Christians Can Be BANNED From Juries – Supreme Court

In February of 2024, the Supreme Court refused to hear a case on Missouri banning a juror simply because she was a Christian, upholding Missouri’s courts ruling that Christian’s could be banned from serving on juries simply for being Christian. Ben is joined by Constitutional scholar, Dr. Joe Wolverton to cover the implications of this action.

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TRANSCRIPT

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Welcome back to the Tree of Liberty Society. I am Ben McClintock. And today on today's program, we're gonna be talking about how Christians have now literally been banned from being on, serving on juries on today's Tree of Liberty Society program.

Now, welcome back. Today, I have a special guest to talk about this just insane ruling or not ruling.

This thing that came down from the Supreme Court recently on banning Christians from serving on juries. And so we have Dr. Joe Wolverton, who is the John Birch Society's constitutional law scholar to join us. And he has written articles for the New American Magazine, the 10th Amendment Center, and many other publications on principles of constitutional law. So I am very pleased to have you join us, Dr. Wolverton.

Thanks, Ben. I'm happy to be with you again.

So just for our viewers, I wanted to kind of bring this up because nobody's really talking about this. And I just think that that's just crazy because this should be something that everybody, like all of the typical talking heads would be talking about. See, I'm gonna share my screen real quick. And so we have here some of the mainstream news articles have talked about it, brought it up.

You have On the Hill. And this is the Supreme Court ruling, or I don't know, it wasn't called, they just refused to what they did. So Mississip— Missouri, sorry, Missouri refused this case, well, ruled that Christians can be dismissed as jurors, being considered as jurors in this particular case of a lesbian, if I remember correctly, being accused of a crime.

And because a person was a Christian, they were going to be dismissed because they clearly cannot be unbiased in their decision because they dared to believe in the Bible. And in the dissenting opinion where the Supreme Court, Justice Alito saying, "We shouldn't have dismissed this. "We should have ruled on this," because dismissing it basically means that it's standing that Christians can be banned from serving as jurors. He said, "In this case, the court below reasoned "that a person who still holds traditional religious views "on questions of sexual morality "is presumptively unfit to serve on a jury.

"Americans who do not hide their adherence "to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct "will be labeled as bigots "and treated as such by the government." That's insane. I can't believe nobody's talking about it. Dr. Wolverton.

Yeah, I think the reason nobody's talking about it is sort of part and parcel of what Justice Alito is saying because the idea of these traditional ideas, the traditional conceptualization of homosexuality as a sin, as biblically revealed, is something that has been marginalized for so long now that to publicly profess your belief in that principle is to automatically disqualify yourself from any sort of public discourse.

That's just the way it is. Justice Alito was correct, but as you probably know as well as I do, this is the trajectory we've been on for quite some time, that to cling, to hew rigidly to Christian values, to biblically based values, is to place a red letter, to taint oneself with the stain of traditionalism, and that word traditional has become defined as bigoted, prejudiced, homophobic, fill in the blank.

You cannot simply stand on traditional values, biblically proclaimed values. You cannot do that without expecting to be excoriated publicly. And in this case, I think frankly, disqualified from discourse.

Coming up March 30th, 2024 in St. George, Utah, having a very special multi-hour presentation. We're gonna have a very special guest. We're gonna have an update on the circumstance with my No-Knock Swat Raid, and what's going on with that now, and really getting into why are they so afraid?

That's what it's all about, is why are they so afraid? I'm getting into the things that they are afraid of. Why are they afraid of me? Why do they wanna stop me? Why do they wanna silence me? Come check it out. Get your tickets at the link in the description and on the ticket tailor, as well as if you go to treeoflibertysociety.com and click on the events tab, and we will see you there March 30th from 11 to four, and lunch will be provided.

And there's tickets options to buy, to get the books "Invasions" volume one and two, and the book "Killing No Murder," laying out the plan that they are afraid of, that they do not want you to know about. Hope to see you there March 30th. This automatically just assuming, like this person has never stated that they wanted homosexuals to be in prison, carte blanche, they never stated anything except for that they believed, that they were believing Christians, and they were like—

And that's the thing, it's like, you can believe that homosexuality is a sin. That's not the same as saying, I want to round up homosexuals and imprison them.

