason we care for this particular story, for this particular aspect, is in this country especially, people put an unjustified amount of trust into people in religious positions, in religious organizations. Just look at the Catholic Church’s history. Everybody assumes it’s only the Catholic Church that does this. No, it happens everywhere. You get bad people. Bad people will do bad things. Good people will do good things. It takes religion to make a good person do a really evil thing, right? To, uh, commit atrocities. Here we’ve got a bad person doing a bad thing. They were caught and thankfully arrested. And this person, hopefully the child, will get lots of therapy and be able to get over with this, um, this person. I hope they go to prison for a long time. So that would be the end of the story. We could say, look, why does God let bad, horrible things happen to innocent children? And, uh, being religious shouldn’t make you extra trustworthy. People should be very skeptical. Just because you’re a Christian missionary, you work for a church, whatever, doesn’t mean you deserve any extra trust at all. 1 may even argue it means you should get a little less. I’m not going to say that, but I mean, given the stats, maybe that’s what’s going on here. So that’s the first part of this story. I’m going to jump to the second part of the story, and then we’ll make the connection. So another story coming out of the same city, fort Dodge, Iowa, dates back to February 27, 2009. The title of this story is anchor Charter Training Center. A children’s center is unlicensed in Iowa. That’s the the headline of the story. There’s news stories dating to this period about this school. Anchor Charter Training Center at this particular story reports that, um, it’s had 24 runaway juveniles, that it cares for a child endangerment charge that involved a paddling incident and one case of criminal mischief over the years. But the headline at this time, 2009, was, there is a 16 year old sex offender living at this center. And it’s an unlicensed center. It doesn’t have a license. They’ve got 35 kids here, one of which is a sex offender, and they have a history of problems. Okay, that’s the story from 2009. Guess who owns and operates that center? A church. That is correct. But it’s also the same church that employed the missionary that raped his child. Harvest Baptist Church of Fort Dodge. Okay. That’s how I found out about them. Like, I started researching them and, oh, they’ve got a history of criminal sexual conduct going on in their facilities dating back to 2009. But the story doesn’t end there. Back in 2017, the state was trying to tighten up on unlicensed facilities like this. And there is a senator, Senator Tim Crayonbrink, back in 2017 proposed to make the Anchor Charter Training Center, operated by Harvest Baptist Church, exempt from any of these new requirements, school accreditation requirements. They deserve to stay open and serve these children. He said, I will not change my mind on this. What would we do with them if they’re not in this facility? The kids are safe, they are well fed, everything is fine. These are all exact quotes that he’s saying. There’s only one path left, and it’s to make an exemption for the school. So now we’re getting a better picture of what’s going on here. Uh, at least this church, and probably many others like it in Fort Dodge, has a history of flying under the radar, cutting corners, doing things that they’re not licensed to do, employing sexual offenders, hosting sexual offenders. They have entered into settlements with parents who have stayed at this place. And they have politicians trying to create exemptions so that they don’t have to be inspected by the state. This is why we care. We’ve got religious organizations abusing children and politicians trying to help them cover it up. It started with just this one story. One missionary is, uh, convicted of raping his kid. And it leads to a history of holy crap, look at what’s been going on in this one town with this one church. This is why we care. They fly under the radar. You would not know about this. Like, when I read the story about the rapist, I had no idea that any of this history happened for this art, uh, Anchor Charter Training Center, the Harvest Baptist Church. I had to Google it, do research, cross reference stuff. Put two and two together. That’s crappy reporting that should have been front and center. Hey, they just got convicted of this guy doing this to his kid after they sent him out to the Caribbean. By the way, did you know that? Although there’s this whole history of this church doing stuff like this in this community, this is why reporters are important. This is why reporters who live in your community and remember the history know to, oh, yeah, they’ve had a problem that’s ongoing. Let’s talk about that in the story. They don’t talk about it in the story that was sent to me. They just talk about the rapists. So we cannot defer to religious organizations and give them any sort of trust whatsoever. Just because you’re a Christian, just because you’re a church, just because you say you serve children, doesn’t mean that we should defer to you, that we should give you any sort of trust in our society. In fact, it may mean that you deserve a little less. So