Jason Jones' Horrifying Phone Call, Jesus vs US Mideast Policy
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Well, we're back for another fun discussion with my friend Jason Jones, film producer, human rights activist, fellows, fan of Rene Girard, and today he joins us from the wild forest of Texas. How you doing? I'm doing good. You know, I'm always coming out talking about genocide, democide, and war, but we have gallows humor, so I guess it's fun. Yeah, yeah.

So what is going on today? Because every time you come on, you're like the angel of death. You're pronouncing somebody else's suffering. And it's like, goodness. Yeah. You know, I picked the wrong career field. You know, when I graduated, when I finished graduate school, I got my, I went to, I went to university of Hawaii and then for grad school, went to Hawaii Pacific university and studied military science and operational studies. I got two job offers, one in DC making $28,000 a year where I'd literally have to live in my friend's couch and

And the other was as a cabana boy because I'd been a bar host at Duke's Canoe Club and a waiter at Chuck's Steakhouse. So I got offered a job as a cabana boy at a resort in Guam making $60,000 a year living at the hotel and eating for free. And I went to D.C. and I'm really regretting that. You know, as a young man, I wanted to order my life. I'd been a soldier. Yeah.

to promoting human dignity and inspiring solidarity with vulnerable communities facing ethnic cleansing genocide or sort of trapped in these great power proxy wars. And in my mind, it was just going to be relentless success. Nobel Prizes, tweed jackets, wine at like, you know, galas in the city. You like wine? I didn't then. I do now.

But it was just this idea, you know, I could see it. It's just, but it's been just failure after failure, suffering after suffering. And I don't know what I'm doing. This is why in the middle ages, they would put people like you out of their misery very early on. You stand in the way of their witch hunt. They'd be, you'd be like, hello, I am Jason Jones with the Votable People Project. I'm here to tell you this woman cannot be burned.

Well, it's what Gerard says, right? Which I didn't get. If I'd have read Gerard in college, I'd be that 53-year-old cabana boy with lots of children from various tourists and skin cancer and a bad liver. Sounds like a White Lotus episode on HBO. I love White Lotus. Don't judge me. It's awesome. No, but Gerard teaches us. Gerard liberated me from feeling like a failure.

You really did. It was the thing that changed me most about Gerard was when, you know, when I read, when you stand in solidarity, you become as vulnerable as them. And I realized, you know, I realized I used to think I was doing it wrong, you know, and now I kind of realized probably we've been doing it right, you know, because we serve these vulnerable communities. And I say I'm a loser that serves losers and together we lose. Yeah.

So why do you keep doing what you're doing? Isn't it what Reagan said? If you spend more money on something, you get more of it?

Like if you invest in loserism, you get more losers? Yeah, you know, we have our great successes, right? We've kept thousands of Afghans alive. Our program to rescue and resettle our Afghan allies. We never left Afghanistan. We never left Central Asia. We have networks of safe houses. We have delivered 60 million hours of heat through coal and other fuel deliveries to the widows and orphans of our Afghan allies who were killed in action.

since the fall of Afghanistan, plus 10 million meals. We've been getting in hot meals, several thousands over the past couple of weeks and drips and drabs into Gaza. We've rescued a lot of Afghan women from Gaza. We're now desperately trying to get barges,

down this river in Sudan to where there are 300,000 refugees in camps that haven't had food in 45 days. So, you know, when I do feel like a loser, sometimes I can do the litany of successes. My staff just put together a file for Eid, an Islamic holiday, where I'm going to send personal letters and gift cards in the coming weeks to all of the Afghan allies, families who resettled. And these are

hundreds and hundreds of people who are alive because of the work in America. They're now in America. Now in America. And I'm going to send them gift cards for eat and a letter, a handwritten letter. And so I do have these successes, but it is the nature of our work that, you know,

If I told you what happened last week, your audience wouldn't even believe me. So I'll share with you offline. I can actually play the audio and video of a catastrophe that we had to deal with with some of our Afghan allies. So, you know, for every hundred success you have, if you lose one family to violence, you know, if you're able to get, you know, barges down a river this time and feed 300,000 people and next time we fail, you know,

All you remember is the failure and all you remember is that, you know, sort of that frontier we haven't reached. So I founded my organization to be a witness of hope. You know, I always have to remind myself what our mission is. The mission of the vulnerable people is to the vulnerable people project is to teach the truth of the human person. Then we are made in the image and likeness of God and we all have an inviolable dignity. It's to teach. We teach through action and words. And so I have to remember not to be too harsh on myself and,

If our action falls flat sometimes or we can't help all of the people, obviously our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ said, the poor will always be with you. The widows will always be with you. The orphans will always be with you. The soldiers with PTSD will always be with us. The men who've lost arms and legs and eyes or had their heart and mind and spirit broken by war will always be with us. The victims of sexual violence will always be with us.

But when you set out, whether you're an oncologist or an emergency room doctor or run an organization like ours, I think, as Gerard says, you become sorrowful because obviously we'll fail a lot. Isn't that fun? Wasn't that fun? Yeah, I mean, that's what Jesus did when he was telling people to repent of their haughty, zealot attitude.

because what was going to happen was that it was going to mimetically come around to the point where Rome would put them down completely, and they did that in 70 AD. Now, the resurrection is not the historic vindication of Christ historically. It's the destruction of the temple theologically, right? And because that was his, Jesus as a prophet, he kept saying this temple's going to be destroyed, right? And that was his calling card.

And, you know, you have a tale of two resurrections of two temples that take place. Well, you have what's going to be vindicated. Is it going to be not two resurrections, two temples, both destroyed? God resurrects one and he keeps the other one not resurrected. And that is, you know, he says, you know, I'm telling you there's going to come a day when not one stone will be left on another. Right. And then they that's the final straw for they've got to take him out now.

And so that's the irony of it is they kill his temple, right? And then that's the final marker for setting their fate to go down into the 70 AD destruction of the temple like he predicted. And then, but God raises Jesus's temple. And when he raises it, it vindicates what he said, which he says to the Samaritan woman, I'm telling you, you worship God on this mountain. We worship him on that mountain, but there's coming a day when we will all worship him in spirit and in truth.

