Point of View September 11, 2026 – Hour 2: Weekend Edition

[00:00:04] Across America, live, this is Point of View. And now, Kerby Anderson. Welcome back to the Weekend Edition. Been having a great conversation so far and more to discuss. I have been talking about over the last couple of days this proposal that was reported on in the New York Times

[00:00:31] because it has caused a lot of controversy between conservatives online in particular. You're seeing a lot of op-eds both praising the proposal, which we have not actually seen any text of a proposal, just details that have been reported in the media. And then we've seen people criticizing it, saying that this is the wrong way to go as conservatives, the wrong way to support families. I had an interview with Joe Waters, who's CEO of the Think Tank Capita,

[00:01:00] on Wednesday to talk about this proposal. And then we talked about it a little bit on the roundtable yesterday, but I wanted to get the perspective here on the Weekend Edition as well. You know, Dr. Matthews, what we're talking about is expanding the federal program, the Child Care and Development Fund, which has typically benefited working parents, oftentimes this ends up being single moms and things like that, who need to work and they need help affording childcare.

[00:01:27] And so this, if you meet the income requirements and you're working, then basically your childcare can be subsidized. Now, it looks like as of right now, only one in seven families who are even eligible or children who are eligible to receive this benefit currently take advantage of it. And according to what has been reported, there would not be an expansion of that fund,

[00:01:50] but an expansion of eligibility to also be make married couples where one works and one stays at home eligible for that benefit to, in effect, subsidize stay at home parents who meet the income requirements. Now, some people are saying this is great moving in the right direction. This is pro-family. We're incentivizing the right things. We're incentivizing marriage. Other that's kind of what you might call the new right.

[00:02:15] And then you have maybe more traditional, maybe Bush era Reagan era conservative saying this is we don't want the government to get more involved in subsidizing family. And so I'm, I'm, I know there's a lot of debates on both sides or perspectives on, on both sides about this, but what's your perspective on this? To begin with, I understand this because when my wife and I got married and she, we had our first child, she said, I'm, I'm going to stay home and be with the child. I don't want somebody else raising my children. That was her decision.

[00:02:43] So other than a little bit of part-time work, she stayed home with the kids. Um, and that made it a bigger struggle for us financially. Uh, having said that if the government had a surplus, then I would be willing to talk about how you might disperse some more of the money. We have a $2 trillion deficit. Any money we're going to be giving out is money. We're going to have to take in taxes either now or in the future. And I'll just add this.

[00:03:11] A lot of times you have unintended consequences that you're not aware of. So when they started the welfare program, they said, you know, we want to provide welfare to single mothers. You know, if you've got a husband, we don't want to try to, I mean, they've got a husband who's worked. We want to help single mothers. And as a result, you created an incentive for women to not get married, have a live in boy who boyfriend who did not have a commitment there and who could leave whenever you wanted to. And you created that kind of problem.

[00:03:41] One of the problems I could see us creating right now is we have a declining workforce. If we're moving out an awful lot of people who are not citizens here, we've got an even bigger declining workforce. Do you want to create an economic incentive for women who are in the workforce now to not be in the workforce? I could see that creating a problem just in the workforce itself. I'm not saying it would be a killer, but it's just there are a lot of unintended consequences can happen when you start trying to pay people to do this.

[00:04:11] One other thing left has been promoting what they call the universal basic income for some time. We just want to give everybody a certain amount of money. We're getting closer to that all the time. We already passed the increased tax credit in a previous bill. And if we did this, we would be saying you get a basically a universal basic income if you're a female, a married female working, staying at home. And that doesn't prevent them from going ahead and working in other areas, I guess.

[00:04:40] But it's just it. It's just something I think we'd have to think seriously about, especially on the financial side. Yeah, the workforce angle is something that has not come up yet in conversations here, but that is important. I mean, it could be it could apply to a dad or mom. But women do outnumber men in the workforce now. And I think women a lot of times are going to be the ones that would prefer to stay home or need to stay home postpartum and, you know, nursing baby and all of that. I don't know. What do you think, Kelly?