Right.

Right?

There's lots of, I don't believe we should round up adulterers and imprison them. There are lots of things that I believe are sinful that don't call for incarceration. And so in this case, it's a little strange as far as the refusal of the Supreme Court to grant cert in this, in other words, by refusing, as Justice Alito said, by refusing to rule on the case, they've ruled on the case.

Right.

Right? And so in this case, if you read the report there, what it says is basically attorneys, and you probably know this, but as a former attorney, when we go to trial, each state allows you so many perfunctory exclusions from a jury. You can exclude a juror for no reason at all. Just, you have blue eyes, I don't like blue-eyed people, you're out. You don't have to explain why you're doing it, right?

Yep.

And then there comes a time when you would have to explain after you've used up all your perfunctory exclusions. And so there could have been an easier way to do this, but in fact, now, as the case has come forward, as the case has proceeded jurisdictionally, you have now this precedent. Essentially, as Justice Alito said, you now have a precedent where if, for example, anyone who is on trial for anything whatsoever, right, any crime whatsoever, you may be, if the Bible declares that act to be sinful, and you declare yourself to be a Christian, then through the transitive property of transphobia, if you are a Christian and you believe the Bible, then you believe that this person is sinful, therefore you're not impartial, which is ridiculous, because the Savior himself, the founder of Christianity, upon finding the woman caught in adultery, did not say to the counsel, "Yeah, throw her in jail," right? He simply, nor did he say, "Do you know what? It's fine, commit adultery."

Right.

So we have a pattern, we have an example, as the great capital E exemplar. You don't justify or excuse the sin, nor do you say, "Yeah, throw the book at her." So in this case, and in any case, Ben, it should be, this should be one of those bright strobe lights that are flashing in the face of all people who value popular government. That is to say, government by the people. Because if we begin excluding Christians because of the things that are said in the Bible, then who are we going to end up with sitting on juries? Right?

Absolutely. And that's something I wanna get into. There's an article that you wrote on that subject as well, but I wanna kind of focus on, so just Christianity. So there are, right, most other religions, the largest, you have Christianity, you have Judaism, and you have the Muslim religion. All three of them say that sodomy, homosexuality is a sin. And so with this decision, is that opening the door? Was this only Christians? Is it just anybody that goes to church that believes in the Old Testament or up to the laws of Moses, which would include all three of those religions, would they all be prevented from serving on juries? And the only people that you have left are the atheists?

Well, theoretically, right? Because all the Abrahamic religions identify homosexuality as sinful. But again, Ben, this is the thing that the Supreme Court's report doesn't get to, that none of the stories get to. There is a wide gap between believing something's sinful and believing the sinner should be imprisoned.

Right.

And so the point isn't to be, you've gotta understand, it's not some picky little point where they're making a distinction between, you can't sit on this jury because you've already predetermined this person's guilt.

Right.

That's not what happened in this case. Because if that were the case, one can see how reasonably that person, in today's definition of fair trial, which is an incorrect definition, but in the definition used today for a fair trial, one can see how an attorney might reasonably exclude someone who openly said homosexuals should be rounded up and imprisoned. That person, I can see how that person would reasonably be excluded. That didn't happen in this case.

Right.

In this case, it's simply, I'm a Christian, so you believe homosexuality's a sin? Yes, excluded, right?

Right.

But believing something is a sin, that's the issue here, Ben, because now this can serve as an example to other attorneys across the country who want to make sure that someone with Christian values is that there's a chilling effect, as we say in the law. There will now be a chilling effect on professed and open Christianity as a member of a jury. You will have to suppress that, right? You will have to prevent that from being publicly known in order to qualify as a juror in the United States. And mind you, Ben, for much of the history of this country, being a Christian was required before you could sit on a jury.

On a jury. Then there have been period of times where—

In many of the states, you not only had to sit, you had to profess before you qualified to sit on a jury that you believed Jesus Christ was the creator and judge of the world.

And that was never considered a violation of the separation of church and state by any stretch. I mean, for our listeners, I think this is a good point to bring up is the idea of what that meant and how the states themselves were allowed to establish religions, whereas the First Amendment only applied to the federal union.

