Published June 25, 2025, 9:02 a.m.
9am Liberty Essentials - Bill Mohr, Karen the Riveter and Ralph the IT Guy will be teaching the perspective on religion in government. This is a continuance of study of the Constitution and lawful self governance. We will be learning together the relevance of current issues and apply the Constitution for guidance. 10am Robert Brown and Matthew Rhodes from the John Birch Society will be discussing Constitutional War Powers. Both Robert and Matthew are impressive teachers. Their command of subject matter in light of historical understanding through the lense of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution bring us back to the roots of our nation and what makes America unique and significant. X/Twitter: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1lDxLzgqRwZGm Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/636616148890812/videos/747293434720110 Rumble: https://rumble.com/v6valop-bnn-brandenburg-news-network-6252025-liberty-essentials-and-john-birch-soci.html https://rumble.com/v6valmv-bnn-brandenburg-news-network-6252025-liberty-essentials-and-john-birch-soci.html Odysee: https://odysee.com/@BrandenburgNewsNetwork:d/bnn-2025-06-25-liberty-essentials-and-john-birch-society-war-powers:e BNN Live: https://Live.BrandenburgNewsNetwork.com Guests: Donna Brandenburg, Bill Mohr, Karen the Riveter, Ralph the IT Guy, Robert Brown, Matthew Rhodes
Good morning and welcome to Brandenburg News Network. I am Donna Brandenburg and it's the twenty fifth day of June twenty twenty five. And welcome to our show today. We're going to start out first with Liberty Essentials with Bill Ralph and Karen. And then after that, we're going to be going to two gentlemen that I have a huge amount of respect for from the John Birch Society. Robert Brown and Matthew Rhodes. And this is going to be a great show. I know it is. I've listened to Matthew and Robert speak, and they are so inspiring and so well-versed on what's going on. And we're going to be talking about several things, including war powers and what the implications of that is. And we're going to start out this morning with the normal crew on Wednesdays. We're all back together again. And morning, guys. How are you doing? Well, I'm not sure I'd call us normal. Okay, so regular, how's that? That works. The regular assembly of misfits. So I got to start this out here with some humor for the day, because I'm sorry, I do believe that we are in fact watching a movie. I really do. So let's go to this. Getting pretty hot. OK, with that said, I'm going to say this is a crazy this is kind of crazy to me. This this song was produced in nineteen eighty. after the Operation Eagle Claw failed to get the hostages back from Iran. So this is an old song. It was a new song. But what was noteworthy was that President Trump posted it. The other thing that was noteworthy about yesterday that everybody's talking about is this thing right there. And on this, the F-bomber, which I thought this meme was actually pretty funny in the grand scheme of things in a situation that's very, very serious. And so I decided I was just going to put these up there because I'm sorry. I think President Trump's humor is pretty interesting and funny. The other thing is the stealth bombers that we saw. There's a lot of things that I am just not buying that's out there. And I've said this many times. So I'm going to stick with it that trust the plan we're watching a movie. because I don't think things are what we are seeing. OK, first of all, let's look into stealth bombers. Stealth bombers are stealth. You aren't going to see them or any of this unless they want us to see this for some reason. They're only showing us what they want us to see. And I think it's kind of to keep us busy in a way to stay out of the way while they're actually cleaning up the planet. And the fallen nature of human beings and our propensity to like to see, oh, I don't know, fighting and division, which has been taught into us, is what captures people's attention. And then you get... you know, other people like us who say this is kind of funny, but you know what? I don't think it's what is really going on here. So let's let's unpack this a little bit there. From what I understand, there were no lives lost in any of these strategic bombings, but it did, let's just say, work towards disarming the the global powers that be from having going from sixty percent enriched uranium to a ninety percent in one week to have bombs that could to have seven of these bombs by the end of the month. Pretty extra sure that's in American interest right there. I just got to say it. And I'm pretty extra sure that probably Israel's going to be next. So as we watch things unfold here, I've been pretty hesitant to post a lot just because of the nature of the disinformation and confusion that has been interjected in there. Not for us. but for our true enemies of the United States who are probably part of the corporatocracy and the world bank bankers and the, the, you know, Council of Foreign Relations and all of these people. They're not going to tell us because if they do, our enemies know. And furthermore, I wanted to bring this up, which I thought was pretty interesting. I've been talking to some people who are socialists and communists because I want to talk to everybody because I want to know, first of all, what their real arguments are. But I thought this was kind of interesting. This is what free everything looks like. And I would say that there's a lot more free on the other side of the taxpayers and enslaving us. And then we're going to go to this and we need to start looking at people who are out there and trying to determine If things have changed out, because I'm going to tell you right now, Alex Jones isn't the same guy, not a chance. Whoever they're putting out there isn't the same. I'm seeing like seven different president Trump's out there. I'm seeing, you know, people all over the place that all of a sudden they look differently. Like Biden was a chip shot. Okay. But go right down the line and you can start seeing that things aren't what we're being told. And we're going to have to use our powers of observation. to actually see what is going on, such as Thomas Massey. Doesn't look the same. And went right from before, the same thing happened and I saw it happen with Pompeo and Ron DeSantis. We're on Ron DeSantis about three point all right now from what I can see. So anyhow, this is where we get to use our powers of reason. And also, I think what's happening is they're showing us how things shouldn't be done. And how, you know, if we're actually running the Republic the way that it should be, what's really wrong, how we got here, and what really needs to change in order for people to get sick of this goat rodeo we have going on out there, which just leads to war and not peace. Well, I want to say the song that you played, right, and you're right to say it's nothing new. But the song that you played, whoever came up with that, is pretty sick-minded in the head. Those who call for war have obviously never been in war. You talk to any one of these vets who have served and have actually had to pull the trigger, that is the last thing they want. And most of them don't want to talk about it because of the things they've had to see and the things that they've had to do. So those people calling for war, you might want to check and see where your actual interest lies. Because I don't care what nation it is. I don't care what nationality or ethnicity it is. If we're calling for just the sheer killing of people, I'm against it, one hundred percent. Well, I get asked that all the time. What side am I on? And I'm like, I'm not taking a side on this because of the fact that we don't have any heroes in this story at this moment in time that have been operational for a very long time. Do you know what I mean? It's like you look in the Middle East, and I think I'm on the side of the people of every nation who have been absolutely victimized by this global power structure, this satanic power structure of killing people. And it's across the globe, and it's just wrong. I think a lot of this big shiny stuff with Iran now, is being played out currently to get the people distracted out of what just happened uh just recently and that was the you know the so-called big beautiful bill that we talked right uh we touched on that briefly and if you want to read through all whatever it was sixteen hundred pages of it uh by all means do so and you will be flabbergasted as to what is actually in there uh so I think you know they move from one thing to another to keep the people distracted uh and People talk about something for a moment in time and then they move right on to the next thing and don't deal with what was just left off. Right. Twenty twenty was the perfect example of that. All right. That's still there. Whether we want to deal with it or not, we still have to deal with that. And then we just compiled another five years of things on top of that. That's just for people with a recent memory. We go back to the early nineteen hundreds. We still have to deal with that. And all hundred and ten years that have been piled on top of that. Right. So it's nothing new. This is the way they operate. And no less than Joseph Goebbels. I don't know. I think it was Joseph Goebbels who said the more that we do to them, the less they believe it's us doing it. When you talk about world powers and such, this is their mindset, right? The communists had a phrase where they say, and I got to paraphrase here, but you thrust in your sword, and if you feel mush, you push forward. But if you feel steel, you retreat. Right. That's their goal, is that they get to just push through some of the mush of the American people who are not paying attention to everything that's going on. Not just the big shiny things, because they don't care about that for the most part. They care about the actual heart, the foundation of the nation. That's what they're after, while everybody else is after all these flags that are flying around, catching your attention. Well, I'm going to say here, this always depends on who you believe is in control at this point in time. First of all, I believe God's in control of everything. And sometimes He gives us what we think we want in order to wake us up, and we have to face the consequences of poor choices. And I think that this may be actually I do believe that the good guys are in control. I absolutely believe that. I think there are pockets that are, you know, that are it's a slow demolition right now is what's going on. But what I do believe is happening is that they're letting us see what the bad choices are. so that it never happens again and people get so disgusted with us because we keep, we're like, we just keep going back and we keep suffering these evils. It hasn't gotten painful enough for people to say, all right, we're done with this, everybody out of the pool. And I truly believe that that's what we're seeing right now, pushing people to actually step up by the evils that they're seeing, to be disgusted with it and actually deal with what's going into being awake enough and educated enough. that we can self-govern, okay? Because even if President Trump swooped in here and fixed everything, and I've said this right from the beginning, who is going to staff it? I talk to people as chairman of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, the Constitution Party in Michigan. I talk to people all the time, and I am on a mission to try to get somebody to run, to get people to run, good everyday people, for every single office in this state. The responses I get from everybody is like, you know, I've got kids. I'm busy. I've got all these things going on in my life. I've got my golf league. I've got this, that, and the other thing. People are not willing to do the sacrifice yet because it hasn't become painful enough. You can talk all day long, but unless people are willing to put themselves in that position to do something, it's just yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. Just stop. And I'm kind of wondering if that's behind this all. It's like we're going to ratchet this. And I think God's behind it. We're going to ratchet the pain up until my children get off their dead behinds and get moving and taking this seriously. I think that's part of growing up. And I got a feeling that God's behind it to grow us up. I think, too, talking about the song you played, I think it's important to keep in mind, too, that there's a lot of stuff that I'm seeing out there where people are using humor where they, for example, they will take something, take an opinion to an extreme to demonstrate the opposite of that and I I don't know what the intentions the original intentions of that song were it may have been for War with Iran it may have actually been against war with Iran and I don't know but that's something to keep in mind in the eighties when the hostage, when the hostage crisis was going on in the late seventies, late seventies, eighties, it was, it was pretty bad. But the problem that I have with it is we kind of set up around, we set it up to be the boogeyman like we have with most of them. So to look past this further, you know, you gotta always have a boogeyman, right? They do. The evil people in government have to have that boogeyman out there. And so I'm pretty extra sure the same thing happened with Benghazi. Benghazi got to have a boogeyman. And unfortunately, we were selling arms. Hillary Clinton was to the State Department to Syria via Libya. And if we would have rescued Christopher Stevens, who wasn't an innocent bystander, if you look into this, there were some real issues there. They wanted Libya to fall anyway because they wouldn't get on the International Monetary Fund, the system, the international banker system. And Iran has been kind of the same way. So we're going to force them. There's all these underlying plots going on all the time. And it's not as straightforward as they want to make it seem in the media. You look at World War II, and I still firmly believe that we caused Pearl Harbor to get the American populace into World War II, because there were so many people that were for isolationism at the time, and not getting involved in these foreign wars. But you look at how Pearl Harbor happened, and Yes, the Japanese government at the time was doing some fairly horrible things. However, the reason why we got into that, in my opinion, is because we started restricting the flow of oil and fuel into Japan. They were pretty much entirely dependent on us at the time for that. We restricted that. and pretty much forced them into attacking us. And you look at a lot of the background on how much they knew about Pearl Harbor before it happened here in the US, how much our intelligence apparatus knew about it beforehand. It was planned in my opinion. Yeah, I think so too. They know everything about every single one of us. And the bigger issue, the bigger issue is that people, for the most part, don't think about what that entails, what Ralph was just talking about. Because it's oftentimes our military, right? Henry Kissinger was the one who said our military is just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy. It was Henry Kissinger. And that was, Donna, that was in your lifetime, right? This was very recent. Things like that were being said. Yes, you youngins out there don't remember this. It's the fact that people are willingly... placing our brothers, sisters, children, aunts, uncles, fathers, whatever, in situations like that, and the government uses them in that manner, just like Pearl Harbor. I'm glad you brought that up, Ralph. They use them in that manner as scapegoats and as the sacrificial lambs to start wars, right? And I'm all for our military men. Don't get me wrong in that. But I am against the way they're being used because they're being told something and they're being conditioned to go in and fight these unconstitutional wars. And they do it flawlessly for the most part. But they're not being told that it's all about their money or resources or regime change. They believe they're out there fighting tyrants. When in reality, they're fighting, just like you said, they're fighting these bankers wars. That's exactly what it is. And you want to know what I heard from somebody who's pretty high ranking militarily, that this whole thing with Ukraine is that they were offering American soldiers two thousand dollars a day if they would go over and fight in Ukraine. Well, it looked to me like it was a purge of some of the bravest guys that would be the first to step up, give them two thousand dollars a day to go fight in Ukraine so they could just go over there and get killed. And that's what it looked like to me. And take that a step further, because I was just talking about this to a guy yesterday while I was eating lunch. This topic came up. Just talked about that issue to a guy yesterday. How many people went over there and started fighting for Ukraine? Right. Not understanding the aspect of that war that was actually going on. But it's one thing if you honestly believe that that was the good that you're going to do. I'm not going to violate your conscience in that manner. Go fight. If you honestly believe that's what you need to do. But look at how Ukraine handled that. Everybody should understand that the Americans that went over to Ukraine and teamed up with them, the Americans were placed on the front lines and the Ukrainian army were placed behind them. Again, they were used as sacrificial lambs. It was a slaughter. It was a slaughter. And Ukraine is a proxy country for the CIA. There's so many of them around the globe. They put in a puppet government and they run it from that. I mean, we're talking a layered system of globalism. And they use each other. They sort of kind of cooperate with each other. But they're really... They're really set against us, which is really, really sad. Don't forget that Iran, this is from Denise, was pretty westernized and a frequent stop for westerners on the hippity trail down to India before the CIA overthrew their government. Absolutely. Iran is not one of those globalist mindsets. Iran is definitely one of those sovereign nation who just wanna, they wanna protect themselves and their interests. They don't want any compact, any contracts with the known world and its entirety, right? And a lot of people think that of America too. And I gotta tell you, you're flat out wrong. America is the largest bully in the world that we have right now. I'm willing to admit that. Our CIA is what has caused this conflict in the Middle East in majority by funding both sides of almost every known war that I know of in the last hundred years. And it's absolutely incredible that the majority of Americans, either one, haven't been taught it, or two, haven't looked at it. know it's one of those things it goes back to the lack of knowledge is what destroys the people right if we want to understand all this if we want to actually be on the right side because I don't care about your left right paradigm I don't care about what we consider uh good evil and politics right all politics is just a necessary evil and we have to deal with it but I care about what's good and what's right according to the law. First being the laws of nature and of nature's God, as our forefathers set up. Second off being the law established to expound upon that, right? Our entire constitution, all of our enumerated laws that go with it, not against it. One thing I wanted to do, Donna, Yeah, exactly. That right there. Yeah. Hat tip to Ralph there. I want to just just to follow up on that. I think that it's important to realize that we're looking at layers. The people are separate from the governments right now. Now, I'm hoping that and I and I believe me. that we're bringing it back to restoring. When you listen to President Trump's first speech, he said we are giving the country back to we the people. And I believe that that's not going to be here. Guys, here's a key to a country who were basically indoctrinated by the education system, not educated. Who is going to step up and do it? You know, it's like it's like we're. I don't know, disabled. We're really disabled and we had to be able to be rehabilitated in order to do that