Point of View August 25, 2026 – Hour 2 : Tuesday’s Top Stories

[00:00:04] Across America, Live, this is Point of View Radio Talk Show, Kerby Anderson.

[00:00:19] Second hour today, we'll spend just a little bit of time talking about this economic D-Day, and then I'll move on because we will get back to this issue again tomorrow, and we've got a number of other articles, one having to do with all sorts of problems government is ignoring, non-debt problems, of course the debt problem is a big one, as well as how DEI refuses to die, and no street vagrants or the homeless are not our neighbors, and a couple other pieces that we will get to in due course.

[00:00:47] But I thought since this was announced yesterday by the Secretary of Treasury, and in some respects has been coming because I think it was what, last Thursday night, is when the president on Truth Social said, we're going to bring the most crushing economic operation ever taken against another country. This will be economic warfare and isolation on an unprecedented scale.

[00:01:11] Goes on to say that this will be the economic D-Day, which is the phrase that he's used and others have used as well. And even as I'm reporting it, I don't want you to come away thinking that I'm thrilled about all of this. In some respects, we should be somewhat concerned. We recognize that when you have this much economic power, it can be misused.

[00:01:35] And we may say, well, we were grateful that we used the kind of economic power and sanctions against Russia when it invaded Ukraine. And we can certainly say we appreciate the opportunity to use this economic power against Iran that has been killing its citizens and threatening the neighbors with the idea that eventually you might have a nuclear-armed Iran.

[00:02:01] But on the other hand, what happens if the economic power in the hands of individuals could be used against you? And for those of you that don't like Trump, you might say, I don't like him having this power right now. For those of you who like Trump, can you remember back just a few years ago when we had other individuals that had political and economic power, and they used it against Donald Trump and his family? Remember when they were debanking his family and prosecuting him and all the rest?

[00:02:29] There is always a reasonable concern about any amount of significant power in the hands of a few, especially when it possibly can be misused. But nevertheless, you might want to go to the piece by Kevin McCullough, fellow talk show host, who said, you know, Iran has spent months threatening the world over the Strait of Hormuz.

[00:02:53] Right now the Strait is relatively open, not completely, but at least 50% of the kind of oil tankers that used to go through there are getting through. And so that is certainly the case. So the ships have been moving in one way or another. And so that has been a significant change indeed.

[00:03:14] And that is also something that has harmed the Iranian government because we still have a blockade of their particular ships. And so some ships are using routes that Iran doesn't recognize that they can't get to. And that has led to the regime's new, I might say new because some of them were eliminated, security chief,

[00:03:38] who has actually said that countries that have been cooperating with America's economic campaign will be treated as committing an act of war. So we're in conflict. We're in a war, a military war. But there's also an economic war taking place as well. This is, of course, what has been called economic D-Day.

[00:04:00] And as I pointed out before, you had some individuals pointing out that Iran is really hurting badly. They need money. They need oil revenue. The IRGC certainly needs resources. The terrorist proxies can't operate without the kind of funding that Iran has provided. Missiles aren't free. Drones aren't free either.

[00:04:28] And as they lose more and more of their military apparatus, they are in need of financial resources, which they do not have. As I pointed out, I'm sad for how this is affecting the Iranian people. The Iranian real open Monday at roughly 2.02 million to the dollar. In other words, you need 2 million real for $1. These poor people, what they are going through.

[00:04:58] And if nothing else, this is also having an impact on someone else, China. The most important oil customer from Iran is China. And that, I think, is going to be interesting because exports from Iran to China fell by an estimated 534,000 barrels per day in August, which, again, is going to have an issue.

[00:05:24] And before it's all through, there will be some other conflicts that maybe break out as a result of that. Not to mention the possibility, as I pointed out when we were talking with Lana Silk, about a possible October surprise. An October surprise is oftentimes something that happens in October to really try to change the political landscape.

[00:05:46] I am at least aware of the possibility that something like that from the Iranians could happen to see if they could affect the election. And you know as well as I do that if there was some kind of terrorist attack or some kind of threat that was acted upon in the United States, instead of blaming the Iranians who are the ones bringing it about, they would blame Donald Trump,

[00:06:13] arguing that the only reason we had an attack against us is because we actually went to a war with Iran. And that could affect the election, and the Iranians certainly will give something like that a try. So what, again, this piece by Kevin McCullough reminds us is all of this pressure doesn't mean that Iran suddenly becomes harmless. Quite the opposite, he says.

