Ed Vitagliano: Welcome back to Today's Issues. Ed Vitagliano sitting in for Tim Wildmon this week. I am joined by Wesley Wildmon and Tony Vitagliano. Steve Jorall will join us in a moment.

Ed Vitagliano: I do want to mention that Frank Turek will be a guest with us tomorrow, like he is on many Tuesdays here on Today's Issues. He wanted us to announce that he will be at the University of Georgia in Athens tonight at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time. The event will take place in UGA Memorial Hall. It is free and open to the public.

Ed Vitagliano: This is when Frank engages with mostly college students, although I do not know that there is an age limit, and promotes the gospel. It will also be livestreamed on the Cross Examined YouTube channel. He said they will be talking about the war on reality, which is also the name of his new book, and doing questions and answers with the young people there.

Ed Vitagliano: So it is free and open to the public at the University of Georgia in Athens, at UGA Memorial Hall. Dr. Frank Turek will be there at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time. If you are in the area, check it out, and pray for them during these kinds of events, even if you cannot make it from around the country. If you are listening to our radio network, please be praying for Dr. Frank Turek and his ministry.

Ed Vitagliano: Dr. Alex McFarland does the same kinds of things, trying to reach our young people. That is a real need, and it brings much glory to God. The gospel is proclaimed in these settings.

Ed Vitagliano: All right, Steve Jorall joins us.

Steve Jorall: My business does not last as long as you are used to.

Ed Vitagliano: Yes.

Steve Jorall: Oh, yeah.

Ed Vitagliano: We are wondering, folks, because this exchange usually goes off without a hitch between Chris Woodward, or sometimes Fred Jackson. Steve Jorall comes in here for the third segment on Today's Issues, but Steve was in here, then he was not in here, so we are asking where he was. He was making sure he did not have to leave in the middle of the show. I will let you fill in the blank.

Steve Jorall: You do not have to do that. I understand exactly what you are talking about.

Ed Vitagliano: Anyway, Wesley, you mentioned that he was down the hall getting a hamburger. I thought, you know what, if we had a little grill down there in the kitchen, like they have at ball games.

Wesley Wildmon: Oh, yeah, the hot dog station. We have popcorn.

Ed Vitagliano: We have popcorn. We do not have hot dogs and hamburgers.

Wesley Wildmon: Hot dogs and hamburgers, man, that would be as close to heaven. You mentioned a pizza oven here.

Wesley Wildmon: Here is the reason. We have added and built a new building, and then we renovated one building and renovated the other one inside of it. All the way through that two-and-a-half or three-year period, we would be sitting in meetings talking about reconstructing security to go this way, and putting departments over here, and having a commercial kitchen for when we host events at our headquarters. All of that was discussed, and there was never a discussion about having a brick oven for pizza.

Ed Vitagliano: He brought it up every time you mentioned it.

Wesley Wildmon: Oh, I am sorry. You are right outside of me. You are welcome.

Ed Vitagliano: I would have been fine. There was no discussion.

Wesley Wildmon: Then there was an awkward silence, and they were like, “Next story.”

Ed Vitagliano: That is a form of water moving on.

Steve Jorall: All right. All right.

Ed Vitagliano: So, next on our security details.

Wesley Wildmon: I will say this. I think one of the reasons why we did not think about it is because we do think about our donors and the idea of us having a brick oven in here for making pizza. It is like an ice cream station. You just go everywhere, though.

Ed Vitagliano: Our donors would have to go for that.

Wesley Wildmon: I also know why you wanted the pizza oven in particular. Just share with everyone.

Ed Vitagliano: It is because you love pizza.

Wesley Wildmon: I have a problem.

Ed Vitagliano: Your wife, not so much, so you rarely get to have it.

Wesley Wildmon: That is right.

Ed Vitagliano: I am just saying this is probably God's best for you, Wesley. If there were a pizza oven here inside, you would be 250 pounds in addition to 150 pounds.

Wesley Wildmon: I would be standing at it while it was in use. I mean, I would take time away from my work.

