Episode 229

In this next installment of the Bonkers series, we are talking about a politician proposing a outright tax on sinful online conduct, the NBA’s decision to release a player for his outspoken witness against LGBTQIA, Joy Reid channeling her inner Whoopi with an insane comparison of the women of Iran and of the U.S., and a police department’s reckless use of AI that landed an innocent grandmother in jail for months before she could clear her name. Join us as we discuss each headline and try to find what little sense is left in them. We would also like to hear from you! Which one did you find to be the most unhinged? Or perhaps you have found a headline warrants discussion. Sound off in the comments or reach out through the contact functions across all our social media platforms!

[Jay]

A Tennessee grandmother spent more than five months in jail after police used an AI facial recognition tool to link her to crimes committed in North Dakota, a state that she says she’s never even been to before. Police in Fargo, North Dakota, have acknowledged, quote, a few errors in the case and have pledged changes in their operations, but they stopped short of actually issuing a direct apology.

Thank you for tuning in to the Removing Barriers Podcast. I’m Jay and I’m MCG. And we’re attempting to remove barriers, so we can all have a clear view of the cross.

[MCG]

This is episode 229 of the Removing Barriers Podcast. And this is the 17th in the series of This World Has Gone Bonkers. And in this episode, we have lined up a number of news articles that we think will show that this world is bonkers.

[Jay]

Hi, this is Jay. MCG and I would like for you to help us remove barriers by going to removingbarriers.net and subscribing to receive all things removing barriers. If you’d like to take your efforts a bit further and help us keep the mics on, consider donating at removingbarriers.net slash donate. Removing barriers, a clear view of the cross.

[MCG]

All right, Jay, I’m going to start with one of your favorite former MSNBC hosts. Joy Reid.

[Jay]

Oh, brother.

[MCG]

All right, so during the podcast appearance, former MSNBC host Joy Reid argued that the U.S. is only marginally better than Iran when it comes to women rights, sparking debate over the comparison. Here is Joy Reid for your entertainment.

[Joy Reid Clip]

Our regime has secret police. They have secret police. Our regime is oppressing women, taking away abortion rights, taking away women’s rights in like 26 countries, 26 states, some states where they’re trying to have the death penalty for having an abortion. They also oppress women. They have the highest rate of women who are in STEM careers. We’re kicking women out of the military, out of university. We’re saying that DEI means women can’t be hired for high positions in the sciences. So we’re marginally better, and we’re doing it for Christianity. They’re doing it for Islam, right? So it’s like we don’t get told those things because it would take away the kind of American exceptionalism narrative.

[MCG]

All right, so there you have it, Jay. I have a question before I give any opinion. What is it with these millionaire black women living in the U.S.? I’m talking about women like Whoopi Goldberg. Oprah Winfrey, Joy Reid, which I’m sure she probably had their net worth well over a million dollars after all those years as the host of the readout on MSNBC. What is it with these black millionaire women that make them feel that they’re so oppressed in the United States of America? The land of opportunity, the land that black people from the Caribbean, from Africa, from all areas of the globe risk their lives, walk across desert, swim across rivers, cross over mountains to get to. I’d show it to you, Jay.

[Jay]

See, I came to this recording trying to have a positive attitude. And the first thing we turn on is Joy Reid. Now my heartburn is acting up. My blood pressure is up. I’m annoyed as all get out. I can’t listen to Joy Reid and be at peace. She has such awful takes on things that I’m immediately annoyed when I see her. And I’m also immediately annoyed that I feel like I have to say to the world, hey, please, America, don’t think that all black women think like this. We don’t. Some of us are sane. Joy Reid has lost her mind. I know she’s famous. I know that you see her on the news. Well, not so much now anymore that she’s been fired. But please don’t think that we think like her. Again, this idea that you can posture yourself as though you are bewailing or lamenting the lack of rights of women in the United States, comparing them to women in Iran is… It’s asinine, and I can’t think of a better word to describe it. It’s insane. It’s unhinged. In Iran, where women are punished severely for not wearing the niqab, it’s not even a hijab there. A hijab is just a veil over the head, right? They have to look like ninjas over there, like complete faces covered with slits only for the eyes, and some of them don’t even have slits for the eyes. And if you don’t believe, like, the Iranian race regime, the Ayatollah, who isn’t there anymore, but if you don’t follow their absolute rules, then you’re gravely and severely punished for that. Here, women are so free that we’re considering, as I’ll show in an article that I have here, we’re considering installing things to disincentivize women from showing off their bodies to the degree, to the freedom that they have here. Women are free to open up their mouths and say whatever they want in this country. Women have freedom to access education, careers. Everything that a woman could possibly want is at your fingertips here. I would say we’ve even bent over backwards and perhaps have gone a little too far to give women the freedoms that they have. And she would feign to say something like this. It’s– I can’t even– see, now I can’t even talk straight because now I’m all perturbed. She can say this because she would never, ever, ever step foot in a country like Iran, much less live there. She would never put herself in a position to be the savior of these poor women that she claims that we are. She would never make such a claim in Iran, and she doesn’t even understand the plight of the women. in Iran, and she can say something like that because no one will call her on it. She doesn’t have to prove it. She can say it, and she gets brownie points with her entire mindless mob, and people will use it to further their agenda to continue the claim that America is the worst country in the world, not the greatest, not the best country in the world, and that it has to be dismantled. Very much the same thing, like Whoopi Goldberg said, and I find it interesting that both of these women compare the United States to Iran. I wish it’s an absurd comparison. I don’t even know what to say to that.

[MCG]

Yeah, I would agree. I don’t have much to add because I figured that, you know, there’s a thing that don’t bite the hand that feed you or something like that.

[Jay]

Yeah.

[MCG]

I don’t know, man. I wonder how many women in Iran are millionaires, independent millionaires, not constantly the network of their husband if they don’t have a husband, but they actually.

[Jay]

Oh, I was going to say the only one I know is Harmozi, but she’s not even, she’s here. She’s not over there. So.

[MCG]

I wonder because for a country that is only marginally better than Iran, we have some rich black women living in this country.

[Jay]

Of which she’s one.

[MCG]

Yeah. So.

[Jay]

You know.

[MCG]

Hey, look, don’t take my word for it. Just look at their lives and compare it to the average life of a woman in Iran. Even the average black person here in terms of network probably has way more money than the average woman in Iran. So anyways, I’ll leave that there. What’s your first bunkers?

