Dixon & Vining Hour 4 (010224)

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All right. Welcome back to the Dixon and Vining Show. Brian Dawson filling in for Richard and Val as they are out on a much deserved and earned vacation joined by Pastor Rich Lusk of Trinity Presbyterian Church here in Birmingham down on 119. I continue to emphasize its location in case you're curious when you have a base pastor in here throwing down like rich. You may think to yourself, my God, I wish my pastor talked like that. Well,

If you make rich your pastor, you can. Uh, so go on down there and give them a visit. Yeah. Come, come check us out. So, um, well, here we are the final hour. We're going to land the plane. We've talked a lot about immigration. We've talked a lot about, uh, and I think we're having conversations that not a lot of people are having. And it's not because they don't believe what we believe either. They haven't figured it out or articulated. They didn't, they've never heard it spoken about this way before.

Maybe they're scared to talk about it because it's outside of the realm of orthodoxy when it talks about immigration's nations, peoples.

all that kind of stuff, whatever. But a lot of these thoughts that we have are not new thoughts. We're not coming up with new things. It's because we've read these things called books. Books are good. And I've got seven children. We homeschool in the beyond. We've got kids that play the piano, kids that play violin, kids that play sports, all this other stuff. But more than anything that I want to impress upon my children is a love of reading and a love of learning.

And so I make them read books, read, read, read, read, read. And I remember when I was a child, I would go around town and the little town I grew up in spent the majority of my life in a little town, Derby, Kansas. And we drive around the neighborhood and I would see what would be obviously the poorer side of town and then the middle class side of town and then the bigger house side of town.

And I would always think to myself, what is it that separates these people? Why are these people rich and these people poor? What makes them different and everything else? And I've always continued to ask myself that question over the rest of my life. And one of the things that I have figured out, and I interact with tons of wildly successful people, in order to do 18, 19 news, I have to hang out with people who can fund it. And these are people who are, you know, worth tens of millions, not hundreds of millions, and some of them, even billions of dollars. And I talk to them, and you know what, all these wildly successful people do, Rich?

read, they read, they read the books. He reads leads. Yeah, that's right. They don't read social media all day. Yeah, they probably, they probably use it, probably check it some, which, yeah, it's okay. But do not let social media keep you from reading books. There's, there's a huge difference between the, the, the, the kind of thinking that you learn to do from interacting with a book and it's, and say it's extended argument versus just this little bite size things that you get on social media.

attention span, ability to follow an argument, ability to make an argument. Yeah. And I think just the act of reading is like lifting weights for your brain. Absolutely. So even if the content's not unbelievably great, though, I don't have a lot of time to read bad books. I only want to read the good ones. So if you're going to read, make it a good book, but just the act of reading long form content

actually shapes and develops your brain and so we are here to highly encourage you to do that uh... rich what was i think you were the one that told me about tucker carlson's dad in the argument he made about book people in magazine people was that you that told me that story i don't think so but that it does sound familiar i think i probably told me this but well you've you've you've you've you've filling in you see you know he's a team up to them up for the spike all right so uh... it's this idea that tucker carlson's dad

You know, in Tucker Carlson was a magazine writer, like that was his best stuff. There's a book, again, a book that I read in 2023. I think it was called the long slide talking about journalism in America. I thought it was going to be a book of Tucker Carlson talking about the decline of journalism. It wasn't. It was actually all of his best columns that he's written and all these major national publications. And so he is a magazine writer, but his dad told him, if I remember this correctly,

you know, don't be a magazine reader, be a book reader. And he basically, you know, kind of, kind of sending when he talked about people who read magazines. Well, what magazines were then is what social media is now and it was the same. Yeah. And, um, it, uh, it's this idea of exactly what rich just laid out. You need to read long form books that are well documented and well researched and well argued so that you can follow these things out, exercise your brain, learn to think and then learn to communicate by doing that.

versus these short form punchy forms of communication. It's just, it's different and you need to train your mind. And so I will say, I might make Pastor Rich Blush, see if I can do it, maybe not. He's not a blushing guy, so I'm probably not gonna be able to do that. I went to his house the other day and I go down and his wife welcomes me in. He's like, okay, go down to, you know, Rich's study. And so I go down into the kind of basement area of the house and the study.

