Tim Wildmon: Hey, welcome back, everybody, to Today's Issues on the American Family Radio Network. Thanks for listening to AFR. My name is Tim Wildmon, and in the studio with me is Ed Batagliano. Now we welcome Steve to the conversation. Good morning, Steve.
Steve: Good morning, everybody.
Tim Wildmon: Did you have a good weekend? Your house wasn't.
Steve: It was fine. Well, no, yeah, it was. We've had better weekends from a college football perspective.
Tim Wildmon: It was. Talk about it. There's one weekend a year, in my experience as a huge college football fan, where it seems like the whole top 25 gets turned over on its head. That was this weekend.
Steve: Your wife is an Alabama graduate, right?
Tim Wildmon: Right.
Steve: Born into Roll Tide.
Tim Wildmon: We married into Roll Tide.
Steve: I married into Roll Tide. Roll Tide rolled into Neyland Stadium in Tennessee and rolled out with a nail.
Tim Wildmon: It was not good.
Steve: It looked good, and then it wasn't. It wasn't like the week before, where they got robbed at the end. They just were never in this one.
Tim Wildmon: Oh, they got robbed. Did they? The week before?
Steve: I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
Tim Wildmon: Talking about being robbed, Notre Dame. I was watching the Mormons versus the Catholics, like a lot of people, on Saturday night in Provo.
Steve: Yeah, two bad calls, I guess. One bad call, one bad ruling. Clear pass interference was not called because Notre Dame was driving down for the two-point win.
Tim Wildmon: Yes, and then the game was called with one second left on the clock.
Steve: Yeah, Notre Dame would have had one more play in the end zone. The officials for the league, the Big 12, which BYU is a part of, even admitted that there was supposed to be time left on the clock for Notre Dame to have another play.
Tim Wildmon: Who knows if they had scored or not, but at least they would have had another shot.
Steve: Well, maybe it was the second that they gave Michigan.
Tim Wildmon: What do you mean?
Steve: Michigan. They're taking it away from Michigan and giving it to Notre Dame, or the other way around.
Tim Wildmon: Oh, they gave it to Michigan. They're taking it away from Notre Dame.
Steve: Anyway, I don't know if this is in the book of Revelation or not, but to have so many top-ten teams lose on the same Saturday does make you wonder, has the world tilted? You know what I'm saying?
Tim Wildmon: So Miami is now number one, and the Mormons are number two.
Steve: Okay.
Tim Wildmon: Ohio State three, Notre Dame four, and Georgia and Alabama are recent recipients.
Steve: Auburn beat Georgia in Athens.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, which is unranked against number one. I don't know if that's ever happened, at least the last time that's happened. I have a couple of good friends who are Auburn diehards, so I texted them.
Steve: Oh, yeah. They were very happy.
Tim Wildmon: Then Alabama loses on the road in Tennessee. There's no shame in that. Tennessee's good, and Alabama's, you know, that's a tough place to win. Then you've got Texas losing to Florida.
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: You've got trouble in Austin right now. Texas dropped 12 spots to number 19.
Steve: Well, they've got two losses.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, they're underachieving with all the talent and money they've got. And then who else? Unless you want Notre Dame, which we've mentioned.
Steve: Miami almost lost. That was an overtime game. If you like college football, it was a great Saturday.
Tim Wildmon: If you didn't care who won, it was some great football.
Steve: Yes, great football.
Tim Wildmon: So anyway, we will see how it goes from here on out. That's what you never know, Saturday to Saturday, what's going to happen, right? All right, you're listening to Today's Issues on American Family Radio. First story, Steve.
Steve: Well, we have a former president who's going around giving speeches, Barack Obama, because he's the only former president who...
Tim Wildmon: Because I don't think Joe Biden is giving a whole lot of speeches.
Steve: Well, George Bush is giving speeches.
Tim Wildmon: Well, he is.
Steve: Nobody's joining us.
Tim Wildmon: Well, he could be. But this is Barack Obama. He was giving a speech and was given an honorary degree at a college. He was talking about Israel, and it did not go well. This is what he said.
Steve: Obama's comments on Tuesday were made in a conversation with journalist Susan McKay. He referred to the Palestinians' reaction to the Jewish people's exerting cultural and military control over the state of Israel. He said, quote, "The Palestinian people say this is an injustice. The Palestinians want their land back."
Tim Wildmon: That's what Obama said?
