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Albert Mohler
It's Wednesday, June 11, 2025. I'm Albert Mohler, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Well, what we have right now is a classic face off. A face off in particular between the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, and California Governor Gavin Newsom. Now, those are two men of opposing parties. In one sense, they're probably two men of rather opposing worldviews. But right now, they're in a classic face off. And the advantage has to go to the President of the United States. Given protests that the President claims have gotten out of hand there in California, the President has called out Marines and National Guards personnel to defend the peace and order there in Southern California. Now, Governor Gavin Newsom has said that that's an overreaction. And in the face off, the point has now been reached where the President of the United States has threatened legal action against the California governor. Now, much of this is a form of political theater, and just about everyone can recognize that. But that is not to say it's not important and that serious constitutional issues are not here invoked. For one thing, in a democracy, it is a very unusual thing for the federal government to call out personnel in One of the 50 states, military personnel, armed forces, because when you look at the shape of the American constitutional order, you are not to have troops used in a federal license in this way unless there is a dramatic emergency as called for in several pieces of landmark legislation. When it comes, for example, to the mobilization of the National Guard, it is unusual for a president to order that mobilization in a state without the cooperation of the state's governor. When it comes to the deployment of Marines. Well, this is an issue that raises constitutional questions about the use of federal personnel, particularly over against the wishes, say, of a sitting governor in a state. That's very different than when in certain situations, governors have called upon the federal government for particular help, as happened in the Los Angeles riots a generation ago. But it's not unprecedented for the federal government for a president to take this kind of action. You could look for an example of this going back to the Eisenhower administration, an action he took in the state of Arkansas. But nonetheless, the very fact that these are rather isolated examples in American history points to the fact that big issues are afoot here, and you're looking at a big political drama. You're looking at big political personalities, and you're also looking at big constitutional issues. Now, let's look at the raw politics for just a moment. Who has the heavier hand here? Who has the stronger hand, undoubtedly the stronger hand is that held by the commander in chief, the President of the United States. That is not to say that California Governor Gavin Newsom does not have several constitutional powers at his disposal. It is to say that in this kind of battle, it looks like President Trump pretty clearly has the upper hand. Tyler Pager of the New York Times reports it this way. Quote, it is the fight President Trump had been waiting for, a showdown with a top rival in a deep blue state over an issue core to his political agenda. Now, if you just stop there, anyone observing the Trump administration and recent political developments coast to coast would pretty much figure out the issue of immigration with would be the flashpoint here. But then Pager's article goes on, quote. In bypassing the authority of Governor Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, to call in the National Guard to quell protests in the Los Angeles area over his administration's efforts to deport more migrants, Mr. Trump is now pushing the boundaries of presidential authority and stoking criticism that he is inflaming the situation for political gain, end quote. Well, looking at this in honest terms, it takes two to tango. In this case, the two are the President of the United States and the Governor of California. And we need to understand they represent not just two different men with two different sets of responsibilities. They represent two different worldviews and in many ways, two very different political agendas, two very different big sets of political ambitions. Number one, what point is President Trump trying to make? He's trying to make the point that illegal immigration, which the vast majority of Americans have concluded is simply out of control, or at least was until recent actions undertaken by President Trump. The president is clearly banking on the fact that the American people will support a crackdown on illegal immigration. The California governor, a leading Democrat, at least intending to run for President, the Democratic nomination in 2028. The fact is that his political agenda is almost exactly the opposite. One of the things we have noted, for instance, on the transgender issue, and in particular, boys and girls sports, Governor Newsom in his own podcast, had tended to send indications that he would think some correction there is necessary on the leftward trend. But when it comes to the actual politics of it, don't hold your breath. If he has any hope of gaining the Democratic political nomination, he won't be able to shift to the right. He won't be able even to shift to the center. And thus this face off is really, in many ways an indication of the political shape of things to come. And that, honestly, is the way you should See it. Stephen Miller, who is the White House deputy chief of staff and the point person in the Trump administration on this issue, described the current face off as a fight to save civilization, end quote. Now, we are looking at a face off between two gigantic political personalities. Donald Trump, to state the least, a gigantic political personality. Gavin Newsom, pretty much the same. Now, term limited so that he can't serve longer in terms of the next election as California's governor. And about the only political ambition open to him really, is the White House. But in one political sense, it's going to be difficult for any California governor or former California governor on the Democratic side to win the Democratic nomination and then to win the White House. In that sense, the difficulty is not gaining the Democratic nomination. Indeed, in terms of constituency, voters and money, a California governor might have an advantage there. But when it comes to a national election, well, the Democrats have pretty much been winning California for years. The problem is they've been losing much of the rest of