News Roundup: Trump & the Pope, Islam & Jesus, Matt Chandler's Mess, Cult future, & More!

That matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. I hope you are having a wonderful tax week. My oh my, I gotta tell you what, I every year think I'm gonna get out ahead of it and I won't be scrambling on April 15th.

And I did start like two weeks beforehand, but I was still scrambling on April 15th. And then to make matters worse, I've never had to do this. I had to file an amendment and I think I got it in 15 minutes before midnight.

So it was one of those, my taxes are so complicated. And at this point in my life, like there's all these different, like I feel like it's nickels and dimes that are keeping me afloat, keeping me surviving, keeping my family going and from all these various places.

But we got it done. I'm not very happy with the government. This is the week that I'm probably the least happy with the government, but the weather does make it nice. So after we were done the next day, I was like, we just gotta go get some ice cream.

So I took my little almost two-year-old and my wife out. She loves ice cream, so it's a wonderful thing. But that's what's going on in my world. There's a bunch of stuff out there and also stuff that I'm gonna be putting out there.

You can check out on my sub stack. Today I released, well, I'll show you later, but an article on the lost cause as they refer to it today in academic circles on Southern slash Confederate history in honor of the esteemed governor, Abigail Spanberger, who has decided that that particular history of Virginia should just be erased.

We should forget about that part, I guess. And there's so much more I'm forgetting, but there's a lot we have to talk about today. We have some international news. Most of it, I think good news. We're gonna talk a little bit about some of the elections that have just happened a few weeks ago in France.

I haven't talked about it because I was waiting and now I feel like I should talk about it a little bit. That coupled with the election that just recently happened in Czechoslovakia. And what does that mean?

What are the results of these elections mean for us as Americans, if anything?

Are they bellwethers?

Is there any relationship? We'll talk about that. We're also going to talk a little bit about this inter-Catholic Protestant debate that emerged on social media last week. It got pretty nasty in some posts.

I'm trying to exercise as much judiciousness as I can have. This is after all the Conversations That Matter podcast. So I try not to give air time to things that really don't matter that much, but this did get pretty big.

And I even on X put out a few pro Protestant tweets. I think there's some separations that should be made. And I've in the past on the podcast talked about this with co-belligerency versus theological compromise.

Obviously you never want an allyship that compromises you, compromises your beliefs, compromises your theological commitments, that kind of thing. But from my perspective, this really got going from Catholics looking down their nose at Protestants.

And it's like, man, you know,.

Protestants really do supply the votes that keep America going, that keep America, America that really is intrinsic to America's own identity. So we'll talk about that a little bit. Friend of mine who is Roman Catholic wrote a piece and I think it's well worth looking into to determine how do we go ahead?

How do we forge a vision? Because we have so many enemies. It's not like Catholics are the primary political threat or anything like that. But it's like, don't try to have a superior posture or cut Protestants out of the party or smear them because they are Protestant.

And I suppose you could say the same vice versa. So we'll talk a little bit about what all that means. Of course, I am very much a Protestant and will continue to be so. We're gonna talk a little bit about just Protestantism and evangelicalism more broadly.

We've got some evangelical news for you, some wokeness stuff, Southern Baptist stuff. And then we're also gonna talk a little bit about just what's on the horizon. What's coming? Because I was watching this documentary on the FLDS church out in Utah on Netflix.

And it's kind of a rare opportunity that I even have Netflix. There was something else. I can't remember what it was now that I wanted to watch or my wife did. I think both of us, there was some movie.

It'll probably, I don't remember what it was for some reason. I don't know if it was some film that we could only get it on Netflix. And I was like, okay, it's cheap. I'll pay one month for Netflix. Normally, no money goes to Netflix.

We do not wanna support Netflix, but there was this one film that we could only see on Netflix. And it might've been, I'm trying to think now, it might've been the All Quiet on the Western Front because I really wanted to see that.

