Avoiding Cognitive Dissonance

TRANSCRIPT

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Dearest Father in heaven, grateful for this time we have to be together and ask thee to please bless us with thy spirit that the words that will be spoken will have an impact on us, that we can ensure that we are working to do thy will and that we can have our minds one with thee and with thy desires to preserve the freedom that thou hast given us. In these things I pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

So avoiding cognitive dissonance to stay in the battle. So just kind of some background on this is something that is in my, what am I at? 26 years of experience in presenting to individuals, working with people in the cause of liberty. Cognitive dissonance is one of the major factors in People either rejecting the principles of liberty or maybe they think that they're not rejecting them, but that get them to actually adopt principles of tyranny because of their cognitive dissonance. And so that's what we're going to be covering tonight. So, of course. We want to make sure that we're failing ourselves if our weekly training is the only learning education that you do on the cause of liberty.

We have our reading list that we have and videos, our list of videos to view that are in the member portal that encourage you to go check out to make sure that you're spending time in bringing your understanding to a greater level than it is. It's something that I'm always learning, always working to build my understanding and build my expertise in different aspects of liberty. And I encourage that for all of us. And the training should always be taken in the light of our purpose as an organization, which is to build understanding of and adherence to the principles that have built free nations, to expose the satanic conspiracy. and to build an effective resistance to that conspiracy. Everything that we do in training and in the organization is to fulfill that purpose. And so making sure that we know how we're looking at the trainings in that light so that way we can ask ourselves how we can better apply this information in our efforts to fight for the cause of liberty. So cognitive dissonance, this is a concept that takes a little bit of background to really better understand how it is used and how we're manipulated to engage in this mental gymnastic or this mental effort exercise. In the Saturday Evening Post, they actually published an article of how this is done. And they wrote, if President Liberal, right, just kind of being generic, not naming names, if President Liberal were actually in the White House, it is not at all hard to imagine the reaction to his program.

The right would be assailing President Liberal for bugging out of Vietnam, undermining American defenses, fiscal irresponsibility, and galloping socialism. The four basic presidential policy positions listed above would be greeted with hosannas by the liberals. Instead, the liberals have showered the president with dead cats, while most conservatives have maintained a glum silence, and thus the administration has been little credited for much genuine achievement, but there are certain special reasons which Pat Moynihan omitted to mention why this is so. And the article continues about a Gallup poll. It says, although big government has been a favorite Republican target for many years, rank and file Democrats are nearly as critical of growing federal power as are Republicans. Recognizing this, Mr. Nixon geared much of his campaign rhetoric to attacking big daddy government. However, the Nixon administration has taken massive steps. to further concentrate authority in the federal power pinnacle. So that was in 1968 that this was written in the Saturday Evening Post. So what you see here is what the, it's like it's human nature.

People get in their tribes and they defend their tribe and they attack the other tribe. They don't look at what's being done, why, you know, how it's being done. They just look at who is doing it. And if it's good or bad is irrelevant, it is about who is doing it that makes it good or bad. If the other party is doing it, then it's bad. And if my party is doing it, then it's good. And so this is a part of Cognitive Dissidence where we separate ourselves from the principles and attach ourselves to personalities. which bring us to ensure that the conspiracy is going unopposed and no effective opposition is actually put forward because you can't attack your guy if your guy is doing the wrong thing. And then the other side isn't going to effectively attack them because your guy is actually doing what the other team wants done. So it's important for us to understand this concept and this principle. Mark, you have your hand raised. You've got to unmute, Mark. I'm sorry. I had difficulty finding how to unmute.

Yes. In this example, what you just said, of course, is completely true. But in this example is also how people believe lip service. I mean, you're going to be fooled all over the place if you believe. automatically what people say is the truth. Nixon, here we're talking about him saying that he's for less government against big daddy government, but his actions are the opposite. So that's the particular tactic used in this, even though everything you said about cognitive dissonance is correct. Yeah, thank you. And there's been a lot of... revisionist history coming forward recently about Nixon, talking about how he didn't do anything wrong and it was just the conspiracy attacking him. And it's rewriting history because his record actually shows that he is in favor of big daddy government. And this is a book I highly encourage people to get a hold of. You can read a PDF of it on archive.org. You can find used copies of it from online booksellers like A Books or Thrift Books, Amazon. I mean, not Amazon.

