Member Training – Critical Thinking Part 2

Member training from May 19th, 2025.

This presentation, Critical Thinking Part 2, In this discussion, I emphasize the importance of critical thinking and logical analysis in the fight for liberty. I illustrate how easily individuals can be manipulated when they fail to engage their reasoning skills, using visual examples and historical warnings from the Founding Fathers. The presentation explores deceptive tactics used to shape public perception, the dangers of accepting vague or misleading statements without scrutiny, and the necessity of evaluating truth claims with precision and consistency. By applying principles of clarity, accuracy, and logic, I demonstrate how to resist manipulation and maintain an informed, independent perspective, ensuring we are not misled by false narratives or empty platitudes. Ultimately, this is a call to reclaim intellectual responsibility and strengthen the resistance against those seeking to erode our freedoms.

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TRANSCRIPT

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this time we have come together to learn and grow. Please bless us with enlightened minds and a flow of intelligence from thee. We're grateful, Lord, for all that was done for us. And we wish to have the courage we need to do as we must. We say these things in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. So I wanted to do a recap because it was about three weeks ago that I did. um that we did this we started this series of presentations so i just want to do a real quick overview before we get into what we did what's going on this week so let's see here sorry i want to bring that over here so i can okay i apologize okay so just as always what is the purpose of training so that way you can get the context of the reason why we're going over these principles we need to build the understanding of the principles that have built free nations we need to expose the satanic conspiracy and we need to build an effective resistance to that conspiracy and so in conjunction in the effort to fulfill all three of those we want to learn how to more effectively engage our critical thinking skills So just a real recap, we got three or four different slides going over that presentation I went over three or four weeks ago.

And this video right here is a really important example of how easily we are manipulated, especially when we don't use our critical thinking skills. Despite what you might be thinking, these two circles are not equal. I repeat, these two circles are not equal. One is in fact larger than the other. What I need you to do is determine which one that is. Please raise your hand if you believe the blue circle is larger than the red. All right. Please raise your hand if you believe the red circle is larger than the blue. All right, very good. Now, before I said anything about these two circles, what was your first instinct? Equal, right? Because they look equal. And the reason why they look equal is because, in fact, they are equal. These two circles are identical. Yet, I got just about every one of you to raise your hand and say that they're not.

So what did we learn? That you can be manipulated like, that to believe in something that goes against your natural instincts just just imagine just imagine as a child you're taught that the blue circle is larger than the red if you say it enough times you convince yourself that's the truth so that's just an example of how easily we are manipulated too often we we put forward this idea of an expert right we're we're listening to someone and they're giving us a presentation and we have our our first inclinations and this one right here is because We have eyeballs and we have the ability to see. And so we said to our minds that, oh, they're the same size.

But then he told us that they weren't. And so we questioned ourselves to thinking, oh, there must be something, an optical illusion that makes them look the same when they're not. Well, that wasn't the case. He was lying to us. And that's what happens too often. And when we turn off our critical thinking cap, we get suckered into the lies that are being told to us, especially regarding our our liberties and so it's important that we don't do that we don't turn off our thinking cap um and so it's you know the scriptures warn us of this we we learn by the from the apostle paul and colossians that we need to beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men after the rudiments of the world and not after christ so people are trying to fool us and so it's important that we are aware of that And one of the best ways to be aware of that or beware of that is to have critical thinking. And so what where I heard.

OK, Mark, yeah, you have a question. You have to unmute. You keep forgetting. Yeah. Logic. Another way of talking about what you just presented is logic supersedes persons. remember what god said he's not a respecter of persons uh so his law comes first against ahead of anybody so that means you could have the most trustworthy person in the world that you think is trustworthy but logic supersedes him and god's law supersedes him and i think that's really important that we have we're required to use our minds uh use logic i don't use critical thinking as i talked about before if you look you might the challenge for you ben is to look at the curriculums because it's it's broken down critical thinking is broken down in different categories and you'll find one of them that is uh not based on logic so uh but anyway i i rely on logic to a large extent so does critical thinking but it doesn't entirely but anyway back to the main point is that we always need to know that logic supersedes persons and that requires effort on our part to use logic and not rely on just people and not be lazy.