[00:05:10] You know, I think the basic truth is less government, more freedom. So government can do good things. But when they start handing out other people's money to, you know, to, you know, to other people, I just, you know, it's usually a bad idea. Yeah. I would I would rather like, you know, buddy says I'd rather them, you know, get get control of the finances, let people make decisions.

[00:05:39] It reminds me a little bit of what they did in Hungary when they actually gave you a loan and then they they actually forgave it based upon you having children. They were they were encouraging people there because, you know, in a lot of the countries now, including the United States, we're not I mean, we're losing ground on population. Right. And and so they actually gave incentives, monetary incentives for people to have children.

[00:06:10] And while that's a you know, it's noble that we want people to have more children. We want people to to to be able to we want our country to be able to grow without having to bring all these people in from out of our country to keep up with what we need to do. But I just don't know if the government is the answer to that question. I just I just I like Merrill says, I just think it's it is there's all kinds of unintended consequences.

[00:06:40] And it's just certainly not. You know, when you think about what God created in Scripture. Right. There's three institutions God created in Scripture. He created the church. He created government and he created the family. And I think it's a bad idea to take one and put it inside the other. I think that the family is meant to be you as a parent, your God given rights, your God given responsibilities,

[00:07:07] not the government coming in and and beginning to interfere in what God would have you do with your own children or the decisions you make for your family. I just think it's you know, it's it's a bad idea to begin mixing those in those kinds of ways. And we can see that we could see that if you had a Democratic administration, if you had this, you could put strings upon them.

[00:07:29] Absolutely. We're going to let you we're going to allow this money to go to you as long as you don't interfere with your children's gender assignment. That's right. So you could end up the government always almost always put strings on money at hands out. President Biden was doing that with an awful lot of the green energy money and some of the other money he was handing out to various companies and to the to the companies that were the tech companies. They said, you you're going to have to have you're going to have to have a daycare place.

[00:07:58] You're going to have to pay them regular wages. You're going to they sent a whole lot of strings on that money. So I'm just with Democrats would come back in power at some point and they could take the same thing and put some strings on there that we would say that's absolutely inappropriate. You know, this is something that has been supported across the aisle. And so for some, they say, well, that's a good thing. It means that, you know, Republicans and Democrats could unify over something.

[00:08:23] But to your point, Dr. Matthews, that does also mean that, well, there might be other strings attached to that in the future. So this is interesting. I'm sure we'll see more details about this proposal or something like it coming out in the future and continue to talk about it. But I think it's good to get different perspectives on that. We're going to a break, but we'll be right back right here on Point of View.

[00:09:00] This is Viewpoints with Kerby Anderson. 25 years ago, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes in an attack on America. Two planes struck the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. A third plane hit the Pentagon. A fourth crashed into Pennsylvania when passengers fought with the hijackers. Nearly 3,000 Americans were killed, including hundreds of police and firefighters. Those are the facts.

[00:09:28] But over these two and a half decades, we have seen how skeptics have promoted various conspiracy theories about that dark day in American history. Even as the rubble was being removed from New York City, you had some people, like Gore Vidal, writing, we still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday or for what reason. Now, the statements by Osama bin Laden should have been sufficient evidence of who ordered the terrorist attack and why it was done.

[00:09:54] But we've heard all sorts of theories, usually from people who tell us that they're just asking questions. Some ask, is it even possible that an airplane can bring down a building? I've never seen buildings come down like that. My question to them is, how many buildings have you seen hit by a jetliner? Another might ask, isn't there evidence that it was a missile, not an airplane, that struck the Pentagon? My question to them is, then where are all the people on American Airlines Flight 77?

[00:10:21] Perhaps the largest conspiracy theory is that the Bush administration was involved in the tragedy. But the obvious follow-up question is why no one in the administration or even on the 9-11 Commission broke and told the truth. You know, 25 years later, we know what happened and why it happened, even though some still want to ask questions. I'm Kirby Anderson, and that's my point of view.

[00:10:49] Go deeper on topics like you just heard by visiting pointofview.net. That's pointofview.net. You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. Well, you know, we talked about the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks a little bit ago, but yesterday was also another very somber anniversary.

