Eric Metaxas: The Left is embracing satanic communism

Summary

Pod Force One – Episode Summary

Podcast: Pod Force One
Host: Miranda Devine (New York Post)
Guest: Eric Metaxas
Episode Title: Eric Metaxas: The Left is Embracing Satanic Communism
Date: August 12, 2026

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Overview

This episode features a spirited and deeply ideological conversation between host Miranda Devine and bestselling author and broadcaster Eric Metaxas. The central theme revolves around Metaxas’ arguments about America’s founding, the spiritual and moral roots of liberty, and his belief that modern left-wing movements in the U.S. are embracing communist, "satanic" ideas opposed to the American founding. Metaxas discusses his latest book, Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World, emphasizing its intent to offer a patriotic, faith-infused retelling of the American Revolution and its relevance to today’s cultural and political struggles.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The American Revolution: Faith, History, and Amnesia

• Book Motivation: Metaxas explains his motivation for writing the book in simple, myth-busting terms:

  "It's just a straightforward retelling of the birth of America. I'm very proud to be an American. My parents weren't born here... they taught me to hate communism and love freedom." [01:28]

• Christian Roots: Both agree it’s impossible to untangle Christianity from the American founding:

  "You can hardly separate Christianity and God from the revolution... that's a pretty unique proposition in the history of the world, isn't it?" – Miranda [01:03]

• Loss of Historical Knowledge: Metaxas laments that past generations had a shared knowledge of America’s story which has since eroded:

  "If you know the story, if you know our history, you cannot help but love America..." [04:46]

2. Communism, the American Left, and Spiritual Battle

• Communism as Satanic: Metaxas repeatedly frames communism and modern leftist movements as "satanic":

  "I think when you have enough people that don't know the story, the door is open to really satanic ideas. And communism is a satanic idea." [04:46]

• Immigrant Experiences: Defines his own anti-communism as rooted in his parents' personal experiences fleeing totalitarian regimes.
• Modern Rejection of Faith: He draws a sharp line between the French and American revolutions, saying only the American succeeded because it was rooted in covenant with God [08:09].

3. Culture Wars and Contemporary America

• Book Censorship & Publishing Bias: Both speakers allege purposeful suppression and bias in book retail and publishing, with Metaxas describing his book’s treatment:

  "Even though it's been on the New York Times list in the top 10 for eight weeks, Barnes and Noble stores still are hiding it..." [14:09]

• Rigged Systems: They connect perceived publishing bias to a broader "war" on conservative and religious voices:

  "They don't believe in free speech, they're effectively communist. They're cultural Marxists, they believe in power." [15:50]

4. Signs of Hope and the Path Forward

• Homeschooling Movement: Metaxas expresses optimism due to the young, faith-focused, homeschooled generation rising up:

  "These young people are brilliant, they're extremely well educated... and they are a tsunami waiting to break on American culture." [21:47]

• Revival of Faith: Observes growing "revival" and religious rediscovery as central to countering cultural and political decay.

5. Trump as an Ordained Leader

• Historical Parallels: Metaxas likens Trump’s leadership to that of Washington and Lincoln, calling him "ordained":

  "I do think President Trump has been ordained for such a time as this... he is outrageously talented, playing 5D chess... it does, in a way, remind me of Washington." [27:59–29:58]

• Existential Crisis: Frames the present as America's "third existential crisis" after the Revolution and Civil War [15:50, 29:58].

6. Covid, Censorship, and the Banality of Evil

• Covid Lockdowns as Tyranny: Both view pandemic restrictions as a test exposing Americans' willingness to surrender freedoms [34:08, 45:30].
• Anthony Fauci: Compared to Nazi bureaucrat Eichmann:

  "I said that he is Eichmann in Jerusalem, and it's Hannah Arendt's banality of evil... But it is satanic evil wearing a different, you know, costume.” [46:59]

• Media and Tech Suppression: Both share personal anecdotes about being censored or suppressed – e.g., after discussing vaccine mandates [48:51].

  "We are in a war." [48:51]

7. Education, Truth, and the Need for Moral Citizenship

• Biblical Foundation: Argues public education and self-governance are rooted in Reformation ideas and broad Bible literacy [34:08].
• War Against Literacy: Claims Marxists intentionally erode educational standards to disempower and demoralize the young.

8. Transgender Issues and Truth

• Cultural Pressure to Lie: Metaxas equates the pressure to affirm gender ideology with a ritualized abandonment of truth and a "curse against God":

  "To lie, to say something that is, you know, a lie, to go along with that is like declaring, there is no truth, there is no God, there is only power. That is the voice of the devil.” [61:02]

9. Antisemitism and the Political Divide

• Resurgence of Antisemitism: Both decry a rise of "Jew hatred," especially on the left but also among certain figures on the right.
• Spiritual Explanation: Metaxas links hatred for Jews to "demonic hatred of God":

  "A hatred of God manifests itself in a hatred of what God loves. God chose the Jewish people, period." [72:36]

10. Personal Faith Journey

• Metaxas’s Conversion Story: Describes a crisis year and a dream leading to his acceptance of Jesus, and consequent political shift [77:39–84:30].
• Faith Integration: Now identifies as a “mere Christian,” prioritizing Biblical truth above denominationalism.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On American Amnesia:

  "If you stuck a microphone in anybody's face in Main street America in 1960, they knew everything that's in my book. This is not extra credit... But in my life, lifetime we've drifted away." – Metaxas [04:46]

• On Communism:

  "Communism is a satanic idea in America." – Metaxas [00:00, 04:46]

• On today's crisis:

  "We are now in our third existential crisis in America. The first was the revolution, the second was the Civil War. We are now in our third." – Metaxas [15:50]

• On evil:

  "It's Hannah Arendt's banality of evil... But it is satanic evil wearing a different, you know, costume." – Metaxas [46:59]

• On sitting out the fight:

  "If you want to sit on the fence, you need to be informed. The devil owns the fence." – Metaxas [51:19]

• On resisting lies:

  "Once you are forced to tell a lie, you've lost your freedom. You are a slave." – Miranda Devine [61:02]

• On antisemitism:

  "A hatred of God manifests itself in a hatred of what God loves, which is serious. Christians and Jews, you see this over and over again." – Metaxas [72:36]

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Key Timestamps

• Opening and Book Introduction (00:00–03:14): Metaxas discusses his family’s immigrant anti-communist roots and the birth of his book.
• The Role of Faith in America’s Founding (03:14–08:09): Christianity’s role, the unique American experiment, and faith in the Revolution.
• Cultural and Educational Decline (12:43–18:06): Publishing bias, need for historical knowledge, "satanic" influences.
• Signs of Hope: Homeschooling & Revival (21:47–27:13): The new generation, faith revival, and resisting despair.
• Trump as Ordained Leader (27:13–33:06): Drawing historical analogies to Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill.
• COVID, Fauci, and Bureaucratic Evil (45:30–48:51): COVID as a spiritual test; Fauci comparisons to Nazi bureaucracy; censorship.
• Transgender Issue and Compelled Speech (57:24–63:39): Resisting cultural lies and the price of truth.
• Antisemitism and Spiritual Warfare (68:20–74:37): Modern rise in Jew hatred, spiritual roots.
• Personal Faith Journey (76:50–87:54): Metaxas’s conversion story and views on faith-driven living.
• Call to Action (89:48–91:53): "Read my book… God is real. Ask him to guide you… Know the story and rejoice in it."

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Conclusion & Takeaways

• Central Message: Eric Metaxas views America’s current political and cultural battles as fundamentally spiritual, pitching liberty and truth against what he repeatedly calls "satanic" communism and cultural Marxism.
• Why It Matters: The conversation draws a direct line from America’s origins—rooted in Biblical covenant, personal liberty, and heroic sacrifice—to the political and cultural struggles of the present.
• Prescription: Learn your history, reconnect with faith, resist lies (especially those compelled by culture), and actively participate in defending American values.

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For listeners seeking spirited debate on America’s founding, culture war commentary, and the intertwining of conservative faith with public life, this episode provides a detailed, expressive, and unapologetic argument for the need to rediscover and defend the nation's roots. It is especially useful for understanding how right-leaning intellectuals frame both today’s crises and the path forward as spiritual in nature.

Transcript

[Eric Metaxas]

Communism is a satanic idea in America. You really have to know what does it mean to be an American? What are the liberties that we have? What does it mean to govern yourself? Where do these ideas come from? It is amazing how biased and how corrupt the left has become in America.

[Miranda Devine]

Our guest today is Eric Metaxas, New York Times bestselling author, broadcaster and one of the most influential Christian voices in America today. His latest book, Revolution the the Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World, explores the ideas, faith and courage that gave birth to America. Eric Metaxas, thanks for joining Pod Force One.

[Eric Metaxas]

It's a privilege good to be with you, Miranda. And it's just a straight. It's not a Christian book. I want to be real clear. It's just a strictly. How do I put it? It's just a telling of the story of the American Revolution, just absolutely straightforward. But the straightforward story is pretty extraordinary, I'm happy to say.

