From the heart of our nation’s capital in Washington, DC., bringing compelling interviews, insightful analysis, taking you beyond the headlines and sound bites into conversations with our nation’s leaders and newsmakers, all from a biblical world view. Washington Watch with Tony Perkins starts now.
They are bringing criminals into our country. They are allowing them into our smallest towns, and our people are dying.
That was Patty Moran on Capitol Hill earlier today, testifying at a hearing of the Homeland Security Committee. Her daughter, Rachel, was raped and murdered by an illegal Salvadorian migrant, Victor Martinez Hernandez. This is Washington Watch.
Thanks for joining us. We’ll discuss today’s hearing on how the Biden-Harris Open Borders policy is undermining the safety and security of Americans, with Oklahoma Congressman Josh Brecheen, a member of the Homeland Security Committee. Also, a tale of two chambers.
We have less than two weeks now before September 30th. If the house and Senate do not act by then to extend government funding, the government will shut down. And there will be no ambiguity that it will be a Republican shutdown.
That, of course, was Senate scare leader Chuck Schumer. But who is really to blame?
We funded over almost 73 percent of federal spending off the house floor in complete and total votes. The process bogged down. You know why?
because Chuck Schumer and the Senate have not put one approps bill on the floor. They have not even begun to do their job. So it is the Senate that has put us in a situation to have to have a CR to not shut the government down.
That was house Speaker Mike Johnson earlier today. We’re going to talk with Ohio Congressman Warren Davidson, a member of the house Financial Services. Also, earlier today, members of the Family Research Council policy team participated in a briefing of the Congressional Family caucus, which is led by Congresswoman Mary Miller.
The briefing was on measures designed to protect children from gender experimentation. Walt Heyer, senior fellow at Family Research Council and founder of sexchangeregret.com will join me later. Hezbollah militants in Lebanon were shaken again today by a second wave of explosions as walkie-talkies detonated, killing 14 and injuring 450, according to Reuters News Service.
Always the useful tool of the terrorists, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for an independent investigation into the exploding pagers. The United Nations Security Council has also called for a meeting on Friday to discuss the blast. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had this to say.
This event confirms that there is a serious risk of a dramatic escalation in Lebanon, and everything must be done to avoid that escalation.
Well, and I can assure you, the United Nations will not solve the problem. We’re going to get an update on Israel and the war from Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor of the Jewish News Syndicate, who just arrived in Washington from Israel. That’s coming up a little bit later.
All right, as we speak, the house is moving forward on a continuing resolution for government funding that would extend funding into March past the unaccountable end-of-year lame duck session of Congress. Democrats oppose this legislation because they want to set the table for another bloated end-of-year omnibus package that allows for more spending. Also, they do not want the SAFE Act, which would keep illegal aliens from voting in federal elections.
Joining me now with the latest is Congressman Warren Davidson. He serves on the house Foreign Affairs Committee, the Select Committee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, and the Financial Services Committee. He represents the 8th Congressional District of Ohio.
Congressman Davidson, welcome back to Washington Watch.
Always an honor to join you, Tony. Thanks for talking with me.
So, the vote is, I mean, the debate is happening right now. Speaking to members of the leadership team earlier today, it looks like it’s going to be a few votes short.
Yeah, it’s not expected to pass. Of course, Democrats aren’t giving, they might give some, which is a little bit of a surprise, but there won’t be enough Democrats to support it. And for Republicans, we have this, you know, kind of odd mix of people that are panicking, oh, we can’t possibly risk anything.
They apparently ran for Congress to keep everything going just the way that it is. And then on the other end, we’ve got some Republicans that unless it’s perfect, they don’t want to vote for it either. And no CR could ever be considered perfect, so they won’t vote for anything, even if we’re going to get a policy win.
So that leaves us votes short. So it’s a tough spot to get in, because as I’ve been back home over august, we spent our time back in the districts all over the country. I don’t think anyone said, please keep the government going just the way it is.
I think everyone said change something, and one of the big ones they’re concerned about is election integrity.
Right. And this would be the measure, and of course, the house has already passed it. The Senate, like all good bills, just sits on them.
They do nothing with them. But this being attached to a must pass piece of legislation could give a little extra push to it, could it not?
Yeah, that’s the goal is to put it on something that the Senate has to deal with. They’ve been able to ignore the fact that we passed HR2 last year to actually secure the border, and I think that’s a valid question. Why not just make sure that we don’t have illegals here in the first place?
Then you don’t have to stop them from voting because they’re not here to vote. So we tried HR2 for a long time. We couldn’t get a vote on that from the Senate.
Now we’re at least saying, well, as we have an election that’s going to be largely about, how do we deal with the illegals that are here? Let’s make sure that they can’t participate in this election. And as we speak, you’ve got states like Arizona that are found to, oops, we did it again.
