Church & State - Libertarian Lutherans of the World Unite with Spike Cohen

Spokane Valley could become a sanctuary city of a different kind. Councilman Caleb Collier says that this proposal. I'm. Proposing that the city of Spokane Valley issue a proclamation stating that our city is a Second Amendment sanctuary. Welcome to the fire. Welcome to the fire. Today on Church and State, Libertarian Lutherans of the world unite with Spike Cohen. Hello, Christian Patriots, and welcome to Church and State, where we drive morality and religion over tolerance and apathy. And I'm your host, Caleb Collier, once again, your favorite far-right shock jock. And the show that talks about politics and religion, Jesus Christ is our referee, so it's always nice and clean. Real quick, I'll point you to the website, churchandstate.media. Fill out this form for us. Number one, you're going to get our newsletter. Number two, bypass a lot of the censorship. And number three, I personally call every single one of you. Who fills it out, so please do so. 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Ladies and gentlemen, Massive growth here on Church and State, NRB TV, Prepper Broadcasting Network, OBBM, Faith and Freedom Television, Your News, Newscaster, so many great networks, and national syndication through AMFM Radio. We're working on that currently, getting pitched all over the country. So please, if you like the show, hit the donate button. Lastly, if you want to get a hold of us, churchandstate1776 at proton.me. With that, let's go ahead and bring on our guest. Now, I'm thrilled to bring to you Spike Cohen again. Spike is a successful business owner, libertarian activist and media figure. He's the founder and president of you are the power. It's a nonprofit focused on using solutions oriented activism to grow the Liberty movement. Spike, it is a pleasure to have you once again on church and state. I'm happy. I hope I perform so well that I will be on the website from now on, but we shall see. That's up to me. That's not up to you. It's up to me. Yeah. I got to tell you, I love, how did you, how did you put it on X? Uh, The bronze medalist in the presidential campaign in 2020 or something like that? I was the 2020 vice presidential bronze medalist. Now, to be clear, I did not get the medal. They have not sent it to me. I'm holding out hope. I think that I will. I think there's a tax— uh burden there so i may immediately sell it um but uh i'll i'll update people update people once i have it but i won i won the i i should have been there wasn't a podium either but i should have been on the podium. Um for sure i mean they never give the podium to any of the third party candidates obviously uh because they want to continue that uniparty system exactly Exactly. I mean, I could pick your brain on, I mean, you're a fellow Lutheran like I am. You're a libertarian activist. Honestly, like as far as libertarians go, you're kind of a giant, if you will, Nephilim even maybe. I'll throw that out there. Libertarian Nephilim. Yeah. You can use that if you want to at any point. I probably won't, but I like it. It's one of those that I'll keep in my pocket for private interactions. I probably won't put that on my Twitter bio. I love it, though. And I saw I am on the website, so that's good to know. There we go. See? The pressure's already down. We do have it. Excellent. Okay. It's already on there. But I do want to really focus on what you've been doing with You Are the Power, because- What we have seen so much is all of these different alphabet agencies that harass the people. And I would challenge the audience, go reread the Declaration of Independence. One of the grievances is that the crown at that point had actually created all these different agencies to harass the people and eat out their substance. That's what we're dealing with currently. Yeah, so at you— I couldn't agree more. At you are the power— in fact, if you read the Declaration of Independence, you look at it and you go, that's it? That's all the crown was doing to get them that worked up? What I love the most— and I think we talked about this the last time. When I was on the show— is that Protestants in particular, but Christians, had been operating from this— lesser magistrate doctrine of saying that, you know, yes, we are to submit to the governing authorities when the governing authorities act in such a way that it is. Tyrannical and harmful to us. It is the goal, the role of the lesser magistrate to stop the greater magistrate. What the Declaration of Independence did is, in effect, the lesser magistrate is who declared independence. But then they also declared that the greater magistrate was going to be we the people. And so it completely flipped everything over on its head. Not sure Luther would have liked that. In fact, I'm pretty sure he would have hated it. But that's the logical conclusion of his doctrine that he helped to put forward. The lesser magistrate doctrine is precisely that the lesser magistrate can and in this case did. declare the people to be the greater magistrate so when you look at romans 13 yes we have an obligation as christians there as well but the greatest obligation is to the lesser magistrate which is our elected officials to submit to our governing authority anyway that didn't answer your question so to answer your question you were the power we uh we protect people against abuse by state and local government officials that can look like all sorts of things um people facing losing their homes to eminent domain at the state or city or municipal level. It can look like and does look like people that have been charged with crimes that they did not commit. And all the available evidence shows that. Over half of the work that we do is parents that have been wrongfully accused of abusing their children, where all available evidence shows that not only did they not do it, but these children have medical conditions that cause the injuries that they have. Sometimes it's some kind of like something they were born with, like Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Sometimes it's complications due to a surgery and the hospital doesn't want to admit that they that they did something wrong. So they just accused the parents of abuse. There are cases where there were complications from the birth, all these different things, but they're