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This is Undaunted Life. A man's podcast. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Let's get
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into it. Our guys have got a special guest on the podcast today. His name is Rod Dryer.
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He is a conservative writer, editor, producer, and documentarian. And he's a guy I've been
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wanting to get on the show for a long time, was going back through my emails. And I think
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I first reached out to him in like 2022 or 2023. Just so glad we can get this done.
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But he has a new book and an Angel Studios documentary series out called Live Not By Lies.
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And so the interesting thing about this guy is he's done so much work, so much writing
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in the conservative space. But it's almost like Live Not By Lies is a bit of his magnum
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opus, because this is where he talks about totalitarianism and specifically how Christians
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can respond to the predations of totalitarianism. And that's essentially what the last half
1:06
of the podcast is. But in the first half of the podcast, we were just talking, I'm just
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kind of looking at my notes here. You know, he lives in Hungary. Why does he live in
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Hungary as an American and what people say about Victor Orban in Hungary in some of the
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Eastern Bloc countries versus what people are actually experiencing that are living there.
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And really just the mass immigration, a mass migration of Muslims into European countries,
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how Europe in a way has been lost. Europe has fallen. They have not required assimilation
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for the people that are migrating into their countries. They're allowing Islamist ideologies
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to basically get deep roots in some of their areas and they're doing so in a very, very
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naive way. And so we weaved in and out of a lot of subject matters there. And I mean,
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when you talk about stuff like that, guys, it can get kind of prickly. And he and I, we
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just agree on most of this stuff. But again, these are very, very important topics that
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you're not really going to hear most pastors talk about on Sunday morning from the pulpit.
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So you're going to get it from podcasters like me and authors like Rod, because that's
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essentially the world that we have to live in. We have to prepare people for a looming
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battle. And that could be a literal or a figurative battle in conversations like this are going
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to help with that. So guys, without further ado, let's get into it. Rod Dreier, welcome
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to undaunted life of man's podcast. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, you're
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here, quote unquote, but you're not here as in like the United States of America. I heard
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a rumor that you live across the pond as it were. And so what in the world are you doing
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over there, Rod? I do. I live in Budapest and Hungary in central Europe. I moved over here
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a few years ago, in part because when I was working on my book, Live Not By Lies, I got
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really interested in the post communist countries of Europe and how they were rebuilding their
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societies after dictatorship. And I like to people here and it was an opportunity to live
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in Europe and experience that. Plus, I get to learn a lot being here in this particular
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country is governed by a nationalist conservative party fetus led by Victor Orban, who I think
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is a real visionary leader. And I got to tell you, Kyle, when I first came here on a fellowship,
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journalism fellowship in 2021, I was here about three weeks and I thought, wait, is this the
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same country that the American media has been telling me is just this abyss of fascist authoritarianism?
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It feels like an American Midwestern city circa 1995, but with better architecture. Because
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you don't have like, this is the high holy month of pride, right? Get on a train and
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go two and a half hours to Vienna. You come out of the station, rainbows flags everywhere.
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They don't have them here. And it's not like whatever the New York Times might say, it's
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not like they persecute gay people. I see gay people walking on the streets every day here
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in the Capitol. But it's just it's a country that is culturally conservative. And they
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and it also has a very strict policy about immigration. And so when we get people who
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come over here from Western Europe, like Paris or from London or major cities in Europe,
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they get here and they've also been propagandized by their own media to think this is a horrible
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place full of brown shirt Nazis. After about a day or two, they're like, this feels like
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what Europe was like 30 years ago before mass migration. And in fact, I don't want to go
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on too long about Hungary, but this is important. I have a friend here, a young woman who's
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a journalist from Paris. Paris is my favorite European city. She moved here two years ago.
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And I said, you know, I'm glad you're here. We all love Budapest. But come on, Paris
4:47
is Paris. She said, Rod, here in Budapest, I can walk out in the day or even at night,
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do my business and nobody bothers me. In Paris, every single day, I was sexually harassed
5:00
by migrants. I'd rather live here where I can be safe than in my home city where the
5:05
police won't protect me. You get a lot of that over here. And so it's a really interesting
5:11
place to try to understand the politics of Europe and the politics, geopolitics of our
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own time. Okay, there's so much there in it in an interesting twist. About an hour ago,
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you know, this is coming out later, but about an hour ago I posted on Instagram, it's a cartoon
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of an LGBTQ person. So purple hair, nose rings, rainbow shirt and all that. And they're hugging
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a Muslim man. And the LGBTQ person is saying, you know, essentially, we're so glad to have
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you. And the Muslim person is saying, I'm so glad you're so naive. And so so the thing
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is is obviously things can very get very prickly very quickly when you get into any of the
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three or four subjects have we've already brought up just in our first salvo back and
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forth. But yes, I've been reliably informed by dorks on the internet and in the mainstream
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media that Victor Orban is basically Hitler, right? Because if it's a politician, you
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know, like they're Hitler, right? Obviously. And so that that he's Hitler, he's leading
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a fascistic state. You can't operate normally. But it's literally people of the left will
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accuse the right of the things that they are doing. That that's kind of a thing that that
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that they do that they're known for. And it's it's the ultimate sound derivative of gaslighting.
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It's the ultimate form of gaslighting. And so for you, you're living there, it's interesting
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because I live technically in the Midwest, even though Oklahoma is kind of like a place
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without a region, we're not the south, we're not the Midwest, we're just kind of like floating
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out there. But it's it's the grit of the people in this area, the country that makes me love
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them so much, right? And it's the same thing with Eastern block countries is there's a
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certain level of grit that these these people are almost like infused with. And so I guess
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my my struggle is is as an American, as a Westerner, as a conservative as a capital
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sea Christian above all of those things, how are we to look at some of these countries
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and live not by lies? We'll get there in a second. But how are we to look at some of
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those countries, especially whenever they're painted in such a negative light by our own
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media? Yeah, man, I'll tell you what, that is a great question. And I have set myself
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out there whenever I do interviews for the mainstream American media and even the European
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media as a defender of Hungary. I mean, I'm an American, right? But yeah, I know from
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my practical lived everyday experience that for all of its problems, Hungary's not paradise,
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no country is this country is so much more free than the countries of Western Europe.
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In Britain, for example, they're putting people in prison for tweeting things that are critical
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of Palestinians or Muslims. The guy just as you and I are talking just the other day,
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an atheist from Kurdistan just got convicted in a British court of what the crime was,
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but he burned a Quran in front of the Turkish embassy as a former protest. I don't think
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burning a Quran is the right thing to do, but it's free speech. And you can't do that
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here in Hungary. I'll give you an example. There's this guy, Peter Bogosian. He's a left-wing
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atheist who was a philosophy professor at Portland State, super woke college in Oregon. He reached
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out to me before he first came to Hungary two or three years ago to say, look, we have mutual
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friends. I've been offered a fellowship at a college there. I'm inclined to take it because
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this place is miserable, the super woke Portland state. But you know, I've heard all these things
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about Hungary. It's a Peter, you're going to come over here and you're going to find
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people who are basically conservative. And you know, there may not be big churchgoers,
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but they have a lot of respect for religion. So they're going to debate you, but they're
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going to welcome you because they're like we used to be in America 20 years ago. They're
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going to disagree with you, but they're just going to want to know, tell us what it's
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like for you. Tell us why you believe what you believe. So he comes over here and I met
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him after he was here a month before I got back here. He said, man, you were completely
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right. I love it here. I can actually talk to people in the college who don't agree
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with me, but don't think I'm Hitler because I don't agree with them. That's the experience
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of Hungary. And all I can tell your listeners and your viewers is don't believe what the
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media say. If you can come over here yourself, you will feel so safe here and you can enjoy
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talking to people who are normal in the way a lot of Europeans and Western Europe just
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aren't anymore because they've been propagandized and they've been driven so hard by migrant
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crime.
