Nov. 6, 2025

Courage is Contagious – Silence is Not an Option – with James Staake – [Ep. 273]

Courage is Contagious – Silence is Not an Option – with James Staake – [Ep. 273]

If you have ever needed a dose of courage, this episode is for you. Linda’s guest, James Staake, joined the podcast with updates to the unbelievable story of cancel-culture chaos that occurred when their family business, Your American Flag Store, was censored, debanked, and nearly run out of business for simply making custom patriotic flags. Cancel culture affected millions of people over the last several years, and the example of what James and his family endured is indicative of what so many others similarly suffered. However, James chose to speak up against injustice - even when others tried to silence him. As a result, he has been able to positively impact policy in his state and around the country. James decided silence was not an option in the fight for freedom. His courage is contagious. Listen today!

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The opinions expressed by guests on this podcast do not necessarily represent those held or promoted by Linda J. Hansen or Prosperity 101, LLC.

 

 
 
The opinions expressed by guests on this podcast do not necessarily represent those held or promoted by Linda J. Hansen or Prosperity 101, LLC.
 

Linda J. Hansen:  Welcome. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Prosperity 101 Breakroom Economics® Podcast. My name is Linda J. Hansen, your host and the author of Prosperity 101, Job Security Through Business Prosperity, the Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck® and the creator of the Breakroom Economics® Online course. The book, the course, and the entire podcast library can be found on prosperity101.com. 

I seek to connect boardroom to breakroom and policy to paycheck. By empowering and encouraging employers to educate employees about the public policy issues that affect their jobs. My goal is to help people understand the foundations of prosperity, the policies of prosperity, and how to protect their prosperity by becoming informed, involved, and impactful®.

I believe this will lead to greater employee loyalty, engagement, and retention, and to an increased awareness of the blessings and responsibilities of living in a free society. Listen each week to hear from exciting guests and be sure to visit prosperity101.com.

Thank you so much for joining with me today. It is just always an honor to have you in the audience, whether you're joining by audio podcast, or you happen to be viewing our new video podcasts on Rumble or YouTube. Thank you so much.

And you know, we are eagerly supporting the freedom message, whether it's through employers educating employees or through this podcast or whatever we do. We want to make sure that we are supporting the values that made this nation great and honor God and honor the families that are our American citizens so that we can be a blessing to the world as well. America is a beacon and when America is strong, the world is stronger. So that's what we're about. And we just really hope that you'll stick with us through this whole episode. 

But before I introduce my special guest, I want to say thank you for our prosperity partners. You know who you are, the ones who donate either monthly or one-time gifts now and then to help us keep the podcast on the air. So thank you. And if you are listening and would like to become a prosperity partner, please go to the website, prosperity101.com.

You can find the prosperity partner link and you can donate whatever you choose. You can do monthly or a one-time gift, but any, any support is helpful. And we're just grateful. One, that you're listening and two, that you would be supportive. So thank you. We also want to say thank you to our strategic partners, the freedom loving businesses that support the values that made America great.

And they try to honor those values in every way that they do business. So please go to our show notes and to our website and support the businesses that are strategic partners. One of them is here today.

Many of you, if you're a regular listener, you know that James Staake has been on my podcast before. James has become a good friend over the years and his wife, Ginger as well, because we just have had a long history of following the journey of what their family went through being censored, canceled, and cut off from an ability to earn an income because of the type of products they sold and their viewpoint. People don't really even understand that that went on in America. Many people still don't realize that people have been censored. They have had their bank accounts frozen. They've had their social media accounts taken offline.

This is something that happened during the Biden administration. And we're so thankful that this is changing now and it's not happening to conservatives now, and we're just so grateful for that. But for those who have fought the hard fight of freedom, we salute them.

And James and his wife, Ginger are certainly in that army of freedom fighters. So James, thank you so much for being with me again. It's just always great to bring an update about your family and your business and your fight to the audience.

Thank you.

James Staake: Thanks for having me. And thank you for calling and checking up on my wife when she was in the hospital giving birth to our baby. You were one of two or three people that were constantly reaching out every few days to just see how she was doing.

She was obviously two weeks overdue and really, really ready to have the baby. And it was always nice to get a text or a call from you. So thank you.