[Miranda Devine]

Well, I mean, you can hardly separate Christianity and God from the revolution because the Founders, as Abraham Lincoln said, as you so put it in your book, so. Well, it's a nation founded under God, you know, dedicated to the idea that all men are created equal. And that's a pretty unique proposition in the history of the world, isn't it?

[Eric Metaxas]

I think it's genuinely unique. I think it is unique and I think. But it's a funny thing because when I wanted to write the book, I said, I just want to do a straightforward retelling of the birth of America. I'm very proud to be an American. My parents weren't born here. My mother grew up in Germany, my father grew up in Greece. They met in an English class here in New York City. And because they had experiences with communism, they taught me to hate communism and to love freedom. And I thought for the 250th I just wanted to write a one volume telling of what happened 250 years ago. But in the course of doing that, the faith stuff, it's just everywhere. So it's not a book about that. But you're right, it's just everywhere you look. I mean, that kind of amazed me, to be quite honest, at how, how prevalent it is in the lives and in the stories of the revolution.

[Miranda Devine]

It's interesting you have talked about your background with your parents both being immigrants. That's a similar background that I've noted in a lot of the Democratic socialists of America, the sort of Marxist revolutionaries who've colonized the Democratic Party. People like Abdul El Sayed, who's just won the Senate nomination in Michigan for the Democrats. Born here of immigrant parents. Hassan Piker is another one. Zoran Mamdani wasn't born here, but similar background. And yet they took from their backgrounds the opposite of what you took from your families. Why is that? Is it generational? Is it cultural? I think it's.

[Eric Metaxas]

I mean, I don't know enough about their stories, but I have to say that, you know, my mother grew up in Nazi Germany, which was then at the end of the war, taken over by Stalin and the Soviets, so it becomes East Germany. So she hated communism. She escaped at age 17. She just called me before this podcast. She's 92. My father grew up in Greece. He saw the communists try to take over Greece. And I think like anybody who's had actual experiences with communism and you loathe it, you know that. I mean, I remember when I was seven years old in 1971, visiting East Germany with my mother, and even at that age crossing the border and seeing the barbed wire and the dogs and the soldiers and realizing they're trying to keep them in. What kind of a country tries to keep people from leaving? What kind of a system is that? So, yeah, just, just growing up in my parents home, I was just taught to hate communism and to love America. You know, they didn't have to try very hard. They just told me their own personal experiences with it.

[Miranda Devine]

That reminds me of a story that Don Jr tells about how when he was growing up, his mother Ivana, who had been from the Czech Republic, used to take them back or send them back to stay with family over long summers. And he said it just really struck him, the poverty there, the lines in the stores, the empty shelves, et cetera, just how good that we have it in America.

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, see, that's the thing. I think that, you know, we're going through a hard time in the United States right now. I mean, having candidates like this, the very idea that, that the door could be open to socialists who are really communists, it tells you how far we've slid as a nation. And I mean, I think the main reason I wrote the book is that I realized that in the last decades we've drifted away from knowing our story. If you know the story, if you know our history, you cannot help but love America. And I think for, you know, for generations, everybody knew this. If you stuck a microphone in anybody's face in Main street America in 1960, they knew everything. That's in my book. This is not extra credit. It's not for history buffs this is every American knew all the stories of the revolution, the heroes, why they fought, what they were fighting for. That was, you know, as basic as it gets in America. But in my life, lifetime we've drifted away. Of course a lot of anti American voices have come in that have denigrated the founders and the nation. And I think when you have enough people that don't know the story, the door is open to really satanic ideas. And communism is a satanic idea. And so I wrote the book really hoping to, to introduce people that maybe had forgotten or maybe had never learned this stuff because I find it just fascinating and amazing the research that I did on this. I was amazed at what I had forgotten or never learned in the first place. And I thought it's too important. America is not a kind of a nation that just exists because of our ethnicity like France or any place else. In America you really have to know what does it mean to be an American? What are the liberties that we have? What does it mean to govern yourself? Where do these ideas come from? And as I say, everybody used to know that. And as we have forgotten it, you know, we, we lose our liberties. And we've seen that. You know, we saw it under the Biden regime, we saw it with the, the COVID lockdowns, things that previous generations of Americans wouldn't have dreamt of. So I think we've, we've been long overdue for a refresher course on who we are and what it means to be American.

[Miranda Devine]

And it's not a hard read. I mean it's a rollicking adventure full of challenges and heroes and just a wonderful story, wonderful tale. And it is really criminal that this deliberate attempt has been made to erase it from the memories of a new generation or two. I wanted to ask you. There is a twisting, you know, there's still this sort of remnant memory that America began with the revolution and then later a civil war. And that vestigial memory has been twisted, it seems to me, by these modern day Marxist revolutionaries into really talk of the blood and guts of maybe a French Revolution style. Heads on pikes, et cetera. Blood on capitalist, blood on the streets. So how dangerous do you think the times are that we are living in and do we have the wherewithal to keep our republic, as John Adams said? Ben Franklin.

[Eric Metaxas]

Yeah, well that's, I mean, to me, first of all, thanks for bringing those things up because the reason the book is titled Revolution and not the American Revolution is because it's my considered opinion that there has only been one revolution that thoroughly succeeded in doing what it set out to do. That is the American Revolution. It is the revolution in the history of the world. The French Revolution is a dark joke, a bitter tragedy, a horror, actually. And when you ask why that is, it's because it's like the spirit of 1776 is dramatically different, almost opp. To the spirit of 1789. The spirit of 1789 is effectively a Marxist, you know, a proto Marxist, proto Bolshevik spirit. It is at odds with the idea of God. And what's amazing to me, and again, this, it was amazing to me as I did the research, how I'd never quite really seen this before. The founders understood what they were doing was unprecedented. They were basically saying, at least it's been 3,000 years since anyone has done what we are doing. And what were they doing? They were going back to the Sinai Covenant. They were basically saying, they were explicit about this. They were saying, as the Israelites came out of Egypt, bondage in Egypt from under Pharaoh, we are doing the same thing. We're coming out from under a monarchy, and we are going to covenant with God as our king. So now we can't do this officially. We can't force people to become Christian or to accept the God of the Bible, but that's what we're doing. And they all understood it, including Franklin and Jefferson, the least religious figures among the founders. They still understood that the only way to govern yourself, to govern yourself without a king governing you, is to allow God to be your king. And they were very explicit about this. The French, on the other hand, you know, after they killed the king and queen, they started killing the priests and nuns. They were dramatically, viciously anti clerical, anti church. And so it's an amazing thing that the American Revolution totally succeeds, wildly succeeds, and continues on for 250 years so far. And the French Revolution ends in blood. It's just a bloodbath, a horror, a terror, as they called it. And then what do they get? What do they trade their king for? They get an emperor dictator named Napoleon. So it's like a bad trade because it doesn't work. You cannot simply do away with the monarchy. You have to think, well, what's going to follow the monarchy? And the Americans understood we are going to do what the Israelites did in the wilderness. We're going to look to God. And they were very explicit about that. And of course, they were very clear that we have religious liberty, so we're not forcing people. But this was genuinely the template. And they all understood it. And what amazes me is that they all understood it. They were not deists. We often hear, you know, it's one thing to have people be viciously anti American. It's another thing to have people really just not understand the founding and kind of not articulate it. So the Ken Burns PBS series on the revolution gets all of this wrong, just ignores all of this and pretends that they were sort of deists and that religion wasn't really central to it. And I thought, that's crazy. That's like saying we're going to do a documentary on the rainbow, but we're going to do it in black and white. You cannot talk about the rainbow unless you get into the color. And that's at the heart of the American Revolution. It's simply inescapable, and I quote all of the folks involved. I mean, don't take my word for it. This was how they saw what they were doing. And it's, it's a very inspiring story and I'm glad you enjoyed reading it. I've, I've been very pleased with the feedback. I mean, the reviews on Amazon have been absolutely an author's dream. And I didn't put my friends up to it. I mean, this is just people reading the book. So I'm, I'm thrilled. And it's been to yesterday I learned that it's, it's in its eighth week on the New York Times bestseller list, which Honestly, for a 600 page patriotic tome, you don't expect the New York Times, they didn't enjoy doing that. So I'm thrilled that it's sort of caught a wave, so to speak.

[Miranda Devine]

Yes, it must have been too big to rig because they do like to do down patriotic and positive books about America. And I wanted to just explore a little bit about the arcane ideas about book publishing because of course, New York Times bestseller list is. Even though it's a corrupt thing, it's still a great booster of sales and still prestigious. And I know that you mentioned the first week your book came out, Jill Biden's book also came out Soldiers Way less than you and ended up number one.

[Eric Metaxas]

We know, we know this. The bookscan numbers don't lie. Those are the official numbers. And so my book Right out of the Gate was number two on the New York Times list. So it entered the list at number two. Number one was Jill Biden's book. And if you looked at the Amazon rankings, you knew right away something's wrong. Her book is not doing as well as mine. Why did they put it. And the bookscan numbers. My book was 25,000 copies, her book was 20,000 copies. So they didn't care. Even though my book outsold hers by 25%. Nonetheless, they put her book at number one. But it kind of gets worse than that.

[Miranda Devine]

Yes.

