Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It's a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute, supported by listeners just like you. I'm Dr. James Dobson, and I'm thrilled that you've joined us.

Roger Marsh: Welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Roger Marsh. We are about a month away from Election Day 2026. You may not be aware that Election Day is coming up because it's a midterm election, it's not a presidential election, but this could turn out to be one of the most consequential elections in American history.

Joining me for a conversation about why this election is so important is our own Gary Bauer, our special secret weapon when it comes to all things Capitol Hill. Gary Bauer is the Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Culture here at the Dr. James Dobson Policy and Culture Center. He's the host of the Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom podcast, which you can get on Apple, Spotify, Oneplace, and also at DrJamesDobson.org. Gary Bauer, welcome back to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. This is going to be a lively conversation about a very important topic, isn't it?

Gary Bauer: Roger, it's always great to be with you. What a great way to start our conversation. This is an extraordinary moment that we're heading into here with the election. It's happening on the 250th birthday of the founding of America where there's the old story, which has been repeated many times, although I don't think they teach it in school anymore, where some lady is hanging outside Constitution Hall and Ben Franklin comes out and she asks him, "What did you give us?" and he says, "A Republic, if you can keep it."

That question and that statement is as valid today, maybe even more valid today, than it was when he spoke it. This really is an extraordinarily important election. There's the rub because so many normal people don't understand that, and I'm afraid that many of our fellow believers don't understand it.

You and I marinate in this stuff, and at JDFI, we're a reflection of Dr. Dobson and all that he did over the years. Of course, he always cared about elections. It used to drive him nuts, Roger, when we would get a post-mortem and they would say, "And only 28% of Bible-believing Christians showed up to vote," and he just couldn't understand why that was the case. But there are a lot of reasons for it. We cannot be at home in November on this election because there are things happening this year that have never happened in America before.

Roger Marsh: It's amazing when you say that, Gary, because I think about what has happened to the electorate over the past 25 or 26 years. Talk about why election integrity this time around is of utmost importance.

Gary Bauer: There have been so many odd things happening in our elections in the last 10 years or so. We've had a number of investigations that show there were real efforts, some of them illegal obviously, to make elections come out in a way that's detrimental not only to somebody like President Trump, but detrimental to those of us that want America to remain a country that's built on the idea of ordered liberty under God, that our freedom doesn't come from some elected official or from a bureaucrat. Our liberty comes directly from God. We're made in His image. That's what our founders thought. They put it in our Declaration of Independence.

We want our elections to result in people being elected that share that basic fundamental idea of America. As we all know, there are forces that have been unleashed in our country that want to rip America away from that. They want a total secular society and there's not only a lot of Americans, unfortunately, that believe this, but they're heavily represented in the media, in academia, and in a lot of the places that really matter. So what you said so succinctly, we see time and time again the media not being a deliverer of the news, not informing, but attempting to tilt the playing field one way or another so that they get the outcome that they want.

We see it when they'll say something about a conservative. They'll call us a Christian fascist or they'll label people Nazis or bigots. That just goes on all the time. The other thing I notice a lot, and it's because I'm here in Washington, D.C., there are all sorts of things happening that the media just doesn't tell the American people about. They're the kind of things that if they were the other way around, it would be everywhere.

Let me just give you one quick example of this. The other day there was a hearing on Capitol Hill of a number of parents that had children that were killed by illegal immigrants in the United States, either intentionally or in a traffic accident. Your teenage son or daughter ends up being run over by an illegal alien and now a person that shouldn't even be in the country has resulted in you losing the love of your life.

There was this hearing, and a number of those parents were there. It was shocking to me, the Democrats in the hearing—and I'm not trying to be openly partisan about this, I'm just saying what happened in this hearing—they spent the hearing complaining that there was a hearing, upset that they were being, "Why are we dealing with this again?"

Finally, one of the mothers in the hearing looked up at the Democrats and said, "What we're requesting isn't that big of a request. We're just asking you to care about our children as much as you do about illegal aliens. We're Americans. We elect you. Can't you figure out a way to care for us?"

If you could have heard a pin drop in the room. I saw this on—somebody sent it to me from the hearing room. They were filming it all on their phone. When I went home that night, I said to my wife, Carol, "This is going to be a big story everywhere." It was on Fox. It did not get one second. This is the kind of story the media looks for, right? You want that story, somebody challenging power, speaking truth to power. That's what it was, but it didn't fit a narrative. It didn't fit the narrative that would be helpful to the secular left in the upcoming election.