[00:06:41] A wounded regime with the IRGC still at its disposal can be exceptionally dangerous. Iran has spent decades using terrorism, proxies, and regional intimidation as instruments of state power. Nobody should expect the men running the system to discover humility because their currency is collapsing. So it's our first article there.

[00:07:04] I might also point you to one that I am going to post tomorrow, which comes from the Wall Street Journal. Well, Trump unleashes Scott Bessett on Iran and pointing out that, again, he announced Operation Economic Outcast against Iran and its enablers. We'll see how that plays out as well.

[00:07:24] And as a result, as they point out, the D-Day analogy might be a bit grandiose, although I don't think it's as extreme as people that have looked at this realize, because this is, again, an economic step that is going to make it even more painful for the few countries, China being on the top of the list, that depend on Iranian oil exports.

[00:07:50] And as more oil tankers move through but make their way to our friends, that will seem to actually be a very different kind of set of circumstances. So right now, the IRGC, which again stands for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, are really hurting because they lack the oil revenue.

[00:08:12] And that is something that they have used for literally more than four decades to not only threaten their neighbors, but to fund their proxies and proxy wars around the world, but especially in the Middle East. So that's where we find ourselves. We come back, we're going to get into some other issues, but we will never lose track of the fact that we're fighting a war with Iran, and that military war has now become a significant economic war.

[00:08:41] Let's take a break, come back with more right after this. This is Viewpoints with Kerby Anderson. More than a quarter of Gen Z investors see sports gambling as their long-term financial strategy.

[00:09:11] A majority of them have bet on sports at least once in the last year, and a recent online survey should concern all of us, and was the reason I published my booklet on a biblical view on gambling. This is not a new phenomenon. We've always had gambling in one form or another, but this recent surge in young adults' gambling illustrates the frustration the younger generation feels about the economy and affordability. Why are they gambling their financial future on sports? Well, opportunity is one reason.

[00:09:39] The Supreme Court in a landmark ruling years ago overturned the federal ban on sports gambling. When you watch a football game this fall, you will see lots of ads for betting platforms. Users can wager minute-by-minute outcomes while watching games live. Payments are instant and thus addictive. Frustration is another reason. Gen Z may be turning to sports betting because they have become convinced that the traditional ways of earning a living don't work for them.

[00:10:05] They have a higher unemployment rate, most cannot afford a home, and college graduates are smothering under unprecedented levels of student debt. One writer for the Wall Street Journal referred to this attitude as financial nihilism. When conventional investment strategies seem hopeless, many in this generation choose the unlikely possibility of a quick return on investment. Sports betting is not a good way to build a financial future, especially when it is easier than ever to invest in stocks or to buy gold or bitcoin.

[00:10:34] The idea of dollar-cost average might not seem too exciting, but is better than gambling away your life savings. I'm Kerby Anderson, and that's my point of view. Go deeper on topics like you just heard by visiting pointofview.net. That's pointofview.net.

[00:11:00] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. Craig, once again, as you well know, we're in the midst of the midterm elections, and you're hearing a lot about what is wrong with America. And I thought it would be appropriate to spend some time in this rather lengthy article by Jim Garrity to talk about what he calls five non-debt problems that the U.S. government is largely ignoring.

[00:11:26] Now, first of all, let's recognize that one of the biggest issues is one we talked about yesterday. It's one I've done a commentary on. I have another commentary coming out next week. It seems like every time we turn it around, we're talking about the national debt. But after all, we just topped $40 trillion in national debt, and I gave you a handle on how big that number is. It is, by definition, astronomical.

[00:11:49] And our friends at Scientific American gave us some astronomical estimates on what $40 million is. $40 trillion is four worth 13 zeros. And, again, forget. And that's part of the problem. When we talk on radio, a million, a billion, a trillion all sounds the same. But $40 trillion is, again, $40,000 billion or $40 million million.

[00:12:19] I mean, you can get the idea. But anyway, it's a four with 13 zeros. That's all you really need to know, especially when you realize that from here to the nearest star is 25 trillion miles, not even 40 trillion miles. So we're talking about huge numbers. Except for just a minute, which apparently many candidates and politicians want to do, there are many other issues. And one of the first ones is the decline in the birth rate.