It might be on Amazon. I don't know. But eBay is where more used books can be found. If you want to understand more about what Nixon actually did compared to what, of course. The conspiracy media talks about what he did. And so another example of this is the this book called The Strawberry Statement. Notes of a College Revolutionary. So, you know, this is the best data is that is the admissions by conspirators. And so this book lays out exactly how they operate. Says also at the convention, men from Business International Roundtables. Things like the CFR and that kind of a thing are the chambers. The meeting sponsored by Business International for their client groups and heads of government tried to buy up a few radicals. These men are the world's leading industrialists, and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. These are the boys who wrote the Alliance for Progress. They're the left wing of the ruling class. They agreed with us on black control and student control.

They want McCarthy in. They see fascism as the threat, see it coming from Wallace. The only way McCarthy could win is if the crazies and young radicals act up and make Gene look more reasonable. They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago. We were also offered SO, meaning Rockefeller money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the center as they move to the left. And so the point is, and so that they can look like that they're reasonable or that they're even conservative. They make sure that one of the, you know, that the party, that the left party, the liberal party is extreme and it's always moving more and more left. So that way, the so-called conservatives will move left as well. And they'll they'll look like because they're not as crazy as the crazy leftists. And so what they're doing is they're moving. what is considered to be acceptable or mainstream or the reasonable position by making one side constantly moving left and then moving the other side with them. But of course, making it appear as though they are not as, you know, that they're not as left. And so that way, what we see here is Republicans of 2026 are actually more liberal than Democrats of 2010. And so we're always moving more and more towards bigger government and less morality.

But you have one party being the vocal in using their thugs on the street to move the people in the certain direction. Mark, yes. Yes, one tool or one phrase that's being used to facilitate this process you just described, and I hear it from Republicans and... Fox News and the president uses it all the time, calling the opposition radical Democrats, radical liberals. So the typical Democrat liberal is okay, implied. It's only the rather extreme ones, like the mayor of New York, that are concerned. And, of course, The average Democrat position is treason, tyranny, as well as the average Republican position as well. Absolutely. So you look at, right, go back to the 1960s. I want to give a modern example. The 1960s, you have the war on poverty, where it was considered to be the liberal leftist, you know, what's his name? Johnson. President Johnson's program and the conservatives were saying that was communism and it was socialism and we oppose this. Whereas you move, you fast forward to 2026 and you have a so-called center-right organization in Utah called the Southerland Institute wanting to revamp social welfare. And instead of having all of these different welfare programs, merging them into one giant welfare program. And so because, you know, the so-called center Republicans are promoting it now, you know, what would be considered the mainstream Republican position when the welfare state first started, nobody's even talking about, you know, not having welfare, getting rid of the welfare state. They're just talking about how do we conglomerate the welfare state.

And so, you know, the things that we see moving in one direction. We see this right now. You see states, you know, conservative states are, you know, talking about their own versions of Obamacare. You know, it was the Republican Mitt Romney that was that was the acceptable version of government controlled medicine as opposed to, hey, how about we actually follow the Constitution? And which doesn't authorize any of these things and abolishing these things. And so that the the mainstream position. what was the default position up to the 1960s becomes seen as extreme right wing when it was simply just the default in some of our lifetimes. So continuing on, right? The conspiracy gets you to focus your attention to the thugs on the street, the Antifa, BLM, instead of the puppet masters, right? You have this, and they are the puppet masters. They're the ones that want to make sure that you do not look at them. You look at the Antifa. You look at the BLM protesters.

