Top 2022 News Stories!

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. If you go way back in time, 2007, 2008, when I first started on radio, that was on Saturdays. It was call to action this week. And then we switched it when I went daily in February of 2011, then it became call to action today. And then industry experts told me that it should really be Steve, nobody's tuning into the show because it's the call to action radio show.

They're tuning in because it's you. So you should really change the name of the show, which I didn't like. But anyway, I did.

But going back to 2007, 2008, Michelle Woodhouse, welcome back. My radio fantasy back in the day was to actually shoot a cow in the studio at the beginning of the show because we had the whole No Sacred Cows thing. We had a scene from Napoleon Dynamite where the kids pull up in the school bus and they shoot the cow and all the kids start screaming. So I had this sick, twisted idea. We bring in a bunch of plastic sheeting inside the studio and we kill a cow. Obviously, we never did that. That might have been the end of my illustrious radio career.

That probably would have been a bridge too far for some people. Happy New Year. How are you? How are your holidays? Our holidays were so great. Happy New Year to you.

Thank you. They get shorter every year, don't they? They do. It's ridiculous. They do.

They do. And having a college kid home for break was so fantastic. And I'm reminded about the rising prices of groceries every two days. Yes. Yes. And my Chapel Hill kid is like, can you get the brown eggs and the vegan cheese? Of course, that's how his mom eats as well.

But it's all great. Yeah. It's not cheap to eat healthy.

It is so expensive to eat healthy. It is. But you know what? Got to do it. What are you going to do? All right. We're going to go through today. We're going to save on haircuts.

That's exactly right. Today we're going to go on, we'll look in the Wayback Machine. We're going to go through kind of the biggest stories of 2022. And we both have our top 10 list.

I've got a much bigger list because like you, when I started looking back at everything, wow, I forgot about this, forgot about that. So a crazy year. So we'll do that. We're also going to look forward into 2023. We'll talk a little bit about the state of North Carolina. But there is a historical event.

I told my students before Christmas break. I said, keep your eye on January 3, it's going to get interesting fast. And here we are. And this hasn't happened in 100 years where we're on, we just passed the second no go vote, picking a Speaker of the House, which I'm thrilled about, because I don't think Kevin McCarthy is up to the job. But unprecedented. Are you surprised at all? No, I'm not surprised. And I think it's great.

I was listening to some talking heads and our drive over from the mountains. And they think this is chaos and horrible for the Republican Party. And I think this is exactly what the grassroots want to see happen in the swamp. Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, and Ronna McDaniel failed the American people in the midterms because they didn't deliver. And McCarthy's hearing about it, 20 people voting against him and didn't budge on the second vote. I think it's exactly what needs to happen. And let's see what happens when they come out of this recess. Will McCarthy fold up his tent? Is he locked in? And we're going to just continue to have these votes. Staffers are saying get ready.

It could go into the weekend. But I don't see any of those 20 people changing their position. A name that I'm hearing out there now is Patrick McHenry right here from North Carolina. Yeah, who's a good guy. And I know our mutual friend Dan Bishop is standing strong. He's said this for a while now. He's going nowhere on the Kevin McCarthy vote.

And if you're going to talk about cleaning out the swamp, well, you need to clean out swamp monsters. And Kevin McCarthy is one of them. Well, absolutely. And, you know, if you look at the government and like Trump or dislike Trump, one of the best things President Trump did is he looked at the government like a business. And if you don't deliver, your three top executives don't get promoted.

They get fired. Right. Right. And Mitch McConnell has continued to show exactly who he is. And the Senate's going to put him right back in.

But the only chance that we have is McCarthy and Ronald McDaniel. So let's see what happens. And if Kevin can't get this vote, which it doesn't look like he's going to, how are they going to get anything done?

Right. And so even if he crawls across the finish line, battered and bruised with the 218 that he needs, we need to be prepared that they're going to do nothing for the next two years. Well, I mean, I think you ditch McConnell and the Republicans that voted in the Senate for that big trainwreck omnibus bill, because that locks government spending conversations out of Congress for the next 12 months. So the only thing the Republicans can do in the House is investigate, which I'm excited about and I hope they do. But they can't do anything in terms of runaway, ongoing runaway reckless spending, immoral spending by the federal government, because Ditch McConnell locked them out of the conversation. Well, and did McConnell do that on purpose to block Kevin McCarthy from becoming speaker? Right.