medically explained. And yet the government still takes. The children away. accuses the parents of abuse. Sometimes they're facing decades in prison, never seeing their children again. Sometimes they're not allowed to interact with their spouse. They can't live together or even communicate with their spouse because they're seen as co-conspirators. And that's part of their bond conditions is they can't speak with their co-conspirator. So not only did they take their children, but they took their spouse from them as well. And we get involved in all those cases, in the cases of people being having their families wrongfully torn apart, people being wrongfully charged with crimes they didn't commit, people facing losing all sorts of things to the. City and the state. We get involved. We put an end to it. We end the nightmare for them. And we have had an insane success rate. We have processed over 2,000 cases in the last three years. We've lost one time. Wow. Absolutely incredible. I got to back up. I do have to say, though, as far as the doctrine of the lesser magistrate and Luther, perhaps not liking it, depending on the Lutheran church you're at. And of course, I'm talking about the good ones, guys, Missouri or Wisconsin. But we do kind of have the Maddenburg Confession, which was kind of that doctrine of the lesser magistrate. So, I mean, it is kind of in our blood as Lutherans to push back a little bit. Yeah. Oh, no. So so Luther was one of the original proponents of the lesser magistrate doctrine and almost. Almost begrudgingly, because his position was that up until then, up until he met with, you know, prominent theologians and attorneys and the officials that were going to have to fight against who was at the the. The emperor at the time, who. Was being pressured by the Vatican to force all the Protestant countries to submit to Rome. And, you know, his position, Luther's position up until then, was that the most that you can do when you're told to do something that blasphemes against God is to just say, I refuse to do that and do what you must to me. That was the most resistance he allowed. He believed in a very strict reading of Romans 13. he was convinced that when a greater magistrate is doing something that goes entirely outside of their purview of office, which in this case, that's what he was doing, that the lesser magistrate did have a burden to do something to stop that, even including potentially the use of force. Luther was perfectly fine with that. What I'm saying is, if you then said, hey, by the way, about 300 years later, 250 years later, This is going to be used to say, well, actually, the lesser magistrate just pulled an uno reverse and decided that the people. Are the greater magistrate. That's the part that I think he probably. Well, who knows? Maybe he could have been convinced of it. But I think at first blush, he would have been like, you're a bunch of Anabaptists. That's probably what he would have said. You're all a bunch of anarchists. And we would have had to say, no, no, no, no. No. Well, we're saying that the lesser magistrate can make us. That was my point. But no, Luther was, even before Calvin and others, he was a proponent of the lesser magistrate doctrine. Absolutely. Going back to what you're doing, I mean, I absolutely treasure your actions and the actions of your organization. This is so necessary, whether. It's I'm sure you remember the CPS agents in Arizona who were wearing the professional kidnapper t-shirts, and they got in trouble for that. But there's all of these different organizations that are going after good people who are just simply trying to live their lives, raise their children, work the nine to five, whatever it may look like, and they get harassed and targeted. Truly, it is lawfare that has. Occurred against these people, and you're coming in there And you're not some government organization. You're not a guy that's like the government oughta. You're like, no, I oughta. I oughta do something about it. And you're having success. We've had incredible success. I mean, in every case we do in a way, say the government ought to, but it's usually just back off and stop doing this. Like stop, stop wrongfully, knowingly wrongfully accusing parents. Of abuse and railroading them through the entire system. I mean, we can, we can do an entire episode just talking about what these parents go through, how they have to fight to sometimes spending tens of thousands of dollars to get their own kids medical records because when their kids are taken from them, They're no longer their kids, at least not legally. In that moment. And so the court, the the the state will argue, well, you don't have a right to their medical records, even though that's the one thing that they need to be able to actually show that they didn't abuse their kids to show the prevailing evidence. And then they get that evidence. They go to family court thinking like most normal people would, that this was all a big misunderstanding. I'll be able to show this evidence. And the family court railroads them. Sometimes refuses to even allow it to be entered into evidence. And if they do, they can still kind of arbitrarily decide to ignore it and just take the word of the state instead. And in the midst of all this, when we started really getting into this and we started having real success and more and more families came out of the woodwork with the exact same story, we found out why. Under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, the federal government is paying state child protective systems The CPS agencies, the family courts, the child abuse pediatrics systems at the hospitals, the entire pipeline, we'll call it the child protective industrial complex, all the vendors involved, the visitation centers, everything that's involved in this multibillion-dollar industry, they pay them for every time they're They accuse someone of abuse and take their children and put them in foster care and keep them as long as they possibly can and ultimately place them for adoption. And if that child ends up having a lifelong health condition, they get even more money. So when a child is coming into a hospital with an as yet undiagnosed condition or with a known but not acknowledged issue like complications from surgery or from birth or something like that, That's a child that can be, that has