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Well, we're going to get to live not by lies here in a second, but to put a finer point
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on some of the things that we're talking about because you brought up the mass migration.
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And typically when we're talking about mass migration, we're talking about people from
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third world and or Muslim countries that are going into European countries into major cities
10:02
and doing nothing to assimilate to the culture, right? Because like here in America, I am
10:07
pro legal immigration and primarily I am pro people that are going to go with the American
10:14
way of life except for the standard American diet. You can leave that. Yeah, bring your
10:17
diet with you. But yeah, like learn the language, be part of the customs of this country. Don't
10:23
hate things like baseball or apple pie or freedom. Like, you know, just be a part of
10:27
what we've done to assimilate to this culture. But these are people that are moving to London
10:32
and they are carving out their own Islamic sex and regions, right? And they're basically
10:38
using Sharia law to supersede the laws of, of, you know, London or the local municipality
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or something like that because they know that the local magistrates are way too feckless
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and weak to push against them. It's kind of the same thing. Like, if you burn a Bible
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in front of my church, the only thing I'm worried about is a catch in a grass fire. That's it.
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That's the only thing I'm worried about. Like it's not really going to bother me. Like,
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it's going to be an opportunity for me to share the gospel with you because you obviously
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have some anger that's leading to arson. But this they would never that same person would
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never burn a Quran. That same person would never like, you know, say, Oh, hey, the prophet
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Muhammad was a pedophile and a horrible murderer, right? They're they're not going to say things
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like that because, you know, that that's just anathema. But when I try not to be hyperbolic
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rod because I have some extreme opinions that I can defend to the death, but it seems to
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me that Europe has already fallen. It just hasn't fallen yet. It's just kind of like
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an inevitability. And again, when you say Europe, you're including Hungary and and the UK all
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at the same time. So I get that it's kind of a blanket statement. But because of the mass
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migration and because the get along to go along attitude and kind of the left wing authoritarianism,
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you got, you know, these these green policies like in Germany that have made have made the
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energy less reliable, more expensive and less clean, like it just it seems like for a myriad
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of reasons migration being the top of which Europe is going to be no more perhaps within
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a generation. What would you say to that? Yeah, man, I hate to agree with you there. But
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it's a very serious problem. Lately, I've been following the work of this guy, Professor
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David Bette. He's at King's College, London, and the War Studies Department. And his specialty
12:30
is his academic specialty is civil war. And he's been saying for a few months now that
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Europe, Western Europe, and the including the UK is on the verge of a civil war. Now, it
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doesn't mean that standard civil war like to uniform armies facing off against each other.
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He's talking about something more like bombings, disruptions, fighting on the street, you know,
12:55
etc, etc, kind of like Northern Ireland was for for many years. And the reason is he says,
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all of the social facts in these countries line up with what academic studies say is
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a pre civil war environment. Most of all, the migration, you know, unlike in the United
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States, we have a pretty decent way of assimilating people. You know, it's not perfect, but it
13:22
has worked a million times better than in Europe. But because of the thing you just mentioned,
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the ghettoization of Muslims and foreign communities plus the fact that people's in Europe, not
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only the elites, but all the way down, they have been so traumatized by the experience
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of the Second World War and Nazism that they're afraid to defend themselves. The Germans
13:45
are the worst, but this is generally true. And they feel that somehow if they speak out
13:50
against this, that they will be fascist and they'll certainly be called fascist by the media and by
13:57
academia and so forth. So they've just succumbed to this. And they've also been educated for two,
14:04
maybe three generations into hating the West, you know, and feeling that the only thing that
14:11
there is to be said about Western civilization is it was all bad, it was all racist, imperialist,
14:17
and all of that. So they don't feel that they have anything left to defend. And Hungary is not
14:23
like that. That's one of the reasons I really admire Viktor Orban. And Eastern Europe, the former
14:29
communist countries, most of them are not like that, but Orban is a real fighter. And they're like,
14:34
no, no, no, we love what we have. And we know we're going to lose it if we keep allowing this mass
14:41
migration. And he's also said, Orban is a Calvinist. He said that the basis of European civilization
14:49
is Christianity. That's it. And we're not going to survive unless we re Christianize. Now, I have
14:56
to tell you that Hungary is not a country where people go to church a lot. But they're so much,
15:02
they're not hostile to religion in the way you see in France, for example, or in Germany. So I
15:07
think Hungary has a chance. But the only way the rest of Western Europe has a chance is if it becomes
15:13
more like concrete. Hey guys, real quick, I know a lot of you guys are really doing everything you
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16:07
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16:28
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16:42
Sorenex.com. Okay, let's pull in the thread just a little bit more. As you were saying that,
16:48
I literally wrote down on my notes, Crusaders. So one of my favorite books that I've read in recent
16:53
years is by Raymond Ibrahim. It's called Defenders of the West. The Christian heroes that stood up
16:57
against Islam. And you just hear, because again, there's a lot of revisionist history as it pertains
17:03
to the Crusades. And it usually just depends on whatever the person, the point the person's trying
17:07
to make in whatever article they're writing for whatever left wing rag, they like to kind of
17:11
rejigger the different things. But the Crusades from the Christian side was a defensive battle
17:17
because of the predations and the expansion of the Islamic state, I guess you could say at that time.
17:23
And so when you have Richard the Lionheart and you've got Godfrey and Baldwin and all these different
17:27
heroes of the Crusades, you read these stories. And by no means am I saying that the people that
17:33
fought for the Christian side were acting in a Christ-like manner at all times because duh,
17:38
because of course, because you know, duh, that's just how that works. It's war, it's nasty.
17:43
People do things that they shouldn't do and that they don't live up to a Christ-like ethic.
17:47
However, this was an ultimately defensive war that we took offensively as Christians to basically
17:54
keep Europe from being completely Islamic. But now what we're basically, you're basically getting
18:02
your communities and your cities and your countries and perhaps even your continent overtaken by people
18:09
with just a whimper, right? And it's kind of this thing. When I talked to Eric Metaxas, he gave me
18:15
some words around this, but it's people that love to leave powder for tomorrow's battle.