What's the seventh grade cheerleading camp drama there? And I think the American people are looking at this saying, this is why we need a complete overhaul. This is why we need term limits. This is just absolute and utter nonsense. Business as usual. Which is no business.

Which is no business. So all right, I'm going to go through, I'm going to just jump through this giant list that I came up with first, and then we're going to go through the top 10. We'll compare your list to mine. And then we'll talk some North Carolina stuff, and then we'll look ahead into 2023.

But I'm going to work backwards. This is in no particular order. The gay marriage protection bill passed. Mass shootings. We had a bunch of those.

The Walmart, the club, the gay club, the UVA shooting, the Raleigh shooting. That was five dead here. We got more.

And of course, Uvaldi's out there. Pelosi steps down. The FTX collapsed. Meta and Facebook is down 63% this year. Go woke, go broke. That's Disney down 43%. Alex Jones, the jury awarded $965 million. That's a big deal because he's a talk radio kind of guy. And then the judge tacked on another $473 million in punitive damages.

I've never seen that before. Zawahiri, who a lot of people forgot about, one of the masterminds behind 9-11, they whacked him with a drone strike. That was in July.

Crypto tanks. That happened in June, May 14. Buffalo supermarket shooting.

Remember that one? 10 dead. All federal raises rates, the Fed raised the rates seven times this year, Michelle, in January of 22, a year ago. It was at 0.08% today, in case you hadn't noticed.

It's at 4.5%, which is 56 times higher, 56 times higher than it was a year ago. Sandy Hook settlement. Remington Arms. This is the big deal. A lot of people didn't talk about this. Remington Arms pays $73 million to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting. That's a big deal. Hurricane Ian, of course, that was September.

Johnny Depp versus Amber Heard. That was in May. Inflation, pretty much every month. The Slap heard around the world. That was in April. A monumental $2 billion Powerball winning, one ticket winner in California.

That was in November. Mar-a-Lago raid. Yuvaldi, Texas. Katongi, Brown. James Webb.

Artemis won. No red wave. Trump announces crime. Border. Queens death. Musk buys Twitter. Russia invades Ukraine.

Roe overturned. We'll work our way to the top 10. I'm here with my good friend, Michelle Woodhouse. This is Steve Noble. Happy New Year, everybody. We'll be right back. What else is new? Welcome back.

It's Steve Noble on The Steve Noble Show. Happy New Year. 2023.

Can you believe it? January 3rd, 2023. Here with my good friend, Michelle Woodhouse.

Good friend, more importantly, sister in Christ. Overlooking at the top stories of 2022. I just went through this big giant list. A lot of that stuff, we just forget things come and they go and the news cycle is so voracious, Michelle, that things come and they go. They're only there for a few days in a lot of cases or a couple of weeks. Some of these have gone on and on and on, but a lot of them have not. They kind of come and go and our news cycle is just voracious and just swallows stuff up.

It's really kind of crazy. So let's go through our top 10 list. Let's start with yours and let's go from number 10 down to number one.

We'll have some comments on here and then when I have them and I have them maybe at a different level, I'll say where I had them. But this is all personal opinion, so it's not like there's a right or wrong answer. There we go. And as we dig into the top 10, I will say that the House of Representatives is on round three. Oh, they are. They're on number three now. And there's been nominations of Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan and Representative Andy Ogles from Tennessee is abstaining in round three, who had been previously supporting Kevin McCarthy.

So buckle up. We might have a speaker by Valentine's Day. And this hasn't happened for 100 years. 100 years. I do not know what happens in the meantime.

Let's say it takes them two months. What do they do? I mean, they're going to have to... Do they have committees? It's not like the Speaker of the House calls all the committees. He puts people in charge.

I mean, what do you do? No committee assignments. No investigations. No nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Right? And, you know, I was thinking about what do they do? And if this was 150 years ago, they'd probably duel on the floor of the House, which isn't a bad idea. Aside from the obvious loss of life, it's not a terrible idea. No.