So we have, just to set the table and you go with it, we have this clear change from ethno-nationalism as the way in which we conduct our affairs and all of its familial loyalties to the human person is sacred. God's temple dwells with the human person as Jesus symbolizes

And he is going to not vindicate the temple, which was an ethno-nationalist concept of the sacred. That's pretty clear. I mean, you don't have to be a Ph.D. in literary art to see the message God's making very abundantly clear over and over again in the text there.

Yeah, brother, I was going to go one way. Now you're throwing me another way because I want to talk about Syria. But, you know, the rise of ethno-nationalism around the world, obviously in Israel and India and in Europe and the United States. And it's horrifying. And I'm really grateful that I'm a Christian. I'm grateful that I have the grace to ascend to the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

You know, maybe just as an American born in the place and time that I was, I would have been doomed to be reflexive. I don't think I could have been possibly attracted to ethno-nationalism as I had, you know, mixed race children by the time I was 18. I was a teen parent and I grew up in a very diverse neighborhood and moved to Hawaii at 17. And I just think I was inoculated from my life experiences there.

to being seduced by ethno-nationalism. But even then, I kind of was. I remember, I think all young people really get into their ethnic heritage. Obviously, there are people looking to take advantage of young people's desire of the pious impulse to honor your ancestors, which is very wholesome and healthy, can be perverted into something very vicious and

And cruel, but I want to go back to what you said about why do I do what I do? And I've thought about this and maybe you know, you're one of the few shows, you know when I do your show I'm talking to you like my brother and you know one of my very good friends and I just assume your audience is of the same mind But so I you know, I might go into these weird places I wouldn't normally go on a show like on a radio show or a podcast like this and

I've thought about why I do what I do. The past five years have been very hard with my work in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Syria. And I really realized, you know, my two favorite thinkers are Rene Girard and Hannah Arendt in her famous controversial essay, The Banality of Evil. I kind of think that my work has become banal, almost. It's just thoughtless. I do what I do because it's what I set out to do as a young man.

I don't even know how much virtue is in it. You know, I just grind it out. Someone may set out to want to cure cancer because their father died of cancer when they were in high school. But when they're 53 years old and they're working in the lab, how much of that passion is left and how much of it is just it's thoughtless habit of doing what one has been doing their whole life. And sometimes I wonder, I feel kind of maybe why I do what I do is it's the banality of the good.

By God's grace, I set out to advocate for vulnerable communities and promote the truth about the human person. But at this point, I don't know what's left in it other than inertia of 30 years of doing this. Yeah, so that's the answer to that question. I wish I could tell you it's, you know, I wish I could give you some great humane speech. I will say I am very much addled by human suffering.

And I take it personal. I take it personal when, and I get very much offended. We can maybe go back to the ethno-nationalism. You know, the poor vulnerable communities of the world, you think of Syria that has a GDP of like between 11 and $50 billion. How many Americans are worth more than that? You know, and our economy is 20 trillion. You had the Western nations,

fomented the Arab Spring, which we all know we did. There's just no doubt. The Wikipedia leaks revealed the whole game. We have Timber Sycamore, Operation Timber Sycamore, where not only did we foment the Arab Spring, not only did we create the means of communication and provide them with the means of communication, you know, through USAID grants to various organizations,

We, through Timber Sycamore, we armed them. A country with $20 trillion economy is, you know, pouring money into a little country with a GDP less than like the net worth of probably hundreds of Americans, you know? And they're helpless. Funding groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS. In other words, just funding street gangs.

You know, it's when you think about it, Syria's economy is, you know, what are we? A thousand. I think our economy is over a thousand times larger than theirs. Imagine if there was an economy a thousand times larger than ours that funded the cartels, the street gangs.

funded propaganda campaigns to create disunity, to foment racial tension and interreligious hatreds. Atlantis, the country of Atlantis, with a $250 trillion-a-year economy, starts funding extremists across America.

arming us, dividing us, how long would it take America to look like Syria looks today? Okay, so this is what we know. I assume most of your audience is conservative. We know thanks to Doge. We already knew thanks to WikiLeaks and thanks to Tulsi Gabbard, who by God's grace is now in charge of all of our intelligence organizations. We knew that we created the hell that is Syria. All right, it's a fact.

And I recently had an article that had, I think, over a million views. And it's, I think, 1.5 million now on Syria. And I did what you should never do. This is the first time I've been on Twitter personally myself, David, because that thing went viral. So I started looking at the comments and it's like rolling over a log in your backyard. You know, what's under there is pretty creepy.

And I see a lot of quote unquote MAGA people, conservatives saying, not our war, not our business. We should stay out of it. Let them all kill themselves. They're all violent fanatics. No, no, they're not. I go there. I've been there. These are not violent people. We are much more violent. I am much more violent.

Temperament is a very peaceful. The Middle East is like sleepy hollows knit together. Do they have problems? Yeah. Their problems are the problems of sleepy hollows, tribalism, you know, things like this little, you know, battles between families and communities. And it's not like mass violence, industrial violence like we see in the West. They don't jump out of planes and fall into other continents to fight wars. That's what we do. But yeah,

But this is what's been happening. And now this week, David, we see that what people like myself have been saying was going to happen since 2011. In fact, in 2011, we launched the I Am A Peace First campaign condemning the United States as meddling in Syria, fomenting the Arab Springs, promoting wars that have led to nothing but open-air slave markets in Libya and hell on earth in Syria. And now...

This week we saw, we don't really know what we saw. So I don't know if you want to talk too much about what happened in Syria, what people are saying to what's happening on the ground. I don't know where you want to go from here. The only thing I saw was a video of some, I guess, radical Islamists were like picking on a guy, you know, riding on him like he was an animal. And there was like a dead body next to him on the road. It looked pretty disturbing.

And I think that's why people online, I'm not saying they should, that's why they have that mindset, just let them all fight. These guys, you know, because it's kind of alien to, I guess, you know, what they think is. Yeah, I mean, I don't, you know, it's because we vaporize people with 2,000-pound bombs we drop from planes. Right. And this is a very ugly, intimate kind of violence. You know, it's nothing, obviously, it's nothing like compares to Gaza, right? What's happening now is horrific. Right.