I hope that Christians realize, and that Americans generally realize, it's not only that you're getting twisted news, but important news is being kept from you. That's what makes these elections so close, Roger, because I think if the elections were just about what the views are of one side and what the views are of the other side—the kind of elections we had when Reagan ran twice—I think our side would be winning elections in landslides. But instead, the views of a lot of these secular leftists, Marxists even, are not being fully described to the American people.

Roger Marsh: Gary Bauer is the Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Culture here at the Dobson Policy and Culture Center. On today's edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, I'm Roger Marsh, and Gary and I are having a conversation about why the upcoming election is so important, why it's so critical. We encourage you to go to DrJamesDobson.org. You can follow Gary's Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom podcast there and also get his weekly blogs where he's writing about the types of stories that he's talking about here that we're discussing.

Gary, you're right. This isn't an our side versus their side. It's a truth versus error side. The fact that the media has become so complicit in just flat-out lying to the American people about what the real issues are. I'll give you a case in point and love to get your response on this. There is a candidate who's running for Senate in the great state of Texas named James Talarico, and he has been interviewed twice now during his campaign by late-night talk show hosts.

You and I both know there's a thing called equal time, equal access. If you are a political candidate, if a commercial radio station wants to run advertising for the "yes on Proposition 1" campaign and the "no on Proposition 1" campaign says they would like to buy time to run their side too, the station by law has to take that advertising, or they take none of it.

I've worked for media outlets that have done both. One said they were not taking any of it because they didn't want any money. There's a lot of campaign cash. But sometimes the message from the other side is so damaging to your side, you'd rather not get into it. But both times this guy was interviewed, then they said, "Donald Trump shut us down and wouldn't let us air the broadcast." Well, that's not true. What's true is if you did a 20-minute interview with James Talarico who's running from Texas, you have to do a 20-minute interview with Ken Paxton, his opponent. The media outlets didn't want to do it.

Gary, it's breathtaking the amount of Americans who don't understand equal access. They'll just go to YouTube and watch the thing and go, "Oh my goodness, this guy is just so smart." Even Christians are falling for this now. Talk about why it's so important for us. I understand the world to not get it. I don't expect the world to understand biblical issues. But for people who are professing Christians, it really is shocking our level of ignorance when it comes to this type of thing.

Gary Bauer: It is, Roger. We're called biblically to have discernment, to be as wise as serpents. You would think with everything that we've been misled about, particularly in recent years, that we would be a little bit more skeptical about some of the things big media is telling us. The example you give of Talarico, I'm amazed that he is competitive in Texas. This is a guy—we didn't coordinate this before we started, but I keep at my desk some of the quotes of some of these people because it reminds me of what we're dealing with.

Talarico has said, "I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity." He said God is non-binary. Now listen to this one, this is the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy: "Our trans community needs abortion care too." I was a C and D student in science in high school and college, and even I can figure out that that doesn't make any sense.

The border issue is a huge issue. I wonder sometimes, have people already forgotten that under the previous president, I think the most likely number, we don't know for sure because the previous president wasn't keeping track, but we believe 15 million people walked into America that shouldn't be here. You can see in the news obviously how difficult it's been to get people out.

But even after 15 million people came in, Mr. Talarico said our southern border should be like our front porch. There should be a giant welcome mat out front. Now, Christians of any people ought to understand there's nothing Christian or empathetic about bringing millions of people into your country and then making all of the American taxpayers pay for those people, for their education, for food stamps, with healthcare. There's nothing Christian about that.

You can welcome people into your own home and take on that burden yourself if you want, but you shouldn't feel as a Christian that the Christian thing to do is to have open borders and force your neighbor with his tax money to pay for all the people that you want to bring in. There's a lot of confusion about that sort of thing that we would hope Christians would know better about.

The polling shows that Talarico is a couple points ahead. We're only a few weeks away from the election. There's no way he could win that election if Christians in Texas get out to vote. If they get out to vote in the normal levels you would hope and expect because we know the left's going to do that. We know the radical gay rights movement's going to turn out 100% of their vote. The radical abortion-on-demand movement, that vote will come out 100% in every election.

Why in the world as Christians would we think, "Well, as long as I show up every four years for the presidential race, I'm okay"? I've talked about this a number of times and I try to remind people that if you were born in America or you came here legally, you got an incredible gift from God.

God knew where we were going to be born. It was not a surprise to God when I popped out of my mother's womb in Newport, Kentucky. So that birth of me could have happened in Nigeria or in North Korea or in communist China where the very act of worshiping God can get you thrown into jail. Or where like in Nigeria, when you go to church every Sunday, you know it might be the last thing you and your family does on this planet because radical Islam is on the march in Nigeria and churches regularly get blown up in that country. There's a civil war of sorts going on.