Linda J. Hansen: Oh, thank you. Yes. I was praying for her and you just constantly.

I obviously, after being a mom of six, having six children, I know what it's like to be pregnant and want to be done being pregnant because you're ready to have that baby and I never went overdue, which I'm so thankful for. But yeah, I often felt like I was going overdue. And so my heart was always just drawn to pray for her and then check in with you to see how she was doing, because it's just such a wonderful season.

It's great when you're expecting this new child and it's wonderful, but the weight is hard and the WAIT weight, but then also the WEIGHT weight of having that one in your body that you're just carrying until it's time for that miracle to happen and your beautiful child to be born. So tell the listeners about this child, this precious bundle that arrived.

James Staake: She's 7 pounds, 14 ounces, 20 inches long. We named her Frankie Lynn after my grandmother and grandfather, both named Francis. My grandfather went by Frank, my grandmother went by Fran, and my uncle Frank goes by Frankie.

So we thought of all of their names and my mother-in-law's middle name is Linda. So we shortened Francis to Frankie and we shortened Linda to Lynn and named her Frankie Lynn. All of our kids are all family names and we wanted to keep with that.

There was a short time where we really considered heavily to name, we thought about naming her Charlie, I wanted to name her Charlie Kay with the middle name K-A-Y. But in the end, my grandmother is still with us. She's 94, I believe.

And I already told her I was going to name her after her, so I had to stick with that. So we stuck with the family name.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah, well, that's great. And congratulations again. It was just a joy when I got the text from you that said, yes, she's born.

And it was wonderful.

James Staake: Oops, our big old oops, baby. And just for context, we have a 16-year-old, a 14-year-old, a 14-year-old tomorrow, by the way. Our son, Max, turns 14 years old tomorrow.

Linda J. Hansen: Happy birthday.

James Staake: And now we have a two and a half week old.

Linda J. Hansen: Well, life begins anew. We never know what is around the corner and what God may have in store for us. So you weren't quite as old as Abraham and Sarah, but, you know….

James Staake: No, feels like it. 

Linda J. Hansen: Well, speaking of Max, your 14-year-old son, for those of you who are not aware of James's story, Max is really the originator of their family business, Your American Flag Store. I haven't really even given James the proper introduction. He and his family, they own Your American Flag Store and they make custom flags for people.

James is a carpenter, Ginger, an artist. And their son, Max, decided one day at six years old that they should make flags and do special things on them. And this grew into a business.

If you want to hear longer versions of the story, I have several podcast episodes where I have followed their journey over the years. And as we go through this interview, if you've never met James before, we'll make sure you know what that journey is. But also for more detail, you can listen to some of the previous interviews.

But they have really fought the good fight. And I mentioned earlier about being censored or canceled. And to this day, I mean, we still see it. Obviously, you mentioned Charlie. I mean, Charlie Kirk was assassinated before our very eyes, so there is a censorship there. And there's a portion of our society that is saying that that was OK. And it's just horrible. We look at that and say, what has happened to America?

What has happened to the mindsets of people? And, of course, James, you and I know that we are in a spiritual battle. This is a spiritual battle. It is not a Republican or Democrat battle. It is not a left versus right battle. It's not a blue versus red battle. It is a spiritual battle. But we do have to fight that battle in the arena of politics and business and ministry and family life. We fight that battle.

And as Christian believers, we can see things that God has called us to do sometimes even when we're uncomfortable doing it. But we know we must. And I would like you to give just a brief, like maybe two minute overview of how you were canceled and what happened.

And then we'll go into what's been happening since and how you have taken this censorship, this cancellation, and turned it into courage and conviction. And you're making a positive difference. So for everybody out there in the audience right now, you do not want to turn this off.

You do not want to go watch something else or listen to something else. You want to hear James's story because his story could be your story next week. And you need to know how to get the courage to fight for the freedoms that you hold dear.

So James, go ahead and give us that little update from beginning to where you are today. And then we'll go into some detail.

James Staake: Okay. Well, the first two years of our business, after Max kind of strolled into our garage one night when we had a sporting event and he asked if he could start a business. We were all shocked when he came up with this idea.

We jumped on it within a few days. Within the next two years, we got ourselves completely out of debt. We saved up a little bit of money and that was right in the midst of COVID.

