Military Rescue in Iran, Pam Bondi, Artemis II, and Social Media Addiction Trial

This episode is brought to you in part by the Table Podcast from the Hendrick Center at Dallas Elogical Seminary. I'm Darrell Bach, one of the hosts, and I invite you to join us as we discuss issues of God and culture, which includes anything and everything. Listen on your podcast app or at dts.edu/thetable. From Christianity to Day, you're listening to The Bulletin, a podcast about the people, events and issues that are shaping our world. I'm Clarissa Mall. This week, the U.S. rescues a downed airman in Iran, Pam Bondi gets the boot, and four astronauts venture to the dark side of the moon. Michael Reno and I discuss these headlines, and Mark, Rachel, and Sarah Linear join us to talk about their landmark case against Mehta. Welcome to the show. Good morning listeners. Welcome to our Tuesday round table where we let you know what's catching our eye as the week begins. Joining me today is managing editor of the dispatch, my friend Michael Reno. Michael, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Clarissa. Happy to be here. Over the weekend, the U.S. military searched frantically for a U.S. weapons system officer who was shot down on Friday morning in enemy territory over Iran. While the man hid in a crevice of a mountainside, combined military and CIA forces discovered his location, mounted a distraction campaign and sent in Navy SEAL 6 commandos to rescue him. After the rescue, President Trump took to truth social on Easter Sunday morning to threaten Iran with further distraction in an expletive laden post saying, quote, "Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day all wrapped up in one in Iran. There will be nothing like it. Open the straight, you crazy b****s or you'll be living in hell. Just watch. Praise be to Allah. President Donald J. Trump. Michael, is this typical Trump social media fair or do you see the president really emboldened by this rescue of the airman to come down harder on Iran now? I do think it's pretty bold to use language like that, particularly on Easter Sunday. If you remember a year or two ago, the Biden administration was in the middle of controversy for posting some kind of trans-affirming language on Easter Sunday. You have the president himself kind of going to the opposite extreme and making fun of Muslims with praise Allah on Easter Sunday. In terms of being emboldened on Iran, the deadline for some kind of cease fire or peace still negotiated, the deadline for that was supposed to be 10 days ago. Then it got pushed back now. We're talking about Tuesdays the day and you see reports of Tuesday night. The objectives here just have not been clear from the beginning. And so when you have different members of the administration, one day it's Marco Rubio, the next day it's Pete Hickseth and next day it's the president himself setting new goals for the entire campaign. I think it's very easy just to kind of flail about in the wind and look for any kind of exit strategy you can get. We've often said here on the show that international laws only as good as the parties who are willing to follow it. So under the Geneva Convention, hitting civilian infrastructure is against international law. We're talking about bridges, power plants. What consequences could there be for actions like the president is proposing? So there are allowances for hitting civilian infrastructure if you can prove that it's got military value. So if you can hobble the military capabilities of an enemy, then it gets around that international law that prohibits civilian infrastructure such as utilities. In terms of the teeth to that, there really is not any. To your point, international law is only as strong as the countries are willing to sign on. The US historically has not signed on to some of these laws and regulations. So I don't think that's some play. The acronym Tacos become pretty well used in the vernacular here lately. Trump always chickens out. So it wouldn't surprise me in the least if we don't actually hit Carg Island or other targets of particular value for energy and infrastructure. At the same time, we woke up on a Saturday morning six weeks ago, right? Five weeks ago. And all of a sudden we were bombing Tehran. So I don't think Taco holds all the time either. But I don't think it's going to be international law that dissuades the Trump administration from attacking some of these targets if the powers would be deemed them worthy effort. We have this vulgarity that has become a part of the military conversation. Secretary of Defense Hegseth has adopted similar vulgarities in his F.A.F.O. How does a Christian get behind a military offensive like this with such vulgarity really woven into the fabric of the campaign? I'm not one to advocate for compartmentalizing as a believer. I want to integrate the gospel and I want to integrate the scriptures into all facets of my life. On the other hand, I do think that it helps to think about this in sort of a compartmentalized way. Very few of us would say that weakening the Iranian regime is a bad thing. Very few of us would say that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Mullahs in Tehran having access to enriched uranium for the use of nuclear bombs, being