Liberty Belle

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I say this calls for action and now. This is Bill Nixon. If you are a regular listener, you might remember me as co-host or maybe junior assistant host for the first Saturday of the month. Today, I had the opportunity of filling in for Robbie while he's hosting a men's retreat. And I had the great pleasure of being on the show with political science professor Dr. Kristin McMasters. She's not only charming, but conservative, which makes her extremely rare in her field. Dr. McMasters is a constitutionalist with a PhD in political science from the University of South Carolina. Dr. McMasters has been all across the state of North Carolina addressing sheriffs and other elected officials, candidates and groups like the Forsyth County Conservative lunch. She's been sharing with groups what it should mean when our elected officials swear their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution in the United States.

This morning, I paid $4 a gallon for gas on my way in, and I wanted Dr. McMasters to discuss with us what we as citizens should expect constitutionally when it comes to our federal government getting us out of this inflation mess that they created. But before we jump into that discussion, I would like Dr. McMasters to share with us about her webpage and her blog, the Liberty Bell. Thank you for being on the show, Kristin. Please tell us about your blog and your webpage. Thank you.

Yeah, I'm really excited to be here. So it's called the Liberty Bell NC. So I had to put the NC on there because unfortunately the Liberty Bell, B-E-L-L-E, is actually bought by someone.

Yeah, my ancestors helped pay for that rascal, didn't they? I guess. So anyway, so yeah, I've got a website. I was a political science major in undergrad and then I went to grad school and majored in American political thought, American theory for my PhD. And I really kind of realized that I didn't understand why I believed what I believed. So when you go through so much academic, you know, research and studying, you have to really challenge yourself in ways that, at least for me, I had never done before. And so as I challenged myself with why did I actually believe what I believed, I started realizing that most Americans don't do that, right? We all have these really strong gut reactions to things. We're like, the government should follow the Constitution, the government should do this, the government should do that. But if we were to really push ourselves to know why we believe this, most people really don't have an answer. And so I really started answering those why questions for myself from a sort of broad theoretical perspective, not one that was just based on my opinions or my feelings.

And it started really grounding me in ways I'd never had been grounded before. And so I wanted to share that with the rest of the world, because I realized that if we're going to actually bring us back to a truly constitutional state in the United States, we actually have to know why our Constitution matters and why our government should follow it. And so that's what the Liberty Bell website is for. I publish three articles a week on there. And I basically just help inform people about the government and then not just the government, but actual modern day issues from a constitutional perspective. It's a nonpartisan website.

I'm not a political pundit. I'm trying to really kind of help people be able to arm themselves with knowledge. And I think what I've noticed is that a lot of constitutional classes, they kind of just go over people's heads, right? People talk about the Constitution, and I've given a lot of speeches. I've seen people like, yeah, the Constitution. But every single one of them, when I ask them, why does it matter for our government to follow the Constitution, they struggle to answer.

They know it in their gut, but nobody really knows why. And they don't even know what the Constitution says. And I really want to make it very simple for people so people can like digest, okay, this is what the Constitution is. This is why it matters for our government to follow it.

And this is what the Constitution says. That's kind of the goal of what I'm doing. That's the goal of all my speaking engagements.

That's the goal. I want to make it bite-sized, digestible for people so they can take it and then they can actually hold their government officials accountable to something rather than just letting them get away with fluff. Well, I was at Golden Crowl and saw this group meeting and stuck my head in, and they called themselves the conservative lunch. I said, I've got to figure this out.

This looks interesting to me. And I went in and we had a small group of people in there that sat around talking about how they thought the world should work better, particularly the state and the federal government. And then this young lady came in and talked to this group. And every time she comes and talks to our group, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

And it just absolutely has been one of the most wonderful parts of the conservative lunch. From there, she has talked to many, many other groups in Forsyth County and surrounding areas, including the sheriffs. What are some of the groups you've talked to in the last year or so? Wow.

I mean, I kind of, it varies. I've talked to groups all over the state. And the funny thing is I've actually had nonpolitical groups.