Maybe just let them do cage boxing or something, cage fighting. Okay. Number 10 for you. Yeah.

The Idaho Murderers. Yeah. So why?

That's obvious. And thank God they brought a guy in. You know, he was a PhD student at a local college. And they brought him in.

He was in Pennsylvania. So why do you think that one is such a big deal? Well, you know, I think for me, probably having a college student, this one really struck for me. But it was such a big story to end the year. And we looked at these four young lives that were just snuffed out for no reason. Yeah. I mean, brutal. Beautiful, brutal murders of these four college students in a pretty quiet college town. And... Nobody would ever know it's there.

Moscow, Idaho. Right. Absolutely. And my guess is that police force hadn't investigated one murder, let alone four. And to see the outcrying of calling for justice and what they were going to do. So it just was, it was in the forefront of the news cycle for really the last two months. Yeah, last two months. Right.

It was early November. That's my number 10. All right. Keep going. Number nine is Donald Trump. And under that...

Which aspect of Donald Trump? There we go. So I have subcategories. Oh, okay. Here we go. Okay.

So we have the Mar-a-Lago raid. Yep. That made my list.

That was number seven for me. The announcement that wasn't an announcement, right? With Trump, I'm running again and nobody really cared. What do you mean? Yeah.

Nobody really... Paid attention. That was a big... Well, and I could put the... That was a nothing burger.

What were those cards that he launched? Oh, yeah. NFTs?

He's a big announcement. NFTs. Non-fungible. I mean... How many people had to Google what an NFT was? I did.

I had no idea what that meant. Anybody over the age of 28. Yeah, because I'm sure lots of people under 28 voted for Donald Trump.

And the dinner party, that was the disaster. When you have the anti-Semite, Nazi, and Kanye for dinner. So I think Trump... And that's just kind of a quick glance at Donald Trump. Is he racing his relevance? I think his base has dwindled and continues to dwindle. We had friends over for dinner, another person had run for Congress in the 11th, and their significant other, and another couple, all Trump supporters, and we just kind of did a round robin at the table, DeSantis, DeSantis, DeSantis, DeSantis, around the table. And it wasn't about Trump's policies, because I think his policies were spot on. And he stayed true to the conservative platform.

He's just gotten out so far over his skis. And as we've talked about, 2016, he ran for the right reason, to save this country from Hillary Clinton. Praise God that he did that.

Yeah, absolutely. 2020, he ran to continue those great policies and drain the swamp. But this time, it's vitriol, and we don't need... We're watching... He's the captain of Get Even. Right, we're watching reality TV play out right now in the House of Representatives.

We don't need any more of that. So he was my number nine. Number eight was the Yuvaldi shootings and the other mass shootings, and probably Yuvaldi was to me the... It was horrible.

Horrible. 19 little kids, two teachers. Yeah, and we had one here in Raleigh. And then the other thing with Yuvaldi was the absolute bumbling of the whole situation by police. And the one guy whose kid was inside who wanted to get in there and they wouldn't let him. I think that's one of the things that's been the biggest downsides in the last couple of years since Floyd and the whole BLM thing, is cops are now so afraid of people filming them. And I can't blame them to a certain extent, but at some point you're at an elementary school and kids are being shot.

Who cares what social media is gonna say? Get in there. Get in there. And get those babies.

Well, I was thinking about this as I was working on my list. I grew up in the neighboring town to Oxford, Michigan, where they had a mass shooting that would have been in 2021. But remember when Columbine happened and it was so startling. It startled America to our core. It really did. And now I think we're almost becoming numb to these shootings. Yuvaldi was a 30-day story. And much of it was about the blunders of the police department. And I think one of the dads or a husband of the teacher charged in and was able to save some children while the police were out there trying to figure out what to do. And sometimes imperfect action is better than perfect inaction.

Get in there and save those babies. Number seven for me was Queen Elizabeth. Her death. Which was huge.

Huge. Longest serving monarch. I think as we talked about off air, the Woodhouses binged the crown. And I have to say... The nobles have watched all the crown as well.

I love it. Down the Abbey was the Jenga piece that started all that. Because you just become fascinated with the way Britain used to run and to a certain extent with the royal family, the way it still runs.