Steve: Yes. The fact that the Jewish people have been oppressed, discriminated against, and killed for millennia, and Europe was responsible for much of it, they understandably sought a refuge. If the attitude of Israel is now that we are the strongest, the most technologically advanced in the region, then our security will depend on us simply doing whatever we need and taking whatever we want, and not making any concessions to anyone. That may work short term, but you have ceded the moral high ground if you take that position.
Tim Wildmon: To which Benjamin Netanyahu replied, "I just need to listen to this."
Benjamin Netanyahu: The other day, I heard a regrettable statement. It talked about Israel stealing land, Israel losing the moral high ground. Well, let me respond to that. The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers. Our history is not a colonial enterprise. Our land is not stolen land. This is our homeland. It's called Judea. That's where Jews come from, and we've been attached to it for thousands of years. We're not the Dutch in Indonesia. We're not the Belgians in the Congo. We're Jews in Judea.
Benjamin Netanyahu: Let me say something else. The obstacle to peace is not Israel. It's not our fight for our very right to exist in our own state. It's the refusal of our enemies and America's enemies to recognize the Jewish people's right to a state of our own in any boundary. That's why they chant, "Death to Israel. Death to America." We are the little Satan. You are the great Satan, and we're defending our common civilization.
Benjamin Netanyahu: A peace built on illusions will crash against the rocks of Middle Eastern reality. Israel will not gamble with its survival to accommodate those who refuse to accept the facts of history, to accept our right to exist, or wish to appease terror. We certainly do not. We never will.
Tim Wildmon: I can't think, in my lifetime, of a better articulator of Israel's right to exist and their history than Benjamin Netanyahu. I don't know whether he's in a tough election. They say it's coming up. They have a parliamentary system of government over there in Israel, much like Canada and some of Great Britain and other places where they have to get coalitions.
Steve: Yeah, parties.
Tim Wildmon: It's not just like we know in the United States, where it's basically Republican and Democrat. In Israel, they might have ten parties vying for the prime minister's position. We'll see, but there's an election coming up in the next few days.
Steve: Yes, right.
Tim Wildmon: Do you guys agree with me that Benjamin Netanyahu, what he just said right there, was gold? You could just play that over and over again to explain what the realities are on the ground there in the Middle East.
Tim Wildmon: By the way, when someone like President Obama and others on the left who are very critical of Israel talk about the West Bank, Israel won the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip.
Steve: In a war?
Tim Wildmon: The Sinai Peninsula.
Steve: In the 1967 Six-Day War.
Tim Wildmon: You're going back 50 years ago.
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: So that belongs to Israel. If folks didn't want to lose it, they shouldn't have been hostile to Israel. Israel has been attacked on several occasions. Intifadas and all kinds of things have been declared against them, and they are fighting for their very survival.
Tim Wildmon: I just don't understand the historical ignorance on the part of President Obama and others on the left. It is an ideological argument that they're making.
Steve: They don't want Israel.
Tim Wildmon: They just hate the Jews.
Steve: They hate the Jews. That's the only explanation to me that makes any sense, because we were talking about 1967. There was a war fought over land.
Tim Wildmon: It wasn't the first war in the history of the world fought over land.
Steve: No. People have conquered the land of other peoples since the beginning of time. In this case, Israel was being threatened by Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, all at the same time, in an attempt to wipe them off the map.
Tim Wildmon: Wipe them off the map.
Steve: Israel, you can read about this. That was the Six-Day War, right?
Tim Wildmon: Six-Day War in '67.
Steve: Yeah. You can read about this. It was like the hand of God was on Israel's side.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah.
Steve: There are stories of God blinding the tank regiments. It's like, wow, Israel could not have won this without divine help. That's what a lot of people believe and say.
Tim Wildmon: I'm just saying that Israel took over the eastern part of Jerusalem and some other places in the tiny country of Israel. They expanded the territory that they controlled and administered. Obama and his ilk want Israel to go back to the way it was before 1967. That's the generous view. Most of them would like to see Israel annihilated and wiped off the map altogether.
Steve: It would be suicide for Israel to give back the West Bank. Regardless, let's just set aside the historical claim that Israel has on Judea and Samaria. They do, since biblical times, but it's high ground between them and enemy countries. In other words, if you give up the West Bank and the Golan Heights, you have the enemy shooting down on you. You're putting yourself at a huge tactical disadvantage.
Tim Wildmon: Well, even without that, and you're exactly right, if they were to give back the West Bank, then Israel at its narrowest point becomes about, I don't know, 11 miles wide, and the country could easily be cut in half by an invasion. They've got no choice but to continue doing what they're doing.
