James' Podcast Episode 1

This podcast episode focuses on a biblical approach to current events, political issues, and civic engagement primarily in America. The host discusses the concept of the lesser of two evils in politics and how both political parties market to their base, leading to a lack of change. The host expresses his conservative and religious point of view, advocating for Judeo-Christian values. He also addresses issues like abortion, marriage, and diversity, expressing his opposition to certain viewpoints and advocating for a shift in culture towards a more conservative perspective. Hey, good morning everyone. I hope you're having an incredible start to your day. So this is going to be the very first in the inaugural episode of my podcast. I've been wanting to do one for a long time now, and so this is really going to focus on a lot of things that are connected to my passion for a biblical approach to current events, constitutional issues, political issues, civic engagement issues that are going on primarily in America, but also even to an extent around the world. There will be times where I'll talk about political developments in the United Kingdom and Europe and other places, and I'll occasionally talk about entertainment, things going on in the media, things going on in pop culture, but the focus is going to be issue-oriented. It's not going to be a pop culture or a film or a literature podcast, but those things will be occasionally discussed, and again, the primary focus will be on the issues. So moving right along, and this first episode is going to be on the shorter side because I want to give people an overview. Today we're going to be talking about the lesser of two evils as it relates to politics, particularly in the United States of America, and before we get started, views are my own. They don't reflect anyone else. They don't reflect any organization I may be affiliated with. They are only reflective of the views of James Daniel Blatt, and so today – and this is actually a message that can apply to you regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, to be honest. I'll be honest. This podcast is going to be coming from a politically conservative point of view. It's coming from a religious point of view, particularly a view that is rooted and grounded in a biblical worldview and also has a preference for Judeo-Christian perspectives. I really do believe that all ideas are not created equal. All ideas are not created equal, and so for example, a worldview that leads to the protection and preservation of life is, in my view, morally and inherently superior to a worldview that results in the murder of six million people, for example, in the 1940s. So I believe that Judeo-Christian values should be given a special place in the life of the United States of America and that you can still have a special place for Judeo-Christian values and still have equality, preservation of human rights for other ideas as well, and so I believe that. But going on with the idea of the lesser of two evils, yesterday the House of Representatives, which is narrowly controlled by the Republican Party by an extremely slim margin of about one or two seats, voted to sign – not to sign into law, excuse me. That's the job of the president, but they voted on a bipartisan basis because more Democrats than Republicans voted for this bill. The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who's a strong conservative but still kind of an institutional establishment Republican, he actually had to get help from Democrats to get this bill passed because most of the people in the Republican Party, most of the Republican congressmen and congresswomen in the House voted against this bill, whereas only about 20, I think 25 Democrats voted against this bill. So the majority of people who voted for this budget bill were Democrats, and so this bill is likely to be signed into law because the Senate is still controlled, 51 to 49, by Democrats, so they'll likely vote for the bill and likely Biden will sign it into law. But the passage of this bill really shines the light on an issue that both political parties, and again, trying to present this message in a way that can appeal to individuals regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. The reason why we do not have change in this country, the reason why there's no incentive structure for change with both political parties is that each political party gets by, and I think honestly this is even more true for Republicans than it is for Democrats. These political parties market to their base, hey, you may not like what we're doing. You may not like this $1.2 trillion spending bill which funds a lot of things that you may not approve of like abortion agencies. There's a lot of money in this bill that goes towards the funding of abortion priorities of the left and of the Democratic Party. One congressman, Max Miller from Ohio, who also was endorsed by former President Trump, he basically said in a tweet or a statement on X that this bill isn't perfect, but it's far better than what the other side wants to do. And that's how both political parties, not only do they stay in power, but that is how they don't change. And so particularly on the right, we conservatives vote for people who we think represent our priorities, our values, and then they go to Washington, D.C. with the exception of a few, including my representative, Bob Goode. I want to be clear, this is not an explicit endorsement of anybody. This is an analysis of how this individual votes. Most of the people in the Republican Party, they make promises, and also probably true of the Democratic Party, but in some ways I think it's more true of the right. They make promises, and they do not keep them. And that, from a conservative point of view, is the frustrating part. And I think we have to be very careful when we talk