We’ve got almost 100,000 people that are not citizens that they registered to vote.
The other aspect of this is to break a cycle. I mean, we’ve seen this last year, of course, we did see something different out of the house to avoid the massive omnibus that the Democrats have become so accustomed to putting Congress up to at the last few days of December. So this would push it into March.
It looks like what Chuck Schumer is pushing for, Democrats are pushing for, is another year-end CR or another year-end omnibus. I mean, do your colleagues not see that coming?
Yeah, I think everyone, no one’s putting the breaking news headline out there that Congress misses another funding deadline. And frankly, there’s no excuse for Congress to miss the deadline. We know it’s September 30th every year, October 1st starts the new fiscal year.
But if there is ever a reason to say, well, maybe we shouldn’t do the deadline, it would be in a presidential year because it is going to be front and center to the election between Kamala Harris on the one hand and Donald Trump on the other, which direction we’re going to go on all sorts of policies. And it makes it pretty high stakes. So I think the thing that really is fair to the country is to say, look, there are very different views, let’s put these things on the ballot and deal with them in the first 100 days.
And so that’s, I think, a reasonable thing. Short of that, we know that Republicans, even if we do win in November, if we allow this to expire in December, which is the traditional Christmas omnibus, Republicans are going to get rolled one more time because Joe Biden going out, or then we have the risk of a shutdown that would carry on for as much as a month going into the new administration.
Well, I’ll have to say, I’ve never been an advocate for shutdowns. But if that’s the case, we come to December because of what the Democrats wanted to do in a massive spending bill, that would be the time to shut the government down at that point, if that’s what they want. I want to switch gears, Congressman, to talk about today, the Fed announced a half-percentage point drop in interest rates.
They’re now concerned that the economy might be stalled. They’re citing the jobs numbers. Could this be the result?
I mean, this is, I mean, we could see the economy stall with the decrease in jobs. But could this be in part because of the dishonest reporting that we’ve seen by the Biden administration on job growth?
Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. This exposes the Biden economy as complete fake news. It’s been misinformation and disinformation to say the economy is strong.
households have been jumping up and down saying, pay attention to us. We can’t afford anything. Debt’s going through the roof.
And you know, they’ve looked at macroeconomists saying, no, everything’s fine. Well, the average might be fine because some of the wealthiest people are flush with cash. They’re in a great financial position because when you have lots of assets and inflation takes hold, well, the wealthy have their assets inflated.
But when you have people that are living paycheck to paycheck, that are on second and third shift jobs, waiting to clock in as the Wall Street’s shutting down for the day, their household income hasn’t gone up. They can’t even afford to buy many of the things. And so debt has really risen, consumer debt has been.
So it looks like the Fed’s finally paying attention to the fundamentals in the economy. It says that they actually believe the corrected numbers and not the fake reports up front.
But this is, as you just pointed out, this has real life implications for the average American. You’ve got the Biden administration that has had to revise, and minor revisions are not unusual, but they’ve had to make significant revisions. The last time over 800,000 jobs that they misreported that weren’t there.
And people are making, as the Fed, being one of them, making financial decisions that affect the entire country based upon these numbers. This would suggest that this is not an administration that can be trusted.
No, they haven’t proven trustworthy, and even the numbers that they were saying up front didn’t get the right scrutiny. Even if they were true, it was, well, you reopen the economy after artificially keeping it closed. That’s not exactly a sign of future expansion.
That’s just a recovery from not really just pandemic risk, but government risk where governments mandated lots of things be closed. People knew there was a pandemic, but governments all over the world imposed limitations on supply. When you added all that extra money into the economy, not just in America, but in a lot of places around the world, of course, it was going to create inflation.
They tried to deny that for the longest time. Now, it says, yeah, we are confronting it. We are going to have to address it just to keep the economy having some sort of momentum.
Congressman Davidson, I know you’re going to have to run here in just a minute. A final question I want to ask you here is we’re up in an election season. Congress is going to be here for a couple more weeks and they’re going to break and go back home.
As you travel the country back in your home state of Ohio as well, what are you hearing from voters? What is top of mind?
I mean, I think top issues are the economy and inflation is the top of the issues in economy. Affordability might be a different way to phrase that. I can’t afford the things that I used to be able to afford.
There’s a lot of concern about national security. If you look at Kamala Harris, Dick Cheney endorsing her says, they’re definitely going to embrace the more wars in more places, as much as it takes, as long as it takes, foreign policy that has gotten into this mess under the Biden administration. Then they’re concerned about our border.
Every area has become a border problem. Even when you have legal refugees, you can see any community can be overwhelmed. One of the big reasons is because of chain migration.
There’s a real desire to reform those three things. Those top three issues are all at odds with what the Biden-Harris administration has done and what Democrats are promising. So, I feel optimistic Republicans are going to perform very strongly in this election.