But it's nothing like what we've seen in Gaza, but it's horrific. And so here's what has happened. Alawite Assad loyalists launched coordinated attacks against the present regime. I don't know what we want to call it. You know, Jelani's forces, HTS and ISIS.

They responded and in some, you know, brutally and indiscriminately and killed lots of civilians. Now, I've been one that's been writing. I think my first article on this came out in in 2011, where I said that Al Qaeda or ISIS would come to power. And in Jelani, we definitely see an Al Qaeda affiliate affiliated leader that has come to power. Yeah.

And but the religious, the Catholic and Orthodox leaders there are actually hopeful. And then just today, the Kurds sign agreement with this present regime. Jelani has pulled his forces back from the Alawite areas. And it appears that he's actually punishing his own soldiers there.

who committed indiscriminate acts of violence. Now, you know, you look at Israel, for example, when the snipers killed the Christian women, when they bombed our churches multiple times, there was no penalty. So this is a hopeful sign. And so I have to, as someone who's actually committed to the people of Syria, one of our things we have to be very, it's important for me with the work that we do at the Vulnerable People Project is

is we treat the communities that we serve as ends in themselves. So as someone who's been an ultra critic of HTS, an ultra critic of their predecessor, the al-Nusra Front, which is Al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, and criticizing the United States for funding them,

I will say that it looks like there is a chance that there can be stability and peace. You saw, you know, we can only assume who is funding it, but the Internet, socials was flooded with propaganda, making it look like these were targeted attacks against Christians. They were not. Christians were killed and brutalized.

They were brutalized in attacks on the Alawite communities. These were indiscriminate, vicious, horrific attacks. But it seems as if they're trying to gear us up for more war in Syria, more war in Syria. And that would mean that MAGA, if we fell for this, we would actually, what the Christian leaders in Syria are telling me, in fact, I shared something very early on from a source I respected on Twitter.

mass slaughters of Christians. It was a video from years ago. Someone shared it like it was new from a respected source. I re-shared it. And a bunch of Christian leaders that I know in Syria pounced on me and said, I'm making things worse. Stop sharing fake information. So we do have to be very disciplined. And so what is our role in all of this? And I really don't know. I'm going to be writing about this in the coming weeks. But we have to acknowledge that our government is

with the Western nations in Israel, are responsible for amplifying the grievances that became known as the Arab Spring, the toppled regimes, led to chaos and violence, and empowered the most extreme elements of these societies. We know through WikiLeaks that this is a fact. We know through Operation Timber Sycamore that...

We armed the worst elements of these societies. People will say, well, we had nothing to do with the fall of Assad. Maybe, maybe at that point in time, our hands weren't pushing the boulder. But the boulder has been rolling down a hill since 2011. We pushed the boulder down the hill in 2011. We gave it a violent shove in 2017.

And so as it's rolling down the hill, smashing vulnerable communities on its way down the hill, we can't say, well, we're not touching it anymore. So then the question is, as conservatives, I oppose the invasion of Iraq. I oppose the toppling of Assad aggressively, vehemently in writing and in the media. But we do have to step back and say, well, wait a second. What responsibility do we have to these vulnerable communities who are deep state put in jeopardy?

And this is a real question, and it's a real dilemma. Are we just ripping off the Band-Aid and letting this play itself out, as horrible as it is? Or do we seek to use the weight of our economic power

And the carrot and the stick that Trump is so good at using to create stability in the region. And that's what I would like to see. But then we have to be honest, our allies, Turkey and Israel and Saudi Arabia, they may see that it's in their best interest, which I believe is the case.

to destabilize the entire region, especially to destabilize and carve up Syria. So these are all the real challenges. You know, and here I am just a guy that runs a Christian organization that seeks to serve vulnerable communities. And now, you know, but you come to understand that these vulnerable communities are trapped between great powers. And these great powers are satanic. They're literally an utterly thoughtless organization.

to the people who live there, and they like to use this expression, well, national interest. Well, what's in our national interest? Well, as the hegemon in a unipolar world that advocates for a liberal world order, a rules-based order, how is it in our interest to foment ethnic cleansing and genocide? How is that in our interest to destabilize the nations of the world? I don't believe it is. And as a Christian,

It's definitely not in my interest to be a party to that kind of. The problem with all of this is like you have this tension between like within the, let's say people who are not totally completely brainwashed into stupor. You have the principles crowd and then you have like the pragmatic. I like to get power and practical things done crowds. And the principles crowd says you shouldn't do this.

But the pragmatic and people who want to have power to beat the nihilists on the left say, well, you got to make, you got to, you got to, you got to do what you can. Don't let the, what's that saying? Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. So, so Jason, you know, this is just the real politic. You can't, you cannot, you know, you know, look at, look at what Trump says. He wants this, the killing to stop.

you know, and Ukraine and other things. And that's, so he's about as good as you're going to get on our side for saying that kind of rhetoric. So even he knows that he's going to have to have some give and take with the warmongers that run so much of the House and the Senate. And I mean, look at your, you know, Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI. I mean, she had put Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis, who's been on my show, is a friend of the show, brilliant patriot.

He served with Colonel McGregor in the famous tank battle during the first Iraq war. And, you know, he couldn't even get – that wasn't even a Senate-approved position, and he still couldn't get it, right, because they did a hit piece on him saying that he was a terrible person, right, because he wanted to have – Isn't it ironic?

What they say about people who are anti-war, it promotes anti-Semitism in my mind. How is it that everyone who's anti-war is anti-Semitic? That's weird. Or pro-Putin, if you're in the Ukraine one. They don't do that one for that. Oh, yeah, or pro-Putin. Right. You're either pro-Putin or anti-Semitism. I have a new hit piece coming out against Putin this week.

Right. Obviously, Putin is what Putin is. But that doesn't mean I want to see the people. I've always had this very strange position on Ukraine where I've opposed the war from the very beginning. I wanted to cease fire immediately. I went to Ukraine. I went to the front. My organization, I say me, I mean my donors. Right. I'm just a concierge desk. It's what my donors do. We, you know, we bought dozens of trucks and evacuated orphans from the east to the west and

We have supported landmine removal in civilian areas and medical missions. Yet I want this war to end. Putin's a thug. And NATO is Orwellian and vicious and thoughtless to the people of Ukraine's interests. And they only see Ukraine as an instrument to bleed, quote unquote, as General Milley said, bleed Russia. So, yeah, no. Yeah, it's ridiculous.