Appreciate that. Let's remind, just a reminder, just to make sure we keep the comments at the end and in the comment section and questions during the presentation. But thank you, Mark. So what is this that we're referring to tonight? That is that critical thinking is the general term given to a wide range of cognitive skills and intellectual dispositions needed to effectively identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments and truth claims. to discover and overcome personal prejudices and biases, to formulate and present convincing reasons in support of conclusions, and to make reasonable, intelligent decisions about what to believe and what to do. So this is a mixture of basically two different things. On one hand, we want to make sure that we're not being fooled. But on the other hand, we use critical thinking to help others come to a logical conclusion to make sure that they're helping the cause of liberty. and not continuing in being fooled themselves by the conspiracy.

So there are four dimensions to critical thinking, and those are the skills required to evaluate arguments and truth claims, the skills required to overcome personal prejudices, the skills required to clearly formulate good arguments, and the skills required to make intelligent decisions about what to believe and what to do. And we need to remember that the truth is knowable. As the Savior said, he's talking to the Pharisees, that you are of your father the devil, and the lust of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar and the father of it. So he's saying that they are liars, which means that the truth is knowable. So these critical thinking principles that we're going to go over tonight, we have one is we have to... on clarity and accuracy precision consistency and that they're logical and that they're relevant okay so those are the six tools we're going to go over uh this evening so i want to bring up the idea of talking about clarity we look at uh the book the sickness unto death written in the 1800s he is a theologian and he wrote this book about how to understand certain principles.

And so I'm going to read from the book. This is in the opening paragraph. It says a human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? the self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relations relating itself to itself in the relation the self is not the relation but is the relations relating itself to itself a human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite of the temporal and the eternal of freedom and necessity in short a synthesis a synthesis is a relation between two considered in this way a human being is still not a self In the relation between the two, the relation is the third as a negative unity and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation. Thus, under the qualification of the physical, the relation between the physical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third and this is the self. You know, right? So, huh? Right? This is not clear. We need clarity on this.

There are some questions that would need, before we said, do we agree with this? Do we disagree with this? Might be the most wise statement ever made. So, you know, right? There needs to be clarity to be able to make heads or tails of this. There are some key questions we need to know to get in the habit. of asking before we even begin to evaluate an idea so right could could we would ask the person could you elaborate further could you give me an example of what you're referring to could you illustrate what you mean what do you mean by the word and then fill in the blank of what word you would like them to define for you so right so these are those the clarity those are things that if if we read something like what we just read before or you're discussing something with someone and you're just totally lost as to what they are they are saying uh before you can have even a good art like do you know what they're saying you're like can i do i do i need to accept or do i need to reject what you just said we need to ask some clarifying questions and when you're not dealing with a conspirator you're just dealing with your fellow man and you're trying to come to an agreement together to to reason together We can do that. We can ask them to elaborate further.

We can ask them to give an example because the people that we deal with on a day-to-day basis are typically not satanic conspirators. They're just maybe influenced by satanic conspirators. And so by asking these types of questions, if they are influenced by an evil person, by asking these types of questions, you can actually help them come to that conclusion themselves. They can come to that understanding themselves. Yeah, as Samantha says, can you say it like I'm five? Precisely. So now let's get into the idea of accuracy. So I'm going to play a clip from a television show from my childhood called Cheers. And one of the characters on there, his name was Cliff Clavin. Some of you might be too young for that or may not have watched the show, but he was always the know-it-all. And so it's important for us to write. If somebody claims to be informed on an issue, we need to kind of think of what they're saying, if there's logic to it, if it's accurate.

I still say that Kennedy will be president someday. Maybe the next time. You know how politicians are. I really don't think so there, Diane. I've got a pet little theory about that. You see, if you go back in history and take every president. You'll find that the numerical value of each letter in their last name was equally divisible into the year in which they were elected. So who's going to win? Reagan again? No, not a chance yet. I figured it out. By my calculations, our next president has to be named Yelnick McGuawa. That's the stupidest name I've ever heard. Sam, please. You're talking about our next president. So it's important that we're accurate. It's the idea of the boy that cried wolf. When we're just putting out some kind of a pet theory that we like and it's just nonsense, then we either lose our credibility with the critical thinker or we, like with Coach there, we lead them. to a faulty, a false conclusion. Yes, Mark, go ahead. You can unmute. Doesn't that also fall into the category of illogical and not logical that's coming up? Yes. Yes, absolutely. That's what I saw mostly.