about the benefits of pragmatism, because there are benefits to it, but whenever you – and C.S. Lewis said something to this effect – when you set one thing up in your life, one impulse, one way of approaching a situation, and then you make that the one way you approach every single situation, that is idolatry. And so people who want to sell out their constituents, who want to sell out what they believe, because the donors, the Beltway insiders, and other forces are telling you to vote a certain way, and you abandon your principles, and you abandon your convictions in the process, that is idolatry. And I know that as I develop this show, there may be listeners who do not believe in God, who do not have a biblical point of view, and I respect the viewpoints of those listeners, even though I personally disagree with that approach. But that does not change the fundamental reality that they are elevating politics, particularly political pragmatism, over the values that they purported to represent. And simply saying, we're the lesser of two evils, and you need to vote for us, is not good enough, because what that essentially does is that maintains the status quo. That maintains a political reality in which nothing changes, and in which the problems that we see going on in America, whether it's abortion, whether it's an ungodly and unbiblical view of marriage, whether it's a flawed approach to diversity issues. There was literally a report published by Bloomberg Magazine, which is no conservative publication, that essentially found that the S&P 500 companies hired over 300,000 people during the period from the summer of 2020 to the summer of 2021, and 94% of those jobs did not go to white men. That is discrimination. I'm sorry, it is. You can argue that, oh, well, we don't want to discriminate against certain groups of people, like LGBT2 people, because we think that's unfair. But if in the process you are discriminating against religious individuals, that is still something that I am going to be speaking out against on this podcast, because I consider it to be morally wrong. And in the same way, if advocating for these supposed ideas of gender equality, where you are elevating certain ideas that are affiliated with modern feminism, like unlimited access to abortion, which I'm obviously opposed to, if you are advocating for this idea that men and women are interchangeable and they can do the same thing, that is actually not only damaging to men, but also to women. And so that is not gender equality, because in advocating for one thing, you are actually advocating for something else that destroys equality in the process. And so for me, I'm very, very focused on the conservative movement, because I expect the Democratic Party and the left to support things that I don't agree with. I expect them to support abortion. I expect them to support same-sex marriage. And I understand where the level of public opinion is on these issues. I understand that some of these issues are popular with the American people. But that is not how you change the culture and move the Overton window from a liberal culture to a more conservative culture that honors marriage and honors life and honors more of a biblical Judeo-Christian perspective on these issues. In 2004, same-sex marriage was overwhelmingly unpopular. This was right after the election of George W. Bush. It was the last time any Republican candidate won in a landslide and won the popular vote for president. No Republican has since. And even with the poll numbers showing some rosy results for President Trump, I am confident that it is highly unlikely that a Republican will ever win the popular vote for president again. But at that time, circa 2004, same-sex marriage was overwhelmingly unpopular with the American people. The left, the political left, did not accept that, and they sought to change the culture and to move the Overton window in a way that was more reflective of their broader goals, and they succeeded. And the conservative movement needs to not try only to govern and only to reflect the status quo and only try and cater to where the American electorate is now. They actually need to be engaging in a conscious effort to shift the culture and to move it back away from this extreme far-left interpretation of social issues that we see today. For example, the way that ideas are defined in the context of the current culture today, whether it's abortion or marriage or diversity or other issues, things that are considered to be quote-unquote centrist and moderate would have been considered totally unacceptable 60 to 70 to 80 years ago. And that's a problem because it means our institutions don't have courage, individuals don't have courage, our politicians don't have courage. Why would you expect our politicians to have courage when nobody else in the country does, when nobody else has a Joshua 1-9 vision of courage? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. Not the beltway donors, not the polling, not the public opinion, but God. And so that is what not just our politicians, but our institutions, our CEOs, our business organizations, our communities, even our churches. A huge portion of the church in America has been infiltrated by this woad ideology, by this far-left ideology, and they have allowed things that should not be acceptable to be acceptable. And so it's up to us. It's up to the American people to actually change that. And the way that we do that is by holding our – one of the ways we do that, not the only way, but one of the ways we do that is by holding our elected officials to the fire. If they don't represent our values, we don't support them, and they can go on to lose the general election to a Democrat because their focus is not the truth. Their focus is pragmatism. And that whole lesser of two evils approach needs to go. It needs to go because it upholds the