And for me, as somebody that teaches US history now, I look at that as an origin story for us. But that was a massive story when Queen Elizabeth died. And Charles had been waiting, especially if you've watched the crown, and if you haven't, I encourage all listeners, watch the crown.

Binge watch that as you're watching the Republicans bare knuckle fight on the floor of the House of Representatives. That when... I think Prince Charles didn't think it was gonna take this long.

And so he was ready, he was ready, he was ready. And so I think her death, the way she served, getting through the Jubilee, and then passing away. And her and Philip's love story, I thought, it was a great story. It got you.

It got me. Number six is Elon Musk and Twitter. Which is an unfolding story. Absolutely.

In the Twitter files, I think we've seen seven, and then he just teased something the other day about Fauci. Yeah. Well, I love the way that he just... Was he gonna be able to do it? Was he not? Was he? Was he? Was he? Was he not? And then when he shows up, and he's basically just starts firing people, and says, we're not doing...

There is a First Amendment, we are gonna honor it, this is nonsense. And he is very methodical in what he's rolling out. And Elon Musk has the kind of money, he can do whatever he wants. Right.

Oh, yeah. He lost the planet. He lost the title. He did. Well, he's just spent 44 billion.

He's cashing out a Tesla stock like crazy in the last 60 days, because he's gotta fund his Twitter purchase. But yeah, there's a lot more in that, which we'll pick up, and we'll continue on the list the biggest stories from 2022. We will, in the last segment, look forward into this year, 2023, what might be on the horizon. This is Steve Noble talking to my friend, Michelle Woodhouse, on The Steve Noble Show. We'll be right back.

Welcome back. It's Steve Noble, The Steve Noble Show, as we move into the new year, January 3rd, 2023, here with my friend, Michelle Woodhouse, talking about our top 10 stories for the year. Recap where you were, because you started at 10, and you're working your way down, then I'll throw my list in there, and then we'll... We're just kind of jiving back and forth on these, and then we'll talk about 2023 and what's going on in North Carolina.

But start from 10 and just flip them off. Idaho murders Trump et al, the Uvalde school shooting, Queen Elizabeth's death, Elon Musk. Elon Musk, right, with buying Twitter. And why do you think that's important?

I'm with you, I had that up pretty high. Well, for me, I think it's the... There's been so many conversations around social media, and social media using their platform to silence conservative voices. And to target conservatives, and to marginalize conservatives, and to be able to use what's supposed to be a free speech platform to drive a political and social narrative, a woke narrative. And he exposed that's exactly what happened. And you know what's happening at Twitter, it's happening at Facebook, and it's happening at Instagram, and it's happening at YouTube. 100%.

So it's all over the place, we're just getting to see this one particular aspect. And just like what the Hunter Biden laptops polls show that if... You would have changed the presidential election result if the Hunter Biden laptop stuff had blown up there in October, right before the election. Because enough people would have been like, and Donald Trump would probably be the president today. Absolutely. And I guarantee you, if he was the son of a Republican former vice president... Oh, baby. Exactly. And people can say, well, if it was one of Trump's kids, it doesn't matter.

It could have been one of George Bush's kids or Mitt Romney's kids. Well, they're much better at playing that game. Well, yes. So number five for me is Ukraine. And this has been, for me personally, kind of an interesting thing. Because early on, I really supported America, supporting the efforts there. But now what we're finding out is when you have Zelensky coming to the floor of the House of Representatives, looking like he stepped off the set of MASH, like a remake of MASH, and getting love and hugs and accolades, this man just shut down churches in his country. He is a dictator, 100% a dictator, and we are funding that war blindly. And when Senator Marsha Blackburn, and I will give our own Senator Tom Tillis, I don't give him a lot of accolades, but I will in this case, when the two of them bring to the Senate floor, we want an audit of every dollar, and it doesn't get traction, that is a problem. That is a problem. And Ukraine was remarkably corrupt already.

Absolutely. And Russia should not have been invading, but that's not our war. We have spent countless billions of dollars, and we're nowhere being done in what we're spending. And we're worried about border integrity for Ukraine. And our border on the southern border is just a wide open train wreck, human destruction right and left, all over the place.