able to project all this power through proxy groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and others in the region. I think very few of us would say that weakening their ability to do those things is a bad thing. You can say this is a campaign that hopefully will bear fruit. This is a campaign that will weaken an authoritarian regime that has committed atrocities, has murdered innocent people, has ruled with an iron fist for well-knife fifty years. It threatens an important strategic partner in Israel and other neighbors in the region. All those are strategic goals that most people, again, unless you're Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, you probably can get behind. On the other hand, I think it's entirely possible to condemn not just the political and strategic way that the administration has waged this war, but also things like that Easter tweet from Donald Trump. If you have an all-been critical of Donald Trump on the grounds of morality and values for the last ten years, this is familiar ground. You can say, yes, there are some things that policy-wise, we would hope that good things come out of decisions that the Trump administration makes. But gosh, he acts like a really vulgar potty mouth for your old, a four-year-old who would have a lot of stiff consequences if you were in my household. You can't put that aside totally, but I think you can recognize that there is a military and political strategy that would be good to see all the way through and execute here while not condoning the way in which it's done on any number of levels. While Iran offers one indication of how the president regards his enemies here at home, the dismissal of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has some wondering if the president is beginning to purge his cabinet of those who are unwilling or unable to fight for him in the way he desires. Michael, why do you think Pam Bondi got the axe now? Especially after we saw Kristi-Nome dismissed just within the month. One is the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files and Susie Wiles, Trump's chief of staff. Probably one of the only people who can really wrangle him to the degree that she can set a few weeks ago in an interview with Anity Fair that Pam Bondi completely whiffed on handling the Epstein files, himming and hawing and saying in a Fox News interview that there's a client list sitting on her desk waiting to be released when in fact there was no client list. You have to go back and clean this comments up. She had an abysmal performance at a congressional hearing. I think the president was plenty hacked off at her handling of the Epstein files and didn't give him a whole lot of cover, frankly, in the way that she handled that. There's also the fact that the Department of Justice tried to go after all these perceived enemies have Donald Trump himself. Not even really the Trump administration. It was Donald Trump the man. You have Latisha James, the New York Attorney General. You have James Comey, Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly after Kelly and others made the comments about not having to obey illegal orders. All these instances of Trump wanting to go after particular political enemies and Pam Bondi was not able to deliver. I think if you look at the facts of all those cases and say there is not anything there to deliver on as we have seen those indictments get thrown out as in the case with Latisha James and James Comey. So it's really hard to hold her to that standard. That is the standard that Donald Trump holds her to as to the timing. It is interesting. Even if you go back to look at Christy Noem, Christy Noem was like go kind of weeks after some of the height and the apex of the controversy with immigration enforcement and what happened in Minneapolis in January with Renee Good and Alex Freddie, both gunned down by federal agents. And after reports and rumors of inappropriate relationship with Corey Lewandowski in her office, wild spending on advertising campaigns, I do think Trump is fairly calculating in terms of he's not going to make a decision on these sorts of issues kind of at the peak of a crisis moment. He seems to let things play out. Even if you read reports, I mean, Trump is still as personally fond of Pam Bondi, even since he made the decision or informed her of the decision last Wednesday to let her go. It still sounds like there's a fondness there. So the timing is interesting that it's kind of lagging behind some of the loudest controversial moments of the administration. I'm curious if you think that Christians who are concerned about the safety of our checks and balances, would read this dismissal of Pam Bondi as a positive or a negative? The jury is probably still out. The Department of Justice gets lost something like 16,000 employees. You had people in the DOJ advertising for open attorney positions, litigator positions on social media, which is not typical operating procedure. I remember the couple of folks who attorneys themselves or used to be attorneys and I talked about the Department of Justice being this. If you wanted to go into criminal law, the DOJ was kind of this aspirational place that you hoped that you could get to in certain circumstances. I don't think