[Jay]

Where’s my blood pressure medication? I’ve got to figure something out here that just right out the gate that messed me up. Let’s move to something that I think I could get behind. Okay. So there is a there is a candidate for governor. in Florida by the name of James Fishback. And he says that if he becomes governor on his first day, he would like to institute or to put in a 50% sin tax on OnlyFans income. I kind of like this guy. Let’s read from the article. It says, gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback unveiled the idea during an interview on the conservative podcast NXR Studios hosted by Joel Webban. We’ll come to who this Joel Webban character is in just a second here. But he says, oh, and this is from NBC Miami. It says here, and this is him speaking, As governor of Florida in my first year, I will push for the first tax of its kind, a 50% OnlyFans sin tax. Fish. And the fact that he literally called it a sin tax, I think is hilarious. He added that if someone is an OnlyFans creator in Florida, quote, You are going to pay 50% to the state on whatever you supposedly earn through that online degeneracy platform. He said that the money collected through the tax would go toward education, crisis pregnancy centers, and mental health initiatives. Quote, that money will be used to fund our education system. fund crisis pregnancy centers and fund a first-of-its-kind mental health czar, primarily focused on men, he said. During the interview, he also explained why he refers to it as a sin tax, saying that it is a sin, number one, but the purpose of a sin tax in economics is to disincentivize and deter a particular behavior. If elected governor, and if the measure were to pass, Fishback estimated that the tax could raise, quote, hundreds of millions of dollars. In a recent social media post, he shared that it would probably be around $200 million, which was also promoted by another account supporting his campaign. So, of course, if you can imagine that many people are up in arms about this, particularly the women that do have OnlyFans accounts and actually post content to OnlyFans. And for those of you that are listening that don’t know what OnlyFans is, you’re not missing anything. It is a degeneracy platform where regular, everyday women are paid to show explicit content to their subscribers. And many women have decided to use OnlyFans as a sort of supplemental income stream. And so, of course, If the algorithm on OnlyFans works anything like algorithms on YouTube or X or any other of these social media platforms, then the more you show or the crazier your content, the more engagement you get, the more likely you are to garner subscribers, the more likely you are to make money. And so the platform is set up to where degeneracy is rewarded. And so this governor or governor candidate, a gubernatorial candidate, wants to tax it in order to disincentivize women from doing it. So this article is not bonkers in the sense that I can’t believe this is happening. It’s bonkers in the sense that I can’t believe that we have an actual gubernatorial candidate that’s willing to say these things without sugarcoating it, without trying to hide what he’s trying to do, without becoming or being mealy-mouthed about it and not calling it what it is, which is sin. I’m blown away. He literally called it what it was. And he didn’t pull back any of his punches.

[MCG]

All right. I wouldn’t say I’m totally against the idea, but let’s say he should win. He’s going to have a very hard time firstly passing that and…

[Jay]

Enforcing it.

[MCG]

Getting it to stick in the courts.

[Jay]

Right.

[MCG]

So firstly, I don’t follow Olifan. I don’t have Olifan account. And quite honestly, I would have spent my hard-earned money on those things. Only fans, the way I understand it, did not start out necessarily to be a pornographic site, per se.

[Jay]

It never starts off that way.

[MCG]

It started out where the ultimate goal was for another social media where the The goal is to sell your content rather than to put it for free. Like YouTube, your content is free. Twitter, your content is free. TikTok, your content is free. Name it. Your content is free. And if you get big enough.

[Jay]

I mean, there are ways to monetize, but your people aren’t expressly paying to see your content.

[MCG]

Right. If you get big enough, then the platform will put advertisement on your stuff and you’ll get paid.

[Jay]

Right.

[MCG]

Only fans say, hey, how about you just get paid for your content? Well, that’s kind of spiral into now woman decided, hey, I have a nice figure. I have a body and men want to see it.

[Jay]

Yeah.

[MCG]

Well, I’ll sell it. And I think it kind of outspring from Instagram because Instagram is free and women put all kind of nasty stuff on there as well. Men too, not just blame women.

[Jay]

I don’t think I realize that. I don’t have an Instagram, so I don’t know, but I mean.

[MCG]

Well, I don’t stuff. I’m just. No, no, you

[Jay]

just know that. Yeah, you just know what they use it for.

[MCG]

So all different colors, hey, get paid for your content and you kind of spiral into this thing. I also know, because this has been in the news a couple of times, one of the articles, I read it because this young lady, I think the first year she went an only fan, she made like $40 million.

[Jay]

Good, nice.

[MCG]

But she, you know, she’s like a 21-year-old young lady at the time.

[Jay]

Right.

[MCG]

And their headline was like, Christian, 21-year-old, made $40 million onogram and claimed she’s still a virgin, something like that. was a big headline. headline on New York Post and I think she was in Miami and she said she grew up poor her family was always struggling and now she can support her family meaning her mom and dad and she can support herself and she no longer struggling and she said oh I’m still a Christian and that’s whatever case might be and get a little bit of backlash there here and there and I did saw that same guy on the Patrick Bett David podcast talking about instituting that syntax that you talk about yeah so I I’m not even going to comment on that young lady, whether she’s Christian or not. Of course, we know that that’s way out left field here. Sure, I guess the big thing about this is, OnlyFan or is someone doing OnlyFan protected by the First Amendment? And I think the answer to that, not being a lawyer or anything, I think the answer is yes. And if that’s true, I think he’s going to have a very hard time taxing that content per se.

[Jay]

He’s also going to have a hard time because the domino effect, where does it stop? OnlyFans is not the only platform on which people are putting explicit content. And so the argument can be made that this is an attack on not just OnlyFans, but any other platform where you could post R-rated or X-rated content. And it would be, again, like you said, like you brought up, an attack on free speech. So I don’t know if this is just political posturing on his point, or perhaps what he’s basically trying to do is put the conversation out there in order to affect change. just by putting the conversation out there and getting a rise out of people. Because politicians are notorious for talking out of both sides of their mouths, turning a blind eye to sin and to things that are obviously a degradation on society. So perhaps that’s all he’s trying to do, is affect social change in that particular way. Kind of like Donald Trump and how he likes to do the big ask, ask for something outrageous and then settle for something that he actually wants. Maybe that’s perhaps what he’s aiming to do.

[MCG]

No, I don’t think so, because, as I said, a young lady, I can’t even remember her name because I don’t need to know her name. But that young lady, and then there’s another group. Miami is kind of the Vegas of Florida, of the East Coast, if you want to put it that way. So I think there’s another, I don’t know what they call it. I think there was this group of young ladies that actually form a company. And they have a home that they do this stuff. So all these young ladies, I’m saying all of them are in their early 20s, late teens, early 20s. And basically it’s like a group of five of them or so. And these are making millions of dollars on OnlyFans by videoing and all this stuff. And it’s all things that you don’t want to see. Right, You know, so. I think he’s targeting that group, because I’m talking about that one young lady, her first year, she made 40 million. And I think the second year, she already made 40 million in the first three months or something like that. And that group that got the home and whatever the case may be, they’re making millions and millions and millions of dollars. So I think he was targeting those, because when I listened to the podcast he did, he mentioned

[Jay]

When he was on Patrick B. David?

[MCG]

Yeah. He mentioned doles grew explicitly.

[Jay]

Explicitly. Yeah. Okay, so then that’s Pandora’s box, right? Once you open it, you can’t put the cat back in the bag. You can’t close it back up again. So you may be aiming for those people, but there are tons of people that will be affected by the blowback. And I’m not entirely sure.

[MCG]

Yeah, I don’t know. There’s not another social media, quote, unquote, platform that pay you for your content. Well, as these Olifan don’t pay you. It’s the people that want to see your content pay you.

[Jay]

Right, that pay you. And they pay you directly.

[MCG]

These are men that are paying thousands of dollars and some even more to see these young lady model and perform or I don’t know what it is. I’ve never been an Olifan, but whatever they do, to see them basically half naked and even probably some of them kind of in the nude, I would assume, to see these young ladies. and stuff like that. So if he’s going to target just content like that, I don’t necessarily think he has to say YouTube and Instagram and all these going to be because they don’t really get paid like that. But he probably would have to also target X-rated websites that charge a fee to get in. So I don’t know. I’m no lawyer, but I don’t think you’re going to succeed anyway because it’s going to be appealed most likely to the courts. And even if the highest court in Florida uphold it, I have a feeling that the Supreme Court will strike it down on the First Amendment.

