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by Rod D. Martin and Eric Metaxas
July 10, 2026
My latest interview on The Eric Metaxas Show. Sign up NOW for the Eric’s YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode!
Eric Metaxas and Martin Capital founder Rod D. Martin discuss:
The Tyler Robinson trial for the murder of Charlie Kirk
How postmodernism and Soviet-style demoralization replaced critical thinking with Critical Theory
The loss of ability to discern between good and bad people in authority
The GenZ revival and the reaction against postmodernism
Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Alexandr Dugin
It’s 11 minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch and share!
Text of our full discussion after this:
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Here’s our full discussion:
Eric Metaxas: Hey folks, welcome to the program. I believe it’s Thursday. I believe later today I’m going to be in Las Vegas having lunch with Rich Little. I believe we’ve covered that.
Chris and I had a conversation about culture, which we’re going to be airing for you. But before that, I want to talk news of the day with the great Rod Martin.
Rod Martin, welcome back.
Rod D. Martin: Great to be here.
Eric Metaxas: Okay, news of the day. What is the news of the day? Maybe we should start with the Charlie Kirk trial. Do you have any observations there?
Rod D. Martin: I do, actually. It’s really remarkable. The prosecution’s case is just open and shut. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a case that was so ridiculously open and shut.
I don’t mean one-sided. I don’t mean they’ve concocted a bunch of stuff. I mean, for instance, Candace Owens will tell you that the guy in the video they have, who is going into the parking deck, who is going up onto the roof, who’s carrying the gun, who then lies on the roof, and then, after the shot, runs off the roof to get away, is clearly not Tyler Robinson.
They’ve got video of all of this. Candace will tell you that’s clearly not Tyler Robinson. But Tyler Robinson’s mother identified him in the video. It’s just absurd.
Eric Metaxas: And by the way, she’s obviously working for the Mossad, his mother.
Rod D. Martin: Well, clearly, as is he and his trans lover.
Eric Metaxas: And let’s not forget about everybody else on Earth.
Rod D. Martin: And let’s not forget about you and me also working for the Mossad. Let’s be clear.
Eric Metaxas: Yeah. Wow. It’s such a mess. It’s a sign of the times, isn’t it, that people can be sucked into these conspiracies? It’s a difficult season, I have to say.
Rod D. Martin: In two strands. The first one being that it wasn’t just Democrat kids who went to the public schools and public universities. We have all, not you and I so much, but those younger than us, been marinated in critical theory for decades. They have absolutely been shielded from critical thinking.
So their postmodernist emotion and narrative over rationality is coming out here in the context of the second thread, which is what Yuri Bezmenov was talking about in 1984, the year not the book, when he defected from the Soviet Union.
He said, look, the centerpiece of the Soviet strategy to get the West to commit suicide and go communist on its own is demoralization. We want to convince you that every authority is illicit and lying to you to such a degree that you’ll listen to anybody who reaffirms what you want to believe.
That’s exactly what’s happened here, especially after COVID. Our government did it to itself. There’s no question about that. But that field had been planted for decades leading into it.
Eric Metaxas: It’s interesting because you could really go back to after World War I. This happened mostly in Europe before it happened here, but the loss of faith in the institutions because of World War I. That worldview was among the elites, but it filtered down. It took some time to filter down into America.
Here, we see it happening with Vietnam and Watergate. But it really is fascinating because you see this over time. We’ve seen it, you and I have seen it, in our lifetimes, basically: this cynical view that we can’t trust any authority.
We’ve all seen the bumper stickers, or I should say, there used to be bumper stickers that said “question authority.” But those bumper stickers didn’t mean rationally question authority to determine whether it’s legitimate. They were saying to question the concept of authority. Is there any authority that’s legitimate?
It’s a very cynical view. And that has filtered down into the culture so that subjectivity rules, basically. It’s a scary thing where we have no objective truth.
Now, of course, there is such a thing as objective truth, and I think it reasserts itself at some point. But we’re dealing with that. That’s part of what you’re talking about.