Steve: When you hear the expression "West Bank," we're talking about the West Bank of the Jordan River.
Tim Wildmon: Yes. So it's in the east part of the country.
Steve: Look at a map and wonder why the West Bank is on the east part of Israel. It's because the Jordan River is on the east side of Israel.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah. All these people that are continuing with the calls for genocide, all these folks are obsessed with this. That's the reason I say they should just come out and say, "We hate Jews." It might be easier than trying to explain it.
Steve: We're talking about Russia and just doing so much damage and killing inside Ukraine. You never hear "Free Ukraine" from these people. I'm going to show Russia as the aggressor in the war there, and it's just, I don't know, you don't hear them talking about freeing the Tibetans from communist Chinese control and persecution. You don't hear them talk about freedom from Boko Haram in Nigeria. It's all, "No, we're not going to talk about the other injustices in the world. We just want to focus on Israel and Gaza." Why? Because we hate Jews. They might as well say it.
Tim Wildmon: Yes. All right, next story, Steve.
Steve: There's a senator from Michigan. Her name is Elissa Slotkin, and she was talking at the University of Chicago to students there.
Tim Wildmon: I was watching that on C-SPAN.
Steve: Yeah, the college football got boring Saturday. I switched over to C-SPAN, and I saw this speech she was giving at the University of Chicago. It was very interesting.
Tim Wildmon: I bet it was powerful. I stopped watching hockey.
Steve: One of the things that we keep warning people about is that if Democrats get back in power, they're going to weaponize the government again. I know they're railing on the Trump administration for using the Department of Justice to prosecute some crimes that were committed under the Obama administration and under the Biden administration. But they never mention the fact that this whole weaponization thing reached its fullest-throated form under Obama.
Steve: Elissa Slotkin is talking about how she wants to make sure that the Democrats send a message to Trump supporters, specifically young Trump supporters. Listen to this.
Elissa Slotkin: I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him. I want young people coming out of school to say, "Should I go work for the Trump administration? That sounds fun. I might get an opportunity." I want them to be like, "That might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don't want, and so let me avoid participating in that." I want that deterrence message sent.
Tim Wildmon: She wants the deterrence message sent.
Steve: Listen, if the Democratic Party wins the House and the Senate, and I don't know what the odds are, the polling seems to lean that way for the Democrats, but you never know. We encourage people to get out and vote, because sometimes these races in individual states or districts come down to a few hundred votes. The people who get out to vote are the ones who are going to determine the election.
Steve: But if anybody wants to know what these radicals in the Democratic Party and on the far left are going to do, this is the kind of thing. We're going to go right back to the four years we had under Joe Biden, where the federal government will be weaponized. She might as well have said, "We want young people to be afraid to work for the Trump administration because they may suffer the full weight of federal power." That is, to me, tyranny, and that's where the far left seems to be willing to go.
Tim Wildmon: Okay. Next story.
Steve: I want to introduce you to a gentleman named David Hoffman, who is an evangelist in Arizona.
Tim Wildmon: Long time since Baywatch.
Steve: Yeah, long time. For years, for a decade, David Hoffman has been regularly evangelizing at Tucson, Arizona's Winterhaven Festival of Lights. It's a free holiday event where you walk through neighborhoods with houses decorated in Christmas lights, and he shares Jesus.
Steve: He has done it in the past with a bullhorn or a speaker, and this time he was doing it with just his voice. He's not being bombastic. As far as I could tell, he's not necessarily preaching just from Romans 1 or something. But they have what they're calling new event rules. He said, "Upon entering the event, we were told that we cannot have any kind of religious expression. They said that you can be there to participate in looking at the lights, but don't talk to anybody. You can't give out Gospel tracts. That would lead to a violation." They were enforcing it. The police came and threatened to arrest him. This is what they said.
Officer: You can't be inside here doing the preaching.
David Hoffman: Is it a threat of arrest if I use my voice at a conversational level?
Officer: Yes, you can be subject to arrest.
David Hoffman: Can I ask them if they'd like to discuss Jesus tonight?
Officer: No, I would say that's still part of the sermonizing.
David Hoffman: Is it amplified sound, or is it using your voice?
Officer: Your voice counts, too, because it's all part of the solicitation. It's communicating. It's the sending of your message, which is one of the prohibited rules.
David Hoffman: I had a young man come up and say, "What would I do if I'm lost?" Is that kind of engagement okay?
Officer: If you want to have this conversation, we'll talk outside the room.
David Hoffman: Okay.