the country. And as we're going to see in just a moment, the hope of the Democratic Party to win the presidency becomes very much constricted if they keep losing the Sun Belt. So more back to that in just a moment. In the meantime, looking at this big story out of California, you do have the mobilization, or at least the call up, of about 2,000 members of the California National Guard and then about 700 U.S. marines. Now, that last call up is particularly sensitive in political terms because it's one thing to look at the deployment of National Guard troops, albeit in the state of California, different, because this is being done by the president. But when you look at calling up US Marines and deploying them in a state and this kind of action over against the protest of a governor, well, there could be some major constitutional issues invoked here. But the big issue right now, frankly, is not constitutional. It's political. And in this sense, President Trump has the upper hand. And also in the president sense, California is the stage. The big issue is the nation. When it comes to California's governor, well, he is the governor of California, but he also has national ambitions. So looking at this, you need to put the political calculus front and center, because I think undeniably that is what is front and center for both of these two men. There's another big lesson in worldview terms for us to notice here, and that is a face off not only between the governor and the president of the United States, but a face off between the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. You're talking about two of the most influential news media sources in the United States, of course, two of the most influential newspapers in American history. And there is a face off between the two papers and their editorial boards. Before we get to the face off, let's consider that in one corner you have the New York Times liberal. In the other corner, especially in the opinion pages in the Wall Street Journal, far more conservative. Let's start with the New York Times screaming editorial headline from the editorial board, quote, trump's troop deployment to Los Angeles is the real emergency. So the headline pretty much tells the story. The editorial board of the New York Times says that the President has acted unwisely, perhaps unconstitutionally. The real issue here is the order by the President of the United States to bring United States Marines and also National Guard personnel onto the streets of California to sustain order. As we will see, the Wall Street Journal takes basically the opposite view. But it's also interesting to notice the editorial board statement from the New York Times and how it begins. Listen to this. Quote, the National Guard is typically brought into American cities during emergencies such as natural disasters and civil disturbances, or to provide support during public health crises when local authorities require additional resources or manpower. The New York Times editorial board statement then continued, quote, there was no indication that was needed or wanted this past weekend in Los Angele, where local law enforcement had kept protests over federal immigration raids, for the most part, under control, end quote. Okay, there's a huge tell there. There is a huge revelation just in that language. You'll notice the New York Times says this was unprecedented, it was unwise, it was unneeded. But then they go on to say, as we saw just in those last words, that there was, quote, no indication that was needed or wanted this past weekend in Los Angeles, where local law enforcement had kept protests over federal immigration. Here's the tell, quote, for the most part, under control, end quote. Now, if you have to say that they had the situation under control for the most part, guess what? You're admitting. There was a significant part that was not under control. So when you look at a statement like that, you understand that what they asserted with one hand, they kind of undercut with the other. Those little words, for the most part, they're a huge indication of the reality here. For example, what if you said, well, I think she's innocent for the most part, or he's on time for the most part, or that's an accurate figure from the bank teller, for the most part, you understand that the most morally significant terms there are actually the words for the most part, the Times board went on to say about the president's action that, quote, Mr. Trump's order establishes neither law nor order. Rather, it sends the message that the administration is interested only in overreaction and overreach. The scenes of tear gas in Los Angeles streets on Sunday underscored that point, that Mr. Trump's idea of law and order is a strong handed, disproportionate intervention that adds chaos, anxiety and risk to already tense situations. So, okay, that's the view of the New York Times. Let's go to the Wall Street Journal, generally, almost always considerably more conservative. Here's the headline of the Review and Outlook editorial in the Wall Street Journal about the same situation. Democrats Make Stephen Miller's Day. So they're saying the Democrats have played right into the Republican playbook by their overreaction and their political posturing. Here's what the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal says, quote, will Democrats ever learn a political lesson on immigration and crime? It doesn't appear so, judging from their response to the migrant protests in Los Angeles that turned violent on Sunday night. Chaos on the streets will increase public support for a hard line restrictionist agenda, the editorial board went on to say. Protests against Mr. Trump's immigration raids escalated Sunday evening as activists torched cars, looted businesses and occupied a major freeway. Law enforcement and immigration officers were pelted with rocks and fireworks. Activists also smashed concrete bollards outside federal buildings where they were protesting using chunks as weapons. End quote. Oh, yeah. Sounds like California had the situation under control. There's a sense in which the rest of the country goes, well, that sounds pretty much like a liberal California government. Now, let's be absolutely clear. The vast majority of Americans believe that illegal immigration has been out of control in the United States for quite a while. The vast majority of Americans are very clear that they want law and order brought to America's immigration system. And when you have state officials such as what you see in many major cities, and in particular in cities in a state like California, what you see is now public resistance to what, in