18:21
When tomorrow's battle may never come because the war may end today and here we are saving our
18:26
powder. And it just seems like, is it because we're just too nice? We don't want to be seen as
18:32
racist or xenophobic or Islamophobic or something like that. So when cities in Michigan here in the
18:39
United States are basically Islamic cities, when there's communities in Dallas in the DFW area that
18:45
have been entirely ran by Chinese people that have immigrated here or Muslims that have immigrated
18:51
here. Again, it's not like we just eradicate those people, round them up and hang them like
18:55
nobody's suggesting that. But it's like, no, we have to push back on these ideas that aren't even
19:01
vaguely in agreement with a Christian ethic. No? No, that's right. And many people don't know,
19:07
in our country, in the United States, that Islam spread by the sword. It's spread by
19:13
conquest, the conquest of Jerusalem, it spread across North Africa, wiped out Christian communities
19:19
wherever they found them and invaded Spain and controlled most of the Iberian Peninsula
19:24
for a very long time until a Christian army led by Charles Martell, a Frenchman in the Middle
19:30
Ages, defeated the Muslims as a Muslim army, as they tried to invade France. And then eventually,
19:36
after hundreds of years, the Spanish Christians reconquered their their peninsula. But this is
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completely not talked about. And Europe was threatened for most of its existence by Muslim
19:51
armies, chiefly of the Ottoman Empire. Here in Budapest, where I live, Hungary was on the front
19:56
line of these battles. It was occupied by the Ottoman Turks, Muslims for 150 years. And you can
20:04
still see evidence of this. For example, in Budapest, one thing all the Hungarians love to do is
20:11
go to the natural spring baths. And you have lots of warm water that comes out of the hills. And
20:19
you know, they go sit there. It's an ordinary thing for people to do, working class people,
20:24
just sit on the warm bath. My favorite one is just across a river from where I live. It was
20:29
built by the Ottomans. You can sit in this octagonal bath and imagine the Sultan and his people sitting
20:38
there and all the Hungarians that follow that. A point simply as I've heard Viktor Orban say this,
20:44
he's like, we were occupied by these people for 150 years before we finally were able to drive
20:49
them away. Western Europe has no idea what they're dealing with here. And this is why Orban is so
20:56
hard on this issue, because he said, you know, once they take over, how are you going to get them
21:01
out? It's really hard to do. And I think too that we, you're right about that we have to be nice. I
21:08
think that there's such a tendency, especially in church culture, to everybody's got to get along.
21:15
You've got to be tolerant. I think tolerance is a fine thing, but you've got to draw the line
21:19
somewhere. Believe me, these Muslims who are coming in to Europe at least, they have no intention
21:25
to be intolerant. They have no intention of integrating. In fact, the Prime Minister of Turkey,
21:31
Erdogan, he's an Islamist and democratically elected. He told the Turks who live in Germany,
21:39
there are a whole lot of Turks there. They originally came as workers after the war. He told them,
21:46
don't assimilate you or the vanguard for the Islamization of this country. I mean, they say it
21:53
openly, but they're the leadership elites, not just the political elites, but also in media,
21:58
academia and so forth. They don't want to hear it. They had this narrative in their mind that
22:04
everybody can all just get along, diversity is our strength and all that. And these outsiders
22:10
to our civilization, not just Muslims, but especially Muslims, are just laughing at us.
22:15
It's a naivety that basically makes people softheaded because they think they're being
22:21
softhearted, but they're actually being softheaded because when people, like I remember after the
22:26
October 7th attacks, there were people that were twisting themselves into pretzels trying to figure
22:33
out a way to make the Hamas charter not say and not mean what it says. What it says, it's there.
22:40
We are here with the express purpose of eradicating every Jew on the planet. And if we get a shot at
22:46
America, we're going to take them out too. And then left us here in this country or across the
22:50
world, we'll be like, that's so precious. It's almost like if you've got an aggressive little kid,
22:55
and you apologize to the other parents that are on the aggressive little kids wrestling team because
22:59
sometimes he gets a little out over his skis at wrestling practice, gets a little bit too aggressive.
23:03
Oh, I'm just sorry about little Timmy. You know, he can get a little aggressive sometimes.
23:07
It's like, no, Timmy's out for blood. He's trying to kill all the other kids. That's the
23:10
situation that we're talking about. And we just, it's like our brain. It's something like from
23:14
Live Not By Lies. I'm trying to remember the exact quote, but it was something in terms of abortion,
23:18
where someone was like, no, I'm not saying what you're saying is not true. It's just I can't believe
23:23
it. It's like they can't find a plausibility structure inside their brain. That would allow
23:29
them to believe that there's a group of people that it doesn't matter how many pairs of Levi
23:33
jeans we give them, how many meals we bring to them in armored trucks, or how many opportunities
23:38
we give their women to drive and to work, they don't care. They want our heads to be on the ground
23:44
separated from our bodies. They live by different set of rules. You know, I was in New York on 9/11.
23:52
I was a columnist at the New York Post on that day. I saw the South Tower fall with my own eyes.
23:57
And I remember the trauma of all that in the aftermath, I went in my Brooklyn neighborhood
24:04
to a mosque that was a Muslim Brotherhood mosque where Al Qaeda had done some recruiting. I went
24:09
to their bookstore, bought books in English that were incredibly radical. They were still selling
24:14
them. And I remember in those days, right after the attack, President Bush was talking about Islam
24:21
means peace and all that. We saw a lot of propaganda. And look, I get it. We didn't want to blame
24:25
ordinary, decent Muslims who, because they're not all radical like that, but you know, they were
24:31
trying to tamp things down. But at the same time, they were telling lies about what Islam is.
24:37
And I remember too, though, Kyle, you know, in the year 2002, with a march up to the Iraq war,
24:45
I'd moved over to National Review magazine. I believed anything that the government said that
24:50
would justify a war. Now, I remember you had conservatives like Pat Buchanan, who normally I
24:55
would listen to, he was saying, this is a bad idea. These people in Iraq, not only did they not have
25:01
anything to do with 9/11, but we can't turn them into liberal Democrats in the sense that we're all
25:07
liberal, the right-wing liberal. You can't do it. It took many centuries and a lot of blood in the
25:13
West to get what we have today. You can't expect people who believe in this religion, which is
25:19
incompatible with democracy. And they're also very, very tribal. So we're going to spend a lot of
25:25
blood and treasure, and it's not going to work out. I didn't want to hear any of that, because I
25:29
still believe back then that over 20 years ago, deep down, everybody wants the same thing in life.
25:36
Everybody wants to be free. No, it's a lie. And it was a very costly lie. We have we turned Iraq
25:45
into a vassal state of Iran and look at Afghanistan, the Taliban are back in charge now. I remember
25:51
talking to my brother-in-law who won a medal for his service in Iraq. He was just straight up working
25:58
class guy from Louisiana. I listened to Rush Limbaugh, all of it. When he came back, he was
26:03
really disillusioned. I said, so what do you think of the war? He said it was a waste. So I'm trying
26:09
to learn from that and not believe the things that my government and the media want me to believe
26:14
about the rest of the world, because I saw with my own eyes how they used the naivete of the American
26:22
people to try to convince us to support a war, that it was a bad idea because we were never going
26:28
to make these people liberal Democrats, right? Well, and I think part of it, Rod, is, and you
26:35
even said it just there, we've been conditioned to believe that there is a delineating point between
26:40
Islam and radical Islam. But when you say something is radical, you're saying that it is an extreme,
26:46
you know, outer edges version of the real thing, right? But when you read the least
26:54
abrogated surah of the Quran, which, you know, the Quran's not in alphabetical order or in
26:59
chronological order, any of those types of things, the ninth surah is the last surah that we get from
27:03
their supposed prophet Muhammad. It is the most violent and most bloody and calls for the most
27:09
violence. And so since it's the least abrogated, that means it supersedes all the peaceful
27:14
verses that people will pull from the Quran to say that, no, no, no, no, no, like Boko Haram and
27:20
al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, these people are doing Islam incorrectly. It's all
27:25
these other people that are more moderate that are doing it correctly. But literally, just like we
27:29
talked about earlier, it's the exact opposite. That is true. It's the moderate Muslims that are
27:35
not doing what their prophet is saying that they should be doing because the same thing,
27:40
it's easy to see radical Christianity because when you study the life of Jesus and the things
27:45
that Jesus said to do and the standards by which Jesus laid out to morally live a godly life as it
27:50
were, if somebody were to kill somebody in the name of Christ, they would be doing a radical thing
27:57
because it doesn't comport with or jive with what the text actually says, right? It's kind of what
28:02
people say that, you know, if a Christian does something badly, it's like, if you go into guitar
28:06
center and somebody's playing sweet child of mine poorly, you don't blame that on slash, right?