Maybe that was it. Anyway, this happened to pop up though. And I think like tomorrow my subscription ends and I was like, let's watch this thing. It just came out and man, it was fascinating, but it really made me think about cults in general and how cult thinking works and why people follow cults and what actually jolts them into questioning the cult mentality they have.

And I really think we are on the verge of more and more of that. More cult thinking, fracturedness, just everyone in the little bitty echo chambers and in tribes. And I don't think it's a good thing, but it is a real thing.

Like it's something we have to talk about and navigate as believers in the Bible and the Lord Jesus Christ, who think there is a universal truth out there that people are gonna be held to. And so, yeah, and we'll talk about some other Christian news as we go.

So hopefully that sounds good. That's what I got for the podcast. You can certainly put in your questions, comments, cries of outrage, whatever they are and I will get to them as we unfold today's Friday edition of the Conversations That Matter podcast.

International News, Elections, and the Trump–Pope Feud

So let's start off with the international news. This is from the Jerusalem Post and I wanted to choose this particular headline in particular because it is from the Jerusalem Post and it's the way they're framing it.

Trump confirms the Strait of Hormuz open for all ships and prohibits, that's their word, Israel from bombing Lebanon. So I just, I do wanna point out that Trump is prohibiting, is holding Israel back, is, I guess, in some sense, controlling Israel, telling them they can't fight against the Hezbollah group, which is pretty much an Iranian proxy in Lebanon because the war is coming to a close.

And so that's the headline if you go there right now. The headline at the Epoch Times is Trump says Iran agreed to hand over nuclear dust. That's huge, by the way. That was the thing that JD Vance couldn't get any momentum on from what I understand.

There was this 10-point plan. I still don't know what the 10 points are. They were supposedly leaked, but that wasn't the actual 10-point plan. And they agreed on everything except the nuclear program.

And it sounds like through the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, they were able to use some leverage to get the uranium that was up to 60 refined and sent to, or some agreement to handle the getting rid of that.

You can't just bomb that. You can't just, I mean, that's the problem with these highly toxic chemicals, right? When you have them, you have them. And I don't even know how long the half-life on uranium is, but I'm sure getting rid of that is, I don't know what process they have, but it may be a longer process.

So that's going on. And we also have a good news, national news I wanted to show you. Mississippi bans abortion-inducing drugs amid continuing threat of mail-order abortion. This is a great headline and you need to know about it.

I don't think this is being covered broadly, but Mississippi has banned the prescription and distribution of abortion-inducing drugs, one of the most common methods used to terminate a pregnancy in the United States.

And this is what the abolitionists talk about a lot, you can have these heartbeat bills, you can have states that have banned abortion at early stages, but what if people are just getting pills in the mail that help them do an at-home abortion?

You still haven't banned all of it. And it's a good point. And Mississippi is trying to take some measures here, which good for them. The Republican governor, Tate Reeves, signed House Bill 1613 into law last week.

The bill amends the state drug trafficking laws to make it illegal to self-prescribe or distribute an abortion-inducing drug, which is defined as a medicine, drug, or any other substance prescribed or dispensed with the intent of terminating the clinically diagnosable pregnancy of a woman to cause the death of an unborn child.

Reeves' approval of the measure follows its passage in the Republican state house. So this is a big thing, 77 to 39 vote in the state house and then in the state Senate, 36 to 14, pretty good margins there.

I think it's gonna be these really conservative deep red states that are able to really do anything about this, because in a state like Virginia or New York, or certainly California, you're never gonna get momentum on something like this.

And even in a swing state where this becomes an election issue, the Republicans don't wanna touch it. It's only in a very deep red state, and even there it's tough, that you even have momentum towards these kinds of things.

So let's just thank the Lord that there was a decision made in the right direction, and hopefully these kinds of things can continue. This can be a domino effect in other states. So wanted to let you know about that.