Right, I mean, the first sentence, and this is what blows my mind every time someone argues this, is Congress shall make no law.

Right.

Why did they say, why didn't they say there shall be no law?

Right. 'Cause there are other points where it says the states are prohibited from doing something.

What's that?

There are other points in the Constitution where states are specifically prohibited from doing something.

There are, that's right. There are some stipulations that the states accepted in order to join the union as described and created with the Constitution. But no—

This is not it.

The reason it doesn't say states shall not pass, because no state, well, very few states would have ratified a Bill of Rights, an amendment in this case. We call it a Bill of Rights. It's 10 separate amendments. No state would have ratified, or let's say this, very few states would have ratified an amendment purporting to put the state in a subordinate position to the federal government.

Right.

Including the belief or the insistence, I should say, that states must abandon their established religion, which was not a consideration until very recently in our history.

Right.

Because the First Amendment was not, despite what everyone's taught in the indoctrination camps, the First Amendment was not meant to put some sort of separation between church and state. The First Amendment was to prevent the federal government from infringing on the power of the people in their various states from establishing a religion.

Right.

And it's very clear from the very first sentence, Congress shall make no law. Maybe the state constitutions, right, have a similar provision, wherein they say this state shall not establish a religion. That's fine. But in those states where such a provision did not exist and there wasn't an established religion, then the federal government as servant to the states had no authority to overturn the custom and establishment in that particular state, of any state.

Before we kind of go back to the bulk of the original topic, I wanna kind of just stretch this out a little bit more into the idea, when did it become kind of popular or start to be implemented where the states were basically compelled to implement the First Amendment into their laws? Was this post 1860s or is it—

Yeah, with the—

Like what states had established religions and when?

With the incorporation doctrine post 14th Amendment. So when it was the Supreme Court after the end of the war of Southern secession, after the end of that war, the so-called Civil War, then it became where the structure of the federal union was flipped on its head and the states became no more than administrative units of the empire and the Supreme Court began to issue edicts declaring that anything in the Bill of Rights that applied to the federal government here going forward, hence forward, they applied as well to the state government.

Right.

Which was not, and again, had that been said in Philadelphia in 1787, that document would have been stillborn because the state would not have accepted.

Right. So let's go back to this, back to the Supreme Court and this deal with banning Christians from serving on juries. Where does this end basically, right? Not only just religions on this specific issue of sodomites, we have just, if you're accused of murder or you're accused of theft, what is to prevent you from saying nobody on the jury should have a religious belief that these things are wrong and then making sure that nobody that believes theft is wrong is allowed on the jury?

Well, it is a curious way to sort of co-opt the system of criminal justice so as to permit crime.

Right.

Right. Do you understand? It's like, it's one of those things where, as originally conceived by, gosh, you can read it in Tacitus's story of ancient Germany, our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, where juries were meant to be sympathetic to the accused.

Right.

Because the idea was if government was going to deprive an individual of life, liberty, or property, there had to be a high threshold that the government would have to cross in order to accomplish such a deprivation. Therefore, when juries were impaneled, those juries were taken from the community, that is to say a jury of your peers. Those people were taken from the accused community and were meant to be sympathetic. In other words, say, hey, if we're going to do this to this person, whomever is accusing this person of the crime has a high bar to cross. And now, and so you would, you were supposed to have familiarity with the accused. Right? You were supposed to have familiarity with the alleged crime. That was the idea. The idea being that way, if this person is deprived by government of life, liberty, and property by those 12 people sitting on a jury, then it's very likely that that person deserved such deprivation. Right? Today, Ben, we have flipped it on its head and we, and speaking as someone who practiced law for many years, we seek out the ignorant to sit on juries. That's not an exaggeration.

'Cause they can be manipulated?

What's that?

Because they can be more easily manipulated or, or what reason?

Now it's become enshrined in the law where we want, there will be regulations, there will be judicial code of conduct, there will be laws of criminal procedure in the various states, stating that jurors should have no familiarity with the accused. Jurors should be chosen who are not predisposed to any position of guilt or innocence. Right? But Ben, you can read it in the history of the Anglo-Saxons, the English, and the Americans. Our original concept of the composition of a jury were people sympathetic to the accused. And today we want people who know nothing. And like I say, it's literally enshrined in criminal codes throughout the states.