I had a real estate investment group have me come speak for them, which was super interesting because I've never spoken to a nonpolitical group. Oh, that's one of the most political groups in the state. I promise you. I'm sure. But I was excited because I was like, well, can I, can I get to everyone? You know, like, is there, is there this love of liberty that's just ingrained in every American regardless of their political beliefs or political activity? And I find that pretty much yes. And I got this very good response from this group of people that I didn't know where they were politically.

I didn't know anything. And they were like, I feel like every American needs to hear what you have to say. I was very encouraged because they saw the unifying aspect of the Constitution, which is what I'm really trying to push is that the Constitution is not a partisan issue. It's actually something that if we don't hold our government, our government accountable to something, we're left with an arbitrary unconfined government. And nobody aside from government really wants that.

Well, I don't know. You haven't found anybody that wanted a government that wanted, could be so powerful, it could do anything it wanted to and take away all your rights with it. No, other than government. Anybody out there that really wants an all inclusive, powerful, God-like organization that can tell you what time to get up, you know, you would think, you would think that they would pass a law that could change the time I get up every day, every day and nobody would be upset. What I really loved about that was the article I read that said, oh, is that what we voted for? Did you see that article? They had an article where they went in and they said, would you please explain to us why you felt it was important to make Daylight Savings Time, a national law locked in forever.

And they said, what are you talking about? Well, it was a unanimous vote. Well, I wasn't there.

There was no one there when they passed the law. Oh my goodness. I didn't see that. That's so ridiculous. And they said was, we expected when we brought this law up that somebody was going to object because it was all set up to have these debates. The person that was supposed to object didn't make it. Oh, wow. They just went through, went through without anybody really realizing what they had done.

That's hilarious. I mean, that's the type of government we've got now. We've got bills that are so huge.

Nobody knows what in the blankety blank blank is in them. And we've got, when we're desperately in debt, we've got legislation that grants billions of dollars to things nobody in their right mind would want it to go to. That's where we are today.

Yeah. And I mean, the thing I emphasize a lot is that our government is our employee, right? We created them to do a job for us. Our government, as shocking as this might be, is our employee.

In our society, we created the government. A lot of those people sit in thrones up there, don't they sit in thrones up there? That's the thing. That's because we treat them that way.

Right? And so this is why I'm passionate about what I do because I really want to empower the people. And this is what's interesting is in any talk I give, the only group of people that give me dagger eyes are the politicians in the room, right? They hate what I'm saying.

Oh yeah, I know, right? I want to confine their power. But very literally, I mean, we, we gave them a job to do and then we gave them a job description, which in the federal government context is the constitution. It tells them what they can do. Therefore, what they can't do, tell them to read that and then swear that you think. But the problem is most people in the United States don't even know it themselves. And so how motivated are our employees going to be to know, much less follow their job description when they know the employer themselves don't know it? Yeah, I've got a friend, we have a friend that went to a meeting one time with a bunch of government officials and had the nerve to ask them if they knew what was in that oath and what was in the constitution.

And the answers that came back were jiggles and laughs and one person got the answer wrong. It's amazing to me. Every job I ever applied for and took and got paid for, I had to understand what that job was and where my authority ended and where my authority started. But we don't do that when it comes to government officials. Exactly. And that's my goal with the Liberty Bell is to arm people with this knowledge. Well, we want you all to tune in, stay here, come back after this commercial break and let's discuss a little bit of what we should and shouldn't expect out of these folks.

We give a whole lot of money to send a nice offer. You're listening to the Truth Network and truthnetwork.com She's real fine, my 409 She's real fine, my 409, my 409 Welcome to the Christian Car Guy radio show. I say this calls for action. And now we want to thank you for tuning back in and listening to Kristen. It's always nice to have a guest in that's smarter than the host. And in my case, that's really easy. So I'm going to give her a chance to just talk to the audience and tell you a little bit more about the constitution and why it's important to us and how it's supposed to work.