Yeah. So it's just nonsense. So accuracy on real life application, right? We have a guy running for office. He's a political candidate. And he says something along the lines of, I trust the people to make decisions for their own lives. We don't need government poking its nose in every aspect of our lives. And so you've got the naive voter. He says, oh, that's great. That's exactly what I'm looking for, right? I like him. He looks me in the eye. So we can ask ourselves, well, what's wrong with this? He's saying that don't you like a guy that doesn't want to poke his nose in all of your business? So a critical thinker is going to ask the question, you know, because this is not really an accurate, there's no way to make an accurate conclusion to what's being said here. So there's some obvious questions that a critical thinker would be asking. So why is he speaking in platitudes? Does he think people should be able to kill unborn babies? You know, I don't want to be in your business.

That's the privacy argument that's brought up sometime when he's talking about killing babies. And then another question would be, he said, Every aspect of our lives, you know, that they shouldn't be involved in every aspect of our lives, which implies that he thinks that the government should have some control over certain aspects of our lives. And so what part of our life does he want control over? And this could be other questions that a critical thinker is going to ask to try and get an accurate understanding of what the politician means when he's giving the platitude statement. So accuracy. Another thing that we see here all the time of inaccurate statements being made on the internet, right? It's these Facebook posts talking about a deadline and that they saw it on the news and that all of these, they're trying to say that Facebook can't use your posts for any of their advertising and that it's all private and you've copyrighted it. It's nonsense.

When you go on Facebook, it's their property. And they can use your post in however way they want to, no matter what dumb disclaimer you claim was on the news. Because it wasn't. You know, people that are forwarding this, they're just forwarding it from somebody else. I like how it says, you know, Channel 13 News talked about it. Channel 13 what? Like, it's nonsense. It's just made up and it's foolish. And because of that, if we believe that, now we're going to do something and we're going to think that we're protecting ourselves when we're not. We are going to maybe fool others into thinking that they're protecting themselves. And so, you know, without asking our, you know, without critically thinking, without asking critical questions, we're going to be led down a bad path. accurate thing that was something that a lot of people in the Liberty Movement were grabbing onto was this idea a few years ago that Walmarts were being turned into FEMA camps.

This was like in 2012, 13-ish, if I remember correctly. Maybe a little bit later, maybe 2015. They're not FEMA camps. Almost camp. Almost camp, maybe. People that go shopping in their pajama camps. But FEMA camps, they are not. And so somebody puts it out there and all of a sudden we believe it. You had Hal Turner going out there and claiming that he had leaked to him from Hillary Clinton these Amero coins back in 2009. And it just was nonsense. And people that were spreading it were losing their credibility. And then you have other people talking about martial law being declared. And these FEMA camps are going to be COVID-19 FEMA camps are being approved. And the military is going to be setting these things up soon for anybody in America that's resisting the government. And so all of these things, when we're not accurate, before we share something, we don't ask critical questions. Now we are going to be fooled.

We are going to... the wrong thing and we are going to get others to do the wrong thing and so it's important that we engage in critical thinking and then we you and that is manifest through questions that will help us to find out if what is being shared is true or not we can't just you know especially with what we're dealing with it's vital that to maintain our credibility that what we share is accurate and to be able to make sure it's accurate We have to do a little bit of extra digging so that way when we are sharing something that is so, you know, pretty big deal, people know that they can trust us. So precision and precise words that work their way into confuse. Using words that are not exactly accurate are a great way to confuse people into not doing the right thing. And so a lot of times you'll hear in the news, the word many, the word a lot. I just said it. It's a filler word almost, but almost everybody, the majority. Let me go back here.