this is a very, very good example of one little story that can grow to make you realize this stuff is happening everywhere, and it’s exhausting to report on it. Exhausting. All right, next story. You may have heard of the wonderfully alliterative name Tommy Tuberville. Are you familiar with Tommy tuberville? He is the Republican senator from Alabama. So that should set off red flags if you don’t know who he is. He is also an absolute moron. He may be, uh, the dumbest senator in the Senate. He’s out dumbed by, like, Marjorie Taylor Green and Bobert in the House, but in the Senate, he is up there as far as just being a blathering idiot. He was in the news this week. He doubled down on previous comments about white nationalism and how white nationalists are not racists. This is a United States senator saying that, um, that’s just some people’s opinion, was his quote. I think the original quote he, uh, had was he was on an local Alabama radio station. This is always how these people get called out. They get home, they’re in their comfortable racist south, and they go on an Alabama talk show on a radio, and he asks and he was asked whether he believes white nationalists should be allowed in the military and because they’re racists. Right. Should we have white nationalists in the military? And he said, quote, I call those people Americans. It’s a political answer. It’s non responsive. Of course, he didn’t say yes or no. The implication is yes, but that’s not what he said. Chuck Schumer immediately responded because, uh, tuberville has put a hold on military nominations. He’s gumming up the works as far as letting nominees get approved by the Senate for high ranking military positions. So Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, quote, last night, given another chance to clear the air, he suggested that, no, white nationalists aren’t inherently racist, that, yes, white nationalism is American and that the definition of white nationalism is a matter of opinion. Schumer said, It’s hard to believe that the senator from Alabama has to be corrected. Again, the senator from Alabama is wrong, wrong, wrong. The definition of white nationalism is not a matter of opinion. Now, we could quibble at the edges about that because all definitions are a matter of opinion. But what matters is when we talk about white nationalism and what everybody means by it is racist, N*** type people that want to take over the United States and make it favor whites in its policies and laws. And Tuberville, who recognizes that a vast majority of his voters are white nationalists, is trying to say, well, no, it doesn’t mean you’re racist, right? It just means you want to favor white people. Again, denying reality, trying to trying to gaslight his constituencies or gaslight his listeners into thinking that it’s not so bad. It’s just like Trump saying there’s good people on both sides regarding the Charloteville N*** march and killing. It’s disappointing, but again, falls into this category of why we care. This man is a Christian nationalist. Don’t be mistaken by the discussion about white nationalism. It’s very closely tied. So he is willing to be the face of it and willing to try to justify it, soften it, and lie to people about what it is in order to trick people into being okay with some sort of part of the concept. So, again, another entry in, uh, our Why We Care. I wouldn’t care about religion if these religious zealots weren’t out there trying to turn our country into a racist N*** stronghold. And speaking of Nazis, Josh Holly was in the news on the 4 July when he tweeted the following quote patrick Henry, as in he’s quoting Patrick Henry. It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians, not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faith have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here. Close quote. So Holly on the 4 July tweets out a quote from Patrick Henry making it very clear that this great nation was, quote, founded by Christians on the gospel of Jesus Christ. Close quote. So if I’m talking about it, you know that it’s not true, right? Right. It’s not true. Patrick Henry never said that. That’s always bad enough when somebody does this. We just had a story earlier where somebody was quoting Adolf Hitler, but attributed Adolf Hitler and got the quote right. So white nationalists can quote people correctly. Josh Holly can’t, apparently, but it gets worse because the quote actually comes from the Virginian, a white nationalist publication, and the quote was, uh, published in 1956. So, yeah, Josh Holly quoting white nationalist propaganda, that is false. So he published a fake fact. We’re a Christian nation. If you’ve listened to my previous episodes. You know, that’s just demonstrably not true. Which is why they have to come up with all this bullshit, these fake quotes. So a fake fact and a faked quote from a white nationalist rag. That’s what he did. And of course the internet jumped all over him. My favorite response was a tweet that says Patrick Henry quote if you put fake quotes in my mouth after I die, I’m going to come back as a ghost and poltergeist the s*** out of you. At Josh Holly. To top it all off, he’s got a degree in history, so he knows what he’s doing. So I know what you’re thinking. He’s going