Let's talk a little bit about the Catholic Protestant stuff. Oh, I should say, I just caught a comment from Hannah. Uranium 235 used for nuclear fuel has a shorter half-life of approximately 700 to 710 million years.

Well, we don't have to wait that long then. That's, oh man. Okay, well, I don't know. I don't know.

Do you bury it?

What do you do with it? I really don't have any idea. Trump angers Catholics in targeting Pope Leo over Iran war pushback. This is in the Hill. President Trump is escalating a rare feud with the Pope over pushback on the Iran war, a move that could isolate the president's Catholic voting block and complicate the Catholic members of his administration, including the First Lady.

Trump posted a lengthy truth social post Sunday night calling the Pope a weak on crime and insisting the Catholic leader believed it was okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, though Leo has not expressed such a notion.

The Pope in return said that he has no fear of Trump. So this began this whole issue. And then it got worse because the Pope decided that not only would he make statements, I think I actually went over them in the last podcast because it was at the end of the last week.

He would not only make these statements about the Iran war needing to end, that war doesn't solve anything. He sounded like a hippie. He sounded like Francis. He didn't just do that. He decided also the same this week, this past week, to make statements of communion with Muslims and how Muslims are, he didn't say that they're on the same level of Christians, but that it was very strange.

In fact, I don't know if I have that pulled up. Do I have that? I should probably add that to the stack of stuff that we're talking about today. Let me see if I can find the exact quote for you. On the news.

So Vatican news is probably, is that the best place to go? Probably. So let's go to the Vatican. Oh, this is one day ago. Pope Leo meets with several Muslim leaders in Cameroon. That's not it. Religion news service, they're progressive, but what do they say?

Pope Leo will encounter a distinct example of Catholic Muslim connection in Algeria. I don't see the quote here. So maybe I'll have to skip that for now. But he made a very strange quote about Muslims and feeling a religious kinship with them.

And so this sparked a bunch of debates. And the first was, of course, the Catholic Protestant debate and it went in all kinds of different directions. There was a really good article, I thought, from Mike Sabo at the American Reformer, the vice president of the Pope and the coming elections.

And he just talks about a number of factors. First of all, Viktor Orban in Hungary, who's been a friend of the Trump administration, lost. He's been in power 16 years. And it's not just that Viktor Orban lost.

Viktor Orban was soundly defeated, pretty overwhelmingly. I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this, but what does this mean for us? I mean, I'm on a tangent here. I wanna get back to the Catholic stuff, but yeah, Viktor Orban, Roman Catholic, Hungary's Catholic.

So maybe there is a connection there, but they've been allies with the United States. And the Tizia party got almost 55 of the popular vote. They got 138 seats. The Fidesz party, which is Viktor Orban's party, only got 37, almost 38 of the popular votes and they have 55 seats.

This was destruction. This was an annihilation, really. And it had the highest turnout post-communism that Hungary's ever had as a percentage. So this was a big recall on Viktor Orban. And the guy that they elected was essentially, is essentially, they call him center-right, but he's not really center-right.

Well, not from an American perspective. He's like, he's soft on LGBT stuff. He's more globalist, more pro-European union. And so what does this mean? Is this a trend that's gonna continue or something?

I mean, Hungary's economy wasn't that great. There were reasons people were dissatisfied with it. But this article from Mike Szabo starts off just acknowledging like there's some losses here and this is one of them.

You also have the Iran war.

It was dragging.

Now it was a short war, if you compare it to other wars, but it still was too long for the American people and the gas prices did go up. And so this is at a point right now where Trump is not as popular as he was a month and a half ago.

And how can the Republicans continue? In other words, how do they find an election map that actually works in their favor, especially when they have a lot of major podcasts out there that are platforming Democrats that are anti-Trump at this point, that suspect JD Vance and the administration of being part of some kind of a, I don't wanna say conspiracy, but they're part of the elites now, which is, it's interesting.

I was saying this to my wife the other day. When Trump got into office, one of the reasons he got into office was the fact that people viewed him as an outsider. He was paying for his own campaign. Look back at the debates.