Okay, keep going. Number four is the economy. And I would put in that, under that, again, some subcategories of, can you believe that in 2022, American mothers could not get baby formula?

Yeah, wasn't that wild back in April or May, whenever that was? And now you can't get antibiotics, or cough medicine. Any medicine-related problem like that generally goes back to China, who has such a huge portion of the market.

Well... Because we don't want somebody in the White House anymore that'll go to war with China over economic policies and trade. Well, and that's, I think, to me, one of the biggest mistakes that Donald Trump made during, early on during COVID, was being able to stand firm, because China put him over a barrel, because that's where our medication was coming from. Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. Well, guess what?

Open up some factories and start producing some amoxicillin. Yeah, how about that? Right? And we still, I think, in 2023, one of our stories that I think will be interesting to follow, because it's kind of been pushed onto the back burner, is when does China make their move on Taiwan? And we were supposed to be making chips sometime in 2021 or 2022 in preparation, and we're nowhere. And we're nowhere near.

Not even close. That's a big problem. Number three is the border crisis.

Yep. And I think... Which is a humanitarian... For me, first and foremost, it's a humanitarian crisis on a number of different levels. Second, it's about a national integrity of your borders, which the Bible, by the way, endorses. Otherwise, you would never have the story in the Old Testament during the Exodus, when Moses is leading a million plus people going towards the promised land. And then at one point, he comes up to a country and God instructs him, ask for permission to walk through.

And if they don't give it to you, then walk around. Which was God endorsing structural integrity of a nation's borders right there in the Old Testament, early on in the Old Testament. So there's nothing wrong with America protecting her border.

Well, and if we don't have a border, we don't have a country. Right. Exactly.

And these aren't... If we could get the stay in Mexico policies back in place, because this isn't about refugees. These are not people fleeing. Because if you're fleeing as a refugee, then the first country you come to is where you find your protection.

That's right. So you're coming from Honduras and Guatemala, through Mexico, just walking in... Six, eight, 1,200 miles. Very dangerous, by the way.

And I believe, candidly, my opinion is 2023 will be worse for the border, which is unbelievable, because we've got Republicans led by our own Senator Thom Tillis here in North Carolina, who wanna put in place amnesty. And you look at the... In Arizona, they put those storage... They kind of built their own wall with the storage containers, and now they're taking it down, which is unbelievable. Right. Oh, absolutely. A total violation of federalism and the federal government, if they're not gonna protect your border and you're a border state, you do it yourself. Well, and we're both parents of girls. If we lived in a border, I would never let my daughter out of the house.

No way. Because we know they're getting kidnapped, human trafficked. Oh yeah, it's terrible. And so... Well, the vast majority of people coming over the southern border just want a better economic life for themselves, and that's contrary to the narrative that America is the worst country on the planet, right? Because why would people still come here?

But it's everything else that comes in, all the riffraff that comes in with that, and all the human tragedy that's going on there with sex trafficking, human trafficking in general, fentanyl, which is an epic proportion at this point. The southern border is killing people on all kinds of levels on both sides of the border. And then ultimately, of course, Democrats, I had this conversation with students, ultimately, why would Democrats want southern border open? Because they know the vast majority of those people, if we give them amnesty, then they're gonna vote, and they're gonna vote for who? They're gonna vote Democrats. That's why I think Trump was scary for them, because he started to pull more Latino votes. Now if all of a sudden the Latinos coming in were gonna vote Republican, you'd see the border shut down pretty fast. They would get a handle on that.

They would. Okay, keep going. Number two is the red wave that wasn't. The big fizz. And I guess we're watching that play out right now, because I think Kevin McCarthy planned on enough of a buffer that the 20 that were not gonna vote for him as Speaker, he had a little wiggle room. No wiggle room.

Right. And I'm watching as the votes are coming in on this third round, and he's lost some votes. Wow, it's going down.

It's going downhill quickly, so let's see what happens. If you could pick anybody in the House of Representatives to be the Speaker of the House, who would it be? Chip Roy. There you go.