Well, I think it should be—

And think about this. I mean, having sat there as a lawyer and gone through the jury selection process, most people do not want to sit on the jury. It's not glamorous and it doesn't pay well.

It's a high paying gig.

And so you don't want to sit on the jury. And so you, now think about this sort of permutation of this process, and that is only those not clever enough to come up with an excuse are left on the jury.

Right.

That's how it is. It's a gross—

The lowest common denominator.

Not only a miscarriage of justice, but a gross misunderstanding of the purpose of trial by jury.

So I think that the dangers of this to individual liberty should be self-evident, but I'd like to just for our listeners and our viewers to just elucidate some of those specific examples of what dangers occur with the situation we're in, with the dumbing down of the jurors and not making sure that they're not knowledgeable on the subject or the individual.

Well, it becomes just a jury of people, as you say, very easily manipulated, right? It becomes a jury who are unable to take into consideration a wider conceptualization of guilt and innocence, that which might exculpate or inculpate someone. And it just becomes rather a contest of who knows the least and which lawyer was best able to manipulate and persuade the very easily persuadable. And so you end up with gross miscarriages of justice, whereas you have our founding fathers who were completely in favor of a concept we call jury nullification. That is to say, the jury, in the words of Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Madison, the jury not only could, but should refuse to find someone guilty if the law is invalid, right? If the law is too vague, if the law as applied should be nullified, then the jury has the ability and in their words, the duty to do so. So now if you take a jury of the least informed, then you're going to have a jury that includes being the least informed of the law, its purpose, its provenance, and you'll end up with people being found guilty of things, A, that shouldn't be illegal, and B, found guilty by a jury, not of their peers, but of those completely, completely dispossessed of any sort of intelligence and wisdom that we once valued in a person sitting in judgment of the life, liberty, and property of another person. And so like in this case, Christianity, I mean, not only Christianity, as you said, profession of any Abrahamic religion, right? Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, you practice those religions and you admit that you are an adherent of those religions, then you are per se disqualified from a jury. Whereas you would expect a Christian, as people would want a Christian on a jury, why? Because Christian, blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. You would think you would want a Christian on your jury, right?

Right.

But no, and so it reveals, Ben, it reveals that there is a deeper movement, a deeper purpose in this. The deeper purpose is to completely marginalize and ultimately criminalize the public profession of Christianity.

Absolutely. This is a satanic conspiracy that we face. And I think this elucidates with these two different cases. We have this one where Christians are banned, and then a case that you wrote about in Tucson, Arizona, about how they required a Satanist to say the opening prayer to a, was it a city council meeting or a county council meeting?

City council.

City council meeting. So you have this juxtaposition. You must have Satanists on one hand, and you must not have Christians on the other. Starts to really make bare the fact that we do face a satanic conspiracy.

Right, it isn't secularization. I hear people online claiming that this is not secularization at all. It's the open and notorious persecution of Christians. Because if it were simple secularization, they would say, "We don't want a prayer to Heavenly Father or to Jesus. And likewise, we don't want a prayer to Satan." That isn't what's happening. We don't want Christians, but Satanists are perfectly, not only, do you get it? Not only allowed, right? But they are preferred. They are a protected class. Christians are now a persecuted class and are kept without any of the protection of civil liberty, afforded now to atheists and any other person.

Right.

Christians are especially, as we say in the law, especially identified now as a persecuted class. And that is where we are as a country, to the point where Satan, and I don't know if I was on your show talking about it, it was on some show, I wrote an article a little while ago about blasphemy. You realize that until as late as the year 2000, there were states who had laws criminalizing blasphemy against God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. You realize that?

That's wild.

Until as late as the year 2000. In the 1970s, for example, is when we first started seeing these states scrap those statutes. But it was commonplace, commonplace, Ben, in the generation in previous to ours.

Right.