[Eric Metaxas]

Even though it's been on the New York Times list In the top 10 for eight weeks, Barnes and Noble stores still are hiding it. In other words, every other bestseller. You walk into a Barnes and Noble and they've got piles of the bestsellers, the New York Times bestsellers, right in the front of the store. My book, in almost every store, you can't find it or it's hidden in the back or something. So we're dealing with a rigged system. You know this because of your political affinities. It's just, it's just where we are in America. And so we, I have, we've done everything to make it too big to rig. And I just wonder if it'll ever break into the mainstream because it is just, it is amazing how biased and how corrupt the left has become in America. They're not interested in playing by the rules because they'll lose. So they have to cheat. But they don't have a problem with cheating because they don't have any fussy principles about honesty or anything like that. That's just those of us on the right.

[Miranda Devine]

Just to belabor the book issue for a moment.

[Eric Metaxas]

More.

[Miranda Devine]

The Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue is particularly egregious and they refuse to carry either of my books. The Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Corruption books, Laptop from Hel. And the second one they ended up. They did. It was, it was somewhere in the bowels. But I know people were going in and asking for the book and they were pretending that it was out of stock and someone had to pre order it and then come in and the book was hidden under the counter for them. So I don't know what's going on. But, you know, if a book is a huge bestseller, you would think Barnes and Nobles would want to sell it.

[Eric Metaxas]

They don't believe in free speech, they don't believe in the free market. They're effectively communist. They're cultural Marxists, they believe in power and they're perpetually in a war. And so I'm glad Amazon exists and other folks out there are selling it. Books. A million. And as I said just yesterday, it was number eight on the New York Times list and this is the eighth week that it's been in the top eight or nine on the list. So it's doing very well. And people who have read it have said it's a page turner. And, you know, and of course, that's my joy and my goal in writing it. I don't want it to be a ponderous effort. I want it to be something that people enjoy. A lot of homeschoolers, I think, are gonna use it as a textbook for high school for homeschoolers in the coming years. So I'm gratified and just to say what I said in the first couple of minutes, it's just a straightforward retelling of the story of the American Revolution. And it is. It's a glorious story. So just telling the straight story is, you know, it's an inspiring story. And I think, I do think we're living at a moment now where we need to know the story, we need to be inspired by what we accomplished in the past, because we're going through something similar. I always say we're in our third existential crisis in America. The first was the revolution, the second was the Civil War. We are now in our third. We're dealing with various forces arrayed against the founders vision, whether it's Islamo fascism or cultural Marxism. They hate liberty. They hate the liberty that you get from the Bible. All of it comes out of the Bible. This idea of liberty and religious liberty. These ideas come out of the Bible all of the founders were coming out of. You know, they're the descendants of Puritans. These are ideas that come out of the Reformation. And they have created the greatest nation in the history of the world, the freest nation in the history of the world. But their forces arrayed against that, they hate that. So they're not just not wanting to carry my book. They're trying to rig the elections and they're trying to do anything they can because they're at war with what George Washington and others loved and fought for.

[Miranda Devine]

What you say is so true and so poignant because I think we live in an era where there is a darkness of censorship and repression descending on the Western world. Well, I mean, the rest of the world never had much freedom. But I know because I've lived in Australia, I've lived in England, and I've lived obviously in America. And the difference is palpable. And I'm not sure a lot of Americans even grasp how different it is. I have friends in Australia since I moved to America who say to me, oh, how can you stand it there? It's so chaotic. You know, everyone's at each other's throat. It's so polarized. And I said, yes, because people in America are actually fighting in Australia, in England, in Europe, in Canada. People have just been polite and silent as they've been assaulted, and they try to pretend that if they say nothing, it'll go away. And all that does is embolden their enemies. In America, at least there's a fight. Whether or not we win the fight is still, I think, an open question.

[Eric Metaxas]

We're going to win the fight. I will tell you, we're going to win the fight. I have many reasons for believing that, but I do believe it very strongly. And also, I think we just have to be honest and say that it is a fight. It's not just that, oh, we're going to win. We have to fight to win. If you said, I mean, if you've read the book, you know, if you said to George Washington in 1776, how's it going? It was not going well. It was going exceedingly poorly. But even if you said to him, listen, I know how it turns out. You're going to win, he would still say, well, in the meantime, we have to fight and fight and fight and pray and suffer and die, and there are going to be casualties. And that's what it is to be in a war, in an existential struggle. But we do it because it's the right thing. This is not just, you know, this is not a soccer match. This is good versus evil. This is for liberty versus enslavement or tyranny. And so it's a noble thing. And I think that Washington, and those of us involved in the fight today, you realize it is a sacred cause, and it's a glorious thing to be fighting in a sacred cause for something beautiful and true. And so I really do believe that we are. We're going to win. I think if we would have lost, it would have already been effectively over. If Kamala Harris would have been elected president, it would have been over. If Trump had been killed by the Bulletin Butler, it would be over. But I really believe God has ordained that we will survive and thrive and flourish, but we have to keep fighting. And I think just telling the story, writing this book, it's my part in this, in a sense, is that we've got to know our story. That's very basic, I think, and I think that if people will know the story, it makes you want to fight harder. It makes you feel like this is an ongoing revolution and I get to play a part in this. This is my story. And so I think that that is happening. So I am very encouraged. Miranda, I have to tell you, it doesn't mean that it's not tough. It is tough, but I think that it's worth the fight.

[Miranda Devine]

Are there other signs that you see that give you hope and make you think that the fight good will triumph over evil in this battle?

[Eric Metaxas]

Yeah, I mean, I travel all around the country, I speak all over the United States, and everywhere I go I meet homeschoolers, these incredibly bright, socially well established young people. And I think the mainstream media doesn't know they exist. The mainstream media sort of acts like, you know, they must be socially ill adjusted or they're just, they don't matter. These young people are brilliant, they're extremely well educated. Their parents are wonderful, normal parents. And they are a tsunami waiting to break on American culture. They're going to be running the world in 10 years or something like that. And I meet them everywhere and we live in a world that doesn't, you know, the mainstream media doesn't focus on them. It only focuses on the loonies, basically, and they're out there too. But I see that is just overwhelming to me. And I also see the early but distinct signs of revival in faith in the God of the Bible. I mean, it seems every week some celebrity declares that they've had this experience with God. And I think 10 years ago that was not happening. Even five years ago. Something is happening where a lot of people are coming to faith. And I think that's actually central. Just as in the story of the revolution, George Whitefield was preaching up and down the 13 colonies, overseeing what we call the Great Awakening. That really set the stage for self government. And there's no way you can take Whitefield and the Great Awakening out of that story. Faith is at the heart of it. And I think that that is happening. I think the mainstream media, they don't report on it either they don't want to or they don't understand it. To them it's just a strange foreign language. And so they don't get it. Which I also think explains why so many accountings of the American Revolution or of many things in history leave out the faith element. Because I think, as you know, people in the media, in journalism, they tend to be secular and they tend not to either not to understand the language and so they just kind of look away or they're openly hostile to it. And so they portray. Because, I mean, watching the Ken Burns documentary, which I say to everybody, if it's possible, try to Miss it. It's not worth seeing. It's because. And I, you know, I had to see it just because I'm. I was writing the book and I want to do my research, but it's kind of a bleak telling. And I thought it's like if you made a remake of the Rocky film and you walked out of the theater and you thought, I don't know who, who was the hero? They both had their stories, but it's kind of even, you know, oh, the Odyssey. You don't want to get me started because I'm Greek and my father's from the island where Odysseus, you know, that that's a whole thing. But wow, that's the modern era that we're in. It's anti heroic. It doesn't love good triumphing over evil because it doesn't really know what good is. It's very, very conflicted, let's say. Right. So I think that a lot of the people in our lifetimes, as they've told the story of America, they don't want to be too celebratory. They think that to be too celebratory we need to be writhing with a little guilt, a little white guilt or a little colonialist guilt or something racist. Well, of course. And at the worst they say, you know. And so I think that there is something happening. I run a thing called Socrates in the City and I was just in Oxford, England. I interviewed Lord Nigel Bigger, who's written a book on colonialism, A Moral Reckoning, and he tells the good side of the British Empire. Not that there isn't any bad side, but he tells the good side. And I think that we have been kind of caught where the, the secular elites are unable to see any good in what America has done, in what the west has done. And so they just don't report on it. And there's something very sick about that. I think that it's important to say that in America and in Great Britain, they abolished the slave trade, we abolished slavery, we didn't have to do that. There's still slavery today in Muslim Africa. And so there is so much that is worthy of celebrating. And at the heart of it is the story of the American Revolution. But the left just doesn't speak the language of celebration. They want to wring their hands and be sort of tortured. They feel like that's the only proper posture. And they're wrong. And I'm happy to say that I think a lot of people agree that they're wrong and they want to Celebrate what is good. And the story of America coming into being. It is. You know, you talk about a David versus Goliath. I mean, it never should have happened. It's absolutely amazing. And no less than George Washington and Ben Franklin saw it as miraculous. So, you know, when you try to portray George Washington as some kind of deist, it's preposterous because his own language over and over and over again betrays that he believed it was a sacred cause, it was miraculous that America came into being. And so I just think rediscovering that is a big part of the path forward, which is genuinely why I wrote the book. I thought we needed a book that actually tells that story in one volume. You don't have to read 10 volumes. There's just one volume to read.