Tim Wildmon: That is so illegal. As far as I know, because this is a public event open to the public, I don't think this is a legal thing that the police were doing. I can understand no bullhorns and no speakers, because that infringes on everyone else's right to carry on conversations. Maybe that should be something you have to have a permit for. But I think the police lose this in court.
Steve: First Liberty is taking them there, by the way. They are counsel. They call it censoring a Christian message during a public Christmas event malicious, unconstitutional, and absurd. Part of the reason is that anybody could probably carry on any conversation they want there. They could be talking football, they could be talking hockey, and the police are saying, "That's fine, but you can't talk about Jesus." That's unconstitutional.
Tim Wildmon: You're exactly right. That police officer didn't know what he was talking about. Police officers aren't trained in First Amendment law.
Steve: Right.
Tim Wildmon: They're there for catching bad guys, robberies, traffic tickets, car crashes, and all sorts of things that they deal with mostly every day. But you get them in a free-speech situation where you're trying to tell that person, and he's telling him, "No, it matters what you're talking about." That's explicitly against the law.
Steve: The pastor, or the Christian man, was fine. What he was doing was fine. The police officer was ignorant. He didn't sound hostile to me, necessarily, but he was wrong on that, and he'll soon learn that.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, I'm sure. But the fact that we would have that going on in the country...
Steve: Yes, that's what you're saying. You need to look at what's going on in Paris and what we're seeing over in Europe, specifically in England, with a lot of police getting involved in free speech on social media.
Tim Wildmon: No, I agree, but they don't have constitutional free-speech protections like we do. A lot of Americans think, "Well, they're Europe and Canada. They're the West, and they're like us." They're similar, but Canada, I remember Focus on the Family during Dr. James Dobson's era. This would have been 25 or 30 years ago. He would say, "If we send our show, Focus on the Family, and the topic of homosexuality comes up, then in Canada they forbid you from airing the show."
Steve: We couldn't air that show in Canada. This was 25 or 30 years ago.
Tim Wildmon: So I'm saying they have different rules in Canada than we have.
Steve: That's an interesting story you tell, because I was working for Focus on the Family when that happened.
Tim Wildmon: Well, yeah. Focus and Dr. Dobson were invited by China to put a minute of the "Focus on the Family Minute" on because China was struggling with its one-child policy.
Steve: Yeah, and China, by the way, also doesn't have religious freedom.
Tim Wildmon: But it turned out that the rules they had to follow in Canada were more restrictive than the rules they had to follow in Communist China.
Steve: Yeah, at the time.
Tim Wildmon: All right, you're listening to Today's Issues. We've got about two or three minutes left. Steve, what do you have?
Steve: Friday, I came to your office and showed you a bit of AI slop, a video that I said, "Look at this. You're never going to believe this." It was a video of a car that drove up a ramp and off what looked like one of those kits that Hot Wheels run on.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah.
Steve: The car went off the ramp, turned over, and it had a lot of rockets. It landed, and I said, "Who would believe this?" It was real. I didn't believe it at first. I thought it was AI. We were all asking, "Is that AI?" But it was real. It was basically a car that could fly.
Steve: Leave it to Elon Musk. Elon Musk is marrying SpaceX and Tesla.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah.
Steve: He says that by 2028, he wants to have this car that can fly.
Tim Wildmon: It literally can fly.
Steve: I don't know. Elon Musk and I are a lot alike. We have a lot of the same ideas and forward-thinking, futuristic thinking. He always seems to beat me to the punch.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.
Steve: Just a little bit of a show-off, to be honest with you.
Tim Wildmon: A trillion times ahead of you in terms of money.
Steve: Yeah, I still have a house note.
Tim Wildmon: So you're a lot like him in ways.
Steve: I'm proud to know you, too.
Tim Wildmon: Well, don't embarrass me.
Steve: I don't want you to think I'm bragging, right?
Tim Wildmon: No, you're not bragging. You're comparing yourself to Elon Musk.
Steve: Yeah, I do wish I had my house paid for, though.
Tim Wildmon: Maybe you can ring him up and ask for a little loan.
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: All right, thank you, Steve.
Steve: God bless.
Tim Wildmon: Thank you for your contributions to this show. Keep listening to American Family Radio, everybody. We'll see you back here tomorrow.
Tim Wildmon: Hey, welcome back, everybody, to Today's Issues on the American Family Radio Network. Thanks for listening to AFR. My name is Tim Wildmon, and in the studio with me is Ed Batagliano. Now we welcome Steve to the conversation. Good morning, Steve.
Steve: Good morning, everybody.