[Jay]

What makes this interesting is that, if I’m not mistaken, he’s a Christian nationalist. And I could be wrong on that, but I’m willing… I could be wrong on that. I’ll just leave a 3% chance I might be wrong on that, but I’m fairly certain that he’s a Christian nationalist. And the podcast that he was on, the Joel Webban podcast, Joel Webban is absolutely a Christian nationalist, but he’s also someone that is quite controversial because many people consider him to be a white supremacist and a misogynist and all of the other, you know, labels that they throw at people. And so there might be this element where people are pushing back on him because of that or because of what he’s saying, being so outrageous in their minds. There’s also that element, too. But the fact that someone would actually stand up and say something and speak up against the degeneracy in our country today, I think is bonkers in the sense that you don’t see that. You don’t see that all the time. And so when you see it, it’s like, whoa, that’s crazy. I can’t believe he actually said that, which I think is a great thing. But yeah. Well,

[MCG]

I said this and then move on. I think it goes back to politician. Again, I don’t necessarily hate this because fine, get them off the internet, fine.

[Jay]

Yeah.

[MCG]

But goes back to politicians always trying to solve issues with a hammer when you need a screwdriver or whatever the case may be. When they have a hammer, everything look like a nail. It’s the same goes.

[Jay]

Are you meaning like you can’t legislate morality? Is that what you’re aiming to?

[MCG]

Well, that’s one, but not even that. I’m going, the problem here, of course, I’m going to go to the young men because the young men are the one who are paying all these money. Well, sure, there’s some rich older guys too. Well, definitely there’s going to be some rich older guys because young men probably don’t have money. But what’s the problem in society that needs to be fixed so that young men or even older men or men in general are not throwing their hard own money towards an image on a screen? You know, that’s the issue there. Why are men so lonely and desperate and siloed That they’re sitting on their couch, getting fat, swiping their cards online to pay to see some young lady. That’s the issue that needs to be addressed. And that issue come back down now that we need to go, okay, one issue is a matter of salvation. Lots of them are not saved. We need to get them evangelized and get them saved. A lot of them, quite answer, they’re lonely. Maybe we need to try to motivate young men and men in general to start, maybe go outdoors a little more, find a hobby, go fishing. Florida, there’s so much things to do outdoors.

[Jay]

A part of it too, is that social media has amplified crazy, harpy women, and that has contaminated the pool of women that they come in contact with, too. It seems like there’s, again, I use the term social contagion. I think that’s really what it is. Crazy women are promoted and amplified online, and so regular women who are looking at this online might be thinking, oh, this is what I have to be in order to get attention or in order to, you know, to present myself. And so they become crazy and it becomes this terrible cycle. And of course, the mark of feminism can’t be discounted, too. What women think about men and about marriage and about what they call patriarchy and about the Bible and all of these things have been warped and twisted so much so that women do not have a godly outlook on these things any longer. They don’t see men biblically. They don’t see marriage biblically, relationships biblically. They don’t see anything like that biblically. Women are incredibly desirous of pursuing their careers over everything else. They prioritize their own goals and dreams disguised as self-care. They create a permissive structure in which they have no accountability for their behavior in the public sphere, and that has a detrimental effect on men. I think it’s gotten to the point where men They don’t want to deal with that nonsense anymore. And if the men speak up and say, hey, this woman is doing ABCXYZ, both church and court systems are still set up to where women are almost preset to be seen as the victim. And men can be blamed for something where the woman has a lot of the blame. We see that in marriages left and right. Now, that’s not to say that men don’t behave crazy in marriage, and I’m not going down that rabbit hole. Of course, that’s the case. But it’s also the case that women have changed to a significant degree as well, to the point that some men don’t want to deal with these crazy women any longer. Imagine how you would venture to go into a relationship with a woman, marry her, only to have her divorce you, and then take your children away and half of your savings and half of your assets away, all because of, oh, we just screw apart or, oh, I need to prioritize me. And that’s the way women are talking today. Again, I’m not talking about the women that are in abusive situations or have legitimate reasons for pursuing these kinds. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about generally women have kind of lost their minds.

[MCG]

Well, I think we kind of stir away here, but to leave it as that, I think men are becoming dependent on these things and addicted to these things and are going into serious debt, paying women on only fans and sometimes becoming very much attached.

[Jay]

Sure.

[MCG]

And even to some degree, they feel like they’re in a relationship with the person, but the person has no absolutely connection to them. It’s just numbers on the screen for them. And to the man, that’s his girlfriend. That’s the woman he wants to marry. So as much as it’s bad for the young lady, maybe I shouldn’t do a comparison, but it’s very, very bad for the young men as well.

[Jay]

Oh, yeah.

[MCG]

I’ve seen a lot of testimonies where young men have gone way, way, way, way over the boundaries, believing that he’s in love or whatever the case may be, and would give his whole life, financial life for this person.

[Jay]

This person have no idea that he even exists. Yeah.

[MCG]