[00:12:49] We've talked about this before. To their credit, both Pennexter and Liberty McCarter have written about this on numerous occasions. We're talking about doing a future Outlook magazine on that as well. But Jim Garrity recognizes how dangerous that is because he says, look, a decline in the birth rate will have ripple effects.

[00:13:11] As a matter of fact, at least two other of his five non-debt problems that the government is ignoring are inversely or in some ways directly related to that. We'll get to those in just a minute. He, first of all, points out that about 3.6 million babies were born in the United States last year. That sounds pretty good. Used to have 3 million births. Started getting 4 million births during the baby boom.

[00:13:36] But, you know, we haven't had 4 million births since the peak in 2007. And so right now what we're dealing with is 718,000 fewer children born in 2025 than were born in 2007. Well, that's going to have an impact. And I think it's pretty easy to figure out. Let's take some predictions. I think the one from the Institute for Family Studies is a good one to talk about.

[00:14:04] They calculate that if the fertility rates continue, and there's no reason to believe that they're going to change, then the U.S. population probably will peak somewhere pretty soon and really begin declining in the 2050s. And the total fertility rate has plummeted below replacement value already. We're at 1.6. 1.6 children per woman. I've never seen a 0.6 child.

[00:14:34] You haven't either. But you know what we're doing. Taking the number of children born, dividing by the number of women of reproductive age. And the bottom line is you need at least 2, 2.1 to replace the population. He then quotes from Paul Ehrlich. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area while Paul Ehrlich was at Stanford talking about the biggest threat was overpopulation.

[00:14:58] One of my professors at graduate school was one of the co-founders of zero population growth. So I'm well aware of that mindset that simply says we can't afford to have a growing population. Well, they're going to get their wish because pretty soon we are going to top out and drop out.

[00:15:19] And if you then begin to realize that before you had a population demographic that had the largest of the bottom and the smallest at the top, so it looks like a triangle, if you look at some countries, and one of those, which I'm sure we'll be talking about in our Outlook magazine article, is Japan. It's an inverted triangle. There are more older people than younger people. And you can see this right now. When you go to Greece, we were just in Greece last year,

[00:15:48] you have more grandparents than parents, more parents than kids. I mean, you can see that the triangle is completely flipped on its head. And that has some real devastating economic and social impact. But that's just the first one. Okay, that's the birth rate. And that brings you to the second very important non-debt problem the U.S. government is largely ignoring. And he says the K-12 enrollment collapse has already begun.

[00:16:17] He says fewer kids being born means that five years down the line, there will be fewer kids entering kindergarten and the school system. That is bad news for all schools, but even worse for public schools because their funding is based on, you know it, enrollment. Fewer students mean smaller budgets. Which, if I might digress for just a minute, it has always been very interesting to me that whether it's the National Education Association

[00:16:46] or the National Federation for Teachers, two big teachers groups, they've always been pro-abortion. Which, if you think about that, that's guaranteeing that there's going to be fewer students, and thus means we're going to need fewer teachers. And maybe you'll compensate by making some of them administrators, but it's not going to work. And two, again, a school with too few students still needs a principal, teachers, and other key employees, raising ultimately the higher cost per student.

[00:17:16] So it isn't that we're going to get any kind of economic benefit. We're going to still have to have some of the institutional and administrative structure, but it isn't very likely. And if you have been paying attention at all to your local news, I certainly have, you can see all sorts of school closures, and he gives some great examples here, school closures in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I was just there recently.

[00:17:43] In Austin, Texas, just south of where we're broadcasting from today. In Oakland, California, I grew up in the Bay Area, where previous attempts to close schools have been vigorously opposed, more than 60 principals signed a rare letter supporting the closures because you don't have enough students. And so you're going to see more and more of these public schools being closed down, especially as you have more and more of these students leaving the public schools

[00:18:12] and going to charter schools, Christian schools, homeschooling, whatever. And that relates to the third one, and then I'll cover the others after the break. And number three, once you talk about K-12, there's something else. Number three, higher education's enrollment cliff has already begun as well. Back in 2008, the Great Recession started, and the U.S. birth rate,

[00:18:36] which has remained flat or showed very gradual decline, went into a steeper decline. And now 18 years later, there were fewer 18-year-olds around, so there are fewer high school seniors applying to college. And in the coming years, those numbers will decline precipitously. And that is certainly the case. Let's just look at this. Here's an article from The Atlantic by Jeffrey Salingo. He says,

[00:19:06] If you overlay a map of where colleges are located with projections of high school graduates, you'll notice an immediate disconnect with supply and demand. In the Northeast and the Midwest, they have higher density of college campuses, but will also see some of the biggest declines in the number of high school graduates by the 2020s.