It is a policy-driven election. Warren Davidson, always great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Likewise. Thank you, Tony. God bless you and all your viewers.
Thank you. Congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio. This is the reason we need to pray, we need to vote, we need to stand.
I’m going to say something here. We’ve got some serious challenges in America, all right? And I think however the election goes, we’re going to have problems, we’re either going to have problems or we’re going to have big problems.
We’ve got to be prepared as Christians in this country to be a part of the solution. We need to be praying for our government, we need to be voting, and then we need to be standing for truth, pointing the way. And that’s a part of what we’re going to be focusing on at the Pray Vote Stand Summit, here in our nation’s capital October the 3rd through the 6th.
And I invite you to come and join us as we pray, and we will be praying, and we will be preparing to vote, and we’ll be getting the tools out to educate other voters, and then we’re going to make a commitment that we’re going to stand for truth. All right, don’t go away, we’re coming back with more Washington Watch right on the other side of this break.
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Hello, I’m Jody Hise, president of FRC Action. Here in America, we thank God for the right to vote, and we can all agree on the importance of this upcoming election. Many of us want to support candidates who share our values, but we’re not comfortable supporting the big national political organizations.
Well, we have a solution for supporting candidates through FRC Action’s Faith, Family and Freedom Fund. Being a super PAC, it allows for unlimited individual and corporate donations, so we can endorse and fund campaigns for people who share our values. By giving to this fund, we’re able to pull all of our contributions together and support and endorse like-minded candidates.
That’s how we move the needle. So let’s be the best stewards possible and get the most out of our political contributions by uniting our efforts. For more information or to contribute, visit paythefamilyfreedomfund.org.
Thank you so much and God bless you.
All of us are born with the desire to find truth and meaning.
While our answers to these questions may divide us, we are united in our need for the freedom to answer life’s biggest questions and make life’s biggest decisions for ourselves. That’s why religious freedom matters for everyone. religious freedom matters because the powerful have long wanted to control those who are less powerful.
religious freedom matters because the freedom of those who are different is often threatened by those who believe different is dangerous. At the Center for religious Liberty at Family Research Council, we promote religious freedom for everyone, because the only alternative is religious freedom for no one. We encourage Americans and the American government to engage and advocate for the persecuted, and they do.
We work every day to bring good news to the afflicted, to proclaim liberty to captives, and freedom to prisoners. We do it because that’s what jesus does. We work to give freedom to others, because we ourselves have been set free.
Welcome back to Washington Watch. I’m your host, Tony Perkins. The website, tonyperkins.com, lots of resources there for you.
All right, the tragic consequences of the Biden-Harris administration’s border policies were front and center today. When the mother of a woman murdered by an illegal immigrant testified before the house Homeland Security Committee. Last august, Rachel Moran, mother of five herself, was found murdered in Maryland.
Prosecutors allege her suspected killer, who was captured in Oklahoma, entered the country illegally. Joining me now to discuss today’s hearing and more is Congressman Josh Brecheen. He serves on the house Homeland Security Committee and the house Budget Committee.
He represents the second Congressional District of Oklahoma. Josh, welcome back to Washington Watch.
Thanks, Tony.
How close are you to having votes called on the CR?
I’m not sure about the exact time, but it’s gonna be this evening.
Okay. I know the debate is going on. I didn’t want people to know where you were going if you jumped up to run and vote.
So let’s talk about the hearing today. Any new information? Let’s talk about what you heard.
Well, I was engaged in another conversation with Ways and Means, and so I came over late. I did not get a chance to hear a testimony, but very much aware of the reason she was there. This mother’s daughter was not only murdered, but also sexually assaulted by an illegal immigrant.
There were warning signs of this individual, and just the lack of vetting that takes place. And then even once some vetting occurs, and these people have broken laws, are allowed to remain in this country unless it’s major infractions. And I went down one by one, except for one of the witnesses who we, the Democrats had brought in, and he was not going to admit that we are in an unsafe environment.
But two people from San Diego, along with the mother, they all just readily state what we all know intrinsically, and that is that you are less safe than you were a year ago. You’re definitely less safe than you were two years ago, and definitely than you were three years ago, because of this administration’s policies. I think many moms and dads, that may be watching your program, know that you’re probably making decisions in terms of your, whether it’s high school or elementary aid kiddos, that you’re keeping a much closer watch on them when they’re going out in public now because of stories like Ms. Moran’s has experienced personally, it’s so tragic.
So Josh, let me ask you this question. We really don’t know the number of illegal aliens that are in the country. I mean, the number of ranges from 12 million to 18 million.
Not all of them are violent criminals, but there are enough to make Americans insecure, insecure, feeling insecure, but also their safety being at risk. Let’s talk about the discussions. What do we do?