Yeah, thank you. So I'm going to try to encapsulate this as much as I possibly can in a small bite sized segment. So anytime I give a talk, I can't I can't talk about the Constitution or things that I feel about government unless I lay a foundation for people. I'm very much when I teach, I think of it as like building a house.

So I've got to build that foundation before I get to the walls and so on and so forth. And so the thing I anytime I start talking about our government, I love to challenge people to really answer the question, why do we actually have government, right? And so it's one of those funny things, because I don't think that we've ever really thought to ourselves, why do we have government not in the anarchist sense, but in the sense of what's government supposed to do, right?

We sit around and we talk and we debate and we critique government behavior all day every day, right? But we have no idea what they're supposed to do. And you can't really critique someone or something if you don't know what it's supposed to do. It'd be like critiquing a Chick-fil-A employee but having no idea their job description, right?

If we don't know what they're supposed to do, and we're critiquing them, then we're implying that we do, right? And so I'm- Chick-fil-A would be a lot easier. It would be a lot easier.

It would be. So we would think, but you know what I'm saying? This is the thing that we're debating and discussing. Well, government ought to be doing this and government shouldn't be doing this, all with the assumption that we know what they're actually supposed to do.

And so I want to sort of- I always like to start any talk I give with that basic foundation. And I can't get into all of that on here because it's so fast, but I want to basically set the stage that we created government in the United States to protect us and our private property from each other. And that comes from some very broad liberal philosophies, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Montesquieu, back kind of during the Enlightenment era. And this is what the founders used. And they understood private property. And I think a lot of Americans were very spoiled because when we hear the word private property or the words, we automatically know what that means. But back in the 1500s and the 1600s, private property was a very foreign concept to people, right?

And most people were the property of whoever was in charge. And so this is very unique that in the United States, this is why we have government, to protect us and our private property. Now I'm stripping it down very simply, but in order to sort of build that foundation, that's where we should start. So then why do we actually have a constitution? And this is where it gets really important and exciting for me because we need to know why we have a constitution if we're going to actually care about what the constitution is doing or how to protect it. And so the thing I ask all of my students or anyone else that I'm speaking to, I'm like, so the funny thing about government is we created government because we needed something to protect us from each other because we were, you know, we could be violent, we could be overly ambitious, selfish, all those things.

So we needed to get out of a state of war or chaos. And so we create government to protect us and our private property. But the irony is we take the same flawed human beings that needed government in the first place and what do we do with them? We put them in positions of power.

And so now we have this very unique situation. And in the United States, our founders did not have rose colored glasses on when they looked at human behavior or human nature. And so they knew that we now have these flawed humans in positions of power. And so we need something to protect us and our private property from our government itself, right?

And so this is where it's so unifying for everyone because I think that anyone can get on board with this. And I have yet to find someone to come up and to contradict this because we need something to protect us from government. And what I explain is we created government, right? So there are employees, we're the employer. But employee doesn't have a job description. This is where the Constitution comes in.

Remember I said at the beginning, I want to make this bite sized, right? Fortunately, I've known a lot of employees that didn't have job description. Well, they're probably not very effective, right?

No, counter effective. Exactly, exactly. So, but the funny thing is we hire these politicians, I guess you can say, and we expect them to do anything when in fact they actually have a job description. So at the federal level, the Constitution very literally and very simply is our government's job description. It tells our government what it can do and therefore what it can't do, which both defines its power and by default of defining it, it confines its power.

So our government literally gets the power it has from the Constitution, which is amazing, right? So it's not arbitrary. Now, the word arbitrary is a word that, did you think about that word much before I started kind of inserting it into the political conversation? I had read it a few times in a few books, but yes.

Okay. Well, I've been noticing it more frequently because I've been pushing it a lot, but arbitrary is power that comes from nowhere. And if it comes from nowhere, it can't be defined or confined. And that's what the Constitution is supposed to do. It's supposed to prevent arbitrary behavior in our government. So when our government acts, it does so because it has the power to do so from the Constitution. Now, if it does something outside of the Constitution, from where does it get the power to do what it did? Well, from nowhere. And if it got the power to do what it did from nowhere, that power is arbitrary, which means it can do very literally anything.