[00:19:30] In all, 38 states are projected to see a drop in the number of graduates. Only 10 of them, most of them in the South, will experience growth. So, as he points out in this article in The Atlantic, unlike, say, a Home Depot or a McDonald's, college can't simply relocate when the nearby population shrinks, one of the professors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison said,

[00:19:57] when local options start to disappear, it can start a downward spiral. And so, if you look at this, colleges are going to, this is the prediction, resemble zombie malls with fewer majors and students, eventually ending up in a doom loop they cannot escape. And if you've ever walked through a mall that just keeps losing the number of customers,

[00:20:26] you know what it's like to walk through that mall and say, it's only got a few days left, maybe a few weeks left, at most a few months left, before they just close the whole thing down and knock down the walls. And I hate to say it, But those of you in the Northeast, those of you in the Midwest, you're going to see a lot of colleges simply cease to exist. And that is something that shouldn't surprise anybody,

[00:20:55] because 18 years ago we saw that the birth rate dropped precipitously, and those are now 18-year-olds, high school seniors, deciding if they even want to go to college at all, given the fact that the amount of indebtedness is so great, and there are many other options besides that. So, if nothing else, there are the first three of the five. We'll come back and pick out a few more. Just illustrating again,

[00:21:23] these are issues that we will talk about. These are issues that your candidates are trying to ignore. We'll be right back. Many years ago they began saying that we live in the information age. Well, today there is so much information coming at us from every direction. The hardest thing is to discern which issues are really important, and how can I make a positive impact

[00:21:49] without wasting my time trying to figure out accurate information. Let me give you a suggestion to help with that. Visit pointofview.net, look at the tabs across the top. Find the one named Viewpoints. Kirby Anderson and others on our team are constantly watching for news to identify those issues that you really need to know about. They boil things down in a brief summary, and then you can decide if it's something on which you want to learn more and get involved.

[00:22:19] Again, when you go to pointofview.net, click on Viewpoints, you'll see exactly what I mean. You'll see the issues that we are covering right now, and when you like what you see, I honestly think you will, you can slide on over, enter your email, and get them automatically sent to your inbox each day. That's it. Take a minute now. Be informed. Pointofview.net. Click on Viewpoints.

[00:22:49] Point of View will continue after this. You are listening to Point of View. The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now, here again, is Kirby Anderson. Back once again, one of the questions I oftentimes have in my head

[00:23:19] is when we hear of something, do we announce it on the air? We've been going back and forth. Should we announce the fact that Dolly Parton has died? But I guess it was worth mentioning because President Donald Trump has actually ordered that U.S. flags will be lowered for the death of Dolly Parton. Not something I would have predicted, but nevertheless, if you have not heard, you heard it here first on Point of View. Let's see if we can get into some of the issues that we have been talking about. My commentaries on the whole question

[00:23:48] about why is it young people, especially those who have the ability to invest in stocks and gold and silver and Bitcoin and all sorts of things, probably easier than ever before because of all the online places you could do that. Instead, they're using online gambling as their financial investment strategy, which makes no sense. So we'll get to that in just a minute. But let me finish this off because one of the articles I posted by Jim Garrity,

[00:24:17] five non-debt problems that the U.S. government is largely ignoring, these are, in some respects, cultural issues. They can't be solved politically. There are some that naively think by paying you more money to have children, that would work. That hasn't worked in Japan, hasn't worked very well in Hungary, although it at least worked a little bit there in a few places where they've tried this. But as we pointed out, one of those is the decline in the birth rate,

[00:24:47] which he also says will have ripple effects, which leads to the second one, that the enrollment in the public school system, K-12, collapse has already begun. And number three, higher education's educational enrollment has already fallen off a cliff. And these are good examples of things where you don't have to be a prophet or a son of a prophet. You can simply be a trend watcher.