For states to have enshrined, either in their codes or in their constitutions, laws prohibiting blasphemy of the Lord. And where are we now, being only 40 years, and in the case of some of these states, it was just in the early 2000s. So we're some 20 years, look how far we've come in 20 years. There were states with laws prohibiting blasphemy against Jesus, and today, anyone professing to worship the Savior is purposefully excluded from participating in the political process.

It really destroys the concept, right? That they say, "Oh, that's just a slippery slope argument. That's just bogus. That's not how it works." But it's blatantly obvious that that is the agenda behind it, is to change it one slow step at a time, whereas it was just about secularization, as you point out, where, no, it's not about just allowing everybody or allowing nobody. It's about getting rid of one class and preferring another. It is the supremacy, the anti-God supremacy movement that is being pushed.

And ultimately, as you do better than most podcasters that I know, you name names, and that is to say, it is Satan. This isn't just the progress of the world. This isn't just hell in a handbasket. All of that sort of talk fails to identify the fact that this is being planned and perpetrated by Satan and those who serve him. And that's pointed out very clearly by the Apostle Paul, right? But we fail to do that, and I'm really grateful to you, honestly, always am very grateful to you for naming that, for saying, this is not the simple decline of civilization. This is a planned and purposeful attack on Christianity by Satan and those who serve him in the public sphere.

Absolutely. I think now that it's, with it being election year, I think another part of this needs to be elucidated as well is this idea, right? One of the main arguments, they always say, well, we need to hold our nose and vote for R or D because of the Supreme Court. You're right, my letter guy is going to make sure that the Supreme Court is moving us in the right direction. Well, the Supreme Court is majority of people that were appointed during Republican administrations, and we see what that has given us. A majority of Republicans, and I'm not saying, it's not saying, oh, we need Democrats on the Supreme Court. No, it's saying that it's a delusion to get us to participate in a lie based on this idea that we think that the R's are going to get us people that are going to protect religious liberty. When we see here, the majority of R's voted against religious liberty.

Right, and if that's your motivation for voting for a Republican, then you're essentially voting for the establishment of a Republican oligarchy.

Right.

Because what you're saying is, I'm going to vote for this guy who I hope will appoint, maybe, maybe not, depending on death and retirement, appoint some black-robed octogenarian, who five of whom can unite and override the will of hundreds of millions of Americans. That is not Republican government as guaranteed by Article IV of the Constitution. If you do that, if you vote for a Republican or a Democrat, if that's your bent, if you're voting for someone based on your anticipation of his appointing like-minded people to the Supreme Court, then you are essentially saying, I am in favor philosophically of rule by five oligarchs. That's what you're doing. You can't, and it's not my opinion, this is the actual political fact, because it's like when Roe versus Wade was overturned, and everybody cheered, right? All the pro-life people cheered. That never should have happened because we should have ignored the fact that five judges were able to override state law. Nowhere in Article III is that power granted to the Supreme Court. And the writings of the founders are very clear. That was never intended to surrender the will of the states and the people of the states to Supreme Court judges who are neither elected by nor accountable to the people. And it is a direct violation of the protection offered in Article IV of the guarantee, not just protection, the guarantee in Article IV of a Republican form of government in every state. Because every state that, for example, prior to Obergefell, every state that had a law on the books outlawing same-sex marriage was denied the Republican form of government when five oligarchs on the Potomac said, you have to recognize them. That was a direct deprivation of the right of Republican government guaranteed in Article IV. But Ben, it all comes down to the fact of tyrants gonna tyrant. That's what they do. But why do we obey? Why, when are we going to have state legislators and governors who follow Madison's council and Federalist 46 and refuse to cooperate? Ultimately, that's what it comes down to. And in the case of this jury, the Christians being denied a seat in juries, Christians in Missouri had better be standing up for that. There should be, our fathers would be protesting, there would be riots.

There'd be a little bit more than that.

Yes, I'm trying to be polite. But there would be protests. There would be some sort of surge of resistance.

Right, resistance, I think more than protesting.

Right, but as it is, we see nothing.

Right.

Right, it's just—

Nobody even knows about it. Nobody's even talking about it. It's crazy.

No, and it's just another one of those things, well, oh well, that's just the way the world is going.