effect, the American people recognize is law and order. That doesn't mean that all these issues are absolutely clear cut. It doesn't mean that it's always true that every federal action is justified. But it does mean that the Wall Street Journal's editorial board is absolutely right. The political leadership in California is playing right into the hands of the Trump administration. One other footnote I would add to this expanding dynamic is the fact that you can count now on the fundamental reality that this issue will be again front and center in the 2028 presidential election. It's going to play a big part, I would foresee, in the midterm elections in 2026. But the immigration issue nationwide, it really comes to a focus in presidential elections. It did so in 2024, and the Democrats in California seem to be absolutely determined that it will be so again in 2028. With this as background, I was asked by Italian major media just over the last several days what I thought about how Christians should think about this. And I'm quite eager to speak as a Christian to these issues and how Christians should think. We need to understand that we have an obligation to try to help all those in need in some way. But that does not mean that unrestricted immigration or migration is in any sense the right answer, because those who advocate for such things, number one, basically undermine the rule of law. They subvert the very idea of a nation. But furthermore, they're the ones who often put human lives at risk by incentivizing people to engage in this kind of mass migration, when honestly that is no sane answer to the problem. If you want to take care of people, that doesn't necessarily mean, in fact, it almost never means you tell everyone to show up in one place at the same time. There's no sense in that. By the way, it's quite easy to say that we should show love and care to migrants and immigrants, but many of the people who make that argument never define exactly what that responsibility is, nor do they ever want to define what is and should be a righteous immigration policy when it comes to a nation. And that's a forfeiture that tells you a very great deal. I think the editorial board of the Journal is right when they say that when you look at actions such as Governor Newsom's response to what they call his, quote, liberal echo chamber in California, they remark, quote, it won't sit well with most Americans who have little patience for disorder. Mr. Trump is already escalating by sending in 500 Marines, ostensibly to protect federal buildings. But Mr. Newsom said the president's calling into the National Guard is an unmistakable step towards authoritarianism. Well, once again, you have a face off in worldviews and a face off in threats. But I think the Wall Street Journal editorial board is far more right here. The American people believe that it is necessary the government establish rightful order, and a government that can't do that isn't going to be trusted to do anything else. You know, in terms of American history, you would think that the Democratic Party would have learned that siding with activists calling for mayhem in the streets, it was a failure in the 1960s. It produced the political conservatism of the 1970s. But, but it does appear that at least much of the leadership of the Democratic Party is so beholden to the left wing of that party that they don't even have any room to grab ahold of sanity. As for Republicans and the Trump administration, yes, it's going to be quite necessary in fairly short order to define what is proposed as a reasonable, sane, righteous and just way of resolving long term the problem of illegal immigration and international migration. Long term, there is no way around the White House and Congress dealing responsibly with this issue. But what we've seen in recent decades is when it comes to Congress, it really doesn't seem capable of functioning in a responsible way on this issue. That's a shame. But it's going to have to change or things are going to be left in the hands of the White House. And then it's irresponsible for Congress to complain. Well, all right. Next I want to turn to two very different news stories, but they have a common theme and both of them point to the fact that when you look at the issue of the sanctity of human life, many Americans, including many major American politicians and law enforcement officials, seem to be befuddled as how to connect the dots. So what are the two stories? Number one, let's go back to the New York Times headline on the front page, they left their babies for dead. Now family tree DNA is used to arrest them. It's about the fact that many abandoned babies, often absolute newborn babies, found dead after being born. When it came to identifying the mother and charging the mother with the criminal abandonment of the child leading to the child's death, there were a lot of evidence lines that ran cold until modern DNA sequencing and genetic testing. Now in many cases, law enforcement, even on long ago cold cases, can connect those dots. And that's why the New York Times in this article by Isabel Taft goes on to tell us that an increasing number of mothers who had abandoned their children, their newborn children then died. They're now being held criminally responsible, legally responsible for those actions. Now, here's what I want to point out. It's an interesting story. It's no doubt a very interesting news story because there is news here. It's the genetic sequencing, it's the DNA evidence that is the game changer here. But I want us to look at the fundamental moral assumption. The fundamental moral assumption is that it is morally wrong and is, at least in many cases, rightfully defined, even by law enforcement as homicide for a newborn baby to be abandoned and then to die. You see the incongruity here. Some of the same legal officials want to say that so long as it was just before birth and defined as an abortion with a woman's right to choose, well, there is no homicide. There is no unlawful death there. That's the incoherence of America's abortion culture and the incoherence even of many legal systems and law enforcement systems when it comes to the question of when human life begins. Let's just note the obvious. This article assumes that human life, personhood, human dignity clearly begins at the moment of birth. And by the way, that's not insignificant and it's certainly not wrong. But what's wrong is to question whether just before birth, the very same human being wasn't a human person possessing of the very same dignity and human rights. And if that was true, say, in the month before birth, it was true in the very