[00:25:15] And many decades ago, it's hard to imagine, it was been almost 40 years ago, I wrote a book called Signs of Warning, Signs of Hope. And I was making predictions that were just pretty safe and common sense about what's going to happen to Social Security, what's going to happen in terms of the crisis of security, loneliness, relationships, things of that nature. And a lot of those were not that dramatic.

[00:25:44] They were just obvious trends that you could see coming down the pike. And they indeed came down the pike and came to fruition. We could see that you were going to have a housing collapse eventually because you can look at the median age of first purchasing of a house. And you can see that we had a baby boom and then a baby bust. Of course, you had some other things going on there politically as well that led to the Great Recession.

[00:26:13] But some of these things were very easy to predict. No one should be surprised that we have $40 trillion in national debt because you could see that unfolding in the 1990s. And so, in some respects, when these colleges keep hoping that they'll be able to stay open, when they look down the road and recognize that the number of individuals who were born 18 years ago has dropped significantly

[00:26:40] means there are fewer 18-year-olds who are going to want to go to college. And as a result, especially now, with the high indebtedness of college and the alternatives that we've talked about on this program and Mike Rowe has talked about, they go elsewhere and they don't even go to college. And so, this is going to be the issue. Which, of course, is a lead-in to number four on the list by Jim Garrity. And that is, while we're talking about colleges, number four,

[00:27:11] colleges aren't preparing graduates for workplace well enough. If you look at this right now, there was a survey that he quotes from 1,000 hiring managers in America who are responsible for entry-level hiring at companies that have at least 100 or more employees. And they had this very grim assessment. Let's talk about that. First of all, a lack of relevant work experience

[00:27:40] is the single most cited concern, 45% of the time. 69% name at least one character concern. Either a lack of work ethic, 33%, a lack of professionalism, 32%, or a lack of motivation, 31%. Manages also frequently cited poor communication skills, difficulty handling any kind of feedback, insufficient technical skills,

[00:28:08] and even poor time management. 24% say grads arrive entitled with unrealistic expectations. 18% say grads are too easily offended at work. All this goes back to kind of the closing of the American mind, okay? Two AI-specific concerns also. 18% say grads submit AI-generated work without checking it.

[00:28:36] 16% say grads over-rely on AI tasks that they should be doing themselves. So if you want to talk about one of the natural topics that maybe Liberty McCarter will get into, maybe even next Monday, when they are going to gather together, here's one of those right there, and that is all the evidence that's coming down from individuals who have been hiring

[00:29:05] the so-called Gen Y, and now most of these are Gen Z, and they are just totally unprepared for the workplace. And at the same time, they seem a little bit lacking in skills, certainly lacking in communication, and maybe even lacking in initiative and expecting AI to do all the work for them. That is not good for the future of the company

[00:29:33] or for the future of the country. Well, if that's not to press you enough, let's take number five, and that gets to AI. Number five, and again, this is one of the five non-debt problems the U.S. government is largely ignoring. AI is hollowing out entry-level jobs. He says, notice the most common complaint from employers about their entry-level employees was what? Lack of experience. But those jobs

[00:30:02] are supposedly entry-level. It used to be that your first few jobs helped you develop critical thinking skills and things of that nature, but it turns out that that wasn't working out the way people expected it after all. And he says, what's even worse is that the capabilities of AI are making some of those entry-level jobs the easiest to remove or just not replace.

[00:30:31] Research from one particular group shows that entry-level postings in the United States basically are down 35% since early 2023. And so, again, you're even starting to see now that if anything, you're going to expect some people that will have maybe some experience with AI and also maybe supposedly show up

[00:31:00] ready to take on more significant responsibilities when that first job is beyond the entry-level job and they maybe haven't learned some of those very important skills like taking feedback honestly and being willing to modify some of your expectations and certainly not come with entitled and unrealistic expectations, that certainly

[00:31:29] is, again, a great concern. So let me just real quickly mention that in addition to this article, if you scroll down, you'll also see my Viewpoints commentary today and one of the things that it should sound familiar because we've talked about it for a couple of times is that when you look at this group and this primarily Gen Z, we find that more than a quarter of Gen Z investors and I put those words in quote