[00:11:17] That's the first year anniversary since Charlie Kirk's death. And so on the roundtable yesterday, we talked about that. We talked about his legacy, and I saw this article after the fact, but I got it up at pointofview.net now from the Daily Wire, and I thought this was really poignant. Charlie Kirk's true legacy may be a surge in young families. So we were just talking about, you know, one proposal that's kind of coming out of the Trump administration,

[00:11:45] and we may, you know, be kind of talking about that or maybe saying that's missing the mark a little bit, depending on who you talk to. I had some co-hosts yesterday who were in favor of it. But I think it is important that we are talking about family formation and what's the best way to support families. And so this is encouraging. According to Gallup polling, roughly 4 in 10 Americans say it is very important that couples who have a child together should be married.

[00:12:12] Now, 4 in 10, that does not sound like a lot to say something that I think is pretty common sense, that you should be married. But get this, that is up 10 percentage points in the last six years. So that's actually an increase. And then when you look at Republicans, the increase is more. There's been a 22-point increase of Republicans who say marriage is important for couples who have children

[00:12:38] and even some minor increases among Democrats and independents. So that is something that when you look at younger Americans or you look at the right specifically, that I do think that you can attribute a lot of that influence to Charlie Kirk, especially for the younger generation, promoting the goodness of marriage and family. And so it's encouraging to see those trends. But obviously, if we're only at 4 in 10 Americans saying,

[00:13:04] you should be married if you have children, then we got a lot of work to do. You know, my understanding is Turning Point USA has grown significantly since Charlie Kirk's death. Yes. And they had, they were featuring Erica Kirk there on the, in the seating there close to the vice president and then the Speaker of the House and so forth. So, and then Trump, I know, called her out on the Wednesday and highlighted her. So they are, they are stressing that. Yeah. I mean, it's encouraging to see more people talk about this, Kelly.

[00:13:33] But again, we've got a lot of work to do. There's still a lot of people who don't seem to see that as a requirement or a necessity for kids to have married parents. Well, I really think this is, I would agree with this. This might be the biggest thing that Charlie Kirk did is, you know, his advice, all these college campuses, it was always get married early. You know, it was always don't wait, get married.

[00:14:01] And have children and have, you know, he was saying this is the best part of life and this is what God created, created you to do. And I think that had a huge impact. And you saw the thing that, that was really, I don't know, it was really telling to me is there's this pollster, I forget what the guy's name is. You've seen him before on, on CNN, who kind of brings them bad news a lot of times. Is 538 Frank Luntz? It's not Frank. But he's on CNN.

[00:14:32] He's on CNN. Okay. And he's, you'd recognize him if you'd see him. But he, they did a survey and it was of Gen Z's. And they did, it was, they listed, I think it was 12 total things about life. And they asked, they asked them to list them in order of importance. And the number one or number two thing on all the male Gen Z's list was get married and have a family. Wow.

[00:15:02] And I was, and when I saw that, I was like Charlie Kirk. Yep. And, but then the thing that threw me, that really shocked me is then they showed the, the female Gen Z. It was number 10 out of 12. Yeah. I mean, and I was like, whoa, wait, this is backwards. You know, women always were more in tune with the idea of getting married, having children.

[00:15:28] And the culture is so changed at least that generation. And I, my first thought was, I was like, I wonder if, if, if this is give God's going to use Erica to do the same thing with the women that Charlie did with the men. I don't know, but there clearly is a problem when you got the men are the ones who saying we need to get married and have a family. And the, the women are going, nah, don't think so. That's not, that's low.

[00:15:57] I don't, I don't want to do that anytime soon. You know, we talked about women's opportunities in the workforce. And one of the things that may be affecting that is women not seeing my, my only real choice as if in the future is being a wife and a mother, but maybe I can be a doctor or I can be a lawyer or I can run a business or something like that. You see, a lot of them are entrepreneurs these days and, and manages families as well. I'll just mention here, Robert Rector, who used to be at the Heritage Foundation for decades. He may still be, but he was their welfare person.