it's that way anymore. So in one sense, getting rid of Pam Bondy as the attorney general might bring some hope. On the other hand, I think it's pretty clear that particularly in the second administration, the people who are going to push back against what Donald Trump wants to do and try to restrain his worst impulses, such as political prosecutions. I don't think those people are coming back. I don't think they're named them left. And so now you have as possibilities for the new attorney general, Lee Zeldin, the current head of the EPA, former congressman from New York, Todd Blanch, who is an assistant attorney general, Donald Trump's personal attorney, for those who are concerned about checks and balances and whether or not the Department of Justice is being weaponized or being used inappropriately or perhaps if the big banner of Donald Trump's face will be taken down off the DOJ in Washington. I don't think I personally will hold out much hope that there's going to be some 180 degree turn. As we record this, Artemis two has reached lunar air space and is beginning its flyby of the moon. The first time an American crew has gotten this close to the moon since 1972, Commander Reid Weisman and pilot Victor Glover, who are both Christians and their two mission specialists, will venture to the dark side of the moon on Monday, reaching the furthest point Americans have ever traveled from Earth. Michael, I'm fascinated by this new moon mission. I'm curious what stands out to you most about what we're seeing with Artemis too. I just get enamored with the historical milestones we're hitting along the way. These guys are getting views of the moon that no human has ever really seen before where they're naked eye. They're going to be communicating with engineers and scientists in NASA trying to describe in their own words these things that they have seen photographs of and seen satellite imagery of unprecedented as a word that almost loses all meeting anymore the way things are going, but there should be an unprecedented experiment about what human beings were actually seeing with their own eyes. The thing that also kind of gets me jazz, so I was taking my kids to school this morning and gotten a conversation with my daughters in fourth grade about their conversations in the classroom about Artemis too. So I'm a millennial. I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s and when it comes to exploration, I can't remember kids in my classes ever being really excited about something that's happening in the moment. The way that my dad or my mom would talk about watching the Apollo missions when they were kids. And so there's the potential here with the Artemis missions and then the goal to get back to the moon and then the goal to further explore eventually Mars for 10-year-olds, 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and then their parents too to get excited about something that the US is doing or the US and our friends as we're in this case with the Canadian astronaut. Something that we're doing that's not politics, it's not war, it's not policy. I think we kind of get a sense of it when we have the Olympics or things like the World Cup or I'm a baseball fan to the World Baseball Classic. Just a sense of accomplishment, this is actually very high stakes, very high difficulty, sorts of technology and capabilities that we're trying to achieve here. We walk around with supercomputers in our pockets that the Apollo astronauts didn't have access to. It's very easy to just take everything for granted, but I think something like this, the first time we can get back to the moon in five decades plus, I think it aroused us a sense of wonder. We're created to want to go and explore and learn and experience and see and understand. And to the degree that we can understand these big, huge cosmic realities, I think we're just geared toward that. I was reminded of the 1968 Apollo 8 mission where the astronauts read from Genesis 1 as a sort of Christmas Eve blessing. And I began thinking, what would the Artemis 2 team read on Easter? And I landed on Colossians 1. For in him, all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. He is before all things and in him, all things hold together. Listeners will keep an eye on the moon and we hope you do too. We're reviewing stories like these all week long as we cover the news for you and we'll keep watching these and others as they develop. Today we dive deeper into the ruling against meta in a landmark social media addiction case as I sit down with the attorneys who won the case. Mark Rachel and Sarah Linear together we talk about how meta and we must answer the question, who is my neighbor? Enjoy the conversation. Mark Rachel and Sarah, welcome to the bulletin. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. Sarah, you have described your dad as fighting the bad guys and sticking up for the little guy. Talk to me about the unique opportunity to argue this case or really any case together as a family. I am a relatively new attorney. I get to watch both my dad and my older sister do what I've been hearing them talk about for so many years. I get to be part of it. And it's on a case that's this meaningful and truly is the epitome of fighting for the little guy. It was a David first Goliath kind of battle essentially getting to be part of it with them was incredible. I remember there was one night of trial where at 11 p.m. I got an assignment that had been requested by the judge and so we were working with defense counsel on it. And typically a boss would say, okay, like I'll review it in the morning. Thank you. But Rachel was like, no, I'm going to help you finish it. So she stayed up with me until I think 1.30 a.m. helping me knock it out and get it done. So it's so special. Marcus, this sort of like a dad's dream come true. Oh, absolutely. It's so much fun to watch them. And Rachel, of course, being 10 years older than Sarah was such an integral part of helping us take care of Sarah as a baby in a sense of almost a second mom to her. And to watch them now as mature adults come into their own both incredibly gifted and talented, but both using those gifts and talents for such a good cause. Sometimes I have to pay attention to what I'm doing because I'm just instead just the doting parent who's loving watching their kids do their thing. Mark, one of the things that's been really important throughout your professional career is this integration of your faith with your work. And as I was preparing for this conversation, it kept hitting me. Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan to a lawyer from your seat in the courtroom, from your experience as a Bible teacher. Can you unpack that for me a little bit? What does it mean for a lawyer to hear the particular parable of the Good Samaritan? I love that parable for a number of different reasons. First, I do find it engaging that a lawyer is debating the law, if you will, with the one who really wrote the law and gave it to Moses, you know, in a very real sense as the Lord. And so I find it a bit presumptuous, then you get to the story itself. And I love this story because the story presents the question of who's your neighbor. And the answer apparent from the story is the person who you see in the road of life that needs help you can give. That person is your neighbor. And so in my road of life, while I'm walking from Jerusalem to Jericho figuratively, who do I come across, then God has put in my path with needs that I can help address in the practice of law, for example, lots of cases come my way, but which cases particularly need me to do something in that case, because the others have passed it by or will pass it by. And so I'm challenged to try to find those that are in my path that God would have me bring my resources, my abilities, my efforts to. That certainly seemed to be the case with the lawsuit that we just finished trying together. Eritle, could you give us a lay of the land as it were? Many of us have seen this trial against the meta in the news, but what are the key points that our listeners need to understand about the case you argued on behalf of the plaintiff? This case was about one plaintiff Kayley who is now 20 years old. She is one of thousands of young adults in her generation that have grown up in a world where social media accounts are the norm for their friend groups and for their socialization. We went to trial up against meta and against Google for YouTube. And the key elements of the case were that these companies targeted kids like Kayley and they didn't care how young kids were when they use these apps. These companies didn't care if they communicated about certain risks. They didn't warn parents and they set out to make their apps addictive. And it caused a lot of mental health harm and a lot of damage to her and thousands of other children similar like her. What the platform does is it changes your concept of what's normal. You get filters where young ladies are able to get on and give themselves the perfect cheekbones. Take care of all the teenage acne and smooth the skin out with a perfect glowing tan. Fix their eyes so they're symmetrical. And then they post these pictures and every time you look in a mirror you look so different than these other people who are truly just make believe in. at that point. Then you get these other features that get you on the app at all hours. They'll send you notifications so that you'll hear a ding and you'll think, "Oh, somebody's commented on something I've done." And the kid wakes up in the middle of the night and they get on to check. And then when they're there, hey, might as well see this. And pretty soon their fingers going and before long as 3 a.m. and this teenager preteen has missed four hours of sleep before going to school. And the next day there are behavior problem, there are an education problem, and it's snowballs. And the studies of the companies show this that maybe a third of the young children and teenagers on these apps have not just distorted perceptions of self-image but they have poor sleep, they have increased depression, they have anxiety, they have social phobia, and these traits really stand out in magnified ways for people who are on these platforms at a young age. (gentle music) A neuroscientist holds a human brain in her hands and says, "I don't know what death is, but I know this isn't just equipment." A physicist discovers that the universe is balanced on a knife's edge. Change one number, any number, and none of this