You look at, oh, look, there's these pile of bricks that are just sent there and to to be used by the protesters. Oh, look, the police car was delivered to the protesters to vandalize. And so you you are to look at them and then you look, you get a few different. Democrat elected officials that set up bail funds for the protesters that are getting arrested. And then it's all of a sudden look at them on the left, whereas it's actually, you know, who who actually orchestrated this stuff? And you can see who's actually orchestrating this when you understand how things work. And in fact, in the state of Utah. You had BYU, University of Utah, Utah State University, Republicans, Republican leadership in the legislature, the Republican governor all came together and put a full page ad supporting Black Lives Matter. And so you are seeing the so-called conservative establishment of the state supporting the communist led. black lives matter movement and so that way that's that's that's becomes the default position as opposed to the extreme position so look at the this is kind of looking at the definition of cognitive dissonance the mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information The unease or tension that the conflict arouses in people is relieved by one of several defensive maneuvers.

They reject, explain away, or avoid the new information, persuade themselves that no conflict really exists, they reconcile the differences, or resort to any other defensive means of preserving stability or order. So essentially, to be able to maintain their position, they have to... that they reject information either reject or redefine new information that if you actually applied it according to its actual definitions you would have to change your position but they do not want to change their position and so to maintain their position they have to attack the messenger They have to say, well, that that's not real socialism. And when a Republican, right, when Mitt Romney did Obamacare, that that was the free market, right? That wasn't socialism. That was the free market solution. And so they'll redefine terms. They'll attack the person that is saying it. They'll avoid it and change the subject. They'll name call and say, oh, you're just a liberal. things along those lines to be able to maintain their position and not have to actually change their views or their opinions on things let's see here uh mark yeah go ahead yes i've been observing cognitive dissonance in my profession and and politics as well for over 50 years and i studied it in both undergraduate and graduate psychology classes One of the contributing elements to cognitive dissonance is that you're faced with truth that it's hard to accept because it's so counter to what you believed before.

It's as though you believed an illusion and you can't believe how much people believe it and you believe that it's not possible to reject it. For example, the conspiracy that everybody, the vast majority of people don't believe that conspiracy controls the political climate and activity of America. But to accept, reject, accept the truth, you have to reject so much of what you believe and also what your family and others that you've got. have respect for their intelligence and their knowledge, you would have to reject such a huge amount of what you believe that contributes to the difficulty in rejecting it. And if I could say one other thing on this, so resistance, reluctance, accept the truth as at the core. of this. And what treatment solution, and maybe you're going to talk about this, is intellectual integrity. People are, with intellectual integrity, they will accept truth if the evidence is there. So you have to rapidly gain enough information on both positions and determine what is factual and what's not based on your prior beliefs.

And people just don't want, Most Americans, most people don't have that kind of honesty, intellectual honesty to avoid cognitive dissonance or to solve the cognitive dissonance conflict. Yeah, very difficult for individuals. And so that's why I think it's really important that we are inoculated against it in advance. And so that way we can identify it beforehand. Because, you know, once it's already happened, we are we get entrenched in those positions. Laurie, yes, you get. Yeah. I think one of the reasons for cognitive dissonance is that in a way we all have been subjected to a lot of brainwashing, programming, television programs, what we're taught in schools. So it is really. It's hard to have patience with people that are not as awake as I am, but I have to realize that at one time I was as asleep as they were. And to try to have a little, you know, show a little grace to people who are still in that state because, you know, I'm reading your book, The Invasion, and then I started another book. And then I'm reading the one by Kathy O'Brien, and it all talks about how, you know, basically we all have been subjected to some degree of MKUltra or, you know, probably not as extreme. But we all are, you know, we're coming out of this and we got to kind of make a bridge to hold hands of those who are still in that cognitive dissonance state. That patience is so important because it's so easy to become critical or to, you know, make, you know, make fun of people, you know, and push them away as opposed to helping them understand what's really going on and the truth. Yeah.