And so this is what I want. This is how I lay the foundation for any one of my talks, because if I'm going to talk about the Constitution, right, what does the Constitution say? What's our government's job?

So on and so forth. I better make sure that the people I'm talking to understand the significance of following that Constitution. So if I understand you correctly, your point is, if somebody is over me and has the right and responsibility to take a gun and point it at me, they can then decide how much of my property they can take. And they can decide what I do every minute of the day. And they can tell me whether I can or can't buy a car, or whether I've got to put on solar panels or not.

And that sort of makes my day more complicated. Yeah, it's I mean, essentially, it's like living under a king or a tyrant, right? Anyone that throughout history, that can say to you that you have to do whatever they say, and you have no recourse, you have nothing to protect you from them. Our Constitution protects us from the government. Well, that's only if we use it, it's like a good tool. If it's sitting there in the tool shed, and you don't pull it out to help you dig the hole, then you just suffer through with that spoon trying to make it bigger and bigger.

Yes, I understand all their points, and they make a whole lot of sense. But I really don't understand how we got to a point where we can have an inflation rate that's making me pay $4 a day for gas. I mean, you know, what good does it do if you get rid of all the oil we saved in case we're attacked and pretend that that's going to bring the price of oil down? I get a little frustrated. But after the break, let's talk about what should or shouldn't be done and what we should or shouldn't expect. Welcome to the Christian Car Guy radio show. I've been doing this a little over 15 years with Robbie, and I realize Robbie is even more impressive and smart than he appears on the radio to you. He is brilliant.

Some of the very best conversations we have are in the breaks, and it would just be really neat to save those so that we can play them. What we were discussing before is that we're in a position we don't want to be. We keep going in this direction of giving the federal government more and more power because the federal government keeps creating larger and larger problems. And then we think that the federal government is going to fix these larger and larger problems. So they come up with bigger and more bizarre ways to fix the problems, and the problems get worse and worse and worse. So in my mind, we're where we should not be, and we need to stop and start heading in the direction where we want to be.

We can't just burn it all the way down to the ground like one dear friend of mine thinks we should and start over again. So, you know, Kristen, how do we head in the right direction constitutionally? What should we expect the federal government to do or not do? Now, some of the friends I love that listen to you come into the meeting, and they say the federal government should do nothing. Well, you know, maybe it certainly should do far less, but I'm not ready for it to do absolutely nothing because it's created things too big and mean and awful for me to fix.

So where do we go from here? What do you think we should require our public officials to do other than stay home and not go to Washington? Yeah, well, I definitely think we shouldn't expect them to do nothing. I mean, the founders created the federal government with intention and with purpose. There was a goal behind it because things weren't going so well under the Articles of Confederation, which is basically the Constitution before our Constitution. So we needed something to bring order to an otherwise chaotic situation where states and their governments were dealing separately, and it was a problem. So, yeah, we do want the federal government to have power.

We need that. We need government, obviously, to protect us and our private property. But I would say, so what should we require our politicians to do? I mean, I think the first step is let's start requiring them to actually know and then follow their job description.

Obviously, where and how that applies to all these specific circumstances, like you mentioned inflation, that's going to come into play. But the first step, we've got to stop with the fluff. That's all they do. And that really starts in the hearts and the minds of the people, right? We're the employers, so our expectations of them empower them. So we expect them to do more than they're actually empowered to do.

Therefore, they do it because they're more than happy to violate their job description all day every day. And so my goal is more to help change the hearts and minds of the people rather than change what politicians are doing, because the politicians will eventually come along if the people no longer treat them as if they are gods, right, that are empowered to do whatever they want, to fix everything. So this is where our mindsets are really skewed. And this really happened in the 1930s, where at least when it comes to the economy, we as a public shifted in our perspective and our expectations on government's job when it comes to the economy, fixing the economy or not. So prior to the 1930s, we were pretty laissez faire, where we did not believe that as a collective citizenry, that the government at a federal level should be- We were lazy what? Laissez faire. It just is like the French word for, you know, we, governments stay out of my business, more or less, at least federal governments stay out of my economic business. So we didn't expect government to fix everything.