exists. A man goes seven weeks without a phone and his memory jumps from the 50th percentile to the 99th. These aren't thought experiments. They're real stories, real science, real people sitting with questions that don't have easy answers. Wonderology is a podcast about science, faith, and the search for awe. You can find wonderology wherever you get your podcasts or at wonderologyshow.com. So, let's get curious. (gentle music) Sarah, I know that Kayleigh was under the age of 13 when she first got on to these platforms. Is this akin to underage drinking? Like she had her first beer before she turned 21. She was clearly violating the app's terms of service, right? I think where the distinction with lies in terms of accessibility, you don't have to input an age when you get into YouTube. So it would be the equivalent of her going to serve yourself kind of bar where they don't check your ID. You maybe aren't placing an order, but you can get whatever you want. So while you can't really upload a video unless you say that you're 13 or older, you can get on youtube.com without logging into any account and you can watch any video that you want. And that's where we do see as sort of a gateway, a lot of people getting onto YouTube, getting addicted to the platforms, and then making an account once they're already addicted. A lot of platforms like Instagram didn't even ask for people's ages until relatively recently. So a lot of people who were underage got on the platforms at a time where they weren't being asked their age by the time they're already on the apps. If they ever are asked their age, they know just lying about your age is how you can stay on the app. And in some cases, people are never asked at all. For Kayleigh's mom, she was aware at least of dangers, for example, on Facebook. So she never let her daughter on Facebook. She didn't want her daughter downloading any apps on her phone that she didn't know about. It was an old, hammy down phone from Kayleigh's older sister. The mom installed some softwares on it. So Kayleigh couldn't download new apps without the mom's approval. The mom also put time limits on the phone. So it would shut off after a certain amount of use per day. But Kayleigh was able to get the apps because her older sister had downloaded them. And even though her mom wiped her phone, Kayleigh was still able to download the app without her mom meeting approval. So in her mom's mind, she's trying her best in doing what she can to prevent access to the phone. We're all sitting here in 2026. We know a lot about these apps. They've been around for a long time, but we have to think in the minds of these parents, we're looking back in 2012, where YouTube is telling parents and presentations, let us be your digital babysitter. Parents need times to cook dinner for their kids. Parents need time to do laundry, clean up after the day. Let us be your babysitter. There was a big misconception around the safety of these apps to begin with, but I also think there were just a lot of unknowns. A lot of people back in 2012 just thought, "Oh, what a good way to connect with people." Rachel, how can you parse that out to say, this was the platform? I mean, if a teenager already has a bad relationship with her mom, for example, or is struggling with high school algebra, who's to say that it's the app that did this? Nobody comes from a life without any sort of difficulty. There is no perfect life. There's no perfect family. What we had here was a teenage girl who's now a young adult who went through a childhood that did have difficulty, but the biggest impact in her life was social media. Even if her life was sort of like a dry wilderness with dry branches, that in and of itself doesn't start a big wildfire. You have to have some sort of spark. And the spark was YouTube and social media. And then social media just continued to pour gasoline and it really set fire to her life. And the thing that's scary about social media and the impact on kids and kids brains that has been studied and now confirmed time and time again, is that social media in particular changes the pathways in the brain. And a super personalized algorithms completely altered the way a child develops. And it social media itself, the use of it, actually makes it harder for a kid to deal with normal life experiences. So almost every kid in life has had a negative social interaction with somebody. And sometimes it's more severe than others, but social media actually makes it harder to deal with those types of interactions. And these companies knew it and their documents showed it. - You can go back to early documents of YouTube that we were privileged to see only because the judge ordered production part of a lawsuit. So we got to see these confidential and ultra confidential documents where they actually wrote, our goal is not viewership, it's addiction. That's what they were after. They live in an attention economy where the more time that people's eyeballs spend on their apps, the more money they make. And so they would set goals, how can we increase the time people spend on our apps and their engineers would go to work on those goals? We've got to get this much of a percentage bump this year. Oh, let's put endless scroll. Where all you have to do is