And it's a very large office. Like it's, it's bigger than this studio probably by about twice the size. And it's got, I don't know, eight or 10 foot ceilings and the entire thing has bookshelves all the way around the entire office. I'm talking Florida ceiling bookshelves, the entire office is covered. And each bookshelf is like two or three books high and like two or three books deep all the way around this huge room. I'm talking more books than any other, like, than most libraries in most cities. Okay.

is Rich's study, and I'm like, hey, Rich, have you read all these books? He's like, there's a couple I haven't, and it's like most of my... I've read most of them twice. Yes, that's it. No, actually they're monuments to my ignorance. Yes. Reminders of what I don't yet know. Yeah. Talk about your library, Rich. Well, I do love books. I would say if somebody struggles with reading, you know, you compared it to like a muscle, I would say,

The more you read the better you get at it. Yeah, I would say don't waste your time reading things that are not high quality Yeah, whether you're reading fiction or nonfiction read stuff. That's really good. That's high quality And make a discipline of it just like you do with exercise and diet and sleep Make it make a lifelong habit of being a reader and a learner

I think that's really something that in our entertainment saturated culture is really missing. Yeah. Yeah. And if you read a lot, you won't be the low IQ guy on Twitter either. I've been interacting with some of them this morning. Wow. This guy could read a few more books. Yeah. I remember a criticism. But down Twitter and go read a book. I sometimes find myself safe. Yeah. And my old boss is a media executive, a gentleman by the name of Lee Habib. He created Laura Ingram's radio show. He's the guy that trained me in media

absolutely brilliant. And I remember there was this up and coming, you know, radio star. I'm not going to say who it was. And I was, you know, talking about something that I heard from this person, I'm like, man, it was really good. And he goes, yeah, you're talking about like one of the best at developing radio talent in the world. And he's like, that person could afford to read a few more books. And so when you're feeling three hours a day, well, I guess here on Talk9954 hours a day, a bunch of crazy folks here doing four hour radio shows,

There's got to be something going on between the ears to make it for four hours a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year, I guess 50 weeks where we come in to fill in on those other two. But there has to be something going on between the ears. You have to fill that machine with more information to talk about rather than just talking about current events to really hold an audience. And I think everyone here at this station does that well. That's why it's the highest rated news talk station in the state of Alabama.

Um, but point being we're just continuing to try and sell you on the idea of why you need to be reading books. We want, we're like a Robert F Kennedy when he like peels his shirt off and he's just jacked at like 70 years old and he's frying his turkey and like, you know, some type of healthy lard or whatever. And it's like this commercial to like get in shape. That's me and Rich with books. So listen to us for the rest of this hour and then turn off the radio and go read a book. That's right.

Well, actually, no, keep listening to talk about a problem with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep listening to talk 99.5 until you just can't take any more and then, you know, then you'll read a book, but. So, um, on that, um, we're, we'll hit a break. And when we come back from the break, we're going to talk about.

Um, some of the best books we've read, uh, what did we read in 2024? Uh, and then what we're going to read in 2025 and, and, and, uh, just kind of, I mean, I guess it'd be a bunch of brief book reviews on, um, if you're wondering where should you start reading? There's so much content out there. There's so many books to read where, where should you begin book recommendations from people who read lots of books are always good. Um, and I'll give you some that are a much easier read and some that maybe a little bit more of a challenge.

But it'll really begin to form and shape your thinking specifically on conservative political philosophy, history of Western civilization, all kinds of really good stuff when we come back from this break. Again, you're listening to the Dixon and Vining Show here on Talk 99.5. We'll be back. That is a Spanish guitar. And it sounds nice.

well welcome back to the dixon and binding show brine dawson's the of eighteen ninety news here uh... guest hosting uh... with rich lust pastor of trinity press peterian church again uh... do another shout out here to eighteen ninety news uh... if you guys like content we produce you guys obviously uh... if you if you're listening to this you hear uh... quite a bit of it uh... whether it's at the top of the hour with our news breaks or articles that are being talked about or when leland writes for us or or or or and so there's a lot of interaction we are the official news

provider and an official news partner for Talk99.5. And if you appreciate that content, you get our newsletter, all of these things, support the work we're doing financially. We are a citizen supported news network. That's why we provide news for citizens and not corporations or radical leftists. So go to the website, 1819news.com. Go to the top says become a member. Click there. You can sign up to become a member today.