And that's where I really, that's kind of the key thing. So when you said government should do nothing, no, I don't think government should do nothing. However, I don't think the solution is to have government fix more things, because it's just going to cause more problems, because they're never supposed to be fixing things. That's not their job. Their job in the Constitution has nothing to do with helping the poor, providing health care, making sure the economy is stable.

That's not their job. But that doesn't mean the states. The states don't have those responsibilities. Because yeah, for some reason, I think North Carolina might be a little bit different than Washington State or California.

So I'm not real sure that a solution that works in North Carolina is going to work in Alabama. Right. And that's the whole thing. That's why the founders didn't give these powers to the federal government, because there's no one size fix all.

You know, that's ridiculous. And so, yeah, this is where it's interesting. So like I said, our perspective switched around the Great Depression era. And we started expecting government to be the solution to most of our economic problems. And so because we expected the government to solve our economic problems, the private industry, churches, local communities, or even states themselves stepped back. And so when they stepped back, federal government stepped in more. And so the more the federal government stepped in more, the more the rest of us stepped back.

So much so now that if the federal government doesn't step in, there's no one. Therefore, it's like they have to step in. Right. And so and there's this really weird assumption.

I don't know how much time we have, but there's this weird assumption that the federal government, it's their job to make sure that the economy is stable. Right. And so this led to a Supreme Court ruling called...

Boy, it sure looks stable now. Yeah, I know. Right. There's a Supreme Court ruling called Wickard something. I can't remember the other side of it. And basically, the Supreme Court interpreted the Commerce Clause. And for those of you who don't know what that is, it's just a clause that deals with commerce amongst the states. Interpreted the Commerce Clause to mean that the federal government, okay, this is really, this is important. The federal government has the right to write law that would regulate an individual who is growing wheat in his backyard and eating his own wheat. Right. So the individual grows wheat, makes the wheat, uses the wheat, eats the wheat, and that's it.

They don't sell it to anyone. And the justification the Supreme Court had for this regulation was that because the individual is growing their own wheat, they're not going to go out and buy wheat from another person or from another company. Therefore, it affects the economy at large. Point being, you're saying that the government said we can get all the way down and get in your pocket and what you can plant in your own backyard and what you can't.

Because the fundamental assumption is that the federal government's job is to maintain the economy. And when we do that, then we're trying to affect an entire world economy. Yeah. You know, at one time, the way God intended this was that I take care of my family and then my family take care of my extended family. And we're supposed to look after our neighbors. We're supposed to look after our extended neighbors. And then all of us are supposed to try and look after our city and our county so that from God's point of view, we're supposed to be taking care of the people that we actually come in contact with.

Yes. And if we did that, there would be very little need for all these great big federal programs. If the church took care of itself first and then it looked on the other side of the walls and it took care of the neighbors to that church and the neighbors of the members, then there would be far fewer need for a federal government to come in and take our money and spend most of it on absolutely nothing we intended it to, to give a little bit of the money to solve the problem that we wanted them to fix.

Yeah, exactly. And that's where it really like, and it's interesting because you're talking about community and family and then you jump right to federal government and that's because that's where we automatically have gone. We don't even turn to our local governments or our state governments first, which is where we really should have been turning because we're going to be much more likely to be able to hold them accountable to how they do things than we are at the federal level, right? And then of course, we're not even thinking about their job description in any of this.

We're just thinking, oh, this is what we want them to do. And this is why I am so passionate about the job description because even if it sounds noble and great for the federal government to help out the poor or do something that is supposedly noble, if it's outside the job description that they've been given at the federal level, yes it can. But if we ask them at the federal level to do something outside of their job description, we're asking them to have arbitrary power.