What’s going to take place? Let’s say the border policy is fixed, but you have all those folks here in the country. What do you do?
Tony, we’re preparing within our office. I’ve told my team member they’d actually worked with Heritage on some concepts, and we are trying to lean in on deportation and the characteristics of, number one, how do you pay for that? We’ve got a country that can’t afford the government we’ve got, and we can’t afford to allow these people that have broken our laws to remain here because it’s such a distant center for this to continue.
We all that hold Reagan in such high regard would look back at 86 and say, but that was a mistake because it didn’t solve the problem. And so these people have to be removed from this country, it’s my belief. They have to send a signal to people that you cannot come into this country, break the law and expect that you would be first in line.
And so deportation is top and center for many of us, and Trump, of course, is talking about it, and we’ve got to figure out the logistics of that.
I know you’re working on the plan, but let me ask you a couple of 30,000-foot questions regarding that, because some of these people, individuals, have been here for a long time. But the law is the law. What do you say to those who say, well, it’s not really the Christian thing to do to uproot these people who have been here in this country and deport them?
Well, look, they’re trying to mix biblical references about taking care of the foreigner and sojourner. That’s an individual mandate. But there’s also a mandate that you obey the laws of the land.
And we’ve got people who have broken the laws of the land. And so, there’s also the biblical admonition that when there’s not, I think it’s in Ecclesiastes, it talks about when there’s not punishment for wrongdoing, it incites more wrongdoing. And I’m botching that passage of scripture.
But that’s what happens when there’s not consequences. It creates the atmosphere where lawlessness is compounded. So, we’ve got to make sure that the rule of law is upheld in the United States.
And we’re asking for law breaking to the nth power to continue.
Let me follow that train of thought for just a moment, because it ties into my next topic. And I want to quote from Proverbs chapter 28, where it says, for the transgression of a land, many are its princes thereof. But by a man of understanding and knowledge, the state thereof will be prolonged.
That’s the King James version. But you also have been weighing in on yet another attempt to assassinate former president Donald Trump. This speaks to violence, turbulence, an unsettled country.
That lawlessness is manifesting itself at every level.
Yeah.
Tony, they’re tied. You’re pointing to it. They’re absolutely tied.
We are projecting when we don’t have consequences for infractions, that we’re inviting more infractions into a greater level, a greater degree. And lawlessness compounds lawlessness. And so this administration time and time again, deviating from biblical truths.
And where does it end? And you just see so many different characteristics that you could encapsulate in the word of lawlessness. And it’s because they don’t believe that the plumb line was established generations ago.
They think that it’s just, you know, mobile, that it’s relative to however you feel in the moment of what’s right and wrong.
The way out is clear, but not easy.
Look, we’ve got a true north. It’s constitutional in regards to illegal immigration, that we are to protect this nation. Article 4, Section 4, it’s an invasion.
And when you don’t feel safe, and you have millions that are coming into this country, you can wordsmith it all day long, that is an invasion. That is, there’s an old African proverb that says, if there’s no enemy on the inside, the enemy on the outside can do you no harm. Chinese government officials, military positions of influence, have been writing for decades about the way that they would take over America.
It would be a plan to take it from within.
Yeah, and they’re working that plan. Josh Brecheen, always great to see you. Thank you for standing firm on Capitol Hill for truth.
Thanks for your work, Tony, what you stand for.
All right, always great to see you. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma Second Congressional District. All right, don’t go away.
When we come back, some good news, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons renounced gender surgeries for minors. We’re going to talk about the implications there. Don’t go away.
Everything we do begins as an idea. Before there can be acts of courage, there must be the belief that some things are worth sacrificing for. Before there can be marriage, there is the idea that man should not be alone.
Before there was freedom, there was the idea that individuals are created equal. It’s true that all ideas have consequences, but we’re less aware that all consequences are the fruit of ideas. Before there was murder, there was hate.
Before there was a holocaust, there was the belief by some people that other people are undesirable. Our beliefs determine our behavior, and our beliefs about life’s biggest questions determine our world view. Where did I come from?
Who decides what is right and wrong? What happens when I die? Our answers to these questions explain why people see the world so differently.
Debates about abortion are really disagreements about where life gets its value. Debates over sexuality and gender and marriage are really disagreements about whether the rules are made by us or for us. What we think of as political debates are often much more than that.
They’re disagreements about the purpose of our lives and the source of truth. As Christians, our goal must be to think biblically about everything. Our goal is to help you see beyond red and blue, left and right, to see the battle of ideas at the root of it all.
Our goal is to equip Christians with a biblical worldview and help them advance and defend the faith in their families, communities and the public square. Cultural renewal doesn’t begin with campaigns and elections. It begins with individuals turning from lies to truth.
But that won’t happen if people can’t recognize a lie and don’t believe truth exists. We want to help you see the spiritual war behind the political war. The truth claims behind the press release in the forest and the trees.