We realized that we didn't want to be in California anymore. That wasn't the right environment for our business. It was not the right environment for our family.

So we moved to Tennessee and that all was made possible through this idea that our son had and us traveling around over pre COVID. We went to rodeos and all over the country. We literally would pack up every single weekend and go to different types of events and sell our flags to the patrons of those events.

When we moved to Tennessee, it was about four months after we got here. Our business was actually really in a really good groove. We had a lot of stability. We put out the same amount of money in advertising every month. We get the same result every single month. I mean, it just couldn't be more smooth.

Then right after the election, literally the day after we were demonetized. We were canceled, de-platformed and all in the side in this very short time, just a few weeks. They had literally canceled us from everything that made our business run our website, our credit card processing for our website, our advertising to get people to go to our website. Every part of it was just taken from us and we had to rebuild it. So, we did our best to rebuild it.

And to some extent we're still rebuilding it. We're still not back to the numbers we were doing prior to being canceled, but we're still making flags and getting flags into homes all over the country. So, the silver lining in it all was our business is a lot different.

It's not as stable, but the people that we've gotten to meet, I've gotten to go on national television over 70 times. A Congressman from Tennessee came to our house unannounced at one point to just find out what was going on with the story and see if there was a legislative solution. We tried to get the legislation passed here in Tennessee, but we couldn't because there were too many forces, mainly PayPal sent a bunch of lobbyists to Nashville.

We had our bill passed the night before it was voted on the day that we showed up to testify the day before PayPal had flooded Nashville with lobbyists and then by the time we got into the testimony in the vote, the next day, we didn't have the votes anymore. Nobody would even look me in the eyes. Or very few people, maybe a half a dozen, would actually look me in the eyes, whereas before we were having very good conversations and everything, but you could tell that something had changed and that they just didn't want to do it.

So that eventually led to our bill, our representative, Monty Fritz, who's now running for governor of Tennessee, he took that thing. He tried to get it. I think he brought it to the floor three different times. And we'd got a bunch of excuses on why they wouldn't vote for it. One of them was that it doesn't have enough teeth. So then we add more teeth to it.

Then it's too much teeth. It's just they really know how to wear people out and just get you off. So being as frustrated as I was with the whole legislative process and seeing that one good man in Monty Fritz was not able to get the good work of the people done because there's a bunch of people in Nashville that really probably shouldn't be there.

So in that whole evolution of kind of learning about cancel culture, how to remedy cancel culture and deal with companies that are going to be aligned with your values to where you don't have to worry about it nearly as much, and then also the process of getting into a legislative fight to really make it to where these companies cannot legally do these things to us. I decided to run for Senate here in Tennessee, largely that you and I had kind of teased about that idea that it was kind of something that could, and I kind of giggled about it with you and several other people. But, the day that Charlie was assassinated, there was something that happened in me that I was just like, okay, I'm not teasing with this anymore.

This has just gotten so far. We're just living in some very, very scared… what I think everyone should be scared times.

So I decided I wanted to run for Senate and I would if I was sent to Nashville by the constituents here in district 12, I wanted them to know how I would represent them. And I'm a nice person, but I'm very direct and I've learned through this whole legislative process. And also sometimes even when I was dealing with conservative companies who might be able to help us not be canceled anymore, as soon as they found out that we were canceled and I don't blame these people at all, they don't want to be canceled.

They have employees they have to worry about. They have their family they have to worry about. And when you touch someone or support someone that's been canceled, it's like the plague, it's very contagious.

All of a sudden those companies go after you for supporting someone that they've already canceled. It's almost like we've canceled them. How dare you associate yourself? Don't you know what we can do to you? We can do the same thing to you. So these companies are intimidated when they even find out that a company, unlike theirs, they don't even want to touch you because they have, it's too scary of a thing.

So I just realized that, okay. When companies are too scared to stand up for their own values, when people are too scared to stand up for their own values, isn't that tyranny? Isn't that, isn't that kind of where we're at?

So that's why I decided to run. And we'll see, we'll see where that goes. That's a little bit out on the horizon, but I think that we're getting involved to really understand better what the constituents in district 12 in Tennessee really want from a representative.