Bada bing, bada boom. Do you think they're gonna come around and dump Kevin and then put somebody else up? I do. I hope so. That's something to pray for. And I think if you are Kevin McCarthy after your third round, do you just keep putting the caucus through this?

Right. Because at some point you have to see the writing on the wall and say, I can't win. There's no path to victory. If it's anything like his pseudo-buddy Donald Trump, his ego will not allow it to. Will not allow it. So if McCarthy is somehow able to sway some of these votes over to him, I mean, he only can lose five, right? He's got to pick up, now I think 15 based on the last vote count.

If he's able to do that, what kind of retaliation is going to come to the Matt Getzes, the Dan Bishops, the Chip Roys that in and so... They're gonna pay a cost. They are.

They are. And let's not forget, there's a reason Kevin wasn't put in as Speaker. There was a reason Paul Ryan became the Speaker of the House and not McCarthy.

I don't think he's ever had the support that he thought that he had, but it's gonna be very fascinating to watch and see what happens. We'll keep an eye on it. And number one is obviously the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs case. And I think we're gonna dig into that and talk about it.

I think it's your number one also. But you look at North Carolina and I was having a conversation with someone about this just yesterday that people often say in politics, because you know I love to talk about that, what George Santos did in New York doesn't really impact me. And what's happening here in California, that doesn't impact me. Well, if you live in the state of North Carolina, the general assemblies in South Carolina and Tennessee that have put in place Heartbeat and Born Alive bills, those votes are affecting us right here in North Carolina because we have in essence become a destination state for abortions. We're an abortion vacation destination state.

Unbelievable. And you can thank Cooper for that because Cooper's gonna veto anything. And then you've got a bunch of Republicans that are afraid to go for the jugular on that issue. And I do think that as much as I didn't want the overturning of Roe to drive what happened in November, I think that was under the radar screen a little bit.

I think a lot of people are freaked out about that because the vast majority of Americans do not want abortion made illegal. Oh, and Democrats control the narrative completely. Oh, yeah.

100%. Republicans just ran from it. Well, and when that memo leaked, initially when the memo leaked out of the Supreme Court, I thought it was a liberal justices staffer.

Now in hindsight, I'm wondering, was that someone who worked with one of the conservative justices? No, that was, yeah. No, I didn't even put that on the list. It probably should have been on the list. The leak?

That was almost unprecedented. The leak, the thing that really is raising my temperature up right now, Michelle, is the fact that they haven't, quote unquote, caught anybody. Or if they did, then they've dealt with it quietly. And that person needed a public flogging, so to speak.

Well, and maybe that leak was an opportunity for conservatives to say, get it together, get your message, get a microphone, and start fighting for these unborn babies. Yeah, we'll be right back. Welcome back.

It's Steve Noble, The Steve Noble Show. It is January 3rd. We're looking back at 2022, almost done with that with my good friend, Michelle Woodhouse. And then we'll turn the corner. We'll talk some North Carolina politics, what's going on in this state, and then 2023, what might be on the horizon here.

I'm just going to go from one to 10 on my list because our list overlapped a lot. Number one, the same, Roe Falls, that's a 50-year precedent, 62 million dead babies. Just to see the full admittance confession here, I never thought I would see that happen in my lifetime and owe me of little faith and praise the Lord for that. Now it's back to the states. I actually think it should still be a federal issue. I think it should be outlawed federally. I don't think this is a state's issue because it goes right to the heart of the Constitution and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And so I'll take the win of Roe over overturning, but I think that should be a federal issue.

I think it should be outlawed nationwide. Number two, just because of its impact on a lot of different levels, I put Russia invades Ukraine at number two, and that's going to unfold. Will we get to a ceasefire this year?

We'll see what Putin does because he's got Europe over a bucket this winter, so that's going to be crazy. I put the economy as number three. On any number of levels, especially I mentioned this earlier, have been seven rate hikes. The rate a year ago, friends, was 0.08%. That was the federal rate, 0.08. It wasn't even 1%. Now it's 4.5%. That's 56 times higher. Seven rate increases in the last 12 months. That's almost unprecedented, and we haven't seen an economy like this since 1980.

So that's why I put there. The economy number three. Must buys Twitter at number four. The border chaos at number five. No red wave, number six.

