Welcome to episode 32 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose conclude our discussion about Christianity and economics. We discuss whether socialism or free enterprise is better for Christian liberties and life plans. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

PLEASE NOTE: During this episode, Rose was still stick and coughing a lot. After an air duct cleaning and removing all the very old carpet in her house, she is now completely cured. She has a couple of conference talks next week, (a keynote and a breakout) that she needs to work on. We will try to fit a recording in this week so you have one for next week.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode 32:

Episode  Summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose look at history and discuss whether socialism has been good for Christians. We discuss whether successful European countries are good examples of socialism. We discuss whether high tax rates and government ownership of businesses has been good for Christians in Canada. We then turn to the free market system, and discuss whether it is any better for Christians. Finally, we answer objections to the free market system. This is the third episode of a three-part series.

Speaker biographies

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.

References:

• Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell
• Money, Greed, and God 10th Anniversary Edition: The Christian Case for Free Enterprise by Jay Richards
• Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity by James Gwartney, Richard Stroup,Dwight Lee, Tawni Ferrarini, and Joseph Calhoun
• The Maker Versus the Takers: What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics by Jerry Bowyer
• The Poverty of Nations: A Sustainable Solution by Wayne Grudem and Barry Asmus

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Music attribution:

Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5744-strength-of-the-titans
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

There was some interesting controversy at Twitter on Thursday night. Daily Wire had arranged to offer their “What is a Woman?” movie for free on Twitter for 24 hours, starting at 8 PM Eastern on Thursday night. But they ran into some trouble with some progressive employees at Twitter, who censored it. But now it’s back. I have the link, and the story about what happened.

The link to the documentary.

The story, from Daily Wire:

Twitter restricted the launch of The Daily Wire’s hit documentary “What Is A Woman?” on the platform Thursday evening after Elon Musk, the company’s owner, said earlier in the day that attempts to restrict the film were a “mistake” and would be “fixed.”

Daily Wire co-CEO Jeremy Boreing revealed in a lengthy Twitter thread Thursday morning that Twitter had canceled a deal to stream “What Is A Woman?” and “would no longer provide us any support and would actually limit the reach of the film and label it as ‘hateful conduct’ because of ‘misgendering.’”

“Specifically: In the film, a father refers to his 14-year-old daughter as ‘her,’ and a store owner uses the ‘wrong’ pronoun in a confrontation with a transgender woman,” Boreing said.

Musk responded to Boreing’s Twitter thread by saying that “this was a mistake by many people at Twitter,” adding that the streaming “is definitely allowed.”

However, when the entire hour-and-a-half documentary was uploaded to Twitter at 8:13 p.m., the film was quickly restricted and received a label that read: “Visibility Limited. This Tweet may violate Twitter’s rules against Hateful Conduct.”

Who could have done this inside of Twitter. Well, although Twitter is a software company, they hire a lot of progressive people. In America, we give a lot of student loans to people who want to study useless, worthless degrees. Then when they get out, with tens of thousands of student loan debt, and a worthless degree, they go work for woke companies like Twitter. They have a lot of confidence in themselves, but not a lot of ability to produce results.

Look:

Ella Irwin, the head of Twitter’s trust and safety department — the department that appears to have been responsible for the label being applied — abruptly resigned from the company Thursday afternoon. Her internal Slack account was quickly deactivated by the company, Fortune reported.

The designation on the film blocked Twitter users from being able to retweet or share the video with their audiences. The video garnered 5,000+ retweets/quote retweets in just a couple of minutes after being published before it was restricted.

“That was fast,” Boreing responded. “Even after ⁦@elonmusk ⁩said Twitter’s threat to label What Is A Woman ‘hateful conduct’ and to throttle the film’s reach was a mistake, Twitter did that very thing instantly upon the film going live.”

The tweet still has a “hate speech” warning as of my time of writing (Thursday night – I write all my posts the night before and schedule them all for 10 AM Eastern) and you can’t retweet it.