28:11
That's not slash's fault, right? That's the person playing the guitar. The problem with Islam is,
28:16
no, it's simply not a religion of peace and it was never meant to be that.
28:21
No, you're right about that. And I mean, it is true. I happen to know Muslims who do not agree
28:27
with the terrorists. The problem is, as you say, they don't have a lot of ground to stand on
28:36
historically or scripturally in terms of the Quran and the and the Hadith, the sayings,
28:41
because it is what it is. And the radicals, so-called radicals within those communities
28:48
actually have a stronger basis within Islam itself to justify what they do.
28:54
But I remember, though, it's so hard for us, Kyle. I remember back in 2002, and I was doing
29:00
a lot of writing about it, I had a friend who was working in counterterrorism. And she said,
29:06
be careful how you write about this, because a lot of our best sources are Muslims who are
29:12
terrified of these people. And they can never go public because they even living in the United
29:17
States, they'll be killed, especially if they're immigrants. A lot of immigrant Muslim immigrants
29:22
just disappear while they've been killed. And she said, we have to be careful to tell the truth about
29:28
Islam without demonizing all Muslims, because if these sources dry up, we're in trouble.
29:35
It's a difficult thing, but I'll tell you, I moved down to Dallas after I was in New York and
29:42
started working at the Dallas Morning News. And based on my experience in New York and all the
29:46
things I learned about Islam, I saw a lot of Islamic radicalism in North Texas. This is like 20
29:53
years ago. And an FBI source told me that North Texas, at least at the time, was the second biggest
29:59
place to do terror group fundraising behind the Washington, D.C. area. And a lot of it was
30:06
because there were so many Muslim engineers there. Anyway, I just started writing things that I
30:13
would find out publicly about the Dallas Central Mosque, which at the time is the largest mosque
30:17
in Texas, things they were teaching. And the local Muslim community came at me, the activist
30:23
community came at me really hard. But my editor, God bless her, she said, look, I'll be willing to
30:28
take all of this on your behalf as long as you have your facts lined up. And I did, I always did.
30:34
But the newsroom itself, I wrote about it in my column, but the newsroom wouldn't touch it,
30:40
because they were in my judgment, they were so much more interested in being nice. And they were
30:45
terrified that they might give some Bubba somewhere in the suburbs a negative thought about Muslims.
30:53
We even had Kyle, something that came out in the Holy Land Foundation trial. It was a Hamas
30:58
fundraising front that pretended to be a charity. The FBI introduced into evidence a document they
31:05
got in a raid on one of those houses was a Muslim Brotherhood planning document in which they said
31:13
our goal is to infiltrate the West and filtrate it all and undermine the infidels from within.
31:19
In the trial, they admitted the defendants admitted, yeah, okay, that's real, but we don't believe
31:25
that anymore. Well, guess what? Two weeks ago, here in Europe, reportedly to highly confidential
31:31
report from the French government in which it was a for your eyes only for the top French officials
31:37
saying that the Muslim Brotherhood has built all these networks all over France with the same goal.
31:43
Right. I mean, it's out there. It's reported the French government said, yeah, this is real,
31:49
but not much has happened. And I'll tell you this, you remember me telling you about David
31:55
Betts saying civil war is coming. Not long after that came out, I went to France to promote some of
32:02
my books and I would just meet Christians there, just ask them ordinary people. So do you think
32:07
civil war is coming? Dude, every single one of them didn't even hesitate. Oh, yeah, it's coming
32:13
because there is no way to reconcile this. And I think that you and I are absolutely going to live
32:19
to see it. And it's going to be a horrible, horrible thing. But you know, the the appeasers in government
32:26
in in the UK and France and Brussels all over, they're only going to be able to kick this can down
32:32
the road for a certain amount of time before ordinary people have had it. Yeah, I think history
32:38
will look back on this time. And for all we know history is going to be coming to a close soon.
32:43
Lord come quickly, but it's going to look back on this time and see this as if he had to put it
32:50
encapsulated into a single sentence, the ultimate Trojan horse that that happened in Europe, perhaps
32:55
in just the West at large of these, these lies and these horrible satanic ideologies that were
33:02
allowed to spread. And that that really is our transition to talking about live not by lies. And
33:07
so live not by lies is a book that you release, but also there's a four part docu series with angel
33:13
studios. And so I've watched the four part docu series guys there's links in the show notes where
33:17
you can buy the books very highly rated and reviewed. And also I thought the angel studios docu series
33:24
was fantastic. But let's just talk basically let's fly over it and then we'll kind of dig down a little
33:29
bit. What's the difference between the book and the docu series like was that always the intention
33:34
to do a book and a docu series? How did you get hooked up with angel? Let's just start there.
33:39
Okay. Well, the book had its genesis in 2015. I was living in my hometown in South Louisiana at
33:46
the time writing for the American conservative. And I got a call one day from a physician at the
33:53
Mayo Clinic up in Minnesota. And we had a mutual friend and he said, I got to tell somebody this.
33:59
My elderly mother spent six years as a political prisoner in Czechoslovakia because she was a
34:07
Christian. She refused to stop going to church. And so they jailed her and tortured her. She came
34:12
to America after she got out and she lived here most of her life. He said that my mom is old now,
34:19
lives with me and my wife. And she said, son, the things I'm seeing happen in this country now
34:23
remind me of what happened when communism first came to power in my home country. And she was
34:29
talking about in particular what was happening at the time around memories pizza. Does that name
34:35
ring a bell memory speech? Yeah, it does. You know, it was this evangelical owned pizza parlor that
34:40
was that had to shut down for a while because they got so many death threats because the owners
34:47
said we would not cater a gay wedding will serve gay customers. We're not going to cater a gay
34:51
wedding. That's what triggered her. I thought that's a little bit a little bit extreme. You know,
34:57
my mom's old she watches a lot of cable news and gets scared easily. But after that, I made a point
35:03
whenever I would in my travels meet somebody who had come to America to escape communism,
35:08
I would say, so what think about wokeness? That's what it was. Does it remind you of what you left
35:14
behind? Dude, every one of them said, yes, and they would get really mad because Americans don't
35:19
take them seriously. So I ended up writing this book Live Not By Lies, the first half of which
35:24
explains the similarities between wokeness and what's happening in America and the similarities
35:30
between communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, but also the differences because there are some
35:36
important differences. We are not we don't have gulags in America. We don't live in an Orwellian
35:42
state. So a lot of us think, well, this got to be crazy. We don't have totalitarianism here,
35:47
but it's a softer, more insidious form that has the same effect. I published the book in 2020,
35:54
in September of 2020, and I had the good fortune, if that's the right word to use,
35:59
that it came out after the summer of George Floyd and the race riots and the way elites
36:08
and corporations everywhere just suddenly went berserk about how with DEI and also after COVID,
36:15
which scared a hell of a lot of people about how fragile things were and how what the government
36:21
could do. The book ended up selling over 200,000 copies, almost all word of mouth,
36:27
mostly from Christians, because the media completely ignored it, no surprise there,
36:32
but the book gave people, not just Christians, but mostly Christians, a framework for understanding
36:40
what was happening. Now, the book became such a sensation in the church community that I was
36:46
approached by the filmmakers. I said, we want to do a documentary about this. This is the same team
36:51
behind No Safe Spaces with Dennis Prager. And I contributed to it. They based it on my book.
