Welcome to the Eric Mataxas Show. Do you like your gravy thick and rich and loaded with creamy mushrooms? If no one was looking, would you chug the whole gravy boat? Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug! Stay tuned. Here comes Mr. Chug -a -Lug himself, Eric Mataxas. Hey folks, welcome to the program. If you're like me, last night you were able to watch the debate and you deliberately skipped it for your mental health. That's just where I am in life right now. I caught parts of it which made me wince and cringe, sometimes wince and cringe. I never wept, but you know what, it's probably better for me to find out what my guest thought. He may have watched the debate. My friend, Kevin McCullough, we call you votes tridamus because you are a prognosticator, a seer, a prophet politically speaking. Kevin McCullough of that Kevin show, how are you? I'm well and I can see some things very clearly today. There should be no more debates. These exercises in futility, and that's what they've turned into, are becoming embarrassing to the cause of what this election should be about. And last night, it's just hard to put into words how bad this debate was, from its execution to the policies, to the answers. It was just nothing good about it. Some people in my audience care about this. I'm in Irvine, California. I'm in a hotel room you people can see. I'm speaking today, so today's Thursday in Costa Mesa. So if anybody wants to come and hold my hand and hug me about the sadness of the debate, or just talk to me or get book signed or whatever I'm going to be tonight in Costa Mesa, you go to my website, ericmataxas .com, and you can see me and talk to me and hang out and whatever tonight in Costa Mesa. This is Thursday, folks. And tomorrow, there's a prayer breakfast here in Irvine that I'm speaking at. But the reason I bring this up, Kevin, is because I rarely have time to turn on the TV. And last night, I realized, oh, I'm pretty wiped out. Let me turn on the TV. Let me just look at the debate just to see. I literally really couldn't bear to watch it. So as someone who watched it, I'm talking to you. Am I being cruel or unfair? Because it was unfair. What little I saw was genuinely unbearable. No, as I was saying just a second ago, from the way it was structured, to the execution, to the answers to the substance, the format's wild and out of control. There's not really a possibility of getting very deep on any one of the single questions. And I think a lot of the questions that are being asked are not the right ones. And so as I've watched, and I didn't watch all of last night's debate in real time, I caught up on a bunch of it after the fact. But as I've sat through both of them now, it is easy for me to ascertain that no one in this field on that stage last night is serious about becoming president. And they're not biting into the enormous lead that the former president has only built on since the first debate occurred. The first debate, they had 11 million viewers put to put that in perspective, Eric, in 2015. For the first debate, they had more than 15 million viewers in 2020. For the first debate, they had about 18 million viewers. You're talking about a diminishing return a, a much less interested Republican base watching these, and they're not they're not going anywhere. And in the meantime, it's putting even with some of our better idea people on display as amateurs, even with Doug Burgum on the stage, hard to believe. Yeah. That would be like a rematch between Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson. You're telling me people, Lisa Hutchinson was not able to be on the stage this time, as far as we know. Yeah, I think he took a, he took a face shot in the early rounds, and he was in his dressing room. Honestly, the thing there, what I said on Twitter this morning, was that they acted like it was 1985. We are living in a time in America, where most people see, we are in freefall, hell has been unleashed. Things have gotten so bad on so many fronts that it is, if you don't believe in God, which I do, and I trust in him, but if it weren't for that, I'd be scared to death. What is happening in this country? And they acted like it's 1985. And we're gonna, we're gonna have this conversation. And I thought, this is this is bad. I mean, the way the the deep state has been weaponized to go after Donald Trump, for example, I don't care if you're running against Trump, if you like Trump, but if that doesn't strike you as, as fundamentally un -American and sick as anything, as though, you know, we were being bombed by China, it's pretty bad. They seem not to be concerned. Well, they're responding to questions that have been supposedly thoughtfully put together by the moderators that are doing the debate. And Ron DeSantis did a little bit more of this last night, all of them to have done more of this, where he actually came with a little bit of an agenda to give little speeches every time that he was given the opportunity to speak. And he got more things out on the record than what he was asked about. But that should be the strategy of every candidate going into every debate. That should be the strategy of every thinker going on every media outlet that you can. Sometimes, Eric, it's better for me to go on Fox or Newsmax or somewhere and have something that I'm more intent on saying that what they want to ask me about. And if you're, if you're running for president in times of crisis, and I don't, I don't view the period that we're in right now as a peaceful time. We're not actively at war with anybody, but we are actively at war with evil on, on almost every front. So we need, there needs to be an urgency. There needs to be a sense of, we cannot phone it in and do it like we've done it in the past, especially knowing that we are going to run up against probably illicit, illegal, cheating schemes, trying to keep the election from actually being determined by the people that have the right to determine it. And before people criticize me for that, we've replaced the population of the bottom eight states in just illegal entries into the country over the last three years. Well, let's do that in a minute, because you wrote an article at townhall .com. That is one of the stunning nightmares that they acted like not, not really a big problem. But what you just said about cheating, I think most Americans know the Democrats cheat at elections. How is that not the most important thing to discuss when you're talking about a presidential election? Are you and I imagining, are millions and millions and millions and millions of Democrats actually cheat? Now they've done it for decades, but now we know that they have turned it into a science. They are at war with we, the people, they don't actually care about winning in a fair way. They just care about winning. How is that not unbelievably important and something that has to be discussed? But the Fox hosts and the Latina from Univision, which is another bizarre thing, they seem to act like January 6 was Trump supporters being violent. They seem to act like the election was fair. Biden won. What world are they living in? All of them. I don't know what to say. And obviously, I think Vivek and Ron DeSantis, they're the only two candidates that I can take seriously. I've got problems with them a little bit. But the whole thing was like, they were all play acting like we're living in a different America than the one most of us are living in. Well, I will hold one exception out to what you just said. And I believe that Nikki Haley had a sense of urgency about her last night. And she did in the first debate as well. And I think that's why she's now out polling DeSantis in several polls, is that people are beginning to understand that as a former governor, she probably has a shot at the VP pick. I don't think the VP pick is going to come out of this group. But if Trump did want one that I'm seeing kind of be serious on the issues that are the most pressing, she's the one that kind of gets the vote in terms of... I think of her as deep state, neo -con, next. All right. That's fine. I'm just saying in terms of her performance thus far. We've got you our wonderfully. I'm so glad that we do. We'll be right back. With the overturn of Roe v. Wade, lots of companies are coming out saying they'll pay for employee abortion travel and expenses. Most of you have heard about some of these companies. You've decided to stop shopping or doing business there. But did you know that you most likely own stock in those companies through your 401ks, IRAs, and other investment accounts? Folks, this is a huge problem. And we need to do something about this to send a message to Wall Street through our investments. You need to go to inspireadvisors .com slash Eric and get a free Inspire Impact report. This biblical investment analysis will educate you on what's really in your investment accounts like companies paying for abortion travel. You need to go to inspireadvisors .com slash Eric to connect with an Inspire Advisors financial professional who can run your report and help remove companies paying for abortion travel today. Go to inspireadvisors .com slash Eric. That's inspireadvisors .com slash Eric. Advisory services are offered through Inspire Advisors LLC, a registered investment advisor with the SEC. 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