If you think for yourself and you say something that goes against the mainstream media or the narrative that they're putting out there, the constant, you know, the drumbeat of fear and all of those things, well, tell you what they're going to take you off social media, they're going to malign you in the public square certainly where opinions are concerned.

And I'm watching more and more individuals now starting to go, wait a second, why am I even doing this? They don't even know why they're doing it, they're not thinking for themselves.

My thinking, and I've left here what you think about this, I believe it's fear as that's the root of it. What say you?

Well, everybody is afraid to dissent from the crowd, right? This is just human nature. We don't want to stand out. We become afraid to take a stand if it's going to make us hated, especially if it's going to cost us our job.

And this is just human nature. I used to be so judgmental of my parents' generation, because I'm in the deep south. I'm from South Louisiana. I live here now. And I could, I was the first generation to go through racially integrated public schools in my state.

And I used to be so judgmental about my parents' generation. How could they have stood by and allowed segregation to happen?

It just seemed crazy to me. But then as I got older, the more I thought about it, what if I had been living in that town and my own hometown during the segregation years, it would have required immense courage as a white person to stand up and say, this is wrong.

You would have had the entire community come down on your head. And I'm not saying it's right to have been quiet about it. I'm just saying that this, if really does become difficult to stand against the crowd.

But what choice do we have? That's the thing. When I was over in the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, the former Soviet block, people would tell me Christians I interviewed who had been dissidents. They said, you mustn't think that all Christians were like this. Most everybody kept their heads down to avoid trouble.

It was only the rare Christian who dared to stand up. But people like the Benda family I mentioned earlier in Prague. I mean, that whole family stood up because they knew that this wasn't just about their politics. This was about their soul.

I asked Camilla, the mom, I said, how did you prepare your children? They had like six kids. How did you prepare your children to resist and to hold on to their Catholic faith?

And she said, because her husband had told him to teach the kids about what's going on in the world and the lies they were hearing in school and how to detect those lies. She said that she read to them constantly two hours a day, even though she was working. Her husband was in prison as a political prisoner for some of that time.

She always read to them two hours a day. I said, Camilla, what did you read? She said, well, I read them the classics. I read them myths. I read them great literature. And I read a lot of Tolkien. I said, Tolkien, why Tolkien? She looked at me straight in the eyes, and she said, because we knew that Mordor was real.

And this was her way of preparing her children who couldn't understand the complexity of what communism was, what totalitarianism was, but they could understand what it meant to resist evil and what it meant to make fellowship with other people, other good people and to fight the good fight.

And she would tell her kids, kids, this is what mom and dad are doing. This is what our friends are doing. And that was how she built them up internally, built their consciences up. And this is the same sort of thing we have to do here in America.

You know, we have to give our children these stories of things that are good, true and beautiful. So they will be able to apply these stories to take them into their hearts and apply them in the real world.

Yeah. And that's what we're going to have to get him ready for. I was talking to my 24 year old son the other day, and I was like, man, we have made a mess of things. I'm really sorry.

Like I'm going to do everything I can to try to write the ship, but I think you guys are in for some hard times. And that's just the truth, just trying to say, hey, look at the cancel culture, look what's going on around you.

Even my even my grown kids, many of them, you know, they're at their in their late 20s now are starting to realize, boy, you speak the truth in the public square and it can cost you.

It really can right now. And so the cost is real, but in your book, you've, you've talked about some of the things that people can do to resist, which is really, you know, the title of the book, live not by lies.

One of the things that really caught my attention was see judge and act toward the end of the book. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, Father Kulakovic adopted this method, a very simple method that he taught his followers to help them get ready for communism.

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