Let me just ask you this real quick. How much do you think the abortion issue had with the no red wave? I think it had a huge impact. Abortion was on the ballot.

You look at places like Michigan, where if there was an abortion referendum, some kind of legislative action, Democrats won handily because they did a much better job of getting a message out. Carpe diem. They seized the day on that. 100%.

And you know what's really fascinating? When you look at, when you talk about the rate hikes and the economy, and I know we both have, it's a huge, huge issue. But it didn't matter. I mean, people didn't blame Biden. They didn't blame the current administration for the failures economically. What shows you on a spiritual level, the size of the idol that is killing children.

Absolutely. That shows you that, that I can be going broke. The average family in America spent over $6,000 last year for the same stuff they bought in 2021.

Over $6,000. That's the direct impact of the inflation, which is a bigger tax on poor people. But that wasn't as big, that wasn't as big a deal to them as protecting the right of states to kill babies. And that God's wrath is being stored up. Just remember that. America is not going to escape that. The border chaos, no red wave. Mar-a-Lago raid because that was unprecedented. And that's going to give, again, the FBI, we could have put the FBI in here in general. That's a beast.

That's out of control. Trump's announcement, and the reason I put it on there is because it wasn't. It was a big dud.

The one that I had on my list that you didn't have on your list, and this might be because I'm a geek and we have all this Star Wars stuff in here. The James Webb telescope started broadcasting and taking radio wave pictures that are unprecedented. We've never seen anything like that. That was back in, I think, January or February.

And then Artemis I. Artemis I was the rocket that just went back to the moon. They're getting ready in two years to actually land back on the moon. That was 50 years. We haven't seen that in 50 years.

Same thing with Roe versus Wade. So when I look at this, because I'm teaching history now and I'm going to add world history in the fall, I tend to think kind of historical because I would ask, I ask my students every two weeks, is there anything that happened recently in the news that you think is going to be in a history book in the next 20 years, 30 years, 40 years? And I'm pushing them to not spend all their time on TikTok.

And then the last one I had, number 10, was Go Woke, Go Broke. Disney went down 43% last year and the whole trans conversation, I think, has gotten to a point of no return. And the culture, I think, is going to start turning on it. I think the culture is going to transition away from transitioning. I hope so. And we'll see what happens there.

But that was a big deal. Okay. 2023, the look ahead. Let's talk about North Carolina first. So you want to talk about North Carolina politics for a couple of minutes? Sure. And we'll throw some things out there because we're not prognosticating neither one of us as a prophet.

And I don't want to get it wrong and get stoned. So North Carolina politics. I think now that Republicans have control of the Supreme Court, it's going to be huge, huge as far as what happens with more versus Harper, how redistricting goes, how bold do the Republicans in the General Assembly get when they redraw the maps. I do think the lame duck Democrat-held Supreme Court played chess when we were playing checkers in throwing out the North Carolina Senate maps. Because until those get righted based on that legal decision, then anything that comes out of the North Carolina Senate, is it fruit of the poisonous tree?

Is it now unconstitutional because the North Carolina Supreme Court of December said those maps were unconstitutional? Right. So it becomes very, very interesting. And remember, the Senate is the chamber where they have the veto-proof, they have the super majority in the Senate, not in the House. So that one's going to be, I think, really fascinating to watch. How do they do the maps for both the General Assembly and the congressional maps? And then how involved is the Supreme Court now held by Republicans, by a Republican majority, and you don't have, Republican judges don't legislate from the bench.

And so what will that Supreme Court do, and how much will the General Assembly push on them to do? That's going to be fascinating. The primaries are already in full swing. January 3rd, we already have two Republicans who have announced to run for lieutenant governor. Two people, three people or so that are not officially announced but are running on the gubernatorial side, a couple other people. Mark Robinson's going to run, obviously. Mark Robinson. I think Dale Falwell's going to run. How does Tom Tillis get into that race? Dale Falwell is the... North Carolina treasurer. Treasurer, thank you. You've done a great job.

Amazing, amazing. But who else jumps into that? And I think... Did you say Tillis? I think Tillis is going to...