status quo, and it prevents any change from happening. I've joked that the Republican Party is basically leftism driving the speed limit and that if the left is a car crash, the political right in America is like a slow-motion car crash. And so with this bill that is passed, the point is raised among many conservatives. What's the point of a quote-unquote conservative House majority if all they do is advance maybe a slightly watered-down version of left-wing priorities because it's the quote-unquote best thing on the table? You see the same thing with this idea of a 15- or 16-week abortion ban, which effectively does nothing to actually restrict abortion. And we think to ourselves, okay, if we vote – if the left wins another term, we get nothing. But we'll at least get something with this. Not so because what ends up happening is that change ends up not happening, and people will justify these policy positions that effectively accomplish nothing because they're still better than what the other side is offering. So ultimately, the incentive to change, particularly for the right, has to exist. And so you have so many people on the right – and I'm trying hard not to name names here – but you have people on the right who want to be pro-choice. They want to be for what I consider to be an unbiblical view of marriage and family. They want to be for a view of diversity and other issues that are concerning to me, and they want to reframe it to where these ideas are actually conservative simply because they're not as bad as what the left is doing. But that's not how we should be defining these issues. These issues should be defined in the context of how they're historically being defined, not in the context of how the culture defines them today. Because I just established how the culture is defining these issues would have been unacceptable 60, 70 to 80 years ago. And just a quick note, we didn't unlearn racism because of cultural change. Racism was always wrong. It was always wrong to be prejudicial against African Americans and other racial groups, Asian Americans, Hispanics, etc. It was always wrong because we have a biblical framework for understanding why that is wrong. We didn't arrive at the fact that racism is wrong through cultural change or advances in science and technology or because we became aware of our privilege. No, racism has always been wrong, and the same thing with abortion, the same thing with the current socially acceptable view on marriage and family and other perspectives. No, the standard of truth comes from the Bible. It doesn't come from science and history and technology and other things. We can learn positive things through these institutions and these organizations, but they are human. And so our ability to understand truth through these institutions because they are human is limited. Science is never going to be 100% accurate, and this is why I personally – and this is a view you'll hear stated on this podcast in episodes to come – is I was always against this idea of you have to trust the science during COVID. You have to trust the experts. You have to stay at home. You have to wear a mask. You have to get a vaccine. Good science is always open to review, and it's always open to correction, and it's always open to revision. And if it's not, it's bad science, and it should not be trusted. And so the same thing with – history is a little bit different because you're looking at the past, but every other institution that's human that was not specifically created by God, which is the Bible, every other institution outside of the Bible is not inerrant and infallible, and it should be subject to questioning at times, science being one of them. Case in point, the current popular accepted view of separation of church and state. So people say today that because the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution states that the government shall make no law establishing a religion – that probably is not the exact phrasing of the Establishment Clause, but it's basically a paraphrase. People want to say that the Establishment Clause means that religion has to be walled off from the public square. But did you know that in 1892 the United States Supreme Court, Associate Justice David Brewer at that time in a case, United States versus the Church of Holy Trinity, declared the United States to be a Christian nation? Justice Joseph Story, another Supreme Court justice, years later reaffirmed that in writings of his own. So many other writers, historical figures, affirmed that the United States is a Christian nation, both legal figures, justices on the Supreme Court, historians, constitutional law experts of that time in the 18th and 19th century. They affirmed that the United States is a Christian nation not because you are required to profess Christianity in order to hold office, not that Christianity is supposed to be the official established religion, but because it was embedded into the principles and founding of this country, that we were founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and that those principles are not just upheld as a part of religious liberty, but they are given a special place. They have almost a superiority of sense in the context of other religions because they were instrumental in the principles that founded this nation, one of which was the concept of inalienable rights. And the concept of inalienable rights suggests that our rights, that the government does not exist to give us rights, but only to confirm those rights, to secure them, because our rights came to us from God. That's not a principle that comes from Buddhism or Islam or Zoroastrianism or Atheism. And for my personal opinion purposes, I do consider Atheism to be a religion. It's just a religion that is structured around either the dislike of God or the belief that there's not enough evidence to prove that there