[00:16:26] And he said, the one thing, the most important factor in addressing poverty is a, a married couple, a stable family and a married couple. Very few of them are actually in poverty. Most, much of the poverty that we have, they're single moms or single dads or something. Um, so that's one way to address the poverty. And it's, uh, it's just interesting that we have these changes going on.

[00:16:51] I suspect one of the things might be not to take away anything from Charlie Kirk, but we come out of this, out of a period when people were saying, let's, we don't need to get married. And they saw a lot of problems. Women, guys who went for years, didn't get married. Now they're getting older. They've never had a solid relationship. And you may just have some pushback from people who say, I want to try to, I don't want to go to that.

[00:17:17] Just the same way as we're seeing many people, the alcohol companies are having some problems financially because people are turning away from alcohol. Um, they may have seen people who were drunk for a while and just used too much alcohol. And now they're saying, I'm not going to do that. That happened with me with smoking. When I was raised, almost every adult smoked. I said, I'm not going to do that. I changed. So you might have some of this just being a reaction of people saying, we've seen so many people that we knew who had problems. I don't want that to happen to me.

[00:17:45] I think that that is true because that is something that when you do look at polling for, you know, what people are concerned about is a lot of it is divorce and children being raised, you know, by divorced parents. And seeing that and then being afraid of commitment. But a positive is because we want to look for the silver lining, too, is that when you look at divorce rates, it is down. It's down a lot since 1980. And in fact, most marriages today are predicted to go the distance.

[00:18:13] So marriage rates are are down. Maybe part of that is because people are being a little more intentional about getting married. But then, you know, something else we've talked about with Gen Z is that there can there are so many options. You've got dating apps that there can kind of be commitment paralysis because people want to be more intentional and be careful. But then sometimes they think, well, I have to have all of these ducks in a row before I can get married instead of viewing marriage as the cornerstone upon which to build a life.

[00:18:42] And that's what Charlie Kirk was really good at. Well, and the thing about this study I mentioned or survey is it, you know, these societal things don't make sense hitting one sex and not the other. Right. So there's something going on with with the Gen Z women.

[00:19:00] You know, there's some ideology that something that's come in where they don't they don't know what, you know, Liberty, the blessing of being a mom. Yeah. Of being married and having children and a family. And and they're told, you know, they can do their career and they can do it later. And now they're thirty five and they can't have kids or, you know, there's something going on there.

[00:19:25] And you wonder if that's going to reverse itself, because if not, it doesn't matter how many of these guys, you know, in that age group are ready to get married and have a family. Right. Yeah. Matching up is hard. Haven't we mentioned I think you had mentioned in the past that there's been a growing interest among young men about religion, especially evangelical Christianity flooding into the church. Which again is something different than what you would normally expect. Right. And so that may be playing a role here with guys wanting to get married and sit down was women.

[00:19:53] And I think among the Democratic Socialists of America, women are one of the major voices in their young Gen Z women, educated women who are attracted to that. So we may just see some, I don't know, role reverses going on here. Yeah. You know, I think that there's a lot to be encouraged about, a lot to work on. I'll just say to young women, you know, people say build your career first or build. Yeah. And then you can have a family later. What makes a lot more sense is to start your family and you can build a career later.

[00:20:23] You know, I ended up getting married right out of college, which I didn't expect because I said I'm going to go in and focus on my education. I don't need to date. Well, first week of freshman orientation, I met the man that would become my husband. And so God had other plans. And I did the same thing. I worked part time for a long time up until recently, actually, because my kids were little and, you know, I was having kids. So it's important to talk about the benefits of marriage to men and women. So I encourage you to go to pointofview.net and click on this link.

[00:20:52] It's by Brad Wilcox because he lays out a plan for basically how can we continue to grow what may be like the seed of a movement? And we are seeing it more with young men right now. But you can talk about the statistical benefits of marriage to men and women. You can be loud about the goodness of marriage. So much of the cultural narrative we see is negative on marriage. But it behooves us as Christians to say, no, marriage and family are good things, just like Charlie Herc talked about.

