Ali Stuckey (5:41)
Hi. She will be on the show today at the end as we talk about some more light hearted things. But you will see her frequently. She is a favorite guest on the show. I come into the studio three times a week in the morning to record for about two hours. Then I go home. My husband and I work together full time. We operate kind of like small business owners. We bring our family along for the ride as much as we can, and we have a lot of fun doing it. And the Lord has blessed us immensely with the privilege of being able to do this together, and we're really grateful for that. My parents are also a big part of our lives, a big part of this show. My mom has shared her wisdom on the show a couple times in my My dad is a frequent guest. He's an audience favorite. Every time we go somewhere and he's there, he always has people coming up to him saying, oh my gosh, I love when you're unrelatable. And in fact, when we asked a lot of you what something you want to see more of or see again in 2025, unrelatable, a lot of you said more conversations with your dad. So he will be here on Thursday. We will be discussing the H1B debate much more. Trump's presidency all that we talk about very serious, very controversial hot button topics on this show in a way that is unique and sometimes can press buttons that we're not necessarily meaning to press. We only talk about things that we think need to be talked about. It's not about getting clicks. It's not about going viral. Either I want to talk about them or I feel that I need to talk about them. My goal is to not only equip and encourage Christians, but to persuade you and to inform you as much as I can. And we always try to bring it back to the character of God. In every story that we are discussing, there are several sayings that you'll hear me say a lot the longer you listen. Relatable has many, many isms and mantras and alliterations, and one reminder that we repeat often is that God's eternal plan of redemption is always going off without a hitch. Nothing throws him off or takes him aback. He is sovereign. As Job 42:2 says, Nothing can thwart his will. Romans 8:28 39 reminds us that God is working all things together for his glory and our good, even when we don't understand it. That passage that I just referenced in Romans 8 it ends this way. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Seasons change and presidents, administrations, they come and go. But the Jesus by whose birth we all count our years is still on his throne, and he will rule eternally. Hebrews 13:8 one of my favorite verses Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And it is against this backdrop of God's unchanging nature, his goodness, his love, his power, his sovereignty, that we talk about what is going on in the world. Jesus is coming back, but he is not here yet. So we occupy this physical space, this temporal world because a God who does nothing arbitrarily or accidentally placed us here. And because he has called us to love our neighbors, to make better this tiny spot of eternity, this small speck of earth on which he's placed us, we have to care about the issues at stake. Particularly these political issues and social and theological issues today have all become political. Politics matter because policy matters, because people matter. Politics affects policy. Policy affects people. People matter. They're made in the image of God, so they matter to him and they matter to us as Christians. So with that, let us get into what is happening in dc, what is about to happen with the Trump administration in 2025, why we should care, and the role that Christians play in all of this. But first let me pause Let me tell you about our first sponsor for the day. It awesome sponsor and that is seven Weeks Coffee. I am so grateful for my advertisers on this show. It is how you are able to listen to or watch this show for free. And I only partner with advertisers that are amazing. It's just one of the standards that I have. It's one of the qualifications and seven Weeks Coffee makes amazing high quality totally clean coffee. If you are looking for organic, mold free all the things and really great tasting coffee then you need to check out seven weeks coffee. But what's even better about it is that 10 of every sale of seven weeks coffee goes to a pro life organization or a pregnancy center that is daily working to save the lives of unborn children and minister to their moms. Seven Weeks Coffee has already raised over half a million dollars for these pregnancy centers across the country and they're called seven Weeks because at seven weeks gestation that little baby in the womb is the size of a coffee bean. So get your coffee from Weeks Coffee. Subscribe to their Heartbeat club. You save 15 when you do that and the coffee shows up at your front door every month. Plus when you use my code ALI you get an extra 10 off 7 weeks coffee.com code ALI alright, so we were going to just get right into what is going to happen post inauguration but right as we were about to record I saw the news that Justin Trudeau, the prime Minister of Canada and the lead leader of the Liberal Party there, has resigned. And I don't want to take up too much of our time because I am really going to try to meet my goal of having this episode be under an hour. But he basically resigned because he is extremely unpopular. There is a lot of opposition from the Conservative Party there, and it doesn't look like he is going to win the upcoming election or the Liberal Party is not looking like they are going to win the upcoming election, which of course we think is a very good thing. So here are some quotes from the Associated Press. Trudeau was facing pressure to call for an election before a scheduled one in October as Canadians reckoned with high inflation and President Elect Trump's tariff threat. The tariff threat would be bad for Canada's economy. That's something that Trump has threatened to do. And so this led to, it seems, the resignations of several cabinet members. There are a lot of internal conflicts, it looks like, within Canada's government and within the Liberal Party and Trump's election and some of his intimidation tactics, which of course I think are good and strategic and smart, they seem to, it seems to have shaken a lot of things