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There is a specific smell to a plate carrier after you've worn it for 3 days in the desert.
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It smells like sweat, CLP, and bad decisions.
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It's heavy, it chafes, it's a miserable piece of equipment that you only wear because the
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alternative is getting a hole in your chest.
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We like to tell ourselves that extremism is a southern thing.
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We watch the news about Texas megachurches or Florida school boards, and we sit here
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in Pennsylvania and think, well, at least we're reasonable.
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At least we're safe.
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I have bad news.
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You are not safe, and we are definitely not all reasonable.
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If you drive 2 hours north of here, up I-81, to a little town called Newfoundland, PA,
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you will find a church.
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It's called the Rod of Iron Ministries.
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On Sunday morning, the choir doesn't just wear robes.
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They wear crowns made of bullets.
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And when the congregation stands for the reading of the word, they don't just hold Bibles.
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They clutch AR-15s against their chests.
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They believe the AR-15 is the literal rod of iron mentioned in Revelation.
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They bless them at the altar.
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Now you might say, Jim, that's just a cult.
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That's the Moonies.
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That's fringe.
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Is it?
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Because the man who headlined their freedom festival wasn't some hermit in the woods.
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It was Michael Flynn, the former National Security Advisor.
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It was Tom Homan, the former Director of ICE.
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It was Sebastian Gorka.
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These are the men who are writing the policy for the administration.
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And they're doing it in a tent in the Poconos where Jesus is depicted holding a sniper rifle.
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We don't have to look at Texas to see the militarization of the church.
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It's happening in the Poconos.
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It's happening in Linnitz.
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It's happening in York, PA.
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The call is coming from inside the house.
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Today we are looking at the Pennsylvania insurgency.
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We are going to talk about the pastors in our own backyard who have traded the cross
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for the sword and why they are so desperate to turn the Keystone State into a theocracy.
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I'm Jim.
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This is False Foundation.
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Let's start with the visual because it's the most visceral example of stolen valor we have.
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If you go to Newfoundland, PA, you will find a pastor, Sean Moon.
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He is the son of the late Reverend Moon, the founder of the Unification Church.
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But Sean had a falling out with the family business.
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He decided his father wasn't kinetic enough.
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So he started the Sanctuary Church or the Rod of Iron Ministries.
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His theology is simple.
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Adam and Eve lost the Garden of Eden because they were unarmed.
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Therefore, the AR-15 is the key to restoring the kingdom of God.
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I want you to picture the scene at their annual Freedom Festival.
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It looks like a county fair, but instead of prized pigs, they have the car arms booth
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because Sean's brother, Justin Moon, owns car arms.
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Convenient how the theology requires you to buy the product the family sells, isn't it?
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But look at the speakers on stage.
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You have Ivan Reiklin, the self-proclaimed Secretary of Retribution.
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You have Michael Flynn preaching a holy war.
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And in the crowd, you have families, regular Pennsylvania families, getting their rifles
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blessed.
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This is stolen valor at its most absurd.
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I've carried a weapon for a living.
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A rifle is not a religious icon.
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It is a tool.
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It is a machine designed to destroy tissue.
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It gets dirty.
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It jams.
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It requires maintenance.
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When you put it on an altar, you aren't worshiping God.
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You're worshiping power.
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You are admitting that your faith isn't enough to make you feel safe.
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You need the cold steel of a receiver extension against your cheek to feel like a man.
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I have said this before, and I will say it again.
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This is offensive.
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Those of us who have actually participated in real-world combat operations look at these
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people and roll our eyes so far that we have a clear view of our brainstem.
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These folks sit in their air-conditioned, tax-exempt churches and talk about a holy
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war.
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There is no honor in what these people are doing.
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It is all performative, to reinforce the absurd idea that they are somehow engaged in an ethereal
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conflict.
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The only battle that these people will ever fight is in their own minds and maybe on X.
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What they are fighting for is ideology, it is supremacy, and it is entirely un-American.
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The Rod of Iron Ministries is the shock-troop wing of the movement.
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They are the ones who make the news because they look crazy, but they are a distraction.