So this is something that is used by the conspiracy to get people to say, oh, I, you know, there are a lot of, I don't want to be on the outside. People are other, the majority of the people can't be wrong. and so it's if you guys have ever seen that show who wants to be a millionaire one of the lifelines for a question that they didn't if the individual didn't know the answer they wanted to pull the audience because the majority of the audience is generally going to be correct and so as it was the the thought process and so we're we're uh manipulated into accepting an idea when we are told that many people do this a lot of people do this almost everybody the majority of people and so that way we don't want to look like an idiot being the only one not believing this thing and so it gets us to go along with with the story and so exaggerating is also bad yes always everyone doctors say this can yes those are great examples and so just an example of how this is used you have sucker a Most scientists agree that the theory of multiverses, going back to Micah's presentation, most scientists agree that the theory of multiverses provides the best explanation for the precision of the physical constants in our universe that make it perfectly balanced for human life. So that'll be an idea, right?

Most scientists, well, scientists, they're smart. They went through edumacation. They know a lot more than I do. And why would I disagree with most of the scientists? And so the person is going to say, well, if most scientists agree, then I guess I'm wrong. So I better go along with most scientists instead of asking critical thinking questions like what study or survey did you get the information from? Who funded this? Were there scientists that weren't allowed to have their voices heard? What is the margin of error? How many scientists did not agree with the theory of multiverses? If it's 51%, that's much different than 99%. We had this same issue during the fake pandemic where you had the CDC as a body. approving vaccines or you know looking through and approving medicines poisons to be approved by the government and they'd say oh the cdc approved this well when you come to find out the cdc board it was actually just barely over 51 percent of the board approved it so that's you know that's saying a good chunk of the cdc board didn't think that that was safe and didn't want it to go to market that's that's an important question to to be considered if you're looking to experts for uh something that you want to ingest into your body but uh you know then ask yourself or ask the individual telling these things who are some of the scientists that would disagree with the theory of the multiverses maybe that they've got to there are a lot of times where the one guy that was wrong he has a better methodology and so he's going to if he's disagreeing with everybody else That would be important to understand. Another question, right? If a majority of scientists say there's no God, does that make it true? Of course not.

The idea of just because the majority say something is true or not true is irrelevant, right? The truth is not dependent upon the majority. We don't get to vote. There's no democracy in deciding truth. And so we need to ask ourselves that question too. Just because the majority say something, stinking deal so lack of precision is usually the sign of a weak argument because they want to obfuscate the point in a way that will make you just assume something and not actually ask questions because you don't want to look like an idiot so consistency is also another important thing when we are using our critical thinking or our logic right we have a professor here where he states that something can only be true if you can prove it scientifically. That statement of itself can't be proved scientifically.

So that statement itself is not consistent with the premise. And so we have to understand what is logical to be able to do that. We have to look at the non sequitur is another way to put it. You have the definition is the term. Non sequitur comes from Latin and translates does not follow. A non sequitur occurs if the premises don't justify the conclusion. The only example, all trees are tall, all tall things are yellow, therefore all trees are green. The conclusion makes no sense based on the evidence. There are other ideas of people live longer since television was invented. Therefore, television makes people live longer. So non sequitur. There was a budget surplus of $30 billion in 1997. And then the budget surplus went to $122 billion in 2000 under Clinton. So the Clinton must have really got spending under control. And he must have been a fiscal conservative, right? He's putting the bootstraps on and making sure that the government's not wasting any money.

That's the conclusion that is not logical. It's non sequitur. First of all, Congress sets the budget, so it's got nothing to do with Bill Clinton. Spending in 1997 was $1.67 trillion. And then in 2000, it was $1.789 trillion. So spending actually went up. So over $100 billion, it went up. So neither the president nor Congress should be called fiscally conservative because just what that means is that they collected more taxes if they had a surplus. So they were just stealing more from us exponentially while they were spending exponentially more money. Just because there was a bigger surplus doesn't mean Clinton got things under control. It's a non sequitur. Now let's go to the next ideas of relevancy. One of the most difficult skills in critical thinking is being able to stay focused enough on the issue, being debated to detect when someone is trying to introduce irrelevant issues as a distraction. So there is an example here is I think abortion should be allowed.