up and scared a lot of people in the Canadian government. So it says this, it says Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico due to his concerns about the number of migrants and drugs coming into the US which triggered fears of inflation and a trade war. And after Trump met with Trudeau just a few weeks ago, Trudeau came to Mar a Lago, met with Trump. Canada then promised they're going to be fop border security in a very muscular way. So Trump is not even president yet and already the conversations and the deal making that he is doing is improving border security both in Canada and Mexico. Mexico responded in a very similar way when Trump talked about tariffs. So just to remind that the border disaster that we have, that we're going to talk about a little bit today, it is a choice. It's not some disaster that governments can't control. It is the result of a policy choice. And because now we have a president that believes in the strength of America and he is not afraid to flex America's muscles, countries are responding exactly how conservatives have said the countries respond when America is strong. But, but currently under Joe Biden, we have a very weak government the way that we also did under Barack Obama. AP goes on to explain. His resignation came as polls indicated that the Liberal Party was set to be trounced by the Opposition Conservative Party in the upcoming election, expected in or before October. Trudeau's decision to leave the post admit his government's deepening unpopularity is a far cry from the popularity he enjoyed when he became prime minister when polls showed he boasted approval ratings above 60%. This is via Axios, by the way. Trudeau noted that the Canadian Parliament will be prorogued, essentially suspended, until March 24 while a new leader is chosen. With Trudeau out as party leader, he will remain prime minister until a new leader is chosen. Once a party leader is selected, that person will become the next prime minister, per the New York Times. So we will see what goes on. They're very interesting development. I mean, the stories that I'm hearing from Canada, not just that their health care is an absolute shambles. You just can't get the care that you need. It's just so costly. And I'm not talking about the money that it costs, although of course it does cost tax dollars, but I'm talking about the lives that it costs and the time that it takes for people to get their very serious illnesses addressed. It's just a travesty. But also housing costs and the mass migration that has changed the demographics, changed the politics there, changed the economy there has been really devastating for Canadians. It seems like the average person can even afford to live there in a civilized way. So, of course, Justin Trudeau is deeply unpopular. And I hope the best for Canada. I hope that they do get new leadership that actually has the courage to make the changes needed. All right, so Trump is about to take office. I envy all of you who are going to the inauguration and all of the inaugural celebrations. That's going to be wonderful. Many of us, most of us will be celebrating from afar, and it just cannot come fast enough. So here's what we want to see from Trump. When people say that Trump has a mandate, that he was given a mandate because he won the popular vote, because he also obviously won the electoral vote, it was overwhelming. That's what people mean when they say that he was given a mandate. This is the American people's way. Voting for him is the American people's way of saying, look, we're giving you our votes, we're giving you power. We want things to change. How things are going right now are not good. So have the guts and the determination to do something about inflation, about the border, about the involvement in unnecessary wars. People want to see him gut and rebuild our security apparatus. The FBI and the doj, people want to see a change in America's health care system. Also how America and American medicine approaches health. This is from the Pew Research Center. The economy and immigration were top issues for Trump supporters. Even more important in 2024 than in 2020. Trump supporters were unified also on several cultural issues in polling conducted over the course of the year. So for example, 92% of Trump supporters believe. I don't even like to say believe, but know that sex is not changeable, that it is fixed, it's something that happens at conception and identity declaration cannot change that. 89% said gun owners more to increase than decrease safety. 83% view the criminal justice system as not tough enough on criminals. I guarantee you that spans the political spectrum that transcends race. People don't like to see the recidivism that we see. We don't like to see violent criminals let back out on the streets only to steal and to murder and to destroy. No one likes that. Only radical activists truly believe in defunding the police or the soft on crime policies that are implemented in the name of so called restorative justice. People want to see criminals behind bars for good. They want to be able to go downtown again. They want to be able to enjoy Seattle or New York City or Philadelphia. But unfortunately, again, policy decisions, deliberate policy decisions by liberals in charge have made that impossible. It's made it less safe because of soft on crime policies, but also because of the soft on drug policies that have exacerbated the homelessness issue and the poverty issue and the health issues in all of these cities. You can't go and enjoy downtown San Francisco. You can't enjoy downtown D.C. you feel like you have to not only watch your back, you really feel like you can't leave after dark in our own country. And this is not inevitable. It's the result of policy decisions. 