Let's jump on into it. Well, I'll just continue the plug real quick. You know, people ask me all the time, where do you get your news, especially, you know, as a pastor, you get a lot going on. What, how do you get your news?

The daily detail from 18-19 is a great way to get your news. Just every morning, great little summary of what's going on, very succinct, but also really gets you up to speed on things. And then, of course, the articles, the in-depth journalism that you guys do, things going on in our state, incredibly helpful. So, 18-19 news, really good stuff.

And I also have a podcast that's worth, uh, yeah. I've been monologuing more as of late, which is interesting. So anyway, I haven't listened to your latest one on populism in Alabama. I'm looking forward to that. So I went back and watched it myself. I think that the content is actually really, really good. If I don't say so myself.

When it's a monologue, it's kind of hard to come. Do you agree with yourselves? Yeah, no. But I do think the information was really, really good, but it's like I'm more of a passionate communicator. There's a lot of humor in my, you know, and there was some of that in the podcast as well, but my first monologue I did, it was much more of that. This last one, it was a lot of more cerebral. It was, it was a lot of, you know, thinking and thoughts more than it was passionate communication.

So it came off different than my first one. I'm still kind of learning, but I think overall I've gotten lots of compliments on the monologues I've done. Hopefully that will continue. But in order to do monologues, you know what I have to do? You have to read. I have to read so that I can do the monologues. You have something to talk about and you have to know what you're talking about. That's right. I at least pretend to. And so on that,

Books for the new year, um, books that we read last year and really just overall, uh, best books that we read that we highly recommend. My, the best book I've probably ever read outside of the Bible. That's just, that was just the most engaging. I couldn't put the thing down and it was just an unbelievable story that changed my life, which is, it's, it's, it's, it's nonfiction, but there's two types of nonfiction, nonfiction is kind of biographical story.

And then there's like more informative, you know, political philosophy, argumentation. And I'm sure there's other types as well, but those are kind of where I play. And so my best biography I've ever read that just ensnared me from the moment I opened the book to the time I finished it is the White Horse King by Ben Merkel. And then the

The book that has the most impact on me and my political philosophy that absolutely radicalized me and sent me down this road that caused me to get into conservative media and start my own news company and fight back against the commies was the death of the West by Pat Buchanan. So White Horse King by Dr. Benjamin Merkel, White Horse King, which is about King Alfred, the great.

the death of the West by Pat Buchanan. Those are my top two recommendations. Rich, what do you got for? Well, I want to talk about your books for just a minute because I like those books too. I didn't read them in the last year. So I can't that they wouldn't fall in this category. But yeah, the White Horse King on King Alfred the Great. I think he's the only king with the title, The Great, the only English King with the title, The Great. 9th century King.

really brought Christendom to England in a very powerful way with the reforms of laws and the educational system. And so there's so much that for us living downstream from this, that we inherited from men like Alfred the Great, that we need to know who they are and what they accomplished so we can be grateful to God for what they did in the foundation of our civilization.

So, yeah, King Alfred is, and Merkel in the book does a great job of telling his story. It's actually a very exciting story. I'm surprised nobody's ever made a movie, at least to find knowledge. Nobody's ever made a movie of King Alfred's life, but they should. Not a legit one. Netflix did a stupid, you know, lecherous series that is not representative of who King Alfred was at all. Godly, man, but only came to the throne through a

crazy series of circumstances had to fight the Vikings. He actually went into, it's kind of like the story of King David in the Bible where he has to go into hiding for a while. He's like a king in the wild, a king in the wilderness. He has to gather his troops to him and all of this. It's a really amazing story and a very godly man who used his power for good and we need more of that in our world today. And the PAP Buchanan book, I mean, PAP Buchanan was, yeah, he was,

I say was, he's still living, but he's not as active, I guess now. But his book, The Death of the West is the best of his books. And it is a wonderful synopsis, basically, of what has gone wrong in America and in Western civilization with a lot of insight, I think, into how to fix those problems. Yeah. And Buchanan was very, he just had a lot of foresight as far as what was coming down the pike. The way I kind of describe what's happened is that

Pat Buchanan offered us MAGA in the 1980s and 1990s.