This is Washington Watch. Good to have you with us on this Wednesday afternoon. The website is tonyperkins.com.
Earlier today, the Congressional Family caucus, led by Congresswoman Mary Miller, held a member and staff briefing to discuss and to draw awareness to a couple of measures that are designed to protect children from gender experimentation. Now, this comes even as the most mainstream medical associations remain captive to transgender ideology. They remain doctors and other experts committed to protecting children from these harms, however, and one of the most recent ones was the plastic surgeons, American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
They broke with the rest of the medical community, or a large portion of it, that has been under the spell of the transgender ideology. Joining me now to talk about this is Walt Heyer, he’s a Senior Fellow at the Family Research Council and founder of sexchangeregret.com. Walt, welcome back to Washington Watch.
Thanks for joining us.
Thanks, Tony. It’s a pleasure to be on it, especially to talk about Dr. Steven Williams kind of coming out and saying, you know, they don’t have enough evidence to be doing these harmful procedures to kids.
This is quite significant because they represent about 90 percent of all plastic surgeons. So this is a big break from that chokehold that the transgender ideology has had on the medical community.
Yeah, it is. And I think it’s more significant than we might even realize in that he’s a plastic surgeon. And what we’re really doing with the children, this is plastic surgery.
We haven’t changed. They haven’t ever changed anybody’s gender. This is all plastic surgery.
It’s folklore. And kids need to know that their gender doesn’t change when they do these procedures to them. And parents need to know as well.
Yeah, you’re just kind of, I mean, you’re just changing the appearance. You’re not dealing with the underlying issues at all, nor, I mean, you’re lying to kids. I mean, you’re actually lying to them.
That’s right. And I’ve always said that, Tony, the one thing they do is devalue them when they lie to them by telling them they can change genders, and then they dehumanize them by giving them hormones, and then they destroy their ability to function as a male or female when they perform surgery on them. It’s a sad case, but I’m glad this doctor stepped up.
So, Walt, you have been doing this for a number of years. You have your story, which has brought you to this point of trying to help other people. Let me ask you this question, is we’ve seen more visibility to this issue, and of course, you were a part of the briefing on Capitol Hill today to talk about these measures to protect children.
Are you getting more people reaching out to you that are coming out of a de-transitioning?
A lot more people are reporting harm, and the reason for it is, Tony, is because they did procedures on a lot more people. People fell for this. We had the social contagion where young people wanted to do what their friends were doing, join a group, or we had the online indoctrination on their computers, especially during 2020 when kids weren’t going to school.
So those two factors really kind of put a big spike in the number of children who are identifying as transgender.
Tell us a little bit about today’s briefing on the Hill.
Yeah, well, it was Chloe Cole, Prisha and myself that testified, along with Dr. Van Meter, and we were really able to punch some big holes in the whole advocacy thing about the help. We know everybody gets harmed by this. When I say everybody, I mean everybody gets harmed.
At some point in time, Tony, I have people that write to me at Sex Change Regret, that regretted either three weeks after the surgery, all the way up to 40 years after surgery. Those 40 years said they waited 20 years to admit that it was bad thing for them to do. I think we had a real good impact on the panels that we did, two panels, one at eight and one at three.
I was really glad to be a part of it.
Walt, do you think that the more robust conversation that’s taking place like we’re having here, in addition to a major medical societies coming out, associations coming out and say, hey, we’re not doing this, the science isn’t there, we’re putting the brakes on it. Could we be at a tipping point? Could we see more of this ahead?
Yeah, I think the tipping points come in, Tony, because what’s going to happen is more and more lawsuits. One of my clients that I started with three years ago just settled a lawsuit with one of the major surgery companies in California. And so I think it’s going to be the lawsuits that are going to bring him down, because I’ve already had one doctor report that he’s not going to do it because his medical malpractice insurance went up to like a million dollars a year.
He said, I can’t afford it.
Yeah, I agree. I’ve been having conversations with trial lawyers who usually are on the other side of issues with us. But when they see the dollar signs and the bad medicine, they actually become allies.
Walt Heyer, I want to thank you for joining us. And thanks for the great work that you’re doing.
Thank you. It’s a pleasure. Rhian, take care, Tony.
All right, Walt Heyer, you can find out more about Walt. Go to tonyperkins.com. All right.
This is just one of the examples of what we’re doing to protect children. And this week, you can have three times the impact with your partnership with FRC. As a part of our Children First Campaign and your gift of $30 or more, you’ll actually receive a copy of a book by George Barna.
It’s Raising Spiritual Champions. You know, we’ve got to get our children at the young age. A worldview is shaped between 15 months and 13 years.