to just blame it on a staffer and move on. That’s not what he did. He doubled down. He followed up the tweet with a second tweet that said quote, I’m told the libs are major triggered by the connection between the Bible and the American founding. Quote that’s his response. That’s a senator’s response. This is where politics is in the United States. That rather than be like, oh, truth matters, I apologize. I didn’t mean to lie to you on two points. I will fix this. I will delete the tweet. I will post an actual quote by Patrick Henry and I still love America and uh, only in America can we make these mistakes without fearing, uh, uh, retribution from the government, right? All sorts of different great Patriotic 4 July, Maya Culpas you could make no, he goes into the uh, point of the entire GOP organization right now, which is you mad bro. That’s all they care about. I’m told the libs are major triggered by the connection between the Bible and the American founding. This is the man who gave the fist pump salute to the January 6, uh, insurrectionists, the religious rioters, and then ran from them as they were invading his office space, right? This is the man and he’s sitting here saying like major triggered and things like that. Again, what a disconnect and what a liar. I wouldn’t care about religion. Again, speaking with this theme of this episode, why do I care? Because there’s people like Josh Holly who have a huge microphone out there who are lying their constituents. So that when they hear this, they’re like, oh yeah, it is a Christian nation. And then they go and they listen to their preacher and the preacher tells them it’s a Christian nation. You heard my episode if you’ve listened to it, about the preacher, Kenneth Copeland, who did a whole like in two or three minutes of talking he had 28 different errors, who then lies and tells him it’s a Christian nation with a bunch of false facts. And then on Kenneth Copeland’s network, we’ve got a guy who’s saying we’ve always been a Christian nation. And the reason the Islam is so successful and we aren’t right now is because we don’t have people passionate enough to strap bombs to our chest. I hope you see the pattern. All the statements I just said are all true. We’ve got all these Christian nationalists telling the lie that this is a Christian nation that was founded on Christian principles, um, and that the founding fathers all were devout Christians and wanted this to be a Christian nation, when none of that could be further from the truth. And they know what they’re doing. It’s all one big machine. Let’s all sing the same message. Let’s all chant the same mantra. And if we say it loud enough and long enough, if you repeat the lie long enough, people will start to believe you. So this is why we care. We’ve got to push back against stuff like this next story is out of Kansas City, Missouri. The, uh, headline is missouri public schools will be allowed to teach electives on the Bible under New Law. So it was actually a bipartisan bill that got signed into law by their Republican governor, Mike Parson. When was this signed? In the week of the 7th, so fairly recently, about a week ago. It goes into effect this coming year. And the Bible will be taught in school as an elective in a social studies class. The names of the courses that are listed as examples, but not limited, uh, to these is Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament of the Bible, and quote new Testament of the Bible. So, basically, old Testament. New Testament. We’re going to study the Bible in public schools. I’m actually not against things like comparative religion classes. Like, if you were to have a class in a public school, that was comparative religion, let’s study the Quran, the Old Testament, the New Testament. Throw in some other stuff in there. As far as what major religions the, the district once represented, I think that’s very educational and it opens people’s eyes. The more that you read the bible and other scriptures, the more you realize they’re all the same and that they all can’t prove each other wrong, and none of them are true. The more you study the Bible, if you’re actually studying the Bible, the more you’re convinced it’s not true. The problem comes in is when you limit your courses that you’re offering to one religion. These courses are only about the Christian Bible. They’re not offering a, uh, comparative religion. They’re not saying that they’re going to study it under a particular view, like study it as literature versus study it as historical fact versus study it as religious doctrine. I haven’t seen the guidance. I don’t think there is any guidance. Uh, so this is singling out one religion to be favored over others. They’re going to have arguments about that. They’re going to have arguments about the nature of the curriculum, things like that. It’s definitely concerning. It’s more example of what we are seeing. If the GOP takes over local government around the country and forcing religion back into schools, we should not just offer this now, one could argue, like, hey, all of our students are Christian. And it’s kind of like when you choose which foreign language to offer at your high school. We don’t offer, uh, the traditional Native American languages at our high school