People lose their minds, they're talking about the abortion or when the sodomite marriage thing, the Obergefell decision went through, people were up in arms and they were talking. It was at least being talked about whether they were up in arms or not. But this one's like just crickets. I just, I'm baffled.

Well, it reveals to you, right?

Yes.

It reveals to you how far Satan and those who serve him have successfully marginalized and even been able to make a mockery of Christianity. It is on the precipice, if it hasn't already crossed that, it's on the precipice of being a scarlet letter, a scarlet C, declaring for all to see that you believe that nonsense, you believe in your invisible sky daddy, and you believe in nonsensical homophobia. It really is. If you look and observe in all the ways in which this prejudice is made manifest in the public sphere, Christianity is nigh on being a scarlet letter.

Yeah. So there's just one thing I think we should talk about real quick first as well, before we finish this topic, finish this program, is another Supreme Court decision that people think of, you know, again, Republicans are gonna save us. We have here in February, the Supreme Court rejects appeal from three GOP House members over $500 mask fines. So they think, you know, the Supreme Court's gonna protect us in our rights, but we here again, have a Republican majority in the Supreme Court saying that Nancy Pelosi cannot be, you know, targeted in this, in her office. Whatever she does in her office as the Speaker of the House is something that is protected. And, you know, the Supreme Court is not going to protect us in our rights. We need to understand that is, you know, something that's very, very dangerous. If that's kind of going back to what your comment was before, you know, putting these people in their positions.

Well, he who poisoned you is rarely gonna be the one to cure you.

Right.

We can't continue to recur to Washington praying and begging and pleading for Washington to repent and to repair itself and to retreat within the borders of its constitutional authority. Ben, it just, it isn't going to happen. It isn't going to happen.

Right.

And for those people of your viewers and your listeners who think, well, we just gotta elect the right people to Congress, we've gotta get a Republican in the White House, it isn't going to matter. What you need to do, if you're one of these people who insist that you revere the founding fathers, that you value their virtue and their wisdom, then you need to do as they suggest, and we need to, as I say, make America states again. We have got to stand up and have our states and restore, retrench, we have got to restore the barricades to tyranny that the states were intended to be, protecting the people from a tyrannical federal authority, because the plain fact of constitutional history is the states surrendered not one iota of their sovereignty. This, any power granted to the federal government was granted in writing provisionally with the assurance that the federal government would stay within those authorized boundaries. If the federal government exceeds those boundaries, it is, as Madison says, not only the right, but the duty of states to refuse to enact unconstitutional acts of the federal government. It is their right, and as Madison said, you are duty-bound to not do that. So Ben, we could solve all of this tomorrow.

Right.

All of it. Gay, I'm not using the word marriage, gay union, right?

Yes.

The protection for pedophilia, this anti-Christian bias, all of that could end tomorrow in any one of the sovereign states if we had a legislature and a governor determined to do what each one of them swore to do. You don't have to swear, right? The Constitution does not require you to swear, but you have to at least affirm, but there's not one of these state governors who didn't put his hand on a Bible and so help me God, promise to fulfill his promise.

Fulfill his Article VI oath, which is to support the Constitution.

Which makes them blasphemers.

And so if you're supporting the Constitution, that means keeping the federal government within its constitutional bounds. And so this is what we don't get, Ben. We don't get, not only are we just winking at someone's wickedness and someone's perversion and well, we don't really like it. We're winking, we're turning our heads at blasphemy 'cause every one of these politicians call God down as a witness to their perfidy, to their perversion, every one of them, Ben. And so we have got to start focusing on that and get Christians, Muslims, Jews, anyone of any faith that values swearing to God as something that should be binding, we've gotta make them know, look, we can hold these people accountable and we can get people in these state houses and in the governor's mansions that can create beacons of liberty in any one of these sovereign states. That's all we need to do. But it first comes, Ben, at the sacrifice of this delusion that we unfortunately perpetuate in the indoctrination camps where 90, what, 7% of Christians drop their kids off, right, at these camps every day, where they are taught these untruths, where they are taught to accept perversion, where they're taught that Christianity is bigotry, right? So we've got, there's a lot we can do and do it a lot easier, a lot quicker than trying to reform Washington. We can reform ourselves and that will prevent Washington from making these incursions into our faith and into our political and civil liberty.

