What Fills The Void Where “good” Once Resided?

As Tradition Is Escorted To The Door, Evil Comes Across The Threshold To Replace It

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “You ought to do all that you can to try to abide the rule and encourage others to do that.  We do the exact opposite.  We tell people: No, no, that’s not a real rule.  That’s one of those fuddy-duddy rules, you know, when those Christian cats used to run things.  The new rules today allow us to be free.  We can interpret these rules the way we need to interpret them because times change.  Everyone needs to get with the times.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  That’s very nice.  I’m glad you have your free speech.  You don’t get to make the rules.  The rules were already made.  You can obey them.  God made the rules.  If you choose not to obey them, then some pretty dastardly, disgusting, and despicable things are going to happen to you.  Unfortunately, they’re going to happen to you for all the rest of eternity.  It’s a pretty safe bet that if there is a rule in place, that you ought to do all you can — of course, this is why we are men and we’re not saints and why saints are saints.  You ought to do all that you can to try to abide the rule and encourage others to do that.  We do the exact opposite.  We tell people: No, no, that’s not a real rule.  That’s one of those fuddy-duddy rules, you know, when those Christian cats used to run things.  The new rules today allow us to be free.  We can interpret these rules the way we need to interpret them because times change.  Everyone needs to get with the times.

[private FP-Monthly|FP-Yearly|FP-Yearly-WLK|FP-Yearly-So76]

If you’re on a bus and it is heading towards a cliff at 180 miles an hour, and if over the cliff at the bottom of it is a pit of flaming hellfire that you’re going to spend the rest of eternity in, and the remedy to that is to say: Okay, let’s slow the bus down and think about this.  Let’s not obsess over whether or not we were actually handed a set of rules.  Let’s obsess over that we were handed a set of rules and this is where we have lost our way.  Chris, we refuse to do that.  That is not a popular thing to say today.  As a matter of fact, it’s going to be come, I think very soon here, something that is probably going to get people persecuted.

Chris Ferrara:  It’s already happening explicitly in Canada.  If you say what Don Jones said regarding the drafting of the gay football player, you’re going to end up being prosecuted for a hate crime.  We haven’t reached that point in America yet, but the tyranny of public opinion is such that if you stand up for what is right, if you advocate principles of Christian morality in the face of rampant homosexualism, you’re finished in public life.  You’ll lose your job.  At the very least you’ll have to make an abject apology in order to save your career.

This is what Stanley Fish is talking about when he says the freedom of speech doesn’t exist because liberalism doesn’t exist.  Liberalism is not what it pretends to be, which is tolerant of all points of view.  Liberalism is quite intolerant of anti-liberal points of view.  The question is, which form of intolerance do we adopt as a society?  Do we adopt intolerance towards the good or intolerance towards evil?  I say we adopt intolerance towards evil, otherwise the liberals will take the field and impose upon us a regime of intolerance of the good, and that is the regime that we’re suffering under right now.  That’s why you can have a black mass at Harvard and the president won’t do anything to stop you.  The only reason the mass didn’t happen was that enough people made enough of a stink on that particular occasion that they went off campus, but they still had the black mass in the Chinese restaurant.

The fundamental problem confronting us is: What are we going to tolerate?  Are we going to tolerate evil or are we going to tolerate only the good?  Then the question is raised: What is the good?  That’s precisely the problem.  We’ve lost our way as a society and can no longer see the good.  I don’t care whether you’re Catholic or not, Pope Leo XIII wrote some encyclicals on the subject of liberty.  He’s not really giving Catholic teaching in these encyclicals.  He’s talking about what he calls natural reason or common sense.  What he says about the modern regime of freedom of speech is, and I’m quoting here, “If unbridled license of speech and writing be granted to all, nothing will remain sacred and inviolate.”  Then he went on to say, “Truth being gradually obscured by darkness, pernicious and manifold error, as too often happens, will easily prevail.”  In other words, things will be turned upside down, evil will triumph, and the good will be persecuted.  He predicted this in the 1800s and it came to pass.  The question is, what are we going to do about it as Americans?  I think your show is exploring the answer to that question.