as a people. When I see the countries of the world, though, and the borders, when they say that, you know, protect the borders, most of the borders at this point in time. are for optics for we the people. Because the globalists are like this little tentacle, this hydra above us. It's got its tentacles in everything. The CIA, GCHQ, Mossad, all of the intelligence organizations, including the corporatocracy going on. So we're like down here and they're kind of like up here just kind of, you know, doing what they want to do. We think we've got these nice countries that we believe in. And we kind of do, but they don't pay attention to any of that. And so they've got proxy. I think at one time I heard that there's about seventeen proxy countries and just the the Western hemisphere alone. And you start, you start looking globally. I'd like to see really do a study on that. Maybe I'll do that on the proxy countries, as well as organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, all of this nonsense. And to put it into perspective, the fighting going on there, Over over Palestine or what they say is Palestine. Who the heck knows? We're not there. Right. It's like it's four miles by twenty miles. Looks like a great place to put an economic canal in to, you know, to get around having to go around the southern part of Africa. If you ask me, it's all economic. and and israel it's a size of freaking new new jersey how much money can you pour into a country the size of new jersey that makes it any sane sense of this you know it's crazy all of it's crazy yeah the problem I have about being you talking about not getting people aren't taking it seriously it's really hard to take it seriously when everything is fake That's my problem. I'm just sitting back and I'm like, okay. We're at war. There's nuclear things going on. I don't believe anything that's happening. If I don't even believe that that's my president doing this or that because it's always a fake. It's always a fake. How can I believe in anything? At some point, there is a well you gotta believe your local community goings on and that's why local action but but you know all this other stuff I'm like okay so much of the discussions are all about the details about what we're being told Not what's actually happening or not happening. You know, you're talking about whether the bunker busters went down and actually destroyed anything. Well, first of all, you have to question whether there was bunker busters. Were our military actually there? Or is it all CGI? Is it all? I mean, they're showing us pictures. Well, look at the pictures. Look at the before app. Who made the pictures and sent them to you? You're going to believe what the media is showing you in the pictures? You're going to believe it just because, well, Trump said it happened. Well, Trump has said a lot of stupid things. Are you going to believe everything that comes out of the fake Trump mouth? Come on. For me, it's just like, yeah, whatever. Military action. Blah, blah, blah. can I put, can I bring out another thing that I think is, is kind of important? How come there's only two pictures of president Trump as a child? He came from a wealthy family. I would think they have a hundred books, right? I don't know. I mean, there's all these questions that, that we need to ask, but we, I don't know. I still believe the good guys are in control because I believe in God. Oh, I believe that too. And that's why I'm calm about it. And I just, okay, well, we just one day at a time and just kind of keep laughing at it because I'm not worried about anything. Like we've talked before. That song kind of like, I was like, this is kind of almost hilarious. And so is the F-bomber. I I'm like, this is kind of funny, really, you know, and to Ralph's point, sometimes people put things out there and just make a comedy of it or push it to the extreme to make a point. And I think that's kind of where we're at, but. Well, to a certain extent, I mean, like, look at Dr. Strangelove, you know, was that, was that promoting nuclear war? Never watched the movie. So remember I'm a, a non-movie, non-TV watcher, so never played Trivial Pursuit with me. Another thing, too, that I find kind of odd is that in all of this stuff, the only aircraft that's ever shown is a B-II Spirit. Have you ever looked at the capabilities of a B-II Spirit and how tiny of a plane those things actually are comparatively? I mean, look at the history of military aircraft and then look at a B-II Spirit. I mean, they're cool planes. Don't get me wrong. I mean, heck, I like the F-Zero, but they're not big. The greatest plane in the history of the world, the greatest aircraft that ever has been. They're almost neck and neck, but not quite. F-Zero is the coolest aircraft that was ever designed in the history of the United States. What about the A-Town? Well, I mean, they made it. F-Fourteen wins every time. They made a mockery of this whole plan the whole time. I'm like, they were talking days in advance about this bunker being underground, and it's kind of like this movie, Top Gun Maverick. Oh, isn't that interesting? It's like a movie. We have only the American military might that could possibly Possibly bring the right kind of missile. With the right kind of pilots. And the right kind of plane. To just get down in the right little. You know like. Like Luke Skywalker. Using the force. To get into the perfect location. To blow up the bad guys. And then we can all be happy. And they're showing us the graphics. Of the super secret location. On TV. Days before they put this out there. And then, oh, no, the planes are leaving Missouri. Everybody can see that. And I have to say, I'm not sure if what the public saw was the ones going to the west or the ones going to the east. Maybe they were super secret after all. But they had these super secret plans. that everybody knew about days in advance, and then they said, well, the Top Gun Maverick mission was successful. We blew their nuclear capacities out of the water, and now we can all stop the war because Trump is the hero. You've got to be kidding me, right? The more the headlines get, the crazier they get. It's like we're supposed to be questioning the reality of everything. Even this morning, I shared a few posts for just a few minutes. And what's going on, allegedly, in the UK and Germany is outrageous. If that's actually happening, they have raids in these people's houses, over a hundred people, because they dared speak up against the political... Elite over there. And the suffering they're doing, I'm comparing contrast folks. If that's true, look what we have been saved over here. It's the modern version of the Coliseum. Yes. Yes. And sometimes you have to look at what's going on and just compare it with what you know is going on, right? Yes. For instance, you just mentioned house raids, right? And I have a friend of mine in Michigan here who was recently raided for speaking out against his local government. I mean, that's no joke. His home was actually raided, and he is now fighting that battle. So I don't deny that it's happening. It's happening through our own agencies. The DNR does it all the time. I've talked about it plenty of times that our township hid tax bills on me personally. And our CFO went in there and four times before they fessed up. And it's like, how do you do that? Because they want to get a hold of our land and resources and such. That's exactly what's going on. But the key point is no matter if these things happen or not, that's the reason why I always go back to the foundation and go right back to the law. Because if you believe they happened, now you have something you can judge it by. And if you believe they didn't happen, guess what? You still have the information you can judge it by, right? Yeah. Ralph is posting. I don't have the information I can judge it by. Because I don't know what the map of Iraq looks like. Whatever they have shown us about how big it is or what the population concentration is and all of that, that can all be misinformation. I have no idea what the politics over there actually are because I don't know anyone from there. This is one of the things that I love about the birds aren't real folks as well as the flat earthers, is that it really makes you, it makes you think, okay, what's the basic premise here? You know, it's one of those things that's so out there that it makes you question the premise and think, okay, this is something I've always been told, but how would I even convince these people based on empirical evidence that I could do myself? Yeah, Karen, to answer your point there, what I was talking about with judging, it wasn't judging the information that you're given, whether it's right or wrong. It's judging the action of what you're told, right? I really don't care how big Iran is. I don't really care how many people are there. But what I was told, I can make a judgment on whether it happened or not. I can at least come to the American people and say, hey, this right here is wrong. I don't care whether it happened or not. If it didn't, cool, glad. But it might in the future. But if it did happen, here's the evidence of why it shouldn't happen. That's what I'm pointing to when I refer to judgment. It's judging the actual actions that you're being told. Yeah. Well, I'm on the side of not killing people, and that's a good thing. And if they did take out, because we're doing a lot of theorizing right now, if they did take out Iran's enriched uranium... then we can all celebrate that because the only reason to have those types of bombs is to massively kill large amounts of people. Well, hold on, Donna. Hold on. Because we have, we supposedly have... that same capability here, right? I've seen some of the bases out in Utah. I've been right up close to them. Obviously, I can't get in, but I've been right up close to them where they claim that we have a lot of stored nuclear missiles, right? Underground bases. I don't deny that those bases exist. I don't know what's in them. But nonetheless, this is America and Israel who supposedly hold nuclear weapons and hold that type of technology telling another completely sovereign nation who, mind you, is not the biggest threat, but telling them they can't have it, right? It's like the American government being protected by all of their armed security staff there in Congress and everybody else. It's like them telling you, oh, no, we can have all this, but you can't. You're not allowed to. Right. So I disagree in that point. I think that is a bully move to say such a thing to another nation to say that we have the right to protect ourselves with these weapons. But you don't. And let me explain why. Because ever since probably the early seventies, how many times have we heard since then about people saying, oh, Iran's only a year away from having nuclear weapons. Oh, they're only a couple of years from being able to successfully do this, right? They've been saying that for decades. And have they done anything? No. Do we really think that another nation is stupid enough to launch a nuclear missile across into another nation's territory, especially when they have allies across the world? No, that's suicide. That's absolute suicide to a nation. I don't even think Iran's that dumb. I really don't. Do I think America's that stupid? We might be about that point. I don't know. Well, our, our nation, our, our government killed its own people too. I mean, it's the point, the point here is that it's all of the governments who have been historically killing their own people or anyone that steps outside of this global power structure. So, but if, if there's somebody out that has a potential to lob a bomb at us, I'm pretty much okay with, you know, getting rid of any threat that's out there to the people. But sometimes you have to have peace through strength. Well, we need to eliminate Israel, if you're correct in that regard, then. Because Israel is capable of doing that to us. And Israel did attack us in the USS Liberty. Everybody remember that? Yep. Right? Okay. I'm not saying we have any heroes there, okay? I'm not saying there's any heroes over there. But Israel might or might not. Israel might or might not actually have nuclear weapons. There's no way to actually tell. Just like South Africa might or might not also have nuclear weapons for the exact same reasons. Are nuclear weapons real? All I know at one point, the American people had a wooden bomb. Right? That's as far as I know about our actual weapons, besides a little bit of information that I get. Now I can tell you one thing, I did get a little bit of information this week, being that everybody here is right from Michigan, I can tell you of certainty, because I know the person who signed the orders, that we had just less than an eighth of our Michigan National Guard just sent over to Libya under the guise of training Libya's military with orders. There's a deadline, and why I can't get those timelines, I don't know. But there's a deadline where they will be going into Syria again. This is an age of only Michigan's National Guard that has been unconstitutionally federalized and are currently on their way to Libya. Right? This is insanity. It is insane. So when I say that you have to navigate through these things using a foundation, right, using the truth as I try to do every time, if you would indulge me, I want to read just an excerpt, small portion of Washington's farewell address that addresses all of these issues, right? Go ahead. He says, friends and citizens, The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust. It appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you with the resolution I have formed to decline being considered among the number of those of whom a choice is made. This is right at the election when George Washington is stepping out. He's telling the people, I'm not going to do this. Here's the reasons why. You're going to elect somebody new, and he's giving them the caution of that. He says, I beg you at the same time to do me the justice to be assured that this resolution has not been taken without a strict regard to all the considerations appertaining to the relation which binds a dutiful citizen to his country. And that in withdrawing the tender of service, which silence in my situation might imply, I am influenced by no diminution of zeal for your future interest. No deficiency of grateful respect for your past kindness, but I'm supported by a full conviction that the step is compatible with both. He says the unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence. The support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, and that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that from different causes and different quarters much pains will be taken, many artifacts employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth. As this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most consistently and actively, though often covertly and insidiously directed, It is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness. That you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it, accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as the palladium of your political safety and prosperity. By the way, this man had less education than I did. I think that anybody on this panel, right? I still have to get a dictionary out every time I read anything that George Washington wrote. He says, "...watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety, discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of your country from the rest." or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts. For this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest. Citizen by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affection. The name of American which belongs to you in your national capacity must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discrimination. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manner, habits, political principles." You have in common cause, thought, and triumph together. The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes. But these considerations, however powerfully they address themselves to your sensibility, are greatly outweighed by those which apply more immediately to your interests. Here, every portion of our country finds the most commanding motive for carefully guarding and preserving the union of the whole." I'm going to skip down just a little bit. He says, "...all obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations under whatever plausible character with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or all the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendencies." They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of the party. Often a small but artful enterprise and minority of the community, and according to the alternate triumphs of different parties to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of factions. rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils and modified by mutual interests. Towards the preservation of your government and the primacy of your present happy state, it is requisite not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretext." One method of assault may be to the effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. In all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments as of other human institutions. That experience is a sure standard by which to test the real tendency of existing constitution of a country. that faculty and changes upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion exposes to perpetual change from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion. And remember especially that for the efficient management of your common interest in a country so extensive as ours, a government of much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is indispensable. Liberty itself will find in such a government with powers properly distributed and adjusted its surest guardian. It is indeed little else than a name where the government is too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction to confine each member of the society within the limits prescribed by the laws and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyment of the rights of person or property. I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, in particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generality. I'll let you read that for yourself because we're not getting into party factions right now. He says, our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external ambulances. When we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality, we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation. When we may choose peace or war as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel." Why forgo the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world. So far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it, for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing entanglements, I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs that honesty is always the best policy I repeat it therefore let those entanglements be observed in their genuine sense but in my opinion it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them that's as far as I wanted to go there for those who haven't read george washington's farewell address Get on it. Make it a priority like this week. Read through the whole thing. Break it apart piece by piece. I don't believe I have ever, since George Washington, have ever read about anyone that even comes close to the way that that man thought about unity within a nation. That was just absolutely incredible. And to see the hand of providence that brought him through it was just astounding. So when I read stuff like this, and you understand that division in this nation is not something new. That it happened even at the time before the revolution in the sixteen hundreds. You can read about multiple divisions, multiple factions. that were going on all through the Revolutionary War, the reestablishment of government, when they destroyed the Articles of Confederation and installed the Constitution, all the way through the War of the Eighteen Twelve. Dissension never quit, but it was understood more in history that to keep from dividing