I also put a question in the chat. I didn't get the title of the first book. I have a strawberry statement and then you recommended another book. Yeah, Nixon. Nixon behind the mask. The man behind the mask. Okay, thank you. Yep. Mark, you got your hand up? Yeah, real quickly. It requires a great deal of humility to accept that your whole life has been based on a fraud, a lie. Because the conspiracy... has been telling us through various means, like our schools and the media and politicians and so forth, just a massive, massive lie. It's a lie to the extent that our lives, our beliefs, our lives have been based on a fraud. And so that's such a huge amount of disinformation we have to, an illusion we have to reject. And most people and all our friends or many of our friends accept it. And it's so much easier for some people to just give up on the truth, sell out the truth for getting along and going along with the illusion. But it's such the size, the dimension of what we have to reject is just too much for so many. Yeah. Okay, so they did an experiment in the 1960s on this very concept. And it's very revealing and can help us to be able to actually, again, be inoculated against it as much as, you know, as much as, you know, maybe for future things. You know, some things we're always going to have to kind of start to undo and it'll take time.

But I think for things in the future that understanding this will be very helpful. to unwinding our programming as well as avoiding future programming so i just want to show this clip of this study not hearing any sound on my end oh there's no sound let's see here uh because that's why i stopped sharing because i was afraid that was the case but i didn't see an option to um i didn't see an option to choose the sound as it had in the past. Let's see here. Preferences, host controls, paused. Sorry, guys. Was that the problem? Did everybody else have the same problem? Yes. Well, I'm glad that's good. It's good to know that that was the case. Do you know? Rod, do you know how to make sure we share the sound? Not off the top of my head, but you have to give me the admin privileges before I can see the selections. I don't know how to do that. What we'll do then is I'll put this video in the online version when I put it up on the website. But essentially, what it goes through and it shows... is different individuals where you showing their different motivations of why they were willing to actually go along with something that they knew wasn't true and that they would show that they would lie to themselves and others regarding what their job was. So their job was to just turn these wooden knobs. That's all they had to do. Their whole job was to change the wooden knobs. So you had a group of people. You had three different groups. Y

ou had people that were. that were just told to do it. Then you had another group that were given a dollar to turn the knobs. And then you had another group that were given $20 to change the knob. I mean, to just turn the knob. So you just think about what's the value, right? So when this was, if we times it by about 60, so about $120, right? Then you have about $60. I'm sorry, no, what, $1,600, then about $60, and then for free in today's dollars. And so you had those three different groups of people that were told to turn the knobs. And then they interviewed them afterwards. And when they interviewed the people that were just, you know, for free, they were told to turn the knobs. They were asked. Was it interesting? Was it stimulating? Did they learn something out of it? And their response was, no, it was boring. I didn't learn anything. It was pointless. And then you had the people that were paid a dollar to do it. And they were a little bit more accommodating to it. They're like, well, you know, I didn't learn a lot from it, but it was pretty fun. I enjoyed it. And then you had the people that were paid 20 bucks and they were like, man, this was so much fun. I learned so much from doing this. And, you know, they were just they couldn't praise what was happening enough.

And so what what what they were able to show is when you are when there was an incentive to engage in the activity, you know, they would have to lie to themselves to be able to justify getting paid to do it. And so the justification would go up the more that there was at stake. And so it was it was an experiment that they were able to prove that people will lie to themselves to justify their actions, to justify what was going on. And we see that in a lot of different areas. So here's a little cartoon by Dilbert that illustrates this. You have the guy saying, if your numbers are correct. My strategic plan is irrational. Cognitive distance takes over. You sure are bad with numbers. What was that noise? So basically, your numbers can't be correct because I can't be wrong. And then you have this other cartoon that says, why should I hire you as my consultant? I'll use my special process of cognitive dissonance to improve employee morale. How does it work? When people are in an absurd situation, their minds rationalize it by inventing a comfortable illusion. Okay, go to it. Isn't it strange that you have this dead-end job when you're twice as smart as your boss? The hours are long, the pay is mediocre, nobody respects your contributions, and yet you freely choose to work here. It's absolutely absurd.