36:58
I'm interviewed for it, but it was a separate thing done by this really talented young filmmaker,
37:04
also a Christian Isaiah Smallman. And I would say the main difference between the book and the movie,
37:11
is the book is filled with a lot more factual information, historical stuff to help people
37:16
understand. The movie touches on that, but it also dwells on the stories, the incredible testimonies
37:24
of Christians, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, who lived through it. And they talk about how
37:30
their faith helped them stay strong and not surrender to the lies that their governments expected them
37:37
to accept. Well, and Rod, I think that the thing that was very helpful for me watching the four-part
37:43
series is understanding as you brought up there, there is a difference between hard totalitarianism
37:47
and soft totalitarianism. The thing is, is in America, we don't learn about either, right?
37:52
Why was I 30 something years old before I heard the name Alexander Sol's Neeson or heard about the
37:58
Gulag Archipelago? Why was that the first time? Why are their kids in America that are graduating
38:03
from high school? They probably shouldn't be, but they're graduating from high school,
38:06
and they've never learned about the Holocaust, right? They certainly aren't learning about
38:11
mouse china. They're not learning about pole pots, Cambodia. They're not learning about
38:15
like any of these other people. They're not learning about Stalin. They're not learning about
38:20
Lenin. They're not learning about any of these things. And so when they hear ideas that were
38:23
propagated by those types of folks, they're hearing it for the first time, and it sounds good. It is
38:29
like sugar-covered diarrhea. Like they just, they love it, but all they taste is the sugar, but we never,
38:35
or go ahead, Rod. You there? Yeah, we're there. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. We had a little bit of snaffy,
38:44
let me actually tee it up this way. Anytime you do something, because people think, oh gosh,
38:50
how are we going to end this, right? So they've got a book or a poem or they're, they're doing a
38:54
mini documentary or whatever. It's like, how are we going to end it? We got to end it. But
38:59
they forget about the concept of primacy and recency. Yes, we remember the thing we most recently saw,
39:04
which is the ending, but we also remember the beginning. And we've all seen those movies
39:08
that had a great beginning and a terrible ending or vice versa. But y'all made a very
39:12
interesting decision to where you start out episode one of this docu series with a video of a
39:19
the director of the UK March for Life. Her name is Isabel Von Spruce. I think is how her name is
39:24
pronounced being arrested in the United Kingdom because she was silently praying on a public sidewalk
39:32
across from an abortion clinic in the UK. She was arrested for that. And so the image is an
39:39
indelible image for me as a pro-life or as a person that, you know, goes and teaches churches how to
39:44
push back on pro life or our pro abortion arguments rather. Why start there when you could have started
39:50
basically anywhere in the world of totalitarianism? Yeah, I think because it's so unbelievably shocking
39:57
to and should be shocking to contemporary audiences, primarily American because of the
40:03
movie was made with an American audience in mind, though, we're having a premiere in London
40:07
next month. But to see that this has happened to England, which is our mother country, right?
40:13
Where the where liberal democracy was born to see that it is impossible there to
40:20
pray silently on the street. She was arrested for the thoughts in her head. And that and we just
40:28
happened to have thanks to Alliance Defending Freedom, you know, the Christian NGO, the legal
40:33
NGO that defends Christians. They had a camera there recording it and you just can't believe it.
40:40
It's so shocking to people today. This happens in England because it's not in our media. In fact,
40:46
Kyle, I was interviewed a couple months ago by a London based reporter for the Wall Street Journal
40:51
an American guy. He is the guy that readers of the Wall Street Journal, one of our biggest papers,
40:57
depend on to tell them what's happening in the UK. Well, he got in touch with me for a story he's
41:02
writing about the growing alienation from MAGA to Europe. And I brought up Isabelle Bond spruce.
41:09
I said, you know, we're seeing on social media, these sort of things, these persecutions happening
41:14
in Europe. And this matters to us. And he said, wait, who's that? Like, wait, you don't know,
41:20
Isabelle Bond spruce? No, I don't think he was a bad guy. I think I told him this. I said,
41:25
you were paying so much attention to the other media in England, which do not want to report
41:31
this stuff. So we wanted to hit our viewers of the movie with actual evidence of an arrest
41:39
for the thoughts in your head happening in a free country, supposedly free country. And we
41:45
wanted people also to know that this is something that hits real people. They have to pay a real
41:51
price for it. Isabelle says in the documentary, she said, you know, in her country, she said,
41:57
I would understand why people would say like, Oh, that can't be happening because it sounds so
42:01
crazy. It is happening. And in fact, they've gone on in England since the Southport killings,
42:07
where the son of some immigrants from Africa murdered three little girls. The British government
42:13
is now throwing people in prison for sending out tweets criticizing that. I mean, it's insane,
42:21
but it's real. And you know, you mentioned earlier that we don't we haven't been taught about what
42:25
totalitarianism was. In the book, I talked about this 26 year old young woman, I met, I know her
42:32
family, she was raising the conservative churchgoing family. But she had moved to California. And she
42:38
said, she told me I'm a communist, like, what? Why? She said, well, I believe that the equality
42:45
of all peace, etc, etc. She goes, I think it's a good thing. And I said, okay, but what about the
42:52
gulags? What? She had no idea. And she had been raised in a conservative churchgoing family.
42:59
And that in her lack of historical knowledge, left her completely vulnerable to these lies.
43:06
And that's a big part of it. Yeah, softhearted, softheaded again. So I want to talk about the
43:13
abortion and trans issue. But let's go back to the issue of lies, because that's really like a theme
43:18
throughout the entire series in the book is in order for these things to be taken. We don't take
43:24
them wholesale, but we have to be forced lies. There have to be lies that are forced down our
43:31
throats. That's that's essentially what we have to do because that's what propagates to
43:35
totalitarianism is the belief in in lies. If you can convince people, I mean, no, let's just wrap
43:42
it all up. So the the abortion and the trans issue, because if I can convince you that there is no
43:47
difference between male and female or that you can switch willy-nilly back and forth based only
43:53
on how you feel at the moment, I can literally convince you of anything as Jordan Peterson has
43:58
talked about in his work. Like there's no more standard fact than sexual dimorphism in the mammalian
44:07
species, male and female. There's no more fundamental fact that we can believe. Now, obviously as
44:12
Christians, we believe there are things that are even more fundamental than that. But just speaking
44:15
from a strictly biological standpoint here on this planet, he's right. Like, and if you can convince
44:20
people that you can switch teams, like you can be convinced of anything. And so is it almost like
44:26
they're shooting for the stars immediately? Like, let's not worry about these small lies that will
44:32
eventually lead to somebody believing that you can change your gender. Let's just start there,
44:36
because if we can get them to believe that, we can get them with anything we want.