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While you are staring at the guy with the crown of bullets, you are missing the guy
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in the suit who is actually writing your laws.
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The guys with the crowns aren't the ones that keep me up at night.
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Crazy is easy to spot.
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You know to stay away from the guy shouting at a stop sign.
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The dangerous ones are the ones wearing blazers in Lancaster County.
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Let's talk about the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society, or MARS.
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They are based right here in Lititz, Pennsylvania.
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Their leader is a man named Joel Saint.
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Joel Saint doesn't wear a crown of bullets.
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He goes to county commissioner meetings.
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He is polite.
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He is articulate.
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And unlike Sean Moon, he isn't playing soldier.
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He is playing governor.
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Listen to what he says.
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He isn't asking for prayer in schools.
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He is advocating for theonomy.
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That is a fancy theological word that means replacing civil law with biblical law.
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This goes back to a theologian named R.J. Rushtuni.
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If you hadn't heard that name, write it down.
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R.J. Rushtuni is the Karl Marx of the Christian Right.
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He invented Christian Reconstructionism.
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His big idea?
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Democracy is a heresy.
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The Constitution is a mistake.
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He believed that the only valid law is the Levitical law of the Old Testament.
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And yes, that includes stoning people for crimes that we consider basic liberties.
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Joel Saint is a disciple of Rushtuni.
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In his own writing, specifically an article titled, The Sound Doctrine of Theocracy or
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Statism, Joel frames the entire American experiment as a choice between God and tyranny.
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He writes, and I quote,
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We must choose theocracy or we will get tyranny.
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This guy doesn't want a seat at the table.
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He wants to flip the table over and burn it.
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And look at his policy.
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He went to a Lancaster County Commissioner meeting and argued against government aid
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to the poor.
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He asked the commissioners, is justice taking money from the productive to give it to the
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unproductive?
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He calls charity theft.
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He calls compassion statism.
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He basically stood in a public forum and argued that Jesus would have hated Section 8 housing.
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And here's the update.
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You might look for Mars online and see their blog hasn't been updated in a while.
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Like four years.
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You might think, oh, they went away.
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No, they just rebranded.
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They are now operating under the banner of the Future of Christendom.
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Why the name change?
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Because Mid-Atlantic sounded too regional.
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Future of Christendom sounds like an empire.
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And that is the goal.
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They want to create a Christian caliphate.
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They have coined the term from their new legal system, Lancastrian Theonomy.
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It sounds quaint, like a type of rose.
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But what it actually means is no legislature.
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In their world, men don't write laws.
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God wrote the laws 3,000 years ago, and Joel Saint is just here to enforce them.
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So we've talked about the muscle, the rod of iron.
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We've talked about the brains, Mars.
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But there's a third group operating in Pennsylvania right now.
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And they're the ones doing the actual damage.
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They are called the Independence Law Center, or ILC.
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They are the legal special forces for the right.
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Based in Harrisburg, funded by the PA Family Institute, which is funded by, well, we can
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guess.
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They are crawling all over our school districts, Hempfield, Penn Manor, Elizabethtown, Warwick,
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West Shore.
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If you go to a school board meeting in any of these districts, you will hear board members
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reading policies that sound identical.
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Policies about bathroom bans, policies about book bans, policies about banning trans athletes.
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That isn't a coincidence.
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It is a franchise model.
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Here is how the scam works.
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The ILC approaches a radicalized school board.
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They say, hey, we see you want to fight the culture war.
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We will draft these policies for you, and we will do it pro bono, free.
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That is the hook.
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They act like they are doing the district a favor, will even defend you if you get sued.
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So the board hires them.
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They pass the model policy that the ILC wrote in Harrisburg.
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And then the chaos starts.
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In Penn Manor, the community begged the board not to hire the ILC.
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Parents showed up.
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Teachers showed up.
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They presented petitions.
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The board ignored them.
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They pushed the ILC contract through.
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And the cost wasn't just lawsuits.
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It was lives.
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In Penn Manor, shortly after these hostile policies began to circulate, a trans student
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named Ash Clatterbuck took his own life.
