Desert Rose and I went on the Freethinking Ministries podcast to talk about Trump’s Cabinet picks. We talked about around a dozen of Trump’s Cabinet picks with host Josh Klein. Which ones will be confirmed? Which ones were home runs? Which ones were stinkers? Tune in to find out. And along the way, we  talked about why Christians should care about policy. See below for my notes.

Here’s the YouTube episode:

And if you like audio-only podcasts, you will find the episode here on Apple, here on Spotify, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts. These guys are a regular listen for me, because they are great on apologetics, and on policy. Which is uncommon.

Here are my notes with links to the articles that I read, to prepare to go on the show:

• This Trump Pick Can Silently Strangle the Deep State (Daily Signal)
• Trump taps longtime ally Kash Patel to lead FBI (New York Post)
• 5 biggest FBI scandals during Christopher Wray’s tenure as director (Fox News)
• Trump taps COVID-censored Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH (New York Post)
• 5 revelations from the House COVID-19 report (Christian Post)
• Trump names his picks for FDA, CDC and surgeon general (New York Post)
• Trump Taps Champion of Free Speech, Biological Reality to Replace Woman at DOJ Who Jailed Pro-Lifers (Daily Signal)
• Putting RFK Jr. in charge of health breaks the first rule of medicine (New York Post)
• ‘Disgusting’: Nikki Haley Condemns Two Trump Cabinet Picks (Daily Caller)
• Dr. Oz, Running For U.S. Senate As A Republican, Has A History Of Donating To Democrats (Daily Wire)
• Trump Cabinet pick Dr. Janette Nesheiwat faces MAGA fury after COVID videos resurface (UK Daily Mail)
• President Trump needs the full story on Penny Schwinn’s education history in TN (Robby Starbuck)

We talked about several other picks not discussed in these links, as well.

Just hours before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, Joe Biden gave sweeping pardons to Dr. Anthony Fauci, Army General Mark Milley, and members of the Democrat-run January 6 committee. These pardons offer convincing evindence that these individuals engaged in wrongdoing, and their acceptance of these pardons are evidence that they admit that they are guilty.

This article from The Federalist is by Beth Brelje, and she has a very direct headline: “Mentally Incompetent Biden Confirms Guilt Of J6 Committee, Fauci, Milley With Last-Minute Pardons”.

It says:

To be pardoned for a crime, there must be a crime. None of the people on this list have been charged for the awful ways they harmed people in their official capacities.

[…]As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice recently reported, during the hearings, “Cheney started coordinating with ex-White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson using the encrypted Signal app to circumvent Hutchinson’s attorney, Stefan Passantino. Hutchinson suddenly went from a benign fact-witness without much to offer Jan. 6 investigators to the committee’s breakout star, offering outlandish testimony about then-President Trump attempting to violently hijack a vehicle from his Secret Service detail so he could personally riot at the Capitol.”

So which is it? Award-winning behavior, or a crime? She tampered with a witness and tainted the facts presented to the American people.

Sounds like a crime, and with this preemptive pardon, Biden proves he thinks so too — a crime vulnerable to investigation that would lead to charges. It could be no other reason.

What about Milley? What crime did he commit?

Milley was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was the top dog during the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, which saw 13 soldiers die, hundreds of Americans stranded, and millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment abandoned.

Heads did not roll. Instead, the White House characterized the withdrawal as a success.

Under Milley’s leadership, the military went woke, embracing LGBTQ issues and placed racial equity above military readiness. Federalist writer Jordan Boyd reported in 2021 how, the day before the withdrawal, Milley was in a Senate a hearing explaining that he wanted to understand “white rage.”

The book, “Peril,” claimed that after Jan. 6, Milley called his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng, and allegedly told him the “American government is stable” and promised the U.S. would not attack and that the Chinese would be warned first.

With the last-minute pardon, Biden finally admits the withdrawal was a crime. But he robs the U.S. of the justice that comes from accountability. It is not surprising; Biden is good at bad exits, a BBC report said.