He would say things like, I can tell you the truth because I'm not beholden to the donors. And if he got booed, he said, those are the donors. Jeb Bush, he's beholden to them. He's paid for by them, not me.

And that was one of the reasons, I think it was a big reason that he got elected, despite some of the negative things that came out in his delivery and past character issues. So he essentially comes into power as I'm the anti-elite.

Well, the move being played on him now is kind of a similar move, only it's by people at this point who don't have any plan for who to replace him with. They don't have a governing strategy. They're not builders.

Trump was always big on that too. I'm a builder. I actually build literal buildings. I work with people. I'll get things done. You don't really have that aspect, but you do have people who are talking heads like myself, of course, myself exempted from this, who have looked at Trump and said, you know what, he's just part of the cabal.

He's just part of the elites. He's just compromised like them. And this happened in a shorter span than a year. I mean, this was a very quick thing. And we talked about it in previous podcasts, why this all came to be.

I'm not gonna reinvent the wheel, but it does pose a number of challenges for Republicans, not just in the midterms, but the next presidential election. And one of the things that would really be bad for the Republican party is if Catholics and Protestants had a big political feud.

I'm not saying we can't keep our religious differences, which we should. I'm not saying we shouldn't argue those things passionately, which we should. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be trying to even convert one another, which Protestants should be doing.

But it does mean that for political reasons, we have an alignment, those of us who are conservative at least, on a number of the core issues, including abortion, including many social issues. And we should try to keep that kind of an alliance going as much as possible.

And so Mike Sabo says this rift is widening between Trump and the podcaster class. And I think that's a good way of looking at it. It is this sort of talking head class of people. And they're more and more of a latch onto anything that's anti-Trump.

And including if it's a spat with the Pope, they'll join the Pope. So he gave a few examples of people who are doing that. He talks about Marjorie Taylor Greene, although does she have a podcast? I don't know if she's part of that exactly, but she's part of the same general group.

And I don't know if he cites anyone else here, but he says one political angle that the president should consider in all of this is how to keep enough Catholic voters in the fold to prevent the worst outcomes in the midterms.

Though nowhere close to the support that white evangelical voters give to the Trump-led Republican Party, Daniel McCarthy notes, I love Daniel McCarthy, by the way, that Catholic voters have supported the president in the past elections.

They accounted for more than one in five of his 2 ,024 voters, with Trump besting Kamala Harris among Catholics. So he has an advantage with Catholic voters. Another thing to consider is the repercussions this could have for President Vance.

So President Vance did try to navigate this at a TPUSA event with a Gallican-like view, which basically means, look, the Pope can be the spiritual authority, but you've got the civil magistrate, similar to a Protestant outlook, that he is responsible for his domain.

So keep your lanes separate. During a Fox interview, Vance exhorted the Pope to keep to matters of morality and theology and to avoid commenting on public policy. Of course, Vance is Catholic, so this creates an awkward situation for him if his own boss is feuding with the Pope, but he navigated probably in the best way he knows how and tried to say, look, the Pope has his lane, Trump has his lane, and the Pope needs to stick to the theology, Trump needs to stick to the governing.

So he said it, obviously, in a nicer, more diplomatic way than all that. There's more to this article, but I think that's really the main of it. There has to be a lot of, I think, not that the administration's listening to me, but there has to be a lot of measuredness on this and attempting to build as many alliances and keep as many alliances as possible.

Now, I'm not in a government position. I'm not a strategist for government officials. It's not really, I suppose, even my place to start calling from the sidelines, like many of the podcasters do, and tell people what I think on these matters.

I don't know if that's exactly what Mike Sabo is doing. I think he is getting into some tactics, but I think his message is an American reformer, and my message is to evangelicals out there who have their own levels of influence, including pastors and churches, and your people are gonna be asking you about these things, and you have politicians in your congregations, and I know that's where my influence at this point is, is helping pastors navigate those things, and those are very real things.