Tulsi Gabbard, to me, is the gold standard. And what's so admirable about Tulsi Gabbard is she is not naive to the dangers of political Islam, but she doesn't believe in this ham-fisted...

You know, we need trillions of dollars of wars toppling nation after nation to defeat political Islam. In fact, we've seen the exact opposite. These regime change wars have empowered political Islam and the USAID with our money has funded Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban. I mean, we now know that they have funded Boko Haram. This is absolutely and utterly unbelievable.

This Americans have to be, you know, one of the large one of the most important projects that we have at the Vulnerable People Project is hiring armed guards and installing cameras at churches in the last synagogues in African countries where they're subject to radical Islamist extremism. Well, why wouldn't you know it? We're funding.

I wouldn't take federal funds. I wouldn't take USAID money. I probably could have. I wouldn't take it to do my work. But to think I have to beg Americans for money to protect Nigerian Catholic and Jewish communities from Islamists that are being funded by USAID. We have been the biggest funders of political Islam, going all the way back to the Mujahideen. Yeah, the Mujahideen, ISIS. I'm sorry, AQ, Al Qaeda. Where does that come from?

That comes from the Arab elements that we were funding in the war against the Soviet Union. The Taliban comes from our work funding the extremists, weaponizing Islamist extremism against the Soviet Union. And then what did we do? We abandoned the Afghan people, tiptoed away from their country, abandoned them to extremism. And then 9-11 happens and we had to show up back in force again.

You know, it's really just all unbelievable. So, no, here's the thing. I'm very hopeful because President Trump hates war viscerally. Something he's communicated for decades. Like he has a very human reaction to war, unlike creeps like Lindsey Graham and even Marco Rubio, someone I have not been like the biggest fan of.

It seems as if he's fighting his true self or he's conforming to Trump. I don't know what it is. And then you have Tulsi Gabbard, who is a war fighter. She was in a medical unit for 13 months. She knows the cost of our foolish wars, that foolish war in Iraq that led to Iran controlling Iraq, the Sunni panic and rise of ISIS in response to the influence of Iran in Iraq. And then, you know,

This is what we've left. We did this. Our elite did this. Then to see American Christians and conservatives, especially, you know, if you're not a Christian, whatever, but if you're a Christian conservative and you see that our policies are leading to the ethnic cleansing of the oldest Christian communities in the world, like the violence we saw in Syria this week was worse than October 7th. So we were told October 7th was the greatest catastrophe in the history of the world. It was vicious. It was violent. It was cruel.

But just in Syria, it's just a little blip this week. And, you know, in the present history of the tragic history of this country, we saw much greater loss of life, right, than we saw on October 7th. So it's interesting to me that the same people that yawn at the deaths of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, two million Arab civilians in 20 years, you know, will be hysterical if it's us. Yeah. That's because no one's Christian in America.

Gnosticism. I don't know what it is, but it's not Christian. Everybody's so busy with their little fiefdom, man. They can't tell the truth. All of this carnage that you're talking about, we have proxy wars and all these things, millions dead. It all stems from being fundamentally, the way we're able to do that is because we have the world's currency. And what is the world's currency? It's printing money out of thin air, which is a direct sin. It's

debasement of people's purchasing power. The Bible condemns dishonest weights and measures, right? You're not allowed to do that. You're not allowed to debase people's currency. The king is not allowed to do that. It's a grievous sin. It's always been known as a scoundrel behavior to debase the currency, even if the kings was diluting their gold with weaker metals to try to get more coinage, right? And now we do that to the tune of trillions, and we think there are not consequences for that.

We think we can yawn when Ron Paul warned us since the 70s to stop doing this. This is a sin. He didn't say the word sin, but that's what he said. It's unjust, immoral. You do that for decades, you're going to kill millions of people with that kind of insane satanic power to create wealth and force everybody to accept it at the barrel of the gun. You will kill millions of people, and the consequences of that will be clear. And people don't care because they're not Christians.

They go to churches that shut their mouth every Sunday and preach a defanged and neutered gospel that doesn't talk about human personhood, that doesn't say a Syrian life is just as valid as an American life, just as valid as an Israeli life. They don't do that. Nobody does that. They're all stuck in their little fiefdom. You're either a leftist,

leftist Christian denomination or a moderate milk toast one or some radical MAGA preaching one, but you don't tell the full truth. You just stay in your little fiefdom. You preach to the choir. You don't want to rock the boat with your donations or whatever it is. And we don't have Christianity alive in America. You cannot do anything. So, so Jason, you know, you're like, you know, you're always going to be fighting an uphill battle until there's a revival of Christianity and

in America. That's it. It has to come from the pulpit. That's what Alex, Alexis de Tocqueville said, right? He said the key of America was in the pulpit. And he said that's the secret ingredient that made their individualism and their collective obligation to their neighbor work. You know, he said, I couldn't figure out

They have these civic ties and organizations, and then they have this rugged individualism. How does this reconcile? And he said, I found it in the pulpit. And that's because that's where the Trinity is, the one and the many. Now, he didn't say that part because he wasn't doing theological stuff, I don't think. But the point, even Rene Girard loved de Tocqueville. Rene Girard incorporated his ideas. He was just being a good Frenchman. But the point was is that that's it, man. That's the elephant in the room.

We can talk about MAGA doing this, but look how feckless even this great victory. I mean, God spared Trump's life and he can't get Danny Davis a job. I mean, what else is, I mean, you know, you get this, you know, he was about to go to prison for life. God gave him this miraculous victory. And still look at how hard it is to claw any kind of moral principles or dignified people into the administration. It's like pushing a boulder uphill, even with the House, the Senate,

That shows you how wicked and corrupt. And what happens when we lose the house in two years, which. They'll go back to pretending to care about spending and stuff. Right. Yeah. Well, yeah. And you want to talk, this was, this was a, I don't know why I was up at like four in the morning reading. I didn't know what I was reading church fathers or something.

But I was thinking about this documentary I just saw, No Other Land on the West Bank. And I encourage everyone to go see No Other Land. Where's it at? Well, in Miami, the mayor's threatening to revoke a theater's permit to have a business because they showed an Academy Award winning documentary. It just won the Oscar for Best Doc. Now the mayor of Miami is trying to close the theater for showing a documentary that won the Oscar. Can you imagine?