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I want you to sit with that for a second.
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We aren't talking about abstract theology anymore.
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We aren't talking about funny hats and crowns of bullets.
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We are talking about a legal machine that enters a quiet community, radicalizes the
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school board, targets the most vulnerable kids in the hallway, and then pushes them
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until they break.
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And when the dust settles and the lawsuits start flying, costing the district millions,
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the ILC lawyers just pack up their briefcases and move on to the next district.
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They don't care about the cost, because for them, Ash wasn't a student.
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He was collateral damage in a holy war.
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They are exploiting the lack of interest of the people here.
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Christian supremacists have been able to exert pressure on the lowest levels of government
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because most people simply don't care enough to pay attention.
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While we are all focused on our jobs and our families and our futures, there are legions
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of pastors and lawyers that are engaged in an astroturf movement to convert school boards
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and by extension, your children, to a militant form of a Christian cult.
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They're hoping that you don't notice until it's too late.
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This is the tactical application of theology.
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Mars provides the theory, the ILC provides the weapon, and you, the taxpayer, you are
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just funding the battlefield.
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So how do they justify this?
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How do they convince regular church-going folks to support this?
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They use a myth, a story.
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You'll hear this phrase a lot in PA, the Black Robe Regiment.
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If you talk to Bill Cook or any of these patriot pastors, they will tell you that during the
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Revolutionary War, the pastors were the real generals.
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They claim that the clergy led their congregations into battle against the British.
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They want to be those men.
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They want to be the generals of the new revolution.
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But here's the stolen valor again.
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It is bad history.
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The term Black Robe Regiment was actually a British insult.
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And while some pastors did fight, the founding fathers, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, were
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not trying to build a theocracy.
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They were Enlightenment thinkers.
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They were terrified of religious war.
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I covered the Black Robe Regiment in a previous episode of False Foundation.
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That is why they wrote the First Amendment.
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Not to protect the church from the state, but to protect the state from the church.
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They knew what happens when a priest gets to write the laws.
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You get the Inquisition.
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You get the Crusades.
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You get the 30 Years War.
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These modern black robe guys want the authority of the founders, but they reject the principles
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of the founders.
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They want the uniform.
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They want the title, but they don't want the liberty.
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I want to pause here, because usually when we talk about politics in this country, we
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are trained to use soft language.
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We are trained to say things like, we have a difference of opinion, or we just see things
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differently.
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We are told that in a polite society, we have to respect every viewpoint, even the ones
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that make our skin crawl.
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I'm done with that.
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And you should be too.
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Because what is happening in Pennsylvania, what is happening in this country, is not
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a difference of opinion.
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Disagreement is when we argue about the tax rate.
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Disagreement is when we argue about zoning laws or how much money to spend on infrastructure.
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00:13:02,099
That is not what this is.
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We are watching a fundamental conflict between two incompatible definitions of what it means
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to be a human being.
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00:13:15,119
On one side, the side of the regressives, the theocrats, the CNP, you have a movement
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that is defined by subtraction.
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Look at their platform.
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Look at what they actually do when they get power.
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They do not build.
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They do not create.
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00:13:25,719
They do not expand.
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00:13:27,520
They remove.
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00:13:29,520
They want to remove books from the library.
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00:13:31,760
They want to remove history from the classroom.
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00:13:33,799
They want to remove rights from women.
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00:13:36,280
They want to remove health care from trans people.
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00:13:40,400
They want to remove voters from the rolls.
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00:13:45,559
Their entire ideology is based on the idea that the table is too crowded.
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They look at America, this messy, beautiful, diverse experiment, and they do not see potential.
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They see a mistake.
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They see too many people with too many freedoms.
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00:14:01,479
And their goal, their only goal, is to whittle it down until the only people left at the
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table look like them, think like them, and pray like them.
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00:14:09,119
They seek to marginalize anyone who doesn't fit the mold.
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00:14:13,599
They seek to minimize any history that makes them feel uncomfortable.
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00:14:18,280
They seek to discredit any science that contradicts their Bronze Age worldview.