I've had pastors contact me that had very real political situations in their church, people who are in actual elected offices, and how do you navigate some of these things? Keep your Protestant convictions.

Don't ever compromise those things, but you don't wanna get into the dirt. You don't wanna get into the mud. You want to be able to keep a clear vision on what your political priorities are. If they're things like immigration, lowering taxes, anti-abortion, social issues, not necessarily in that order, but if those are your priorities, and you have people that can come alongside you, you don't want to alienate them if you can help it.

Now, if the gospel alienates them, so be it. Absolutely. If salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, alienates some of your voters, then so be it. You gotta stick to what God has stated, but on those policy issues, I think we should try to keep a clear vision and focus on winning.

That's gonna be something that real soon we're gonna be getting a lot of messaging on, and we gotta be smart about these things. Now, Catholics and Protestants are going to need each other for what's coming, says John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist.

I know John, and I know he's got the best of intentions about this. He is Roman Catholic, and he makes essentially the same argument, and says, look, there's bigger threats out there. Let's stick together on the bigger threats.

Islam is one of those things. So is the left. So, you know, let's keep going. He even mentions that the Democrat-controlled Virginia signed a law by Governor Abigail Spanberger that would strip tax-exempt nonprofit status from Confederacy-related groups in the state.

Now, I just wrote a whole piece about this, helping people navigate and understand this, which I'll talk about a little bit at the end. I'm gonna do a whole separate podcast on it, but listen to what I'm saying here.

This is a big deal. Like, I understand there's a lot of people obsessed with a lot of different niche things online, and maybe some of the podcasts and things you're reading on Substack and other places are focusing on one particular issue, but remember what happened in the last five years, even.

Remember how they took down hundreds of monuments? I'm talking about the left. Hundreds, not just Confederate monuments. It was monuments to Columbus, even Abraham Lincoln. And have all those monuments been put back?

No, they have not. Or have we restored America? Has the woke agenda been somehow contradicted and defeated? And have we educated people enough so they understand what was wrong with it so we can actually go back?

No, we haven't. We're not there, but it's like Squirrel, right? Like, there's all these other things to focus on, and not saying that there aren't other issues in the world, but like, this is an actual big deal in Virginia.

Virginia, you're losing your identity. You're losing part of it, at least. And there's an honorable tradition that you have, a military tradition, a tradition of being a gentleman, a tradition of, yes, being part of the Confederacy.

And that doesn't mean that you're still looking to go back and be part of a secession effort, or you're still looking to go back to make social arrangements the way they were in the 19th century at all.

It just means that this is part of your unique history. You've had many different things that have developed you as a state. I guess I'm speaking to Virginians now. And all of those things should be considered as part of the story.

And that confers identity. You start excising parts of that. You start saying that various heroes and founders of institutions, and even Christian men who have godly character, who have been American heroes more broadly, you start saying that all that stuff is bad, all that stuff should be thrown away, then you're doing yourselves a disservice.

You're creating a vacuum. And who's gonna fill the vacuum? Who are the heroes that Virginians should look to in their own state history that can confer identity? Is it, I mean, who do you replace it with?

Is it Michael Jordan? Is he, he's not even from there. He's from North Carolina. I'm trying to think, like, who's the Virginian who's going to come in and provide the template for character? This is a big thing.

And if we lose our character and our identity and we understand who we are, we don't understand that, I should say, anymore, then we are gonna have problems. And I think that is one of the problems we're having right now.

We just don't know. These things don't help. And we do need people that are politically in the game, on the local level, on the state level, focused on the right things, not being distracted and passively watching honestly ridiculous stuff.

And there's just a lot of super ridiculous stuff. People think they're learning things from podcasts where they're really not, or they're learning a little bit that doesn't really mean a lot for their life.

Like think of, just take inventory yourself on what matters in your life and then adjust your information intakes appropriately. If you're online, then make sure you're following people that are helping you get information that actually matters in the real fights.