injuries that are either not explained or they're refusing to explain it medically. And they can put them in foster care. If they're super young, like just born, they can put them in foster care for many, many years. They can place them for adoption and they already know they have a lifetime health condition. And so that they already they're looking at this kid. And instead of looking at them as an individual human being, a child in need of care, they think cha-ching because they know this is the maximum amount of money they can get. All they have to do is turn off their humanity, dehumanize both themselves and that child in the families, because that's how they get funded. And so what we're doing initially, I mean, I guess the first phase is get the kids back. Like, triage. Like, get these children returned to these families and get these charges dropped to keep them from going to prison for years for a crime that never even happened. As we're doing that, we're creating the momentum, the public opinion and political momentum to get legislation passed, like we did in Florida and Georgia, to add a lot more due process to the process of accusing parents of abuse, especially when they could just get medical records. So we've made it easier through that legislation for them to get immediate access to the medical records and forcing the family courts to actually hear it. Long-term, what our goal is is to either end Title IV-E entirely and end that federal performance-based funding pipeline, or if that's not possible, tie the funding to something much more neutral, like the population of the state or the number of children in the state or something like that. That can still be abused. That can still be played with. But at least you're not paying. Agencies to assume something, to go one way or the other. Well, we'll pay you if you go this way. We won't pay you if you go that way. We've had some people that have said, you know, well, what if we instead pay the agencies for every time they reunited a family? Well, now you're going to have the opposite problem. You're going to have children who are being abused by their parents, who are being neglected by their parents. being reunited with parents that might end up killing them or just, you know, continuing to inflict severe suffering on them. So what we're saying is neutralize either— cut. Off the funding entirely. Show me in the Constitution where it says anything about the federal government being involved in child protection. Clearly, that's a Tenth Amendment issue. But if they are going to be involved, because I understand we're not going to get everything they want, we're not going to get everything we want. At minimum, make it something neutral. But in the meantime, we're not going to let perfect be the enemy of good. There are people who need to be reunited with their kids right now. They need to be allowed to speak with and live with their spouses again right now. They need to not be put in prison for years right now. And that's what we're doing. Yeah, I got to tell you, I really love this approach because oftentimes the accusation for libertarians is that we're idealists and we're seeking that perfect, right? And if it's not perfect, it's never good enough. And certainly you've seen it even more than I have. But a lot of times you get a bunch of libertarians in the room. And it's just a lot of arguments. But your approach here, you're rolling your eyes. But your approach here is, look, the system is corrupt. It's nasty. But if we're going to do some good here, let's explore different avenues that it will at least reduce the amount of government abuse. People, 100 percent, all of that. People are motivated. By incentives, right? And the incentive structure that is inherent to government is one that naturally corrupts because it gives a tremendous amount of centralized power. It makes it so that your source of funding cannot opt out. It makes it so that you don't effectively have any real competition. That's called treason or a civil war. And. They can even create money. If the federal government's involved, they can even create money to fund it and stick you with the cost of the devaluation of the currency they force you to use. So when almost every single mechanism for feedback and correction is systematically removed or just non-existent by virtue of what government is, a monopoly, I mean, the only thing they make you think you have is the ability to decide who's sitting in that chair. But even if you do truly have a say in who's sitting in that chair, it's still the same chair that's attached to all the same buttons with all the same built-in incentives. So it's naturally going to lead to that kind of corruption in the first place. And so we kind of bypass all that and say, no, you're a human being with agency. You're motivated by incentives. We're going to change that incentive structure a little. Right now, it's politically expedient for you to do what you're doing. We're going to make it where it's not. So we're not going to make it harder to do what you're doing necessarily. We're just going to make it– or we're not going to make the– we're not going to make it. More politically expedient to do the right thing. We're going to make it comparatively more expedient to do the right thing. By making it really inexpedient to continue doing the wrong thing. And we can get more into what that means, but we're basically– We've figured out how to maximize and direct public attention on these issues directly to the people who need to hear it and to keep kind of hitting them with it until they back off and. Do the right thing. I love that. So as we're getting into the nuts and bolts of what you do, I mean, I would imagine that you have a legal team, but you are also using activism. To pressure these people to do the right thing. Is that an accurate statement? It is correct, yeah. So the attorneys that we work with are in the cases where they have to actually go to court, or we call them our client, the families and the individuals that we're helping, when they have to go to court, whether it's to sue over something or whether it's to defend themselves in criminal trials or whatever, we will partner with attorneys who can work on those issues. And these are usually mission-aligned attorneys that want to help. Us on that. What we do is entirely in the court