[00:21:22] We'll be right back after this short break. Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. Those are the words of President Ronald Reagan, a staunch defender against socialism.

[00:21:44] Sadly, too many Americans have failed to educate this generation about the dangers and failures of socialism. Surveys show that a majority of young Americans hold favorable views of socialism. And here's what's really surprising. More than a third of churchgoers prefer socialism to capitalism. How can we prevent freedom's extinction?

[00:22:10] It's up to patriotic Americans like you, those who believe in the existence of truth, to band together and defend freedom's legacy. Thankfully, there is a team dedicated to doing just that, the truth team. And we have a spot for you. Join us in defending freedom's legacy. Learn more by visiting pointofview.net or call 1-800-347-5151.

[00:22:39] That's pointofview.net and 800-347-5151. Point of View will continue after this. You are listening to Point of View.

[00:23:04] 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 Kerby Anderson. I want you all to know that America today, America today, is on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here,

[00:23:30] for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn. This nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens. I can hear you.

[00:24:14] You know, that's just one of those, I mean, quintessential moments that is going to be in history books and documentaries forever. That was on September 14th, so 13 days after the September 11th attacks. And he was at Ground Zero. And I'm sure people have seen the video. He's got his arm around a firefighter at the time. And he was talking to the first responders and the people who were still there digging through all the rubble.

[00:24:41] And so, you know, Kelly, you mentioned earlier just the heroism that we saw after 9-11. And I think that's worth remembering for a moment as well. Well, and the symbolism, you know, the visual of that, of the cross, right, from the part of the building that was down there. The American flag, as I recall, was hanging there as President Bush was speaking as well.

[00:25:08] And I don't know if presidents can walk in the middle of that many people right now, you know. But, I mean, that was so real, that whole moment. And, you know, it kind of brought a lot of that together. It brought community together. It brought sort of a pride in America together. It brought a we're going to respond together. There was a unity in that.

[00:25:32] Again, to me, the thing I remember the most, in addition to that visual and that statement, was Congress. I mean, gosh, if anybody is always charping at each other, it's Congress, right? And to have Democrats and Republicans standing together on the steps singing God Bless America. When have we seen that since 9-11? I don't think we have. And it's probably worth noting how effective our anti-terrorism efforts have been since then.

[00:26:01] We've had one al-Qaeda attack since then. It's 2019. One person from Saudi Arabia shot three people, I think in Florida, if I remember right. So you had that. But, my goodness, we've managed to stay away from anything like that. Because right after that occurred, people were afraid we would be seeing a lot more terrorist attacks. That could just be the beginning of it. And so far, we've remained fairly safe. Yeah.

[00:26:31] Thanks be to the Lord. And at that time, I remember many people called out to God. And you mentioned, you know, Congress. Churches were filled. The churches were filled. Congress was singing God Bless America. No separation of church and state talk at that moment. I remember in just houses and in our neighborhood and anywhere you would drive, people had signs up in their yard saying, pray for America. And, you know, we pray for America. We send out an email every week at Point of View.

[00:27:00] You can sign up to get those. But when you have a very scary time like that, people turn to God. They turn to a source of comfort. And I think that that's very telling. And we also need to pray that we don't need those kinds of reminders before we can turn back to God as a nation. So I wanted to highlight that moment and that memory for a minute.

[00:27:26] But speaking of scary things, so this is an article that has been posted at pointofview.net as well. I was looking at this. Dr. Matthews, you sent it to me as well. I was going to talk about it yesterday, and we ran out of time. So I was like, well, that's perfect. We can talk about it today. But is AI going to kill us all? Oh, yes. That's what the headlines are saying. And so here's a little context.

[00:27:48] Over the last week, it was on Tuesday, an AI researcher with Anthropic, which is kind of one of the big two main AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI. So an Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon announced that he was resigning because of concerns. He says neither OpenAI or Anthropic is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence, and they are gambling with our lives.

[00:28:16] He said these will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. And the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. And now here's what got me is I can't remember. That didn't get you by the end of the decade. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's old hat. We've heard that.