And this is one of them. And I think John Davidson is absolutely correct here. We gotta focus on those things. We can't just be focusing on foreign policy as important as that is, or just, I see so many forums going in ridiculous directions often at times on what the quote unquote Jews do here or there.

Look, think about your life from the ground up, believe your eyes, look at the grass, go touch it, and think about who's actually trying to prevent you in the real local and state level, especially, but also on the federal level.

Who's making the decisions in front of you that are affecting your life, stopping you from doing what the Lord wants you to do. That's really how you gotta look at this. I think it's liberal ideology.

It's radical leftist revolutionaries. Obviously there's other groups in there. You could say that secular Jewish people have been overrepresented in some of these causes. You can certainly say that white Protestant Northeasterners have been overrepresented in some of these causes and are the origination of most of them.

You could say there's a problem with immigrants coming from other countries who do not share our religious beliefs at all, including Muslims and Hindus and now various other groups in places like even Texas now.

It's not just Dearborn, Michigan. It's not just Minneapolis. It is so many other places. And so we have to have a wholesome kind of broad view of these things. And when we do that, where do Catholics stand in all of this?

Well, I'll tell you what, they're not the... Maybe if you go back a hundred years, the Know Nothing Party and the concerns over will Catholics have an allegiance to the Pope, that was a war that was fought at that time.

Looking at all the various threats now and triaging them, I don't think Catholics stack up that far. Now that could change depending on, if the Pope tomorrow starts calling for very liberal policies and Catholics start following him.

I mean, the conditions do change, but as it stands right now, we gotta try to maintain the political alliance while keeping the theological differences. I hope that makes sense. Now, in this whole situation, to make it even more complex, should we make it more complex?

I guess so. In comes the sort of two veins. One is Protestants are basically stand-ins for Jews. And if you already believe that Jews are the problem behind everything, Protestants are their allies. Protestants are the reason that Jews can operate the way that Jews operate, right?

So this narrative has gained wide acceptance, but that became one of the things that I saw last week. And then the other thing was, Muslims really aren't that bad. And I'm like seeing this from people who supposedly are on the right, who five seconds ago would have said so, maybe some of them still do.

And I'm like, what is going on here? So let me give you just two examples, okay? Representative, I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this. This is the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm talking about things that matter.

However, once you get, even if it's dumb things being said, once you get enough people to believe dumb things, then they become things that unfortunately start to matter. And so I'll show you dumb thing number one here.

Dumb thing number one is Tucker Carlson posting this. The people in charge don't want you to know this, but Muslims love Jesus.

All right.

Now, which Jesus are we talking about? Do Jehovah's Witnesses love Jesus? Do Mormons love Jesus? Who actually understands and loves Jesus? That's a question that's valid. And I think as Protestant Christians, as those who believe in what the Bible depicts of Jesus, we have to say there's a number of false Jesuses out there.

About 45 minutes south of me is the headquarters nationally for the Church of God, or I should say the World Mission Society Church of God. Now, the World Mission Society believes that Jesus came back in the 1970s as Aung San Hunk, and that the Holy Spirit is living in South Korea today.

Now, they love Jesus. At least they think they do, but it's not the same Jesus. And this is one of the things that we have to keep clear in our theological, under our theological parameters and our theological categories.

Many political talking heads are trying to tinker in the realm of theology, and they really don't know what they're talking about. Sadly, some of them are pastors, but those who have really wanted to be political, social commentators, who don't understand theology well enough to comment on it are deciding they're going to now comment on it.

And because there's a vacuum left from just discredited theological institutions, whether that's Protestant institutions like the Southern Baptist Convention, or whether it's Catholics. I still live in an area where people still remember the whole church abuse scandal, and they don't trust the Catholic church.

So who are they going to trust now for their theology? Well, I'll just trust the political guy I'm listening to. So this is why this becomes an issue. I've only read the first sentence, let's read the rest.