44:40
That's exactly right, because it is one of the most undeniable facts in observed reality,
44:47
men and women. And yet they were able, they meaning the government, the media, academia and so forth,
44:56
they were able to compel people to live by this lie, because you could lose your job,
45:01
you could lose your business, you could not get into universities, things like that, unless you
45:07
accepted the lie. And there is a line by this man, just while Miwosh, he was a Polish anti-communist
45:14
dissident. And he wrote a book called The Captive Mind, came out in the 50s, after he left Poland.
45:21
And he was trying to explain how intelligent people will accept all this garbage. And he
45:26
made a really interesting point. He said, you know, a lot of people in the West think that we only
45:31
accepted it because we were, the gun was held to our head by the Soviets. That was part of it,
45:36
but not the whole of it. He went on to say that there is something inside every person
45:43
that is desperate for a sense of harmony and a sense that, you know, we can live in peace. And
45:50
if you have totalitarian activists like the trans people saying, if you want to live in peace,
45:56
if you want to protect your job, if you want to still be respected in the community,
46:00
if you want your kids to love you and not kill themselves, then you better accept it. And that's
46:06
where it comes in. And this is also why, Kyle, in the book and in the movie, you hear these
46:14
Christians from all over the former communist world talk about the willingness to suffer for
46:20
the truth. That is at the core of it. Whether it's suffering like being sent to prison and maybe
46:27
losing your life or simple suffering like being abandoned by all your friends, people are so
46:33
afraid of that, that they will go along with just about anything. This woman, I don't know what you
46:39
think about this part of the film. I think it's one of the most powerful, this woman, Camilla Bendova.
46:43
She's still alive. She lives in Prague. She and her late husband, Vatslav, were the only
46:48
Christians in the inner circle of the anti-communist movement in that country. It's a really atheistic
46:54
country. And I asked her, I said, Camilla, was it hard for you and your husband as Christians and
47:01
as political conservatives to be in a coalition with these hippies and these people who weren't
47:07
believers to fight communism? And she said, Rod, no, it was easy because when you're standing up
47:13
all alone and against totalitarianism, you will find that so many of your fellow Christians will
47:20
keep their heads down just like everybody else will was doing. These hippies, we may not have
47:26
agreed with their atheism or their lifestyle, but they had courage. They knew that this was wrong.
47:31
What was happening to our country. My husband and I as Christians knew that we were accountable
47:35
to God, not to our friends and neighbors. And so we also knew that we had to stand with them
47:43
because they would look after our children if we were sent to prison and they knew they would
47:46
look after. We would look after theirs. So the point I want to make, Kyle, is that courage and
47:53
the willingness to suffer is so key. I remember standing in Moscow just off a red square. I'd
47:58
interviewed this man. We couldn't get him for the documentary because we couldn't travel in Russia,
48:03
but he's in the book. Yuri Sitko, he's a retired Baptist pastor. He used to lead the Russian Baptist
48:09
community. He looked at me, pointed his finger at my eye and said, go back to America and tell the
48:15
church that if you're not prepared to really suffer for your faith, you're lost. And that's really true.
48:24
Rod, I added this discussion with my wife within the last year because we're growing in prominence
48:33
here and on to life. My voice is growing in prominence, those types of things. And I was like,
48:37
babe, because of the things that I believe, which are basically a biblical
48:40
ethic as it pertains to morality, sexuality, like all those different things. And this was
48:46
before Trump was elected. So obviously there's a different feel in this country right now.
48:50
But with the thought of Kamala Harris becoming president and the continuation of that regime,
48:55
it's like, babe, there might be a time coming where I'm going to be in handcuffs because of the
49:01
things that I say on the show or because we decide to go to church or any of those types of things.
49:05
And if you don't think it can happen here, it just happened in Canada during COVID and different
49:08
things like that. Obviously, and we spoke to some of those guys here, James Coates on the show and
49:13
other folks that were put in prison for basically holding church. And I think part of it, Rod,
49:19
is we live in perhaps the time in history with the most ubiquity of the Bible and the least
49:26
biblical literacy. So especially here in the States, like you have people that have six or seven
49:31
Bibles on the shelf that all have a quarter inch of dust on them. And we've got five or six Bible
49:37
apps on our phones that we just don't open, right? We get a new phone and we don't even download the
49:41
Bible app because we don't ever open it anyway. We don't read it much less study it. And if you
49:46
even do a cursory study of the Bible, you don't come away with this idea that as a follower of
49:53
Christ, things are just going to be, you know, Benleys and rainbows and unicorns, right?
49:57
Like it's exactly right. We have the biggest heroes of the faith died horrific deaths because
50:04
of the faith. I mean, just look at the apostles. John's the only one that got out somewhat clean
50:09
and they actually tried to boil them alive. It just didn't work. Right. And so like all these,
50:14
the others, they were skinned alive. They were crucified upside down and in all these horrible
50:18
things. And so that's, that's part of the thing is, as American Christians, we've bought the lie that
50:24
being a Christian means things are easy and things are okay. Derivatives are prosperity gospel and
50:29
whatnot. But it's like, no, we're, we're not, we're not ready for the fight. And we don't want to get
50:35
ready for the fight because we're soft and basically any way you can be soft. Yeah, we don't want it
50:40
to come to us, but it's still to needs and said, there's this thought in the West that what happened
50:46
in Russia can't happen here. He said, believe me, what happened in Russia could happen in any country
50:52
in the world under the right circumstances. And I dedicated the book live not by lies to the memory
50:57
of this very brave Catholic priest, I'm not a Catholic, but he this man is a real hero of mine.
51:03
His name is Father Thomas Love Kolokovic. He escaped from Zagreb Croatia in 1943. He was doing a work,
51:11
underground work against the Nazis and they were coming for him. So he escaped and went to live in
51:16
his mother's home country, Czechoslovakia, and under an assumed name started teaching at the local
51:22
Catholic college. And when he got there, he told his students, I have good news and bad news and
51:27
good news is the Germans are going to lose this war. The bad news is when it's over, the Soviets
51:33
are going to be running this country. And the first thing they're going to do is persecute the
51:37
church. We have to get ready for it. So what he did was he speaking to his students who wanted to
51:43
listen to him. He prepared them biblically in terms of discipleship and also in terms of learning
51:51
things like how to how to survive an interrogation, practical things they needed for the underground
51:57
church. Within two years of his arrival in that country, they had a little Kolokovic group in every
52:04
town of any size in the Slovak part of the country. Now he had to fight against some of his bishops,
52:10
some religious leaders who are like, Father, come on, it's not going to happen here. You're just
52:14
scaring people. You're alarming them for no reason. But he kept doing his work because that man,
52:20
when he was preparing for the priesthood, he wanted to be a missionary to the Soviet Union.