Tim Wildmon: Did you have a good weekend? Your house wasn't.
Steve: It was fine. Well, no, yeah, it was. We've had better weekends from a college football perspective.
Tim Wildmon: It was. Talk about it. There's one weekend a year, in my experience as a huge college football fan, where it seems like the whole top 25 gets turned over on its head. That was this weekend.
Steve: Your wife is an Alabama graduate, right?
Tim Wildmon: Right.
Steve: Born into Roll Tide.
Tim Wildmon: We married into Roll Tide.
Steve: I married into Roll Tide. Roll Tide rolled into Neyland Stadium in Tennessee and rolled out with a nail.
Tim Wildmon: It was not good.
Steve: It looked good, and then it wasn't. It wasn't like the week before, where they got robbed at the end. They just were never in this one.
Tim Wildmon: Oh, they got robbed. Did they? The week before?
Steve: I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
Tim Wildmon: Talking about being robbed, Notre Dame. I was watching the Mormons versus the Catholics, like a lot of people, on Saturday night in Provo.
Steve: Yeah, two bad calls, I guess. One bad call, one bad ruling. Clear pass interference was not called because Notre Dame was driving down for the two-point win.
Tim Wildmon: Yes, and then the game was called with one second left on the clock.
Steve: Yeah, Notre Dame would have had one more play in the end zone. The officials for the league, the Big 12, which BYU is a part of, even admitted that there was supposed to be time left on the clock for Notre Dame to have another play.
Tim Wildmon: Who knows if they had scored or not, but at least they would have had another shot.
Steve: Well, maybe it was the second that they gave Michigan.
Tim Wildmon: What do you mean?
Steve: Michigan. They're taking it away from Michigan and giving it to Notre Dame, or the other way around.
Tim Wildmon: Oh, they gave it to Michigan. They're taking it away from Notre Dame.
Steve: Anyway, I don't know if this is in the book of Revelation or not, but to have so many top-ten teams lose on the same Saturday does make you wonder, has the world tilted? You know what I'm saying?
Tim Wildmon: So Miami is now number one, and the Mormons are number two.
Steve: Okay.
Tim Wildmon: Ohio State three, Notre Dame four, and Georgia and Alabama are recent recipients.
Steve: Auburn beat Georgia in Athens.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, which is unranked against number one. I don't know if that's ever happened, at least the last time that's happened. I have a couple of good friends who are Auburn diehards, so I texted them.
Steve: Oh, yeah. They were very happy.
Tim Wildmon: Then Alabama loses on the road in Tennessee. There's no shame in that. Tennessee's good, and Alabama's, you know, that's a tough place to win. Then you've got Texas losing to Florida.
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: You've got trouble in Austin right now. Texas dropped 12 spots to number 19.
Steve: Well, they've got two losses.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, they're underachieving with all the talent and money they've got. And then who else? Unless you want Notre Dame, which we've mentioned.
Steve: Miami almost lost. That was an overtime game. If you like college football, it was a great Saturday.
Tim Wildmon: If you didn't care who won, it was some great football.
Steve: Yes, great football.
Tim Wildmon: So anyway, we will see how it goes from here on out. That's what you never know, Saturday to Saturday, what's going to happen, right? All right, you're listening to Today's Issues on American Family Radio. First story, Steve.
Steve: Well, we have a former president who's going around giving speeches, Barack Obama, because he's the only former president who...
Tim Wildmon: Because I don't think Joe Biden is giving a whole lot of speeches.
Steve: Well, George Bush is giving speeches.
Tim Wildmon: Well, he is.
Steve: Nobody's joining us.
Tim Wildmon: Well, he could be. But this is Barack Obama. He was giving a speech and was given an honorary degree at a college. He was talking about Israel, and it did not go well. This is what he said.
Steve: Obama's comments on Tuesday were made in a conversation with journalist Susan McKay. He referred to the Palestinians' reaction to the Jewish people's exerting cultural and military control over the state of Israel. He said, quote, "The Palestinian people say this is an injustice. The Palestinians want their land back."
Tim Wildmon: That's what Obama said?
Steve: Yes. The fact that the Jewish people have been oppressed, discriminated against, and killed for millennia, and Europe was responsible for much of it, they understandably sought a refuge. If the attitude of Israel is now that we are the strongest, the most technologically advanced in the region, then our security will depend on us simply doing whatever we need and taking whatever we want, and not making any concessions to anyone. That may work short term, but you have ceded the moral high ground if you take that position.
Tim Wildmon: To which Benjamin Netanyahu replied, "I just need to listen to this."