So yeah. Anyways, all right, let’s go into my second one. I’m going to go to the NBA. Chicago Bulls just fired Jaden Ivey for being Christian. And this is from the Christian Post, but you can find the news all over the interweb. The Chicago Bulls have a message to their Christian fanbase. Your faith is welcome if you keep it quiet and compliant. On March 30th, the Bulls wave guard Jayden Ivey, fighting conduct detrimental to the team. They did so not because of the Caesar-ended injury he incurred, nor for the poor performance before that, not even because he refused to play or disrupt team activities. Ivy have already been shut down for the season with a knee injury, just four days prior. Instead, Ivy did the unthinkable. He dared to speak openly about his Christian faith on his own personal social media accounts. Ivey’s no marginal talent, scraping by in the G-lead. He’s a former four-star high school prospect who attended Catholic Marion High School in Indiana before transferring to powerhouse L.A. Luminaire. A high school phenom, he chews Purdue over offers from Notre Dame and small school powerhouse Butler University. He was selected fifth overall in the 2022 NBA draft by the Detroit Pistons. He’s even a gold medalist, having won the medal with Team USA in the 2021 FIFA on the 19 World Cup. In the NBA, he has consistently averaged nearly 15 points per game while ranking among the least leaders in scoring efficiency, playmaking, and ball handling for his position. This is a young man who can compete with the best of them and do so at the highest level. More importantly, he knows where he stands with his faith. Ivy has been transparent about his journey, including overcoming struggles with addiction, before placing his trust fully in Jesus Christ. On his personal Instagram pages, Jedi, Jaden Edward, Dean J. Ivy went live reading scripture, preaching salvation to Jesus alone, and adjusting the culture around him. He stated plainly what the Bible teaches. God designed marriage and sexuality for one man and one woman and that celebrating what scripture calls unrighteousness is incompatible with following Jesus he did not make these statements on the court in the locker room or during any team mandate event he spoke as a private citizen on his own time and platform in turn the Bulls responded within hours by waving firing the basketball star the claim is for conduct detrimental to the team make no mistake this is a direct affront to Christians who hold to traditional biblical theology in today’s NBA vague postgame thanks to God or a cross tattooed might be tolerated have the courage to articulate what the Bible actually says about human sexuality sin and repentance that crosses the line into conduct detrimental This should alarm every believer, basketball fan or not. For years now, the NBA has aggressively pushed a series of woke agendas, turning its courts, jerseys, and platform into vehicles for far-left progressive orthodoxy. During the 2020 season restart, the lead painted Back Lives Matter on both sides of every court, allowing players to replace their names on the jersey with social justice slogans. encouraged kneeling during the national anthem all of which was coordinated in the leaves solidarity teams wore black lives matter t-shirts and the entire Enterprise was celebrated as courageous activism Year after year, the NBA has gone even further with LGBT Pride Month. The lead matches in the New York Pride Parades, adorn arenas with rainbow logos, host pride nights, and promote institutional affirmation of LGBT lifestyle. These initiatives are not private opinions. They are top-to-bottom corporate campaigns designed to weave even so blatantly into the very fabric of the game. Yet, when a young player like Jaden Ivory used his own personal social platform to confess biblical truth and dissent from the lead orthodoxy, the response was immediate termination. The double standard could not be clearer. The NBA welcomes… amplifies and intuitionalize certain ideological messages while treating traditional Christian convictions as toxic and potentially career ending one can give God a blanket thank you at the postgame press conference but if you reference personal transformation or reality check on sin pack your bags even more telling was head coach Billy Donovan’s response Rather than adjusting Ivy’s actual statement, the divan expressed concern that the young man might be struggling mentally. He stated, Mental health is a real issue. I’m not passing judgment on what Jaden is or is not going through. But I do know that I always worry about that, not only for Jaden, but for all of our players. In other words, publicly confessing biblical truth on social media is now being framed as a potential sign of mental instability. When a Christian’s athlete shares from his fate, The lead’s response is not honest disagreement, but an incineration that something must be wrong with his mind. The Chicago Bulls and potentially the NBA have made their priorities plain. They will bend over backwards to accommodate and promote leftist social agendas, but biblical Christians must be silent. Christians who take scripture seriously on matters of sexuality, marriage, and repentance are increasingly told their fate belongs in the closet. Jaden Ivory chose faithfulness over compliance. Believers should pray for him as he enter free agency and recognize this situation for what it is, a fragrant fall on the court of American culture. When professional sports organizations punish at least for off quote fidelity to Christ, the message to millions of Christian fans should be unmistakable. You are not welcome. All right, so I don’t necessarily disagree with the article, but I think there’s another side and I I don’t know if this opinion of mine is going to be popular or not, but that’s not important. So there’s another side of this. So I asked myself a couple of questions. If this were LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, Gilchrist, Harden, these players that are the top of the lead, superstars in the lead, household names, so to speak, would they have waived them? the under truth would be no there’s no way they’re going to waive Leon James paying him $40 million per year to bounce the ball and throw it in a hoop Jaden Ivory has been in the lead a few years seem like he has been injury prone and seems like at least up to this point may not have lived up to his talent potential talent so the Chicago Bulls look at him and say hey you Yeah, we understand you have freedom of speech. We understand you can do these things in your own time, but maybe you’re more troubled than what you’re worth. From a business employer perspective, many folks out there, both on the conservative side and under non-conservative side, the liberal side, have been fired for sprewing whether it’s political views or religious views on their personal time. And I think the right has been a little bit hypocritical because They push just as hard for leftists to be fired when leftists say things that they disagree with to the leftist employers, and they get fired, and the left does it too. So I guess the question in my mind, does an at-will employee have the right to say whatever they want to say on their social media platform? Yes, but also an at-will employer can say, hey, we can fire for any reason, no reason at all, get out of here. No, I’m not defending the Chicago Bulls and say the Chicago Bulls should have fired him for what he said. Obviously, I agree with what Jayden Ivory said, but there’s a reason why I don’t mention who my employer is on the podcast. I’ve never mentioned the name of my employer because I’m not representing my employer here. Quite honestly, I remember having a conversation with someone. I remember this was probably 2020, and they were having company-wide discussions because of the George Floyd stuff and everything. And my white supervisor called me up and she said, hey, the CEO wanted to talk to everybody. And they wanted to know what my feelings were about George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, everything coming up. And I told her exactly how I felt about it. I didn’t hold back anything. They asked, so I tell them. But I remember at one point in the conversation, I told her, hey, I’m not the PR person for the company. So I don’t need to go out there and say, this is my company and this is what I believe. My company believes that. The company’s woke. But I guess what I’m saying is that there’s some things that you say, hey, let me maybe not say that because my employer, or whatever the case may be, maybe this is a price Jade and Ivy want to pay. And if that’s true, good on him. Maybe another team will pick him up. But in sports, as much as these woke people push DEI, and all these things in sports your talent is what matter and even though Avery was picked fifth overall up to this point he has not lived up to that talent that he’s expected to live up to and that more so than anything else is probably the reason why they let him go because they’re saying hey you’re injured you’re out for the rest of the season you have not lived up to the potential that we think you were going to live up to being picked fifth overall so Why are we going to be bothered with a headache as an employer? Because if they didn’t let him go, you know, all these LGBT groups going to be contacting the NBA and news organization. They say, oh, look at this guy. He said, da, da, da, da. And Chicago will say, you know what? I don’t want to deal with a headache. You’re more trouble than your work. Again, not defending them. But I think, as I said, there’s another side to this where the employer might just say, hey, yeah, just let him go. Because I can guarantee you, if he was one of the superstars that I mentioned, He will still be playing, especially in April, where the playoff is going to be starting soon. But he’s adding nothing to the team, so it’s nothing to let him go.

[Jay]

So basically, they ran a basic cost-benefits analysis, or what do they call it, where they see if you’re worth the trouble. Well, I suppose I could see that, but I think Christians all across the world should, or at least particularly in the United States, should just take note. If you’re going to be explicit in your stand for Christ, there will be consequences. You may lose your job. You may have the mafia come at you, the LGBTQIA mafia come at you, or other of the devil’s minions come at you. And I think all of us have to decide if we are willing to lose, perhaps, our positions and our employment and Perhaps something that we built from the ground up, are we willing to lose those things on account of Christ? And every Christian has to be like Jaden and say, You know what? Yeah, I might lose my job or I might lose my position, but… In light of the spiritual and political climate of my country today, it’s important to stand up and speak. And he did it with his name and his face attached, and he’s paid the price, and that’s admirable, I think.

[MCG]

Well, let me say, he wasn’t fired from the NBA. He was just released from the team. Another team can pick him up if they want to.

[Jay]

No team is going to touch him with a 10-foot pole, because, again, they’re bending the knee to the LGBTQIA mafia. No one wants that headache.

[MCG]

That goes back to my point. If he was talented enough, they would.

[Jay]

Maybe he’d be able to bring enough money to offset the cost of dealing with the okay I see.

[MCG]

Who knows he’s injured now maybe beginning of the next season someone picking him up because he seems to be very talented he does not a superstar also name let me say this are there some things that you should be able to walk away from employer to I have been asked by a potential employer to lie on my resume and I walk away I had opportunity where this guy was my team lead and he He was a liar. I decided I’m not working under a blatant liar. So I left. There are terms when you draw a line and say, hey, I had an employer that wanted me to take their covid vaccine and I got an exemption, but I wasn’t prepared to walk away if they were going to force me to do it because I wasn’t going to put that thing in my body. Are there things that you should walk away from? But I’m saying maybe just like right wings do it and left wings do it, if you say something into the internet and someone doesn’t like what you’re Just today, I saw Libs of TikTok was calling for someone to be fired who work at a hospital that says something dumb. You know, it’s just a political climate we’re in. And I know he didn’t really say anything political, but more religious. But hey, freedom of speech is from the government to you, not from your employer to you, unless your employer is the government. A lot of people make that.