And if that's something that aligns with my values, I would be proud to represent them. What I'm not going to do is if I find out that my values really don't align with the constituents and I'm just going, then there's no need for me to do it, I'm not going to change who I am or what I believe to fit the people. I'm just going to be me and if they want me to fight for them, I'm going to go fight for them.

Linda J. Hansen: That's just a great story. I want to fill in a few gaps for people who may have never heard your story here. I mean, we take it for granted because I know so many details about this, but when you first realized that something was wrong. When was that? You said it was right after the election was after the election or after January 6th or which one?

James Staake: Yes. It was just a few weeks after the election. It was actually January 7th when I realized it, come to find out later on that it had been going on for a few weeks prior to that and we saw something. We saw fewer sales, fewer visits to the website, a lot less activity.

And I just kind of chalked it up to, well, it's election season, people are unsure, people are just… weather it, just let January come and go and it will all get back to normal. But it was getting worse by the day and almost, it was just compounded. So then I started doing a deep dive and that's when I realized really what happened was that I was like, okay, I got to go all in. I'm going to put a big ad out there. I'm going to do a huge ad spin. I'm going to place the biggest ad I've ever done.

And that should get us something. And when I went to hit publish the ad, I got a message saying that your ad privileges have been suspended. You're no longer allowed to place ads on our platform. That's when I really realized, okay, something's been canceled.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah. Well, and this was one of the things, for the audience, I want them to realize like what had happened is you had all these flags. So, for the audience, if you don't really know what Your American Flag Store offers it's custom flags and many times people will just have a regular flag, just a flag with nothing on it that they paint.

And James builds and Ginger hand paints, but some people want a special design, like say in the bottom right corner. So you've done everything from family members or a family crest or a fallen officers badge number, or military things. You've done pictures of presidents. You've done really everything.

James Staake: And business logos.

Linda J. Hansen: Yes. Business logos and things. And everything was great until a customer of yours actually posted a flag that they custom ordered and were very happy with, and they were so happy about it. They posted it. And that flag had a picture of Donald Trump in the bottom right corner. And that was the flag that evidently flagged Facebook to suppress your ads, suppress your posts.

And not only that, suppress posts of your customers. So your work could not really get out there anymore. And then really you went through and found out, okay, great. What do we do now? And you found out that Shopify was actually taking things off your website. In real time, removing products that you had for sale.

And some of them were…

James Staake: Our best selling products.

Linda J. Hansen: Yes. Very patriotic things. I mean, nothing controversial.

It was like military flags or law enforcement flags things… I mean, of course, in 2020, 2021, everything was controversial, but these things were literally being removed from your website by no will of your own. And then you had PayPal hold like a hundred thousand dollars worth of your money about, pardon me?

James Staake: 114.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah. Who's counting, right? 114,000 dollars of your money that now you had been in business many years, you had been in business many years, successful business.

You paid your bills, you delivered things to your customers and things. And then PayPal said, oh, we don't think you're a credible business. So until you fulfill all the orders…. one thing that I want the audience to know is that after you were canceled and you discovered what happened, you didn't take it sitting down.

You reached out to media personnel. You got on TV shows. You started talking to people. You started to really share the news. And then your orders started to soar again. People heard what was happening.

And so they were ordering. So then you had this $114,000 worth of orders. And you had ordered wood from the lumber company and they called and said, sorry, your card doesn't work.

You're like, what? This is more money than I've had. And you found out that's when PayPal said in order for you to be deemed a credible business by them, that  you had to fulfill all those orders. Well, how could you do that? Because they were holding all the money that was for the materials to fill the orders. 

So they just hit you, Facebook, Shopify, PayPal, and this is not uncommon. Yours just happens to be a story that we've been really able to follow and to keep in the forefront of people's minds because you've been able to get on national media and I've had you on many times and stuff, but you're not the only business where things like this have happened to you.

You're not the only person who's been debanked or had your business just destroyed because of your political views or who you serve and so I really wanted the audience, if this is a first time listener or a viewer, I wanted them to know this history because we're not making this up, when you hear cancel culture, you hear people talk about being censored or something.

And now, right now, the mainstream media is like, oh, all up in arms that conservatives are censoring people, we're not at all. Like it's insane. But this, when you know people who've had their bank accounts closed, their marketing and their websites monitored and changed before their very eyes just because of their political views or the views of those they serve, I mean, that's so wrong.