because nobody in our community wants to learn how to speak that. They all want to learn how to speak, uh, French and Spanish. So that’s what we offer. My local school district has a lot of Korean students, and they want to study Korean, or they want an easy A, just like I take English for an easy A. So we offer Korean and English in my school district, whatever it may be. And they could make that argument. Right? When it comes to religion, that’s a special decision, right? It’s not just like picking French versus German. It’s picking one religion over another. And when the First Amendment gets involved, we have some establishment clause problems. This current court may not see a problem with this. I haven’t done a lot of research on the history of this. Uh, like, how often has this been tested by federal courts? I’d love to go do that. I just want to bring it up as another example of why we care. For those of you who keep saying, why do you atheists care so much? This because it’s being shoved down people’s throat. And if you’re a student in this school and you elect not to take this class, you are now different. You are now the person who chooses not to do this. If you are a student who does take the class, but you are an atheist and you are seeking to enter into genuine discussion, you may be surprised when the teacher starts preaching this as true, and you are saying, actually, there’s no justification for that, and you start getting a failing grade. If you are taking this as an atheist, and you notice, hey, you are only discussing the good parts. You know, when you go and you take, ah, a Bible study at a church, it’s always funny how they start with the good stuff, the gospel, little baby Jesus being born, little baby Jesus dying for our sins and saving us. Uh, all of that stuff. They don’t ever get into the nasty stuff like, hey, God ordering you to go and kill everybody in that city and take the children and take the infants and bash them upon the rocks, because that’s what m makes God’s happy. The smell of burning flesh in God’s nostrils is what really gets them off. All of that stuff that’s never, strangely enough, never taught. So if you’re an atheist or a secular student or someone who’s Islamic, let’s say, right, you’re a Muslim in this class, and you’re asking these questions about, why aren’t we studying this other stuff? The teacher may be prejudiced against you. It opens up a big can of worms. So it’s best to stay out. If you’re going to do it, do it as a comparative studies, right? Do it as something where you are studying it as literature. Compare the histories, all sorts of stuff you can do. So it’s a tough call for me on this particular issue without doing more research. It definitely raises a ton of concerns, and it is why we care. Next story. This is a video of an interview a reporter did in Pickens, South Carolina. Yet another South Carolina story during a Trump rally. They’re talking to fans of Trump in line at a Trump rally. So listen to this. What should President Trump do on day one when he gets back in?

Speaker C: Lock him up.

Speaker A: Lock him up.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker A: The deep state. Take it down.

Speaker C: Take them to train station.

Speaker A: Take him to train station. I didn’t say that. Take him to the train station. Trump woman says, what should Trump do on day one? They should take the deep state. They should take the Democrats to the train station. And the reporter, if you could call him that, repeats that so the audience can hear it, and then says, I didn’t say that, with a smile on his face. While everybody around, this woman is smiling. Shoulders are chuckling, jumping up and down as they chuckle. This is a reference to, of course, the Holocaust. Let’s take our political opponents, put them on a train, and take them to gas chambers and kill them all. This is what is going out as news. This is what these people think is a good idea to report to the rest of the country. That’s already in a very tense sort of mental situation. Again, I can’t say for sure that these are all Christian nationalists, but looking at the crowd, they are all white. They’re all in South Carolina. They’re all supporting Trump. They’re wearing the Lions Not Sheep T shirts that you may have seen going around. And they’re telling people that we should take our political point, uh, and put them in the gas chamber. It’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it in the country. These people need to be stopped. This news service, whatever it was, RSBN. I don’t even know that one. It seems like a very OAN type of thing. Should be ashamed of themselves. I know that they aren’t. I know that this is what they know they make money off of, is putting controversial people on camera. But the fact that people feel comfortable saying this makes me very, very aware of my naivete and my innocence back. Pre. Trump. Pre. Obama when I used to have these conversations, late night conversations at school, like, I just don’t understand how the N*** movement took over Germany. I know they were down on their luck and they lost the first war and all that stuff. But how do you jump from that to, like, we should just kill millions of people? And now I get it. I mean, I get it. We are living