[Jay]

Mistake thinking that freedom of speech is protected when you’re working for a private company. They can fire you for whatever reason.

[MCG]

Most states are what you call at will. Your company can fire for any reason, no reason at all, except for the fact they can’t fire you and say the reason we fire you is because you’re black or because you’re a woman or because you’re X, Y, and Z. They can’t say they fire you because of this particular reason, because they can be sued, obviously, because the government say you can’t fire someone because they’re black, woman.

[Jay]

All those protected.

[MCG]

All these protected, you know, stuff. But if they can just fire you without a reason, they don’t have to give a reason. Just like you can leave without a reason, you know, at will. So, anyway.

[Jay]

Well, I pray that he keeps the fervor and the candor and the boldness that he has for Christ. I think that’s wonderful. I think that’s a great example. But again, speaking up for Christ, there will be consequences.

[MCG]

Yeah, definitely.

[Jay]

Yeah. Okay, so my next article is from CNN. Police used AI facial recognition to arrest a Tennessee woman for crimes committed in a state that she says she’s never even visited. So we’ll read a few lines from the article here. A Tennessee grandmother spent more than five months in jail after police used an AI facial recognition tool to link her to crimes committed in North Dakota, a state that she says she’s never even been to before. Police in Fargo, North Dakota have acknowledged, quote, a few errors in the case and have pledged changes in their operations, but they stopped short of actually issuing a direct apology. So the lady’s name is Angela Lips. She’s 50, and she was first arrested in Tennessee on July 14th. I assume this is of 2026. I’m sorry, of 2024. What am I thinking? 2025, according to a statement from the Fargo Police Department, and according to the GoFundMe that she set up, and I think her family members set up for her. Unbeknownst to Lips, a warrant had been issued for her arrest weeks earlier in Fargo, which is like, I’m sure, more than 1,000 miles away from Tennessee. Months before, several instances of bank fraud had occurred in and around Fargo, and in the search for a suspect of the bank fraud cases, investigators used, quote, our partner agency’s facial recognition technology, as well as other investigational steps, in order to identify who this woman is and it ended up being Lips, even though she’s never been. In North Dakota, she never set foot in the state, certainly wasn’t involved in any of these bank fraud cases. So her lawyer, I’m assuming this is, a man named Zebulski. It looks like Zebulski, I guess he’s running the police department in North Dakota, and he says that his police department’s reliance on some of the information from a neighboring agency’s AI system was part of the issue, and that’s why errors were made in arresting Lips. He said, at some point, our partner agency over in West Fargo It’s just their own AI facial recognition system, and we weren’t aware of it at the executive level, and we would not have allowed it to be used, and it has since been prohibited. In other words, it’s not our fault. It’s our partner’s fault. It’s their software. They’re the ones that did it. So apparently, they didn’t issue an apology to her. When they released her from jail, they didn’t even set her up to be transported back to Tennessee. They literally just released her from jail, and she’s stuck in North Dakota with no way to get back. She has no idea where she is in North Dakota. don’t know anyone in North Dakota. How in the world is she going to get back? So she contends that she was treated very, very, very poorly. And I think perhaps she has a case for some kind of restitution to be made because the police department depended on this particular software, apparently made by a company called Clearview AI. And of course, it was erroneous, and they had her arrested all the way in Tennessee, brought her all the way to North Dakota, and then spent five months in jail and then released, just released in the middle of North Dakota, No way to get back, no apology, no restitution, nothing. And so her case comes as police departments across the country have rapidly integrated new technologies, including AI. But police use of the novel technology has attracted criticism, particularly for things like this, especially when the software is wrong and it misidentifies someone. Lips said that she was terrified and exhausted and humiliated. So on July 1st, a North Dakota judge signed a warrant for her arrest with nationwide extradition. treating her like she’s fugitive or something. She was arrested on the 14th of July. Again, I think this is 2025, and she spent over three months in a Tennessee jail before being extradited to the jail in North Dakota. And it wasn’t until October that the Tennessee law enforcement told the sheriff’s office in North Dakota that they had her extradition waiver. So all of these things are happening. Two states trying to communicate with each other about who’s going to arrest when and who has when and when are we going to extradite her. And she’s sitting in jail the entire time. They can’t figure their stuff out. She’s sitting in jail the entire time. And it says here that, of course, Tennessee authorities are not willing to talk about this. They’re not willing to talk about the mix-up that has been made. But she set up a GoFundMe, and she said she was terrified. It was the first time that she’d ever even been on an airplane. She was terrified. She was exhausted. She was humiliated. She was like one of those people, born and raised in a particular city or town and never left, you know, just was there her entire life and never went anywhere. And all of a sudden, she’s in jail, put on a plane. She’s never been on a plane and put in jail for five months for something that she didn’t do. Just all around terrible situation. And so the reason I picked this article is because AI, of course, we all know is developing at such an incredible rate. And the applications that the technology is being used for, I think it’s developing faster than we’re able to stop it or catch it or vet it or adjust it to whatever particular situation that we’re applying it to. We’re using AI for the answering of phones. We’re using it in chat situations where you’re asking a question, sort of like a search engine Google thing. We’re using it for apparently facial recognition. I know that medicine is using it in order to identify treatment plans and physical, if I remember something along the lines of, like, physical reactions of medicines in the body, and to just give the doctors an extra eye, an extra overseer on potential contradictions or contraindications. We’re using AI for almost everything now, and there’s very little that’s in place for when AI gets something wrong. And in fact, I think that I remember listening to a podcast where they’re explaining that our use of AI is training the next generation of AI. So they don’t have anything in place for when something goes wrong. How we interact with the AI is how the AI is being trained for the next generation of AI that they’re going to be releasing for whatever reason or another, whether it’s in use of robots or in that same chat system or in the same medical application. And that’s a very dangerous thing. Because then you end up with a situation where someone has been wrongfully imprisoned, wrongfully accused, wrongfully put through the system, which everyone knows is punishment in and of itself. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do to clear your name. because you don’t even know what happened. And in her case, she never even set foot in the state. And that’s a very frightful thing to have to consider, especially when you’re actually spending time in jail, which jail is a very dangerous place. There are hardened criminals there that could care less if you were there because the state made a mistake or the police department made a mistake, and they might see you as prey and attack as they feel like they’re want to do. But for 60 or 70, I forget how old she was, for a grandmother to be put in that particular situation and No restitution made. I think that’s abhorrent. I think that’s abhorrent.

[MCG]

What do you say? Well, I hope she gets some good lawyers because I think she probably has just become a millionaire in terms of suing not just Tennessee, but North Dakota. So hopefully she gets a good lawyer and can get some money out of this. I wonder if before all this happened, if she had a criminal record, whether it was, you know, a misdemeanor or something, something that would have cause it to have a mug shot. Because I’m going to go a little bit different directly from you. Where did the AI compare her picture from?

[Jay]

It says here, I’ll read the paragraph here. At the news conference, the police at the Fargo Police Department, the ones that they say that they don’t have any AI and they used a partner, they said that their neighbor, West Fargo, does, and their system identified her as a potential suspect based on the image of a fake ID used in one of the bank fraud cases.