No, wait, there must be a reason. I must work here because I love the work. I love this job. And so using that tactic was able to make him excuse why he's doing what he's doing. And then you have here, he says, I want no part of Obama's socialized medicine. And he'd better keep his hands off my Medicare too. So pointing out that both of them are socialized medicine and that the government should have no part of either one. We see this a lot, of course, in politics, and we excuse it. We're like, okay, this person is doing it because they're engaged in 4D chess. He doesn't really believe that. He's just saying it to avoid twicking at the tail of the beast. They have to do it to get anything done. He doesn't really want to. It's strategy. We have to have a plan to be able to move in the right direction. Where, in the meantime... we continue administration after administration, state, local, federal level, moving towards tyranny. So all of these so-called strategies are not moving us in any kind of good direction. They're actually moving us in the wrong direction because they're designed to. We're playing the devil at his own game, or he's talking in code. He doesn't really mean that.

He's actually saying something else. So there's all kinds of different excuses that people give their particular politician of choice an excuse to be a tyrant. And we have to recognize that that's what's really going on. Yeah, quickly. Mark, go ahead. The bottom line here is people are selling out the truth. And the dissidence is a position where it's uncomfortable. So they're willing to sell out the truth. to avoid that uncomfortable feeling. And that's not a person of integrity. But the second point is the humility. People are not willing to say, I've been fooled, a lot of people, or I'm stupid. I really didn't put that out. And also a contributing element is the level of intellectual ability of people where they pass judgment before they do an adequate job of researching the facts and then conclude based on a rational... criteria of what truth is beyond a reasonable doubt or scientific uh certainty of 97 and so forth so they they get rid of that distance they're willing to jump to the the wrong conclusion And last point, one contributing element to selling out the truth and cognitive dissonance is loss of acceptance. Rejection by your family, by your friends, by holding to the truth and not accepting the illusion that most people are under. And a lot of people are so needy, emotionally needy, socially needy, they're willing to sell out the truth for acceptance by others. Yep. So you see with all of these different excuses, right, they are they're finding a way to reject the information that's being given to them. And without calling you a liar, they're saying, yes, what you're saying is true, but it's OK because X.

So what they're what they're doing is they're actually dismissing like what you're saying isn't actually true because there's a bigger there's a bigger thing going on. And of course, we know that. you know, nothing actually has changed, right? Trusting the plan, all these different excuses that go on have led to bigger and bigger government, right? So we have this, right? We can avoid falling into this trap by being consistent ourselves, sticking being consistent with correct principles, right? If it's bad when the other guy says that thing or does that thing, we have to recognize that then that means it's bad if my guy does that thing if we're not willing to do that we are not honest and that's that's something we have to grasp with if we're making excuses when somebody right you'll see this a lot well you know so and so is accusing your guy of doing something and so you say well that's well he did it first or they do it too right that's that's that's that's the argument of a child of a young child It is not the argument of an intellectually honest, principled person. Right. We we look at the this goes on where with, you know, president with Republicans and with Democrats where you have the they're actually friends and they're actually doing these things. Be you know, they're actually pretending to be it's like, you know, professional wrestling where they are rabid enemies. in the ring, but when they get out of it, they are best buds.

And we have to start recognizing that that's actually what's going on, that they're not who they are pretending to be, but they are characters. We have here an example of this where people will say, well, Democrats are anti-gun and Republicans are there to protect your gun rights. You have the NRA putting out this meme where they quote Joe Biden. Right. It'll stop at nothing when it comes to restricting your gun rights. And then they quote him saying, let me say this as clearly as I can. This is just the beginning. Right. And what what the implied message there is, is that Democrat will take away your guns and then the Republicans will protect your guns. But we have Trump saying, I like taking guns way early. Take the guns first. go through due process second. So he's saying that he wants to take away guns from individuals that have not been proven, right? Nobody's had a trial. Nobody's had, you know, maybe even with these red flag laws, you don't even have to have charges filed against you, let alone be convicted of anything. But he wants to take away the guns first. So the Democrats, you know, they're open about taking away guns. Republicans pretend to be for your gun rights while they're actually working to actually take your guns away, just like the Democrats are, because they're designed.