of public opinion. We create content. Once we have— fully vetted these cases. Um, cause I know that's the first thing I'd be thinking is like, well, how do you know they didn't abuse their kids or how do you know that they didn't do the crime that they committed? So on our, on our non family related cases, like eminent domain stuff, uh, you know, people being charged with other things, charities being threatened with a B with, uh, with arrest for feeding people, stuff like that. We spend several dozen hours vetting the causes. We have actual professional volunteer vetting teams with law enforcement professionals, legal professionals, and all sorts of other people that help to vet these causes. On our family stuff, when someone's accused of abuse, we spend on average 300 hours vetting each of those causes. And if there's a single question mark, forget a red flag or a yellow flag, if there's even a question mark, if there's a question we have that can't be answered, we default to not taking on the case. there are many cases that we don't take on and we wish we could because it's almost certain they didn't do anything wrong but there's this one thing missing so if we go forward with a case where we say that parents did not abuse the kids you can rest assured that there's not a single person on our team who thinks that they did or even has a question mark because if there's one person that says no uh then it doesn't happen so once we go through that vetting process which includes medical professionals on that side as well. I mean, we literally create medical and legal narratives before we even go forward with it. Once we do that, then we put out posts and videos and images and all sorts of other content that gets people's attention and immediately directs that attention to a page on our website for that family or that individual or that community or whatever the cause is. And with... So a couple. Of presses of a button or clicks of a mouse or presses of your finger on your phone, you're able to send out pre-filled emails to all the officials involved. You can modify the wording or you can leave it exactly as it is. You can just put your name at the bottom and press send. And inside of like 40 seconds, you just send emails to everyone involved. We encourage people to share our posts so that more people can see it. We encourage people to become members, which there are free memberships. So you can become a member so you can be regularly updated by email before anyone else gets the update. And in general, that method has allowed us to touch officials like family court judges, CPS caseworkers, and supervisors, people that aren't used to getting emails. And then suddenly they're getting thousands of emails or Tens of thousands of emails and they're all saying the same thing. Back off of this family or stop trying to steal this home or stop trying to remove this elderly citizen from his grandkids house and force him into a senior care center that no one wants him to be in or whatever the case is. And yeah, it turns out that they usually back off. In many cases, they back off within 24 to 48 hours. Sometimes all we have to do is send out an email. We don't even go public, and they already back off because I assume they look at our social media and say, I don't want any part of that. We do have cases where people dig in their heels. We have one in Nevada, California right now where the city council— is trying to steal multiple acres from a senior living community. They paid off the loan for the land, and they were told that they would get the title given to them once they did that. Well, that was 30 years ago. They're about finished paying it off. Now the new city council says, actually, we're probably going to open it up to the highest bidder. So they're fighting us a little bit because there's, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, certainly tens of millions, but we'll win that. And we win just about every time. So that has been a very effective way. We focus on, and again, all what we are doing, we're putting a very robust version of what Christ says to do to our enemies and those who persecute us. We love them. We pray for them. And we seek to reconcile with them. That can sometimes look like rebuke. In fact, it does look like rebuke until they back off and do the right thing. And, you know, we try to reach out to them privately. If that doesn't work, we let the public know, and then we just keep moving forward until they do the right thing. And the second they do the right thing, we thank them for it. And we say, thank you for joining us and doing the right thing. We're not trying to be adversarial. We just don't want children taken wrongfully. We don't want people to lose their homes. We don't want people to have their families and their freedoms and their livelihoods torn apart entirely because of corruption. And so as long as that continues, we'll keep fighting it. When it stops, we'll thank them and hope that they join us to fight against future ones. I love this model. And I used to work for the John Birch Society. And we did something similar where we would target specifically elected officials. And a lot of times these elected officials, they were used to getting emails. But you're targeting everybody involved. And I love what you said there. Most of these people, they're not used to that. And all of a sudden they hear or at least see some public outcry. they're a little bit concerned. You know, hey, my sins are in the light now. Perhaps I should rethink this. And the model of, look, you're loving people, and rebuke is love. Jesus rebuked a lot of people, if you read the Holy Scriptures, guys. So this is a fantastic model, and I'm so thrilled to see that you're having success, only losing one case. I mean, that's an incredible track record. Yeah, we have been. I will say it shocked by how successful we've been. And, uh, I have to say first and foremost, I think it is a, a moving of the Holy spirit. I, I have a hard time thinking that you can have the kind of success we have without God directly involved in it and, and, and very much smiling upon the efforts. Um, Uh, it's interesting when I started this, I was not a believer. In fact, you were the power was a reference to that. People had far more power than they thought they were. The government power was really just your, your