the nation and separating the unity of the people, not unity with government, but separating the unity of the people, it is important to hold to that which the people remain free. And what is that? It's written on our Supreme Court wall. Justice guards our liberty. Injustice is what will destroy it. So that is how I look at things. That is how I make judgment calls. Whether or not things happen, at least I can tell you whether or not they should. And that's just one instance. I don't hold one hundred percent to George Washington. He made his mistakes too. I don't hold to any man. I'll hold continuously to the law of God and to the laws found within our nation. And there's the core right there. The core right there is that when we get away from God, we end up grabbing for things in the material world. You look back between the division between Einstein and Tesla. And that sort of thing that was going on. People are constantly fighting and it becomes very political and it becomes political for economic reasons to grab and be in it for greed, self-preservation or self-enrichment. I think that the closer a person gets, and this is why we're in crisis right now, because we're in a spiritual war and the country has been basically brainwashed out of it, of walking away from God. Now, I think we're coming back after a little bit of pressure from God. But the point being is that when you're grounded in God, you have a completely different mindset and the world doesn't understand. It calls us a peculiar people and tries to fit us into their worldview. It's impossible because some of us don't work for those same reasons. We work in service without an eye on getting something back. And until we go there, all of these fights are all about grabbing the resources, grabbing the land, trying to control. Because if you don't have God in your life, if you don't worship God Almighty, you will try to put yourself in the position to maintain some sort of control in order of a chaotic world. If you're close to God, it doesn't matter because you know who's in control, and that would be God Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth. And so you kind of go with it. So I want to throw this out just to give somebody something to think about. When I refer to what God has spoken to his people in the Old Testament, because I believe God doesn't change. He said so himself. You read through Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and you understand the judgments of God on a wicked nation, one that has abandoned him. David said it in the Psalms, he'll turn that nation into hell, Sheol. But you read there, and when he talks about bringing in a nation of fierce countenance, one whose language you won't understand, to siege you, right? A slow takeover of your people, of your nation. He says he'll do that for a people who are disobedient to him. He says that they will become the head, you will become the tail. They will rule, you won't. He says they can lend to you But you won't lend to them. You'll have nothing to lend to them. They will overtake everything. When I first heard of everything that's going on, right? And I'll tell you, I'm with you, Donna. I don't watch TV. I rarely ever even look at a news source. Most of the time, I get hundreds of emails a day with news. And a lot of them, I just swipe right. Goodbye. But occasionally I'll pick up something. The one that people want to talk about all the time is the one that I want to address with the people. Right. Counterpoint it. Out of school. Counterpoint it. Yeah. So when you look at this, understand that our nation, including our states and local governments, have been creating sanctuary cities, and they have been enticing and paying for and bringing in different resources different cultures from the Middle East, right? And a lot of them have made it public that they're bringing in Muslims specifically from that region and not segregating them, but bringing them all together into isolated sanctuary city, right? Minnesota's a huge one. Michigan is just outrageously large when you go to the southeast side of the state. And numerous states across the nation are doing it, right? They're enticing them to come over. And I've always wondered why that was, right? But I understand the judgments of God in this as well. Now, when you have tens of millions of people of people from other nations that are being brought in, not Americans, they do not hold to American standards, but they still retain their nation's laws. I want to promote that. They're brought in, and then we're told that we just go over there and bomb one of their homeland countries. Does anybody think about what could possibly happen in that regard? And I'm not trying to fear mine. I'm giving you... the point to look at God's judgments and say, yes, He does. It's an analysis. It's an analysis of reality. And I can see that happen. You want to see the hand of God through a wicked nation? Look at things like that and see how through history that has worked out for other nations because they've all been destroyed in very similar manners. God's the one that raises up nations, and He's pleased in destroying them as well. It's His work, not mine. My duty here is to just continue to point to the truth. I can take none of this with me when I go. I don't care. I don't want it. The only thing I can take with me when I go is other people. That's the only thing that I can hope for, is that other people may follow along. Well, there's more hope than that. I misworded that. Sorry. So we can't just go with the bright new shiny thing, right? Like Karen says, you're not there. You have no actual evidence that any of this is real besides what they're telling you, right? That's absolutely true. But no matter what you're being fed, compare it to what you know is right. Always be willing to make that judgment call and always be willing to speak out for or against something, whether or not it happened or not. If it's on the mind of the public, it needs to be addressed, lest they just fall to all sorts of winds of doctrine. Well, and I think what we've been talking about today, which I'm a huge fan on, is the question everything because there's so much CGI out there. There's so much theater out there that why are they showing you things? Because they want you to see them or they want somebody else to see them. If it's really hidden, you're not going to have a clue what's going on there. And so I think it's important to go back to the fundamentals of what's supposed to work and how our nation was founded. You know, whether that be whether that be, you know, learning to do pro se cases like I'm doing, whether it goes back to studying the Constitution. I mean, there's a lot out there that everybody can pick. Pick one, start somewhere and keep going. You know, trudge through, trudge through actual documents, the structure, what what we're supposed to be focusing on. And we're going to figure out how this country is supposed to run. Not the not the circus we got going on. Right now. I mean, somebody asked me about about where would you start if you were going to remove people? I'm like, well, considering that I believe that every single person that's in office right now that's received a paycheck is probably would be would be, you know, qualified themselves for a for a. trial for treason, you know, to try him for treason, because nobody seems to be stepping up and saying enough and making a big enough stink about this to say, we're going to do the right thing. Any of the governors could have nullified this. None of them did it. And so we point to the rodeo of Whitmer and Newsom and all these people that we know are And can see they're breaking the law. But the rest of them are breaking the law by not enforcing the way the United States and the states are supposed to be run. And so therefore, you know. We need to look into that and their unjust gain. I mean, look at Granholm lately. I mean, she's a disaster, complete disaster with what she's done, but that list would go on forever. So anyhow, I love this discussion. It was fantastic. And I'd like to go into last words here because Robert Brown is, sitting backstage with Matthew Rhodes, and I want to bring them on the next thing. So why don't we close out here, and everybody do their last words for the day. I love you guys. I'm glad to be back on with you. I always miss it when we're not doing this segment because we're all friends, and we speak our mind. Even if we disagree with each other, it's going to come out, and I love that. So I'll make one last point for the Constitution, right? The American people have to understand the essence of a republic, not a democracy. The essence of a republic is that the people call forth the justice, right? That being done through our representation, they have certain powers and duties more so than an executive head, okay? And in this case, understand that no president, no executive head has the right to call forth any war. That is Congress's power alone. An executive head can only prevent an imminent threat, right? Take that as you will, but always know. Which brings us to power powers, which we're going to be talking about next. Yeah, I try not to overlap them because I know a lot of people in the John Birch Society, and I respect these guys. It's a good segue, and I think that it's good to have a discussion, a true discussion, to hammer out details and such. So Karen and Ralph, thirty seconds apiece. I think you asked for me. I'm having a hard time listening because there's a technological issue on my end. I would say everybody listening to what they're... Yeah, I think we've lost Karen. Jump in, Rolf. She's got some technical issues going on. Yeah, well, I kind of wanted to bring up the same kind of thing that Bill did, is that foreign aggression is supposed to be difficult, in that the power to declare war or grant letters of mark is supposed to be by Congress. And I don't think that it's proper either to just have perpetual states of war, such as the war on terror. That goes against the spirit of the Constitution, in my opinion. However, for any of this stuff, it's supposed to go through Congress, which is supposed to go through our elected representatives, as well as the representatives from our state governments. And so there's supposed to be bureaucracy involved in even initiating foreign aggression. All right. And with that said, we're going to go to my buddies in the John Birch Society. I got to tell you, I was up in New Hampshire for the committee meeting for the Constitution Party. And it was probably one of my favorite meetings I've ever been to. And it's because of these guys, because they were actually teaching. And I love them. I think that you guys are going to like everybody that's going to. So call your friends and have them come on. We're going to go to a break. And thanks for being on today, guys. I love you both. You guys are wonderful friends. And thank you for being so gracious with your time. and all the studying that you've done over the years. See you next week, Wednesday. Everybody said yes. Okay, awesome. Well, I'll be right back in about about a minute here for a break. Good morning and welcome to the second hour of Brandenburg News Network. I am Donna Brandenburg and it is the twenty fifth day of June twenty twenty five. Welcome to our show. I'm going to go right into my buddies from the John Birch Society, Robert Brown and Matthew Rhodes. How you guys doing? Hey, good morning. Doing great. Good to be here. Awesome. It's nice to see you again. I so enjoyed your presentation and Matthew's presentation when we were in New Hampshire. And I'm glad that you came on today. We're getting a little feedback there. I think we're getting feedback. Let's see. Yeah, it's you. For some reason, we're getting feedback on your side. I don't know if you can adjust any settings or something like that, but we'll try it. I very much enjoyed... Oh, now it stopped. Very much enjoyed your presentation and so glad to have you on today. And what are we talking about? Turn back on my mic here and try it. So I really liked what I was hearing right at the end of the last... guest there with William Moore there talking about war powers. It's become a very hot topic. And unfortunately, so many good patriots are very, even bitterly divided over this topic right now. Some feeling like they must at all costs defend President Trump's actions and others calling him out saying that he has clearly violated the Constitution. And I'm obviously in the second camp that he has overstepped his bounds as president in the war powers area. And so lately, especially on social media, I've seen it just absolutely erupt with people trying to defend Trump. And the defense comes in several ways. One of them is simply other presidents have done this. Where were you then? Why weren't you complaining about Obama when he did this and things like that? Foreign aggressive action. Going on the offense against a foreign country without the approval of Congress. Well, look, Obama did it so many times. Biden did it. If they did it, then why can't Trump? And that's where you look at your kids and say, just because your brother jumped off a bridge doesn't mean you need to follow him, right? Yeah, just because other people are getting away with violating the Constitution doesn't make it right. And then the other arguments I see when people try to get just one step more intellectual into this is they start pointing to history, that it wasn't just Obama, it wasn't just Biden, that this is something that has gone through our entire nation's history. Presidents have always gone against foreign powers without congressional approval. And they point to Jefferson even did it against the Barbary pirates. And I want to spend some time on that topic because... What Jefferson and Madison did in regards to the Barbary pirates is actually a great lesson for how a president should act when there is a foreign threat. And when they bring up that claim, you know they have no idea what they're talking about. When they say Jefferson did it, there wasn't a declaration of war. Now, first of all, there is some truth there. The U.S., Congress has only declared war for five wars in our entire nation's history. The War of the Spanish-American War, the Mexican-American War, World War I, and World War II. And how did we do in those wars? Well, we won. We won all of those. And actually, we won all of those quite decisively. How have we done in the undeclared wars that we've seen in recent years? Well, they seem to never end. They seem to just drag on and on. We never have victory. And I think that there is a reason behind that. I think this is a reason. The way the Constitution was designed, as was mentioned with your last guests, it was designed to make sure that war was rare and that the country was united behind the war effort. When we are divided at home on whether or not we should even be there, whether or not we should even be involved in this war effort, we don't tend to win. We don't tend to have a quick resolution to the war. And so, in fact, I'm gonna share a few quotes from the founders because I think we need to remember what was intended by the Constitution. For example, James Wilson- He was a delegate at the Constitutional Convention in seventeen eighty seven. He's one of those that helped draft the Constitution. And then as it was being ratified by the various states, he was at the Pennsylvania State Ratifying Convention. And they're talking about war powers and how they divided up the war power. He says this system will not hurry us into war. It is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man or single body of men to involve us in such distress. For the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large, meaning U.S. Congress. This declaration must be made with the concurrence of the House of Representatives. So both the House and Senate need to agree on this. And from this circumstance, we may draw a certain conclusion that nothing but our interests can draw us into war. You get what I'm saying? We want to make sure that any time the United States actually goes to war, it is because it is what is in the best interest of the American people. Now, somewhat ironically, Abraham Lincoln also clearly articulated the founder's view of the war powers and what the president has the power to do and what he did not have the power to do. I say somewhat ironically because he later violated this, but... But he said it so clearly. And he's absolutely right. He was actually in writing a letter rebuking someone for claiming the president has full power to take us into war whenever he feels it's necessary. And Lincoln wrote a letter back saying that's absolutely not true. He starts off by saying, well, let me first understand your position. You're saying, President, and I'll just read a little bit here. It's. You're saying that if it becomes necessary to repel invasion, the president may, without violating the Constitution, cross the line and invade the territory of another country. And that whether such necessity exists, the president is the sole judge. You get what he's saying? So he's rebuking this guy and saying, your position is the president can go, in order to defend, we can go on the offense. We can go invade another country. We can go attack another country. And the president gets to judge that. He says, the provision of the constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated as I understand it by the following reasons. Kings have always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars. Pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention that wrote the constitution understood to be the most oppressive, of all kingly oppressions." Hear that again. He's saying that this power for the president to be able to take us to war at will would be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions. And so they, writing the constitution, resolved to so frame the constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter and places our president where kings have always stood." That's powerful. The founders, as they're creating the Constitution, very intentionally did not create a king, and they very intentionally did not give the president kingly power of being the sole person to decide whether or not we're going out against foreign nations if we're going to war. Now, one of the other excuses that we're seeing lately from those trying to defend Trump's actions is that, well, this isn't really war. We just dropped a few bombs on them. And my response is, so exactly how many bombs does it take before it becomes war? Oh, they only dropped fourteen bombs, but would fifteen bombs be a war? Twenty? Fifty? How many bombs is it? And the founders were very clear on this. The dividing line between what the president has the power to do without Congress and what he does not have the power to do without Congress is defense versus offense. Very clear line. When we are being invaded or under the very imminent threat of being invaded, when they're actually attacking us, the president can immediately take up arms and defend our nation. But the moment that shifts to going on the offense, that is when Congress must be involved. And so In fact, at this point, I think it'd be appropriate to turn to Thomas Jefferson. You remember right around the year, the Barbary pirates were becoming a big problem. They were attacking our merchant ships, capturing people, enslaving them, and so on. This was horrible, as well as, of course, stealing their goods. And as those defending the president having unlimited war powers, turn to Jefferson and say, well, they didn't have a declaration of war, and so Jefferson violated the Constitution in the same way, or it wasn't a violation of the Constitution because Jefferson did it, or whatever their implication is here. What did Jefferson actually do? What actually happened between him and Congress? He actually looked to Congress every step of the way in his reactions to and taking on the Barbary Pirates. I don't know if you've heard of Thomas Woods, but he does a great job of outlining this history in his Liberty Classroom website. And in there, one of the things he talks about is the President, excuse me, President Jefferson. I'm just going to quote from Thomas Woods here. He says, in the