Carol Quigley, in his book Tragedy and Hope, if you haven't read it, I encourage you to copy The Naked Capitalist by W. Cleon Skousen is like a book report synopsis version of that book. And so that's another great way to be able to kind of get the meat. out of tragedy and hope is to read The Naked Capitalist. But Carol Quigley said that, you know, in reading the papers of the conspiracy, that he didn't disagree with them, that he just wished that they didn't keep it a secret, that it's so great that we should be bragging about it. And he said that they're designed to make both parties look like they're different, right? We're going to throw the bums out and elect a different party, but there is no substantial shift in policy, he said. And so that's exactly what's going on here is we're going to drain the swamp or we're going to build back better. All of these different slogans to make it look like you're different than the other guy when the policies are all the same with just a little bit of window dressing as a difference. Right. We got to hold our guy to the same standard. You look at the Patriot Act. This is something that I myself, when I was first beginning to wake up. had to grapple with. I grew up a staunch Republican, right or wrong, Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment, thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. And so, you know, I had, but I was reading the New American Magazine, and which is, you know, a constitutionalist publication. And I knew that the Patriot Act was bad, right? But I had to, you know, in my mind, I was like, the Republican is good. So Patriot Act is bad. Republican is good.

And this is when kind of I had to in my beginning of recognizing that the Republicans were a part of the conspiracy was I had to say, OK, I might not think that George W. Bush is a bad guy. I didn't know he was skull and bones. I didn't know, you know, all of the different conspiracy stuff at this point. but I knew the Patriot Act was bad. So I had to say, maybe my guy won't abuse this power, but my guy is not going to be there forever, right? We had just gotten over having Bill Clinton as president. And so, you know, do we want to give the other side the powers, even if we don't think that our guy will do anything bad with it, do we want to set that precedence? And so I think that this is a way to help people overcome cognitive dissonance. If they're not ready to awaken to the fact that their guy is a bad guy, we can approach them and say, OK, maybe your guy is not a bad guy, but do you want to give your guy's power to the other team? And that helped me wake up, right, to say, OK, no, I'm opposed to the Patriot Act.

That doesn't mean I'm a commie or, you know, liberal or whatever. It just means I want everybody to stick to the same standard. So, you know, we've talked about, you know, our histories. Everybody has of, you know, different levels of waking up. Right. I was in, you know, a young adult and I was campaigning for Bob Dole. I'm ashamed of that to this day because it's so ridiculous and unprincipled. And, you know, there was nothing conservative or constitutional about Bob Dole. But I didn't know that at the time. Right. And so I have to. And so when we know that we see other people today supporting people that are obviously to us bad guys, we look at, OK, what what did we go through to come to the point that we're at? And this process was something that was helpful for me when I wasn't ready to reject an individual or a party. But I could say, I don't want to give my guy. the powers. I don't want to give the other side these powers, even if my guy won't abuse them. Mark, go ahead. Yeah, another way of saying this is you're putting the guy's position, whether bad guy, good guy, whatever, ahead of what's just, what's right, what's godly, what's civilization. And if the person... supporting whatever position he takes. He could be the worst savage the world has ever seen. He could kill, rape, steal anything he wants, you know, and you're supporting him because you're putting the guy ahead of righteous law, godly law and civilization itself. So I think that's so important to realize if you're putting your loyalty to a guy, you're rejecting. Godly law. Absolutely.