Benjamin Netanyahu: The other day, I heard a regrettable statement. It talked about Israel stealing land, Israel losing the moral high ground. Well, let me respond to that. The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers. Our history is not a colonial enterprise. Our land is not stolen land. This is our homeland. It's called Judea. That's where Jews come from, and we've been attached to it for thousands of years. We're not the Dutch in Indonesia. We're not the Belgians in the Congo. We're Jews in Judea.
Benjamin Netanyahu: Let me say something else. The obstacle to peace is not Israel. It's not our fight for our very right to exist in our own state. It's the refusal of our enemies and America's enemies to recognize the Jewish people's right to a state of our own in any boundary. That's why they chant, "Death to Israel. Death to America." We are the little Satan. You are the great Satan, and we're defending our common civilization.
Benjamin Netanyahu: A peace built on illusions will crash against the rocks of Middle Eastern reality. Israel will not gamble with its survival to accommodate those who refuse to accept the facts of history, to accept our right to exist, or wish to appease terror. We certainly do not. We never will.
Tim Wildmon: I can't think, in my lifetime, of a better articulator of Israel's right to exist and their history than Benjamin Netanyahu. I don't know whether he's in a tough election. They say it's coming up. They have a parliamentary system of government over there in Israel, much like Canada and some of Great Britain and other places where they have to get coalitions.
Steve: Yeah, parties.
Tim Wildmon: It's not just like we know in the United States, where it's basically Republican and Democrat. In Israel, they might have ten parties vying for the prime minister's position. We'll see, but there's an election coming up in the next few days.
Steve: Yes, right.
Tim Wildmon: Do you guys agree with me that Benjamin Netanyahu, what he just said right there, was gold? You could just play that over and over again to explain what the realities are on the ground there in the Middle East.
Tim Wildmon: By the way, when someone like President Obama and others on the left who are very critical of Israel talk about the West Bank, Israel won the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip.
Steve: In a war?
Tim Wildmon: The Sinai Peninsula.
Steve: In the 1967 Six-Day War.
Tim Wildmon: You're going back 50 years ago.
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: So that belongs to Israel. If folks didn't want to lose it, they shouldn't have been hostile to Israel. Israel has been attacked on several occasions. Intifadas and all kinds of things have been declared against them, and they are fighting for their very survival.
Tim Wildmon: I just don't understand the historical ignorance on the part of President Obama and others on the left. It is an ideological argument that they're making.
Steve: They don't want Israel.
Tim Wildmon: They just hate the Jews.
Steve: They hate the Jews. That's the only explanation to me that makes any sense, because we were talking about 1967. There was a war fought over land.
Tim Wildmon: It wasn't the first war in the history of the world fought over land.
Steve: No. People have conquered the land of other peoples since the beginning of time. In this case, Israel was being threatened by Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, all at the same time, in an attempt to wipe them off the map.
Tim Wildmon: Wipe them off the map.
Steve: Israel, you can read about this. That was the Six-Day War, right?
Tim Wildmon: Six-Day War in '67.
Steve: Yeah. You can read about this. It was like the hand of God was on Israel's side.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah.
Steve: There are stories of God blinding the tank regiments. It's like, wow, Israel could not have won this without divine help. That's what a lot of people believe and say.
Tim Wildmon: I'm just saying that Israel took over the eastern part of Jerusalem and some other places in the tiny country of Israel. They expanded the territory that they controlled and administered. Obama and his ilk want Israel to go back to the way it was before 1967. That's the generous view. Most of them would like to see Israel annihilated and wiped off the map altogether.
Steve: It would be suicide for Israel to give back the West Bank. Regardless, let's just set aside the historical claim that Israel has on Judea and Samaria. They do, since biblical times, but it's high ground between them and enemy countries. In other words, if you give up the West Bank and the Golan Heights, you have the enemy shooting down on you. You're putting yourself at a huge tactical disadvantage.
Tim Wildmon: Well, even without that, and you're exactly right, if they were to give back the West Bank, then Israel at its narrowest point becomes about, I don't know, 11 miles wide, and the country could easily be cut in half by an invasion. They've got no choice but to continue doing what they're doing.
Steve: When you hear the expression "West Bank," we're talking about the West Bank of the Jordan River.
Tim Wildmon: Yes. So it's in the east part of the country.
Steve: Look at a map and wonder why the West Bank is on the east part of Israel. It's because the Jordan River is on the east side of Israel.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah. All these people that are continuing with the calls for genocide, all these folks are obsessed with this. That's the reason I say they should just come out and say, "We hate Jews." It might be easier than trying to explain it.