[Miranda Devine]

Now, you mentioned George Washington. You believe that he was ordained by God to be in that role, that crucial role, do you think? I know a lot of Christians believe this. I've spoken to them that Donald Trump is similarly ordained by God, sent by God, sort of imperfect vessel, and that the fact that he's escaped all these assassination attempts is sort of evidence of that to them. I mean, I hope he doesn't think that, because I think he's already afflicted by hubris as it is, much as I'm a huge fan of his. But do you believe that? Do you believe he also is ordained by God?

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, I guess I would have to say that in the same way that Washington and Lincoln were, that there are figures in history. You could say the same of Churchill biographers. In 1974, Thomas Flexner calls Washington the indispensable man. And I think that you have to say the same thing about a figure like Churchill. Churchill had tremendous flaws. But can we imagine what would have happened if Churchill had not been at the helm in England during World War II? And I do think right now, if Donald Trump had not succeeded in getting back into the Oval Office, I don't even want to begin to imagine where we would be, the dark forces that were already taking over and are still hoping to escape justice. Whether it's the, you know, Anthony Fauci or. I mean, there are. There are figures. James Comey. These people did incredibly wicked things. And I most, I think most Americans, actually, we're just not used to looking at real evil. I mean, we've had it pretty good here. And I think it reminds me, uncovering what has happened in the last number of years, whether we're talking about a stolen election or we're talking about The COVID stuff or J6. I really think that it's hard to believe that our government could have been militarized against us. It seems like that could never actually happen in America, but I think it's coming out. And that's why I say we're in the third existential crisis of our history. And as far as that goes, yeah, I do think President Trump has been ordained for such a time as this. I think that he, you know, he is outrageously talented, and he is playing 5D chess, and it's a joy to see him be underestimated and misunderstood by his enemies. They hate him.

[Miranda Devine]

Yeah.

[Eric Metaxas]

And, and, and, and so it. It does, in a way, remind me of Washington, because the, you know, there are all these stories of. Of during the French and Indian War, they're trying to kill Washington even during the revolution. And I think sometimes, even if you don't have a real point of view, you just look at a situation, you go, it sure looks like that guy has God's protection on him, because I can't really make sense of it any other way. How can he possibly survive? And keep going, keep going? And I really think that is the case with President Trump, because I do think we're in, as I said, the third existential crisis of our history. This is. This is for all the marbles. This is not, you know, 1988, that what we're dealing with are very dark forces that will stop at absolutely nothing. So we're not talking about misguided, weak figures like Jimmy Carter. We're talking about very dark figures who are at war with George Washington's vision of America. They're at war with it, they hate it, and they will do anything they can. They will stop at nothing. And part of the story of my book is how the leaders of the revolution genuinely knew that apart from God, they could not succeed. I mean, you just read what they say. They knew that British outgunned them, literally, that there was no way that they could succeed. But if God was with them in the sacred cause, they would win. And so they really wanted God's favor. They actually believed that they needed to comport themselves in a way that honored God, and then he would honor them. They really believed it. That's covenant theology going back to the Old Testament. You know, you see it with ancient Israel. It's just covenant theology. When you behave this way, God does this. When you behave this way, God removes his blessing.

[Miranda Devine]

And.

[Eric Metaxas]

And that's what the founders believed, even if we don't believe it. I mean, I do believe it. But even if somebody doesn't believe it, you have to acknowledge that the men of the Revolution, they believed this, and they fought the war in such a way that they would not stoop to the barbarity of the British. The British were sadistic and cruel. And the Americans over and over said, we refuse to stoop to that barbarity. We believe God will honor us if we do not do what the British would. I mean, the British would. Americans would stop, surrender, and the British or the Hessian mercenaries would bayonet them to death. Very often really gruesome things. And the Americans just said, we will not do that. And George Washington was adamant and stern with his officers that we will comport ourselves in a way that honors the sanctity of our cause. Those are the good guys. If you're watching a movie, you'd say, those are the good guys. And I think they're going to win. And so that's part of our story today as well. I think that there are enough people that realize, you know, America, to make America great again, we have to make America good again. We have to acknowledge the source of our blessings over the centuries. And I think that's happening. And I'd like to think that my book will help it to happen. But we all have a part.

[Miranda Devine]

I mean, the founders designed America to be run or peopled by good and moral people. And you look around, particularly in the media, and you don't see that. You just see sort of degradation. And certainly our sort of reigning culture is that. And that's what young people are soaking up. And also, I think they also believed that we had to be an educated populace. And that was part of the success of America was that it was so well educated by comparison to the rest of the world. And I don't know that you can say that anymore, although the whole world has gone downhill in a hurry. But it's almost like there's been a pride or a deliberate ploy to ensure, for instance, that children can't read, particularly poor children or children from socioeconomic doldrums without parents to be there to help them.

[Eric Metaxas]

That's part of the war. There's no. There's no doubt about it. And I think. And I have to say, again, those ideas, they don't come out of the Enlightenment. People say those are Enlightenment ideas that we. No, no, those are biblical ideas. You know, the people of the Enlightenment got these ideas from the Bible, and it comes out of the Reformation. I mean, I wrote a biography of Martin Luther. You Realize that once they understand, we can read the Bible for ourselves, now we have an obligation to read it for ourselves and not to simply receive the interpretation of it from some priestly caste. We have to take responsibility. Is this true? Are we. We have to understand it for ourselves. We have to teach our kids. And I, and I say someplace in my book Revolution, that in the early in the 17th century, when John Winthrop and company come over and found the Massachusetts Bay colony, that's in 1630, already in 1636, they establish Harvard College and they insist that every town in the Massachusetts Bay Colony have a grammar school because they put a premium on education, on reading, on reading the Bible. They said that's the only way we can thrive and be free. That's the only way we can govern ourselves. So again, that's the Sinai covenant, that we're going to be under God, but then we all have to take personal responsibility in our relationship with God, in our understanding of what it means to be a good citizen. And so that involves education. So you're quite right. The Marxists, leftists, they have done all they can to harm that. So, you know, we're still in a war on all these fronts, but I do believe we are going to win and we are winning, but we have to keep fighting.

[Miranda Devine]

Talk about the founders believing in God and that if God is on your side, that you can triumph. But I mean, that also is a belief of Islam. And in a way, I mean, I talk about this often as an example, but when I was covering the Iraq war, for instance, and Afghanistan, you know, there were these horrible Australian and American soldiers were having to fight side by side in Afghanistan with these awful warlords who were pedophiles and just would go and kidnap young boys. They were their T boys, their sex slaves. And I remember thinking, if I were a mother in Afghanistan, I would gladly embrace the Taliban and wear a burqa just to protect my children from the warlords. So I think that in a way, in a country where we see drag queen story time, we see such decadence. I mean, it's not representative of America, but it's certainly what's suffuses our media. Yeah, you know, what is, what are people to do? I mean, I can see that Islam could, with all its rules and prescriptions and lack of freedom could be alluring.

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, no, there's no doubt about it. There's absolutely no doubt about. You can see how people get sucked into that. But that's the devil's choice, right? You know, you either choose dreg's Queen Story Hour or wearing a full burka and being subservient to your demonic husband who has five other wives. I mean, that's a bad choice. And we also have to be really clear. Liberty does not come from the Quran. The idea that we are all created equal does not come from the Quran. It comes from the Jewish Bible. That's where those ideas come from. And all these ideas of liberty, all the ideas that led to the founding of the United States come from the Bible. They don't come from the Quran. Neither do they come from secular atheist French philosophy. And I think a lot of people want to pretend that they do. Like, well, we're sort of evolving forward. No, no, these ideas come from the Bible. And everyone involved in the American Revolution understood that. You know, maybe one out of the 60 or 56 signers would have quibbled a little bit. Maybe Thomas Jefferson would have quibbled a little bit. Everyone else was on the same page. Everyone else understood our rights come from God. The only reason we have rights is because of God. The only reason we would dare to say we're created equal is because God says it in the Bible that you don't find those ideas in the Quran. You don't find those ideas in atheist philosophy. And I think that we have to be clear as Americans, where do our liberties come from? Where do these ideas come from? Where do they not come from? They don't come from the French Revolution. They don't come from the Quran. And I think that because we're at such a tipping point, it's time that we catechize ourselves. I'll say again, it's why I wrote the book. I said, we have to know this. This is no longer, you know, this is not for history buffs. This is for every American. If you care about the next generation, you care about your kids and your grandkids, you have to take responsibility. And so we are at an absolutely crucial point. We're in the middle of the war. There's no doubt about it.

[Miranda Devine]

And meanwhile, there's a real war that is taking a lot of President Trump's time. I mean, my fear is that it's a distraction from the war at home and expending a lot of energy and thought on that. But is the Iran war an existential crisis that we need to win?