Can you imagine these woke Republicans that they're afraid of free speech? I tell you what, I saw it at my local theater. It only was here for three showtimes all in the middle of the day. I took my assistant, but I was just I couldn't get it out of my couldn't get out of my mind. And so last night I just tweeted this. I was thinking, what's wrong with us? We know it's Gnosticism.

especially the evangelical church. They're so Gnostic, they don't even know they're Gnostic. Hey, and if you're watching this show, I'm not a Gnostic. Were you so excited about the red moon yesterday? Because it's something Pastor Hagee said, you're a Gnostic. So this is what I tweeted. The prosperity gospel is the visceral rejection of Christ's poverty, driven by a deep aversion to his suffering.

In the end, its proponents inevitably abandon the widow, the orphan, the refugee, the disabled and the poor. And I could go on. The Palestinian, the Congolese boy mining your cobalt for your car. The Jew in Africa or India or other places don't fit your narratives. The child in the womb. Sooner or later, the prosperity gospel is going to drive you away from the Uyghur because we need them assembling your Tesla car.

or putting together your solar panels. Sooner or later, even on the left, we hear the left say, we need open borders. Who's going to do our dishes and pick our

our produce. They openly admit that the open borders policy, and this is where we as Americans, we're like bipolar. We make, we're a vicious couple, the left and the right together. We're an insane couple. I might write it as you know, I'm a filmmaker. Your audience doesn't know this. Maybe you'll write a movie about a couple where the left and the right symbolize the American, you know, the married couple symbolizes the left and the right. You have the left advocating for open borders, pretending they care about the migrants and,

But reality, wink, wink, it's so we have 13 million people in an underground economy we can exploit. And then when the right finally gets fed up with the excesses, like all of us know somebody's kid who's died from fentanyl. All of us do. That's insane. And then we react and blame the migrant that we lured into exploit. I'm not talking about the cartels and the thugs. I'm talking about most of those 13 million people. And we're mad at them.

Mm-hmm.

And we benefited from it. Same thing with our foreign wars. You know, in Syria in 2010, their economy was much bigger than it is now. It was about 0.4% of the U.S. GDP. Their GDP collapsed by 80%. Well, ours has grown by 40% since 2010. What do we do in Syria? We destabilized the country. We fomented a civil war. And then if that wasn't enough,

We impose sanctions and destroy their infrastructure. And now we go, not our business. Not our business. I agree. It wasn't our business to destabilize that country, to arm the radical elements of the Civil War, to destroy their infrastructure.

and maybe putting sanctions on it wasn't the best idea, but we did all of that. And then now when Christians and Alawites and others are being slaughtered, we go, not our business. Now, I'm not saying we do more of the same. We don't arm more rebels. My son fought in Syria and Iraq. My son fought in Syria and Iraq because of policies I opposed. And the people who advocated those policies, I guarantee you, David from...

All that group of neocons, Bill Kristol. No one has worn a uniform in any of those families ever. I think from Canadian anyways. Brooks, all those guys. I oppose the war. But like every male member of my family, we serve. My oldest son served. My youngest sons will serve. I don't want to send our boys back there. But you guys, don't you think you got to starve the beast if it's satanic? Yeah, we have to starve the beast. I'm saying like don't put your family members in it when it's diabolically against...

the image of Christ. Well, my sons have very strict. I mean, they're adults. They can do what they want to do, but I think churches need to start saying, Hey man, maybe we might be to that point. You know, my oldest son said, dad, why do you really encourage us all to serve when you've opposed every war in your lifetime? And I said, because I don't want you to grow up to be a neocon neolib. I want you to have skin in the game. I want you to be a part of the human family. I want you to break free from the chains and not spend your whole life

All they're going to do is shadow you, though, on one of your excursions. They do. You know, they do. They do. I'll be going to some interesting places this summer. And, you know, I just came back from the Middle East. My son came with me on part of that trip when we were bringing trucks into Gaza. I didn't bring him. He didn't go into Gaza. But, no, they do go with me. You know, and I want my son, I want us to have skin in the game. I think the problem is we're governed by people who have no skin in the game. People that will sign bombs...

But, you know, they go to Israel and sign bombs. And but if you smack them at a dinner party, they'd be horrified. I would say that I've done it. I have done it. I've smacked. God forgive me. Warmongers at dinner parties are thrown across the room. And then they look as if the greatest wrong in the history of the human race was ever done for them. And that was just my over response to their advocating genocide. And they can say things like flatten Gaza.

But then when I throw them out the door, literally, I'm some kind of barbarian. And it's because these people have never had skin in the game. They've never smelled burning human flesh. They've never saw a child with a little hole in the front and a big hole in the back.

Well, that kind of skin in the game, they can get that. I'm just saying, I think Christians need to stop encouraging their families to go to the military at this point because nothing is getting through that killing and all this has to stop. And I think at this point you get more skin in the game shadowing you, watching the suffering and the holes in the back of heads than you do

being the skin of the game of being this big military industrial complex equipment and everything is that really as much skin in the game as going there you know my son my oldest son it was interesting i was in iraq with the peshmerga when he was in syria and the u.s forces and the kurds at that moment were pretty tense and i'm thinking my son might drop a howitzer round on my own head but uh

He was an artilleryman. But, you know, I think about this a lot. My sons and I, my oldest is 18, and he's debating now the Coast Guard or college. My 17-year-old is committed to the infantry. My 11-year-old said he's wanted to be a Green Beret since he's four. He wakes up every day and does PT on his own. His room is filled with field manuals and he studies. So, you know, look, my goal is that all my boys work for me and with me in my work.

But you're right. You know, we may have reached a point where it's not prudent that my sons go in the military. But, you know, in the nature of the work I do, there's I probably shouldn't say this.

I really don't. My least favorite type of person is the man who didn't serve in the military, but builds his identity around being really pro-war and a big fan of the military. You know, you know, those guys, they wear grunt wear. They have a tactical watch. Yeah.