And if they have arbitrary power, that means they can literally do anything. I wish I could remember which communists said it, but the one of the main communist early on said, I see a group of people going by the front of our building. I need to go find out where they're going so I can lead them. As a nation, we say, oh, we got this great big problem. And then there's somebody in Washington that says, oh, they all agree we've got a problem. I'm going to pretend I've got a solution. They'll empower me and then give up a big chunk of their money and their rights and their privileges. And over and over and over and over again, we elect these people to go to Washington who think their job is to help us so that they can enrich themselves and enrich the people that gave them the money to get elected.

And that's the fluff I talk about. Yeah. And they love crisis because crisis is the most empowering thing for any government. Never miss a crisis. They're always wonderfully empowering. Yes. You know, my favorite drum to beat is the 17th Amendment.

I don't know whether we've got time to get into it before. But if we allow the government to eat more and more power, they will eat as much of our power as we give them. And that power is our rights and our privileges and the ability for us to live. And our liberty.

Yeah. You're listening to the Truth Network and TruthNetwork.com. Welcome to the Christian Car Guy radio show. I say this calls for action.

And now. We want to thank you for staying with us through the show. We've got just the most wonderful guest on Dr. Kristen McMaster's. She is a Ph.D. in political science.

She's got a wonderful Web page and a wonderful blog. They help you understand that we're supposed to be in charge. We elect people who work for us and that those people that we elect are supposed to be accountable to us, that the things that they should do should be open and above board and visible. And that when we send them there to solve problems, that they should solve the problems and they should solve the problems in a way that makes sense. That's clear. And we got a lot of problems in this country that we need to fix.

I'm from affordable housing to the fact that I paid $4 a gallon for gas today. We need to hold the people we elect accountable. And that starts with making sure we elect the right people, that we elect people that understand we're not sending them up there to enrich themselves or their family members. We're sending up there to find common sense solutions to the problems that we and our neighbors have.

We don't have a whole lot of time in this segment. So I want to make sure you tell people about your web website and the web page and what they'd find if they go there. Yeah, so it is the Liberty Bell NC.com and that's B-E-L-L-E. So it's a little play on words.

But yeah, I mean, essentially the website is kind of what we've talked about today is a microcosm of what I talk about on my website and my YouTube channel and any of the speaking engagements I give or the book that I published, I can't remember, it was a year and a half ago. And I'm just trying to empower the people. And like you said, we are the boss. And the thing that I kind of want to amend my statement as far as us being the employer, we are the employer and the government is our employee, but we are not the final say. The people are not the final say. And that's because the founders were very aware of human nature, right?

And they were very wary of human nature. And that's why they created the government with ambition, counteracting ambition, which basically just means they wanted to pit power against power. They expected government to kind of go after power. But they would also expect that from the citizenry because it's not like we're angels. Madison said, men are not angels, which is why we need government. And government is not angels, which is why we have checks and balances, right?

And so the thing I like to leave a lot of the speaking engagements with is we are a constitutional republic. We are not a democratic republic with intention. And the difference is if the final say is the people, we would be a democratic republic, right? So we ultimately could tell our government exactly what we wanted them to do. How am I going to take everybody else's property away from me if I can't vote for it?

Right, exactly. See, I mean, people voted for Hitler, right? We actually wanted Japanese Americans to be interned in the 1940s.

700,000 of them stripped of their property and put in internment camps by popular demand, right? And so what the government should have done is say, no, our job is to follow the Constitution first and foremost. So when it comes down to it in a constitutional republic, the final say is not the people, the final say is the Constitution, because the Constitution literally protects us not only from government, but also from ourselves, because we can be irrational and emotional and through irrational emotional whims, we can demand things that will end up damaging our liberty.

And so or the liberty of some group of people. So that's why the Constitution is supreme. It is the literal job description of our government, it confines their power. And it also confines our power, right? Because it's not arbitrary, we're arbitrary. And so is government. And we don't want that.

We don't want arbitrary power from us or from government itself. And so and the other funny thing is the government, the founders expected our government to be corrupt, right? And that's why they gave it a job description. That's why they built it in such a way we're one of the only countries I know of to be built on the assumption that men are bad, which is beautiful. I would rather say self-serve self-serving.