a Christian version of MAGA. We got a less Christian version of it, a more secularized version of it with Trump in the, you know, in the 2018s and now 2020s. But a lot of the same issues that I think Trump blashed onto, like the immigration issue and what that means for our nation economically and our civilization. I think Buchanan was seeing that clearly. He saw the need for

the moral framework that the Christian faith had provided for Western civilization and what that means. So yeah, incredibly important. I've got several books I could mention here. One that I read this year that I really enjoyed was very eye-opening to me. You know, the question sometimes comes up, are we living on stolen land? Are we living on land that was

forceably stolen from the Indians who rightfully owned it, and therefore do we somehow owe, say, reparations? Are we supposed to give the land back? What do we do with that? There's a book called Not Stolen by Jeff Finn Paul. Not stolen by Jeff Finn Paul. And the title tells you the thesis of the book. He argues basically that it's not that no land was stolen, but just as a general

account of what happened historically when the colonists came over, when this land, when European settlers came to this part of the world, they did not steal land from Indians.

just as a general rule. He's very honest about some of the problems with American history and some of the problems with the conquistadors and that kind of thing. He's very honest about the problems with the Trail of Tears and the way some of the relations with the Indians, how that was handled. But overall, it's really an incredible book.

It really gives you, I think, a very, it just gives you a lot of insight into how they thought. Columbus and those early settlers that came over from Europe were definitely not racists. He makes a very compelling case for that. A lot of what they said and did is very misunderstood because we don't have the context for it. And it's just a wonderful book that will help you understand

that your ancestors were not villains. Yeah. That you have a great deal to be thankful for, a great deal to be grateful for when it comes to what your ancestors did in settling this country. Yeah, which I think is great. And another thing that's helpful for that is watching Apocolipto. You know that movie. Oh my gosh, it's a Mel Gibson film. You haven't seen it. I haven't seen it anyway. All right. Well, we'll continue talking books and my theory on why it is that you don't know who King Alfred is.

Uh, on the other side of this break, this is the Dixon and Vining Show on Talk 1995. We will be back. All right. The music is kind of, it's kind of coming down now. It's like we can see the end from here guys. We've got 26 minutes to convince you of how we're going to take over the world. Well, at least Rich does. I'll be back tomorrow. Uh, so, um, but, um, before we go into any more books, I honestly think those three books right there,

If you just read those books, you would be radicalized and you would, you know, your Twitter account would have the red background with the shooting eyes coming out and everything if you just read these books. But I want to talk about something. All three of these books have in common and it's, it's, it's, uh, you know, you ever see like the, like, if you go to on the rumble to watch a podcast every time, it's like, you know, the regime doesn't want you to know.

And then they tell you this stupid thing, you know, and it's like, you know, the, the elites don't want you to know this, but here's the secret. Well, kind of in that whole thing that is actually really true, uh, historical revisionism is such a big part of communism, Marxism, woke mind virus, progressivism, the regime, whatever you want to call it. Uh, these people that are shooting Donald Trump in the head and, you know, blowing up Tesla trucks outside of Trump tower, these people,

that are losing power, power is slipping from their fingers and they can feel it. These people, how they've gotten into the position they have is through historical revisionism, taking over our education system. We had some collars where we kind of made that point. And a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big part of their effort is to villainize heroes and to turn villains into heroes. They want to galvanize

um, the view of heroes to people who are actually villains, Che Guevara, uh, people like that. And then they want to villainize heroes, George Washington, Christopher Columbus, people like that. And so, uh, in doing that, they're not only trying to villainize heroes, but they also want to just memory hole the greatest people who have ever lived. And I would bet of, you know, I don't know, 10,000 people listening five, I guess maybe it's a January 2nd and everyone's on vacation, maybe 5,000 people listening now, whatever it is.

I thought we had millions listening to us. Millions. But I would say a very, very small percentage of the people listening have any idea who King Alfred is was, and I am not going to say anything except the fact there's a reason you don't know who he is. There's a reason that he isn't talked about as much as George Washington used to be in the 80s, right? And now you don't even get much George Washington.

Thomas Jefferson raped his slaves. That's all you get. That's it. It doesn't matter that he wrote the, he was the one that wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was 33, right? Thomas Jefferson, that was him. Jefferson, yeah. Yeah, primary law. Getting my civics out. I went to public school too, to make sure I get that right.

Well, the thing about the rape is heavily disputed amongst real historians. Correct. Real ones that aren't communist Marxists that want to villainize heroes. I went to Monticello a few months ago, actually, and got the tour and everything. And of course, that's all they can talk about. Yeah.