late, late, the posh of Tripoli did declare war on the United States. Jefferson sent a small force to the area to protect American ships and citizens against potential aggression. But he insisted that he was, quote, and this is Jefferson's words, that he's unauthorized by the Constitution without the sanction of Congress to go beyond the line of defense. Congress alone could authorize measures of offense also. So for that reason, Jefferson told Congress, I communicate to you all material information on this subject. that in the exercise of this important function confided by the Constitution to the legislature, Congress, exclusively by their judgment may form itself a knowledge and consideration of every circumstance of weight. So what he's saying is I'm forwarding to Congress. Here's all the information we have about what's going on with the Barbary pirates so that you can have an informed decision made on what we should do. But he totally deferred to Congress the moment it transitioned from defense to offense. So when they claim, oh, well, Jefferson's a great example of president taking on foreign powers without consent of Congress, no, not remotely true. In fact, if only presidents today were following Jefferson's example, saying, I can go on defense. The moment I cross into offense, I'm turning to Congress. I'm supplying them with the evidence of here's why I feel it's necessary to take action against Iraq, Iran, Barbary, whomever, and then letting Congress decide. And not only did Congress decide and give him approval, they actually funded him having ships to go into the Mediterranean and so on. So Congress was very much involved in this process of not just giving approval, but also funding for everything that Jefferson was doing. And on the contrary, there's one other excuse that we see happening today. And that is, well, the War Powers Act, the War Powers Act authorizes this action. If the Constitution very clearly defined that the President has defensive power only, and when he goes on offense, he needs Congress's approval, how can a simple act of Congress change that requirement in the Constitution? Can an act of Congress change the Constitution? Well, of course not. And here's the problem with the War Powers Act. The War Powers Act is not Congress saying, okay, here is a specific situation against a specific enemy. And we're giving authority for the president to solve this problem. No, instead it's a blank check. It's a, anytime you feel like there's a threat, you can take action. And that clearly violates the intent of the constitution. What was the founder's intent here? Why did they give this power to Congress instead of the president? I'd say it's two reasons. Number one, it's divided among today, five hundred thirty five people, hundred members of the U.S. Senate, four hundred thirty five members of the U.S. House so that more people can come in on the discussion and deliberate. So it's not just one person saying, well, I feel like we should go to war. But number two, especially with the House of Representatives, they are the closest to the people. And as such, they're going to be listening to. do the people feel this is enough of a threat that the people are willing to put their lives on the line in a war effort to defend against this threat? So when the House votes in favor of a war resolution on a specific issue, they are putting themselves on record as saying, my people support that we need to have some aggressive action here against a foreign foe. Now, And I have to back up a little on history. When the Senate votes in favor of war, prior to having the Sixteenth Amendment and the Seventeenth Amendment, back then, the U.S. Senate did not represent the people. We didn't elect our U.S. Senators. Who did they represent? It wasn't a direct vote for the Senate. Yeah. Instead, it was the state legislatures appoint U.S. Senators. And in the same way, before the sixteenth amendment, funding for war had to come from the federal government requesting funds from the state government. They didn't have any way of directly taxing the people. And so the Senate being responsible to the state government, being appointed by the state government, when they're drawing funds from the states, who's most accountable for how much money is being pulled from the states? The Senate. And so if the war effort is expensive, the expense of the war effort is, US Senate is the one that's mainly going to hear from their states on this is getting too expensive. We don't want to have to raise taxes to this level to pay for this amount of war. So the resistance to the expense of war comes in the Senate. The resistance to the loss of life from war comes from the House. But when there's a big enough threat that both the House feel it's worth the lives and the Senate feels it's worth the expense. Then, yes, the people are united behind this war effort and Congress declares war. And that's that's why, as I quote from James Wilson earlier, the system will not hurry us into war. It's calculated to make sure that nothing but our interests, the actual interest of the American people would draw us into war. Instead, as I mentioned with Lincoln, kings have historically always been involving and impoverishing their people for war. And it's typically for their own aggrandizement, for their own selfish interests, far more than the interests of the people. And so this, the founders, as they formed the constitution, sought to remedy that most oppressive of all kingly oppressions to make sure that the only time we'd actually declare war would be when it was in the interest of the American people. It's not for personal political issues of the president or of a king or something of that nature. And so we've gone so far from what the founders intended by allowing the president to take us into war. Now, I've mentioned several times the, but yeah, but where were you when Obama was doing this? Well, yeah, I was very prominently also arguing against him having such power. The president, whether it's Bush, whether it's Obama, whether it's Biden, whether it's Trump, does not have the power by himself to decide on foreign aggression. And the founders made this very clear in their intent as they created the Constitution. So where in the Constitution are such powers defined? That's often a question that's raised as well. Well, Article I, Section A, Clause gives Congress the power of declaring war and granting letters of mark and reprisal. Declaring war, like I said, has been very rare. Letters of mark and reprisal, that's also very rare. And what is that? Matthew, are you still with us? I see you're still on here. I'd love to involve you in the discussion here. Yeah, he turned his camera off and such. So I'm just listening because I want to see where this is going. And I have some questions actually. So I want you to keep going and then I'll just remember them and bring them in at the end. But I think this is important. The whole discussion is important because we've gotten so far away from what was intended in how the nation runs. that we don't even really know what it looks like. And so I think that this is incredibly important to go through this. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Now, and you'll notice one thing I am not discussing today is whether or not Iran needed to be attacked. Whether that was the right action or not, if it was authorized by Congress, was it the right thing to do or not? That's totally off the table. That doesn't even matter to today's discussion. What matters is who is supposed to decide that? Because the evidence should have been brought to Congress. And then if they feel there's enough evidence that there is really an imminent threat here and they vote in favor of some war action, great. But whether or not that's even the case, never was even voted on in Congress. So Don, you mentioned you had some questions. get into that a little bit. The questions I have is that it seems like going back to the way that it was supposed to be, the United States is supposed to be run, you know, this is a structure, the constitution is the structure, right? To understand that is going to be fundamental going forward. Don't, you know, no matter what this is going to look like, but right now we've got a Congress that is totally off the rails. So to bring them, So to bring them anything, to have them vote on, they're going to be voting with the globalist corporatocracy from what I can see, regardless of what's going on, because the moral fabric of this nation has been completely destroyed by the removal from God, from our culture, from our schools, from the honor and the integrity. So even if the president went to Congress, I'm pretty extra sure we've got a bunch of people that are guilty of treason sitting in there that are going to vote for their own self-interest. So the system itself is completely and fundamentally broken. Now, I've heard that from a couple of people that what it appears is that Trump is re restoring the unitary executive. I don't understand enough about this. It's, um, to, to, uh, uh, defend it well, but that seemed to be something that gives him more powers to be able to do something, especially if Congress is completely off the rails. So my opinion on this, or what I think I'm seeing, is that since the entirety of our governance from top to bottom, including in our townships, no one seems to be listening to we the people. We're being taxed wrongly. We're being the the the them having the audacity to tell us we can't speak in the meetings or if we can, it's for three minutes. All of this stuff is fundamentally wrong. So by having a country that's already been invaded by traitors sitting in the seats as their public functionaries, the fentanyl that's coming pouring in through China and none of these people sitting in the seats are doing anything. to stop the invasion that came through our borders. We're so off the rails that I don't know how we could possibly, you know, if there was actually one honest person in there, how they could actually reach out to Congress without them subverting everything, no matter which way it goes. Now, I guess that's my question. How do you deal with it when the entire government is completely off the rails? And honestly, we need to go back to the Declaration of Independence and the whole thing needs to be replaced. Unfortunately, the real problem in my mind isn't Congress, as bad as they are, as off track as they are. They are a symptom of what we will tolerate. Number one, we don't understand the principles of liberty that our founders gave us. We don't know or understand the Constitution. We've become so partisan that... One of the major arguments we're seeing in favor of Trump doing what he did was, well, the other guys did it. Yeah, it's like go sports team go. You know, I'm the chairman of the Constitution Party in Michigan, and I would like to see all political parties abolished. Even the one that I'm the chairman over. And we've had lots of discussions within the party about how evil this party, go sports team, let's get your colors on and win at all costs, even if we cheat. That's what we're seeing. This is not okay. And I know we're all on the same page with this. I'm not arguing with anybody here. I'm just stating facts. Well, if I could just chime in real quick, Robert, if I could add anything, because the argument about unitary executive, that's the same argument they use for saying that all the problems that we're experiencing are so great that we need to allow for these executive privileges. for this administrator who just takes care of everything from top to bottom because the problems are so great. And this has been the excuse since forever. They just used it at different times. But the structure of the presidency has definitely been changed. The EOP, which is the executive office of the president, so he's not really controlling everything anyway. But what Donald Trump is doing through all these last executive leaders to consolidate power within the executive branch. In a way that's true, but in a way it's also an excuse because they've been pushing this idea for a very long time that we need to change the structure of our government to suit the modern problems as if though our founding fathers didn't deal with similar problems when you know our country was being founded you know they'd like to think that thomas jefferson and james madison were chiseling out the constitution with rocks and dragging their wives around by their hair and there were these just very primitive people that didn't understand modern government they understood modern government they understood uh tyranny they understood uh they understood uh warlords they understood people that uh wanted absolute power and everything they did. And they understood people that were capable of manipulating the populace to accept a brand of government that was never supposed to exist. And that's then that they tried to create our government to protect us from that. So our founding fathers were not ignorant. That's what I'm trying to say. And everything else is just an excuse, you know? Well, and what you brought up is that there's always been conflict. And I've got to correct something I said earlier. I said it was Einstein and and Tesla and it was I got to change it. I meant Edison and Tesla that had the conflict. And so and when you look back at the Edison Tesla conflict that happened, it was all about economics. and politics, and that's what we have going on right now. It's not for the good of the people. This seems to have been the threat all along. It's for people who are godless, who refuse to walk with God in service to God and man here, regardless of what they get out of this, but doing the right thing when nobody else will. That's what we have to go back to. And the only way to do that, and I'm going to say it again, because I'm an unapologetic Christian, is that we have to go back to God and check ourselves every step of the way. Are we doing this for ourselves or are we doing this for God, family, and country? Until we go back to that, we're going to have the same fight no matter what. We've got to figure out a way to deal with it. And removing all of these traitors from office and disabling them forever taking office. Again, this is part of my pro se battle that I've got on right now is that I'm suing people pro se that need to be removed and, and establishing that they need to be removed so that they're just barred, they're removed and that they never pop their heads up again. We, we have, we're going to have to take this seriously and remove them and not listen to this narrative of whoever sports team is pushing somebody else, somebody to keep them in custody. I love the sports team analogy because it really has become that meaningless. It is. If our guy's doing it, we're going to defend him. If the other guy's doing it, we're going to attack him. Right now, with Trump and the war powers and things of that nature, there are quite a few on the left that are attacking Trump, saying that that was unconstitutional for him to have bombed Iran. They're right, but what is their motivation in saying so? has nothing to do with the Constitution. It's not because they love the Constitution and want it followed. Otherwise, where were they when Obama did it? Right, right. That argument is correct against them. The only reason they're attacking Trump for it is because he's not their guy. Right, exactly. If it was Biden doing it or if it was Kamala Harris doing it. And we, in fact, a statement I've used multiple times in the last week or so on social media says that if you are not able to to call out constitutional violations, regardless of what party the person is who's doing it, then your partisanship has eclipsed your patriotism. I agree with that entirely. And people, I don't know if they understand that Nazi Germany, whatever side of this argument people are on, some people believe it's real, some people believe it's not. I'm not going to bring this up today or debate this out, but we can. But the point being is that the whole party, the party politics, it was started at the county level, but it was a party politics that basically created what happened in Germany in World War II. And that's really where we're at right now. And we're going to have to stop this. Actually, I decided I was going to talk to everyone under much chagrin from everyone. I reached out to the chairs of both the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, and I'm going to reach out to all of them and say, let's drop the labels and sit there and talk about things as statesmen. and actually bring ideas to the table and talk about real things instead of this. They actually really liked it. And we sat down, I sat down with Andrew from the Green Party, which fundamentally he admitted, he said, I am a communist. And he said, most of the time I will say that I'm, I mean, I support people's opinion to have an opinion. And I also support the ability to have it out there in discussion because that's where we find the caveats In the structure, you know, free everything. OK, who's going to pay for this? You know, it's like it's like that's that's the discussion. Where do you think we're going to get this from? When over I think it's over forty five percent or so of the people in the United States are on a government paycheck. That means that the workers are less than thirty percent. And that is a form of slavery right there. When you can't pay for your own way and somebody else has to pay for it. We had this huge discussion on this. It's like, who's going to work for free? Or who's going to be taxed to eighty five percent, which is where we're at right now forever before they just decide, guess what? I'm going to sit home like the rest of you and let's just break the system. And, you know, but I mean, I digress here. We're getting off. I'm getting off in the weeds here. But we have to drop these sports team mentalities and come together as Americans. And to your point, when the nation is divided in these wars, we never win. And it's always for economic advantage because killing people makes them a lot of money. Yeah. Yeah, it really does. And not only that. I'm going to introduce one other topic here on the war powers topic, one subtopic. And that is, who are those that are pushing for it? Who are those that are pushing for constant war? We often call them war hawks or whatever else. But, and in my lecture series, the constitution is the solution. In the fourth lecture, I go into this topic of constitutional war powers and the enemy within. And what I'm referring to is the enemy within. is that within the conservative movement, there is a separate group that we don't recognize as separate. And they're called neoconservatives. Neoconservative or neocon is not just a slander of, oh, you guys aren't as purely conservative as I am. The neoconservatives are actually a specific defined group that up until about nineteen seventy two, they were Democrats. And in seventy two, they shifted over to the Republican Party. because they felt like the Democrat Party is no longer hospitable to our views. Democrats became the Peace Party with the nomination of George McGovern as their presidential candidate and the peace movement really taking over Democrats. They came over to the Republican Party and have largely taken over. But the the neocons, their primary objective is that they are international socialists. They are communists. And Their objective is to achieve global communism through war power, through toppling foreign regimes with war and putting in our own people and really taking over the entire world as a globalist communist state through war. And so when you see people like Mark Levin calling out neocons and never defining what a neocon is, that is because he is one. Mark Levin is a neocon. He uses the term neocon to slander anyone who claims to be conservative that he disagrees with. That's not what a neocon is. A neocon is actually someone who seeks world domination for global communism through war. Like Rumsfeld. Yes, absolutely. Rumsfeld and Cheney and Wolfowitz and so on. In fact, that team, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others, back in the year two thousand. September of two thousand, they declared as part of an organization they'd formed called the Project