Another article from The Federalist, by Jordan Boyd, goes into the details on why Fauci needs a pardon:

The evidence overwhelming indicates Fauci played a large role in funding the Wuhan lab where the deadly virus originated and also worked overtime to subvert information about the viral leak that killed millions of people worldwide.

Biden’s pardon for Facui notably extends back to Jan. 1, 2014. It was around that same time that NIAID’s parent agency, the National Institutes of Health, claimed it ceased funding for the gain-of-function research (GOF) “involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses.” GOF involves extracting viruses from the wild and engineering them to infect humans to study potential therapeutics. Just three years later, GOF was eligible for taxpayer funding again.

Fauci not only supported GOF research of coronaviruses like Covid-19, but he also devoted taxpayer funding to it — specifically in the form of a $600,000 five-year annual grant through the EcoHealth Alliance for work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Then he lied about the research’s existence to Congress.

As early as February 2020, Fauci knew the signs of Covid-19’s creation and origin pointed to the Wuhan lab. He also knew from a 2020 Federalist article that masking was ineffective, flip-flopped on the importance of in-person schooling, nuked the herd immunity strategies in favor of deadly lockdowns, and pushed for a forced jab proven not to prevent infection.

Instead of informing Americans of these facts, Fauci colluded with federal government players like the CIA, the Department of State, and the Biden White House to downplay the truth about the virus. He also turned a blind eye when corporate media and Big Tech censors used their power in the public square to defame and deplatform those who dissented from the regime’s Covid response.

Fauci opted for ineffective and even harmful Covid-19 policies that made him and his agency millions. Shortly before the pandemic he became the highest-paid federal employee.

Biden’s pardon of Fauci may look like an obstacle to the justice he deserves, but it’s actually a gift in the form of an admission.

For one, Biden’s pardon does not protect Fauci from a reckoning in the form of state prosecutions. Nor does it prevent Congress from compelling Fauci to explain in detail his role in one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history.

Sen. Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, already vowed on Monday to continue Congress’s pursuit to “pierce the veil of deception.”

“If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the COVID pandemic, Biden’s pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal,” he wrote on X.

What should we make of these pardons? These pardons make me think about the evangelicals for Biden, like David French and Russell Moore. These two clowns present themselves to others as pious and moral Christians. And they claim to care about morality. But now we know that they don’t care about morality at all. Or the rule of law. They just care about saying whatever they have to say to get the approval of secular left elites.

I saw two interesting articles over at The Federalist, listing out 12 corrupt actions that Joe Biden committed, and 7 reasons why Biden was one of our worse presidents. I read through these, and the first thing I though of was all of the “Christians” who cheered him on in his presidency: people like David French, Russell Moore, etc. How could “Christian” leaders support such an immoral man?

Here’s the first article about the 12 corrupt actions.

Releasing Gantanamo Bay prisoners:

The Biden administration has been busy its last few weeks in office repatriating terrorists and other bad actors imprisoned at Gitmo back to foreign countries throughout the world. The decision appears to be an attempt to fulfill Biden’s pledge to close the high-security detention facility by the end of his presidency.

Unsurprisingly, relocating Gitmo detainees to foreign countries has produced horrendous consequences. According to the New York Post, “Twenty-three years after the 9/11 attacks on NYC, new US intelligence documents reveal 234 ‘rehabbed’ former Gitmo detainees have returned to terrorism and killing Americans — an alarming 32% recidivism rate. Most of them have not been recaptured and are still at large.”

Pardoning Hunter Biden to protect himself:

For Americans who have followed the Biden family’s corruption, it came as no surprise when Sleepy Joe doled out a blanket pardon for his son Hunter last month. Rather than only wiping Hunter’s slate clean of his tax and gun charges, Biden’s pardon covered all “offenses against the United States which [Hunter] has committed or may have committed or taken part in” dating back to January 2014.