consent. That's what we meant by you were the power was not claiming to make some kind of metaphysical statement. Now you were the power for me. Anyway, is a personal, personal statement of devotion to God that you are the power from which all of this comes. Um, so the, you in this for me is, is God. Um, but I was not a believer when I started this. And yet, uh, And we started much more adversarially. We never threatened people or were violent or encouraged violence or anything like that. But we definitely had a harder tone. We weren't exactly looking to reconcile, if you know what I mean. We were trying to cyber bully people into oblivion. And even before I became a believer, we just kept shifting more and more towards a model of saying, hey, why don't you just do the right thing here? And then after I became a believer and started reading, you know, was it Matthew 18 and how you correct people and, you know, from the Sermon on the Mount and about loving your enemy and praying for those, and I'm like, that's what we do. And it was, I will admit, like, at least for me, I wasn't going, let's do what Christ is doing, guys. I realized after the fact that made us more successful. So when our first year and a half to two years, give or take, we had two losses from far fewer cases that we took on. Still a really good track record. As we move to this model, we suddenly go from a, I want to say like in the. 70s, 80s percentile range success rate to now it's like nearly 100%. And I think that's, again, I think that's God countenancing what we're doing. And I will be the first to say, I did not go into this saying, hey, let's do this the way Jesus would. And yet- his hand was there pushing us even before we realized it into, into what we're doing now. And I couldn't be more grateful. I, I, once again, I just, I'm in awe of what you're doing and I love it. And Jesus, God is certainly blessing what you're doing. I love that the model as you changed it and became more Christ-like that it's found more successes. It's, it's all the evidence the audience needs to prove that, Hey, yeah, if you put Jesus in the center of your life, you're going to have success and not the prosperity gospel kind of success that you and I both really, really dislike. That's not the kind of success we're talking about. No, and that may come too, right? Like we're called to pray in all things, right? So there's nothing wrong with praying for prosperity. There's nothing wrong for praying for any of those things. And then just like Paul did when he kept asking God to heal whatever his, to remove whatever his thorn in the flesh was, God said, no. You're you're you're you're what is it? You're you're I'm made strong in your weakness. My grace is sufficient. So we do ask. We ask of all things. And we also ask to do so with the the. Right reason behind it. You know, Lord, bless me with prosperity so I can further help those and bless those around me. If it is your will, you know, Lord bless me. You know, I have MS. I would love to be cured of MS. Bless me with that. If that's what you, what you see to be your, your will for me to have whatever good will come from that. I will say my MS. I apologize. We're hitting that hard break. I hate interrupting people, but no, no, no worries. Ladies and gentlemen, Spike's going to come back. Hey, this is Caleb Collier with church and state. And I want to tell you about methylene blue. For a long time now, you've seen the Maha people using methylene blue. I thought I'd give it a try. You know what? It helped me considerably, not only with mental clarity, but also with insomnia. Now, you've got to be careful with methylene blue because the market is filled with counterfeit products. But Best 365 Labs is the greatest methylene blue on the market. I'm telling you, take. This stuff, enjoy the benefits, and also have a little bit of fun when going to the bathroom. I need you to go to best365labs. Com. And use that promo code CHURCHANDSTATE. You're going to get a discount. You'll also be helping to support Church and State and our pursuit of truth. And we are back. And thank you for staying with us. You're over at churchandstate.media. We're going to go right back to our guest. I do got to plug one of our awesome affiliates. And I'm going to mark37. com because with everything that Spike was talking about, if you're a parent and you maybe have some concerns about what's going on, one of the big things is to stop using the comms devices of our enemies okay you're using your iphone you're using your google phone These companies fundamentally hate everything that you believe in, whether it's your Christianity or your thoughts on liberty. They hate this. They're opposed to this. Get yourself a phone that doesn't spy on you. Get yourself a ghost phone. One of the greatest things, you want to apply it to what Spike was talking about? The agencies, one of the Alphabet agencies goes and gets into your house and they want access to your phone. I have a pin in my phone that nukes it. I punch in four numbers. Boom, the phone is useless to them. That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. So go check out mark three, seven.com. Use the promo code church and state. You're going to get a discount and you'll help support us. And just real quick, as a reminder, please hit the donate button for us. Please continue to have this show on the air with that. Let's go ahead and go back to spike spike. I had to rudely interrupt you. Uh, it's the nature of the beast. Do you know how it is? Uh, but please continue with what you were saying. Yeah, I'll try to, to, to firm it up a little bit from, from the long and the tooth version. Uh, I think that there is this false dichotomy between, you know, the, you know, word of faith, prosperity, preaching type of doctrine, if you can call it that. And and then there's this other where it's like, well, so then we shouldn't even be praying for that stuff. We just leave it in the Lord's hands. Well, there are so many times in the Bible that people are praying to God for things. uh wealth wisdom health all sorts of things and there are times he grants it and there are times he says my grace is sufficient but that's part of his will that we that we pray to him in all things and i think the most important thing is whatever we're praying to uh let's have the two things pray for it to ultimately