[MCG]

Okay.

[Jay]

It was a fake ID that they… Okay.

[MCG]

So I guess I’m getting that is not so much that is, you know, How was this AI train? Did it compare images from Facebook or from just random things on the internet or maybe from the Department of Motor Vehicles or whatever? What image did it compare and say, oh yeah, this is this lady? There has to be some sort of comparison. AI have to search some sort of database that would link that face with that name and somehow give some sort of confidence to the police officers, whether it is 80%, 90% or whatever, that is this person with this person. So where the failure was in technology, I’m trying to get at. But even more than that, this should ignite the folks. One of my pet peeves that I don’t really talk about on the podcast a lot is this data brokers and their constant mining of our information on the internet by these companies.

[Jay]

You mean like companies like My Life?

[MCG]

And Spokeo and all these things that grab information. Even if they have images of you, they will put images out there too. I think these things should be illegal.

[Jay]

Yeah.

[MCG]

The AI, of course, we need to regulate AI. I strongly believe that. But we need to regulate some of these things too, because if they don’t have any image to compare it to, then the AI can’t identify anybody. Or at least they would have to have access to the Department of Motor Vehicle Records or whatever the case may be. And the fact that this lady have never been to North Dakota, tells me that they have some sort of nationwide way to search for these things.

[Jay]

Yeah.

[MCG]

So if it wasn’t Facebook and wasn’t social media, well, it had to be through some sort of government channel. So I I guess what I’m getting at is the privacy issue of it more than the fact that the AI failed. It’s more of the privacy issue of this is that if she had had a criminal pass, misdemeanor, felony, or whatever the case may be, somewhat I can understand, because they probably have that somewhat in some sort of database you can search. And if you had a criminal record, everybody’s in that kind of lump, the police can pull it up and say, oh, you had a charge out of Florida, even though the person is now in North Dakota. I can understand that to some degree. But if she has never had any run in with the system as to her name and her face is not in the system it should be alarm all of us that the fact that someone can be totally innocent never had any run in with the law and yet the AI identify her as being the person of interest I arrested, life wrecked. I saw this story, lost her job and everything. Life wrecked because I made a mistake. And the violation of privacy that caused. It’s a big violation of privacy. And I think Congress needs to really crack down on these, not just the AI stuff, but also these data brokers. Annoying. Try it one day. Google your name. And they have your name, date of birth, adjust.

[Jay]

Your family members’ information tied to you.

[MCG]

Everything out there. And I think also a lot of these things that are public records should not be public records. I don’t think your home information should be public records and all this stuff. We no longer live in the 80s. I know in the 80s, everything was in a phone book. You know, someone named you, look at the phone book, you see their phone number and their address. I don’t think you should be that way anymore. I think government needs to truly crack down on these things that you can’t display these things. These people are making millions of dollars just by selling new information because they mine it from here, they mine it from there. It annoys me, but Anyways, you’re listening to the Room of the Virus podcast. We’re in the middle of another bonkers episode. We’ll be right back.

[Jay]

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[MCG]

All right, Jay, my turn bonkers. I’m going to make it kind of quick because it’s kind of graphic. So the title of it is 2 Ohio Children charged with attempt murder, rape, and hollering attack against five-year-old girl.

[Jay]

Oh, my goodness.

[MCG]

Left unrecognizable.

[Jay]

Oh, goodness.

[MCG]

So the gist of it is that the five-year-old mother left her daughter, I think, with maybe a friend or family friend or some sort of relative. For some reason, the five-year-old slipped out of the residence she was at and was wandering off. And these two youngsters, and I think they were like 10 and nine or something like that, or 10 and 12, I don’t remember. This is out of the New York Post. The suspects had a nine-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl were hit with a laundry list of charges following the shocking September 13 attack on the little girl. And this is out of Ohio. So they basically did all that, pulled out their braids and everything, which is scalper. of course, they’re being charged as juveniles. What else can they really do in this situation? But there are two things out of my mind, of course. How did a 10-year-old start having that kind of thoughts that they would, a nine or 10 year old, that they would actually act upon it already? And two, we have seen both in Michigan and in Georgia, Parents being charged for the children’s crime. But would it involve a gun? Of course, they didn’t use a gun. But I’m saying here, if it’s appropriate that parents in Georgia, this guy, what’s his name? Gray, I think his last name is, was charged for the actions of his son. And the Crumblies, I think, or Crumblies in- Crumblies, yeah. In Michigan were charged for the actions of their son because he shoot up a school. Gross, bad, I’m not condoning it. I’m just simply saying there’s a double standard in the law here. If parents are being charged for the actions of their children, I’m sorry, what happened to this five-year-old is just as gross. And I’m not hearing anybody saying, get the parent, charge a parent for the crime of their nine-year-old and their 10-year-old son and daughter. Yet their actions… In Georgia and in Michigan, person who pulled the trigger were teenagers. Teenagers in my argument that had agency. You can argue maybe a 90-year-old or 10-year-old may not have agency to some degree. They may not even understand that he was charging against them at this point. But I think a 15-year-old or 16-year-old do understand those. So if you’re charging parents, again, I don’t agree with charging parents, but if you’re charging parents, what happened to this young lady here, five-year-old, Most likely they’re going to be sued. If that’s the standard, where are the criminal charges against these parents?

[Jay]

They attacked the five-year-old because the child got out of the house. So as punishment for getting out of the house.

[MCG]

No, she wandered off and then they saw her and figured they will take advantage of her.

[Jay]

Oh, so these are not the kids that were supposed to be watching her. These are just a regular random tenant. Oh my goodness. Oh my. I don’t even know what to say. That story kills my heart. It hurts my heart.

[MCG]

Anyways, what’s your final bunkers?

[Jay]

That was depressing. Whew, okay, my final bonkers is also kind of sad as well, and it opens a lot of discussion when it comes to MAID or medically assisted suicide. Father loses legal fight to halt euthanasia of 25-year-old daughter in Spain. Noela Castillo Ramos becomes the youngest person to die under Spain’s euthanasia laws. Spain is grappling with the death of a 25-year-old woman from Barcelona who was euthanized following a series of tragic events despite multiple legal challenges from her father. I think it’s pronounced Noelia Castillo Ramos’ case galvanized international attention after her father, Geronimo Castillo, mounted a legal battle against the authorization of various Spanish courts for his daughter to receive euthanasia in 2023. Aided by a conservative Catholic organization, he has exhausted all appeals to the Spanish courts. The father argued that his daughter wasn’t fully psychologically able to make a decision regarding euthanasia, and that she needed better medical and psychiatric care. His legal battle was ultimately shut down by the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg on March 10th.

[MCG]

Dr. Achimarin, human rights.