[Eric Metaxas]

I think my instinct is always to trust President Trump. This doesn't mean that he is perfect, but I know that he knows many things that we don't know. And I think that, generally speaking, I mean, I think it's healthy for the base to, you know, to assert our convictions that we don't want to be in forever wars. But I think we have to remember, where do we even get the idea that forever wars are bad? We got them from Donald Trump, who, on the stage in 2016, slapped down Jeb Bush and his brother. So I think we'd be really foolish to think that Donald Trump has turned into some neocon or that he's the puppet of Bibi Netanyahu. That's just so ridiculous, such a misreading of President Trump. So I think there's no doubt that we all wish that the Iran war were not happening, but I don't think it can be compared to the quagmire of the Iraq war or Afghanistan. I think it's a completely different thing. I applaud the president for doing what so many presidents refuse to do. For 47 years, we've allowed them to get away with murder, literally. And I would simply say that I trust President Trump in this, and I think that he is as eager to end it as anyone. And I just think we have to trust him because I think that there's a lot hanging on it. I think our relationship with China going forward, there's a lot. This is the 5D chess that people talk about. And I think President Trump, he's stuck because he can't really say exactly everything that he's doing. So I think we have to trust him, at least that is my instinct, and so far, I've been proven right every time that you can trust President Trump's instinct, I would bet on him all day long.

[Miranda Devine]

Yes, that's so true. I interviewed him recently, and he said. I said, people are confused and don't know where you're going with this. And he said, good, I'm glad. Because if they're confused, Iran's are confused.

[Eric Metaxas]

This is exactly correct. I didn't know that he had said that with you, but that is exactly what he's doing. It's the art of the deal, and he is deliberately throwing everyone off the scent. And I think that that is a big part of his genius, is that he does that and that he's aware of it. So, yeah, I'm not worried about him. I mean, I think this is very serious. But I. I trust him with the nation and with the leadership of the world at this point, because that's. The leader of this country is, for good or for ill, the leader of the free world.

[Miranda Devine]

It's fascinating with President Trump because to have the ability to restrain his ego. So much so that he's willing to have the New York Times and the world, the BBC and so on, treat him and look at him and speak of him as if he's a buffoon and an idiot who's blundered into this war, being tricked by the Israelis, doesn't know what he's doing, is stuck in a quagmire, et cetera. And it's exactly the same playbook that they have used since he first came down the escalator. He's always wrong, he's always a liar, he's always stupid. Now they've added in his senile, which is hilarious since they ignored Donald Trump.

[Eric Metaxas]

Hilarious? No, he's brilliant. He's absolutely brilliant. And he's brilliant on many levels. And he's demonstrated over and over again. And I find it, there's something wonderful and entertaining about watching him because he knows exactly what he's doing. He knows he's the president and they're not. And at the back of most of it is tremendous jealousy. There's tremendous jealousy on the left. As, you know, people in the media, in the world of journalism, they, they despise him because he's wealthy, he's successful, he, he, he's happy. You know, they, they, it's the same reason they despised Reagan. I mean, that's just, that's what they do. But it really is tremendous bitterness.

[Miranda Devine]

And he's also, he's uncontrollable. That's really why they hate him. They cannot find an angle that they can force him to do their bidding. He's just, I think he's always been like that since a child.

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, I mean, listen, we have to be clear. Donald Trump didn't invent himself. God created Donald Trump with all of his extraordinary gifts and you know, what he does with them, that's on him. But he is outrageously, I would say, unprecedentedly gifted. And that redounds to our benefit. He is working for us. He is working for the United States of America. And I'm thrilled that we have someone with his talents and with, with most of his personality, because you couldn't pull this off unless you had outrageous courage and ego self belief, you know, And I think that that's, in the end, as I say, redounds to our benefit. So I'm thrilled that he's in there. And there's all kinds of stuff going on behind the scenes that we don't know right now. But I am genuinely confident that he does know what he's doing. And we all have to do our part.

[Miranda Devine]

He was right about. I mean, honestly can't think of any big thing he hasn't been right about since he's been on the political stage. But particularly during COVID in his first term, which just came out of the blue and basically destroyed his presidency and ensured he would not win in 2020 because so many opportunists saw this as their chance on the left. Remember Jane Fonda saying Covid is God's gift to the left. But, you know, the scary thing that we saw during the pandemic was the willingness of so many free people, supposedly around the world, including in America, to give up their freedoms through fear to people who did not have their best interests in mind. And now we find to an evil liar like Anthony Fauci, who. I mean, I believe Jeffrey Tucker is correct when he says from reading the whole diary, that Fauci tried to exaggerate the threat of the virus to cover up his culpability in the creation of it.

[Eric Metaxas]

I have no doubt of any of that. I mean, again, it's hard for us to believe that anybody is genuinely wicked and evil. I think that that's. But he's not evil.

[Miranda Devine]

It's the banality of evil. I mean, he is evil.

[Eric Metaxas]

But I actually said that on my podcast two days ago. I said that he is Eichmann in Jerusalem, and it's Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil. You look at him, you don't see a monster. You see a bureaucrat just like Eichmann. But it is satanic evil wearing a different, you know, costume. But it is the banality of evil. You cannot. It doesn't. You think, you know, evil should have horns and fangs. Well, the harm that he has done and that people, Francis Collins and others have done.

[Miranda Devine]

Yes.

[Eric Metaxas]

Is just. Who gets away with it believable? And we have to. We have to have a reckoning. We can't let it go. We have to have a reckoning with. With the stolen election. The details of it ought to come out, and what happened at J6. All of that stuff has to come out. And I think that it is finally coming out. But it wasn't looking good a few years ago, but even then I had faith it will come out. The truth will out, to quote Shakespeare, and I think it will out soon. There are things happening, so I'm hopeful,

[Miranda Devine]

really, genuinely, the truth does eventually seep out, but it doesn't find its way into the mainstream media. I mean, the Fauci diaries, the Fauci pleading the fifth 111 times that's barely squeaked into the New York Times, CNN, et cetera. They were complicit in the lies about COVID in the forced lockdowns and the vaccine mandates and the censorship. I know you. Your show was censored after you had Naomi Wolf on, I believe, talking about vaccine mandates.

[Eric Metaxas]

They completely shut us down. No, listen, I'll say it again. We are in a war. But I think we have to be careful. Miranda to CNN and the New York Times. As much as I would like to fantasize that they might someday report the truth, the bottom line is that they're losing market share by the day. There are people listening and watching this podcast and my podcast and many innumerable other places that did not exist 10 years ago. And so I think that CNN and the View and all the mainstream media, they're clinging, hoping that they can keep viewership. They're losing viewership. And I really do think that eventually it's like capillaries forming when the blood vessel is blocked. People are finding their way to the truth. I mean, I get half of my news on X these days because I follow people that I trust and. Or go to the New York Post.com or there are places where you can find the truth. And I really think that's happening. And so I think that CNN and company, either they will realize that they have to, you know, get serious and start reporting some of the truth, or they're dying. I really think they're dying. They're being propped up by, you know, they're billionaires. But I'm not. I really do think that it. We've, we've seen a change, a dramatic change, and that there are places you can find the truth and that every day somebody else is finding one of those places. The fact that, you know, Barry Weiss is the head of CBS News, you know, there are things happening everywhere that give me hope. Sometimes a little bit of hope, sometimes a lot of hope.

[Miranda Devine]

Talking about Fauci, he wasn't motivated by, oh, I want to kill thousands, millions of people and cause suffering and hardship. He was merely motivated, I believe, by self preservation, by his ego, his vanity, his fear of being caught out for the funding, the gain of function research in Wuhan. But he wasn't, you know, I guess those things are just human flaws.

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, you don't think Hitler thought he was doing evil, do you?

[Miranda Devine]

Well, he was driven by hatred of the Jews, in part.

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, maybe he was hidden by hatred, but he thought it was righteous hatred. You know, in other words, I don't think there's anybody out there where there almost no one out there who thinks that they're evil. They think that they're right. And maybe they don't believe in the categories of good and evil. But I think that, you know, I mean, you know, I have to put my cards on the table. I believe God is real. I believe there is good and evil. And I think most people have a sense of that. But I think that needs to be encouraged, that there is good and evil in this world and you get to choose which side you want to fight for. And if you want to sit on the fence, you need to be informed. The devil owns the fence. You're helping, you're complicit with evil. And there were plenty of those. I wrote a 600 page book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany, and many in the church sat on the fence and they said, well, that's not our job. We don't want to be political. Well, you're serving the devil's purposes. And there are people today, and there are people in the American Revolution serving the devil's purpose, purposes by doing nothing, by saying nothing, by worrying about themselves. So they didn't need to be working for the dark side. They just needed to do nothing and not take sides. And they were complicit with evil.

[Miranda Devine]

And so, well, Chuck Schumer and the entire Democratic Party that's allowing this takeover by the Marxists is sitting on the fence. I love your phrase, the devil owns the fence.