[00:28:38] What really, though, got me is that I can't remember if it was another person from OpenAI or Anthropic, but they retweeted what he said and said, Jacob's right. We believe that there's a more than 10% chance that AI will lead to human extinction. And here's why I'm still working at the company. And so this is what the people who are building these products are saying. We can get into some of the details and some of our Christian perspective here, too. But Dr. Matthews, initial responses.

[00:29:06] Well, let me just add to that. I didn't read this until this morning, but yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, one of the columns from Paul Tudor Jones, who is with an investment company. And he says in there, he starts out by saying, because I'm an investment company, I've been meeting with an awful lot of AI companies that are creating these chatbots and other things. And he makes a statement in here. He says, we are at the dawn of recursive self-improvement.

[00:29:31] The moment when AI systems begin rewriting and improving their own code, causing an intelligence explosion, all without human intervention. Recursive self-improvement is machines building machines with absolutely no, which is absolutely stunning. And I've been looking at this. I've been sort of following this.

[00:29:52] You have the issue of one of the chat box, one of the AI companies getting, as they say, sort of escaping and going into a company called Hugging Face. Yes. Which is now going to be bought. And the real question is here, why would any company call themselves Hugging Face? Yeah. But it – Mystery for the ages. I saw that and said, why – how do these things escape and go to other places?

[00:30:17] And he doesn't mention in here, they talk about various ways that they could release this, but conceivably you could have some AI system infiltrate the nuclear missiles that somehow or the other and create a thing in which they see a warning or something and initiate a nuclear attack. I'm guessing that's probably a long way off for possibility.

[00:30:40] But if you're connected in some way or the other, could these kinds of things happen that actually could start World War III or a nuclear holocaust? I'm not trying to be – I'm not trying to be too terrorizing here, but it is – I just don't understand these things, and I certainly don't understand some of the ways that these things are beginning to improve in ways that we don't know and feel like we can't really control anymore. Well, and I think you've got to take some people who understand this arena a little bit, right?

[00:31:10] Obviously, you've got this researcher who was looking at this, and then somebody responding saying, well, I only think it's a 10% chance that they'll destroy the world. It's a 10% chance. Well, are we okay with that? Okay, so there's them, but Elon Musk warned about this. I mean, there's really not anybody more intelligent on this when you look at what he's done over the past years. And being able to see a little bit into the future and having a high level of intelligence of where things go.

[00:31:37] And then you even had Bill Gates in the last week or so. So you've got all these people who kind of took us to whole new places with the products and inventions and things they came up with, and they're telling us that this is really dangerous, what's going on right now. And I don't know how you stop it, right? I mean, I think it's really dangerous for two different reasons.

[00:32:06] Number one, what Meryl was talking about, that you sort of put this intelligence from humans in this, and then you ask it to almost learn on its own. And it begins to change from what you started, right? And it just continually is changing. And that could decide to wipe all the humans out, wherever it's going.

[00:32:34] You also have the danger of evil people getting access to this and intentionally doing things. So it doesn't just have to happen because, you know, I think in the hugging face, they had a couple of different groups, and they were trying to find a solution, and they were doing it separately, but they were within somewhat of a bubble. And they, you know, they were not supposed to do this.

[00:33:04] Yeah, it was not as secure. They found a way out. And so whether it's intentional by people who are evil or whether it happens, I mean, it's something that I don't think anybody knows how to control, and I don't know how you stop it at this point. So I know there's been talk in Congress and other places about putting, you know, some sort of guardrails on these things and everything.

[00:33:29] But, well, I mean, even if we do it in America, that doesn't mean it's going to be done all over the world. So we've got the same danger. Right. Yeah, I did interview somebody on the Know I podcast this week, and I think that perspective might be helpful. So let's get into that when we get back from this break.

[00:33:59] Girl Scouts around the country are winning awards and earning patches for promoting the Islamic faith. An investigation by independent journalist Natalie Winters reveals that awards given for being a Girl Scout of the Islamic faith have been created by the National Islamic Committee on Girl Scouting. Ms. Winters notes that the National Girl Scout Organization's public posting says it approved the programs and allows their insignia on official uniforms. Ms. Winters reports that there are numerous Girl Scout troops operating out of mosques.