in that sort of about to have crystal knocked type of moment in our country where the Christian nationalists are using Trump as their leader to help them deny reality and shift blame onto any scapegoat that they can possibly come up with. And right now, it’s atheists, it’s Biden, it’s the deep state, whatever that means. Ignoring the fact that he had four years, uh, Trump had already had four years to do anything, to do absolutely anything to help his voters, and did nothing. The one major piece of legislation that he passed during the two year period where he had the House, the Senate, and the White House for two years, what did he get done? He passed a trillion dollar tax cut for the wealthy. And the people in this line, let me tell you, are not wealthy. These are blue collar workers spending their time, their valuable time off of work, showing up at a Trump rally and telling people that we need to bust their political opponents off to gas chambers. What is wrong with you people? This is insane. This is why we care. These people don’t believe this. If they don’t have pastors telling them that we’re a Christian nation, if we don’t have Trump holding up the Bible upside down and pretending to be one of them, right? They’re excusing the p**** grabber in chief. These are not what I was raised to believe were good, moral people, which is what they think of themselves as. They are potential gang murderers. They are willing participants in a, uh, genocide. If her particular statement, which is chuckled at sheepishly and with a wink today, becomes a slightly more serious proposal tomorrow. Because we realize, of course, that all of our political opponents are pedophiles. And that’s our excuse to, of course, send them to the gas chamber, which, if you’ve been listening to this show, you realize the vast majority, if not all, of the pedophiles we’re catching are all conservatives, they’re church members, they’re Boy Scout leaders. All of those people tend to be the ones that are getting arrested, not the politicians that these people want to point at. So this right here, these people in the street that have been affected by all of these opinions floating around in the ether, affecting their perception of reality, this is why we care. We don’t get people proposing mass execution of political opponents without religion in the mix. We just don’t get it. We do get it today, because that religion is being weaponized against rational thought. Speaking of which, here’s a great example of that.

Speaker E: Today, I’m, um, announcing a new plan to protect the integrity of, uh, our immigration system. Federal law prohibits the entry of communists and totalitarians into the United States. But my question is, what do we do with the ones that are already here, that grew up in? I think we have to pass a new law for them.

Speaker A: So this is Trump, uh, saying that if he’s elected president, he’s going to keep the Communists and, uh, totalitarians out and that we probably need a new law for those people who grew up here and have communist leanings right, and I guess totalitarian leanings that we need a new law to handle them, too. He, uh, goes on with some details.

Speaker E: Using federal law in section 212 F of the Immigration and Nationality Act, I will order my government to deny entry to all Communists and all Marxists.

Speaker A: All right. He’s going to use section 212 F of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The Ina What does that actually say? Let’s read it. This is, uh, section 1182 of title eight of the Federal Code. Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may, by proclamation and for such period as he shall deem necessary suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. So this is broad power that has been delegated from Congress to the executive to say, hey, if you’re finding a particular alien, a particular person who’s not of the United States or a class of aliens, some group that has the same characteristic. Everybody who is carrying a weapon, everybody who is a member of a terrorist group, things like that. If you find that admission into the United States they used to say entry. Now they say admission is the word use. If admission to the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, you can basically forbid them. And this is the section that he tried to rely upon back when he did the Muslim ban, as it was known. He tried to disguise it as well. We’re just banning entry from certain countries, but all of those countries were of, um, Muslim origin. Here he’s being much more explicit. I am going to issue an order that’s saying anybody who’s a Communist can’t come into the country. Obviously, no definitions. He’s not big on any sort of details on anything or actually doing anything, but that’s what he says. He’s going to go further, though, and describe why we don’t want these people in the country. So let’s listen in.

Speaker E: Those who come to and join our country must love our country. We want them to love our country. We don’t want them when they want to destroy our country. Welcome to America. We want to destroy your country. Thank you very much. So we’re going to keep foreign, Christian hating communists, marxists, and socialists out of America. We’re keeping them out of America.