They greatly minimize and marginalize all the other things Jefferson did. And it's mainly about the issue of slavery. Over here, you can see where he raped his slaves. And it's like, wow, I'm glad I paid for this tour. Yeah, so I mean, it was wonderful to see Monticello, but it was kind of frustrating the tour part of it. Yeah, and as a creationist, that's how I feel on any scientific, anything. Oh, yeah, yeah. In a hundred, could you, a billion years ago, this rock was formed. I'm like, where'd you come up with that one? Science.

But I digress. So the point is, if you knew who your fathers were, you would know, you would know who you are. You would know your heritage. You would know, uh, is Americans where we come from. That is our heritage is Western Europe. It is. We are New England in a sense. We are a lot of that, but then since then we've gotten the Scots Irish. We've gotten

Italians, we've gotten all of this. So either way, the European continent is what ultimately settled this land. And you go back and look at the kings of old and the great people in Western civilization. And I would throw in the crusades, Duke Godfrey of Blyon is amazing. That's another book. Defenders of the West that I highly recommend reading a real look at the crusades, not this gobbledygook that we're being taught. But the idea is, is if you knew who your fathers were,

You would know that there's a story that you're a part of, and I believe the story goes back to, and this is where the real catch is, is the story that God is telling in His creation and in the Bible and in church history and all of this. This is the storyline that we're involved in, okay?

And if we knew who our fathers in the faith were, King Alfred, if we knew who he was and what he did when he was facing similar circumstances, we would know what we were supposed to do, and we would resist the way that he resisted. We would fight the way that he fought, and we would fight for the same reasons that he fought. But they don't want us to know that because they want us wandering around blind, not knowing that we're actually part of a story arc.

There is a story that's being told and we are in it. And if we know our part, then we will play it. But they don't want us to know the story. And so they rip the story away from us. And it's the terms literally called deracination. It means to uproot. We're being uprooted from our culture and our heritage and our customs and our ways and our stories so that we won't continue on the way that we were.

Or they retell the story. This is what's really happening is that now, particularly so much of public education, but of course this is just all over the media, you're being trained to hate your story.

Hate your past, hate your heritage, hate your skin color, hate the civilization that produced all that we enjoy. And so modern man is afflicted, modern western man is afflicted with this deep sense of uncertainty about himself and even this deep sense of self-hatred. And that's not the way God wants us to live. That's not the way we're called to live. And so it's very, it's very distressing to see this kind of thing, especially when it's taught to kids.

and they're taught that everything about our nation is tear. In fact, that book that I mentioned already not stolen, one of the things he talks about is Thanksgiving and how the Thanksgiving narrative has kind of gotten hijacked. Thanksgiving is turned into something that we're supposed to be ashamed of and embarrassed about rather than

Actually, it's just a bunch of racist whites mistreating Indians that that's the whole history or narrative there. That's not the case at all. Historically, that's just not what happened. Again, like I said, they were not racist. They didn't even understand race in the way that we do. In fact, that was one of the things that Finn Paul points out in his book is that

You know, they didn't have, you know, the settlers who came to North America, they didn't have the same understanding of genetics. And this is pre Darwin. So they're not thinking in evolutionary terms. They really thought skin color was a function of latitude where you lived on the earth more than anything else. They did not think of the Indians as a different race at all.

fact they intermarried and intermingled with the Indians quite a bit. So there you go. Yeah, well, a lot of people are. I mean, that's what happened to a lot of the Indian population is that God absorbed

through intermarriage and intermingling, and it just got absorbed right in. So the whole idea that these were racists who came to commit genocide, the Finn Paul book shows that the whole genocide thing, it's just as much of a lie as the stolen land's thesis. There was no attempt to genocide the American Indians at all.

So yeah, we got to get our history straight. And so if you talk about reading, a big part of what you need to do is unlearn all the lies you were taught because you have been lied to and you need to learn the truth. And the truth definitely, you know, there are some things to be ashamed of in our history, our heritage.

in the past. There's no doubt about that. There are many things to be ashamed of, but there are many, many, I would say many more things and many weightier things to celebrate, to recover, to learn from, to be grateful for. And it's that sense of gratitude for those who have gone before us that I think is so important. Again, as a pastor, I keep bringing the Bible into it.

But I think it's an aspect of the Fifth Commandment. Honor your father and your mother. Honor those who went before you, who paved the way, who laid the foundations that you're building on today. Be grateful for them.

