Good Faith

I listen to lots of different types of podcasts. This one is probably my favorite of the year so far.

Yes. It can. I would have really liked you to have David French on with the most recent guest to push back on some of his pronouncements, which _sounded_ very fair-minded, but were born more of empathy for Palestinian suffering (an empathy which is in itself very good) than a clear understanding of facts and actual practices of the Israeli army. Obviously Christians should NOT simply support everything Israel does just because they’re Israel. But I don’t see many in Hamas arguing “if only we had rights we wouldn’t do this stuff.” As Christians, we should care about and love people—even people who want to destroy us or others, but that love must be grounded in a clear-eyed understanding of their actual motivations (and the actual practices of the people we’re critiquing on their behalf). I’d recommend listening to The Dispatch and Free Press for a corrective to the narrative this most recent guest assumes.

Russ scares me. He looks like a ventriloquist doll that came to life. I met him once in person and he smelled good at first (he kept hugging me over and over so I got a good whiff)… but then he burped and it was clear that he had taken cans of axe body spray and used a knife to crack them open and drain the liquid and then chugged it. I asked him about it and he started crying and said “don’t shame me. I drink what I drink!!” The podcast is pretty hard to listen to. Russ voice sounds like someone took a bunch of old ground meat and left it in the sun and then slapped it on top of a living rat and then covered it and mayo and started punching it really hard. Like you could hear a wet noise and then something screaming that’s Russ’s voice. Like a lot of wet noises and screeching. Russ talks a lot about his private life. And those episodes are rough. He leaves his family out of it which is respect. But too many episodes are centered around how he rides his bike out to an empty field and cries and cries and listens to Sabrina Carpenter while he cries cause no one reads his blog and his parents “don’t understand him and think him acting like a big sloppy weenie is just a phase”… and then he talks about how it’s not a phase. It’s who he is now. I think that’s weird.

Occasionally, Curtis records a show that completely negates his stated purpose for the show This episode was unabashed platforming of a Hamas apologist. He blames the IDF for failing to differentiate between militants and civilians when Hamas commits the war crimes of having non-uniformed combatants and sheltering under hospitals and schools. He draws false equivalency between collateral damage of painstakingly executed war and the rape/murder/kidnapping that Hamas executed on October 7th. I could go on and on. Curtis should be ashamed of exposing to Good Faith audience to this drivel and claiming that it is letting an expert weigh in. When David French co-hosted, you had a reasonable expectation that the conversation would be grounded in reality. Since he stopped regularly hosting, shows often revert to the progressive party line at the expense of honestly trying to pursue application of Biblical truth on today’s world. It is going to drive people away and it contributes to the siloing that Curtis claims to be against.