Speaker A: So we’re going to keep foreign, Christian hating communists, marxists, and socialists out of the country. Christian hating. Now we are out in the open, right? This is Christian nationalism. If you’re not Christian, you can’t come to this country. I’m going to couch it as, uh, he noticed how he added socialism. At first, it was totalitarians and Communists, and then it was Communists and Marxists and socialists and Christian hating people that are of that type. So this is the rhetoric that we hear from Christian nationalists that sounds very similar to prewar Europe, right? Let’s keep the Other. As Orson Scott Card described it in Ender’s Game and in the series of Ender’s books the Varelsa, the Other, the Alien. Let’s keep the alien type of person literally and figuratively, away from me. And here it’s focused on religion. Would this pass constitutional muster? Right? Uh, absolutely not. If he came in and said, anybody who’s not Christian that doesn’t like Christianity is a threat, would be detrimental to the interests of the United States of admitting them. That finding could be questioned, and I think the court would jump in and say, no, this is a violation of the First Amendment. Now, one makes all these sorts of arguments as saying, well, they’re not citizens. They have no right to be in here. But you would find test cases where people who have some sort of interest vested in them. As soon as you show up on the shores, the Constitution gives you certain rights. Right. As soon as you are physically here, we would find people who made it to America, and now they’re being denied admission, um, based merely on their religious views. The fact that they have religious views that the President doesn’t like, I can’t imagine the Court would go along with that. Well, actually, I could imagine this Court going along with that, but I don’t think they would. I’d love to love to get a constitutional scholar in here to break that down for me. I did a little bit of research, and the Supreme Court has only addressed this particular section once in its history. And that was back in 90. What, 90 something? Let me see. 92 no, 93. 93. It was sale. Or sale, maybe. Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, Inc. And that was an executive order by Bush SR. Ordering the suspension of admission of any aliens coming to the United States by boat without proper paperwork. That was the class that he was forbidding, and the Court was fine with that. There was a previous, uh, issue under the 11th Circuit in 92 on a Reagan order that was very similar. Boat, uh, traveling immigrants without proper paperwork were banned. And again, they were fine. And there’s a couple of histories dating back to the 1950s, uh, about similar statutes. This is relatively new, this particular section, but there’s nothing in here where the President says, I think that admitting people that don’t like Christians to the country, uh, is detrimental to the interests of the United States under this section. Therefore, I’m forbidding it. That does not seem to hold muster. It’s not an area, immigration area is a little hazy for me, to be honest, because you do have that question mark of which rights apply. I could go and dive in, I’m sure, and maybe we’ll do an episode on that. Better yet, to talk to an expert and find out at what point, like when your foot touches if you step off of a dinghy and your foot touches land. Because this has been a case on immigration coming from Cuba, where people the decision literally has been is part of their body touching dry land. Right. What rights are now attached to you? Because some do. Because the Constitution doesn’t say it only applies to citizens. It applies to anybody who is physically in the United States. Just because you’re not a citizen doesn’t mean I can do whatever I want to you and the Constitution doesn’t apply. But the court has agreed that there’s some things that you some things that you’re allowed to do regarding regulating immigration, even if the person’s here where you don’t have the right, uh, that a citizen would have. I would love to get into a conversation. So if anybody’s interested in coming on and talking about that particular issue, because it is going to be a continuing issue from the GOP for the next two decades, I’m sure, trying to keep non Christians out of the country because this is a Christian nation, please give me a ring. I would love to interview you. I’m looking at you, Ryan Jane, of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. If you’re listening. What is FFRF’s take on a proposed ban on, quote, Christian haters entering the country? Um, I’m pretty sure I know what your position is, but I’d love to chat with you about it. Let me know. Next up, we’ll talk very briefly about the submarine incident you may have heard of. I think the entire world heard about this. The Titan sub that was pulverized, crushed instantly, as it was, um, trying to make it down to the Titanic. I cite this not as a religious issue, but as a repeated mantra on this show of, uh, if you believe things based on insufficient evidence, you can hurt yourself or others. By all accounts, the guy that was