[00:31:58] are actually seeing gambling as their long-term financial strategy and you have a majority, some say 52%, I've seen some say 53%, that doesn't matter, more than a majority say that they have bet on sports at least once in the last year and that's one of the reasons, of course, we produced my booklet on a biblical point of view on gambling because let's face it, gambling's been around for a long time, we have state lotteries, we have pari-mutual betting, we have all sorts

[00:32:28] of things, but one of the things that has changed is the Supreme Court decision that actually overturned a federal ban on online sports gambling so there's a greater opportunity, number two, frustration, there's a greater if you will need because the younger you are, the more likely you are to say I can't afford a home, we have a high unemployment rate, I'm smothering in any kind of financial debt

[00:32:58] and I know that dollar cost averaging doesn't sound real sexy, real creative, but if you can set some money aside in some very reasonable investments, you're going to do a lot better than hoping that you're going to get lucky with some kind of, if you will, savant in terms of sports gambling. So there is again the piece that we've posted for you today and again I would recognize

[00:33:28] that some of you probably have young people that are around you, might be your children, might be your grandchildren, who are right now convinced that the answer to all their problems is sports gambling. We need to break to them some very important facts which are in that booklet and we'll take a break, come back with more right after this.

[00:33:58] You're listening to Point of View, your listener supported source for truth. Back for a few more minutes, let me just mention that the September issue of Outlook, I'll hold it up right now, those of you should be looking for it in your mailbox, is entitled Not Making the Grade, Exposing the Miseducation Crisis in America's Public School System. You have Pennedexter's piece on grade inflation, mine on the miseducation of America, as well as a very good article by Liberty about the issue

[00:34:28] of ed tech and how to make education better for kids, and then a very good piece by Liberty as well on the importance of classical liberty arts in the Renaissance school. So again, talking about the problem, talking about the solution, and some great resources that will be coming. And as we've been talking about what's going on in the schools, I thought it would come back to this last piece that we have posted today by Kenan Spivik. He is an individual that

[00:34:56] works primarily as a consulting firm and investment bank, but his piece is, I think, very well written, DEI refuses to die. We've always said that DEI should go and die, but nevertheless, this diversity, inclusion, and equity are really used in many cases to enhance treating individuals based upon race

[00:35:25] or gender or sexual orientation. And he says that although the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the civil rights laws dating back to 1866, prohibit nearly all racial preferences. Most Americans oppose these preferences, and Donald Trump was elected to eliminate DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. But, unfortunately, progressives won't give up. Their race-obsessed thinking, he says, reduces America to intersectional classifications of oppressed and

[00:35:55] oppressor. In 2025, President Trump issued executive orders that revoked President Biden's mandates for interweaving DEI into all facets of the federal government. Since then, you've had the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department under Harmeet Dillon, who has filed numerous administrative actions and lawsuits to end racial preferences that disadvantaged whites and some universities, corporations, and charities have limited their DEI programs.

[00:36:25] But, he goes on to say that in just the last three months, the Justice Department has announced at least 25 investigations, lawsuits, and settlements involving alleged unlawful racial preferences. And he goes through this long list, College of William and Mary, Duke University, City University of New York, the whole state of Minnesota, city of Evanston, Illinois, Arizona State University, which, by the way, is the picture we have on the particular article, U.S.

[00:36:55] Davis Medical School, UC San Diego Medical School, and all sorts of medical schools. As a matter of fact, the medical schools have been the biggest problem right now. And then just last month, if that's not enough, you have a liberal federal judge in California that ruled that the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Interior exceeded their authority by imposing conditions which would end DEI in grants in California. So, even trying to do

[00:37:24] what is actually being mandated has been challenged in the courts as well. And he goes on to point out that numerous companies, Apple, Microsoft, Costco, Delta, Cisco, openly continue their DEI programs. And so, there is, of course, your problem. One progressive panelist on this particular broadcast called Get Real explained that blacks require

[00:37:54] preferences. First of all, you don't see that many people making the argument. When they do, they're usually trying to talk about, well, maybe past discrimination. But that argument doesn't work very well because the current people aren't being discriminated against. So, the progressive used a different argument, and that is, it's not what you know, but who you know. And, of course, he goes on to say that's very patronizing of blacks because more than half of all blacks in metropolitan