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, I mean, that's exactly what it is. It really is. I mean, we saw it. I wrote a book called Letter to the American Church, which came out about four years ago. And it was really about the parallels with the German church under the Nazis and the American church, the evangelical church, in the last few decades, where to pretend that you can sit on the fence, that you don't need to get involved, and when you don't get involved, you allow Hitler or whatever the present evil is to win. And I think that happened in the United States. I can't say how many people I know who. They go to different churches today than they did a few years ago because their church shut down, agreed with the government, we need to shut down. And there was a real sifting that happened in the last, I don't know, five or six years that I think the mainstream media has reported. Well, Covid is, is at the center of it. Yeah, I think Covid was at the center of it. I think a lot of people have been radicalized that. That they. They'd never seen anything like this before, and it suddenly got them thinking for the first time in their lives. And to some extent, I saw that in my own life, that. That I, you know, in 2020, I was naive about a number of things, and over time, I kind of thought, my goodness, what were you naive about? I think the idea that petty tyrants, whether Governor Whitmer or Governor Cuomo or what, that they would do things, really wicked things, that they would exercise their power in this naked way. It really took me time to finally think, my goodness, yes, they really did that. Because I thought, even though I disagreed with Cuomo tremendously, I didn't think he was capable of that. And then I realized, no, they are capable of that. And we need to be much more vigilant and we need to work much harder in electing the right people, that it's not. A lot of these figures proved themselves. Fauci. Prove themselves really to be wicked. I mean, I think that even talking about some of this stuff is so horrifying. It's. I mean, it reminds me of when we opened up the death camps in 1945. I just think people reeled at the horror of it. They said, this can't be that in a civilized European nation, this is going. It doesn't seem possible. It really. It takes time to process that, yes, this was satanic evil. We just didn't think this was possible. We thought we'd move past this, and we have not. It's funny, I was just reading a book by Stefan Zweig. He was a Jewish literary figure in the early part of the 20th century, and he writes about the same thing that we lived in this kind of charmed world world, you know, the vienna of the 1890s and on, where we just. We had evolved past all of this base stuff, and we were just, you know, through. Through science and so on and so forth. We're moving forward into this wonderful world. And then the Nazis come, and they realize we haven't moved an inch. We're exactly the same as we've ever been. And because we foolishly assume that everything is just fine, we've allowed, you know, evil in. I think you could say that about many Americans, that we have been so spoiled in this wonderful country that we didn't understand that there are people that are dramatically opposed, violently opposed to everything we believe in. And they've been working the long march through the institutions, through the decades to gain power in universities and in newsrooms and everywhere and in publishing. And so I Think many of us woke up just in time. I'm not saying that I Woke up in 2020, but a part of my thinking today is really different than it was even just a few years ago.

[Miranda Devine]

Mine too. And, I mean, one of the revelations, frightening revelations for me, was that actually we're all really sheep. Majority of humans are actually very susceptible to manipulation through fear. I guess that was Covid's weapon.

[Eric Metaxas]

Yeah, well, I mean, again, that's something that, you know, I guess we ought to have known, but we've been spoiled in America and in the West. We forgot. But again, all you need to do is think of Nazi Germany. You know, I think my mother, my family was there when this happened. And so this is not some distant world. This is not the medieval era or antiquity. This is, you know, yesterday. And this is. This is the story of human beings. You know, that there really is good and evil and there really is the God of the Bible and the devil, and this is a real thing. And anybody who wants to see things through a secular lens, eventually you're going to be hard pressed to explain. How do you explain that? Yeah, and so I think that that's. I mean, we haven't mentioned the transgender madness. I think a lot of people have been blown away. They thought, what is going on? Who decided that there's more than two sexes? Who decided to call it gender? Who decided that it's a flu thing? When did that happen? In what laboratory did they discover this? And the answer is, of course, no one discovered it. It's nonsense. And it's been pushed on us, just as climate change has been pushed on us. And you can just feel the forces in the culture saying, don't dissent. You must accept this. And at some point, you're inside the story of Orwell's big brother or 1984, where you're being compelled to lie. You're being compelled to say, two plus two equals five. And in a way, it's a subtle, clever way of getting people to curse God. You're getting people to curse God when you are demanding that they lie. I mean, to speak a lie, to say that that man is now a woman, or to say a woman can become a man, or a man can become a woman, or Ellen Page is now a man. If you go along with that nonsense, you're complicit with evil. And, you know, I think a lot of people just in the last five or so years have woken up and said, you know what? I can't. I can't go along with that. I've been drifting along and trying to be polite, but at some point, J.K. rowling and many others have said, I refuse. Elon Musk. Many others have just said, I just refuse to go along with it. I won't go along with it. And those who are bravely refusing to go along with it inspire the rest of us. And I know you and I have had the privilege of being some of those voices, and I've drawn strength from others. It really is. We're living in extraordinary times.

[Miranda Devine]

And the cleverness of the transgender hoax was that it sort of preyed on, especially in America, people are courteous and polite and open and tolerant and don't want to hurt people's feelings. And so, you know, if someone is genuinely in front of you and say that, it hurts me gravely if you misgender me. You know, if you call me what I actually am, then a lot of people went along with that. And I remember Jordan Peterson was an early. He was a canary in the coal mine, and he refused to do so and suffered enormous harm to his career. And, you know, at the time, people thought, oh, he's a stubborn old coot. But he was. He knew. He absolutely knew that once you are forced to tell a lie, you've lost your freedom. You are a slave.

[Eric Metaxas]

Yeah, you've lost your freedom. You've lost your integrity. And it really is. I mean, I was just thinking this recently, and I just mentioned it, but it is really like they're demanding that you curse God, because to lie, to say something that is, you know, a lie, to go along with that is like saying. Like declaring, there is no truth, there is no God, There is only power. That is the voice of the devil. And I think that that's what the secular left, ultimately, the Marxist left, ultimately, that's what they want to do. They want to destroy your ability to discern between good and evil just to go along with things and at some point compel you to lie, to participate in a lie. And it's funny because in my book, Revolution, I see that's exactly what happens with the Americans around. The Boston Tea Party and a few other things where they can see that the British are playing a game with them and saying that we're gonna get you to relax your highfalutin Christian principles. We're gonna get you to buy the tea. We're gonna artificially deflate the price of the tea, but we'll keep the tax on. So you'll be morally compromised. You'll buy it because it's so Cheap, but you're going to pay the tax. And it really was something that it set off the Americans because the Americans said, you know what? We refuse. We would rather die than participate in your lie. You're trying to bribe us. You're trying to get us to go along with a lie, that it's okay for you to tax us. This tax is illegitimate. It violates our rights. So it really was the principle. It wasn't the money. And I think the British were convinced that they could get them to go along with it, that they thought, we'll get you to. We'll see how principled you are. You know, you're nothing but a bunch of religious hypocrites in Boston and in the colonies. And the Americans said, no, we actually believe this, and we will fight if you want to play this game. So it's the same story over and over and over again, where you have corrupt, cynical elites who are secular and who believe in power, and they believe that power wins. And then you have people on the other side, the good guys, who say, we don't believe that. We believe good wins and we're gonna do the right thing, even though it's gonna cost us something. Cause we think it'll be more costly for us not to do the right thing. That's the story of the American Revolution. It's the story in which we find ourselves today. And it's a very important story.

[Miranda Devine]

I think you've hit on a crucial difference with America. And it is that, you know, as I said, I've lived in Australia for a long time, in England and so on, and the culture in these countries, Canada and so on, is go along to get along. And I see in Australia that that mentality gives you a sort of a, you know, a pleasant, calm life. But it also sends you down a path of destruction. Where China is encroaching on this country now. And you can see, I think, people are starting to glimpse a really dark future in which they're not in control of their own country. In America, that refusal to go along, to get along creates a lot of friction and anger and explosions of violence even, which from the outside, people look at it and think it's unfathomable. Why wouldn't you want to live in a calm, orderly society? But when you understand why that's happening in America, we've come back to the fight is worth fighting. And if you don't fight, you're lost.

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, that's. I mean, this is why I say that the American experiment, the story of The American Revolution. Thomas Paine famously said it, this is for the whole world. This was not just for America. This is an idea that transcends nations. There isn't a person in the world or a nation in the world who is exempt from making these choices. And so, just as John Winthrop in 1630 famously is talking about the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be that it would be like a shining city on a hill, he's quoting Jesus, of course. The idea is that it would be something. People would look at it and say, what do they have there? It's beautiful. How can we get that? And that's really what America has always been meant to be. So that we don't just say, this is just for us. This is for anyone in the world who wants to join us in this. And I would like to think that, you know, people like my friend Lawrence Fox in England and Tommy Robinson and others, that they get this. There are people around the world who see this, who are getting it. And I think Tommy Robinson said in the rally, whatever it was six or eight weeks ago, that he said about England, we are a Christian nation. And I thought, aha, finally someone has said it. Because apart from that, what are you? If you're just a secular European nation, then the Islamic wave will roll over you. They are eager to crush you in your weakness. If you don't know who you are, if you don't know what you stand for, they're happy to come with their values. So I think that at the end of the day, we have to figure out, what do we believe? Is it true? Do we believe it? Are we willing to fight for it? And then let's joyfully fight for it. And I think that that's the only way to live, you know, to live with comfort. I mean, that's not the way I would raise my kids to live. And I think that to have self respect. And so to me, that's one of the joys of researching the story of the American Revolution is to see how heroic so many of them were. I tell the story of Nathan Hale. I mean, one of the great heroes of the American revolution. He got 10 seconds mentioned in the Ken Burns PBS documentary. And I thought, this is one of the heroes in American history. He gets 10 seconds in the PBS version. They're very uncomfortable with heroes. And so I think we have to, you know, we have to celebrate these heroes. And then we have to understand that, you know, God gives us these heroes to inspire us to be heroes in our time. This is not just history. I mean, History is for now. So, you know, all that said, I think there are many Americans waking up now and seeing that I have a role to play in the ongoing American Revolution, that the liberties that were won by these brave men who suffered and died, I have to, to do my part. And the first thing that we can do is know the story. So again, that's why I wrote the book. I thought we, we need, we need a proper accounting of what it was that happened. We. There aren't too many and certainly not on pbs. So I'm, but, yeah, so I'm hopeful now.