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00:14:23,340
And they seek to disenfranchise anyone who might vote against them.
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That isn't politics.
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That is oppression.
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That is the definition of a bully.
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A bully doesn't want a relationship with you.
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A bully wants you to disappear.
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Now look at the other side.
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And I don't mean the Democrats or the leftists.
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I mean the humanists.
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00:14:40,659
I mean the progressives.
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I mean the people who actually believe in the promise of America.
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Our movement is defined by addition.
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00:14:49,979
We want to extend freedoms.
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00:14:52,799
We want to see more people vote, not fewer.
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00:14:56,039
We want more people to have health care, not fewer.
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00:15:03,659
We want more books in the library representing more voices, more experiences, more perspectives.
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00:15:08,619
We operate from a core belief that humanity is a positive sum game.
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We believe when my neighbor has rights, I don't lose mine.
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We believe that when a trans kid is safe in school, my kid isn't in danger.
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00:15:22,739
My kid is actually safer because they are growing up in a world that values kindness
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over cruelty.
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00:15:28,979
We want to see all of humanity benefit from a shared core of ideas.
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00:15:32,340
Reason, empathy, science, liberty.
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00:15:37,659
We want a society where you can worship any god you want, or no god at all, and still
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be treated with the exact same dignity as the guy in the pulpit.
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That is the difference.
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00:15:46,900
One side wants to build a fortress to keep people out.
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00:15:51,280
The other side wants to build a table where everyone can sit.
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00:15:55,340
And the reason the right is so angry, the reason they are buying plate carriers and
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stocking up on ammo, is because they know they are losing the moral argument.
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00:16:04,359
They know that subtraction is a losing strategy in a world that wants to grow.
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So they have to use force.
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They have to use intimidation.
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00:16:11,739
They have to use stolen valor and fake authority because they don't have the consent of the
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governed.
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00:16:14,880
I need you to understand the stakes here.
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This isn't about red versus blue.
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00:16:19,299
This is about liberty versus oppression.
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00:16:21,820
When they ban a book, they aren't protecting children.
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00:16:23,659
They are oppressing ideas.
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00:16:26,900
When they ban a medical procedure, they aren't protecting life.
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00:16:29,419
They are oppressing bodily autonomy.
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00:16:34,099
When they gerrymander a district to silence black voters, they aren't securing elections.
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00:16:36,719
They are oppressing democracy.
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00:16:39,940
We have to stop pretending that these are valid political tactics.
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They are not.
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00:16:44,380
They are acts of aggression against the citizenry.
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00:16:48,979
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability
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00:16:54,179
to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.
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00:16:56,559
We have reached that limit.
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00:17:01,159
We cannot agree to disagree with a movement that wants to strip mine our civil liberties.
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00:17:06,839
We cannot find common ground with people who think that some of us don't deserve to exist.
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00:17:12,479
There is no middle ground between I have the right to exist and no you don't.
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00:17:14,880
The time for polite disagreement is over.
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00:17:18,760
The time for calling it what it is has begun.
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00:17:20,640
They are regressives.
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00:17:24,500
They want to drag us back to a time when they held the whip.
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00:17:26,199
We are the progressives.
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00:17:29,199
We are moving forward, and we're not going back.
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00:17:32,380
You have to decide which side of that line you are on.
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00:17:35,680
Are you here to help, or are you here to control?
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00:17:39,680
Are you here to build, or are you here to burn?
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00:17:41,000
Because you can't be both.
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00:17:45,239
You cannot claim to love liberty while you are actively working to take it away from
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00:17:46,359
your neighbor.
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00:17:47,880
That isn't patriotism.
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00:17:49,839
It's hypocrisy.
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00:17:51,920
So here's the question I know you were asking.
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00:17:55,119
Jim, how can these people call themselves patriots?
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00:18:00,640
How can they wave the flag while they try to burn down the very thing that flag represents?
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00:18:04,400
It's because they don't believe in the America you believe in.
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00:18:07,119
You believe in a constitutional republic.
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00:18:10,660
A place where power comes from the consent of the governed.
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A place where we the people get to decide our own future.