52:24
So he had to learn the Communist mindset. Well, it all happened like he said because he had done
52:31
what he did and because enough Christians, a minority of them, but enough of them had taken
52:36
him seriously and prepared themselves, the underground church and the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia
52:43
was strong. Yeah, that was one of my favorite people that you discussed in the docuseries. And
52:48
it really goes back to a theme. You could call it an overall theme of the docuseries is that in
52:53
order for totalitarianism to work totally, Christians need to accept their persecution and marginalization
53:01
and refuse to fight back. And again, it's this pacifist, pacifistic strain of Christianity
53:09
that gets this idea that Jesus was just this wispy haired Danish looking guy that just constantly
53:14
walked around and told people he agreed with them. And it doesn't matter how you live your life. It's
53:18
this, hey, come as you are thing. Well, guys, guess what? If Jesus loves you just the way that you are,
53:23
then he didn't need to die on the cross for your sin debt. So that's that's kind of like a package
53:27
deal. But yes, I think it just kind of goes back to this idea that Christians have accepted their
53:33
position in this country as being downstream from culture. And so what do Christian artists try to
53:37
do? They try to look like culture. What do Christian pastors try to do when they're trying to build
53:41
another campus or try to, you know, expand their influence or sell more books or get a bigger
53:46
Instagram or whatever, they try to just do the things that culture is doing. And they just
53:50
sprinkle some Christian over the top of it. I talk about these men, these not ministries, but these
53:55
big ministries that it's basically Ted talks with Bible verses sprinkled over the top so they can
53:59
keep their taxes and status, right? And the songs aren't really prickly at all. And none of the
54:05
sermons are really going to go at things like sin or or immorality, because I mean, they just want
54:10
you to get some life lessons and make you feel good, get you your spiritual Skittles and then
54:15
get you back there next week, right? Good middle class, nice guy.
54:18
Right. The problem is, I think, because I talked to people that are, you know, part of the underground
54:23
church in Ukraine, it's like, are the people that we've mentioned out several times, are the people
54:28
in the DFW area, the Christians there, are they ready to be a part of the underground church?
54:32
Because you know, it's fine. They go to church, you know, a couple of times a month. And you know,
54:38
when it when it doesn't, you know, conflict with a travel baseball schedule or the lake or things
54:42
like that, but you know, they're Christians, right? Because, you know, grandma was a Christian and they
54:47
listen to country music and they occasionally vote and they when they do, they vote Republican and
54:51
God's pro all those things. But if if we're in a situation like the countries you describe in the
54:56
documentary, or in Ukraine, or say like a Nigeria, where where Christians are being beheaded by
55:04
Boko Haram in droves, being just gunned down in their villages, gosh, I just don't think we have
55:09
the stomach for it. And maybe that's the burning off that that would need to happen to where it's
55:15
only whenever the church is in the persecuted state when it seems to be added strongest, because you
55:20
only get people that actually have real faith. Yeah, you know, the Danish Christian philosopher
55:27
Soren Kierkegaard from the 19th century Protestant guy, radical Protestant, actually, he ended up
55:32
falling out with the state Lutheran church. He made a really interesting observation. He said that
55:39
a lot of people admired Jesus. You know, what a great guy, look at him and look at how compassionate
55:45
he was, et cetera, et cetera. But Jesus didn't call admirers, say Kierkegaard, Jesus called disciples.
55:51
And you can tell the difference between an admirer and a disciple when it comes time
55:56
to really suffer for the faith, whether it's a matter of martyrdom, which is the most extreme
56:01
form of suffering, which has happened throughout the entire history of the church. And it's happening
56:05
today, as you said, in Nigeria and in Egypt, or whether it's simply not being invited
56:12
to be part of the social group, because Christians are weird, and you believe bigoted things or whatever.
56:18
If you're not willing to accept that because, you know, for the sake of the gospel, then you're
56:24
useless. You're just an admirer of Christ. And I think that describes most American Christians,
56:30
whatever your denomination. You know, something you said reminded me back there in COVID, I'm in
56:37
comfort to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, part of the Orthodox Church in America. I was living in
56:42
Baton Rouge, then we had a small mission church, we suddenly started seeing an influx of young
56:48
men and young couples to our church. And most of them had come from mega churches. We're like,
56:56
hey, we're happy to have you here, but what brought you here? And it was all a variation of the same
57:01
story. COVID shook them up so much, I made them realize, hey, life can change very radically,
57:07
very fast. We don't feel that our previous church is preparing us deeply enough for persecution. And
57:16
this church seems like it's a more serious, deeper form of Christianity. And this same thing has
57:23
been happening to Orthodox churches all over the US. I don't know the Protestant world that
57:27
well, but in Catholic churches, you're seeing a lot of young people, especially young men,
57:32
go to the older Latin Mass simply because it's serious and it demands something of you. The church
57:39
is not there to make you feel good. I mean, it's not there to make you feel bad either, but you know,
57:46
it's like we're here to be disciples, not admirers, and we're not here for therapy. We're here
57:53
to change, to convert, to become holy. And you can't do that just by changing your mind. You have
57:59
to change your life. This is what these people in Eastern Europe who were persecuted by the
58:05
communists. This is what they found out with a gun to their head. Well, Rod, if you're a Christian,
58:11
you're a war, but we don't act like it. And so, so here's the thing. Several times throughout my
58:18
life, because I'm kind of a lunatic, I work out like crazy and I don't just work out for fun. I work
58:23
out like people have asked me a lot. They're like, Hey, why do you work out so hard? I'm like,
58:27
well, partially because I'm just working out for life, I want to have longevity. But one of my
58:31
sons one day is going to say to a kid on the playground, Hey, my dad can beat up your dad. It's
58:36
my job to make sure my kids not lying, right? But I remember this guy, he came and worked out with
58:41
me on a Sunday night. And gosh, he just he was dying, right? He was on death's door. And afterwards,
58:47
he came up to me and he was like, Kyle, I don't understand, I work out three or four days a week.
58:52
Like I work out hard, but for whatever reason, your workout just killed me. I was like, what did
58:55
you do? The elliptical or something? It's like you were working out. Yes, categorically binary zero
59:00
or one. Yes, you check the box, you're working out, but you weren't working out hard. And so,
59:04
you have these American Christians that are checking the box, they're going to church, right?
59:08
They are in a community group or a life group or whatever they're they're calling it, right?
59:12
They go to random action word church. And then they're they're thinking they're being prepared
59:18
for war. But you don't prepare warriors by just having them drink milk, right? You you give them
59:23
meat and you give them tasks, right? And you give them standards. And that's why I've talked about a
59:27
lot. Young men being drawn to Eastern Orthodox and to traditional Catholicism, like the Catholic mass
59:34
and different things like that. It's because there's a strength in it. There's lead in the pencil,
59:40
if you will, to where they go to some of these these Protestant churches. And it's like it's
59:44
this doughy frumpy pastor or this pastor that's trying too hard to be relevant to be stylistic
59:50
or stylish. But they're not giving me anything that's going to prepare me for battle.
59:54
That's true. And look, it's mostly true about the American Catholic church. I was Catholic for 13
59:59
years. I haven't had enough experience broadly in the American Orthodox church. But I would not be
1:00:05
of the least bit surprised if some of the older congregations, which were more concerned with,
1:00:10
for example, being Greek than being Christian, that if they would be soft and conformist in the
1:00:16
same way, but this new generation, the Gen Z and younger millennials who are finding their way to
1:00:22
the more rigorous traditional forms of Christianity, they want to be challenged, especially young men
1:00:29
in the Orthodox church. Fasting is a regular part of our Christian discipleship. And when you worship,
1:00:36
you worship with your body. You're not just sitting there hearing a lecture, you worship with your
1:00:41
body. And it's masculine without being macho, if that makes any sense. And I'm really drawn to it.