And so I just applaud you for standing up, for being willing to fight this. And then you were able to get legal help. Harmeet Dhillon, who now serves in the administration, she was really helping a lot of canceled individuals and she took on your case.

So you fought things legally. And can you just give a brief on the situation of the legal battle that you were in?

James Staake: Well, unfortunately for me, but fortunate, very fortunate for the country. Harmeet took a position in the department of justice, she's running the civil rights division, which falls in line exactly with what she did. Now, another important thing is that when they took the money, it took Harmeet quite a while, Harmeet came in about five, six months into it. PayPal had already had our money after she got involved almost immediately, they gave us some, and then every couple of weeks they were giving a little bit more Harmeet can put some weight on you and convince you much better than I can.

But it took 311 days before we got all of our money back. And while we're fighting that fight, the really cool thing about Harmeet- Harmeet and my first conversation with her, she just basically said, look, you make flags, I'll fight for you. She was asking me, so what's business like now?

And I was like, well, I'm just trying to like, keep things together. I don't have any time to make flags when someone does order it, because where's the money coming from? PayPal at that point, PayPal didn't give us back our money.

We didn't have anybody. This goes back to what I was saying before that nobody wants to touch you when you're canceled. So we were trying to get another credit card, a processing company to process our orders.

Nobody would, PayPal was it. So PayPal was still taking money through orders, but then holding the money. And we couldn't even get them off of our website.

Luckily, Thomas Troyer at second amendment processing came in and got that whole thing taken care of for us. And we've never had anything held ever again. Thomas is a former Marine.

He's a real fighter and this guy will fight for someone that he doesn't even agree with. If it's just right, he fights for what's right. So he's a great guy. Between the people that we've had, we really have been blessed by going on podcasts like this and going on TV, those people will see us and they'll call us and say, Hey, look, I have a remedy for this.

And that's really what saved us are the podcasts and the TV shows. Another friend of yours, Rachel Campos-Duffy. She had us on Fox and friends that really exposed PayPal actually. At the end when Harmeet kind of got to a stalemate and they said, Hey, look, we still have $11,000. If he wants that, he's going to have to sign a nondisclosure agreement. He can never tell anyone what we've done to him and his family.

Linda J. Hansen: I'm glad you're bringing this up. I was going to just make sure you mentioned this too, because honestly they were… is the word blackmail correct? But they were really treating you unfairly and wanting to hold your money unless you never said anything. And, yay for you to say, no, we're going to speak.

James Staake: Oh, well, I had a good lawyer giving me good advice. So, she kind of laid out my options and made it very clear that she got to know me a little bit and realized that the chances of me keeping my mouth shut were probably pretty slim, and signing a nondisclosure probably wasn't a good idea for me. 

And yes, you're right. I learned there's a very weird thing about extortion. So if PayPal would have basically made an ultimatum to me and say, Hey, if you sign this nondisclosure agreement, we'll give you your money back. That would be extortion. But if PayPal pays a lawyer to tell my lawyer the same exact thing, that's not extortion, that's just a settlement agreement. So as long as you have lawyers in the beginning, they can literally extort anyone they want.

They just use lawyers to do it. And that's more or less what happened to us. I mean, it, you can really get into the weeds with it all, but more or less from a layman, from a common guy saying, Hey, where's my money.

And in them saying, sign this, never speak about what we've done to you. And we'll give you your money back. I don't know what other word to use besides extortion, even though it's not.

They did what they could legally do. Yeah, legally it's not. So I don't want to get into any… I don't want them suing me because I'm using the wrong terms, but that's what it felt like.

I think that any reasonable person from the outside would say that that is what it is. I should be allowed to tell my story and they shouldn't be able to. Here's the other thing, Linda, is that if they would have come to me and said, Hey, we're going to give you all your money back. We realized that this was wrong or we made a mistake, or maybe not even say that we just realized that this may have cost you money. We're willing to give you an extra 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 or whatever.

I would have jumped all over and said, just let me go back into business. If you want to give me 10, great. You want to give me 20? Great. I just need to get back into business. I would have taken it.

That's not what they did. They were trying to extort me with my own money. It was my money that they were going to be paying me back.