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00:18:17,959
They believe that is a heresy.
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00:18:19,880
And I'm not using that word lightly.
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00:18:25,199
R.J. Rushduni called democracy the heresy of democracy.
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00:18:32,199
He said that the phrase, we the people, is an act of rebellion against God.
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00:18:36,079
In their minds, the people have no right to make laws.
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00:18:38,920
Remember Joel St. Lancasterian theonomy.
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00:18:42,359
No legislature, no Congress, no school board.
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00:18:43,359
Why?
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00:18:46,680
Because in their worldview, men cannot make laws.
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God already made the laws.
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00:18:51,260
We just exist to enforce them.
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00:18:55,560
So when they call themselves patriots, they aren't talking about the Constitution.
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They are talking about a covenant.
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00:19:03,119
They believe America made a blood oath with God in 1620 and that their job, their holy
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00:19:09,300
war, is to force this country back under that oath, whether you consent to it or not.
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00:19:10,839
They don't want a republic.
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00:19:13,979
They want a caliphate with a different flag.
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00:19:16,540
There is nothing more American than we the people.
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00:19:21,500
There is nothing more anti-American than we the enforcers.
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00:19:27,180
The men running the Rod of Iron Ministries and Mars and the Independence Law Center,
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00:19:29,739
they rely on you being confused.
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00:19:35,020
They rely on you seeing the flag and the Bible and assuming they are on your side.
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00:19:38,260
They are counting on your politeness.
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00:19:40,219
But remember the plate carrier.
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00:19:41,859
Remember the Velcro.
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00:19:43,739
It's a costume.
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00:19:48,780
And the man wearing it isn't here to defend your freedom, he's here to take it.
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00:19:53,119
These groups have been effective over the course of the last half century in reprogramming
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00:19:57,140
their congregations into giving up their autonomy for authority.
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00:20:01,219
They now bow to the idea of Christian supremacy.
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00:20:05,699
And they aren't even remotely interested in what you believe or how you think you should
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00:20:07,099
live your life.
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00:20:10,760
They want to be the ones making those decisions for you.
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00:20:14,760
They want to be able to tell you which race is the right one.
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00:20:19,959
They will define what a marriage is for you and it isn't between same-sex couples.
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00:20:25,439
They'll dictate what women can and cannot do with their own bodies.
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00:20:30,119
And they'll be more than happy to tell you which version of their religion is right and
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00:20:34,839
that all of the others are not only wrong, but evil.
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00:20:38,839
Many people have been sending up flares about this movement for a long time and we've been
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00:20:43,920
told that we're overreacting to a bunch of incels getting mad on social media.
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00:20:48,760
But now those incels are in power, they are running our country directly into the ground
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00:20:51,959
and it's going to take a lot of work to save it.
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00:20:55,000
We are the ones carrying the torch for the founders now.
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00:20:57,239
The founders were imperfect men.
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00:20:59,280
But they set a trajectory.
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00:21:02,680
They pointed the ship towards a more perfect union.
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00:21:08,479
Every time we expand rights to women, to people of color, to the LGBTQ community, we are moving
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00:21:10,439
that ship forward.
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00:21:15,479
Every time regressives try to stop us, they are trying to sink the ship.
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00:21:19,199
So don't let them lecture you about American values.
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00:21:20,800
Oppression is not an American value.
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00:21:24,439
It is the thing we fought a revolution to escape.
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00:21:26,859
Theocrats are not patriots.
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00:21:28,520
They are the redcoats.
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00:21:31,719
And just like in 1776, we have a choice to make.
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00:21:34,680
Do we submit to the rule of kings and priests?
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00:21:37,479
Or do we fight for the rule of the people?
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00:21:39,319
I know where I stand.
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00:21:44,040
And looking at the history of this country, I know which side eventually wins.
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00:21:45,640
Regressives make a lot of noise.
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00:21:47,199
They break a lot of things.
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00:21:51,839
But eventually, the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.
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00:21:56,280
It bends that way because we are the ones pulling it.
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00:21:57,719
I'm Jim.
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00:21:58,719
This is False Foundation.