1:00:50
I can see whenever I go back to visit churches with some of my Protestant friends or some of my
1:00:55
Catholic friends, even if they are in conservative churches, you still get that sort of therapeutic
1:01:01
idea that you're just there to hear something uplifting and then go on your way. And that can
1:01:08
be fine if you're in a time of peace and prosperity, but we're not in that time. And it's going to get
1:01:14
much, much worse before it gets better. And I'll tell you this too, Kyle. A few years ago, I was in
1:01:20
France promoting one of my books. And I met with this French intellectual, one of the top intellectuals
1:01:27
in this country. He's a Jewish atheist, had been on the left, but has been pushed to the right by
1:01:32
Islam and the decadence and French society. And so we talked, we shared a lot of the same views about
1:01:40
the decline of our civilization. Finally, I said, Professor, where do you find hope? And he looked at
1:01:47
me and said, I have no hope. He was serious. I said, I do have hope. And my hope is in Jesus Christ,
1:01:53
but please don't think I'm saying that to you in some trite, kitschy way like a TV evangelist.
1:01:59
I don't believe things are going to turn around anytime soon. But because I believe in Christ,
1:02:05
that any suffering that I and others have to do out of fidelity to him will be redeemed. I might
1:02:12
not live to see it, but it's going to be redeemed suffering in Christ. If you unite yourself to the
1:02:18
suffering of our Lord, it will be redeemed. That man listened to me very respectfully and said,
1:02:24
well, that's good for you Americans. But here in France, we don't believe in God.
1:02:27
Kyle, I had nothing else to say to him because he was clearly in so much despair of what's
1:02:33
happened to his country. Well, I'm going tomorrow after we talk. I'm going to France. I'm writing a
1:02:39
story about a pilgrimage that the traditionalist young Catholics are all young make. It's a three
1:02:44
day walking pilgrimage 30 40 miles from Paris to Chatura to the old medieval cathedral. These
1:02:51
are young people who don't want to give up. They don't want to shrug and say, we have no hope.
1:02:56
Their hope is in Christ and get this. They're having to do this. It's a Latin mass community.
1:03:01
They're having to do this with the opposition of a lot of their bishops who just want to go along
1:03:08
to get along. But the spark is there, man. And it is rising. And thank you for what you're doing
1:03:14
to help it rise in the Protestant community and not any Catholics or Orthodox who listen to you.
1:03:20
Yeah, absolutely. We're happy to have all of you. I know for a fact that we have
1:03:25
Protestants, Catholics or Orthodox and atheists in this audience and we're thrilled to have all of
1:03:29
you. And I think part of what you're talking about, Rod, with that gentleman is identity.
1:03:33
He found his identity in the colloquial understanding of his community, which is
1:03:38
we're atheistic. We don't believe in skydaddies, right? We've risen above that. We're too smart
1:03:43
for that, right? And so it's like, but but again, he shall not be named. Robbie Zacharias taught me
1:03:48
about origin, meaning morality destiny, right? Every single worldview has to answer those four
1:03:54
questions. Origin. Where did everything come from? Meaning, why is anything including you here?
1:03:59
Morality. What's the difference between good and evil? And how can we tell destiny? What happens
1:04:04
to you when you die? Well, if you have an nihilistic point of view or atheistic point of view or a
1:04:08
Buddhist point of view or something like that, you have to answer those four questions. I just
1:04:13
happen to believe that the Christian answer to those questions is a lot more plausible than
1:04:19
I am a highly evolved chimp that used to be a fish that used to be goo that used to be
1:04:24
Stardust and all that Stardust came into existence in a timeless, spaceless, immaterial beginning.
1:04:29
Sorry, I just don't really, really buy any of that. But Rod, we got to wind do a close a little bit
1:04:33
here. So you know, you might listen to a conversation like this and be like, well, gosh, this is really
1:04:37
depressing. This is there's not really a whole lot to go on here. But again, if you're a follower of
1:04:42
Christ, you know, that we ultimately win in the end. But what is your your final message to the
1:04:47
people my audience about? Okay, yes, there is this information that's in the docu series that's in
1:04:51
the book. It's not fun. It's not cute. And it's it's not clean. But what is your ultimate message to
1:04:58
people about where we are now and where we're going? Yeah, the ultimate message is this, we do live
1:05:04
under a form of totalitarianism. It's not like what George Orwell, it's not like Russia. It's more
1:05:10
like what you can read in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It's a totalitarianism that is based on
1:05:16
comfort on making people so comfortable and so afraid of losing their comfort that they will
1:05:22
surrender their liberties and maybe even surrender their faith to preserve their sense of comfort
1:05:27
and harmony with the post Christian society. We as Christians have to understand that and we have
1:05:33
to prepare ourselves and our children and our communities right now to resist it to resist its
1:05:40
manifestations that are happening right now and anything that might come in the future to get
1:05:45
much worse because I can't do better than that. Dear old Russian Baptist pastor Yuri Sifko,
1:05:51
if you're not prepared to suffer for the truth, to suffer for Jesus Christ, you're going to capitulate.
1:05:57
These people in the film, Kyle, not a single one of these Christians we interviewed thought
1:06:03
he or she would live to see the end of communism but God intervened. The reason I bring that up is
1:06:09
because they were willing to suffer persecution, the hatred of others for the sake of the Lord
1:06:17
and for the sake of truth. Not expecting any earthly reward but realizing that they were accountable
1:06:23
in the end to God Almighty. That's the message I want to get to your listeners
1:06:30
and to take the lesson from Father Kolokovich. He was told don't scare people, don't make them
1:06:36
think things are going to be bad but he knew the truth and the people who believed him, like the
1:06:42
people who believe, who may have believed Noah, you know that a flood is coming, they survived.
1:06:48
Many of those who didn't take it seriously, who thought everything's going to be great,
1:06:52
it can't happen here, they went under. Well, Rod, I appreciate everything that you've done
1:06:58
and I appreciate your work but that's all for me. Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
1:07:02
No, I just, if people want to read me writing every day, I write a daily sub-stack about politics,
1:07:08
culture, religion, roddreamer.substack.com and go to angel.com and stream Live Not By Lies,
1:07:15
the movie, your kids, it's so important for youth groups and young people to see this.
1:07:20
They might never pick up the book but they'll watch this movie because it's a compelling
1:07:25
movie full of human stories and it's so inspiring. I know this story left and right, up and down,
1:07:32
backwards and forwards and still in the fourth episode of when the guy Timo Kriezka, the young
1:07:38
artist, talks about suffering and hope, I cry because I know what that meant to those people and
1:07:45
I know these are the witnesses that God has sent us to our time to prick our consciousness and wake
1:07:52
us up. Absolutely, guys, it is all in the show notes. Rod, I appreciate it again.
1:07:56
Thanks so much, God. There you go, guys. Hope you enjoyed my time with Rod but before we let you
1:08:01
go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost. Adam Daunton, life or mission is equipping
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men to push back darkness with content that forges spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
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The links I've got for you today, I've got a link to the Angel Studios website where you can watch
1:08:12
Live Not By Lies, also linked to Amazon where you can buy the book version of it and a link directly
1:08:17
to Rod's Substack. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Wherever you're listening to this,
1:08:21
please subscribe, rate and leave us a positive five star review. If you want me to come speak
1:08:25
live at your event or on your podcast, just shoot me an email to info@undaunton.life. That's i-n-f-o
1:08:31
@undaunton.life. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and check out our website for
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everything else, including how to donate to keep more content like this coming your way.
1:08:38
Just go to www.undaunton.life. And as always, we want to thank the band Holy Name for allowing
1:08:43
us to use their music for our content. The music on this podcast is our song Perpetua,
1:08:47
which is off their self-titled debut album on Face Down Records. The links are in the description.
1:08:52
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual,
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mental and physical resilience. Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
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