We got to get them early so we can prevent them from being taken advantage of, lied to, and their lives nearly destroyed. And that’s what’s happening in this gender ideology movement. And it starts in the home at the earliest of ages.
We’re hitting it every front. And you can help us text the word children to 67742. That’s children to 67742.
We’re not going to back away from these issues. And because we leaned in on this issue about five years ago, six years ago, maybe a little bit longer, we’re seeing tremendous progress being made. We’re going to stand for truth no matter what.
Don’t go away. More Washington Watch. Straight ahead.
Join us October 3rd through the 6th as we gather with spiritually active governance-engaged conservatives from across America at the Pray Vote Stand Summit in Washington, DC. We’ll pray for our nation, engage in government and culture, and stand for biblical truth alongside Christian leaders, worldview experts, and government officials. We’ll discuss important issues like the sanctity of life, religious freedom, protecting students, strengthening families, praying for our nation, and how you can impact America’s future from a biblical worldview.
Our nation stands at a critical juncture, and we must ensure that the issues impacting faith, family, and freedom are understood and advanced. Register now at prayvotestand.org. That’s prayvotestand.org.
jesus said in John 15, These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. In 2024, in these divided and uncertain times, how can this be possible? By abiding in him through his word.
At Family Research Council, we wanna help you do that, which is the reason for the stand on the Word Bible reading plan. In just 10 to 15 minutes each day, you will have read the entire Bible in just two years. But more importantly, you will be abiding in him daily.
Find our Bible reading plan at frc.org/bible. And join Tony Perkins each weekday for a 10-minute devotional, inspired by the daily reading and designed to encourage you on this journey through the Bible. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.
And remember, the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.
Research has found that there are 59 million American adults who are a lot like you. There are millions of people around the country who are born again, deeply committed to practicing their faith, and believe the Bible is the reliable word of God. But that’s not all.
They’re also engaged in our government. They’re voters. They’re more likely to be involved in their community, and they’re making a difference in elections.
The problem is that a lot of them feel alone too. We want to change that. FRC wants to connect these 59 million Americans to speak the truth together, no matter the cost.
If you want to learn more about this group and what it means to be a spiritually active, governance-engaged conservative, or if you want to find out if you are one of these sage-cons yourself, join us. Go to frc.org/s-a-g-e-c-o-n, sage-con, to learn more. That’s S-A-G-E-C-O-N.
Sage-con, to learn more.
Welcome back to Washington Watch. I’m your host, Tony Perkins. So good to have you with us on this Wednesday afternoon, the website tonyperkins.com.
Another round of explosions rocked Lebanon today, just a day after an attack that targeted members of Hezbollah by exploding thousands of their paging devices. Now, since last October, the terrorist group Hezbollah has launched missile strikes into northern Israel, forcing many Israelis in the north to flee their homes and raising concerns that Israel’s war in Gaza could expand into a wider regional conflict. Well, today, there was a second wave of explosions with walkie talkies exploding.
Another dozen plus militants were killed in this attack. What do we anticipate in the Middle East? We’re nearly one year into this war.
This is the longest war that Israel has had since its founding in 1948. And quite frankly, I don’t see an end in sight. Joining me now in studio to discuss this is Caroline Glick.
She’s a senior contributing editor at the Jewish News Syndicate and host of the Caroline Glick Show on JNS. Caroline, welcome in person here to Washington Watch.
It’s great to be in your studio for the first time. Tony, thanks for having me.
And the timing is a little better. It’s not midnight.
No, exactly.
So let me start with what I just said there. I, you’re much closer to it than I am, but I don’t see, I don’t see an end in sight right now.
Well, I mean, I think that we have to win. You were talking in the intro about this becoming a regional war, but really it’s been a regional war. It’s been a seven front war that Iran has been waging against Israel through all of its proxies in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Judean Samaria, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, and from Iran itself.
So we’re talking about a regional war that’s been going on. And then the question just becomes what, how are the different fronts going to develop? So in Lebanon, we’ve seen a massive escalation in the missile attacks on Israel by Hezbollah over the past couple of weeks, where we’ve been seeing over a hundred missiles shot into Israel a day.
You know, the landscape has changed over the past year in northern Israel because they’ve they’ve destroyed large swaths of our forests and the homes themselves and a lot of these communities have been destroyed so that the people have been refugees. They’ve been out of their homes since mid-October. And when they get back, you know, you’re going to have dozens and dozens of homes in their communities in cities like Kiryat Shmona or Metula or in the Kibbutz, it seems they just no longer exist.
So the Israeli military has neither confirmed nor denied the involvement in these pager explosions and now radio explosions today.
And also cars and computers.
A lot of things blowing up. In reading press reports, obviously anonymous sources saying that this was a part of an initial wave of expanding military involvement into Lebanon and that they had to act prematurely because the devices were discovered, but this was actually going to be a diversion of an invasion into Lebanon and the north. So are we that close to seeing the IDF now?