beginning, even from the point of fertilization on. This is an incoherence. Now we need to recognize there's still a vestigial morality in place where law enforcement thinks that they should hold women who abandon their babies unto death, they should hold them accountable. But what about abortion? And in that case, you're often not just talking about abandonment, you're talking about the violent destruction of life in the womb. The New York Times article says this, and I quote, law enforcement investigators have been flummoxed for years by cases of newborns who were abandoned and apparently left to die. They are known as baby does, unidentified infants whose remains were discovered in wooded areas or garbage cans or roadside ditches. Such cases, says the paper, historically have been hard to solve. That changed, they say, around 2019, when the police first used the enormous public DNA databases that have been created for amateur genealogists to trace their lineages as a resource to solve these crimes. Since then, we're told, law enforcement investigators have used the technique to identify nearly 40 women as the mothers of newborn infants who were found dead all around the country, most of them decades ago. End quote. I think the average person reading this says, well, it is absolutely right to hold these women accountable. And it's inevitable that when you look at a baby that's been abandoned after birth, you say, that's a human person, that's a human being. That little human being, that little human person is fully human, fully an image, bearer of God, fully deserves the recognition and protection of life homicide at that point is exactly that. It is the death of a human being, an intentional death, or at least a death by neglect. But then you come back and say, well, how can birth. How can just the passage through the birth canal be the most morally significant factor here? How can on one side of the birth canal that not be a baby, there be no dignity of life, no legal protection. And on the other side, all of a sudden, there's legal protection, right down to using DNA sequencing to find the perpetrator. But then yesterday's edition of the Dallas Morning News had a front page of the Metro section article with the headline, man facing murder Charge. Here's the subhead. Doj. This Department of Justice worker is accused of spiking girlfriend's drink with abortion pill. Chase Rogers is the reporter here. And we're told, quote, a U.S. justice Department employee was booked in Parker County Jail Friday after he was accused of slipping an abortion pill into his pregnant girlfriend's drink in what authorities described as an attempt to terminate her pregnancy without her knowledge. End quote. So think about this. Here you have a man, he didn't want to be a father. And so even as the mother of the child did not want to abort the child, he decided to take matters, at least allegedly, into his own hand and spiked her drink with an abortive fashion pill. It did indeed lead to the death of the unborn child. And this headline says that the man's now facing a murder charge. Well, again, where's the coherence here? I'm not saying this is wrong. I think the murder charge here is absolutely right. But I also think it's then absolutely wrong to turn around and say if this woman had been involved in bringing about an abortion, it would have been thus morally insignificant. And let's be honest, there are pro abortion activists who are making exactly that argument. It's a horrifying argument. We need to see it for what it is. These two headlines represent common moral sense. It is wrong to kill an unborn child. It is wrong to abandon a baby. It is wrong to spike a woman's drink with an abortion pill. But if that's wrong, guess what? The entire enterprise of abortion is wrong. But neither article makes that point. It's up to us to make that point. At times in worldview analysis, we talk about vestigial influence of a passing worldview. And when it comes to Christianity, much of our society thinks it's way past that. It has left the Christian worldview far behind. In the past, a liberation ethic says we have now overcome the oppression, the patriarchy of the Christian worldview. But you know what, a worldview like that is actually very difficult to ditch in toto. And there's evidence of that in these two stories. Even the front page of the New York Times, about as pro abortion as you can get. The front page of the New York Times seems to indicate it's an issue of justice, that DNA evidence is now being used to track down women who abandoned their newborn infants. Well, that's interesting. And then the front page of the Dallas Morning News tells us of a man facing a murder charge because he spiked a pregnant woman's drink with an abortion pill. Now, I think the Dallas Morning News ran that article and the prosecutors filed those charges with a pretty clear belief that the average person will look at that and say, that's wrong. And by the way, when they say that's wrong, they're right. The problem is we're in a society that increasingly is confused about when to say anything's right and anything's wrong. And when it comes to abortion, which is fundamentally wrong, much of our society is in a headlong effort to try to say, to some extent, in some cases, at least in most cases, many want to say in all cases, some are now willing to say what is wrong is right. But the killing of a baby is never right before or after birth. And if the rest of the world won't see that and won't conceive that Christians had better be in the front line of that moral sanity, regardless of what it costs us. One final note on this particular case, this is indeed a very old story. The moral principles are very old indeed. But when it comes to some of the evidence cited by law enforcement officials, some is pretty new, including video surveillance of what exactly happened when the man is accused of putting the abortifacient pill in the woman's drink. It's tempting for us to look at that and just wonder how many people got away with this in the past before the age of surveillance. But for Christians, it's good for us to remember that even if there is no camera and there's no human eye to see, God is omniscient. He does see, he does know, and his justice is absolutely inescapable. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmohler.com youm can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x or twitter.com albertmohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts Eduardo for information on Boyce College just go to boycecollege. Com. I'm speaking to you from Dallas, Texas, and I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.