is God, which for me, the whole concept of faith is very instrumental in why I believe that Jesus Christ is my personal Lord and Savior, and that God is the unmoved mover who created everything, and nothing else would have been made except through him and by him. So that whole concept and principle of inalienable rights, that is a principle that comes directly from a Judeo-Christian belief set. It's not a principle that comes from any of those other religions because it clearly states that God is the author of our rights, and George Washington believed this as well. Even Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who were the two more quote-unquote liberal Enlightenment, more deist thinkers, they were just as passionate about religious freedom and about individuals practicing their religious beliefs, not just in private, not just in church, but in the public square as well. It is perfectly reasonable for people to be able to hold church services in a school building or another secular building. That is perfectly acceptable, and that is why the Supreme Court threw out the 1973 Lemon Test in the recent 2022 case with head football coach Joe Kennedy and the Bremerton School District, and they ruled that that Bremerton School District violated Coach Kennedy's rights under the First Amendment, and I believe also Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And they threw out the Lemon Test, which said that the government had to have a secular purpose towards any involvement with religion. And no, they said that instead you needed to have a historical test for determining government involvement with religion, a test that is determined on historical practices. And so the Supreme Court indirectly affirmed what Justice Joseph Story and David Brewer and other people suggested about religious practice in America. And they said that no, you don't get to culturally change the meaning of religious freedom in the United States from having the ability to practice it in the public square. To no, it has to be walled off from the public square because we want to update the Constitution to today's culture, and our stance of right and wrong, our locus of control and context of morality and what is right and wrong today is based off the current culture because the Constitution is a living, breathing document. I don't mean to be disrespectful or rude by talking that way on the show, but to me, that ultimately is the issue that has determined my vote because I don't want to see those kinds of justices, judges, don't care about their gender, don't even care about who they're attracted to or who they're not. I want them to interpret the Constitution as it was written, not as the current culture demands it be so because that is what the founders of this country wanted because they wanted a country whose laws were deeply rooted in the concept of individual inalienable rights, rights that are given to us by God, by God himself, and that are secured by the government, not taken away. So all that being said, this issue of the lesser of two evils, it really applies to the right because – I'm going to borrow a bit from folks over at The Daily Wire who are kind of the inspiration for this podcast to be honest. Folks like – it was Matt Walsh who said it on an episode of – it was their 2022 election night coverage over at The Daily Wire, which I've listened to quite a bit at this point. And basically he said, how many people in the Democratic Party are conservatives masquerading as leftists, meaning that they're pretending to be liberal, but they're actually not? And I believe Jeremy Boring suggested that Manchin might be an example of that, but really isn't. But how many people on the right, on the Republican side do we have who are masquerading as conservatives, but actually where they're actually liberal, particularly on the life issue and the marriage issue? And to me, that is what I want to see change in this country. I want to see the political right get back to both social and economic conservatism. And this is why we're currently in the situation that we're in where the swing voters, many of them, they like the fiscal conservatism, but they're socially liberal. And in order to actually change the voting patterns, the conservative movement has to have the guts to step away from pragmatism and get back to the issues and get back to, okay, you actually can't have an economic framework that's conservatism without a social framework that's conservatism. You can't have a conservative culture in a society where the church isn't honored. You can't have a conservative society in America where children are being force-fed LGBTQ plus talking points, where they're being force-fed drag content in schools, where they're being force-fed sexually inappropriate content in their books. Regardless of how much CEO dad and entrepreneur mom is mating because of the GOP-led tax cuts – sorry, there's a little bit of the thing that went off in the back. But the Republican Party needs to get back to that and focus on what the truth needs to be. And the Democratic Party is always going to be the party of the left, but the right needs to actually remain focused on the fact that you cannot have a conservative framework for the economic issues without also a social framework for conservatism on the issues. And so that kind of is where I want to give people a starting point for this podcast, and I can't believe this episode has already gone off for almost 30 minutes. So I'm going to bring this episode to a close. Thank you for watching the first episode of my podcast. I hope you all have a wonderful day. And whether you agreed or disagreed with the content presented in this message, I hope that you all have a great day, and feel free to send me a message on Facebook or Instagram, at JamesBlack or at RunTheRace727 afterwards. Thank you and have a great day. God bless.