They're on testosterone replacement therapy and they're 54. They didn't even start lifting weights until they were 50. So now, you know, they're a little buff with their grunt wear shirt, their tactical watch, and they've never seen a war they didn't like. And they talk real tough and they tweet even tougher. And they love war so much. I always invite these people. I love inviting them with me on my trips. Only one person is, two people have gone with me on trips in 30 years.

to war zones. One was Josh Charles, the great Catholic apologist. I don't know if you ever have him on your show. Was Pence's speechwriter. And he came with me to Ukraine. I was very proud of him. Then the Mexican movie star and the producer of Sound of Freedom, Eduardo Verastegui, came with me to Darfur in 2009. I was very proud of him. But yeah, no, it's never the tactical gear wearing guy.

And they always want to come until I invite them. And I'm dead serious. I'll pay their way. You know what we did in Gaza? What we funded in Gaza was virtuous. I will pay you to go to Gaza to document for the public your reaction to what you say you supported. I would love to do that, please. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm thinking about Ron Paul next week. I'm going over to Texas to see. He's got an event going on there. And I remember in 2008, he did his rally for the Republic across the street from John McCain's nomination, the GOP.

And Tucker Carlson was the emcee of Ron Paul's event. So Tucker was already on the right side by 2008. He was dabbling. He wasn't fully, you know, he didn't fully get it where he gets it. But he was already, you know, he was looking where the cool kids were hanging out that night, you know, and he decided to not go to the GOP. Wow. Good job, Tucker Carlson.

My point here to say is that with the rally for the Republic at the end, Ron Paul had that famous song about the universal soldier. Have you ever heard that anti-war song? Yeah. And he had Amy Allen, who was a musician, who was a fan of his, come on stage and sing an acoustic version of the universal soldier, which is this idea that you have to have...

the soldier willing to go and fight and die to get all of these wicked wars accomplished. And then Ron Paul got up right after she said that. And he said, it's time that we have a universal champion for peace, a universal fighter for peace that, you know, this is where history needs to move towards. And again, this was an idea that we should be celebrating and promoting this stuff. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a mark that,

on the Christian church that it took someone like Trump with his bluster to kind of sell them on slightly ending wars. They couldn't hear the full message of the Christian message the way Ron Paul gave it, where he said, let's have peace.

Because all human beings' lives matter. They had to have it with the machismo to swallow that medicine. That's a blight on the churches that they have not been able to do a better job at catechizing their communities to be more Christian, right? Because my point in starting this conversation earlier with you about

about the vindication of Christ's body versus the vindication of the temple is that that's everything about the Christian difference, right? And if you don't understand that, you really haven't been preached the gospel at your church. If you don't understand that, if you're making equivocations to call somebody less than worthy of human life, when you go to a, I mean, just think about it. When you go to an event at your church and you see children playing in the aisles,

You cannot earmark and say, well, other people's children in Syria or Gaza or Israel or wherever else, Ukraine, Russia, those little children's lives are just not quite as important, and I don't need to take a stand against the killing of them.

When you do that, you are blaspheming against Jesus Christ. I'm sorry, that has to be understood. And maybe you don't understand it. Maybe there's grace. Maybe there's mercy. Of course, I'm sure that's what's going on for all of us. But if you can't even get that as a directional star to shoot for,

you're not getting the gospel at your church. And I don't blame the people as much as I blame the church leaderships of these different, whether it's pastors and preachers and priests and, you know, all of this has to be, you know, shaken to its core. So,

I appreciate what you're doing because you're one of the few people. Go ahead, brother. I said, I appreciate what you're doing because you're one of the few people who's willing to go there. Well, I'm grateful for the privilege of my apostolate, but I'm grateful that you actually go over the airwaves, you know, because this is actually a terrestrial radio show as well. And I think that is absolutely amazing that, you know, what you're saying is these are the things I think about a lot.

And, you know, compared to the temple that was to the temple that is the mystical body of Christ, that we could talk about this on the radio, that Christianity is not reduced to a self-help book. Because the reality is that the temple was a place of sacrifice. But now we are the sacrifice that our Lord has provided. And when we realize...

You know, I'm going to tell you what happened this weekend. It's going to be so bizarre, but it's a little glimpse of the VPP's work that people don't often hear. And it was really, it's going to seem a little strange. And later on, I can actually even send you the video and audio if you want to embed it. But it was really startling. I was giving a speech at an event in Ohio called Make America, Bring America Back to Life Conference. Thousands of people and people

It was an amazing event. It's one of the most beautiful events I've ever been to. It's a really lively event. And so the day after the event, I was kind of, I woke up early for my flight. I have a shoulder injury, so I was waking up every two minutes. And I'm so grateful for the shoulder injury. So I was lying in bed at four or five in the morning just thinking and thinking about theology, philosophy, what I'm daydreaming about. And then my phone vibrates.

And it's an Instagram message. With the work I do at VPP, we get messages on LinkedIn, Instagram, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook. They come in from everywhere. But this was an Instagram message, the strangest Instagram message I've ever received. And it was just a young woman saying, crying with sirens in the back, I'm dead. Then a video message comes in one second behind it of a wall of flames. I call. It's a young woman. We have a very safe place.

the highest level of security safe house in an upscale area in a Central Asian country because she's a high-value target to an Islamist organization. We're sheltering her until her visa can be processed for humanitarian parole. And the building caught on fire. She was surrounded by flames. She called me. She's surrounded by flames. And she says, I'm sorry, brother. She's crying. And I got, I'm sorry, brother. I'm dying. She's sorry. She called me to say sorry for dying.

And I said, are you standing up? She said, yes. I'm like, lay down. And she lays down. I say, touch your nose to the ground. I said, do you know the way out? She says, yes, but I can't. It's too hot. I'm going to die, brother. She calls me bump dying brother. I said, you owe me your life. You were going to crawl, go. And so I'm telling her crawl, crawl. She's screaming. It's so hot. I'm dying. I'm dying. I'll play the, I got you the audio. I'm going to send it to you. I said, sister,

I'm keep going. The phone goes dead and I'm lying in bed in this hotel in Cleveland. Tears point out my face going, Lord, what is going on here? What is this world? What is this life? You know, here I'm feeling sorry for myself that I have to be like Gerard says a part of this. Why am I a part of this? It's too much already. And I'm thinking this like in a second seems like a year, but it's like maybe four seconds later. She calls me back and sent me a video. She calls me back.