I know they’re moving troops to that region. Are we finished with Gaza for the most part and now moving to the north?
We’re not finished with Gaza. We just buried four soldiers today who were killed yesterday in Gaza, one of them from where I live in my community. But no, we’re not done.
We’re in a multi-front war. There’s nothing we can do about it. We have to continue fighting in Gaza and it’s very difficult because as a maneuver force, the Israel Defense Forces is quite small.
So it means that you have to scale back your operations in Gaza in order to have the forces that you need in order to carry out a conventional battle in South Lebanon. So it’s very difficult. It’s a lot of juggling of the forces and trying to prevent exhaustion of the forces as well and of our reservists.
So it’s a very difficult situation. Luckily, when you talk about previous conflicts, Israel’s economy is much stronger now than it was in previous wars so that we’re able to withstand prolonged battles, but it’s very difficult and it demands a massive sacrifice from the people.
I want to ask you a question. I’m going to come back. I want to play a clip of Kamala Harris, but I want to ask you something you mentioned to me.
We were together last night and you mentioned something about Israelis, the Jewish people, over the last year drawing from biblical faith.
Yes.
And you made a comment that you saw a stream of people talking about after these explosions took place, making references to biblical occurrences.
Yes, to the rape of Dina in Genesis 34. And, you know, that Simeon and Levi going into Shrem and taking revenge on the men for raping their sister. And it was very funny.
You wouldn’t have seen this in the past, but I started getting on all these WhatsApp groups and seeing on Twitter everybody writing, Genesis 34, and calling this the campaign, Dina’s revenge or something like that.
So your point being that something that’s happened, something’s happened in Israel in the last year.
Yeah, look, I mean, I think, sort of like alcoholics, they say that they have to reach rock bottom before they start a recovery process and getting back to health. And October 7th was rock bottom. I mean, what happened on October 7th, I think it was so, it was so heinous and so barbaric and sadistic that I think the immediate response, and that was interesting, that it was really an immediate response, was an overwhelming return to faith.
So we’re seeing this prompting the Jewish people and the Jewish state to return to God.
Yeah, very strongly. And you see that even in pop music, that the songs that everybody’s are singing, they all have biblical illusions. Many of them sound more like prayers than rock songs and a lot more open.
And very fervent prayer among our soldiers before they go into battle while they’re there. A lot of Torah study in Gaza going on between battles. I mean, things that were happening, but more on the margins of the IDF.
You’ve not seen this before.
Not to such an extent, not to in such an overwhelming way that it’s not just soldiers who are from religious communities, but everybody. You have rabbis who do outreach and stuff like that, and you have more and more supposedly secular Jews wanting to wear the men. It’s called laying to fill in.
There are these leather straps that they put around their arms and their foreheads, and it’s usually just a province of Orthodox men. Here you have boys, some of them were teenagers and soldiers, and young men who never even had bar mitzvahs in some cases, and they’re calling up these rabbis and saying, can you bring me to fill in? And so, yeah, we’re seeing an extraordinary religious awakening in Israel.
Is that helping to unify the nation?
Very much. I mean, I think there was a lot of intolerance on the left in the 10 months that preceded the invasion, where they were trying to banish Judaism from the public squares, and there was a lot of really ugly scenes going on, particularly in places like Tel Aviv. And I don’t think that they could happen anymore, because they made everybody angry at the time, but I just wouldn’t be tolerated any longer.
And I think people are realizing that, you know, what happened on October 7th happened because we’re Jewish. And if we want to withstand this challenge to our survival, then we do it as Jews.
And do you think this is drawing the Jewish and the Christian population, Bible-believing population closer together?
I think so, you know, from a Jewish perspective, I think that the less tied to God and to the Torah that a Jew feels, the more threatened they feel by people of faith who, who, who support them because of their faith, because if the Jews don’t have it, then, then they feel more threatened than supported. And I, so I think that the more fervent Israeli Jews are in our belief, and attachment to our traditions and to our faith, the better we are as partners to Christians in the world who support us as well because they believe in Scripture. So I think, and, and are drawn to the, the Holy Land and to God’s people.
So I think, yes, I think that that’s true, that the more, the more confident you are in who you are, and the more knowledgeable you are, the easier it is for you to recognize your friends and, and stand with them.
Well, we, we share the book.
And it’s a good book.
It is a good book. And we are grateful because most of it was written by Jewish people and we’re grateful for that.
All of it from our perspective.
True, real test. I want to, I want to go to another topic. I want to go to a comment made by Vice President Harris, in particular about the, there’s been weapons allocated by the Congress, house Speaker Mike Johnson specifically working on this, taking some real hits to fund Israel, which included weapons needed to finish the task.
Those have been held up. Play clip number eight.