Islam reveres Jesus as a major prophet and messenger of the Lord, believes he performed miracles and states that he will return to earth to defeat the Antichrist. That's why Donald Trump painted a painting.

Now this, I haven't mentioned this yet. I was waiting to, and I'm going to talk about it, but his painting depicting himself as the son of God offended the president of Iran. It was an attack on his religion as well as Christianity.

So now Trump is attacking Islam. Today's morning note newsletter covers Masoud Pezikian. I'm going to have trouble pronouncing this name. It's Pezikian, that's my best attempt. Condemnation of Trump's desecration of Jesus, the Iran wars, gutting effects on America's housing market, Columbia's plan to murder.

Okay, so other things as well. Now let's just talk about this for a minute, okay? And by the way, I did forget that part of the thumbnail that I just showed you is the AI generated painting of Trump where people thought, myself included, that he was reposting something that made him look like Jesus.

I didn't mean to show that to you for the same reason that I didn't mean to, that I did not actually post anything about that couple of few weeks ago, who everyone was showing, look at this husband who said his wife has a promiscuous past.

Let's make her famous, right? I was like, that's ridiculous. If you want to bring back public shame, why would you share that? If that's what you're about, right? It's the same reason people are saying this is idolatry.

I was like, well, we shouldn't share the image. So my mistake, sorry, I didn't realize on the, so Tucker shared it and I just showed you what he shared. But regardless, this particular image, apparently according to Trump was supposed to be him as a doctor healing someone.

Now I said online, I said, you know what? It very well could be. I know people might hate me for this. They might think, you know, let's not give Trump the benefit of the doubt here. It very well may be.

He should have someone screening these things because you know what? To me and to a lot of other people, it really looked like it was Jesus. In fact, I'm pretty sure whoever made it initially intended it to look like Jesus.

There's a red robe. Franklin Graham didn't think it was Jesus apparently. So there's people who didn't, but Trump says he didn't. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, but it's like, you know, that of course, that is going to offend Christians.

It's going to offend all members of Christendom, whether Catholics or Eastern Orthodox or Protestants. However, Muslims, this is the distinction here. Muslims don't believe in the same Jesus. The Jesus of Islam did not die on the cross for the sins of mankind.

The Jesus of Islam mirrors a lot of the apocryphal stories told of Jesus, not the biblical account of Jesus. The Jesus of Islam reveres Mohammed and submits, and he's just one of a line of many prophets who have come.

He is not the Messiah. So Islam is obviously very different. And this is something that is creeping into the right, these Islamic interpretations being valid somehow. And this is something that I honestly didn't think I would see on the right.

Of course, I live what, hour and a half, two hours north of New York City right now. And I didn't think I'd see a Muslim mayor there either after 9 -11. I remember 9 -11. I didn't think you'd ever get that population to vote for a Muslim mayor, but here we are over two decades later, and it's acceptable now.

It's acceptable to be a Muslim, not just a Muslim, but a Marxist. So here's where we're at. So let's put up the fence right now and say, look, guys who do this, who say these kinds of things, they're not being accurate.

Make the theological distinction here. Jesus is not the same Jesus in Islam as the Jesus of Christianity. They are very different. And this is the problem. This is basically the issue with having a different Jesus that 1 John talks about too.

Like this is a Jesus that can't save you. You got to figure out who the identity, you can actually believe in that Jesus. So the idea that Trump is somehow offending Muslims and offending Iran, it's like, now we're very, I guess we're concerned about what Iran thinks in this whole mess.

It's amazing. Not wise of Trump to do that at all. He needs someone guarding his social media, but people have been saying that since 2016 and no one seems to take that seriously. So I'm expecting more cofefe's, if you know what I mean.

So I figured I would mention that and also mention this too while we're on that, if I may. One of the things that I keep hearing this is that this comparison made between Jews and Muslims, that at least the Muslims believe in Jesus.