[Miranda Devine]

We haven't talked about the rise of antisemitism, the resurgence of it, I mean, around the world for a long time, but also in America. We see it obviously on the left in the Democrat Party, but we've also been seeing a glimmer of it on the right with a few prominent people who, you know, people like Tucker or I don't know if he's anti Semitic, but he's anti Israel and others.

[Eric Metaxas]

He's incredibly foolish or stupid. I don't know what it is, but it's kind of like talking about Anthony Fauci. He's not stupid, you know. Well, he's not stupid, you're right. No, it is, but it is a willful ignorance and tremendously destructive. I mean, honestly, it breaks my heart because I used to know Tucker and I think what he's done is just absolutely despicable. But I think he and those of his ilk will get their comeuppance. This is not something that will succeed. I mean, he and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie posed for a picture the other day brazenly standing against President Trump. And I think, are they crazy? Look, there were people. Again, you've read my book. So, you know, there were people, generals, Horatio Gates and Charles Lee, who thought they should have Washington's job. And so they dared to go against him over and over and over again. They were humiliated. And I really believe the same is true for Trump that God has said, look, this is the guy that I'm using right now to stand against Marxism, madness on the left, every kind of madness, Islamo, fascism, and if you dare, as Tucker and Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene have done, to stand against him, you're not going to win. You're very foolish, very, very informative, inflated. You're, you know, you're like the leaders of the so called Lincoln Project. I mean, ultimately it ends up very pathetic. It really is pathetic. But they somehow have been deluded into thinking that they might succeed and they can't succeed, they won't succeed. And I think that the rise of anti Semitism. I mean, as you know, I wrote a book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and that to me is the Christian response to antisemitism. That's the story and we turn it into a film. We're re releasing it in theaters all across America. October 7th. I picked the date, of course, October 7th. And so it's gonna be theaters all across America. And if you wanna know what is the Christian response to antisemitism, the story of Bonhoeffer is the Christian response. And it's astonishing to see figures like Tucker and Candace Owens and others, you know, just go along with what we thought had been eradicated, which is to say anti Semitism in various forms.

[Miranda Devine]

I think that Massey and Green are driven by, you know, resentment. They've been cast out of the fold. So that's them. And I think Tucker genuinely began with an honest revulsion towards war because he'd felt so betrayed about Iraq and Afghanistan. So I think he started at a good place, but he's isolated and he's talking to so called historians who just have things skew if.

[Eric Metaxas]

Yeah, no, his is a really sad story.

[Miranda Devine]

But why is the Jew hatred? Because I don't think it's just anti Israel or anti so called anti Semitism and call it for what it is really Jew hatred. It seems to be visceral on the left. Visceral. You can see it. And I mean, is that in part because of the Islamic immigration that is now, which has also happened elsewhere in the world now overwhelmed in sheer numbers, the Jewish population. So that the Muslim sensibility becomes a political calculus, particularly on the left.

[Eric Metaxas]

But it almost doesn't matter. You know, Muslims were not involved in the Holocaust, right? In other words, what we're talking about, again, we have to frame it properly. This is spiritual. The God of the Bible is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. A hatred of God manifests itself in a hatred of what God loves. God chose the Jewish people, period. You know, as a Christian, I don't believe there's salvation outside of Jesus Christ. But God chose the Jewish people. God has a special role for the Jewish people. Now what that means, it can get complicated, but the basics are there. And so a hatred of God, a demonic hatred of God always manifests itself in a hatred of what God loves, which is serious. Christians and Jews, you see this over and over again. You see it over and over again in history. And I, you know, I'm Surprised to see it now, but at the same time, that's what it is. It's satanic, it's irrational. It makes absolutely no sense. I mean, when you think of the. The evils in the world and that, for people to think, aha, I figured it out. The secret key, it's the Jews. I mean, it's almost such a horrible cliche that you would think people would be embarrassed. You'd think that people like Tucker and others would be embarrassed to fall into this cliche, that it's the Jews, it's the Jews. I'm fascinated by it, actually. I think that it may be an

[Miranda Devine]

element of breaking taboos. We've broken every taboo. I think pedophilia is the last one, and that's looking shaky. And antisemitism for so long, Jew hatred for so long after the Second World War was a taboo. And so maybe there's an element of that.

[Eric Metaxas]

Yeah, no, that's true.

[Miranda Devine]

Do you see a parallel between Nazism, between the lead up to World War II and today? Because certainly those Lincoln Project people do, but they get it backwards. They say that Donald Trump is Hitler.

[Eric Metaxas]

I mean, I have to tell you, since I wrote my book on Bonhoeffer, when I came out for Trump, thousands of people came against me and basically said, doesn't this idiot understand he's written a book about Hitler? Doesn't he understand that Trump is Hitler? And I can understand their point of view. The only problem is they're wrong. But I can understand how you could get sucked into thinking that. But the irony is that it is the left, it's the anti Trump forces that are behaving like Hitler. That's just the way it is. Whether it's the anti Semitic left or the woke right, they all have one thing in common. They hate Trump because Trump is standing up in a way that they can't handle it. So they want to attack him. And. It's horrible to see. But I do think that you can't really. God makes his will plain sometimes, and I think that he has ordained that the Jews, even the apostate Jews, the Jews who reject him, are his beloved children. You know, I mean, on one level, of course, we're all God's beloved children, but he has a special place for the Jews. And I think that the visceral hatred of the Jews that we've seen, it's just a manifestation of. It's a demonic hatred, basically. Because I really think that people can pretend that they have reasons, but it goes. There's something deeper going on it really doesn't make rational sense.

[Miranda Devine]

Let's just go back to your formation. You grew up, you were born in Queens, as surprisingly, I guess to many people, so was I, and of course, so was Donald Trump. And then you grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. It sounds like an idyllic boyhood where you were ice fishing in the winter and fishing in the summer and had a lot of outdoor time. Your father was Greek Orthodox, your mother German Lutheran immigrants. How did you, you were brought up, I believe, Orthodox. But how did your parents reconcile their religious differences, such as they are intra Christian, and then take us from that to your awakening to your becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ, I guess.

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, I, I think for me, honestly, I think, you know, European immigrants, they come to this country and they're not particularly religious right now. It was the Greek Orthodox Church. For my father, it was the Greek cultural center. So this is not to say that his faith wasn't sincere, but it wasn't very deep. And, and I think most immigrants in churches like the Greek Orthodox Church, it's just what their family did and it's, it's a point of cultural contact. Whether they actually have a deeper faith is another question. Some do and some don't. I can say that the people I grew up with in the Greek church were lovely, wonderful people. I'm still friends with them. I love them and they're my community. But it didn't really prepare me for the secular world of Yale University. Right. So if you grew up in a place that's sort of culturally Christian. Of course, my mother, you marry a Greek, you know, you're going to take a Greek surname and you're going to join the Greek Orthodox Church. So my mother's Lutheran faith was pretty meaningless to her as it, you know, a lot of people are just cultural Christians. They sort of grow up in that world, but they're not serious about it. So they were just, you know, good Americans and they went to the Greek church on Sunday.

[Miranda Devine]

She went to church every week?

[Eric Metaxas]

Yeah, I mean, you know, and dragged me along, but you're pretty much going through the motions. And I don't say that in a cynical way, it's just that. But like a lot of people, a lot of, like my wife who grew up in the Catholic Church, you know, you just sort of, you're not sure what you believe, but this is what you do on Sundays and you kind of go along with it. And for some people, the penny drops and it becomes real. For some people, it doesn't. So for me I go off to Yale University and you know, my parents hadn't gone to college and so I just drifted along with the zeitgeist. What does everybody believe? Well, when you enter the world of Yale University naively, as I did innocently, you pick up the, you know, the cultural cues that, well, we don't take the Bible seriously and we certainly aren't conservative. We hate Ronald Reagan. You know, like I was, I just drifted along with that. So I was an English major, want to be a writer. So when I graduated, I was totally lost. I was, I was not some bold sinner that had become an atheist. I just didn't believe anybody could know whether there's a God. And anybody claims they know God, they must be nuts. So I just drifted. And then around my 25th birthday or at in my 24th year, I moved back in with my parents, which is kind of funny in a way because I think, you know, they're like, what are you doing here? Like, we worked menial jobs to send you to Yale University. And like, you're trying to find yourself, like, what happened? You know, what's wrong with you? And I think that my parents would be like, why don't you find yourself a job? Like, you know, what's wrong? You know. And so I, so I had a really hard year, but in the middle of that year and I wrote about it, I wrote a book called Fish out of Water, which tells my story. It really was a hard time for me. And right around my 25th birthday, just to cut to the chase, I had a totally miraculous experience. One of the. A Jesus dream, whatever you want to. You know, I've written about it in a couple of books, but it was a genuinely miraculous experience because I think I was too intellectually gummed up to be able to think about this stuff. I was sort of assuming that educated people know that you can't know that you have to be perpetually agnostic. And so I had this miraculous dream. And literally, I hate when people misuse or overuse the word literally, but in my case, literally overnight everything changed. And I gave my heart to Jesus and to the God of the Bible. And so pretty quickly I drifted politically conservative after that.