[00:38:23] areas live in suburbs. Their children are educated in suburban schools. Let's point out the fact that there are 1,000 African-American mayors in this country, 1,000 state legislators, 14 billionaires, and 1.4 million black millionaires. And so, there are some people they obviously could go to. And, of course, again, it's just so, you know, again, this idea of the soft bigotry

[00:38:52] that takes place when you just have lowered expectations. But, I thought it was interesting because this guy, Kenan Smivak, says, you know, while listening to the panelists, I thought about the middle-class neighborhood I grew up in, in Baltimore, excuse me, in Brooklyn, I should say. And, he said, you know, my neighbors were policemen, firemen, teachers, plumbers, good people. Not one of them was in a position to help me in my career, or to introduce me to someone who did.

[00:39:22] So, again, networking is important. It's not networking, unfortunately, because they say if you can't network, well, then it's not what you know, it's who you know. And the bottom line is, I just think, it's just the soft bigotry of lowered expectations. And he does end with a couple of little shots, and I couldn't resist these. He says, I defy any children of Michelle Obama, Eric Holder, Jay Johnson, Beyonce,

[00:39:53] Ibram Akindi, to deny that they have every advantage, including a terrific education, a network of contexts that millions of white Americans lack. And, more importantly, he ends with, of course, the famous quote that comes from Chief Justice John Roberts. When we were dealing with this issue a while back on this issue of discrimination, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion, the best way to stop discrimination on the basis of

[00:40:23] race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. That was a good piece. Anyway, if you've been frustrated that maybe some of these attempts to deal with DEI are still hitting some roadblocks, this is a good piece to document that. And, just before we go, I thought I'd have a little bit of fun since we were already quoting some of those. The other day, one of the city councilmen for Los Angeles came up with a new phrase. You've

[00:40:52] heard the homeless or the unhoused, you know, but the other day, Hugo Martinez, Soto Martinez, referred to these drug addicted vagrants in the city as our neighbors. Well, Heather McDonald, who's been on the program with us many times before, just couldn't let that one go, because she said this new identity is even more cheeky than the original rebranding of

[00:41:22] vagrants as the homeless. He used neighbors to designate individuals that are in these homeless encampments that they wanted to allow to be posted near senior centers and libraries and around freeway overpasses. And she said, we do know what the word neighbor means, don't we? Neighbor traditionally conjures up the image of someone with an equal stake in one's community as oneself, who shares

[00:41:52] one's interest and stability, and who can be counted on in times of need for help. And she says, I doubt the councilman and his fellow DSA, Democratic Socialists of America members, would ask an encampment occupant to watch their children while they run an errand, or to keep an eye on their homes while they go on vacation, as one might actually do with an actual neighbor. So be aware, we're going to start

[00:42:21] hearing the homeless are our neighbors, and words do have a meaning, and you know what a neighbor is, and that is not a neighbor. Or if you are going to call them a neighbor, you can start treating them like a neighbor, and let them watch your home while you're away, and see how that works out for you. Well, that's all we have for today. Tomorrow, we're going to have a very good conversation as well, not only about Fellowship of Christian Athletes, but of course what's going on in Iran, and of course an update

[00:42:50] on some of these other actions that are taking place that you need to know about. As always, I want to thank Megan for help engineering the program. Derek, thank you for producing the program. Visit the website, you can find my commentaries, these articles, and I hope that you might even click on that button that says donate, and we'll see you back here tomorrow, right here on Point of View. It almost seems like we live in a different world from many people in positions of authority. They say

[00:43:20] men can be women, and women men. People are prosecuted differently, or not at all, depending on their politics. Criminals are more valued and rewarded than law-abiding citizens. It's so overwhelming, so demoralizing. You feel like giving up, but we can't, we shouldn't, we must not. As Winston Churchill said to Britain in the darkest days of World War II, never give in, never give in, never, never, never,

[00:43:49] never yield to force, never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. And that's what we say to you today. This is not a time to give in, but to step up and join Point of View in providing clarity in the chaos. We can't do it alone, but together, with God's help, we will overcome the darkness. Invest in biblical clarity today at pointofview.net or call

[00:44:17] 1-800-347-5151. pointofview.net and 800-347-5151. Point of View is produced by Point of View Ministries.