Sure. Yeah, self-serving, selfish, ambitious. That was the entire fundamental understanding when they built this country is that they knew we have to figure out a way to sort of pit all of this ambition against itself to keep it at bay, which is remarkable.

It's really ingenious. And I think the only reason it's lasted this long, and this is why it's so important that we understand how it functions so that we can actually continue to protect the liberty that does exist to this day, right? We're very blessed that we still do have liberty. And something I always say is, listen, if you if we believe men are all good, we don't need government. So the mere fact that we need government means that there's something we believe is wrong that needs some sort of, you know, correcting in law for.

We also need to teach history so that people realize that throughout the history of mankind, maybe that's a problem, it's been mankind instead of womankind. But because throughout history, there have been people doing things that they shouldn't do to other people. Exactly. And so, you know, theories like socialism and communism and all of these, they're really sort of push the idea that man is genuinely selfless, genuinely sort of out for the good of the rest of the communal society. Right.

And it's true if you're one of those top two or three people. Right, exactly. And so that's why that's why these theoretical foundations are so critical. This is why I'm trying to sort of help build a theory, a theoretical foundation for people who follow me, because we need that foundation and fundamentally it does come down to what do we believe human nature is. And if we believe human nature is fundamentally good, well, then we don't need government.

Or if we do, we could have some sort of communal society. And we've seen throughout time that one bad apple ruins the whole thing. And so, you know, one bad apple in a selfish society that we assume is selfish. When you have a bad apple there, that means the person's selfless. Well, that's not going to hurt or ruin the whole thing.

In fact, it's probably going to do something good for society. And so that's sort of the whole point of the Liberty Bell is just to help arm people with answering these deeper why questions, these deeper why questions that I think most people don't ever push themselves to actually answer. And that's really I believe the fundamental way we're going to save liberty is because we ourselves need to know why we believe what we believe so we can start holding our politicians accountable to why they're doing what they're doing, rather than just taking the fluff.

Right there. They know how to itch our ears. They know what to say. They know the big popular statements. And most of them are not even part of their job description. And we're letting them get away with it.

It's the most exciting thing for me to see people starting to say, hey, that's arbitrary. You don't have the job. That's not within your job description. The other side of this is who is the job? Who is responsible for solving those problems? If you've got Jesus in your heart, if you're a Christian, our problem is that we quit taking care of our family and we quit taking care of our extended family and we quit taking care of our neighbors.

And the churches turned inside and didn't reach outside. Instead of being coast guard cutters out to rescue people, we turned into these little life rafts scared to death to bring in another soul. We've got an obligation. We've got a responsibility to remember that we're Christ's shoulders, that our hands are Christ's hands, that we're supposed to be out there making a difference in the lives of the people around us. If we did that, then we wouldn't have to have a federal government taking huge chunks of money from us to give a few dollars back to do services that really don't operate that well.

Yeah. And the thing that I think I always tell people is there's two sides to every question. There's how you feel about it and then there's where does government fit. Because yeah, there are some legitimate real issues in the world, right? And just like what you said, what's the solution? Because where does government fit? Yeah, if we see poverty, poverty is a real thing and we don't need to pretend like it, but where does government fit and what level of government?

Where do we fit? If we see a problem that needs taking care of, you pray, should I help this person? Well, I promise you, I promise you, Jesus is not going to say, we'll toss it to federal government. Exactly. Jesus is going to say, if you're there, you see a need, you got the opportunity to help somebody, you need to stop and help them.

And if it's too big a problem for you, you need to reach out to the other people that you know and to your church and you need to solve the problems that are put before you. Thank you so much for coming on. I hope everybody goes to the Christian Car Guy website and looks at the links. And the Liberty Bell is just a pleasure. When I see it pop up in my newsfeed on Facebook and when I get an email about it, I really enjoy spending some time each month reading about things that I really should have learned when I was in school. Pray for the men's group that Robbie's leading today and look for an opportunity to be a time of refreshing and a light on the hill in your community. Thank you so much for tuning in. This is the Truth Network.