Yep. Oh, can I say something about the 11th commandment? Yeah. You know, that violates one of the 10 commandments. Thou shall not bear false witness. And nobody ever says anything about that. Yep. Okay. So, you know, we have to know the facts, right? That's important. And so what sometimes people will say, they'll say, you're right. But at least they're spending less. And so I need to, you know, hold my nose and vote for the Republican because at least, you know, they're fiscally conservative and they're going to spend less money. Well, if you look at the data, that's just not the case. Now, of course, I'm not saying that Democrats are these, you know, spendthrifts, that they're going to be saving your money. We can see by the actual data that it doesn't matter. Right. Just as I mentioned before, Carol Quigley said this. that you're looking like you're throwing the bums out, but the policies don't change. We're moving in the same direction. The insane spending budgets from 2020 are still in place today, and then they're just adding on top of it. So the emergency of the fake pandemic... was the excuse behind these massive spending bills. We have to, as they said in 2008, we have to suspend capitalism to protect capitalism. And so these concepts, they become the new normal as opposed to the exception to the rule. And so Republican, Democrat, no, spending is not going to go down. How about Republicans?

They won't fund abortion. So, yeah, sure, they spend a ton of money, but at least they're going to protect the unborn. I mean, we can't be insane and say that we want to, you know, we're just going to reject both of them because then the Democrats win. They're just going to, you know, fund like crazy the killing of babies. Well, the fact is that Republicans are Democrats. Abortions continue to go up. And government spending on abortions continue to go up. And so Republican, Democrat babies continue to get murdered in the womb. So no, voting for one of the parties over the other to protect the unborn is not a good sound strategy. The next strategy that people say, I've got to do this because I've got to, you know, the Republicans will pick better Supreme Court justices. So, yeah, they're horrible on everything else, but at least, which, you know, on its face is so ridiculous. If they're doing all these other horrible things, why would they pick good Supreme Court justices?

This cognitive dissonance to excuse ourselves in voting for continued evil. is insane because you look at the facts. We go to Neil Gorsuch, Gorsuch, I can't remember how to pronounce his name, but he was appointed by Trump and he was the one that wrote the opinion that says the constitution says that a Christian bookstore has to hire sodomites, right? You are not allowed to choose who works for you, no matter what business you are, if you're a single mom. with kids and you're renting out a room or a basement apartment, you can't discriminate. You've got to have people that you don't want to have living in your home, living in your home. You've got to have people working for you that you don't want to have work for you. So did he help protect family values? No, absolutely not. John Roberts, appointed by a Republican. He was the one that wrote the opinion and was the tie vote breaker, supporting and upholding Obamacare. Then you have Anthony Kennedy, who was appointed by Reagan. And he was the one that voted and wrote the opinion that says that states are not allowed to outlaw sodomites.

And they are the ones that forced nationwide sodomite marriage, saying that, you know, state of Utah, state of Tennessee, Texas, you have to allow sodomite marriages. And so the result of this is, you know, so-called conservative states like Utah are now the, you know, marrying more people than Las Vegas because we, you know, because all of these people from all over the world actually even do, you can do a Zoom call marriage if you're like in Dubai and Florida and you want to get married. Utah does those marriages. And so. You have all of these Republican presidents, people voting for Republicans because there are going to be better Supreme Court justice picks. The data, the facts say that is not the case. That Republican or Democrat, that the Supreme Court rulings are going to continue to be pro-big government, anti-family. Moving and strengthening the conspiracy. So we avoid cognitive dissonance, right, by focusing on what is right, not who is right. If we can ignore who is doing the thing, it will be much easier for us to identify right and wrong because we will only be focused on what is going on, not who is doing it.

And if we can train ourselves to never look at who and only at what, we will be much more effective in our defense of liberty. If we are only focusing on who and not the what, we will spend our time and money and effort and our influence on promoting evil. Thinking that we are promoting good, we cannot promote good because we are not focused on good. We are focused on individuals, right? If you won't put principles above personalities or parties, you cannot be effective in the fight for liberty. Your efforts will be continually in supporting the conspiracy and its agenda under the delusion that you're fighting against the other guy who is supposedly worse. And as I showed with the chart, The current guy is worse than the previous guy. That's just. It's not Republican is worse or Democrat is worse. It's the current guy is worse than the previous guy. And so if we fail to do this, right, we're going to think we're doing something when we're not. We're actually helping the conspiracy because we're focused on who is right, not what is right. And so to fight against cognitive dissonance, and that fight against cognitive dissonance is essential in our being effective, advocates for liberty, because we can focus on supporting correct principles. I'll give you another example. Recent currently is the SAVE Act.