[Jay]

Yeah, definitely so. Her case was that she was the victim of sexual assault by multiple men at the same time. And as a result, she developed a lot of mental, spiritual, and emotional issues that she just couldn’t. resolve, and she desired the euthanasia, but her father didn’t. And so there was this whole back and forth. The article continues, hers is just the latest in deaths across Europe. But in Barcelona, the woman’s choice to die has inflamed passions across the country. Plus, I suppose that would make sense because I’m not mistaken. Spain is a majority Catholic country, isn’t it? So her parents divorced when she was 13. she spent four years in public tutelage centers, and she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. And her diagnosis led to, or it can often lead to, severe depression and suicide ideation. And there’s a tendency for people with this particular diagnosis to become addict. By her own account and in an interview that she gave before dying, she tried to commit suicide at least twice, despite being under intensive psychiatric care. And her first attempt She took pills and ingested a toxic automotive liquid, but her mother saved her, found her and saved her and took her to the hospital and they pumped her stomach. But then things got worse for her when she was taken back home and she left home, and that’s when she was sexually assaulted multiple times when she was about 20. At first it was a former boyfriend that took advantage of her after taking sleeping pills, and then afterward, multiple men attempted to assault her while she was at a club, and that left her deeply scarred. She was never really able to recover after that, and her psychiatric symptoms worsened. And so she’s been wanting to put an end to it, but her family wouldn’t allow that. And so she went to what’s, I think it’s like a care home. I don’t think it’s called a halfway house, but they put her in a home for her worsening psychiatric systems. And in that home, she was assaulted by three men. They took advantage and assaulted her. And she attempted to end her life by jumping out of the fifth floor, like the window of a fifth floor of the building. Multiple reports indicated that the men who assaulted her were illegal immigrants. They were minors at the time. They were immigrant minors under the care of the state. And I don’t know if that has anything to do with how that played out in courts legally, whether or not they were prosecuted and whether or not justice was served. But she, of course, just… the end to deteriorate. And many Spaniards have reacted very angrily with this decision that the courts have made to allow her to end her life. They feel like they failed to provide her with medical care, and they also see the state as responsible because they’ve opened up the country, as many European countries have done, even here in the States have done, opened up the country to mass immigration where people are flooding in unvetted, and then some of these migrants are committing these egregious crimes. And so they’re saying, hey, it’s your fault for letting these people in, for the lack of policing, lack of immigration law, lack of pursuing justice for people who have been affected by the crimes of illegal immigrants. And so you shouldn’t allow the euthanasia. You should do your job better. And so there’s this whole back and forth. But the courts allowed her to end her life, and she did. She died at 6 p.m. on local time, local time in Spain on a Thursday in a hospital. And she was the youngest person ever to be euthanized since the country allowed medically assisted suicide back in 2021. The reason I brought this article out, it is definitely sad and terrible, but medically assisted suicide is on a meteoric tear. It is rapidly becoming one of the ways that people die in several countries. Like for example, in Canada, assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 deaths in Canada. And numbers are rising in countries all across the world. And so it really raises this idea of whether or not this is a good idea. Many people are saying that if you don’t value life at the beginning, i.e. the permission of abortion, you’re not going to value life at the end, which is what you have with euthanasia. And there’s obviously the spiritual side to the argument that who are we to determine that our lives are over? How is medically assisted suicide any different from any other type of homicide or suicide. Granted, there are obviously mental issues that were in play here, spiritual issues, very deep-rooted issues. She had a tragic, tragic life, and she was the victim of many assaults that obviously would’ve taken a toll on her wellbeing, both mentally, spiritually, and physically. But does that give us as a people the green light as a society? Does that give us the green light to determine, hey, this life is no longer worth living? we can end it here. And that’s the debate that’s raging in Spain and in, well, maybe not so much in Canada, but I’m sure that many people that are against it all across the world are looking at this particular story and saying, hey, this is why this is wrong and trying to fight back against it.

[MCG]

I wonder what’s the statistics on this in third world countries where people are voluntarily trying to kill themselves. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m just wondering what the statistics.

[Jay]

Are you leaning towards saying that this is a first world problem?

[MCG]

Not necessarily, just wondering. I think it more affect the first world. You know, I was listening to a podcast again the other day, and the host was saying that he was talking to someone from a terrible country. And I think the person migrated to the US, and the person was saying to him, I constantly hear, American using this word, hear it on the television, and the word is depression. He said, what is depression? I tell the person was from India, actually. And he was asking this American guy, what is depression? And I’m not talking about depression, like monetary stuff, like when people say they’re depressed. And after he explained it to the guy from India what depression is, he said, don’t you have that in your country? He said, yeah, but we just worked through it. When you have to consider how you’re going to put food on the table on a day-to-day basis, you don’t really have time to you wonder that you feel a certain way about certain things. So again, I don’t want to minimize what this young lady went through because obviously being sexually assaulted by multiple people on multiple different occasions and her upbringing and everything is terrible. And they will weigh on anybody mentally, no matter whether you’re first world or third world. But also, I guess what I’m getting at is how much these countries have moved away from Christ and being God-centered and stuff like, when you don’t have anything to live for, when you don’t have anything to anchor you, don’t have anything. Well, why? Why live?

[Jay]

Yeah.

[MCG]

You know, being 25, why live? You know, and we had interviewed missionaries in Spain. It’s a very tough country. I think one of the missionaries we interviewed, he probably go years without seeing converts and stuff like that because they’re deeply into the Catholic faith and yet they had some weird beliefs with that and, so no foundation, no higher power, not being Christ-centered and all these things, you can understand. And you can understand why other countries want to do it too. Because one, it saves the government tons of money. Because if you have to go through the system from mental institution to… not being productive in society and can’t pivot her whole in the medical stuff and being medicalized for the rest of her life, potentially another 50 years, the government said, well, I give you 1 pill, cost me 5 bucks, and you’re done. As you say, if you go to treatment life at the beginning, why not treatment it at the end?

[Jay]

Yeah, I used to think that people that would make those kinds of arguments were just being, I don’t know, let’s say prudish or exaggerated or doomsayers or what do you call people that think the worst of what might happen, but I think they’ve proven themselves to actually be right because we’ve seen a precipitous decline, a drop in allowing one sin and And then seeing the full expression of that sin in society, especially with the explosion of social media, the time between the allowing of one sin and the full ugly expression of it, that timeline has been shortened significantly. And to answer your question, as of 2026, assisted suicide or euthanasia is fully legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, New Zealand, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Uruguay, and all the states of Australia, as well as a few states in the U.S. Every other place, it’s currently illegal.

[MCG]

Yeah, but how many places on there consider third world? I heard Colombia, that would probably consider third world.

[Jay]

Maybe Colombia, maybe… maybe Uruguay, but every other place, these are first world countries, you know, or at least second world, or at least close to it. And so, yeah, this definitely seems to be a first world problem, you know, and to consider her particular situation, I’m not making light of it at all. I’m not trying to whitewash it either. However, every place that’s supposed to be safe, every place that’s supposed to be a help to her was anything but, you know, in her home, the home was broken up as a result of divorce. The different halfway houses or care homes that she was in, that’s where she was assaulted. And of course she was assaulted at a nightclub, which, you know, that doesn’t fall within that category. That’s an inherently unsafe place. And it was done by people. in some cases, people that were supposed to love and protect her. First, it was her boyfriend, and of course, with the divorce being what it was, you know, who knows if sometimes when parents divorce and if they start dating again, I think the argument that, or the statistic that is widely recognized is that the children of the divorced parent are at greater risk of being abused, whether verbally, physically, or sexually. there’s a step parent or someone else in the home that is not a parent to that child. So could it have been a situation like that where she was exposed and in every single way and in every realm of authority that God has instituted to protect her, all of it failed because of things like divorce, because of things like the, let’s just call it what it is. It’s just called, you know, the sin, sin all the way down the chain. And she she felt like she couldn’t take it anymore. And so sin compounds sin. So she makes the sinful decision to end her life and sin begets sin. And again, I’m not casting blame. I’m not shaming. I’m not doing any of that. But again, when people who argue against these things say, hey, you’re lying once sin and the full ugly expression of it is something that you’re not going to want at the tail end, that’s something that perhaps as a society we ought to be listening to. Again, especially with social media being what it is, putting everything, just amplifying every ugly thing in our society. We should really be careful about that.