[00:34:29] She says these mosque-based troops are embedding Islamic values into Girl Scout programs across America. She describes programs in Sacramento, San Diego, Long Island, Brooklyn, and the Washington, D.C. and Chicago areas, plus a dozen troops in Minneapolis. Under the Girl Scouts Bronze Award, there's an All About Islam patch in which Girl Scouts can complete the five pillars of Islam, including optional fasting for older girls. There's a Hajj patch and a Hajj passport for completing a pilgrimage to Mecca.

[00:34:59] The troop at the Sacramento Mosque hosted an event for the broader Girl Scout community, which featured a hijab photo booth. There's a patch named Share Ramadan with a Friend. According to Joshua Arnold, writer for the Washington Stand, this is Muslim evangelism. He says the Girl Scouts' approval of Muslim practice seems to go far beyond any favorite ever bestowed on Christianity. A spokesman for the Girl Scouts USA told the Daily Wire, Girl Scouts is not a religious organization and does not teach religion.

[00:35:30] Indeed. Patty Garibay, founder of the Christian Girl Scout alternative American Heritage Girls, told the Daily Wire, We watched the Girl Scouts move away from their Christian roots decades ago, removing references to God wherever they could. The Girl Scouts of the USA is allowing its brand to be used not to encourage Muslim girls to adopt our norms, but to advance theirs. For Point of View, I'm Penna Dexter.

[00:35:54] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. All right. As we have a few minutes left in the weekend edition, I did want to mention an interview that I did on the Know I podcast. It came out on Wednesday with Doug Smith, and I really need to get him on Point of View. He's got a book coming out soon that I think is going to be great. His background is a software developer.

[00:36:21] He's done that for over 20 years, and he has taken a very strong stance against generative AI, so large language models and chatbots and those things. And I appreciate his perspective because he knows a lot more than me, being a software guy, on how this all works. And so I basically asked him to break down the hugging face situation that we were just talking about. And so it's very helpful if you want to understand how did this happen.

[00:36:50] And he notes that the way that we talk about these things is very anthropomorphized, if I said that word correctly. You know, they apply even the term agents. Only God and his creations, meaning humans made in his image, have agency. They don't have agency, but it is a very advanced program that operates very quickly and is learning how to operate more quickly. Learning again.

[00:37:17] That's a human term, but it is designed to do that. It is designed by humans to do that. And so he kind of demystified a lot of what happened, but it's still concerning. You don't have to believe that, you know, AI is sentient or anything like that to know that we are creating a technology that might move more quickly than we can keep up with and then make, you know, quote unquote decisions.

[00:37:43] Like we were talking about, like you mentioned, Dr. Matthews, if it can go rogue, so to speak, on the Internet, then what what can it hack into and gain access to and start? And so one of the things that this kind of whistleblower.

[00:37:57] Well, the person who wrote this report in the free press about the whistleblower ends by he talks about all these problems and ends by saying we need to figure out how to train AI to have the traits we want them to have, meaning care for humans. You can't do that.

[00:38:44] That merging biology with technology is the next stage in human evolution. And they do not have any sort of, you know, biblical eschatology or anything like that. I mean, even Elon Musk has said that humans need to merge with AI in order to beat AI. And so this is obviously very unbiblical, but it does help you understand that even though they think there's such great risk, they say, well, it could kill everybody or we could create paradise.

[00:39:12] Well, as Christians, we know you're not going to create paradise. So I think let's not build it. Well, you know, it's interesting because virtually all the people who are concerned will say we need to have legislation. Congress needs to get involved, something of that nature. I don't know how many of your listeners ever work with Congress, but many it's very slow. Many of them don't understand what they're doing when they're creating legislation. A handful may, but oftentimes they don't understand.

[00:39:40] They will have people from the tech industry who will be there saying this is not a problem at all. Don't don't get involved. And they'll have other people who will say this is a huge problem and they've got to try to negotiate this. They could end up creating something that sort of kills the whole thing. They might end up creating something that just doesn't work. So as much as you may need Congress weighing in, Congress may not be able to do this the right way, one way or the other, even if they can get it done at all. Yeah.