She's crying. I made it out. I made it out. I'm like, run from the building. Go find water. Rinse your face off. Then she sends me a video from right around the building. She's crying. You can hear her crying. And then I kind of had this weird epiphany as I was lying in bed that morning. Like there's no escape. I always talk to my wife. We're going to retire in Madrid in 10 years or this or that. In the life of the Christian, there is just no escape. We are the sacrifice person.

Our life is a sacrifice and some of us it's we have a child with autism or a spouse who struggles with, you know, bipolar disorder or we're running a small struggling business and we employ seven people. We all have, you know, different struggles or we throw ourselves into our community and our Lions Club and we are scout leaders or we play chess every night at the old folks home or we do prison ministry or.

Or maybe we're struggling with mental illness and it's just enough to keep myself together to be as charitable to my family as I can be. I've been that guy too, right? So we all, as a Christian, we are the sacrifice. This ethno-nationalism sees others as the sacrifice. This is the difference. The two temples, these are very different, very different ways of seeing the world. And I am grateful that

I sometimes you wish I wish I could be that cabana boy that didn't know you know was 53 been surfing every day since the 90s playing volleyball tourists drinking mai tais every night with the guys whatever you do as a cabana boy you know I always worked in Hawaii I'm from Hawaii when I worked in Waikiki at bars there were always those 50 year old guys who've been working on the beach at the beach bars their whole life you know and I and that's beautiful too maybe

But whenever I think about that, I am actually very grateful that God has given me the grace to know and love my neighbor and not to be distracted by ethnicity or by religion and to know that it is my vocation as a human being. Every human being has the same vocation. Christianity shares with us fully through our revealed religious truths, our purpose, which is to love God and love our neighbor.

And this debate in some religious traditions of who is my neighbor, it's a very pernicious debate. If your religion has a debate on who is your neighbor, that's gross. Your neighbor is the human person that your life touches. Used to be the dude next door. But through social media, as an American with power and access to wealth, we touch a lot of people. I mean, as a nation, right?

We touch everyone on this planet. So as an American, everyone's my neighbor. Sometimes I wish like I was, you know, I was from New Guinea and lived in the mountains, then my neighbor would be my neighbor. I could be a Christian, but my neighbor is the guy next door and the guy, you know, across the street. But as a Christian, that doesn't mean we're globalists. That doesn't mean we're busybodies. That doesn't mean we're do-gooders running around trying to get into everyone's business.

But I think it does mean we should be thoughtful of how we are in everyone's business. And we should be thoughtful of how that's impacting the lives of people who have less power and influence and control over their destiny than we do. Because I can tell you what, my mom had me at 16. I became a dad at 18, high school dropout and a soldier. But I got to go to college. I got to go to grad school.

I recognized as a young infantryman, as a 17-year-old high school dropout in the infantry, on my deployments overseas, I really got to understand I have potable water, literate, I have access to antibiotics, I didn't lose any siblings to childhood illnesses. 50% of the world has a toothache 50% of their life.

I realized as a young 17 year old, I joke that when I got to college and my professors were trying to tell me how disadvantaged I was as a high school dropout, teen parent veteran at the university. I remember I told a professor once, I'm so grateful I was in the army before I showed up here because I got to learn how privileged I was before you were trying to explain to me how underprivileged I was. Um, so all of us are very privileged. We're blessed. And, um,

I think it was Spider-Man that says, what is it? With great power comes great responsibility. And we're the most influential Christians who've ever walked the face of the earth. That's a burden, but that's the truth.

Yeah, you can reach a lot of people, you know, just doing a podcast or whatever, you know, or Facebook post or whatever. You saw my podcast this week in my article this week, like reach over a million people. That's just bizarre to me. Obviously, I was devastated for this woman, but I was also like, God, are you kidding me? Like, how much stuff are you going to throw at me? Because we're in the middle of trying to get barges down this river in Sudan for 300,000 refugees that haven't had food in 45 days.

We were dealing with Syria and Gaza. How about Congo? Are you guys doing stuff with Congo with those 70 Christians being beheaded violently? We are, yeah. So we have this program. Our website is vulnerablepeopleproject.com. And we have a program called the Vulnerable Parish Project. And what we do is we provide cameras and armed guards there.

for parishes, Christian churches and other religious communities, but it's mostly churches and synagogues. We have a few synagogues that are exposed to extremist violence. And so we put in cameras and we train local, we hire local people and train them to be guards. So we create jobs while we help keep people more safe. And we're greatly expanding in Congo. We're greatly expanding in Nigeria and Africa.

But it's like whack-a-mole. You know, we expand in one country and then another country erupts. And we expand in that country and we're just, we are a small Christian apostolate. And if you're not a Catholic, what is an apostolate? It's just, it's the apostolic work. It's the work of the Christian community. As a lay Christian, as lay Christians, we do have a role to play in the works of mercy in the world. And we do it primarily to teach people the truth about who they are.

And then when they ask themselves, we don't proselytize. I don't think it's, I used to say metaphorically, we don't share the gospel of Jesus Christ with people who are pulling out of burning buildings. Like that was what I would say. And like last week, we literally were, I was in a hotel in Ohio talking a girl out of a burning building. We don't think it's appropriate in that, or we don't think it's appropriate when a community like the Yazidi are facing ethnic cleansing and

to take that moment as we're rescuing them to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with them with words. But we do it through radical, courageous acts of love with fortitude. We do not leave the communities we serve ever. And, you know, we do, and we've seen this. They ask themselves, why are these people doing this for us? And they come to see it's because we're Christians. And I would say it's because only because God has given us the grace to do it. But,

But also our faith teaches us to do it, tells us that they're made in the image of God. Like the Yazidi community is a community I love so much. And in the Middle East, because their religion is pre-Abrahamic, in fact, there are some historians that believe Abraham comes from the Yazidi. So their religion is not an Abrahamic religion, but Abraham was possibly and probably of the ethnic people that became known as the Yazidi community.

And it's they believe in these emanations of a numinous reality that present themselves as angels. And some of these angels make Abrahamic religion people uncomfortable in how they're presented. And they're demanded to perform that part of the religion is to perform. They have to give offerings to all these angels. And so Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Middle East will not as a rule, obviously not everyone follows, but as a rule will not eat anything a Yazidi picked or touched.