[Miranda Devine]

What was the dream?

[Eric Metaxas]

I can't tell you because it's too complicated. It's like a long story. It's a long joke, but I told it. If people look up. Jordan Peterson interviewed me and compelled me to tell the 20 minute story of the dream. I wrote about it in my book on miracles and I write about it in My book, Fish out of Water. And. And I know there's a video on my website, ericmataxas.com, but in a nutshell, it was a kind of a Freudian, Jungian symbol dream where God showed himself to me and basically said, you know, you thought that I was the collective unconscious, that I was some energy force or what? You know, like I was trying to think, what do people mean by God? They must mean what, Jung or Freud, you know, the collective unconscious, some kind of energy force. And in the dream, he made it clear to me, no, the God of the Bible, my son, Jesus. That's what you're looking for, Eric. You're not looking for some energy force. You're looking for the person of Jesus. You're looking for the God of the Bible, who is a person who wants to have a relationship with you. And that was just. It was delivered in the dream in such a way that was absolutely mind blowing. And I just. My life changed literally overnight. And I was born again, as we say. And I've been spending the decades since reading and trying to catch up with what happened to me.

[Miranda Devine]

So was there some sort of sudden crisis or was it just the culmination of your year of being lost, or did someone show you the way?

[Eric Metaxas]

It was not a crisis. I think I was. I was struggling. It was a. It was. It was a bad year. So I think because of my struggle, I was for the first time open to, like, is there truth? And if there is a truth, what is it? But I was inoculated at Yale against it couldn't be the God of the Bible. And you know what these Jesus freaks believe, like, certainly it's not that. And it can't be thinking of religion. Well, I was. I was. I had. I had met someone. I had a menial, horrible job that I took, you know, while I'm doing my writing on the side as a proofreader at Union Carbide in Danbury, Connecticut. It was really like hellish experience living at home and doing that horrible job. And I met somebody who was a really sophisticated, wonderful Christian who was sharing his faith with me. He would share Bible verses with me, but I was absolutely not interested. I thought, I'm not, I'm not. I know that ain't it. But over the months, I feel like I opened the door just a crack. I mean, just a crack to say, you know, if there is a God, I wish he'd reveal himself to me. But, you know, I don't think that's gonna happen. And in this Dream. It did in such a way that I just, you know, and in my case, it needed to be dramatic because I was really so inoculated against that that I knew I would lose friends, you know, and of course I did. I mean, all my sophisticated left wing Yale friends thought, oh, Eric's gone insane.

[Miranda Devine]

So what did you do? How did your life change the day after the dream?

[Eric Metaxas]

I think I immediately stopped sleeping with my girlfriend. That'll tell you that I was pretty serious, right? I mean, we've been together for three years. And I said, I'm sure she was not happy. She thought, what happened to you? You know. But I mean, I proposed to her eventually. We did not get married. We split up. We split up. And I'm glad that we did, but it was really dramatic. And of course, you know, when I would meet my old Yale friends and say, you know, hey, how's it going? I would be unable to shut up about, you know, I've, I've. I've had this Jesus experience. And, you know, and so I think that turned a lot of them off because that, you know, the Jesus experience will tend to make you politically. Excuse me, will tend to make you politically conservative, you know, and so suddenly I thought, well, I, I don't think abortion is a good thing, and I don't think sex outside of marriage is a good thing. And I don't, you know, like, suddenly I, I shifted in my views. So I did lose some friends. But I thought, well, what can you do? I mean, it's like I, I have to believe what I think is right. And I have to, you know, I can't just bow. I just can't bend my views to please my friends, which is effectively what I had been doing up to that point.

[Miranda Devine]

So if you were a Catholic, I mean, that sounds like a calling. You would then join the priesthood, become a nun. What did you do in your circumstance? I mean, and you were kind of, you were Greek Orthodox, but how did you find a religion?

[Eric Metaxas]

I guess I really just believed that, you know, I'd been born again, I'd become a Christian, I believe in Jesus. And so what does that mean? I don't know what it means. And so I prayed and said, God, lead me in my career, because up until now I've been floundering and floating and confused and so lead me. And I haven't put it in a book yet, but through a number of miraculous experiences, not all, but a number, God did lead me in my career. And it wasn't all easy, but I had Very clear sense that God is leading me. And in retrospect, of course, it's that much clearer to me now. I just see that writing the Bonhoeffer book and a lot of what I did, God's hand was on me and writing this revolution book. I mean, I don't have any doubt that God led me to write this book. And people can make of that what they will. Some people just think that's crazy to say such a thing. But, you know, I think God has a plan for every one of us. It's not just for me. And so I don't subscribe to any particular denomination. I'm like a C.S. lewis, mere Christian. You know, it's about Jesus at the Bible. And there are plenty of denominations where you can find a church that preaches that and you can find churches that don't. And I think that. So for a while, my wife and I went to an Episcopal church that was spectacular. Most of them are horrible. So it's really about the particular church, not the denomination. But, you know, I believe in the Nicene Creed in the Bible. So.

[Miranda Devine]

Yeah, interesting. That's a bit harder, I think, isn't it? To sort of construct your own.

[Eric Metaxas]

I don't think you can construct your own. I think it's really. Yeah, I mean, I would say I'm an evangelical, you know, and there are plenty of those kinds of churches, but I think that. So I've always been a very pro Catholic, non Catholic, and I attend the Greek Orthodox Church when I'm in Connecticut. And, you know, so I think that any place that is genuinely Christian, that's the church. That's what I care about. So.

[Miranda Devine]

Yeah, and you've become, I guess, for want of a better word, you're really a preacher. I mean, you are in a secular world. You are giving a message that doesn't have to be overtly Christian, but everything that you do is based in that direction.

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, I mean, it's the same with Charlie Kirk. I mean, Charlie Kirk, who was a dear friend of mine, it was his faith that informed everything else. And I really do think that's God's will, that our faith is supposed to inform our views of politics. And what is my view of America and what is my view of it that, you know, to me, God wants us to be biblically based in whatever we do. Whether God calls you into a life of writing or business or whatever it is that everything we do we think of as ministry because, you know, we're with God all the time. He's with us. All the time. So whatever he's called me to do, if it's just to be a father or, Or a husband or whatever I do, you know, I want to do it as he. As he wants me to do it, Whatever. Whatever that means. And sometimes it'll be explicit and on the nose, and other times, you know, it's just. It's something deeper. So it. But it is, it does, I think, properly become who you are. You know, it's. It's at the center, let's put it that way.

[Miranda Devine]

Now, I usually wrap up interviews and ask people, what's the secret of success? But I wanted to ask you an extra question. You may have an answer to that, but really, what should every person listening to this podcast, what could they do to help restore America? To be part of this counter revolution, I think is what Victor Davis Hanson calls it, against the sort of Marxist revolutionaries?

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, you've given me the author softball question, because my answer in this case genuinely is, read my book. Because we have to know the story. The story will inspire you. And I think, and I say this to everybody, God is real. Ask him to guide you. And I think that if I ask George Washington what. What's the secret of success? He and John Adams and the others said that obedience to God is where it starts. God cannot steer me if I don't acknowledge him in my life and how I live. And if I live in a way that honors him. He wants to guide me. He has a plan for me that he, He. He wants to. To. To help me succeed in that plan. And so I think that's true of everybody. And I think. But right now in America, the reason I wrote the book is because I do believe we need to not just know the story, but we need to rejoice in it. It's a beautiful, inspiring story. I think we forgot, culturally, we've forgotten how beautiful it is and how wonderful it is and how true it is and that it's meant to be our story. This is not just something that happened. It's meant to be something that. That continues, that we didn't start America for nothing. It's to start a new way of living, self government, looking to God and not to government. So again, to me, that's at the heart of everything. Yeah.

[Miranda Devine]

Yeah. And Eric, I think the beauty of the sort of amnesia that country has been going through is that there's a whole generation that's there that's able to rediscover it for the first time. And what a wonderful blessing to have so thank you for your great part in making that happen. And thanks for joining Pod Force One.

[Eric Metaxas]

You're very kind. Thank you. Miranda, great to be with you.

[Miranda Devine]

Thanks for joining Pod Force One. Please like and subscribe and leave a comment below. I love to read them. And we'll be back with another interview next week on podforce One.