Look at how many hungry and starving children are out there already. We don't need any more suffering children, okay? So by a raise of hand, just calling a couple of people to raise your hand, who can identify the irrelevant point being made to the topic of abortion, aka baby murder and torture? Mark, you're muted, Mark. Thank you. It's a false premise. just because there's abortion that is a cause of people going hungry and there's no argument that's being presented there that one causes the other it could it could but there's no there's no presentation of a logical connection between the two right yeah there's no it's not relevant people that are hung there's people that are hungry therefore we should kill babies it's not a relevancy yeah micah get close to the mic make sure they can catch it it ignores the facts of the evils of abortion right and so it's yeah but that's irrelevant to the point being made here but so that's irrelevant so he's the example makes the evils of abortion irrelevant so they're they're ignoring facts about abortion and and distracting you with a with an irrelevant fact yeah it's it's like I think it's kind of a poorer example, but it's like extra reasoning.

That's what I call it when they, when basically there's like this hardcore fact, someone, someone is like, I saw you at the gas station yesterday. And you're like, oh really? Because I have video and very many eyewitnesses of me and not the gas station yesterday. And they're like, well, I don't care about that. I'm just going to keep talking about you were at the gas station. there's extra reasoning because they're ignoring facts then they're trying there's like oh well none of that stuff matters we're just going to brush that on the rug and we're going to keep talking about all this other stuff to rationalize how you were there they'll bring up like oh you've got a snickers bar so clearly you were at the gas station yeah like evolution creates extra reasoning by ignoring all basically all natural laws to explain it the often word you use was rational it's not logical that because if you have more abortions, you're going to have less suffering children.

There's no argument that could be made to that. So that's what we need to really point out is just the absence of logic here. That's the most important. Yeah. It's not a relevant point. If you want to say that we can kill people because there are hungry people out there, that doesn't just apply to children. You're saying that we should just kill anybody because there are starving people out there. they're gonna die anyway so we the the the amount of hungry and starving people as irrelevant to murdering and torturing babies okay let's go to another example deborah should not marry paul statistics show that 73 of marriages end in divorce okay so what is the irrelevant point being made to distract from why the two individuals should or should not get married. 50% of those marriages are sodomite marriages.

Any thoughts? Anybody want to raise their hand? What's the irrelevant point? Yeah, Mark, you got your hand up? Yeah, they're ignoring the, what is that, 27%, but they're also ignoring, if you're divorced, you can remarry, and they're ignoring the blessings of marriage. Right. So, yeah, the other people's actions. are irrelevant to deborah and paul's actions right like it's almost like with the gun control you shouldn't be able to own guns because bad people hurt others that's other people hurting people has nothing to do with me hurting people it's an irrelevant point it's more in the benefit of having guns right to protect your own rights your family's rights and the rights of others yep anybody else okay so the goal is to the person that is Bringing up the irrelevant point is to put aside the main issue and present another one in its stead as if it was the same issue, kind of like a straw man argument. If they will put something else up, the 73% of marriages and divorce as the thing to attack.

And so, you know, obviously you're a bad person if you get married because everybody gets divorced. So if we fail to recognize what's going on, we will fall prey to an irrelevant. unrelated argument and believe a lie thinking we're believing the truth. So you're going to think that you shouldn't get married because of a certain amount of other people that get divorced. It's like saying we shouldn't get married because a certain amount of husbands beat their wives.

So we have to remember these principles when we are evaluating truth claims that come at us to make sure that we not being fooled and that we are going to be as effective as we can be when being presented with information when we're being presented with uh solutions we're gonna we have to ask our we have to ask these questions so that we can logically come to an accurate conclusion yeah we need more houses to take care of the homeless these are also called red herrings the point is to throw you off track by using them absolutely great points and so if we remember these six different uh principles As we are evaluating the claims that come at us, we can really be much more effective in weeding through deception. And so it's important for us to do these things. And so that we can be as effective.

That's what we're doing in training so that we can be that effective resistance to the conspiracy. And if we do not understand. this critical, these methods of critical thinking and using logic, we will fall prey and we will not be an effective resistance. We will keep like, you know, Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football where we're told this time is going to be different. And we're going to fall for the same thing that we've fallen for before. Whereas we need to make sure that we don't do that anymore. And being using logic and using critical thinking is our, are keys to our effectiveness in building that resistance that we need to build to destroy the conspiracy that we face. So we've got a few minutes left. Let's open it up to please raise your hands. And if anybody has any comments, questions, thoughts about the principles that we covered in training tonight. Yes, Joyce. Sorry, I was late. That's okay. We'll forgive you this time.