Absolutely. I wanna go back to that article because I think there's a point in there that is made of why the case was dismissed that I think should be chilling as well, is, and I mentioned it briefly, was is that their case did not have any basis because the Speaker of the House and others enforcing the mask mandate could not be the target of legal actions for choices they made in their jobs as government officials. So basically they're saying that as long as you're acting in your capacity as a government official, you can do whatever you want and there is no legal recourse. They're admitting that they're a tyrannical government.

Well, I mean, and again, this just goes back to education. We need to understand as our fathers understood that tyrants are enemies of the human race and deserve to be destroyed. I just wrote an article today, a biography of John Milton, who said no sacrifice is greater than the sacrifice of a tyrannical king, right? We have got to realize now we don't need to kill them, but we don't need to lay hands on them to do something similar. We can simply refuse to obey, right?

That's the beginning point for sure, yeah.

We've got to recognize there isn't a government, if Nancy Pelosi or anyone can do anything they want to, so long as they're acting under the color of their office, then we do not have, we have then what Jefferson called a democratic despotism. We simply are ruled by kings and princes by other names.

Absolutely.

Right?

So, I mean—

But again, we're not gonna do anything because 97% of our people not only allow, but encourage their children to go to these schools. They go to school in Rome for 12 years and they learn to praise Caesar.

Yep.

And that's just the way it is. Until we realize that without education, without virtue, we cannot be a free people, we will continue to be enslaved by those who act as our masters. Can you imagine a government? It isn't even worthy of that name, Ben. That's not a government that says, "If I'm elected, then I can do whatever I please." That's simply an elected despot.

Absolutely.

And now we have a situation where we don't even know who's elected and who isn't.

Right, yeah, elections are very much up in the air.

Right.

So, I think reading, if we are not willing to read, we are not willing to be free. And so there are a couple of books that you've written that I highly recommend, "The Founders' Recipe" and "What Degree of Madness?" Encourage you all to get Dr. Woolverton's books there. And then also we have "The Tree of Liberty Society," "Invasions, Volume 1 and 2," and "Killing No Murder." I think those are important books to help us to understand the score and the long-term solutions of how to rein in the situation that we're in. And if we're not willing to read, we are saying that we would like a tyranny. So thank you so much, Dr. Wolverton.

Richard Price, who was a great friend of the Founders, called the torchbearer of liberty, a Welsh preacher, who was offered citizenship, the Continental Congress offered to bring him and his family over and set them up with a farm in America and offered him citizenship because of his great service to liberty. He said, "Why is it that you look throughout the world and find people willing to bow to tyrants, to be as nothing more," he said, "than cattle?" Why do we find that? Because they are not educated. And his phrase that I love, "Enlighten them and you will elevate them." Right? We have got to take education out of the hands of the government and return it to our families. If we ever hope to restore liberty to this people, we have got to begin at home by pulling our kids out of those schools and by restoring. How about we restore good government to the smallest government, that is to say the family?

Yep.

Let's focus on getting that family, like Hugo Grotius, right, said, "A man who can't govern himself can't govern his family." And how could such a man ever be thought to govern a country?

Right.

So our obligation, get yourself in order, get your family in order, and then work to influence your state governments to restore that barricade between the people of the states and federal tyranny. And then we simply can vote with our feet and states that agree to adhere to the requirements of the Constitution. We go to that state and we make it prosperous and peaceful, and maybe sister states will understand, "Hey, I want a piece of that too." And they too will begin to refuse, as Madison said, to cooperate with the unconstitutional acts of the union. Simple as that. It really has been that simple. And we can undo the damage that's been done in excluding Christians from the public sphere, from mocking Christianity, from exalting perversion. We can undo all of that in any state if the Christians would unite with other people of faith in that state in upholding and enforcing the Constitution.

Okay. Thank you so much. I appreciate those final words.

Sir.

We will see you soon, hopefully. And I hope folks will continue to check you out with your work you're doing at the John Birch Society and check out your books.

Yes, sir. Thank you.

Until next time.

What's that?

I said, thank you.

Oh yeah, yeah, fantastic. And we will see you soon.