So that whole thing kind of rubbed me the wrong way. You've been very kind with the languages you've used. I don't think that I've done anything that any other entrepreneur that… I mean, just if any parents out there had their six-year-old son come to them and say, Hey, I want to start this busy business.

And then you do it. And within two years, you're out of debt and you're buying your dream house and you're moving across country and your business is thriving all because of this side kids idea Then they try to shut it down and take all your money and say, Oh, you can never tell anyone that we did this. I don't think that I've done anything that any other parent wouldn’t have done.

Linda J. Hansen: Exactly. You know, you have shown such courage and determination through this. And I got to hand it to Ginger too, because moving cross country and raising a family and going through all of this stress and not knowing where your money comes from.

And I remember you saying in one of our interviews too, that when it began to turn around is when you and Ginger both got on your knees and prayed together. And you had not prayed together about this situation before that, but it was just getting to a point where like, we just have to give this to God and it began turning around. And that actually really began a lot of spiritual growth and development in your own life as well.

That if people want to hear more about that, they can listen to some of the past interviews, but your growth in the Lord and your increased trust in Him, He proved himself to be faithful to you as you were faithful to Him. And this is one of the things, sometimes we don't understand what happens and we can look back and say, wow, we can see how all this fit together. But that messy middle point is so difficult.

And, we all have messy middles and sometimes we have many of them all at once. Sometimes we have one and everything else is fine. But, we all have situations in life that we would like to see turn around or improve.

And,your story about giving it to God, releasing it unto Him and asking for guidance and then having that courage. I mean, I really do believe that God gave you and Ginger that courage to stand up and fight, even when it was very, very hard and scary and it felt like the world was against you. But, it had to be a little bit comforting to see that you weren't the only censored person.

But at the same time, it didn't matter because your bank account was challenged by the situation and you had a family to feed and a business to run and you still stood up. So I always say that, you were censored, you were canceled, but you are courageous in that you didn't take it sitting down. You just got up and decided to make some positive changes, whether it is trying to improve legislation so this never happens to anybody ever again, or your thoughts about running for an elected position in the state of Tennessee and these upcoming elections, you have not declared at this point or or filled out paperwork or anything, nothing's official, but I know where your heart is on that and you would love to serve. And so, everyone in the audience, I really hope you'll follow James and he's also written a book.

It's in the background. If you're watching this on video, you can see his book. Could you tell us a little bit about the book and then tell people how they can reach you. But I have one final question for you after you give your information about the book and your website.

James Staake: The book was really… doing interviews like this, there's been a couple of them where they're like an hour long and we really get into the real thick of everything. And in doing that, many of those people would be like, you really need to write a book. And I was like, for what?

You know, my life isn't really that exciting. It's actually relatively boring. But after hearing it for so many times and then another friend said, hey, look, you really, really need to do this. And then I was like, OK, let's do it. And I don't think I think it's going to be boring. But then when we started working through all the chapters and I was like, you know what? My life is pretty cool. It's not- I mean, in the moment, it just kind of seems like I'm doing this again and you're going through your day to day.

But when we started really stringing it together, the real interesting thing in the in the book writing process, what I really realized and this is, again, a kind of a recognition that God has been with me for a lot longer than I really noticed going all the way back in high school, the book talks about the guy who co-authored it with me. He said, what was the first time you were canceled? And I was like, I don't know, I guess this.

And he's like, OK, all right. And then I thought about that night and I was like, you know what? When I was in high school, any time that I would challenge a teacher, teachers, it didn't matter if I was in English class, math class, the math teacher would somehow turn in any type of word problem that we might be doing into a lesson about Reagan spending too much money. It didn't matter. He would somehow make it use that example to solve his lesson plan. If you were in English class, the teacher would be like, oh, trickle down economics.

That's perfect. That's a perfect example of hyperbole. And it didn't matter. They would do all these little jabs, these little zingers constantly. And any time that I would push back, I'd get sent to the principal's office. I'd get kicked out of class.

I'd be disruptive of the teaching. And what I really realized in that was that I was actually only disrupting the indoctrination process. So I realized that this whole cancel culture thing and being kind of not really attacked, but kind of attacked by the powers that be, whether it be a teacher, a principal, a school administrator.