Steve: We're talking about Russia and just doing so much damage and killing inside Ukraine. You never hear "Free Ukraine" from these people. I'm going to show Russia as the aggressor in the war there, and it's just, I don't know, you don't hear them talking about freeing the Tibetans from communist Chinese control and persecution. You don't hear them talk about freedom from Boko Haram in Nigeria. It's all, "No, we're not going to talk about the other injustices in the world. We just want to focus on Israel and Gaza." Why? Because we hate Jews. They might as well say it.
Tim Wildmon: Yes. All right, next story, Steve.
Steve: There's a senator from Michigan. Her name is Elissa Slotkin, and she was talking at the University of Chicago to students there.
Tim Wildmon: I was watching that on C-SPAN.
Steve: Yeah, the college football got boring Saturday. I switched over to C-SPAN, and I saw this speech she was giving at the University of Chicago. It was very interesting.
Tim Wildmon: I bet it was powerful. I stopped watching hockey.
Steve: One of the things that we keep warning people about is that if Democrats get back in power, they're going to weaponize the government again. I know they're railing on the Trump administration for using the Department of Justice to prosecute some crimes that were committed under the Obama administration and under the Biden administration. But they never mention the fact that this whole weaponization thing reached its fullest-throated form under Obama.
Steve: Elissa Slotkin is talking about how she wants to make sure that the Democrats send a message to Trump supporters, specifically young Trump supporters. Listen to this.
Elissa Slotkin: I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him. I want young people coming out of school to say, "Should I go work for the Trump administration? That sounds fun. I might get an opportunity." I want them to be like, "That might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don't want, and so let me avoid participating in that." I want that deterrence message sent.
Tim Wildmon: She wants the deterrence message sent.
Steve: Listen, if the Democratic Party wins the House and the Senate, and I don't know what the odds are, the polling seems to lean that way for the Democrats, but you never know. We encourage people to get out and vote, because sometimes these races in individual states or districts come down to a few hundred votes. The people who get out to vote are the ones who are going to determine the election.
Steve: But if anybody wants to know what these radicals in the Democratic Party and on the far left are going to do, this is the kind of thing. We're going to go right back to the four years we had under Joe Biden, where the federal government will be weaponized. She might as well have said, "We want young people to be afraid to work for the Trump administration because they may suffer the full weight of federal power." That is, to me, tyranny, and that's where the far left seems to be willing to go.
Tim Wildmon: Okay. Next story.
Steve: I want to introduce you to a gentleman named David Hoffman, who is an evangelist in Arizona.
Tim Wildmon: Long time since Baywatch.
Steve: Yeah, long time. For years, for a decade, David Hoffman has been regularly evangelizing at Tucson, Arizona's Winterhaven Festival of Lights. It's a free holiday event where you walk through neighborhoods with houses decorated in Christmas lights, and he shares Jesus.
Steve: He has done it in the past with a bullhorn or a speaker, and this time he was doing it with just his voice. He's not being bombastic. As far as I could tell, he's not necessarily preaching just from Romans 1 or something. But they have what they're calling new event rules. He said, "Upon entering the event, we were told that we cannot have any kind of religious expression. They said that you can be there to participate in looking at the lights, but don't talk to anybody. You can't give out Gospel tracts. That would lead to a violation." They were enforcing it. The police came and threatened to arrest him. This is what they said.
Officer: You can't be inside here doing the preaching.
David Hoffman: Is it a threat of arrest if I use my voice at a conversational level?
Officer: Yes, you can be subject to arrest.
David Hoffman: Can I ask them if they'd like to discuss Jesus tonight?
Officer: No, I would say that's still part of the sermonizing.
David Hoffman: Is it amplified sound, or is it using your voice?
Officer: Your voice counts, too, because it's all part of the solicitation. It's communicating. It's the sending of your message, which is one of the prohibited rules.
David Hoffman: I had a young man come up and say, "What would I do if I'm lost?" Is that kind of engagement okay?
Officer: If you want to have this conversation, we'll talk outside the room.
David Hoffman: Okay.
Tim Wildmon: That is so illegal. As far as I know, because this is a public event open to the public, I don't think this is a legal thing that the police were doing. I can understand no bullhorns and no speakers, because that infringes on everyone else's right to carry on conversations. Maybe that should be something you have to have a permit for. But I think the police lose this in court.