Ed Vitagliano: That is right.

Wesley Wildmon: So I get it delivered from Papa John's.

Ed Vitagliano: That is right. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

Wesley Wildmon: Maybe that is a bad metaphor. I should be talking about Chinese food when I am talking about that.

Steve Jorall: That is cool. I think that is what that metaphor did there.

Ed Vitagliano: All right, Steve, moving along. What news do you have?

Steve Jorall: Well, the jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial continue to preen themselves in front of the television cameras, spouting wisdom. I want to remind everybody what the job of a juror is as we go into this discussion.

Steve Jorall: A juror's job is to look at the evidence presented in a trial and, with as much of an open and unbiased mind as possible, render a verdict based on the evidence that has been presented in the trial alone. You are not supposed to bring in your own expert testimony. You are certainly not supposed to think about the larger ramifications of a guilty or innocent verdict on the larger culture, or what is good for women in this case.

Steve Jorall: But that is exactly what one of the jurors, Paula Devlin, said in an interview. She made an astounding admission.

Paula Devlin: We knew that this was a turning point, and this would be something that could change something to make it better for other women in the future, for other families. Justice for those children is this never happening again.

Ed Vitagliano: All right. Tony, I am going to go to you first. What is she saying? What is her name?

Tony Vitagliano: Devlin. Her first name is Paula. Paula Devlin.

Ed Vitagliano: This is part of the problem we have had for a long time in our country with activist judges, judges who do not like what the law says, so they legislate from the bench to, quote unquote, fix what is broken. That is what I heard her saying in terms of the jurors trying to fix what is broken.

Ed Vitagliano: I am setting aside the horrifying comment she makes about justice for these three children being making sure this does not happen again. That is just a ridiculous thing. But this is a broken part of our country where people are absolutely willing to forget what the law says, what the Constitution says, and what the system is supposed to be like.

Ed Vitagliano: They want to forget all that. Instead of doing the hard work and fixing what is broken in the law, there is a problem here. I am going to throw this to Wesley in a second. There is a problem with the law in Massachusetts that opened the door for this problem, but they do not want to do it that way. They want to take their opportunity and try to fix it by sheer willpower.

Tony Vitagliano: It is so disgusting. Comments like that are just disgusting, honestly.

Ed Vitagliano: Justice for the children means what?

Wesley Wildmon: Justice for the children should mean that Lindsay Clancy is never allowed to see the light of day again, in my opinion. What form that takes would be up for the judge to decide, but that is justice for the children.

Wesley Wildmon: Honestly, government is established by God and upheld by God, and one of its purposes is to punish the wicked. This is an open-and-shut case, as it appeared to me, where the guilty party should be punished. For these jurors to turn this around and make it about society needing to correct these issues, or an opportunity to change things for women or whoever in society at large, is missing the whole point of what government is there for.

Wesley Wildmon: Someone committed a crime, a heinous crime. One that has kept me up and that I have had a hard time thinking about as this trial has been going on. We have had to keep up with it as it progressed.

Wesley Wildmon: The purpose of the jury was to look at the evidence and decide guilty or not guilty. According to the evidence and all the admissions of everyone involved, it seemed pretty open and shut to me.

Wesley Wildmon: We are losing the ability as a society, because we continue to drift away from our Christian, biblical foundations, to even judge wickedness rightly. We are losing the ability to recognize it and say that it needs to be punished, regardless of what you think about the extenuating circumstances around what this person was going through in their home life or marriage or whatever. Wickedness should be judged and should be punished.

Steve Jorall: We see the same problem in the immigration debate, where you have people saying that the needs of people in other countries to escape difficult circumstances and, quote unquote, have a life are worth the cost to society when some criminals slip across the border illegally and wind up killing Americans. That is just part of the price you pay.

Steve Jorall: There is something wrong with the way this country, overall, in certain segments of it, is thinking about the job of government.