take your finger and do a finger swipe and you can scroll. And then let's change the algorithm so that about every 10th scroll, you get a video that kind of jolt's shoe, but our artificial intelligence says is one you might find enticing and that'll make you stay on longer. And then the ones that you stay on longer, our algorithm will say, oh look, they stayed on this one, they must like this or this or this about it, or they went to that one because of this teaser frame. That must perk their interest and their AI will generate every screen that should come to you. All of these are not incidentals. These are purposely engineered by some of the smartest people on the planet to trap and entice people to addiction on these apps. Once I saw the behind the scenes of it all from the company's perspective and I saw the documents, that's when it really hit me what it means to target teens. That is their prime audience because if they can hook somebody at that age, they turn that person into a lifelong user and that person then gives them more and more and more revenue over time. Teens also are much more susceptible to social validation and to following the crowd. So if you get one teen on the platform, their whole friend group's gonna wanna get on the platform. And that's where accessibility comes into play as well. A big part of the problem is as much as you can limit one kid's access to a device when they go to school, if somebody at school has a device and they're on these apps, that's another way that these companies are able to kind of target these teens by getting into the friend groups essentially. So this is a very unique age group that's been specifically targeted, not just in forms of ads and in forms of content, but in terms of who are we pushing our algorithms towards, who are we trying to reach, how are our notifications gonna be structured so we can make sure we hit big with teens. Some of the ways, for example, that likes are distributed on the platforms and notifications that you're getting, you get them in batches sometimes, which then you look down at your phone and you see that 10 people liked your post, you wanna immediately go click on your post, you wanna immediately go look at your phone. When I talk to other people that are Gen Z and I tell them, yeah, I mean, we're arguing about how social media is addictive. Their response is always, well, of course it is. I don't think it's really a foreign concept to people who are on these apps that they are addictive. So essentially the younger generations are very knowledgeable, not only of how it all works, but of the fact that it is addictive, and it was designed to be addictive. Now I hear that Rachel, and I have seen a reference to the 1996 Communications Decency Act Section 230, a number of times. I wonder if you could explain how that is or isn't relevant here. It's hugely relevant here. Section 230 was originally supposed to be for the New York Times or the Houston Chronicle or publications that they wouldn't be held liable for harm from the content of the publication. The goal was freedom of speech and for these to protect publishers and that the sad thing is, is in the internet age and in the age of these platforms, that has really been taken and worked in a way that really advantages these companies. So these companies have fought to the nail and lobby to make it where they can kind of hide behind Section 230 and not be held accountable for any harmful content on their platforms. And this is content like self-harm content, suicide content, eating disorder content. The companies say, you know what, because of Section 230, we get a free pass. We're just publishers, even though they've created an algorithm that elevates that type of content. So we needed to find a way to focus not on the content on the apps, but to focus on the features themselves because even if you have a kid that's staring at good content, it's still not healthy for the developing brain. If a kid's looking at and scrolling videos of sunshine and rainbows and butterflies for three hours and it keeps them from going out and playing in a park or being with their family or getting real life social interaction. So the focus of the lawsuit was on these features because the company exploited these addictive features. I hope that the law eventually will change so that companies can be held accountable for bad content on their platform too. But for now, our focus has to be on the features and there is a lot of science just about that too. Mark, if Section 230 or those who appeal to it are some who pass on the other side as it were in the story of the Good Samaritan, who else has passed on the other side? regulators, lawmakers, are they culpable here too? Oh, I think so. We live in a society where our elected officials are able to take money from any number of different people for any number of different reasons. And there's really little to no regulation if you want to funnel money to politicians for their elections or their campaigns or their inaugural balls. And so you give a billion dollars you can stand behind the president when he's taking the oath of office. You've got a lot of people who need to own up to the fact they're not handling business the way they ought to. And I put it at the