When I was a kid for being a conservative kid on campus in a very liberal school in Southern California, that all prepared me for what came with this whole cancel culture thing. So it really kind of made me realize how God is working for us long before we even understand what problems are ahead. He's already given us the tools we need to get through it.

So it doesn't matter what anyone out there is going through. God has given us the tools to get through all the struggles that we have. So writing the book for me, in the end, I kind of went in it reluctantly. And then I found out that it was one of the most needed bits of therapy that I needed. And I really confessed everything in there. There's parts about my life before we got into making flags that I'm proud of, that it is what it is.

Linda J. Hansen: God uses every piece of our lives, and He can make beauty from ashes. And so if anybody is listening, make sure you get the book.

James Staake: And if you want to know what was bad about me in the beginning, it's in the book.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah, but God prepared you for that time in your life and what you needed to do to speak up and be a voice for millions of people who were being canceled, even if they didn't know it yet. And so I thank you for that. Also, you have to go.

I know that we have a hard stop here in just about two minutes. But what would you tell employers who need to educate employees about how this whole cancel culture issue is so important to their job security, their paychecks, their own family flourishing?

James Staake: Well, I think that obviously every business owner, they're politically-minded. I think that they need to really have a come-to-Jesus moment. How you're running your business, would Jesus be happy with that?

I think a lot of people out there are afraid to voice it, and I was. You mentioned how me and my wife prayed for the first time. It wasn't that we prayed for the first time about this together. My wife and I have always been religious. It was the first time that she and I prayed together out loud. This is also in the book.

A very bold answer to that prayer came the next morning. This prayer was at 11 o'clock at night. Seven o'clock in the morning, something happened that both my wife and I were like, my God, that's the answer. We specifically asked for a very specific thing, and we got it. Then the person who brought it used the same words that we used in our prayer to ask for it.

Linda J. Hansen: Listeners, you need to get the book in order to find out what that was. God doesn't always answer quite so quickly in every situation, but when He does, it's just so remarkable. Whether the answer is quick to come or it takes a long time to come, the fact that we know He is there and hearing is just incredible.

We had great plans, and He weaves it all together for good. I didn't mean to interrupt, but I know you have to go. So listeners, you can go to youramericanflagstore.com, and you can reach James there. You can also order your very own custom flag. Take a look at everything that they offer and decide what you'd like to have in your home. If you use code P101, use that code, you'll get free shipping on your flag.

Also, make sure you just let James know you heard about this on the podcast. Please do, and share this with others because James and Ginger are not the only ones who've been canceled.There are so many people.

If we had more time, I'm sure, James, you and I could sit down and come up with quite a list of our own personal friends or acquaintances or people we've worked with who've been canceled. It's not just you, but God chose you and Ginger to be one of the voices standing up for this. I thank you, and I know that our audience thanks you as well.

Any other final comments?

James Staake: No. I guess if you're married, grab your spouse and pray. Whatever it is that is troubling you, go sit down, get on your knees, and just ask God for it to be taken away from you.

It will.

Linda J. Hansen: If you're single, you can pray too. I just want to say, if you're single, you can pray too.

James Staake: Absolutely. I really believe that couples need to do it together. I think that there's power in that.

It does bring couples together. I wasn't always that adamant about really praying with your spouse, but it really does align the two hearts in a way that really nothing else can. You can have a family talk, but when you include God in that conversation, I think that the outcome is always going to be better.

Linda J. Hansen: It levels the playing field. Thank you again, James. We appreciate it.

I know I'll probably have you back again in months ahead to get another update, but thank you for being courageous in spite of being censored and canceled. Thank you for being courageous.Congratulations again on your new little girl, and what a blessing to your family.

Thank you. We appreciate it.

James Staake: Thank you, Linda. Thank you for being there for our family this whole time.

Linda J. Hansen: I appreciate it so much. Thank you for being a great example for others who need to fight the good fight. Thank you.

James Staake: Thank you.

Linda J. Hansen: Thank you. Thank you again for listening to the Prosperity101® podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share and leave a great review. Don't forget to visit prosperity101.com to access the entire podcast library, to order my newest book, Job Security Through Business Prosperity, the Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck®, or to enroll you or your employees in the Breakroom Economics® online course.

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