I cannot stand Tillis. So here's kind of the interesting thing that I think the establishment group is looking at. They see Mark Robinson and Dale Falwell as both far-right candidates that will split the vote.

Right? So based on polling that we've seen, that we have seen so far, Robinson getting about 80% of that far-right segment of the party, then you put somebody in like a Tom Tillis who is a moderate and does that set up better to win a general election, right? Which I find, you know, repugnant because either you're a conservative who stands true on the fiscal responsibility, on the pro-life, the pro-personal responsibility, either you support that platform or you don't. It isn't... You can't be kind of.

It's like being kind of pregnant. You're either in or you're not in. And so that one will be really interesting. Who's going to run for the Democrats for governor? Josh Stein.

Josh Stein. But what... Unopposed for the most part. Probably. They'll clear the field. They're excellent at that. So I think what we'll watch happen in North Carolina is one, what is the role of the Supreme Court? Number two, how do the Republicans use the authority they now have in the General Assembly?

One law that went into place today which is great is being able to really revoke a lot of the emergency order powers that Cooper's had in place for two years. So how well do Republicans navigate the General Assembly in order to get legislation? One of the things I'm watching for and I think all conservatives should really be paying very close attention to is Republicans closed out 2022 in the Senate pushing Medicaid expansion and medical marijuana. They need to immediately stop that and take up the Born Alive bill and the transgender sports bill. And that's going to be... Where are they going to go? Are they going to go more moderate? That's a big marker to put down. You're either going to go uber conservative, you're going to go more moderate, you're going to go more moderate than Tom Tillis.

Then why bother? So I think it'll be interesting to watch and then the whole council of state will be up. We're going to have 14 congressional races.

Who's at the top? You know what happens if we have the wrong people at the top of the ballot in North Carolina, North Carolina becomes a swing state and a battleground state in a way that's going to be really scary. Yeah, we don't want that.

All right. So looking ahead this year, what are some of the things that you're on your radar screen just as we look ahead? Well, you know, are we ever going to have a Speaker of the House? I mean, let's start like what's happening today. You know, I think it's how does, how do Republicans that we've taken the House, how do we at the federal level work in that space? I think that's going to be interesting. Watching what states do because of the Roe decision, I still don't think that's completely ... No, that battle will continue.

... continue, that'll continue on. What happens at the border? That's going to happen with crime and we had some, across this country, some great victories on school boards. I know it didn't happen here in Wake County, but we had some great victories in North Carolina and across this country. Are we going to see a shift back to classical education with our children, getting this woke nonsense out of the classrooms? I think you'll see it in areas. And what kind of parental opportunities are going to be put in place where the school district stops trying to parent our children and is this trans, are we going to see a shift in the transgender wokeness? Yeah, I think the economy, you alluded to this earlier today, I think it's going to be worse. It's going to get worse.

It is. You're going to start getting into a lot of layoffs. We've already seen some of that, but that's going to get worse.

The Twitter files, that's an open question. You mentioned, Musk mentioned something about Fauci in the last few days, so that's like I'm dreaming about that. What do the Republicans in the House do since they can't touch spending because they just got locked out of that for 12 months? Presidential primary is going to heat up. Are we going to see the total implosion of Donald Trump and he can't even win a primary?

That'll be interesting. CNN had a terrible year, so it's going to be interesting to see what happens there. A lot of people are not paying attention to this. This is talk about Fox News. Dominion Smartmatic lawsuits or a billion dollar plus lawsuits against Fox News and other conservative groups. And that's going forward. Those are huge lawsuits. That's kind of dealing with the space of reporting the news.

That goes back to the Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube kind of digital democracy out there. So we'll watch that one. Of course, Ukraine, what's going to happen there? The one thing I do know for sure, Michelle Woodhouse in 2023, is God is still on the throne and he rules the entire universe for all time with his feet up. He's going to just picture him on the throne and his feet are on a step stool and he's not pulling his hair. He's not thinking about 2022 and 2023 and what's going to happen next. And that allows me to look at the news of the day in light of his sovereignty and sleep well at night. Absolutely. Because the king is on the throne and the kingdom will be reestablished on this earth. Another program powered by the Truth Network.