Wesley Wildmon: The passage in the Old Testament says they make evil good and good evil. You are seeing that in cases like this, where there is so much empathy and sympathy for the criminal and not the victim. That is a problem.

Wesley Wildmon: We talked about this particular story for about a half hour last week on one of the shows I was on, so I will not spend much more time because I talked about it a lot there. I will not revisit all of it, but it is as simple as Tony made it.

Wesley Wildmon: A mother strangled her three children with an exercise belt systematically over about a 20-minute period, one by one, and we are having a conversation about her potentially being let go on the word insanity or psychosis or whatever. That is absurd. It is, like you said, an open-and-shut case.

Wesley Wildmon: Unfortunately, we live in a fallen world, and things like this happen across the country often. Even if it is not reported as a copycat, within a couple of weeks of this case going to trial, you are going to see heinous crimes in a fallen world and in our society. Some of it is incited based on the policies we have in place. Some of it is just evilness. Nonetheless, it happens, unfortunately.

Wesley Wildmon: To hesitate in showing any empathy toward the murderer is a reflection of the problem. Most of the empathy that Clancy is getting is from women. Almost all of it is from women, judging by what we saw from the jurors.

Wesley Wildmon: If you are hearing this and you know someone who is empathizing at any point, this is an opportunity for you to explain why this is a closed case.

Ed Vitagliano: Steve, I was just going to ask you this before you continued. Is there any update on whether the prosecution is going to refile charges?

Steve Jorall: They have until the end of the month to make that decision, and I have not read or heard anything.

Ed Vitagliano: We asked this last week, but we did not have clearance at the time. Let us play this out hypothetically. Let us say that nothing comes of it. What is next if they drop the case? She is free. There are no charges.

Steve Jorall: It is unlikely that will happen, but the extreme narcissism of the left continues to be displayed. I would like to introduce you to an OB-GYN by the name of Camila Phillips, who says, “Wait a minute, folks.” She is chiding everybody here. She was on Oprah, and she is saying, “You took your eyes off the ball, people. We are supposed to be about race.”

Camila Phillips: We are losing this. We are not talking about race anymore, could we?

Camila Phillips: The other thing that I would be remiss not to say is that I hope this never happens again. We know statistically that it really will.

Camila Phillips: I want us to have the same passion for people who do not look like Lindsay, who do not have her same access and education, her melanin, or her privilege. There are women of color sitting around this country in prisons for the same thing that we have never heard of. I just want to remind us to have the pink shirts and the energy for them as well.

Camila Phillips: People, it is about race. Did you forget?

Ed Vitagliano: Is that true? Are there black women sitting around in prison?

Steve Jorall: In her mind, there are.

Tony Vitagliano: There is a reason why the statue of justice has a blindfold across her eyes. It does not matter what other attributes a person who commits a crime has. The person should be punished for that crime.

Tony Vitagliano: Again, this goes back to Wesley's point. Why are we spending so much time on the criminal, the person who committed the horrible act, and sympathizing with them? What made them do this?

Tony Vitagliano: If your worldview does not allow you to recognize that evil is inherently within humankind and the flesh, then you will struggle to understand this. You will spend more time asking why someone would do this. Maybe it is because evil objectively exists in this world, just as much as good and righteousness objectively exist in this world.

Tony Vitagliano: You spend all this time wondering why the criminal would do this, while spending almost zero time on sympathy for the victim or the people who are left behind in the wake of such a horrible event. I am not surprised, though, that the conversation turns to that.

Wesley Wildmon: If there are black women across the country in prison for murdering their children, I say good. I want white women to go to prison too, just like Clancy. If they kill their children like this, or in any way, they should be in prison too. I do not care if they spiked their Fruit Loops.

Wesley Wildmon: I do not understand the need to turn this into something that implies people are letting white women off the hook because they are white. That does not seem to be what is going on in Massachusetts.

Steve Jorall: That is what happens every single time a black person talks in the woke left. If it strays from that narrative, they have to bring it back.

Steve Jorall: There are two more clips, and I know we need to move on. I do not want to beat this horse to death, so tell me if we are doing that, because we probably are. But there is a new twist.