But in the way that we send weapons, in the way that we interact as their ally, are there specific policy changes?
Well, Eugene, for example, one of the things that we have done that I am entirely supportive of is the pause that we’ve put on the 2,000 pound bombs. And so there is some leverage that we have had in use.
Okay. So that was Vice President Kamala Harris with political White house correspondent Eugene Daniels. They’ve held up weapons allocated by the Congress to use those as leverage.
Right. because Kamala Harris has made very clear that when she says she supports Israel’s right to defend itself, what she means is that she supports our ability to intercept missiles en route to Israel. And if we miss from time to time, well, you know, tough luck.
But she does not support Israel defending itself by defeating its enemies. And so the weapon systems that have been held up by the administration are offensive weapon systems that you need in order to finish the job, in order to win. So you said we’ve never faced such a prolonged war before.
We’ve never fought wars for so long before. And that has a lot to do with the White house’s opposition to an Israeli victory, which is shocking given the stakes in this war and the nature of our enemy, Iran and its terror proxies. But that does seem to be the position of this administration.
I mean, their view is kind of if they break into your house, you can defend yourself, but you can’t keep them off your property.
No, no, no. If they’re in your front yard, that’s OK. It’s only if they come in and start raping your wife.
Yeah, I mean, that’s not allowing a nation to defend itself. And sometimes you actually have to go and eliminate the threat in order to secure. And America knows that.
I mean, we do the same thing. I want to play another clip because as we talk about resolution, bringing a managed peace to the Middle East, you have to have a clear vision of what that looks like. I’m not sure she has that.
Play clip number seven.
We have to agree that not only must we end this war, but we have to have a goal of a two-state solution because there must be stability and peace in that reason. In as much as what we do in our goal is to ensure that Israelis have security and Palestinians in equal measure, have security, have self-determination and dignity.
Okay. Gaza was under control by the Palestinians since 2007.
2005.
Right. They’ve had that property, but they elected the Hamas in 2007 and they had total control there. That’s just a little strip of land.
When you’re talking about a two-state solution, we’re talking about literally the heart of the land of Israel, Judea and Samaria. How does that work out?
It doesn’t work out. I mean, if they could cause a kind of damage to Israel, overrun our communities, committed in one day genocide on October 7th from within our territory, from Gaza, from that little smidge of land that they’ve been sovereign in since 2005, 2007, and what would they do if they had the commanding heights that control Ben-Gurion Airport, that control the eastern border of Israel to enable invasion from the east? What would they do if they were inside of jerusalem, having control over part of the city?
I mean, this is just an invitation for genocide. And because, you know, there’s this myth that there are these moderate Palestinians that they want peace with Israel, but that’s what’s called the Palestinian Authority. And they’re funded by the United States, their security forces are trained by the United States, et cetera, and they are as dedicated to the annihilation of Israel as Hamas is.
I’m going to ask you to speculate because I can’t figure it out. And anyone who literally knows what’s happening and has been to Israel, which any of our leaders should have gone there, stood on the heights there in Samaria and looked into Tel Aviv and into the Mediterranean. How do they think that this works?
First of all, I don’t think there’s a lot of thinking going on here. I think that you have as a herd mentality where everybody who’s everybody knows that you need to get to a two-state solution and nobody ever is allowed to question that.
because it sounds good, right?
It sounds like you’re fair to everybody. But what you’re not doing is you’re not standing with your ally. You’re standing with people who support the annihilation of your ally and actually they were the ones cheering out in the streets and passing out sweets on September 11th.
From our perspective, and I think you would share this, we believe, Evangelical Bible-believing Christians, this land was given to the Jewish people. It’s not ours to tell you to give it up or anybody else.
Even if you take the spiritual aspect out of it, can you imagine the Americans telling the French that they have to quit Paris? I mean, just on that basis, it’s appalling, but of course, why are we there? We’re there because we’re Jews.
Where are Jews from? From Judea. What has been the capital of the Jewish people since time immemorial?
jerusalem.
Right, it’s very troubling, but very important that we get this right. Carolyn, always great to see you and always love having you on the program so that we can keep our viewers and listeners informed as to what’s going on.
It’s always a pleasure and a privilege to be on your show with you. Thank you, and it’s exciting to be here in your studio for the first time.
All right, well, have a great evening. And folks, I want to thank you for joining us as well. And I do want to encourage you to pray, to pray for Israel.
In fact, at the Pray Vote Stand Summit, we’re going to be praying for Israel just a couple of days before the first anniversary of October 7th. So I invite you to join us, prayvotestand.org. You can find out more about how you can be here.
Until next time, I leave you once again with the encouraging words of the Apostle Paul, Found in Ephesians 6, where he says, When you’ve done everything you can do, when you’ve prayed, when you’ve prepared, and when you’ve taken your stand, by all means, keep standing.
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