running that company was both a sort of scientific engineering guy, but also a maverick. And it sounds like, uh, in reading everything and listening to his interviews, he believed things about his own capability that were not justified based on the evidence. Especially the evidence of other experts coming in and saying, hey, using carbon fiber hole attached to a metal, uh, end caps. That’s a bad design. It’s going to wear out over time. And sure enough, he killed four other people. Thankfully. It sounds like it was instantaneous. Just, you are first. The quote I heard was, you are biology, and one millisecond later, you’re just physics. You’re just particles floating in the water. So, yeah, small and large, you. Shouldn’t go around just believing you’re going to be safe and that everything’s just going to be okay because, hey, it’s you or hey, this guy is a, uh, CEO. He must know something. Get the evidence first. Next we’re going to and finally we’re going to end on a, uh, funny story, somewhat funny story. It’s still a little weird and disturbing, but the headline was as follows. This was an NPR story. A fishing line encircles Manhattan protecting sanctity of Sabbath. What’s that about, you might wonder. Well, it turns out that for observant Jews, I don’t know how orthodox you need to be in order to believe this particular rule. Ah, it’s a mystery to me as to which rules people choose to apply and don’t apply. But, um, there is a rule that says you are not allowed to leave your home carrying anything on the Sabbath, the day of rest. Right. No carrying on the Sabbath. And according to the laws, nothing can be carried from the domestic zone into the public zone on the day of rest. Saturday. That means no carrying house keys, no wallets. If you’ve got a kid, you can’t push a baby stroller. So all of that would not be allowed. You must stay in your home shelter in place on Saturdays, unless you are walking inside of this enclosure, this symbolic enclosure, as far as I can tell, called an aruv, eru v. Aruv. Now I’m relying on this NPR article. It says that the aruv was first established about 2000 years ago to allow Jews to more realistically follow the laws of the Sabbath rest, particularly the one of no carrying. Right. I find that interesting because if it’s almost 2000 years ago, that means it’s long after the Torah was written. So it sounds to me like somebody’s like, you know, we’re getting pretty sophisticated here. Cities are busy. Uh, why don’t we invent an excuse to not have to follow one of the rules, right. So if nothing can be carried unless you’re inside of an aruv and you want to go about Manhattan, guess what? You surround all of Manhattan in an aruv. This symbolically extends the domestic zone into the public zone is what is the theory. So they literally spend hundreds of thousands of dollars stringing a fishing line around most of Manhattan. I’ll put a map up on my site of where it goes, but they have an interactive Google map. I’ll try to find that for you to show you how big it is. But it goes all the way down to Lower Manhattan, the top of Lower Manhattan, all the way up to Harlem. It includes all of Central Park, Washington Square, Midtown most of midtown, except for H***’s Kitchen. I find that interesting. There’s a lot of space, uh, that’s covered by it. So they run a fishing line and every Thursday I think it is, yes. Every Thursday before dawn, a rabbi drives the perimeter, checking to see if wind or fallen branches or anything has broken the line. And there are usually a few breaks. So a construction company is called, and the rabbi gets in a cherry picker with fishing line in hand and repairs the aruv. Okay, that’s $125 to $150,000 a year this community pays to string a piece of fishing wire around Manhattan. I kid you not. So I’m not saying that this is why we care, but if you’re willing to spend $150,000 a year for your magical barrier to get out of following a rule in your book, how important is that book, and how realistic are those rules? I don’t know. You tell me. Am I being, uh, a little too picky on this one? I think it’s a perfect example of how people know deep down inside that most of this stuff is just BS. And when it starts to really interfere with what they want to do because they know it’s the right thing or what they need to do, they find ways to not follow the rules. You see lots of Christians with tattoos. Let’s just put it that way. All right, so I’ve gone on long enough. This is my first episode back. I appreciate your time. Uh, next episode, I’m going to be doing I think I’m going to do a quick take. There was a story that came in about Yuri Geller, uh, this week that I was going to do here, but I know I’m going to talk longer about it than anything else. So I’m gonna probably do a quick take on that. And then we’re gonna get back to my faith healing series. We’re gonna do a deep dive on the history of Christian science in America. So I hope you join me for that. Thank you for listening, and remember to have a fun time all the time. I’ll see you next time.

Speaker B: This has been the Cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing. See you soon.

Speaker C: Sauce. M.