So one of the things I love to do, inspired by Paul, is whenever I'm with the Yazidi, I'll eat off their plate, you know? Oh, you need that? Can I have that? Hey, you want some of this? And, you know, oftentimes they will tell me, you know, when you're in Iraq, they'll say, oh, you cannot eat this. Why can't I have this? Oh, because I'm unclean. They'll say that they're unclean. I'll say, well, no, you're more clean. I'm not clean. You're clean. I can eat it. You want some of mine? Or am I too unclean?

They look at me like, is this guy crazy? Someone needs to read him the rules. But, you know, to me, just little things like that, eating off of someone's plate, to me, is a way to share the gospel of Jesus Christ without using words. And can I use a bad word on your show? Go ahead. Well, I mean, if I say it, I'm using it. It's not that bad. It's not like the F word. Yeah, go ahead. Sometimes I do a spiritual exercise where I'll lie in bed and I'll think,

of theologies of the world, God, man, and the world, and my neighbor through Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism. Sometimes I think of it, you know, as an atheist. And then I ask myself, how would I order my life as a Hindu, as a Muslim, as a Jew, as an atheist? At the end of the day, I would say the only way I want to live my life is the way James says, that pure religion is caring for widows and orphans. That's pure religion. And I boil it down to this.

for those who aren't Christians. The end of the day, God, no God, if there's nothing but a dark, cold, empty abyss, the end of the day, I want to live my life not being a dick. That's it. I do not want to be a prick. I do not want to live on the, I do not want to trample and live a beautiful, rich life while walking over the weak, women, children, orphans, the disabled, mentally, physically, physically.

I don't want to do that. I look, you cut me off in traffic. I'm a, I'm going to be a prick. You know, I will act. I will. I have moments where I become a prick, but I, I just, this is my, this, I really boil my religion down to this. And, um, and in a way, I think that's what the gospel is. Like,

The religion that is pure is loving widows and loving orphans. And what that really is, it is saying being a sacrifice because loving widows and orphans is not easy because you love them once. And guess what? They call you, Mr. I need help again. Mr. You know, you have you help drug addicts.

They're going to lie to you. They're going to try to take advantage of you. They're going to gaslight you. We all have those family members who are like that, or maybe we've been that person in our family. We know that we've been dishonest or we've gaslit our relatives. Typically, the thing that makes people widows and orphans is war and losing a war. So you're standing on the side of people who've lost a war in a lot of those scenarios, you know, or pestilence or disease or poverty. It's the stuff that, you know.

All the ancient religion said that if you lost a war, if you were poor, if you were sick, right, or diseased, that means the gods hated you. But Christianity says, no, God loves you, and he has a particular love for you because of your suffering. I mean, that's amazing. I didn't become a Christian until I was in my late 20s. I don't remember when I read the gospel. I was an Ayn Rand objectivist raised with a brutal prejudice to Christianity. My parents were Ayn Randians.

But my grandfather was a Scientologist who was viciously anti-Christian. And I remember the first time I read the New Testament, I said, God, if you're out there and this isn't you, you're not even this good. Like, it was just too good. And I thought, how come Christians never presented Jesus Christ to me this way? I thought of Jesus Christ as a weak, nonjudgmental hippie. Then you read Paul. Don't you know that you're going to judge the angels in the world?

Are there kings and angels? I think he says, how much more should you judge the matters of this world? How many times do people tell me when I'm advocating for this community or that community? Don't be so judgmental, whatever. I will judge. I will say that it is wrong to enslave Congolese children to harvest cobalt so you can feel like you're driving a green car. Yeah, I think that's wrong. I think it's wrong.

to say you care about migrants, to foment and to advocate for open borders, which lures millions of people into an economy where they will be exploited. In the richest country in the world, they'll be exploited without the same workplace and legal protections as the rest of us. That's, yeah, I'll judge that. I'll judge destroying the child in the womb. I'll judge that. I'll judge dropping 2,000 pound bombs on civilians in Gaza. I'll judge that. Of course I will. You tell me I can't judge that.

And by the way, Jesus never said don't judge. He said don't judge like a hypocrite. And I remember, you know, being a Randian and reading Aristotle, when Christians would tell me not to judge, I would say, who said that? And they'd say, Jesus. I'm like, he did? He should have read Aristotle.

You know, you cannot use a concept to refute the concept. And telling me not to judge is to make a judgment. And Jesus didn't say that. He said, judge not like a hypocrite. Take the board out of your own eye so you can take the speck out of your brother's eye. And by the way, the only reason I want to get the board out of my eye is so I can help my brother.

If the world was a utopia, I'll be drunk. I'll be living above a bar in Costa Rica. When I wasn't drinking, I'd be surfing. You know, so thank God for the board in my eye and thank God for the speck in my neighbor's eye. If my neighbor didn't have a speck, I'd leave the board in my eye all day long. I think we'll probably all feel that way, right? We could live with the board. I could live with my, I like my board. Actually, my sinful inclinations are I like. So why don't I just leave that board in my eye forever? Well,

If I leave that board in my eye, then it leads to scandal. How can I effectively advocate for the civilians in Gaza who are being starved to death? Because people will call me a hypocrite. And so I really want the board out of my eye so I can act on my judgments on how innocent human beings are being abused. And I can do so in a way that's useful.

VulnerablePeopleProject.com, Jason Jones Show on all podcast platforms. Anything else you want to leave us with? No fun. We were supposed to have a fun show. We got all serious. We were going to talk about wrestling and Muay Thai. You and I, people will not know this. We're fun guys. We were talking about how we went to a boxing match. We have fun.

But this show just took a bad turn. I blame the host. We got pretty serious. It was not a very lighthearted show. We'll have to do a fun show one day. Yeah, let's do that. Well, look, if we get it to the new heavens and new earth, we'll have eternity to have some fun shows, okay? All right. In eternity, I want to challenge you Muay Thai versus wrestling. Okay. I'll put you on the claw. Yeah, you put me on the claw. And I'll elbow your head. It'll be fine. We'll do it, uh...

And the big arena in the sky. All right. You take care. Good to see you. All right, brother. Peace out.