Rod D. Martin: Our government did this to itself. I can’t stress that enough.
They built it into the public schools. They lied to us over and over again about countless things we could sit here and name.
But the problem here is that people have lost their ability to discern the difference between one authority that is a truth-teller and another authority that is clearly false. They can’t tell the difference between Anthony Fauci and RFK. They can’t tell the difference between Donald Trump and Barack Obama. Not anymore.
That’s just absurd. People on our side, for heaven’s sake, ought to know that we voted. That we actually changed our government. That we actually made a difference. Let’s actually trust these guys to at least be trying to do the right thing.
But even the ability to do that has been lost in some subset, primarily of our younger friends who have been through the educational process in the 21st century. It’s really horrifying.
I don’t know how we come back from it, but I know what we’re going to try to do, and I think it will work, which is simply keep repeating the truth and keep showing the falsity of the lies.
Eric Metaxas: As Christians, we’re not to despair. We’re to do our job. We’re to stay at our post, speak the truth, as you say, and pray.
I do think that there’s revival happening in the country, that people are waking up, generally speaking, even apart from the spiritual side of things. There are people who just five or six years ago were in a completely different place. I think that the madness on the left has driven many people toward the right, and that there’s something happening in the country.
The question is whether it’s happening quickly enough to save us from perdition.
Rod D. Martin: Yes, indeed. And we are seeing revival among GenZ youth. It’s really encouraging. Predominantly the males, which is good. We want the men to lead. That’s a positive thing.
It’s certainly different from prior generations, which tended to be female-led on spiritual matters. So that’s unique and different and kind of cool, I think. We’ll see how that goes. There’s a lot of opportunity there.
I think the reaction against this postmodernist irrationality, which is so driven by a visceral hatred that comes from not having the tools to process rationally, is going to be very much like the reaction we’ve seen against wokeness once people woke up and realized just how wicked it was.
Eric Metaxas: That’s about it. I think that there are people waking up.
None of us expected the rise of what we now call the Woke Right. I do have to say that it’s a horror to think that we’ve defeated the Woke left, generally speaking, or mostly, only to have the lunatics on what’s called the Woke Right rising up.
I don’t know how deep that is. I don’t know how far that goes. I don’t know whether Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson really have any kind of a future. For him to declare that he’s against Trump and going to start a third party, that’s a level of hubris that I just kind of shrug at. I hardly know what to make of that.
Rod D. Martin: It’s silly, actually. It’s just goofball stuff. Even Elon thought better of it, and he could actually afford it.
But all the more so because Tucker has made very, very clear he’s no longer for America. He wants Iran to win. He wants an Alexander Dugin-esque sphere-of-influence system where Russia dominates Eurasia and China dominates East Asia and we dominate the Western Hemisphere.
Wait, that sounds exactly like the setup in 1984. That’s exactly what Orwell describes as the global order then. Tucker’s all for it and advocating for it, and just loves Dugin.
Dugin is satanic. Dugin is a pagan. He is a terrible, terrible soul. I’m not going to say all the things that some of our friends on the left might say about Vladimir Putin, but I can tell you this: he ain’t our friend.
So if you’ve got somebody who is Vladimir Putin’s favorite philosopher and just tells you up front, “My number one goal is the destruction of America,” I don’t understand why an American would be attracted to that, especially when he [Tucker] spent his life making money off of the conservative movement.
Eric Metaxas: Well, I guess some people simply have no values. For those of us who have values, it’s very difficult to fathom that somebody could have no values, or that their principal principle could be having no principles. I don’t really understand it either.
We are, today, out of time, my friend. Rod, I just enjoy talking to you about practically anything. So thanks for coming on today.
Folks, in just a moment, we’re going to play a conversation I’ve been having with Chris Himes about culture, generally speaking, at least that’s how I see it. So thanks for tuning in.
Again, Rod, thank you.
Rod D. Martin: Thank you.