If God gave us this incredible gift to be in this country built on ordered liberty under God, don't we have an obligation, a responsibility, to take care of that gift? If somebody gave you a car and you didn't take care of the car, you would be an ingrate. You were given a free car. Well, we were given this great country. We have an obligation to take care of it and make sure that our children and grandchildren enjoy the same blessing that we have enjoyed.

This 250th birthday and all the speeches I've been giving, I keep trying to remind people of that. This isn't a side show. This is the country we have. The question that was asked of Ben Franklin is a question that every generation has to answer again because Ronald Reagan used to do this in his speeches: Liberty is not a given. It's got to be won in every generation. Now it's up to us, and very specifically, it's up to us this November to exercise this fundamental right that we've all been given to vote for elected officials.

It's particularly important this year because we have actual Marxists—they're calling themselves socialists, but they're Marxists, they're godless, they're radical secularists. We're going to have a bunch of them in the new Congress because they ran in areas where they got the nomination and they're in districts that overwhelmingly always elect Democrats. But we may have a lot more of them in states like Michigan and even Texas and Pennsylvania and Ohio unless Christians turn out to vote this November.

Roger Marsh: When you see what has happened to the Democrat Party, I think it is worth noting that if a Christian who favors conservative biblical values sits on the sidelines—and historically, Gary, we're not here to beat up our own, but the reality is Christians are more likely to stay home on Election Day than get involved on Election Day.

We do run the risk of the Democrat Party has been taken over in many key areas by the so-called Democratic Socialists. As evidenced by the fact that we recently just commemorated the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with a Democratic Socialist mayor of New York heading up the celebrations in the Big Apple there. Could you or I ever have imagined something as audacious as that happening 25 years ago? And yet, this is the world we're living in right now.

Gary Bauer: What's happening in New York is a perfect example, Roger. He got elected. He's been very open about it. He's a serious Muslim. He said, "I take my faith seriously, I follow Sharia." Somebody pointed out to me he's what's called a twelver. And I thought, a what? A twelver? Even I didn't know what that meant. What it's a reference to is that he's a Shia Muslim and he comes from the branch of the Shia Muslims that believes the 12th Imam will appear on the earth. They believe it's going to happen sooner rather than later and we will know him because the first thing he will do is slaughter all the Christians and Jews.

That's not a minor point. If a Christian was running for office—in fact, when Christians run for office, the reporters will sometimes say, "Do you actually believe the world was created in seven days? Do you think an ark was able to put two of every animal..." you know these questions. If you say, "Well, I believe my Bible," then you're a crazy person. Nobody that I have been able to find, no reporter, has asked him, "Mayor, you belong to a Shia sect that believes that the 12th Imam will come soon and that you have an obligation to hurry his arrival, but it also believes that when he comes, he'll kill all the Christians and Jews. Do you renounce that, or do you believe that's what's going to happen?"

That would be an interesting and informative question for the mayor to answer, but he was elected and he was elected by a coalition of Muslim votes. I believe the Muslim population of New York City is twice what it was on 9/11. And also, a coalition of that vote and very radical leftists with advanced degrees, many of them young. Interestingly, he didn't do as well among other minorities, but there were enough Muslims and enough highly educated leftists in New York City to elect him. He's doing a lot of things that I think if we see it spread across America, every American will regret not voting.

You mentioned he presided over the 9/11 25th anniversary. He did that after 100,000 people signed a petition urging him not to come to that ceremony because he has said so many odd things about 9/11 and has suggested that the most important thing after 9/11 and the most horrifying thing that happened after 9/11 was the backlash against Muslims.

I think history will record that unlike what probably would have happened in a lot of other countries, there really wasn't that much of a backlash against Muslims. We're actually pretty good people as Americans, and we didn't hold every Muslim responsible for what these radicals did on 9/11. Of course not.

I remember a few years ago calling one of the presidential elections the 9/11 election. I wonder if maybe that fits this year too, because it was the 25th anniversary and there were Christians on those planes on 9/11, particularly very notably, the one that ended up coming down in a field in Pennsylvania. That happened because Christians on that plane, along with other Americans of all kinds of backgrounds, first of all, disagreed about what was going on and about what the right thing to do was. Some of them felt that they ought to go back to their seats and sit down. Others said, "No, I just talked to my spouse, and we're at war."