Steve: First Liberty is taking them there, by the way. They are counsel. They call it censoring a Christian message during a public Christmas event malicious, unconstitutional, and absurd. Part of the reason is that anybody could probably carry on any conversation they want there. They could be talking football, they could be talking hockey, and the police are saying, "That's fine, but you can't talk about Jesus." That's unconstitutional.
Tim Wildmon: You're exactly right. That police officer didn't know what he was talking about. Police officers aren't trained in First Amendment law.
Steve: Right.
Tim Wildmon: They're there for catching bad guys, robberies, traffic tickets, car crashes, and all sorts of things that they deal with mostly every day. But you get them in a free-speech situation where you're trying to tell that person, and he's telling him, "No, it matters what you're talking about." That's explicitly against the law.
Steve: The pastor, or the Christian man, was fine. What he was doing was fine. The police officer was ignorant. He didn't sound hostile to me, necessarily, but he was wrong on that, and he'll soon learn that.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, I'm sure. But the fact that we would have that going on in the country...
Steve: Yes, that's what you're saying. You need to look at what's going on in Paris and what we're seeing over in Europe, specifically in England, with a lot of police getting involved in free speech on social media.
Tim Wildmon: No, I agree, but they don't have constitutional free-speech protections like we do. A lot of Americans think, "Well, they're Europe and Canada. They're the West, and they're like us." They're similar, but Canada, I remember Focus on the Family during Dr. James Dobson's era. This would have been 25 or 30 years ago. He would say, "If we send our show, Focus on the Family, and the topic of homosexuality comes up, then in Canada they forbid you from airing the show."
Steve: We couldn't air that show in Canada. This was 25 or 30 years ago.
Tim Wildmon: So I'm saying they have different rules in Canada than we have.
Steve: That's an interesting story you tell, because I was working for Focus on the Family when that happened.
Tim Wildmon: Well, yeah. Focus and Dr. Dobson were invited by China to put a minute of the "Focus on the Family Minute" on because China was struggling with its one-child policy.
Steve: Yeah, and China, by the way, also doesn't have religious freedom.
Tim Wildmon: But it turned out that the rules they had to follow in Canada were more restrictive than the rules they had to follow in Communist China.
Steve: Yeah, at the time.
Tim Wildmon: All right, you're listening to Today's Issues. We've got about two or three minutes left. Steve, what do you have?
Steve: Friday, I came to your office and showed you a bit of AI slop, a video that I said, "Look at this. You're never going to believe this." It was a video of a car that drove up a ramp and off what looked like one of those kits that Hot Wheels run on.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah.
Steve: The car went off the ramp, turned over, and it had a lot of rockets. It landed, and I said, "Who would believe this?" It was real. I didn't believe it at first. I thought it was AI. We were all asking, "Is that AI?" But it was real. It was basically a car that could fly.
Steve: Leave it to Elon Musk. Elon Musk is marrying SpaceX and Tesla.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah.
Steve: He says that by 2028, he wants to have this car that can fly.
Tim Wildmon: It literally can fly.
Steve: I don't know. Elon Musk and I are a lot alike. We have a lot of the same ideas and forward-thinking, futuristic thinking. He always seems to beat me to the punch.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.
Steve: Just a little bit of a show-off, to be honest with you.
Tim Wildmon: A trillion times ahead of you in terms of money.
Steve: Yeah, I still have a house note.
Tim Wildmon: So you're a lot like him in ways.
Steve: I'm proud to know you, too.
Tim Wildmon: Well, don't embarrass me.
Steve: I don't want you to think I'm bragging, right?
Tim Wildmon: No, you're not bragging. You're comparing yourself to Elon Musk.
Steve: Yeah, I do wish I had my house paid for, though.
Tim Wildmon: Maybe you can ring him up and ask for a little loan.
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: All right, thank you, Steve.
Steve: God bless.
Tim Wildmon: Thank you for your contributions to this show. Keep listening to American Family Radio, everybody. We'll see you back here tomorrow.
Tim Wildmon, Ed Batagliano, and Steve Paisley-Dordoff discuss former President Barack Obama's comments about Israel and the Palestinian claim to the land. The hosts highlight Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's defense of Israel's historic connection to Judea and its right to exist, along with the security concerns surrounding the West Bank and Golan Heights. The hosts also examine Senator Alyssa Slotkin's comments about deterring young people from working for the Trump administration, calling them evidence of possible political weaponization. They discuss an evangelist challenged by police while speaking about Jesus at Tucson's Winterhaven Festival of Lights and First Liberty's response. The segment closes with a conversation about Elon Musk's plans for a flying car.
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