75% of Trump supporters, according to Pew Research, did not think the legacy of slavery affects the position of black people in American society today much or at all. And that really needs to be higher than that. 2020 really did a number on people in a good way and a bad way. I mean, a lot of people just got really confused in 2020 because of all of the social justice nonsense. But it was also clarifying for a lot of people who were previously confused. The vast majority of people, it seems from the conversations I have started listening to this show in 2020, there just weren't that many Christians in the evangelical space saying, yeah, I'm not going to post a black square. And actually riots are not the voice of the unheard and actually, I'm not sure about some of these claims about systemic racism and pervasive white supremacy and white privilege. I'm not so sure that social justice is justice according to the God of the Bible. I don't think this is going to end up well. And we received those of us saying those things received a lot of flackers, like more than ever, just the hateful, angry messages that I received from professing Christians during that time. But I would say that we have been at this point vindicated because we've seen the really dark and ugly underbelly of the real ideology of critical race theory and social justice ideology and Black Lives Matter. It was really all just a money grab. And people laughed when we called it Marxist or communist. But of course, that's exactly what it was. And like all left wing collectivist movements, it lends itself to destruction and confusion and chaos because they are all Satanic and Satan is the author of chaos and confusion. And so I actually think part of that, part of that chaos of 2020 actually helped Trump win in 2024. It helped him lose in 2020. But as people saw the light took them and the craziness of COVID and the corruption that was all exposed there, I actually think that helped Trump a lot win in 2024. And because of that, we have a broad coalition. We talked a lot about this at the end of last year. We have new people that we have brought into the fold on the conservative side, on the Republican side that were not there previously who don't share all of our values. We've got a lot of people in the Make America Healthy Again movement that I really appreciate and whose boldness is an example to us all. I have lear learned from them. I am so thankful that these people have been given positions of influence and authority, not just in the Trump campaign, but also potentially the Trump administration. But a lot of these people are pro choice. A lot of these people aren't bold when it comes to the reality of gender. A lot of these people don't know where they stand on things like immigration. So that means conservatives, and in particular conservative Christians, that we have our role to play in holding the line. Line. I'm not saying we should excise the moderates out of our party. I'm not saying that there is no room for the RFK types, the people who would have never voted for Trump a few years ago, but have seen the light on a few issues but aren't conservative on other issues. I'm not saying we shouldn't partner with them and link arms with them. They were necessary to winning the election. So I'm thankful for them. But that doesn't mean that we as Christians abandon our priorities. We also have our place at the table and we cannot give in just because we are afraid that truly advocating for Christian values and our conservative positions on a variety of issues is going to cost us future elections. We have to be an anchor over here on the right and to pull those people who are now newly in the fold over in our direction through the power of persuasion. So we'll get into a couple of those issues that we really have to hold the line on over the next four years that we really have to work hard at making our case to convincing those who are in the middle, center right, center left to come over to us. But before we get to that, let me pause. Let me tell you about our next sponsor for the day, and that is Life or Death Con. So this is a conference that will be right before the March for Life in Washington, D.C. on January 23rd. I'm so excited about it. I am going to be speaking. This is hosted by Seth Gruber, one of your favorite guests. He sat right here and told us about the dark hidden history of the pro abortion and eugenics movement and who Planned Parenthood really is, who Margaret Sanger really is. Nazi Ties. Fascinating episode if you haven't listened to it already. But he's Hosting Life or DeathCon. I'm speaking. Eric Metaxas is speaking. This is really a rallying cry for the pro life movement to start off not just the year, but the four years of the Trump presidency. I mean, talk about holding the line. This is where you are going to be inspired to hold the line and to be told how to do it. So sign up. Join me at life or deathcon. It's going to be super encouraging. Go to lifeordeathcon.com use code ALI10. You'll get 10% off your ticket when you do life or deathcon.com code ALI10 speaking of life or death, one of the biggest things that we are going to have to hold the line on as Christians in the Trump administration. Not that we are in the Trump administration, but when it comes to the Trump administration and the policies that they will be putting forth is abortion. You will remember during the campaign, Trump was very wishy washy on abortion and some of us raised respectful ruckus and said, oh, I don't like what he's saying about Amendment 4, that he doesn't know how he's going to vote for an Amendment 4. You'll remember in Florida where Trump has a residence where he was voting, that would have allowed abortion through all nine months in the state of Florida, whereas previously they had and they do still have. Because Amendment 4 didn't pass a heartbeat bill that says, sorry, once you detect a heartbeat, you're not going to be killing this baby. And Trump originally said, oh, well, I don't know. That's, I think heartbeat bill, that's too soon. I don't know how I'm going to vote vote. But a lot of people said, whoa, whoa, whoa. Really? That's your stance, President Trump? And thankfully he backed down and he said, yeah, I'm going to vote no on Amendment 4. That goes to show Christians do have influence in his administration, had influence over his campaign. And of course, that wouldn't have been the case with Kamala Harris. So even though Trump wasn't as isn't as pro life as I am, as I would like him to be, I know where pro lifers can have influence and it wasn't going to be in a Kamala Harris presidency. The most pro abortion candidate we had ever had. Just as a reminder, here is Trump on abortion. So one, will you restrict the availability of abortion pills when you're in office?