Steve Jorall: You brought this up in our story meeting. There is a religious component to this. We talked about it a little bit in our story meeting. There is a new term out there that seems to be catching on on the left.

Camila Phillips: The holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial was a black man, and I am not going to share any opinions because I am not a person of color. I am a non-practicing white.

Camila Phillips: I am surprised. It changes the landscape of the conversation a little bit. A lot of us were assuming that it was a white man.

Camila Phillips: I need to confess that this comment I left was stolen. I saw “non-practicing white” in somebody else's comment section, and I loved it so much that I am using it. I plan to make it part of my bio.

Camila Phillips: There are white women who say they are white and non-practicing. Now that is my identity. Non-practicing white person. I am a safe space. Let us know how to officially apply for the non-practicing whites club.

Camila Phillips: I understand there is a new club on TikTok, and it is the non-practicing whites, those of us who are absolutely fed up and tired of colonizing racist white behavior. As a white woman, non-practicing, thank you.

Camila Phillips: I just want to comment saying I am white, non-practicing, and I am adopting that for all future conversations that I have around my whiteness.

Steve Jorall: The self-hatred of white people on the woke left is amazing to me.

Ed Vitagliano: Tony, you have a lot of interesting thoughts about this.

Tony Vitagliano: I brought this up in the meeting. Steve was talking about the non-practicing white idea, but this is their religion. Identity politics is their religion.

Tony Vitagliano: I am not sure any of these people would even claim a religion otherwise, but if they want to go on about the evils of organized religion, or talk about how organized religion brainwashes people, point them to examples like this, where they are using literally religious language: non-practicing.

Tony Vitagliano: This is the same language you would use if you said, “I am Catholic, but non-practicing,” or, “I am Muslim, but non-practicing,” or, “I am Jewish, but non-practicing.” It is the same language.

Tony Vitagliano: To take that and apply it to a trait that God, your Creator, gave you, something you did not have a say in, and apply it to your race is applying a religious overtone to something that is not and should have no bearing on spirituality.

Ed Vitagliano: Wesley, what these ladies are saying, and God bless them, is that when they say “non-practicing white,” they are saying that being white is evil and they are not going to practice that evil. What an absurd thing to say. You are white regardless of what you are doing.

Wesley Wildmon: The left in and of itself has its own religion. We in the conservative movement, by and large, are based on a Christian worldview. The left, by and large, has a religion of Marxism and atheism, and they have their own religion.

Wesley Wildmon: It has nothing to do with the things that matter or with what our Founding Fathers created from the very beginning. We are seeing a big divide in our country. The blue states are going to get more blue, especially with the big cities, and the red states are going to get more red.

Wesley Wildmon: I will say this, though, on the front of woke-ism: We are winning that one. The American people are just fed up with that type of divisiveness.

Wesley Wildmon: It is one thing to divide over something that has merit. It is another thing to create an artificial division for the purpose of causing chaos and frustration among people. People have enough problems organically in their own lives, but when it is self-induced, like this type of division, people are over it.

Wesley Wildmon: They are over it. That is the reason all the companies, in the last two or three years, canceled their DEI programs. College campuses said, “We tried DEI your way. It was a drain on our resources, it was a drain on our money, and it was unproductive.” Now we have more riots on campus than we did before DEI.

Tony Vitagliano: The average person is going to hear a statement like that and recognize how ridiculous it sounds. The average concerns of the average American are not even in the same universe as the concerns of these women making these absurd statements.

Wesley Wildmon: Not at all.

Wesley Wildmon: Thanks to Brent, our producer, and thanks to Ed, Tony, Steve, Chris, and myself. Thank you all so much. Please continue to listen to American Family Radio.

Wesley Wildmon: We have a news break here, and we will come back with some great radio content for this afternoon. My brother, Walker Wildmon, comes on at 1 p.m. He has a great radio program for you on American Family Radio. We will see you tomorrow on Today's Issues.