Well, you better watch this movie for free while you can. I’ve seen it, and it’s great. You will not regret watching it. My favorite scenes: his interviews of the Planned Parenthood woman, and the LGBT male professor. Absolutely perfect.

First, I have some good news for listeners of Knight and Rose. First, we will have a new episode for you coming out this Saturday around noon. Rose still sounds a bit sick in it, but we found out what was causing her to be sick, and we are working on eliminating it. But for today’s post, I just wanted to write something up that I could refer back to if I ever had to answer why I like a secure border.

So, I went looking for a recent article about the costs of illegal immigration, and I found this article from The Daily Signal, written by Erin Dwinell. He is the senior research associate with The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center.

He writes:

Annually, illegal immigration now costs taxpayers billions of dollars a year. For instance, in states far away from the southern border like Illinois, that cost was $4.59 billion in 2022. That’s $930 per household. Every year.

[…]Border communities have long been overwhelmed under these policies. The crisis now costs California $21.76 billion and Texas $8.88 billion annually in education, health care, law enforcement and criminal justice system costs, welfare expenditures, and more. Border states are often the subject of shocking reports of epidemics of violent attacks, taxpayers footing the bill for illegal aliens’ health care costs, and increased property destruction.

It’s not just border states. A lot of states are run by Democrats and they refuse to enforce immigration policies. The voters in these blue states want to be seen as tolerant and generous. But there’s a price to pay:

At a rate of $65,116 per alien, New York City Mayor Eric Adams estimates his city will need to spend $2.8 billion in the next fiscal year to deal with the rapid influx.

The costs are for things like health care, education, state and local government benefits, legal representation, etc. Boy, that sure is a lot of money just to be able to virtue signal to the rest of America about how generous you are.

But the funny thing is, Democrat voters aren’t actually generous. They talk about being generous, but when the bill comes due, they don’t want to pay it. As I blogged about recently, leftism is mostly about loudly talking about being on board with the latest thing. It’s a social activity. People say whatever they have to say in order to seem virtuous, as long as it doesn’t cost them anything.

And that’s what we see when illegals arrive in blue states:

Florida Gov. DeSantis followed through on his promise to drop off illegal immigrants in progressive states, sending two planes full of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday.

A video provided to Fox News Digital shows the migrants deplaned at Martha’s Vineyard Airport in Massachusetts.

“If you have folks who are inclined to think Florida is a good place [to settle], our message to them is we are not a sanctuary state, and it’s better to be able to go to a sanctuary jurisdiction,” DeSantis told a crowd Thursday afternoon.

“And yes, we will help facilitate that transport for you to be able to go to greener pastures,” he added.

[…]The migrants boarded a bus Friday that departed the liberal island haven and arrived at Joint Base Cape Cod, where Republican Gov. Charlie Baker opened a shelter.

Sadly, the Democrats deported all of their illegal props at the local military base, and last I heard, they were planning to build a wall, like the MULTIPLE walls around Barack Obama’s house.

It’s not just Martha’s Vineyard thinks that illegal immigrants should be welcomed in, then immediately deported. It’s Chicago, Illinois – one of the most progressive cities in America.

The New York Post reports:

Chicago residents condemned local leadership last week for plans to house illegal immigrants in a shuttered high school in the neighborhood.

Chicago is one of many cities overwhelmed by illegal immigrants seeking asylum amid crisis at America’s southern border.

During a May 4 community meeting at South Shore International College Preparatory High School, local residents expressed their outrage at the proposal of housing hundreds of migrants in an already struggling area.

Again, remember that study I blogged about. The “morality” of the secular left is simple. Talk and talk and talk about loving your fellow man. As long as it doesn’t cost you anything, personally. We have to get better at understanding that people who talk about the poor are just serving themselves. The people who say “help the poor” don’t help the poor themselves. The people who say “don’t judge” say that because they don’t want you to judge them. It’s just selfishness.

It’s important to understand that the secular left doesn’t intend to pay any of the costs suggested by their generous talk. They expect YOU to pay for their virtue-signaling. That’s why we must never let them win elections.