feet of the politicians who refuse to change Section 230. I hold up politicians like Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri who has fought for these changes, Martian Blackburn from Tennessee who has fought for these changes, who recognize we need to change 230. But how do you get enough votes? We live in such a difficult political environment to get enough votes to do anything. One side says, yes, the other side says no, almost as a knee jerk reaction. And if both sides say yes, you've still got to convince the White House or whoever else you've got to deal with. So I do think that the political situation is one that needs to take some measure of accountability and responsibility. But I really think that the ones who's most aggressively responsible are these platforms that are purposely putting in these addictive features. I told Mark Zuckerberg in cross-examination. I said, you know, we know in the world that there are vulnerable children, children who don't have the educational, wherewithal don't have the socio-economic, wherewithal don't have the home life stability, don't have the emotional fortitude. True, true. He agreed. I said, there are vulnerable children in the US. True, true. In the state of California, true, true. In our neighborhoods, true, true. We know that. That's a given. I said, so then it seems to me there are three things we can do. And it's interesting. You bring the goods to merit it up because it is in my brain as I'm planning this cross-examination now. Three responses we could have, Mr. Zuckerberg, number one, we can just walk on by. Not our problem. I don't need to look there. I don't need to investigate. I'll just keep going live in my life. That's one option, isn't it? Yes. Option two, we can help. We can see these people, know these people are there and try and do our bit to try and help them overcome some of these difficulties and challenges they face with their life. Couldn't we do that? He said, yes, we could. And the good Samaritan story stops there, but the story of meta does not. And so I said, there's a third option. We can pray upon those vulnerable children. We can decide we can use them and make money off of them. We can target them, make their situation worse and enrich our own coffers in the meantime. And then of course, my big question is why does meta choose option three? In the story of the good Samaritan, the gospel of Luke ends this parable saying that the expert in the law replied, the one who has mercy on him is the one who is the neighbor. And in that single sentence, I see this tug and pull of mercy and justice as we close what does justice and mercy look like for two particular groups? First, for the parent who discovers that his or her son is swept up into social media addiction. And then maybe for the harder party, what does justice and mercy look like for tech companies? Because we want to blame them as though they're these inanimate objects, but they are populated and powered by humans who are also made in the image of God. My guess six, eight puts those two terms into one verse. What does the Lord require of you to do justice? Love mercy and walk humbly with your God. Those three aren't opposite ends of an extreme. They all fit together quite well for the believer, justice and mercy go hand in hand. We live in a world where the greatest mercy we can be for the families and the greatest mercy we can ultimately be for the companies is to enforce some measure of justice and accountability so that everybody's aware of what's going on so that people are not allowed to take advantage of others. And that extends mercy where it should be, including correction where correction needs to be. The parent who never corrects a child is not merciful to that child. They're actually the opposite. So I think that justice and mercy go hand in hand and the humility that's added by the myconverse is just our posture always needs to be that we are under the ages, the authority, the control and the glory of the Lord. Justice requires a real actual scale. If there's an imbalance, God commands us to help the marginalized to help the poor, to help the downtrodden, to help the people who have been hurt. And part of justice and mercy and that balance is writing a wrong. So when it comes to these companies and the harm that they've caused, justice is not just a concept for the courtroom. It's a reflection of God's character and injustice is something where the goal is to restore what was in balanced and the wrong that took place. Mark Rachel Sarah, thank you so much for this conversation. And listeners, we always appreciate the opportunity to wrestle through complex issues with you here on the Bulletin. Thank you for taking us along as you walk the dog or full the laundry or commute to work. We will see you next time. The Bulletin is a production of Christianity today. It's produced by Clarissa Moll, the associate producer is Alexa Burke. This episode was mixed by Kevin Morris, theme music by Dan Phelps. Eric Petrick is the executive producer of the Bulletin and Matt Stevens is our senior producer. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review to help more people know about the show. Thanks for listening. 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