You had earlier this, was it earlier this week or late last week, where Trump did his speech talking about how the Chinese were influencing the elections, and that's why we need the SAVE America Act. And suppose every, you know, you have Mike Lee. and that he's the sponsor of the bill, and he's the most vocal supporter of the Save America Act, which is, you know, it's being promoted as the bill that will ensure that non-citizens don't vote, right? Only citizens will vote. That's what everybody's saying is that's what it is. It's kind of like with the Patriot Act, right? And it's always this way. If a bill is, you know, patrioted, it's actually anti-patriot. If it's the Save America Act, it's the Kill America Act because it's being promoted as If you don't like the Patriot Act, that means you like the terrorists. If you don't like the Save America Act, that means you want non-citizens to vote. But what the Save America Act actually does is it creates, it's actually an expansion of the Patriot Act. It's actually, it's creating a bigger police state, a bigger surveillance state. And it is expanding on digital ID, is expanding on national ID. It is ripping away the sovereignty of the states.

And it is it is. But because people are focusing on who as opposed to what. Right. They're just looking at the name, looking at the window dressing. Says Save America. Trump's for it. Mike Lee's for it. Therefore, it must be good as opposed to what does the bill actually do? If they actually looked at the what, then they would know instead of the who, they would know that it was wrong. But because too many of us are focused on the who instead of the what, we have people that are advocating for tyranny thinking they're advocating for liberty. So if we want to be effective, we have to stop thinking in this way. Mark, go ahead. Yes, the SAVE Act is also unconstitutional. The Constitution gives no authority to the federal government to dictate election laws inside the state. Right. Specifically prohibits them. Yeah. So do we – it's here. We've got a minute left. Do we have any comments or questions on the topics covered tonight? Mark. Yes. Back to your chart, which is excellent, of the spending, deficit increasing spending. You know, you were talking about – you said something that's very true.

The next guy up becomes president is worse than the last one, whether he's Republican or Democrat. But if that next one up actually decreased the rate of increase, he's still a thief. If he eliminated the increase and just kept at the same level, he's still a billion, trillion dollar thief. So the only acceptable position is, you know, let's say spending, not deficit spending, but it implies that deficit spending will exist, is no stealing, no socialism. And that would take it down to that baseline. And each president should be doing that, not accepting any bills at all that come from Congress these days and vetoing everything. enforcing Congress that they're going to have it, they have to have a two-third majority of both houses. Yep. Override the veto. Yep. Thank you. Rod, go ahead. I think one of the things that makes it tough on people to sometimes to face up to, you know, having been wrong is that guilt. Feeling like, oh, dang, if this is right, then I've actually been a part of the problem.

You know, I don't want to face up to that. I remember learning about when they claimed to have gotten rid of sudden infant death syndrome and that sudden infant death syndrome had actually started around the same time they were vaccinating babies and things like that. So I was sharing all this information that I learned and we'd had a friend whose kid had supposedly died from SIDS and she was just angry and vehement that I was wrong. And I wouldn't look at any of the information, the research that I was trying to share. And that's always been my feeling there. It's just that she felt guilty. If it was true, then she took her kid to have that done. And she had a part in the harm that happened there. Yeah, exactly. But you know what? There's a good man who said, you know what? I want to know the truth and come what may, right? Good or bad. Absolutely. Whatever the results are. I just want to know. Yep. All righty. Well, Carmen, would you give this the closing prayer? Yes. Okay, and then we'll get to you, Mark. Go ahead, Carmen.

Our dear Heavenly Father, we end this meeting with gratitude, with many words spoken, many ideas given. Father, would thou help each one of us to choose just one thing that we feel that we can accomplish, be good at, and do it properly? Bless our minds with creativity. and that we may take joy in extending ourselves to restore our lost liberties. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.