glorify him. So don't make me wealthy because that will be awesome to be wealthy, but make me wealthy so I can bless others or whatever the thing is, make it ultimately for his glory and be okay with whatever he does, because that's ultimately what's going to happen is wills what's going to happen. And, and it is our, our posture towards that. So that's the only point I was making there. You know, one of the things I love about Lutheranism is, you know, that we recite the Lord's Prayer. And, you know, a lot of Christians kind of bypass this. But when asked, he instructed his disciples, this is how you should pray. And if you look at it. You know, if the first thing is we're honoring God. Like hallowed be your name, right? I mean, that's huge. It's not till much later that we get to give us our daily bread. And that daily bread could be that wealth, could be that prosperity. It's not just food in this case. So maybe you structure your prayer a little bit more like that, honoring God first, and then maybe towards asking him for things. Oh, of course. Well, look at what we're asking, right? We start with, you know, hallowed be your name. May your kingdom come. here to earth just like it is in heaven, then give us what we need, and then forgive us for all the terrible things that we do, and help us to forgive others the way that we wish to be forgiven by you, and. Help us not to sin, lead us. Not into temptation, deliver us from evil, and then we end it with further glorifying him. Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. And that is, it really is a great way of looking at prayer. Start with glorifying him, And thanking him and praying ultimately above all things for him to be glorified and for his kingdom to come. Don't forget to ask for forgiveness because you're full of reasons that need full of need to be forgiven and to also be able to forgive others. It's really it's a good model. I lament that. You know, he's saying, don't pray as the as the hypocrites do, where they just kind of give this rote thing. And then he gives us a way to pray. And then, unfortunately, a lot of people pray it as this sort of rote hypocritical thing that they say. And it's like, no, no, no, that you're doing the thing he said not to do with it. Like, do you know what that means? I think there are a lot of people who have memorized it and don't even consider what it is they're actually saying. And it's a it is a beautiful. Not just a beautiful prayer in and of itself, but a beautiful template for how to pray. I couldn't agree more. Amen to that. All right. I would be remiss if I didn't change the conversation a little bit more towards politics, because I got Spike in front of me. I mean, come on, guys. We got to talk a little bit about politics. You know, I don't know if you saw this, but there's this commentator. I think he's a pastor, Joel Webberton, something like that. He made a post where he was talking about how Republicans, if they want to win, have to embrace socialism. And a lot of people were flying off the handle on that. A lot of the MAGA people were flying off the handle on that. But as I paused and considered what he was saying, I realized... They're already doing it. I mean, we got Donald Trump talking about $ 5, 000 to everyone, every man and woman, adult man and woman, if the Republican Party wins. That's socialism, guys. He's talking about paying people, the government paying people to be a stay-at-home parent. What are we doing? I shouldn't say what are we doing. What is the Republican Party doing if not embracing socialism? Well, I mean, it goes even worse than that. I guess welfare state as well. They're like straight up requiring companies to give the federal government a share of their business. That's literal seizing of the means of production. And it's through the form of stocks. But it's the same thing. They're claiming ownership of companies. It's not for nothing that what was it today or yesterday that Trump was praising Zoran Mamdani. I don't even know what to say. Like, what do you add to that? Like, you know, here, here's, that would be, he might as well praise AOC. Like it, this is one of the, uh, almost, uh, uh, you know, the, the, the, one of the favorite people that Republicans love to hate. And for, in many cases, good reason, your guy just said, he's great. So now what? Like it's, it is, it's. Cults of course, personality, um, force people to go through a kind of, um, Humiliation ritual that often involves forcing them to publicly disavow things that they once held very dear. And at the same time, to publicly endorse things that they once, you know, had greatly disavowed. And we're in. That phase now, in that particular cult of personality. It is the humiliation phase. Like, it's already— you didn't get what we said we were going to do. Now it's, if you want to continue being a part of this, whatever this is, you're going to have to now say, yes, Zoran Mamdani is good. Yes, seizing the means of production is good. Yes, endless war is good. Yes, war— High gas prices is good. The things that we said we were voting against are now the things that we must say are good things. Still a couple years to go. I shudder to think what's next. Unfortunately, I think that a lot of people have built... I think it's two things. Some people truly, genuinely just want to believe in something, and they've made him into a type of idol, a golden calf of Trump. Some have built their entire Brand around Supporting him and so they have to go down with the ship And it's incredibly unfortunate. I would agree. And now we have Trump TV. So we got state sponsored media as well. This is a thumbs up, guys. This is going to be really, really good for us. The question is, though. Is- Move over, NPR. Here comes Trump TV. Trump TV. I know, right? And the MAGA people are like, yeah, we got Trump TV. It's insane. Does this give an opportunity for libertarians, constitutionalists? I mean, within the libertarian movement, I mean, there's There's so many different factions. You know, I mean, you and I are proof that a minarchist and an anarchist can be friends. Hey, libertarians, you're paying attention to that. We can actually communicate like each other. As long as you're all Lutherans, that's all we can. Specifically, Missouri Senate or Wells Lutherans, then the anarchy versus minarchy, we can let slide. But