The move marked a clear attempt by the outgoing president to protect his son (and himself) from criminal investigation into the Biden family’s foreign business dealings.

Raising the price of oil and gas:

The Biden administration’s war on American energy is nothing new. But his latest action to stymie incoming President Donald Trump’s plans to unleash the country’s oil and gas industries takes on a whole new level of despicable.

As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice reported, Biden issued an executive order earlier this month “banning new oil and gas projects across 625 million acres of ocean across the East and West Coasts, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Bering Sea.” While Trump has vowed to undo the “ridiculous” edict, the law weaponized by the outgoing administration to shut down the planned projects will seemingly make such an action much more difficult.

Bailing out people who refuse to pay back the money they borrowed for useless university degrees – with your children’s money:

After being denied by the U.S. Supreme Court twice, Biden is spending his final days in office attempting to circumvent the nation’s high court by unilaterally bailing out student loan borrowers. The administration announced Monday it used taxpayer money to “cancel” the debts of more than 150,000 individuals who chose to take on such loans.

In the second article, we hear about 7 reasons why Biden was one of our worse presidents.

Runaway inflation, caused by blocking energy production, and runaway government spending:

According to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, $100 when Biden took office is now worth just $82.88. Relatedly, Americans’ credit card debt has risen 51 percent under Biden (through last September), to $1.166 trillion, the highest tally on record.

What’s more, the federal government racked up more deficit spending during just the first half of Biden’s presidency than it did during the four years of World War II — even after adjusting for inflation (see “Chart”). With such massive quantities of borrowed money sloshing around in the economy, inflation predictably ensued, with everyday Americans paying higher prices for items ranging from groceries… to Big Macs, to airline tickets, to cars, to homes. Speaking of homes, 30-year mortgage interest rates rose from 2.8 percent to 7.0 percent on Biden’s watch.

Supporting racial divisiveness and misogyny:

On his very first day in office, Biden issued an executive order on “equity.” Asserting that America is a land of “unbearable … systemic racism” — a claim unsupported by the evidence — Biden launched “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.” This radical agenda informed Biden’s entire presidency — from his refusal to enforce federal immigration laws (which are said to disadvantage non-citizen “people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality”), to his rejection of the colorblind ideal in favor of race-consciousness and favoritism, to his insistence that boys and men should be allowed to play girls’ and women’s sports and use ladies’ locker rooms, and that anyone who says otherwise is a “bigot” whose views should be suppressed by the federal government and/or its social media allies. This radical leftist social agenda, which defies both basic notions of equal treatment for all and basic recognition of biological truths, became a hallmark of Biden’s presidency.

Lawlessness and abuse of power:

The federal courts routinely had to rebuke Biden for issuing kingly mandates that usurped legislative power. Examples include his vaccine/mask decree at the expense of private workers; his transportation edict requiring Americans to wear masks on planes, trains, and buses; his proclamation that federal employees had to get one of the experimental Covid vaccines or else be fired; and his ploy, via executive fiat, to transfer some $400 billion in student-loan debt from borrowers to taxpayers as a whole. (After being rebuked by the Supreme Court in the latter instance, Biden declared that “that didn’t stop me,” as he went around the verdict and transferred much of that student loan debt anyway.) Each of these monarchical decrees was struck down by the federal courts on the grounds that Biden exceeded his lawful authority.

Not content merely with usurping legislative power, Biden also took it upon himself to try to rewrite the Constitution. On literally the last official federal workday of his presidency (the Friday before Inauguration Day), Biden — in opposition to a recent statement from Colleen Shogan, his own appointee as the Archivist of the United States — declared that the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment whose ratification window expired more than 40 years ago, somehow is now “the law of the land” and “has become part of our Constitution” — per his decree.

Since evangelicals for Biden – people like Russell Moore, David French, the ERLC, etc. – supported these actions and policies, you really have to wonder whether “Christian” leaders are capable of understanding morality. Did they just get compromised by their desperate desire to get the approval of non-Christians?