for the New American Century. They said, you know, we really need a restructuring of the powers in the Middle East. And probably the only way we're going to achieve that is if the United States has another Pearl Harbor event. We need a Pearl Harbor event to get the American people to go along with our plans to restructure the Middle East. And almost one year later, September of two thousand one. What happens? The nine eleven attacks. Now, we could talk about whether or not that was an inside job that could be a whole separate show. But the fact that they actually called for. Yeah, I agree. So they actually called for a Pearl Harbor event, a Pearl Harbor attack on our country. We need this for our political agenda. Surely shows a motive behind it. And and here's Number one, that should be considered treasonous to say, we need the American people to be attacked again, just like Pearl Harbor. We need another Pearl Harbor. And they got that. And then, of course, they're using all kinds of phony excuses to perpetrate war in the Middle East under the Bush administration. That is neoconservatism at its core. That is exactly what they're trying to do. Topple foreign regimes, put in our own people, start controlling foreign countries, and turn them into Just one more puzzle piece of the global socialist state. Praxis countries. Yeah. And here's one of the most shocking parts of all of this is that neoconservatives, if you start reading into their literature, who do they praise as their ideological leader? They're basically their founding father of neoconservatism. Well, I've got some homework to do here, so I don't know. It's Trotsky. Neoconservatism is Trotskyism. Now, you go back to the Bolshevik Revolution and so on, you have Lenin and Trotsky who basically turned Russia communist. When Lenin dies and Stalin takes power, he and Trotsky had, they were butting heads, literally to the point where Stalin said, I have an extermination order on Trotsky. He sent out men to try to kill him. And years later, they eventually did kill Trotsky. But this division created a division in global communism, global Marxism. There's the Stalinist camp and there's the Trotskyite camp. The Stalinists are national socialists. And national socialists like Obama primarily focus on the home front, that we need to create a more perfect socialist state right here at home with welfare programs and Obamacare and things like that. whereas a Trotskyite is more focused on foreign affairs. They're more focused on foreign restructuring and controlling of foreign countries through war. And so really what we've seen with the shift from Bush, a neocon Trotskyite, to Obama, a Stalinist national socialist, that's what we have there. We basically had Stalin versus Trotsky. And today, unfortunately, the Trotskyites, the neocons, are having a lot of influence over our executive branch. They also have a lot of influence over our Congress. They have a lot of influence over conservatism. When you have people like Mark Levin as quote unquote, the great one, which I consider a blasphemous title, he's this national talk show host. He's really not very good either. This guy has a very whiny, nasally voice. He has the manners of a grade school bully. He's not very intelligent, and he's not truthful. He will blatantly lie to his audience about so many things that we've caught him on. He will refuse to actually do public debate. He'll invite people onto his show to debate him so he can mute them when they start making him look bad. But he will never do public debate. He humiliates people that talk about conspiracy all the time. He'll just shut them down. Absolutely. He is... Honestly, I don't believe Mark Levin got to the national prominence of having a national talk show based on his talent. I believe he was placed there because he's not very good. There are so many more local talk show hosts like Donna here who are far better, far more reasonable to talk to, far more talented than Mark Levin. But he is there to influence the American conservative and lean us in the neoconservative direction. That's his purpose. That's why he was placed there. I don't believe he earned it. His book is in every conservative's house that I've met since I've been working as a field coordinator for the John Birx. I don't have a book. So does that make it? Does that put me in a different category? That's a good category. I don't like TV either. Did you cross that off the list, Robert? Because we've been checking the list all the whole time. We've been talking to see if you're a communist or not. Well, yeah. Yeah. I do, I confess, I do own one Mark Levin book, and I bought it very begrudgingly. It's his book called The Liberty Amendments, because one of my main battles that I fight in is this push for a national convention to rewrite parts of the Constitution. They call it the Article V Convention, the Convention of States. Mark Levin wrote a book, The Liberty Amendments, promoting the Article V Convention. And the only reason I bought it was because I need to understand what the opposition is saying. And I studied the opposition on this topic far more than I study our own side. And honestly, I can make their arguments far better than many of them can, but they blatantly lie about historical precedent and what will happen if we have this convention to supposedly just make a few amendments, a few minor changes to the constitution. It'll be totally controlled. Don't worry. Nothing will get out of hand. The constitution will be safe. We won't lose our bill of rights that all these different claims, but they will blatantly lie to promote it. A case in point about a year ago, Mark Levin was doing one of his shows in which he's talking about this article five convention topic. And he says, James Madison even talks about the article five convention in his letters to, and they list about eight or ten different letters that Madison wrote about the article five convention. sounding like, look, Madison was so excited about this Article V convention, he's promoting it in his letters to Philip Mazzei and to Thomas Jefferson and to Edmund Randolph and all these different letters that he wrote. He never quoted any of those letters, though, on his show. The reason was, in Madison's day, when he was writing those letters, there was a movement for an Article V convention that Madison was fighting against. And every one of those letters was Madison saying how dangerous it would be to have an Article V convention at this time. And here's Mark Levin holding up all these letters implying that Madison was so in favor of having an Article V convention. I dare you to read any of those letters and try to find anything supporting an Article V convention in there. For example, I'm going to have to just paraphrase this off the top of my head. He says, In one of his letters to, he actually wrote five letters to Jefferson on the topic. One of them he says, friends of the constitution are fixed in opposition to another convention. I'm gonna pull this quote up because it is so stellar. I tell you, I was so excited when you started talking about being against the Article V Convention because I've been saying that for a long time. This is going to be a really stupid move to go to that because they start messing with this. We don't have the moral integrity, and we've already been infiltrated. We're going to have infiltrators in there that are going to destroy anything that was in there that was meaningful. We don't have the integrity to do it. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. In today's political environment, it would be absolute national suicide. I have to read this quote to you. I didn't want to just paraphrase it because it's so good. This is a letter from James Madison to Jefferson. This one's dated the eighth of December, seventeen eighty eight, right in the middle of when there were states pushing for an Article five convention. They were trying to use the Article five convention to propose the Bill of Rights. And Madison made sure we're not using Article five convention. We'll make sure that the Bill of Rights proposals come through Congress. He called that the safer mode. Much safer to propose amendments through Congress. But here in his letters to Jefferson, he's saying the friends of the Constitution are fixed in opposition to the risk of another convention. Those who have opposed the Constitution are, on the other hand, zealous for a second convention. And there are others who urge a second convention with the insidious hope of subverting the Constitution just established, if not subverting the union itself. So he's saying there are three groups of people here. Friends of the Constitution are fixed in opposition to having a convention. Those who oppose the Constitution are zealous for a second convention. And then there are those who have ill intent, those who have the insidious hope, he says, of subverting the Constitution, if not subverting the actual union, destroying our country. I often like to use that quote and just say, so which of the three are you? Are you one of the friends of the Constitution that are fixed in opposition to a convention? Are you an opponent of the Constitution wanting to replace it with something else? Are you actually trying to destroy the union? Because Madison saw there are only three groups of people here. Which one are you? And this was one of the letters that Mark Levin pointed to as if Madison supported a convention. Well, it's like this headline. He's not an honest person. This is, yeah. Yeah, this is like politics. Throw it out there. It sounds good. So everybody flocked to it like a bunch of lemmings instead of getting behind it and finding out what's really going on. But we're asking ourselves a question about, like, what has happened to the conservative Christian movement when we believe somebody like Mark Levin is actually a good person? Shouldn't, you know, we have a standard of behavior, a caliber of character. of a person, a talk show host, on how they act, how they conduct themselves. And it seems like, and with some of these talk show hosts, particularly Mark Levin, is that we just sort of throw that metric, you know, that measuring stick out the window, you know, and it seems to me that's what is, I think, troubling about the freedom movement, at least what I see. Chesterton, G.K. Chesterton has this great quote where he says that we... we all disagree. We all agree on what is evil, but we disagree widely on what we find allowable, you know, evils we find allowable. And that is what the freedom movement is, is that we tend to go, well, this is okay. This is okay. And so our politics has been guided really by our prejudices versus principle. And so I don't know at what point there'll be hope for the freedom movement. If we don't turn to, you know, For myself, as a field coordinator for John Birch Society, for instance, there is a certain level of behavior and conduct that's expected of me out in the public. And for instance, you know, so a Republican, say, like run a red light, kill some people, you know, defraud the people of their money. And nobody would ever implicate the entire Republican Party. However, if I did that, Robert Brown and everybody in the John Birch Society would be dragged through the gutter. mercilessly and so that kind of thinking is something that I try to hope to unravel when I talk to people when I go throughout doing my talk is like well what are you saying is permissible what evils are you allowing around you and why are you doing it because if you're saying that certain behaviors that are immoral are okay then we we have another discussion we're not even at the constitution yet we're at we're on a different we're on different playing fields so let's get to that first So I think that, you know, we have as a freedom movement, you know, have a conduct that we should expect of ourselves, our talk show host. And, you know, and people like you, Donna, you're a great gal. I mean, really, you know, person. And, you know, you see Robert Brown the first time you go, this guy is a great guy. You know that he's a man. You meet them. You meet certain people. But I have to be honest with you. I don't find that very often in the freedom movement. It's just a lot of people jockeying for approval. for what they want to. And our founder, Robert Welch, talks about this, that people are more concerned about winning in politics. They're winning elections. So their behavior changes based on what they are trying to do. And so that's why we wonder, well, why are we losing all the time? Well, the Republican Party is not winning all the time. And it's going to continue to lose because it has changed its moral barometer for what it expects of its own people. And so as long as it's, and this is why Robert Welch also said that the means are as important as the ends. So how our behavior and how we act is if we have to be evil to get there, if we have to be dishonest to get there, then first of all, let me say as a Christian, God's not going to bless it. God's not going to bless immoral behavior on our part. He's not going to bless subterfuge. He's not, you know, and so at the very least we have to change. how we think. And I'm not talking about everybody that wants to say, let's have a Christian revival. We need to have an awakening, stuff like that. How about just being a good Christian? Live it. You have to live it. Live it. And show an example. So that to me is a whole nother, that's, really what I wanted to talk about. But, you know, again, I really selfishly just wanted to come on and listen to Robert. And so I'm still considering suing the Republican and Democrat parties as domestic terrorist organizations because they've taken foreign money. And I mean, we need to really talk about it. Those organizations need to be abolished. And anybody that has and I've said this many times, anybody that's still a part of those organizations knowing full well the crimes that they have committed, including taking foreign money, dark money and whatever, they're rolled in with them because they're complicit. This whole thing is complicit. And not only that, when you look at the structure of the political parties, they function as a cult. It's sort of like a Freemason cult, really, you know, it's like or any other of the cults that you get into them and you can get just so far and then you're just not qualified enough to move on because you're not willing to throw everything to stand there with the party, even if it's against God and immoral. And so dismiss these people. And it's wrong. And I'm going to one more thing I'm going to throw in here and then I'll shut up for a second. I still have an issue. And I said this from the beginning with the last election, because my question is, why did they allow President Trump to win? And with as much cheating as we had that we can prove from twenty twenty, twenty twenty two and going to twenty twenty four. Honestly, I would have loved to have to have somebody go in there. All right. Everybody out of the pool. This thing has been wrong for the last two elections. And I'm willing to throw my office to tear this entire system down and bring it back to a lawful situation. Well, Trump had one role, and this is my own opinion. I don't speak for everybody else. My opinion is that Donald Trump's purpose was to act as a magnet to pull what's left of the people that love America. I don't even want to call them the freedom movement, neocons, or conservatives. Let's talk about the people that have a brand of America in their minds that says this is what America is, okay, that statement of values. I agree with you. His job was to drag those people like a magnet over into the socialist camp that Robert Brown was talking about. And he's successfully done that. He has he has convinced most of the Republicans that I know that globalism is OK, that attacking other countries is OK, that, you know, having executive orders or executive order is OK. And they have literally. he has literally changed psychologically the way americans think and so that and so he did this in a great way and I think it was planned you know you had he and and hillary clinton bashing each other and so you know they're the deplorable so they set him up as the perfect victim and anybody had followed him so it was a great psychological conquest for the left And that, you know, I'm probably going to lose a lot of friends over that statement, but that's what I believe. I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen under the bushes. It's nothing like living in a trailer park in Florida, watching people with flags on their cars bragging about the Patriot Act. And, you know, and I've seen it. I've been, when you've done this, and most people, here's the thing, Donna, most people have not been in the freedom movement much more than the past maybe six years, seven years. And so their perspective is they just got it. And suddenly they know everything. They haven't watched these events unfold after President, after President. They didn't watch what happened in Reagan. They didn't watch what happened in the Nixon. So this is the problem we have. They have their timeline is like this. And so you can't talk to these people. And so they are stuck in a cultural personality. And that's really, that's what's in our society's job. I would imagine what Robert Welch did after Eisenhower was to break that diagnosis. That's what he tried to do. Anyway. Well, I like the term call to personality, and I actually use that one a lot when we listen to things. And what's really missing is the critical thinking. We get ourselves in trouble here a lot because we question everything, even the current narrative. Now, I believe the good guys that are in control, that there are some things that are not in control. And I think a lot of it's for optics. But the people that are really fighting this on the good guy side, they're not going to be telegraphing what they're doing. They're not going to be doing any of this. And so though we're going through this exercise and learning how the United States is supposed to work, which is probably the most important thing we can be doing, instead of being a mouthpiece, for these crazy narratives that are out there. And there's so many of them. I mean, do you guys get asked this a lot? I do. Who do you follow? Who do you trust? I'm like, God. Okay. I trust God. I follow God. And everybody else is on approval at all times, depending on what kind of nonsense are coming out of their mouths. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. The real problem is, People want to be led. People want to be led rather than to think for themselves, rather than study for themselves. It's been really interesting for me as a nationally known constitutional scholar and lecturer. I've had the wonderful opportunity of traveling all over the country, giving presentations on the Constitution. And who comes out to those kind of presentations? Yeah, it is. It's Constitution nerds. And I say that in the most loving way. It's the people that already know the Constitution to some degree. They love the Constitution. These are the type of people that come out to hear more about the Constitution. It's not the average citizen that's totally oblivious to these things. And so as I go to these events and I meet with hundreds of constitutionally minded conservative people, one of the most interesting things that I found is that the degree to which we disagree on what the Constitution says and means is is almost zero. There's almost no differing of opinion in any aspect of the Constitution among these people who have each independently taken a personal study to find out what the Constitution says and means. It's pretty obvious as we start reading that Congress has the power to declare war. It's pretty obvious that Of all the different powers that are enumerated to who they're enumerated to, what is not on the list, what is left to the states, it all becomes very clear as we read into it. It's when we take the honest perspective of discovery in our research, rather than I'm trying to prove that I'm right. If you come in with a preconceived notion, the president has the power to do this attack on Iran. then you're going to miss truth. You're going to try to find anything you can to defend your position rather than simply trying to discover what is the true constitutional position. One other factor here is that's on my mind. I'm going to give a reading assignment to all of your audience. That is, if you haven't read it in the last year, it's probably time to read it again. George Washington's Farewell Address. That's what Bill was reading before you came on. Oh, that's great. We've gone through it several times and he said the same thing today. He was like, he's like, if you haven't read it, you need to read this. And yeah, this is, you guys should come into Liberty Essentials with us. And we can all sit there and talk about it. We've been doing this for a couple of years now. and uh you know just talking about warned about so many current issues it's so pertinent to today to your point he warns against the baneful effects of the spirit of party the the party system that we have today and how damaging that is to our politics he warns against in fact I'm gonna have to pull it up because I can paraphrase pretty well but uh Talk about the part where he talks about the dangers of the administration of government, the administrative state. I'll let you jump into that one. But yes, here's the one I was looking for. He says, and you have to bear with the language here. It's a little bit deep. And then we'll discuss what it means. He says, of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. So kind of a deep language there. But what he's saying is, if we're going to have political prosperity, we need religion and morality. He says, let me see if I can find the next part here. I'll just paraphrase the next part. But he basically says that let us with caution indulge this idea that, oh, here it is. Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. We can't just be a moral people unless we have religion. John Adams said the same thing. The Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It's wholly inadequate to the governance of any other. Kevin talked about what we were talking about earlier, that we need a moral basis. Matthew was asking about, so what is our standard for someone who is a moral, good person? I would say, first of all, they need to be honest, telling us the truth. And I could show you example after example of how so many of our political talking heads are blatantly lying to us, lying to the American people. Everybody's lying all the time. Yeah. And another great warning from George Washington here. Let me see if I can find this one. There we go. Here it is. I love the ability to search for key wording. We do this on our show all the time, just so you know, sometimes we'll get on a topic and this is what I always tell everybody. This is real news for real people by real people at the kitchen table. And sometimes we'll just stop and say, Hey, let's look this up a minute. We'll take a few minutes to go through things, to find things. This is not a canned show. So this is perfectly acceptable here because we do it all the time. So this is one of my favorites. It, guides for following the Constitution. He says, if, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular realm. Pause for a moment. So if the way in which we divide the powers in the Constitution, if we missed anything, if we messed up in any way, he says, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way in which the Constitution designates. So if the Constitution has a flaw, we use the amendment to correct it. But let there be no change by usurpation, by stealing the power, such as war powers that we talked about at the beginning of the show. We don't let it just happen because we feel it needs to be needed. But let there be no change by usurpation for this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good. We might need to do this attack on Iran. So should we just let the president do it? It might be the instrument of good, but... It is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. So if we let it slide just because we feel like it's needed, and let's just say we all agree that Iran absolutely needs to be bombed, so we should just let the president do so. This is laying the seeds of our own destruction. As we allow the president to usurp power, to take on, as Lincoln called it, kingly power, we're letting our president become a king. We're letting him have unlimited power. We will, as he says, we're creating the weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil, any partial or transient benefits. Washington, it's not easy reading, but his warnings are so pertinent to today. I've got a book that Bill sucked me into. It's called Freedom Documents. And it's no longer available or published. But I found one in a couple of my friends. Curtis is here today in the chat. But I found one for about one hundred thirty five dollars. If you can find it, buy it. They're fantastic and well worth the money on it, you know, to to read through them and take the time to educate yourself. It is very it's a difficult process to have to ask your own questions and and find the actual answers instead of just taking a million headlines in a day and say, I like that. I like that. I like that. I guess we'll do with that. In Michigan, we had a bunch of proposals that passed in the last, not the last election, but the twenty twenty two election that passed that basically took away all parental rights. And when you read the headline, it sounded great. After it was voted in, which it should never have been voted in the way it was because it should have been left to our legislature, not put it out there as a proposal. But the way that it, and I would question if they actually had enough signatures for it because of all the signature fraud that was going on here and throughout the country. The thing about learning what we've all been pursuing is it takes time and you have to make a sacrifice. You've got to decide that this is worth your time, like reading the Bible and actually reading the words instead of reading some agenda pusher from some seven mountains church or something that says, claim it, frame it, hold God to a contract. Don't think that's going to work out well for you, just saying, but getting in there and actually studying this and improving yourself in your grasp instead of being you know a baby bird with your mouth open hoping that somebody is giving you some good food instead of dropping you know the other end in your in your mouth you know it truly is a decision that we have to make you know you're either gonna eat eat eat good stuff or you're gonna eat the crap from the other end and it's up to us to stop pause ask some questions and And there's so many good sources out there. And I really think that the classes that you guys have put together is a wonderful, wonderful source. John Birch Society to understand fundamental principles and then ask questions when things come your way. You got to be able to ask those questions and challenge people. We have a good experience coming up, not something that I did, but one of our chapters with the Constitution is the Solution. I've been dying to tell you about this, Robert. We don't know if it's going to happen yet, but Robert gets a lot of calls from me because I'm always dying to tell him things. But anyway, there's a group of people at a library. This lady would like to have, we're having a Constitution is the Solution class in Framingham, Massachusetts. And she, from what I'm told is that they want us to teach some of the immigrants that are coming in to you as part of their civics training for the constitutional solution. And I said, you know what, I'll even do you one better than that. I will do English as a second language and use the blue book as a, as a, um, as a tool to the teaching tools. So, you know, there's a way for us, you know, we'd complain about the immigrants coming in. We complain about people that don't know the constitution. the object is to get outside the choir okay so we have immigrants coming in guess what the globalists are going to take slaves of them too you know these aren't people that are against you these are for your potential allies and that's one of the things that we have lost as well in our in the freedom movement we with the when you have people that are polarizing opinions about the their opponents all the time that's on purpose You know, when you have seventy five people in the stadium and you're still beating up on Democrats, you've already won. You're talking to the you know, you're you're the people that love you. Why are you polarizing even further? There is no reason to polarize. And, you know, what I said to a bunch of Republicans the other day is that you're Americans, OK? And your job is to help save America. And these people are potentially Americans. not looking at the people who listen to you as enemies. That's one of the things we need to, that's why the party politics is so bad. I mean, we have people also saying really stupid things that are talk show hosts. You know, and Don, I think you're a wonderful gal, so I listen to conservative talk show hosts. It's very dangerous. One gal said, the beauty of the two-party system is that it provides with checks and balances. And I said to myself, okay, the worst thing I've ever heard. So when I was in Massachusetts giving a talk in front of like, seventy-five people, and I heard that on the local talk show host there, I said, you know what you can do to save Massachusetts? Stop listening to conservative talk show hosts. It's a uniparty. I mean, we got the uniparty. It's like having an airplane. We got two wings. One's this, the right, one's the left, and the plane's going exactly where the plane is going because they're driving it all. It's not, here's the two-party. What the Bush in class teaches us is that for you to want to know, Chesterton also says that America is the only country founded on a creed. So when I hear people like, I don't know, who's that guy with the beard? Matt Walsh or jokers like that. We really need to talk about what it means to be an American. We need to establish identity. Let me tell you something. Our family and enter that discussion in seventeen seventy six. It was called the Declaration of Independence. Read it. It's very it's a very simple document. So for the libertarian that's sitting out there going, well, taxation and taxation, you know, OK, certain types of taxation. are theft, things that don't come with permissions and boundaries and limitations. But other things, taxes are in the Declaration of Independence. It talks about unreasonable taxes. But everybody knows that the proper amount of government makes us freer. So we're not talking about no government. We're not talking about let's get rid of government. We don't think about that. So I would say that we go back to the system well I would say a system where that we start exploring the foundation that we have it's the only series out there that literally approaches america's from its foundational viewpoint what do americans think like what did they not think like if you don't get that and and here's the thing about that class let me tell you I'm sorry I'm bragging on you robert but that class like if you read that watch that class and you are not humbled when you walk out of that class like you know nothing I had a guy about five years ago said hey great man he said you should do a class on the constitution and I was like I don't know anything about once I started looking into it I said I realized I didn't know anything I was just like all fluff and you know fluff and I didn't know anything and then I found robert's thing and I said I knew nothing I absolutely had to start tabula rasa Right from the ground up, I had to be stripped of all preconceived ideas that I knew. And I honestly believe that's what America needs. I believe the Constitution is the solution. You watch that class, you need to strip away every idea that you had before walking into that room. And as a person presenting that class, you can see the people that are arrogantly sitting there going, well, this is horrible. I mean, particularly when you get to the one, which one is the one on war powers? Robert, it's like four or five, four? Yeah, that's the fourth one. That's when all the veterans get up and walk out the door. The problem with that. Considering everything, we have to consider everything and, you know, to jump on things and have an opinion right away. Even if you disagree, you can talk to anyone. And I'm not saying you too personally, but a person can talk to anyone if you listen to them. and give them a chance to out of respect to say what their opinion is even if we disagree and I think that that's what this is all about is protecting their rights even to disagree with us and then start a discussion not these emotionally unstable crazy screaming fits you know that that any reasonable person would have to look at and say yep I believe in demon possession it's right there you know And sit back and just say, I had a grant. My grandpa was this way. He looked at everything. And if he didn't agree or if he did agree, he would go, well, well, well. And he never said another word. He just sat there. That's what he said, whether he agreed or disagreed and gave it time to settle. And then come back with later on with perhaps a very healing statement, you know, and the Bible says that a healing word can turn away wrath. We can't do that if we're ready to jump down everybody's throat emotionally trying to guard our bias castle. That that that's communication one on one. And I know you guys get it. You're wonderful. I love you guys. Yeah, I believe in listening to people, too. I start out when I do a presentation. I tend to start out with this idea that I say to people there's because I don't know who's in the audience. That's the whole thing. When I do stuff, I do it like I'm talking outside the choir. I could have any type of person there of any background life. And I think that's how we should approach our discussions with other people. We don't know where they're coming from. We don't know what their beliefs are. We don't know what their pain centers are. So when I start out, I say I want to let you all know that there's generally two people, two types of people, and those two types of people are attached to two different forms of government. There's some people that really like a lot of government. They really believe in their heart of hearts that more government, is going to fix things. And for at least the last, I would say since at least the Roosevelt administration, this has been what people think. In some way, shape or form, government is the answer. And those people you have to make an appeal to. And I say, and there's another class of people that believe that they don't want government to do anything. And those are libertarians. And those are the guys like smoking pot in their mom's basement saying they don't want to do the dishes. And so anyway. That was me. But I'm just trying to say there are some people, and then there's the middle ground, say that we need to have a proper type of government because governments tend to be an overwhelming agency. And so when I talk to people, they'll say, oh, I don't like what Trump did. He was really mean. He did all these things. And I'm saying, yeah, well, I don't like it either. Well, why would you say that? And I said, because I don't think anybody should have that amount of power. And these are the type of conversations we can have with people around us. You're right. Trump shouldn't be allowed to do that. Your guy shouldn't be allowed to do that. I mean, there are Democrats right now that are pushing back on Trump, probably in a very hypocritical way, acting like they've been innocent the whole time. That's fine. But let's get behind, what's her name out there in, I want to say, New Mexico, Stanton. I mean, she's, you know, wrong as the day is long on something, but on something, she's right. Let's help her out. If this isn't a thing that we're attached to, we want to say the government shouldn't have this much power, then let's stand our ground together on those things. So. That's what I look for. And I've had Democrats come up to me after the class, the Constitution is the solution class. And they say, the way you presented it, I came here to mock you. But I found that I was I was pleasantly surprised. And they had to think about it. I've had state reps come up to me. They said they didn't understand what we believed. They wanted to know why we were pushing back on grant funding. And they finally understood. And now what happened with Trump, it's like we don't say. A lot of Republicans, what they did is they came out and they said, oh, well, how did it feel when your job, you know, you took our jobs and now you're losing your jobs. And how do you feel? That's the most immature thing to say to somebody. What we have a member down in New Hampshire, what he said, what he's teaching the people around him is he's saying as an alderman, he's saying things like, well, this is what I've been trying to show you is that when you depend on federal money, You can't even turn the lights on. I mean, New Hampshire is so dependent on federal money. They call themselves the free state and they can't even turn on the lights in their in their in their, you know, fire station without federal money. And so when, you know, he said this is so there he was in sales. They call it striking when the iron is hot. He had a perfect opportunity and he waited a year and something happened. And instead of, you know, creating division, he created harmony. And they were like, oh, OK, now we get it. And so the question that has to be asked to people is why are your towns broke? Where is all your money? Instead of like, I'll do it better. You know, I'm a better administrator. That's all they do. They think of themselves as administrators. So the question should be, why are your towns broke? Why is nobody asking that question? Why are you have complete reliance on federal money that if it was stripped from you, that your town would be shut down, but we don't. So these are opportunities as conservatives and as Christians that we can take to help educate the people around us. So let's, you know, get, we don't want to start walking into the room and say, Ooh, the constitution, this and the constant, they don't get that. They hear that word, they shut you down. So but we can talk about principles. You hand them a scorecard. You say, you see all this money we put out the scorecard with the John Birch aside. And you say, you see this down here, this three hundred twenty three thousand. You know how we're thirty six trillion dollars in debt. That's your portion. And I say it very gently. And I talk to young kids every day at the malls, at the at the colleges. I go around and I talk to them and I say, this is your debt. This is what you owe. I talked to him about principles. So that's what we need to do as conservatives. So I guess I just went off on the field, but. You're in proper form. Well, I just, I feel very passionate about this. Oh, there it is. Debt clock. I love this. And I love when you look at the individual liability on this, it gets scary real quick. Yep. And what's real scary is when you start looking at the unfunded liabilities and that sort of thing. We're at wealth per citizen, hidden wealth. We're talking all kinds of stuff here. Go and look at this, everybody, and you'll find out. This is kind of fun and terrifying at the same time to watch exactly what happens. Yeah, we don't want to say to people, you know, when you're walking up to somebody that you may not be familiar with politics, I don't say things like, oh, he doesn't follow the Constitution. I say things like, this is happening because of the poor decisions your congressman is making, and it's affecting you. And we have that amongst Republicans. They'll go borrow money. These local aldermen, selectmen, they'll go borrow money from a private bank and put their town in debt. And basically, they conscripted their entire town for this money that they couldn't afford. I mean, look, your town can't afford to build the roof on its schoolhouse. Guess what? It doesn't have the money. Your town should die. Civilizations die. You don't have the money. But what you're willing to do is get to take the money. When you take federal money, you're taking it from every taxpayer In America, that's what