Mike:  It explores the answer, but that doesn’t mean that the line of conversions is growing exponentially yet.  The conversions that we’re seeing today would not be up to the standards of St. Vincent of the friary.  At that point in time when similar events were happening in Spain and in Europe, there was a retrenchment.  There was a pushback that kind of righted the ship and got people off of the [mocking] “I can say whatever I want.  You don’t have to like it but you have to allow me to say it,” which, as you pointed out, is an invention post-Hobbes and post-Age of Reason.  If you really want to lay this at the feet of someone, philosophically speaking, then it probably belongs at the feet of that lunatic Rousseau.  It’s Rousseau that really got the French all drunk on the concept.  Of course, we know what the French did.

That’s one of the epics in history, Chris — I haven’t made it this far in Liberty, the God that Failed book just yet.  It’s one of the epics in history that Americans today, French people today, Italians and other Europeans today better not forget what happened during the Great Terror.  This was the rule of man and it was the rule of the politically incorrect made politically correct.  If you were on the wrong side of the fence, brother, well, they pulled your head through a picket to the right side of the fence, and then a steel blade came down on your neck and severed your head from your body.

Ferrara:  The reason there was so much blood in the French Revolution as compared with the American is that the ideas that the so-called modern enlightenment had introduced into the Western world confronted in France head-on a Catholic social order of many centuries standing.  That had to be eliminated.  There was resistance on the part of Catholics.  There had to be bloodshed on a massive scale.  The problem that you’re identifying, which originated with Rousseau, is this idea of the general will, which is not to be confused even with the majority will, but rather the will of those that claim to speak for we the people, which invariably ends up being we the politicians.  This is the great danger of mass democracy.  It degenerates into a rule of we the politicians that claim to represent we the people and the people sit there and take it because they’ve been dumbed down, because they’ve lost their sense of outrage, and because they’ve been fed the idea that freedom consists in tolerating everything except the good.

Mike:  There were men of the American Revolution that were just on the cusp of being founding fathers that saw a lot of this stuff coming about the time that de Tocqueville saw it coming, too.  John Randolph of Roanoke was one of them.  My buddy Brion McClanahan has this at the Abbeville Institute today under the headline, “Democracy, Liberty, Equality: Lincoln’s American Revolution.”  He writes about this turn towards mass democracy or king numbers and that everything could be broken down, regardless of what history had said about it, that everything could be broken down and reinterpreted and then re-administered based on numbers, meaning based on votes.  Of course, Randolph went: This is dangerous stuff, guys.  You don’t want to fool with this.  He said this at the convention to alter the Virginia Constitution in 1829:

[reading]

Are we men…Or are we in truth, a Robinhood Society discussing rights in the abstract? Have we no house over our heads? Do we forget that we are living under a Constitution which has shielded us for more than half a century?—that we are not a parcel of naked and forlorn savages on the shores of New Holland [Mike: That’s a jab at the Vikings.]; and that the worst that can come is that we shall live under the same Constitution that we have lived under, freely and happily, for half a century? To their monstrous claims of power, we plead their prescription; but then we are told: nullum tempus occurrit Regi (no time runs against the king). King whom? King Numbers. And they will not listen to a prescription of fifty-four years—a period greater by four year than would secure a title to the best estate in the Commonwealth, unsupported by any other shadow of right. Nay, Sir, in this case, prescription operates against possession. They tell us it is only a case of long-continued, and therefore of aggravated, injustice.

[/private]

They say to us, in words the most courteous and soft… we shall be—we will be—we must be your masters, and you shall submit.

[end reading]

Mike:  What he was protesting against was they were trying to expand, in the new Virginia Constitution, how people could vote, who could vote, and the representation of the vote.  They were

basically trying to get more people to vote.  Randolph was going: What’s wrong with the people that are voting now exactly?  What’s wrong with the order that we’re living under here today?  This worked out pretty good for 50 years, guys.  We’ve had relative peace, save for that one episode that Mr. Madison created in 1812.  We’ve had relative peace for over 50 years and you clowns want to change?  You want to upend the apple cart?  This is the beginning of what we still see today and what Hamilton correctly, believe it or not, pointed out in the Federal Convention in the opening days, “I think the people begin to suffer from an excess of democracy,” not that Hamilton was right about much, but I think he was spot on in that and in the admiration that he had had for the order of the ages that had been handed down from English monarchy and French monarchy.  He wasn’t among those that was ready to just jettison the whole thing and say we could make our own rule up here, a true Novus Ordo.

End Mike Church Show Transcript