[00:40:11] And even if they do, I mean, that's just in America. Yeah. Right? So what does that do? I mean. Kelly's point is right. You've got North Korea. You've got Iran. You've got China and Russia, all and non-state actors, all working to try to break into our system, both our water systems, our electricity grid and other things. They have been successful in some cases, usually short term.

[00:40:39] But you have those actors who don't have good intentions and would like to see us be able to be shut down. And this is why I think President Trump is correct when he said that basically this AI, this race to AI is about the future of even countries against each other.

[00:41:01] Like, in other words, if China were to beat us in AI, we're done for economically and lots of other ways. He thinks that the race, we have to win and we will win in this. So, I mean, it's like you can't stop it. You can't not do it. And I don't know how you put guardrails on it. And so, you know, we need a lot of prayer, I guess.

[00:41:28] And hopefully there's something that actually nobody's thinking of that could actually keep, you know, these horrible situations from happening, which are very possible. Yeah. And that's, of course, on the country level. You have on the individual level. And I think we've talked about this. Yes. There's memes where you have an AI Jesus and people can pay $1.99 a month and go and talk to Jesus online. And, of course, that's just AI talking.

[00:41:55] And so you have relationships that can be shifted here in ways that we don't know how this is going to play out in the long run. And the danger, in fact, I think a number of people, maybe even Elon Musk and others, have said that we're kind of already at the point where in education now people are going to stop the process of figuring things out themselves. Yeah. Right. Right.

[00:42:23] And what kind of future person does that create across the globe? What kind of human beings who they've never had to find their own answers. They just spit everything out to AI and it answers all their questions. It takes away their deliberative process. They don't even know how to work the deliberative process. Right. I mean, the danger of that and what that does is something, especially in education, but really just in life for everybody. Yeah.

[00:42:50] You know, the Old Testament is filled with basically criticisms of people who are taking pieces of wood, carving them into an idol, and then bow, dying, and worshiping. You can see this kind of thing happening. And so if AI gets that effective, you will have people that begin to treat it figuratively in a sense as a kind of a god that they can go to for answers, that can respond, that can fix things for them. It's a concern. Sure.

[00:43:19] And this is something that, again, some of these creators of this in Silicon Valley have been very explicit about. I've written about this in Point of View's Outlook magazine, that one of them, when asked basically, are you building God? Mm-hmm. He said, we haven't built God yet. Yeah. And so, again, coming from a materialistic worldview, that is what many of the inventors think.

[00:43:44] And so when we talk about kind of these bigger questions of what is Congress going to do, what is China going to do, you know, I think I'm still in the stage where I'm trying to learn as much as I can to say, what kind of policies can I advocate for in good conscience regarding this? But a lot of that's outside of my control. What is not outside of our control at the individual level, as you were saying, Kelly, is protecting our minds.

[00:44:09] Because I think that it is a very real possibility that at some point in the future, because of hacking, a cyber attack that is way more powerful from a foreign enemy or even a domestic enemy at some point, what if the Internet goes down? What if you don't have access to the kind of information? And if you've been raised or you've let your mind atrophy to where you depend to, you know, on something like a chatbot to do your thinking, then where are you going to be at that point?

[00:44:38] So I think one of the best things we can do is to keep our relationship strong and our mind sharp. But we're out of time. And so hopefully we've helped to sharpen your mind a little bit today on the weekend edition. Thank you, Dr. Matthews and Kelly Shackelford for being in studio as always. And thank you, Megan and Derek, for your help producing Point of View. And again, remember September 11th. Remember freedom. Take some time to pray for America today. And most of all, enjoy your weekend. Kirby will be back on Monday right here on Point of View.

[00:45:15] It almost seems like we live in a different world from many people in positions of authority. They say 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.

[00:45:43] As Winston Churchill said to Britain in the darkest days of World War II, never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never. 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.

[00:46:07] 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 1-800-347-5151. Pointofview.net and 800-347-5151. Point of View is produced by Point of View Ministries.