you're doing. You're saying, oh, I need a top lot. I'm going to get a grant. We needed the money, but we're going to pay it back. Stop taking other people's money. This is a moral requirement. This is the moral high ground that we at least need to bring the Republicans in or supposed conservatives in on and say, listen, you have an obligation not to touch this money. And if you're taking federal money, don't come to me and talk about your convention of states when you're taking the Congress's money. They do it all the time. I was testifying in New Hampshire, and I said, okay, you guys want to follow the Constitution? You think Congress is evil? Guess what? You could start today right here in New Hampshire by stopping taking the illegal federal money. And, boy, I tell you, the looks I got that day. I mean, that's how I approach it. It's like stop being a hypocrite with me. This is pure hypocrisy. Right. It's pure hypocrisy. That's all it is. It's like, and this is the problem that the freedom movement does as well. We're always pointing the finger. It's always somebody else's fault. The Democrats did this. The progressives did that. They know the system, blah, blah, blah, blah, on and on and on. Well, listen. Okay. That's right. They know the system better than you. What are you doing? What? I mean, they can, they can launch like a thousand people for a rally in five minutes. And granted, many of them were probably on welfare. And they don't, you know, but like groups like Lower Cape Indivisible out of Massachusetts, you watch how you look at. I had a guy. Listen, I had a guy join. He came over from the Democrat Party. And you know what he said to me? He said the John Birch Society is the only conservative organization that knows what it's doing. Because it activism wise, it is the only organization we have the power of five hundred. We have our scorecard programs. We almost require our chapters to do literature drops every month. What has Thomas Jefferson said? And I'm stealing this from Robert because he told me about Thomas Jefferson, but educate the whole mass of the people because they are the surest preservers of liberty. OK, so what are conservatives doing? They're watching Tucker Carlson for six hours and feeling proud about themselves at the end of the night after they've had like ten beers. That's what the conservatives do. It's entertainment. And you have to jump online and argue that Tucker Carlson was right. You know, I did some arguing on Facebook. So I'm defending our country. And then I defended my country. And so that's so this is so we have we have to look. What are the things that Constitution is the solution class will do? It will teach you how to hold yourself accountable. It will challenge your thought processes. What do you think the purpose of government is? And if you have a false notion of that, that's going to be stripped away from you. The moment you watch that class. OK, and so this is what I say when I talk, when I'm going around and I listen to the blame game, you have to you can't allow that. You know, you can't allow you have to look at yourself. And I and yeah. So if we with the conservatives accountability with the left, they believe the same things. They understand tyranny is coming, but they're just not sure that they they have their own conspiracies, by the way. There are reasons why the Democrats, we worked with the Democrat group to fight the COS in New Hampshire and in Massachusetts. And what we found is that they have conspiracies about Trump. They're not the same as ours. But OK, that's great. You have your conspiracy. I'm not going to argue about your conspiracy. I mean, if that's what you believe. And that's the other thing. We don't have to be right about our conspiracies. There's only one thing that we really need to be aware of. They're a globalist. that want to take over the lives of everybody and they want to enslave you. That's it. I mean, they use false. They use fake money, which every time you use one of those greenbacks, it's like it's like a credit card. OK, read the creature from Jekyll Island. So they created this vertically integrated control system. I could show you some slides of some time, but they created a vertically integrated dependency system from the Federal Reserve. They print the money. They create these programs. then that money gets passed down through uh through the states uh in they created the administrative procedures act which created the system which allowed for for this to take place and so everybody's taking the money and then they create in in the during the progressive era of the early they created the municipal association the planning agencies first planning agency was in uh new york city okay and they created these systems on purpose and then they created the idea of the town manager So what are people doing there? They don't want to fire their town manager. They love that because look, people think government is a business, right? How often do you hear people say he's the right guy for the job? He's the right guy to take care of things for us. They look at, you know, they look, does he have a business acumen? When did that happen? That happened, that psychological shift happened on purpose. You know, there was a book written by, uh, the making of citizens, by uh charles miriam and and he used the rockefeller foundation the carnegie foundation to to uh help reshape how americans think about what the nature of government should be so when you go to vote for somebody do you say oh this is a moral guy who's going to protect my constitutional rights you're like no he's administrator I mean he's going to fix things for me he's going to make me prosperous that's why americans for prosperity is so dangerous they're voting for uh They're pushing for EFA bills and they're calling themselves a patriot group. OK, they're pushing. We're trying to get the government out of education. And we have the Americans for prosperity with the American flag pushing the government back into the educational system. So ninety percent of our problems, I mean, I would say ninety, but at least fifty percent of our problems are conservatives that are pushing for the globalism. I mean, they are the neocons. American prosperity is neocon. So you touched on something there that I think might be a good way to spend maybe the remainder of the time. You talked about some of the solutions that that we're working with, such as the power of five hundred scorecards, things of that nature. You being in the trenches as a JBS coordinator, you're day to day working on how we reclaim our country, how we restore liberty and things like that. I think we should talk a little bit about some of the details of what the power of five hundred is, what the scorecard is, what we can do. We've talked a lot about problems in our nation for most of the show. What can we do to solve this? And I would add to that setting the Constitution. The Constitution is the solution. Tell us a little bit about each of those. Well, the scorecards are a program that we use. You know what? This is tough. They are basically they tell you how you're you're. Yeah, just go over to the main menu and then hit the main menu on the left, all the way on the left, or at least the left on my screen, and where it says, yeah, main menu. And then when you click over to Freedom Index, you see where it says Freedom Index? All the way over to the right. You'll see it on the last column all the way over. Got it. And click on that. And now this is fun. Scroll down a little bit. and go ahead and click on oh we'll go down you're going to see a map show up let's click on say let's click on new hampshire yep there we go and you can go down there and it this is your senators and your state legislators and you can go down go down to like the m's I'm going to show you a guy that nobody pays attention to he's a republican you could you can by the way You could use this scorecard. When you look at this, go down all the way down to the M's. There's like four hundred twenty three of these guys. You could use these scorecards to really track and understand how your legislator is voting. And it it'll show you, like, for instance, in New Hampshire, they'll say, oh, we got so many Republicans. We have a majority. However, over I would say, fifty percent of the Republicans that are in New Hampshire are progressive. Go down to Michael Mills or I think it's David Mills, M-I-L-S, something like that. And I'll give you an example of a good progressive. Where is he? There he is right there. Click on him. This was fifty six percent right over there. Go down a little bit and click on David Mills. You'll see. Now, now you scroll down a little bit more and we'll show you. Now, see where it says print latest scorecard? Click on that. You see this guy's got a lifetime score of fifty six percent. Yeah, you can see what this guy is voting for. This is amazing. So we go around and we hand these scorecards out in town to their district, you know, and it tells you what we rated them on. And this is a good example. of where somebody will say well he's a republican so he's a good guy he'll left he'll be left unchecked we have members in this area that never talked to the guy uh you know he gets the you know he gets a he gets a get out of jail free card and you can see where like where it's x it'll uh talk about you know what he's uh voting good or bad on the other thing too is if we the members were paying attention to their score they would say see that this guy is a heavy duty progressive. You can look at all of the scoring. However, you would print this out. You could personalize it as well. You put your name on it and you could walk around. And that's what we do. We'll go around like Derry, London Derry. And as a coordinator, I like to take the members on these, what I call field trips. And I recommend every coordinator spend some time taking their, and when you go into a town, and I hope Robert, keep me on track here, buddy. But what I find, And I call this part of the literature drop. Say, for instance, you know, I'll take like a reprint, you know, and I'll like say the war on farmers. And what I'll do is I'll walk into a store. I'll give you an example. There are over nine thousand business, for instance, in Nashua and New Hampshire. And it's probably forty seven thousand employees in that state. You start walking into business, which I call like your first tier of birching. And you go in, you say, hey, did you hear about the stuff that's happening with the food in America? Could I give you something? And they say, yeah. And you hand it to them. And then you go, oh, and by the way, I put the scorecard in here. And I want you to see how your congressman is voting. So it's not like a trap. But the main thing when you're handing out literature is you ask for permission. Don't just walk in and hand somebody something. Say, can I give you something? Can I give you something to read? Well, it's got to be relationship first. You've got to care about the person to have them to really earn the right to take their time for them to listen to you, really, in my opinion. Well, there's different levels of birching, and I'll send you what I have on that, Donna. But I would say that when you're going into a store, you want to make it two minutes and you're out, out the door. Churches, hospitals, things like that, anything with a waiting room. The second thing we have, so that's, you can print those out. You can go to your district and show people, and you don't want to make it partisan. It's not about partisan. It's about voting constitutionally. And when people start seeing how Jared Golden's, you know, his voting record, we only lost, I think, in The second district in Maine by about twenty nine thousand votes. So you can actually track the activities we've handed out probably over a thousand scorecards in the last year. So, yeah. So you these are your House of Representatives. You can go to your congressman. You could do the same thing. And that's where it shows the money. But if you start looking at your your scorecards, look at all the sixties and forties that you have there. That's Michigan, right? Yeah, that's that's a red flag for me. So we try to drive our members to this. So that's the scorecard program, which can be incorporated into the Power of Five Hundred. Robert Brown, could you talk more about that? Because that's your baby. That's Robert. Look at all the Democrats and zeros here. Yeah. So the Power of Five Hundred is a program that the founder of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch, is the one that really originated this idea. The Power of Five Hundred suggests that a team of about five hundred people working in a coordinated effort in a congressional district have enough influence to start influencing their U.S. congressmen to obey the Constitution. And when I was first hired by the John Birch Society back in two thousand nine, I was sent to the state of Montana, which at the time had one congressman across the entire state. It was the largest population congressional district because they were right on the verge of getting two congressmen. And within about four months, our congressman went from following the Constitution about half the time to his score jumped up dramatically. He got up to an eighty percent lifetime's best score ever. And then he eventually got to a ninety percent in following the Constitution. And this is all based upon us holding him accountable to the Constitution. As I went around the state, The things I did were really twofold. Let's teach the Constitution and let's publish their scorecards. And the scorecards are a great way to teach the Constitution, especially the U.S. Congress ones, because they pick a handful of issues over the last six months and they explain how this bill squares with the Constitution. So it's a mini lesson on the Constitution. So as we're sharing the scorecard around that congressional district, people started asking him. I love it. First time I ever did this. I went to one of his town hall meetings. His name was Denny Reberg, Congressman, and he was following the Constitution fifty to sixty percent of the time. I stood at the door dressed in a white shirt and tie as people are coming into his town hall meeting, handing out his scorecard. And my favorite comment was a couple had picked up the scorecard and went and sat down at some chairs fairly near me. I was able to overhear the conversation. The husband leaves over to the white holding a scorecard and showing him and says, honey, I don't think he is with Congressman Reberg's office because this doesn't look good for Congressman Reberg. They assume there was otherwise. But then as the meeting began, Congressman Reberg, I wanted to ask you about your vote here on this issue and where you felt you had the constitutional authority to vote for that. That was the mood of the meeting thereafter. And as a good politician, he would talk about and around the issue without ever really answering their question and then move on to another topic. He was really sweating it. He was trying to look good without ever admitting, yeah, I totally violated the Constitution. But it was almost immediate that he started looking to the Constitution for his votes as we started doing that. So that's part of the Power of Five Hundred. Power of Five Hundred, as the video was brought up on the screen here a moment ago from the JBS website, it really goes into how we, at several different layers, are able to use our influence as we implement one portion of it's called the one hundred ten six program. One hundred is a hundred households that we're sharing information with on a regular basis. And that might be your neighborhood. That might be local businesses. But as we're reaching out to people within our community, we're sharing things like like Matthew was talking about. The War on Farmers article or whatever articles from our magazine, helping share understanding from a constitutional perspective of what's going on in today's issues. And then from there, the ten is ten people within your community that are influential. Ten people of influence. And that could be people in politics, that could be prominent business owners or whomever. And you're on a regular basis sharing information with them, helping them have a better constitutional viewpoint on today's political issues. And then the sixth is that you're choosing six people that you feel like would be good candidates for being activists like you. People that you're helping court along the way to help wake them up and help bring them along to Join your side as someone who's helping spread the word about defending the Constitution, fighting for liberty, and so on. And in that category, one of the things I've done a lot is just let's host classes on the Constitution, invite people to come to these classes. The first time that happened to me, this is really what woke me up more than a dozen years ago, was a friend, a neighbor of mine, invited me to a class on the Constitution, which he told me was going to be held in my living room. And okay, so I showed up to my own living room to this class on the Constitution. And that was what ignited me. As I began to study the Constitution, I recognized two things. Number one, we're really not following the Constitution in any honest way today. And number two, if we were, it would solve most of the problems our nation's facing today. And That then ignited under me a passion to do everything I can to help defend the Constitution, to help teach others about the Constitution, because I concluded the main reason we're not following the Constitution today is because, and this is Hamilton in Federalist Sixteen, he points to the people are the natural guardians of the Constitution. The people have that responsibility to enforce the Constitution. And yet we don't know the Constitution. How can we defend and guard the Constitution if we don't know the Constitution. And that's where I began hosting classes on the Constitution. I began looking for more classes on the Constitution. I studied every class I could find out there online and eventually decided we need to create our own class on the Constitution that's specifically designed for the activist, the people who don't just want academic knowledge of the Constitution. These are people who want to know what they can do to defend and enforce and reinstate the Constitution as the supreme law of our land. And so that's where eventually the Constitution is the Solution video series was created, was to help educate someone who's concerned about the direction our nation is going and turn them into an activist that knows what they need to know to sustain and defend the Constitution. So that's all part of the one hundred ten six part of the power of five hundred program that we use to outreach and really turn our communities to understanding and defending freedom again. And the great part of that program too, Donna is, and for your listeners too, you know, is if they haven't been falling asleep from me talking is that it is. Now they're all still here. The numbers are going up. I always watch who's, how many people are watching. That's great. So I would tell you that if you have a town and you are going to have a constitution as class solutions class, I would do, I would tell you to do what I do is you have an Excel sheet. Every chapter should have an Excel sheet, every group of people. That's has every elected and non-elected official in your town and from your mayor, your town manager down to the dog catcher. And those people should be part of your contact sheet. And for every public event you have, they should be invited to it. So have a constitution as the solution class, get outside the choir. Okay. Don't stop worrying about the people that watch Tucker Carlson and getting them to agree with the minutia that you have about your view of the world. Okay. Start talking to the people out there that are going to be enslaved just like you. You need them. They are your allies. And if you don't teach them about the Constitution, guess what? They are going to hurt you. That is all there is to it. OK, that's what they're being trained to do. They're being trained to turn you in. We were handing out scorecards down in Merrimack. I think it was Merrimack, me and Megan Schmidt. And