[MCG]

Yeah. All right. Well, I don’t go into some dishonorable mentions. I’ll start out with, I have about three of them.

[Jay]

Okay.

[MCG]

The first one, Oklahoma 7-Eleven clerk, mom of three, fired after shooting customer who attack her. And she said, I need to be here for my kids. So I guess we can understand why big companies will fire employees when they defend themselves. They’re trying to minimize liability. But I think common sense needs to reign here, you know, defend herself. And in Oklahoma, where the Second Amendment reigns strong and working overnight shifts as a woman, of course she should have a gun and of course she should defend herself.

[Jay]

Absolutely.

[MCG]

So, but anyways, yeah, 7-Eleven. Seven-Eleven in one of those places, what they call it, Stop and Rob.

[Jay]

Yeah.

[MCG]

I don’t go to those places unless I really, really have to.

[Jay]

Yeah.

[MCG]

And I know that might sound a little bit elitist or whatever the case may be.

[Jay]

No, that’s just practical. It’s wise.

[MCG]

Those convenience stores, shop and rob stores, don’t go to them when.

[Jay]

People are talking about the four rules of stupid that’s what they’re talking about those convenience stores that are just easy targets for robbers.

[MCG]

And I’m like kind of condemn this woman she works there of course sure but if you don’t have to go one they overpriced anyway and two you never know what’s going to happen there the only time I go there is if I’m on the road Highway driving for hours upon hours and I need a gas station and that’s the closest one but other than that I don’t go to those places man absolutely next one is Florida teens lured 14-year-old girl into woods before fatally shooting her and setting her body on fire, according to the police.

[Jay]

Going on with our children.

[MCG]

Teenagers, young people, too. Anyways, and my last one is the one we did some time ago. I think you did this one. But Finnish member of parliament was her name Pavey. I’m not even going to try to say her last name. She was found guilty of hate speech over a 22-year-old pamphlet. I think I remember the story. Yes, I think the lower courts had given her the victory, but they appeal it to the highest court and then thinks they charge her some a fine because of the pamphlet. So.

[Jay]

That’s insane.

[MCG]

Anyways, those are my dishonorable mentions.

[Jay]

Okay, I’ve got to. First, The Providence mayor calls for removal of Irina Zarutska mural, saying that the intent is divisive and misguided. You’ll remember, Irina Zarutska is the Ukrainian refugee that was stabbed in a train during a train ride unprovoked in North Carolina. And there was a mural put up in order to remember and honor her. And this mayor called for the removal of it because he feels like it is divisive and misguided. And I won’t say much about this, but I did pull up a website that tracked every single social justice event and movement since the death of George Floyd, every single event that happened in Rhode Island since his death. And this particular mayor was in power for more than half of those events, and he never said a word in order to discourage all of those different events. But when someone wants to create a mural for Zarutska, it’s a problem, and I think that’s bonkers. We’ll leave.

[MCG]

Is it because she’s white and young and female?

[Jay]

Yeah, and she was the victim. And so because she’s white, clearly she’s in the wrong. So we can’t have a mural to a white person put up that that’s just divisive, which is bonkers. It’s insane. I’ll leave that there. And my last one there is, which I’m pretty sure many of us have heard, Joseph Duggar of 19 Kids and Counting, charged with child sex abuse and is awaiting extradition to Florida. This piece of news has been living rent free in my head since it came out, because not only do I hate what happened here, I also hate the coverage that I’m seeing about it, both from the news sites and also from people who obviously have an anti-Christian bent. And they’re using this as an opportunity to cast shade on the Lord, on his name, on his power to forgive and restore and to heal. And that really, really, really bothers me. And so that is a dishonorable mention. I put it as a dishonorable mention because I didn’t want to go into detail with it. because it definitely really bothers me. It bothers me that it even happened. The fact that this was done after his older brother was already found guilty of pretty much the same thing. And the coverage bothers me a great deal. So those are my two dishonorable mentions.

[MCG]

Yeah, I guess we’ll have to see what come out from the court with that. Anyways.

[Jay]

Yep.

[MCG]

I’ll end with a letter from Franklin Graham to none other than President Donald Trump now I don’t always align with Franklin Graham doctrine I’m sure.

[Jay]

You know you’re the only one that pronounces a Graham right?

[MCG]

But on October 15th he sent a letter to President Donald Trump and if you remember sometime around that time President Donald Trump was actually he believed he was going to get to heaven and he said that I think he said he hopes so or you think so and then he started listing off all the good deed he has done that he might get him in or whatever he said. But Franklin Graham, being in the inner circle of Donald Trump, decided to send Donald Trump a letter concerning the matter. I’m going to read a letter, then I’m going to give my opinion and to why I’m reading this letter. Dear President Trump, congratulations. The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and the hostages being returned home are incredible accomplishment. Your leadership is historic. This is an answer to much prayer. Jesus said, blessed are the peacemakers, Matthew 59. And Mr. President, that is what you are. This week you commented to the media that you might not be heaven bound. Maybe you responded in jest, but it is an important issue to know for certain that you’re solely secure and will spend eternity in the presence of God. The only one who can save us from hell is Jesus Christ. You can’t save yourself. I can’t save myself. Good works, Emanence, success, none of these things get us to heaven. The only way to heaven is through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. God requires us to turn from our sins and by faith, belief in our heart that Jesus Christ came to earth, died on the cross for our sins, was buried, and God raised him to life on the third day. If you accept that by faith and invite him to come into your heart, you are heaven bound, I promise you. The Bible says, If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Romans 109. You continue to be in my prayers. Franklin Graham. And, you know, again, I may not agree with everything his doctrine is saying, but what this says to me is that he’s actively trying to win the people in his inner circle. You know, I probably would not have such access to the president. Of course, I could write the president a letter. every one of us can but would the president post our letter on social media showing what we wrote to him maybe not but Franklin he decided to post what Franklin Graham wrote to him and to some degree a clear presentation of gospel let him know he can’t be saved by works is only to repentant faith in Jesus Christ so let me ask you as we always say and as we always ask during the bunkers episode do you agree with us do you agree that this world has gone bunkers Well, again, as we always ask, what are you doing about it? Franklin Graham decided that he heard the president say something that very bonkers, and he sent him a letter with a gospel message, something as simple as that. As one man say, you know, I’m just one beggar telling another beggar where to find the bread. And my encouragement to you is to go and tell another sinner on of the need of Jesus Christ. And one soul telling another soul, maybe we’ll make this world a little less bonkers.

[Jay]

This is the Removing Barriers podcast. If the podcast or the blog were a blessing to you, leave us a rating and a review on your favorite podcast platform. And don’t forget to share the podcast with your friends. Removing Barriers, A Clear View of the Cross.

[MCG]

Thank you for listening. To get a hold of us, To support this podcast or to learn more about removing barriers, go to removingbarriers.net. This has been the Removing Barriers podcast. We attempted to remove barriers so that we all can have a clear view of the cross.