Yeah. And another commandment would also be the not lying, right? Right. Tell the truth. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, there's a really interesting story. I won't go into it, but in the book of judges, where basically there's a there's an invasion. Jeff is the best warrior. So he has even though he's got kind of a questionable background himself, he's summoned to do the fighting

And the whole first part of the chapter is Judges chapter 11 is basically historical dispute where Jeff has to set the records straight. They basically say to the Israelites, you stole our land from us. And Jeff says, no, actually, let me tell you what really happened. And if you go back and you look at the account of Israel,

In the wilderness, they did not take the land that they were accused of taking there. And so he sets this historical record straight. And it's like, what a great model that is. And it was really in that particular context, an act of diplomacy. But it's also, he was able to do this because he knew his history. We need to know our history so we can set the record straight and say, no, you don't have that right. This is what really happened.

The unlearning thing is really interesting because I tell a lot of people, I take a lot of flak because of how critical I am of the public education system. And I believe I'm 100% justified in my, uh, not only critique, but just absolute, um, I mean, just the absolute, I, I, I tell people like your child would literally be safer if you dropped them off in the Saharan desert with a knife, uh, then some of these public schools that they go to, not only from a physical safety standpoint, but also the spiritual well-being world of the things that are being taught and the things that their friends are showing them on the cell phones.

I mean, all of this stuff, it is insane to me. And then even in a lot of the universities and stuff, when you send your kids to these universities, which I think you have, my kids aren't college age yet, prepare them so that when they go in there and they're going to be up against these lies, these myths, this historical revisionism, and we need to be able to, they are children need to be able to

refute it with sound knowledge of the actual history. Yeah. That's really good. I totally agree with you. Yeah. All right. Well, coming up on our last break before the end of the show, we're going to hit that, come back, and we'll finish up this conversation. This is the Dixon and Vining Show here on Talk99.5. We will be back. All right, and we're back. Last segment here before I go find something else to do to keep myself busy. I don't live in Birmingham, and so I'm just going to be wandering around aimlessly.

to kill time until I come back at like five in the morning tomorrow. Anyway, so I think I want to put a little bow on the conversation we're having here. I think the biggest takeaway from everything that this entire conversation is actually a holistic conversation in the sense that every bit of it except maybe the prisons, it actually ties very well together in the sense we started to talk about immigration. What does it mean to be an American?

H1B visas and the pushback against that to these books that we're reading and everything else. It's a whole conversation and it's the idea that we've come up, I don't know, we've been indoctrinated into believing that what does it mean to be an American? Well, as long as your feet are touching the soil here, it doesn't matter where you came from, how you were raised, what your beliefs are, who your God is, what language you speak.

As long as you pay lip service to the ideals of democracy and your feeder on our soil, you too can be an American. And we would push back against that. We say that's not true. There's more to be an American than that. And I think we have to get over all of us who've been indoctrinated into thinking that way need to begin to think differently.

And I think those books that we we talked about the death of the West by Pat Buchanan the White Horse King by Ben Merkel and not stolen by Jeff Finn Paul Jeff Finn Paul so read those books start to you know Maybe that'll begin to shift your your your mind on that to a little bit different way of thinking So yeah, I think I think we've made a lot of good points

I think that it was a really good conversation and glad you guys have been with us on it. And I'm going to let Rich close out with one more book that is a little bit kind of the same but different than what we've been talking about. Yeah, I'll mention one more book that I read this year that was right towards the top of my list as far as books that I thought were helpful and insightful. It's Abigail Schreier's book.

It's called bad therapy, why the kids aren't growing up. It's got the word therapy in the title. It's I would say really a parenting book. Maybe you've heard people talk about gentle parenting. If so, this is a book you need to read because in my view, she really exposes a lot of the problems with so-called gentle parenting. I mean, obviously parents should be

gentle in a certain way. But gentle parenting is a philosophy of parenting that basically is non-judgmental, never tells a child no, certainly does not use any corporal punishment, focuses on the child's feelings. And so you're constantly asking that question, how do you feel? How does this make you feel? And it turns the child very, it's a very therapeutic approach to parenting, basically is what it is.

And she shows how this is actually made things far for worse for children, that by training children to focus on their feelings, say, rather than their duties and obligations, that actually we create children who are an emotional mess. I mean, so we talked about this already. I'm Gen X.