we were walking around this like outside mall, like, you know, And some lady said, you should get permission to do that. We went throughout the whole place. Nobody ever complained about it. And it was this little luggage place. And we said, okay, I guess we're not buying luggage at this place anymore. But eventually, sometimes you're going to get pushback. But most people, if you're not there to overwhelm them, don't try to. I'm going to tell people this. Stop trying to debate them. Don't download everything you know. about anything to anybody. Okay. Nobody's interested in your crazy theories. They're going to think you're crazy. Number one, just say, Hey, would you like to come to a class? Let's just talk about some basic things that we agree on. Here's a class, here's a scorecard. And then if you're really good and you have a constitution as the solution class going on while you're doing your literature, drop, put these, put a flyer up at your gas stations, find out your allies, at least, you know, for that first tier. of influence of people around you. Because quite honestly, if the freedom movement was unified, and it's not, okay, it's not at all, we would not be having as many problems as we have. So we first of all have to get under a banner of what we agree on. And that is the Constitution is the solution class. Once we arrive at that, basic level, then we can start talking about the other minutiae. But for me, none of that stuff is necessary. The most important thing that's necessary, Donna, is having a conversation with your neighbor about how you are being seduced into slavery. But include your neighbors. Talk to them nicely. Go to your shops and businesses. The little kids are behind the counter. You know, everybody's always like that. I mean, how do you talk to kids these days? Well, certainly don't talk to them about their pink hair. Certainly don't start attacking them on the most volatile issue that you can. You say, you know, you say, look, you see this number on the scorecard. This is how your congressman is voting and it's affecting you. One gal in a shop was visibly shaking and I talk very softly. How are you doing there? These are people. These are allies that you haven't made yet. So we have to change our attitude and disposition. Robert Brown, John Birch Society have created the perfect tools for us. Now it's time for us to get our attitude together about how we talk to our neighbors. So, yeah, I've been doing a lot of preaching. I'm going to start pounding the pulpit here once in a while. But I believe strongly in this. I've worked on the other side. OK, I went to a picnic one time, you know, here in Maine. And I was, you know, like this one guy provided all the food. This is what you often see at freedom events is, you know, it's almost like a haphazard, like a bunch of people with dyslexia. Parkinson's got together and tried to put something together and uh and it's it's really just it's like okay no wonder I mean look I watched my ex-wife a democrat you know uh she was the head of social security and if she had an event there would be people with your money walking around with silver trays and canapes on them and uh you know but the freedom movement we don't we have to remind people to bring like bring utensils okay bring water for people to drink like if you have a class Bring water for crying out loud. Stop, you know, stop acting like an animal. Okay. This people are going to be impressed by the first things that you do. So, you know, when you see Robert Brown do a presentation, he looks nice. He has a nice shirt on, you know, he's not showing you all his tattoos and everything or whatever it is, you know, try, try not to branding yourself less is better. Okay. You know, try to be as neutral as you can. I'm not saying tattoos are bad. I'm not saying that at all. That was just for my friends that are listening. I'm saying that for their benefit. But the thing is, is that present your best side. Don't try to win loyalty based on what party that they love. You know, don't try to gauge their loyalty on who they like, who they watch. You'll get that a lot. Who do you watch? Who's your favorite? Do you like Donna? Because if you don't watch Donna, I'm not going to talk to you, okay? That's how it is in the freedom movement. Right. And you don't want like Robert Brown. I'm not going to talk to you. So meet personalities. It's gotten to be just all these personality nonsense instead of issues. And I got in trouble one time. I did. I got done with the presentation. I said to the audience, I said, could you guys please stop worrying about liking each other? Like, could you just grow up? I mean, I don't like any of you. OK, I don't even want to be here. OK, I don't want to be around people. I'm out of my comfort zone. OK, I'm doing something that is horribly hard for me. OK, I don't do this because, oh, I want to be famous. I do this because God has asked me to do it. I believe he has. And it's uncomfortable and it's painful. And I and I have to learn from mentors like Robert Brown, who are going to keep me in check the whole time. Find people around you that can mentor you. Find people that you could role model after. That's what we have to do. Certainly not Mark Levin. OK, if you're running around making fun of Democrats or Republicans or anybody like that, it's OK for us to kid each other. But if you're running around hurting each other, chances are you're not helping God fulfill his mission to save souls. Well, we all have to remember that we all have biases. And I think one of the goals is to get rid of those personal biases. And one of the prayers that. that I ask God for help with every day is help me to see the situation and people through your eyes, not mine. Because we are our own worst enemy in that regard. You know, your best friend may be the person that, you know, the best friend that you ever met in your life. Maybe that person that says uncomfortable things to you because they actually care and they care more about you than they care about your opinion of them, you know, to call them out on things. That's, that's real. That is actually real love. I had a friend of mine, she, I was very young and it impacted me my whole life. And she told me like when she had her first baby and she realized that everybody she met was a baby at one time, you know, and she just viewed the whole world differently. And I said to myself, you know, these are children of God. You know, and so we're not here to be at war with each other. You know, and then, of course, you'll see people like God, you know, hated people and destroyed private property. And, you know, and it's like anything to justify their anger. We're all angry. But let's turn that to something positive. Well, it takes discernment, you know, a lot of discernment. And I think we should ask for discernment, which is understanding what the, you know, what the truth is around us, you know, and asking for those gifts of the spirit discernment and wisdom is how we carry it out. You know, wisdom is how we carry out the discernment and, you know, and how we wisely approach things, I think. And remembering that the people who do wicked and really evil things that are for self are And at the expense of other people, you know, a true psychopath that doesn't care who they step on is a totally different person than the majority of us who are just human beings making mistakes. I mean, the Bible clearly lays it out that we're in a fallen world. We're all like a bunch of little kids, you know, flopping around in life, trying to figure out what's, you know, like a fish out of water, trying to figure this thing out because it's, it's uncomfortable and there's a lot of threats around us and such. And so we do quite often, we don't do the right thing every time. And so that's where we give each other grace, mercy, but then we also come and we tell each other, Hey, it looks like you're struggling there a little bit, buddy, and you need a little help. And, uh, a lot more forgiveness to go around you know we need a little bit more I I totally love the way you talk we talked a million times on the phone I love your language and um I don't you know at the risk of sounding like a hippie we all probably should just hug each other before we start a conversation and then hug afterwards and then be done with it you know it's like I don't know I guess I'm a product of this you know of a world that I saw that was kind of like turned upside down I grew up in the city and I want to see I believe the constitution was created for the greatest amount of people to get along didn't mean that everybody else was left out but you know it was definitely the the most amazing like god-inspired document that ever was created for man I mean people were enslaving each other just for existing you know they were just people were just killing each other for no reason whatsoever they were throwing each other in volcano into volcanoes I mean the world was and and and so here we are in this country and it's like We just if we limit government, we'll get along. We'll be fine. We can we can take care of each other under moral law. You know, and that's Robert Welch in the blue book spends two chapters talking about personal responsibility. There is no freedom without personal responsibility. So what is the blue book you have to introduce? What is the blue book? Oh, well, the blue book is the eleven twelve speeches that Robert Welch gave. in nineteen fifty eight at the end of nineteen fifty eight where he called some people together about starting the John Birch Society. And it is the philosophical matrix of what we believe as an organization and what we're fighting and the reasons why the John Birch Society was created. And how did I do on that, Robert? I mean, this is like the most horrible thing that could have ever happened to me in my entire life. So, um, But so you have to read the Blue Book. I make everybody read the Blue Book. When I joined the John Birch Society in nineteen ninety eight, you were handed the Blue Book and you were expected to have read it by the next chapter meeting, because without reading that, you cannot understand what it was. And here's the thing. You read the Blue Book and after you're done with it, you are now a different person that it's that transformational for me. I could not understand for a while I was a Democrat. For a while I was, you know, oh, we got to save the environment and why are we killing the whales? And then I was like, oh, we can't let people starve, you know, because, you know, being a Catholic with all the social teaching there. And then, and I was like, okay, but definitely like the, at a certain point I was ready in my life at the age of saying both the Republicans and the Democrats really don't care about anybody. And I was like, I was, I was ready to give up. And then I read the blue book and I was like, here it is. And honestly, when I, this is just me and I'm going to share this. I'm sorry. But the Blue Book will transform the way you view everything that's happening around you. It will strip you of your partisanship. It will strip you of this idea that there are so many multiple value systems coming at you. There's only one thing that's coming at you as a government, and that's collectivism. And that's what Robert Welch spends most of his time talking about. And the Constitution is the most important the best bulwark against collectivism, which is a naturally occurring cancer in every society. And I don't know if you saw that presentation, Donna, but scholars have been talking about it for decades. I mean, everybody knows it exists. It is a natural tendency that happens with mankind. And then what Robert Welch saw when he was writing the Blue Book is that this was a purposeful collapse that was being created. They were using the natural tendency that humans have towards collectivism, and that's when the alarms went off. And he created the John Birch Society because he realized he couldn't do it alone. So for you guys out there in the freedom movement with your millions of ideas, let's understand that we have to get together and work with each other. And if we disagree, as Robert Walsh said again, we don't tackle people in our own backfield, okay? It's like, okay, go do your thing. You want to do whatever tactical civics, that's fine. But don't yell at me if I don't agree with you Because that has happened too. I have people come into John Birch Society events and go, well, I'm tactical civics and I have a new idea. And one of the things you have to know is like every five minutes, there's a new group with a new name. You just have to type in the words in your search bar on Facebook, like liberty and freedom, and you'll get like a thousand different hits. It's made that way to absolutely distract us and divide us. I mean, that's another diversional tactic. But that's a natural tendency. See, the natural tendency is for us to organize. Our natural tendency is to create solutions for our problems. And so the globalists use that natural tendency to create permanent collectivist structures to permanently run our lives. OK, so it's OK for people to want to get together and do things. But the freedom people need to ask themselves, is there already a group doing this? And if they are, what I always say is whatever group you join, go be the best member of that group. Do everything you can. Fight with that group as much as you can. Don't divide them. Don't go, oh, well, I don't like the way this guy picks his nose, so I'm going to go do something else. I mean, they do. They over ridiculous things. And so. Just work with that group as much as you can. Be a loyal member to that group until it's done. And so, yeah. I love this. I love this discussion so much. I'd like you guys to come back on again and do this again because I think this is a wonderful discussion. I hope you – we were talking about it tonight, and Robert and Matthew had not been on the show before, so everybody's always like, we don't know how this is going to go the first time. I know everybody's the same way. And, and I hope you had a good time with this because this is the way it kind of goes. It's like a, it's like an amoeba. The show is kind of like stretches and moves into different positions and, and, and hopefully it goes in the direction that God wants us to go. So how about we do this? I'm going to say a prayer. If you guys, if one of you guys wants to say a prayer, I would love that. Would you like to say, Robert, you want to say a prayer today? Did Matthew just volunteer me there? We're going to volunteer you. How about you do the prayer today? And then we'll, we'll end with a few statements and then we'll go and stay out. I'll end the stream. We'll have a few minutes to talk and then I'd love to have you back on again. So go ahead, Robert. All right. Thank you. Our father in heaven. We are so thankful for this opportunity we've had today to share with one another, our experiences and, understanding of this great legacy of freedom we've inherited from our forefathers. We are so thankful for those who have gone before, who have fought and even bled and died and sacrificed all, that we may have liberty. We pray that we may be good stewards over this great inheritance, that we may find those who will be allies with us in standing for truth, for right, and in defending the liberty of this land, that we can learn ways of finding harmony and agreeance rather than fighting against one another. That as the enemies seek to divide us, we can find ways to unite. We pray over our efforts that they may continue to preserve liberty for the next generation. that we may have thy guidance in the actions we take. These things we pray in the name of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Thank you so much. So let's do a lightning round here. Last few comments. We'll go Matthew and Robert, and then I'm going to end it with my normal, non-conceding message. So go ahead. Now I'm good. You have to watch out. So I would tell you this. If you're out there and you're listening to Donna Brandenburg She's a great gal. She has a wonderful presence. So here's the thing. Find and make relationships with people about you. These are permanent spiritual relationships. Look at your freedom movement as a fellowship. Look at it as a fraternity. Look at it as a brotherhood. Find ways to ask your God to help you to be a better person in what you have to do. This is not just about you. This is about everybody. This is about God's God's kingdom. And if you're not using this opportunity and freedom movement to enhance your relationship with Jesus Christ, you're missing a great opportunity. So anyway, hope you answer the call. I would conclude with saying the Constitution is the solution that we meet. As we stated earlier, we need to be a moral and religious people. We need to understand liberty and defend the Constitution. And we also need to understand the enemies of freedom and what their tactics are. All of those reasons combined is why I chose to spend my time, my political effort with the John Birch Society. They prioritize those issues as how we can help preserve and defend the liberty we've inherited. Constitution is the solution. Thank you so much, Donna. I've really enjoyed being on your show today. Oh, that's awesome. I love having you guys on here today. It's so fantastic. And we'll have these guys back on again, and we're going to continue to talk about some of these really deep subjects because we really need to learn. We need to learn more. I need to learn more. I mean, I know that, you know, we all know what's in our heads and such, and that's pretty limited. But when you get all of us together, it's amazing how much wisdom that we can bring to the table as a group of people who are committed to to the United States of America, to the world, and to God, to our families, to everything good that we treasure. We fight not just because of the things that we dislike or we hate. There's a lot of things that I absolutely despise. I mean, if you guys would have heard me go off yesterday on developers and how they have rigged the system here to commandeer our land and such, and I mean that to be the big corporate developers, you know, like BlackRock and China and that sort of thing. But when we come together and we fight for what we love, we fight for each other, we fight for each other's rights, even the people we disagree with, we have to fight for them and give them their ability to have an opinion and a voice and not censoring. That's why I don't censor here. You'll hear everything here. And it's an important part of the process. The question is, are we strong enough to stand on those principles? Are we going to get offended when somebody says something that hurts our feelings and then go off? Or are we going to stand and just say, well, well, well, and process it and maybe do a little bit of investigation so we can have a sane discussion about and help educate each other. That's really what we need to do. And with that said, it's time, boys and girls, go to ding, ding, ding, ding, brandbrookforgovernment.com because I'm the best non-concealer who's ever not conceded in the history of the United States of America. And I'd like to have a discussion with the rightful president of the United States, President Donald J. Trump, in cowboy boots. I wear them better because I wear them all the time. And then we'll talk about real stuff. And so and so goes it. So thank you guys for joining us today. And just for everyone, remember, God bless you. God bless all those whom you love and God bless America. Make it a great day. It's a choice. It's a choice. Every every minute of our lives is a choice. We were given that to make a difference, to to find things that God wants us to do, to smile at people in the in the checkout lane. to say a kind word to someone, to look at those hard things and stand up. Even when nobody else agrees with us, when we see something wrong, it's an act of bravery to do that. And we have those opportunities every day. And you can always ask God to show you what it is that you need to be doing. With that said, we're going to end the broadcast. And this is when things get really fun and we have more discussion. But these guys will be back on again. Have a great day. And I won't be on tomorrow, maybe Friday. All right.