But I was thinking about, and that's why I'm really late, but I only got the tail end. But I can recognize from very early, like elementary school, I think it was second grade or third, that I had magical thinking. So I got accused and caught having stolen another boy's, his snack. He deserved it. Vanilla wafers. Thanks. You guys are my friends. That's why. But my mother ended up talking to the teacher. She never bought vanilla wafers. I mean, I had to be convinced. And as I look back, I realized that I thought some force put those there for me because I had got my snack at home. I didn't think I was stealing anyway. But I see this repeat throughout my life.

Even like going to somebody's car door that looked like mine and thinking, oh, somebody left a package in there for me. Not thinking, oh, this could possibly not be your car. And then I have this other friend. He generalizes like crazy. It's horrible to talk to him. He just drives me nuts with. only good looking people ever have anything good go for them and like generalizing negative so i'm the half cup cup half full person he's the half well his cup is totally empty anyway i i just if i think that it helps me to have seen this about myself at a you know through repeating that i have this problem i'll even make up things about oh somebody's looking at me they must think i'm beautiful you know like just crazy stuff look and and so anyways um i try not to i try to be yeah keep my mouth shut more or question myself i say if i get angry i say could i be wrong things like so you stole all the snacks the last uh member meetup it was you she didn't steal there were men for her obviously i shouldn't leave any confession Yeah, well, I think that's really important for us to all consider, especially in that circumstance, is making sure before we blow our lid that we make sure that we're seeing things in the right light.

Ask those critical questions, not only of other people, but of ourselves, right? Those questions of ourselves. So, Mark, yes. Yeah, before I get to my point, Joyce, you're a champion of rationalization. But obviously you can turn it off because you can't be any kind of decent math teacher and be rationalizing. You know, arithmetic is what I used to teach people. Algebra is entirely based on logic. But now back to the subject. I'm glad you brought up straw man arguments. They're very common. If you are good at arguing a point, you're going to be confronted by people using a straw man argument against you. and just to be sure everybody understands it when they can't collapse your argument based on the facts and the logic you use then they change your argument They say, well, this is what your position is.

And then that's the straw man. And then they argue against a straw man, or at least they appear to be. And it's really important to identify a straw man argument right away and expose it. This is not what I said. This is what I said. You're changing the subject. And sometimes it's really good to even tell them you're using what's called a straw man argument. That's really a blow the belt blow. It's not really honest. And then get back to the arguments. Another point. A fiscal conservative, when I ran for Congress, this is what they called the Democrat I was running against. She was fiscally conservative. She was a very powerful, wealthiest CFR member, wealthiest Democrat in Congress, head of the Intelligence Committee.

And this is what the local media always called her. And one of the reasons they get by with terms like that is they're not objectively definable. uh like conservative is not a good term to be for us to be using in political science we never use that term we only use it in history identifying like in britain they have a conservative party so fiscal conservative uh conservative could be anything and she was a leftist liberal and yet They got by with that. And one of the reasons they got by with it, it's not really definable. What she would do, she would throw a scrap on the table once and now in the right direction. And that allowed her to use that title. So I just want to bring that up. It's really important. We define the terms at the very beginning, define the concepts, and expose those are not definable. Yeah. Going back to that straw man argument, that's something that happens to us. We say, This is a bad solution, right? This is not the way. We don't vote harder. We don't sue the government.

And then the straw man that's brought up is you're giving up. No, you're not giving up. I brought it up in training before. It's like somebody not playing three-card Monty is not giving up. They're not quitters. They're just not playing a rigged game. You don't keep on playing a rigged game to avoid being called a quitter. You're absolutely right. That is a straw man argument. And one of the most important ways to... it expose that to the other people listening and also the person that's using it is to really simply call it did that is not what i said at all where did you see that and what i said and then so put put the uh focus on their dishonesty intellectually dishonesty and that's one way to get them to back off on using those things term techniques yep amy you've got your hand up yeah yeah um can you hear me sure can okay i didn't know if my i was on mute or not so I just want to throw out a little phrase that morality can see farther than intellect can.

When the COVID get vaccine rolled out, I didn't have to think very hard because I knew it was morally wrong. You don't have to do all the studies if you already know it's wrong. Sometimes intellect can be wrong and morality can see farther than intellect can. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Mark, you got your hand up.