you must be Wells or LCMS or don't talk to me. I love it. That's great. But is there an opportunity for those of us on the liberty spectrum? Yes, and we are on the spectrum. Thank you for acknowledging that. Yes, I would say that there is always this opportunity, but I would give some incredible caveats there. One is that there is still a structure in place that makes it nearly impossible to be able to break through. You've got just the barriers to ballot access, the millions of dollars that third parties have to spend to try to be able to even get on the ballot, something that's automatic for Republicans and Democrats. They get state-funded conventions with automatic public television access and everything else And anyone else is basically having to pay for. That and pay to even be able to get on the ballot. So, I mean, that's before you get into, you know, debate access and. That's before you get into the fact that— and. This is probably the biggest barrier— is people's minds. Like, most people— and it's, what is it, Devergier's Law— that if you have a political first-past-the-post voting system, people are typically going to fall into one of two camps. They'll typically fall into whatever the two biggest camps are, and they'll go with lesser evils, and they'll create a lot of false dichotomies. And so there's just a lot of structural and mental barriers that you have to reach. But here's the real kicker. I'm not convinced we would be any better because, again— We're trying to occupy the same seat with the same buttons and the same incentive structure and the same funding and the same lack of accountability and the same immunity and the same everything else. Now, we can try to go in and make changes to it, but you and I both know that's not going to be instant. And how much do you want to bet that the system changes? us before we change the system? And, I mean, it's not for nothing that if you look at what the Republican platform used to be, the two of us would say yes and amen. To most of it. But look what the Republican Party actually is. Long before Trump, like, I mean, long before Trump, most debt was run up prior to Obama. It was pretty much 50-50 who ran up the debt. And, in fact, Bush had pushed it over to, you know, Republicans running up more debt. It's—you can say one thing, and you can even believe that thing. But if you have a system in place that requires you to operate under this other way of doing things, or else you're not going to pan out— we just saw that with Thomas Massie— I'm not convinced things are going to be any better. That is one of many reasons that I shifted to what I'm doing at You Are the Power. We don't care who gets elected. We literally do not. I don't care about your party. I don't care about your claimed ideology. I don't care what your name is. I don't care where you come from. You are in this seat. You are a human being. You were created in the image of God. You are as fallen as I am. You are motivated by incentives. I'm going to change that incentive structure somewhat. So you hopefully do the right thing. And I am going to lovingly but persistently encourage you to do the right thing. I have found that to be far more successful. than any time I have spent trying to get myself or anyone else elected. Now, I knew I wasn't going to get elected, but I've been involved in many other efforts where it looked like. They could get elected. In some cases, they did. In most cases, they did not. I've had far more success with what we're doing now, which is going to a bunch of people that most of them probably aren't even remotely aligned with me ideologically, but I was able to change the incentive structure and appeal to their humanity in a compelling way that got them to get on board, either by you know, political, you know, opportunism, that's fine. Or in some cases... genuinely. Realizing and probably some combination of these things, realizing that, yeah, this was wrong and I wouldn't want that to happen to me. And yeah, I would hate for that to happen to my kids or my home or my family or my livelihood or whatever else. So I have found, and I'm not, I'm not trying to black pill people that want to get involved in third party politics or any of that. We need to do everything we possibly can. I pray that God greatly blesses whatever it is you're trying to do. I have found personally that, that it is far more fruitful for my efforts to just say, you know what, whoever's in this seat is in the same position, literally and figuratively. I'm going to do what I think is best to change the incentive structure and to lovingly encourage them to do the right thing. And that's, you know, we've lost once. You know, there's so much wisdom in what you were saying. And in fact, I would point to the Free State Project as an example. You know, on paper, libertarians should be a force to be reckoned with in New Hampshire. And how's it turning out? There's a lot of infighting, a lot of factions over here. And New Hampshire is continuing down the path of bigger government. So I think your model of, look, I'm still a libertarian at heart. I still want people to get involved with their third parties and push for. Changes in government. But I'm going to go over here and I'm going to do this and I'm going to be effective at this. I absolutely love that. Now, I would imagine as you're doing everything, you're doing it, you are the power that you need media as well involved in this, that you're getting interviews and pushing the subject matter. Is that correct? Oh, yeah. Yeah. We deal with podcasts like this as well. A lot of local and regional media when we're doing a cause that's in a media organization's backyard. And the beauty of what we do is there's already the built in human interest angle. And and so we're able to leverage a lot of things that are usually leveraged by very cynical people to do some really terrible things. And we're able to use it for good. We absolutely tug at people's heartstring. We absolutely allow people to experience the natural outrage they're going to experience from hearing about these things. And then we direct it to something useful. I don't then weaponize that to say, and this is why you should support, you know, taking away this person's rights or why you should vote for this person, even though that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but we're not doing that. What we do is we say, here's the thing. If you're as outraged as we are about this, here is a proven successful way that you can with $ 0 of your money and about a minute or two, maybe three minutes of your time, you can actually help us stop this outrageous thing from happening and, and, and, and help to repair the damage that's already been caused. And it's been very successful. I will say, I look at organizations like Free State Project, the Libertarian Party, insert Liberty Organization name here. They can all point to successes that they've had. So I'm not trying to say like, oh, everyone join me or everyone do things the exact way I am. I'm saying that to whatever extent you are engaging in electoral politics, you are starting with the uphill battle of the very nature of the office itself, and then you're dealing with all the barriers. That have been put in place to make it nearly impossible for you to get involved. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying just know that that's happening. We have found this path of somewhat less resistance that's been more successful by just going past all that and saying, I literally do not care if you are the antithesis of everything I think politically and you're in this seat. I bet I can both convince you that it's wrong to take people's kids or steal homes or whatever else and or change the incentive structure so it makes more sense to do the right thing than to continue doing the wrong thing. And that has served us very, very well. I would never tell people not to be involved in other organizations or anything else. And they've all had various levels of success. I would say that we have a proven method that works. And if you would like to be a part of it, you go to you are the power dot net. You can join us today. Yeah, and we're going to bring up that website real quick. I did want to add, please have me as one of your media sources. I would love to assist in any way possible. If you have a family or a situation and you want some light shed on it, I would be happy to open up the microphone to whatever the issue is, whoever the person is. You are the power.net. Spike, this is a great website. There's a lot here. I'm already on the join. So as soon as the interview ends, I'm going to be filling this out and I'm going to join you guys. But plug the website real quick. Just tell the people why they should get involved here. Yeah. So like I said, we help people who are having their lives destroyed by state and local government officials, and we've done so successfully. Over and over again. So if you'd like to be involved in that, there's many different ways you can help. If you say to me, Spike, I got, I don't got a lot of money, but I got a bunch of time and I can help you that way. That's great. Become a member. We have free and cheap memberships. You can sign up today there. It's right there. You can sign up today as a member and then you can follow up and volunteer with us. We'll actually reach out to you once you become a member or you can go straight to youwithapower.net slash volunteer and work on us. The bulk of our work is actually done by volunteers. It's allowed us to be a very dynamic and lean running organization as a result of that. If you say to me, Spike. I don't got a lot of time, but I got so much money, I don't know what to do with it. Well, that's great news. Instead of giving your money to the IRS, give it to us because we're tax deductible. You go to youwerethepower.net slash donate. You can donate money. You can donate crypto. You can donate property, stocks. Get in touch with us so you can give whatever you want. But if you want to, like most people, donate with a credit card, you can go to youwerethepower.net slash donate, and that's right there. If you say, Spike, I got so much time. I got so much money. I'm just lousy with time and money. Well, that's great. You can do both. You can you can you can volunteer and you can donate. And if you say, Spike, I need your help. I'm facing losing my kids. I'm facing losing my home. I'm facing losing possibly something we've never even worked on before. But we have city and state official or state officials or county officials, local and state officials who are wrecking our life. And we don't know what to do. I can't promise we can help you, but I can promise that we will look at your case. And if there's anything we can do, we will help you. If you go right there to you are the power dot net slash help. You can fill out our form. Our team will take a look at it. We will be in touch as soon as we can. Usually we're able to be in touch that same week. And and we can start seeing if there's anything we can do on your case. I love all of what you're doing, Spike. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the program. Once again, I'll remind the audience to go to you are the power dot net. But Spike, I got to go ahead and close this out. If you have one more minute post-production to say our goodbyes, I'd appreciate it. But thank you so much for joining us and especially for your work. Thank you. And God bless. Thanks for having me on again, man. All right. So there you go, ladies and gentlemen, Spike Cohen with you are the power dot net. I'm telling you, I absolutely love when somebody says, I'm going to do something. I'm going to be a force for good. I'm going to bring about positive change. This is exactly what YouAreThePower.net is doing. Go check them out. Church and State is brought to you in part by Colonial Life Spokane, Independent Agents, Finders Insurance, and Mark37. com. I'm Caleb Collier. I was born for a storm. Welcome to the fire. Hey, this is Caleb Collier with Church and State. I'm here to tell you about Hunter's Blend Coffee. I got to tell you, I absolutely love this stuff. I'm all about the dark roast. Hunter's Blend Coffee, black powder. Doesn't that just sound like deliciousness and rebellion? I got to tell you, in America, we don't drink tea. No, we drink coffee. It's the food of the gods, and I endorse and support Hunter's Blend Coffee. I got to tell you. Tastes like freedom. So I need you to go over to churchandstate.media, scroll to Hunter's Blend Coffee, and use the promo code churchandstate to help support us. When you go to huntersblendcoffee.com, not only will will. 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