Certainly, Gen Xers didn't have the perfect childhood, but we had a real childhood. We didn't have a childhood that was dominated by phones. We were mostly outside, playing in the neighborhood, riding bikes, lots of unsupervised play. And what I would consider a sort of a normal childhood, certainly a normal American childhood. Children today, you have a lot of so-called helicopter parenting where the parent hovers right over the child. We have

parents who basically try to bubble wrap their children so they never experience anything difficult, challenging, or tough. And Abigail Schreier shows in her book that this is a disaster. Another book that I would say goes along with this. Well, another couple books actually, Jonathan Hates.

Jonathan Haidt's book, The Coddling of the American Mind, and then the newer book he just came out with called The Anxious Generation. Haidt really focuses more on the impact of social media. Shrier is really focusing more on the impact of therapy and therapeutic culture.

But they're both are really getting the same thing. And that is that parents are failing their children. The reason we have so many anxious children going around is because we have so many anxious parents, parents who really don't have any confidence in what they're doing. They don't have any confidence in their authority, the authority that God has assigned to them as parents. So they don't know how to lovingly exercise that authority.

over their children and in the lives of their children, they don't know how to do effective discipline that is consistent, that's not emotionally driven. And the result is just a disaster. So I would strongly recommend the Abigail Schreier book. If you've asked that question, why do so many young children today even have mental health issues, which weren't there a generation ago and certainly not there before that,

Uh, she will show you why that is the case. I don't think she has all the answers as far as what we should do instead of this therapeutic approach to parenting. For that, you'd have to go, uh, to other sources, but she does a really good job of showing what's wrong with the way that so many parents are seeking to raise their children today. Yeah. And again, how does that tie? I mean, keeping the conversation holistic. Well,

what I forget which color it was that called in and you know said that they had a friend that started a bakery and there was no one that could work at the bakery again this this goes into the fact the reason that we don't have workers that can go on to these construction sites workers that can go into these restaurants to make the tacos workers that can go into the engineering firms or whatever else goes back to our pedagogical system that always begins and ends with parents

But you can outsource that responsibility of discipleship, training, educating, training your children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. You can outsource parts and pieces of that to a school. I would obviously recommend a Christian school, but you can outsource it, but the responsibility is still yours. You have to be the one who's doing that. You can't just hire someone to raise your children and expect that that's going to turn out well.

Uh, and if we would take responsibility for the training of our children, the discipleship of our children, the raising and parenting of our children, uh, and provide them challenges and allow them to deal with adversity and actually, um, you know, experience hardships and you want to raise resilient children. Correct. And if we did that, we were, we would produce children, um, you know, like our country used to produce that, uh, basically took over the world. So.

You know, I think we do have to get back to that. I think, I mean, my gosh, we could do a whole other four-hour radio show just on, you know, the parenting collapse that's existed, that exists in our country now, how we got there, why we're here, so on and so forth. But I think another conversation I think is really interesting, too. It's multifaceted in

One, you know, so they say, well, you know, why are we drafting daughters in the NDAA? I have five daughters. I have seven children, five of which are daughters. I don't like a lot of this language being thrown around about drafting our daughters. And one of my friends wrote one of the senators that was involved in that and the response the office sent back to him is that, you know, very Vivek, Ramazwami, all of our young men are fat and worthless. And so we have to send our, apparently, our fat, worthless daughters too.

Um, to, to have a force formidable enough to take down China. That was essentially the argument. It's like, okay, well, can we stop teaching, you know, trans this in school? Maybe we may be RFK can whip the end into shape. Yeah. But he's probably in better shape than a lot of our teenage men. And that's kind of my point is like, man, have children eating healthy, have them doing physical activity, uh, parent them correctly. And, and basically that's really the root is, is that what are we doing with the next generation? So, uh, I think that

Would help us go along a long long way So yeah, and I guess we're coming up pretty pretty close here 10 seconds to manage to fill the four hours We did and I feel like we could do another four hours back-to-back actually pretty easily With minimal to no show prep so don't tempt Andrew. Yeah

well with that uh... andrew mccain i don't know is he on vacation or see here steve over here okay so andrew mccain in person a voice that you're familiar with it will soothe any anxiety you have of your normal host being gone

Tune in, listen to him coming up next, and I will be back tomorrow morning filling in with Dixon Vining. Thanks for listening in.

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