As a response to what you just said, we always need to start with what's right and wrong. What is godly law? What is constitutional law? And this is where, over and over again, the conspiracy is constantly having us ignore right or wrong. Justice, what is liberty, what is tyranny, are terms that have actually been implicitly... sense of abolished, abolished in common conversation, not only by the conspiracy, but they taught us to not use those terms. So we start there. But once we have that, what is right or wrong, what is the standard of right or wrong, then we apply logic. Then we apply scholarship to it. Then we apply history.

And so the argument goes from there. But we have to start with what you're saying, identifying what's right and wrong and why. Yeah. And we definitely have to convince other people anyway. So, I mean, we do want to do the studies, but it's just part of the equation, I think. You can start off, right? You can still know it's wrong and then start to work with logic and reason from there. Studies do no good if we don't know what's right and wrong. Right. And just like statistics, they can be manipulated to move an opinion one way or the other. Joyce, in the comments, asked you a question, Mark. She says, I want the word that you use to describe our fiscal responsibility and following the principles of liberty, if not conservative. If you don't use the word conservative, what do you use to describe fiscal responsibility and following liberty? We're talking about political terms of right and wrong. So to begin with, we should start with tyranny and liberty.

And liberty is a portion of justice. So really, it all begins with injustice. And what is justice and injustice? According to God's law, according to the principles of our free society that our founding fathers gave us, and so forth. But conservative, how do you define conservative? I mean, literally it means conserving something. But what do we have now? We have a mixed socialist economy. Why would we want to support slavery? Fiscal, you know, that means financially the person was conservative. But when you look at the facts, but that's even objective. Republican Democrats, except for Thomas Massey, they're all... none of them are fiscally conservative in terms of reducing the size of government. They're all increasing at exponentially rates. So these terms are left open to relativity. And I mean subjective. We need objective terms that have one definition and only one definition, and there's no wiggle room. Terms that I use are, well, constitutionalist is very objective. The founding fathers, if you look at original 10, it means one thing and one other thing, only each provision in the Constitution.

Another one is collectivism versus individualism. Those are political terms that are very objective. And I'm trying to think of some others, but we can't use terms that are left open to different definitions. Can you give me a definition of conservative that's not objective, Joyce? I hate using the term conservative, and that's why I was so curious. I want to plug whatever word you say, I'm plugging it in. So I love individualist, constitutionalist. Yeah, and tyranny and liberty are very objective terms as well. Yeah, but I'm a liberty. Liberty. Well, tyranny is a founding father. This is the violation of individual and native natural rights. And so any form of that, whether it's violating property rights, taking your property, taking your life, taking your freedoms away from you, those are very objective language.

But don't you have to put IST at the end? Oh, well, that's identifying somebody like a tyrant. That's identifying the person as that. Yeah. I want to say I'm a birdie. And that's not an adequate argument. You're making assertion. You have to back it up with your history and your positional issues and so forth. So I call myself a constitutionalist, but you need to have me prove it to you. Well, I'm talking to people. If I'm talking to a liberal, they don't do math. They don't look into things like that. Well, liberal is a counter term we're told to use instead of conservative, and liberal is exactly like conservative, it's a subjective. And one example of how it's a particular history, classical liberalism of 125, 30 years ago, what was what today would be a constitutionalist libertarian. It was the FDR that changed the term probably to destroy as an attack on the conservative, what was it called, classical liberal of his time. And he's the one that changed it and said, no, it really means socialism. But he didn't say it that way. So it was one way to destroy the classical liberal movement that our founding fathers were all basically classical liberals.

I appreciate the discussion that we've had about tonight's training. We'll continue it on next week. But let's go ahead and have a closing prayer and then we can have an open forum where you guys can talk about whatever you want. Um, Mike Jackson, I appreciate you being on tonight. Would you be, are you available and be willing to give us our closing prayer? All right. Oh, wonderful. Thank you. Okay.

I'm grateful that we get together today to talk about, um, reading the certain truth and, uh, and, uh, be able to, um, have critical thinking, grateful for, um, my blessings and, um, guide us in everything we ought to do. I say this in the name of our Son, Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Thank you.