Dr Koontz and Rev Fisk talk about why they do A Brief History of Power, why memory is necessary for all art, the foundation of worldview, the history of McCarthy's investigations and the modern implications of the Left's response to it, and the current level of vehement disagreement that parallels what existed before the civil war.
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Dr Koontz - Trinity Lutheran Church
Rev Fisk - St Paul Rockford
Music thanks to Verny
Transcript:
[Speaker 2] (0:06 - 0:09)
Dr. Koontz, what good is this show? [Speaker 1] (0:10 - 0:23)
This show is great entertainment for many people. It's informative for others and it delights still others. So I'm fulfilling all the ancient purposes of history writing on this podcast.
[Speaker 2] (0:24 - 0:27)
Oh, history writing. That's good. That's good. Because it's like, why are we doing this? [Speaker 1] (0:29 - 0:56)
Yeah, I actually got that question from a listener a couple of weeks ago. You know, what is the point of Brief History of Power? I took a while to respond to her because I was like, I don't know.
I enjoy doing it. I like talking. I like talking about these things.
I don't actually like talking full stop. I like talking about these things specifically. If we had a show about the weather or the Philadelphia Eagles, I wouldn't enjoy it as much.
[Speaker 2] (0:56 - 1:00)
Do you still talk about the weather on Word Fitly with everybody?
[Speaker 1] (1:00 - 1:01)
We do, yeah.
[Speaker 2] (1:01 - 1:03)
That's always my least favorite part of that show.
[Speaker 1] (1:04 - 1:13)
See, some people love it and some people hate it. So what are you going to do? But it's been there, I think, forever, maybe.
So it actually predates the show somehow.
[Speaker 2] (1:13 - 1:15) So go ahead. Go ahead. [Speaker 1] (1:15 - 1:59)
But I mean, when I did respond to her, I said that it had to do with people knowing history so that they can be wiser today. Because I think that's the essence of what history is for. It's not just...
We've made this distinction, I think, many times in the show between history and antiquarianism. And I don't say that to the detriment of people who are interested in the past solely for its own sake and on its own terms, which is how I'm defining antiquarianism. I say that just because there is a difference.
And if I were going to share with you my love of the past for its own sake, on its own terms, it would be a very different show.
[Speaker 2] (2:00 - 4:08)
Okay. So I've been thinking about this a bunch recently. And one thing that the listener may or may not know, especially if they've come in recently, is that from where I was at, I started this show so that people would know who you are.
Like, that was my idea. I know you were doing A Little Word Fitly. And so I think you would have found your ground in the LCMS anyway.
But I had this moment in 2020 where I kind of set about three different goals for myself. And one of them was to use my platform to find others, specifically you, and launch you up so that your voice could be heard. Because I do think you are a man of insight and you have a lot to share.
You can cut through the thick of things pretty quick. You're an outsider to the LCMS who loves the Lutheran confessions and the scriptures. So you have a lot there also to bring to bear on those of us who are homegrown and cult-like and backwards and self-hating and all the things that the LCMS often does to its leadership or its people.
That's like a rousing success in my book right there, what all that has been. But then I've had to ask, so then what's my real place in this now? Why am I here?
You know, and it's like, I mean, I know that I'm basically getting a free class from Dr. Kuntz every week, one-on-one, and I get to pick his brain and learn from him. But then as other avenues and focuses and how much I have learned from you actually comes to bear, I've had to just go back and re-ask that question a little bit. And so maybe another way to look at it then to get real narrow, real broad and real narrow, you kind of already answered, you know, what good is history?
You kind of did that, but I wouldn't mind a little more in that. And then like, seriously, like World War II again, like, can we, why World War II? What does that teach us?
Although I have an answer for that too, but I'd like to hear your response.
[Speaker 1] (4:08 - 6:54)
Okay. The good of history is that it makes you much less of a child also spiritually than you otherwise would be, that you get vicarious experience of previous generations and thereby become wiser in your own right for your own day. That is something I think everyone should desire.
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that of everyone. And I think that knowledge of history, maybe not, you know, knowledge of every single battle in the Western theater of the American Civil War or something, but knowledge of history comes naturally to most human societies because people don't go anywhere or they go not much of anywhere. So it comes naturally to know what things used to be and who people are and the connections between them.
And that's on a pretty small scale for your average human being historically, but it is a knowledge of what we would call history combined with genealogy combined ultimately then with assessment of character and of what's good and therefore what you should sacrifice for. So I think that the knowledge of history is not really actually optional. It is in fact, in this way, natural, and it's a measure of our detachment from what is humanly natural that for many of us, again, not that, you know, all the true movements at the battle of Chickamauga, but that you don't know where you came from or, or who your people are or things like that, that that is unnatural.
In addition to that, World War II is vastly important for our self-understanding because it is such a large part of our current mythos. So in the same way that the Mexican- American war plays no role in the average Americans thinking about what America is, World War II plays perhaps an utterly opposite and enormously disproportionate role in Americans thinking about who they are in a kind of sliding in then sliding into the Cold War. So that's why we've been doing World War II in the Cold War because it is definitive psychologically for most Americans on, on the level, you know, maybe of almost like memes, to be honest with you, you know, here's Omaha beach.
Here are these, you know, young men who didn't complain and what's wrong with young people today. I mean, it is, it is on the level of memes, but nonetheless it's, it's there and it's powerful. And so to neglect it would be to neglect really something enormously significant for really all of us.
[Speaker 2] (6:55 - 9:28)
Mentioning the meme is, is, is useful here as a modern medium of communication that kind of is the level of thought that I just, I feel like most of us have been driven into doing, you know, even, even when we're going to complain about this or that politician doing this or that, like the farthest we get is to make a joke about it and kind of compare that to a movie or something like, like, and it's, yeah, that's right. It's pretty debilitating.
So, um, okay. So, so what good is history? Um, Chris Roseboro, uh, fighting for the faith, uh, who I haven't talked to Chris in a long time, but I used to know him personally.
And he once said something on a show that really, really stuck with me. Um, I mean, I guess I'd already done it, but I was like, man, that's really good. Uh, and it was just, uh, Hey Christian, read a book written before you were born.
Just, just try it. Right. Instead of only reading what has come about in your life, uh, find a way to think outside of your time.
Right. And you will find that there's so much more there than you realized in this very stilted kind of, uh, media driven bubble that, that we live in. And, um, I don't know if this is directly connected to that, but, um, I had a friend at seminary who, uh, was a pastor.
He's not a pastor anymore. But, um, he said a lot of things that stuck with me, uh, was wise for his, his time. And, um, so he said that he believed that the future of dogmatic theology was historical or is historical theology.
And that there had been an overemphasis of the modern mind on pure dogmatics, which is effectively history without the history, because the dogmatics is the history of our arguments about certain things. And, and he saw or, or believe that, that knowing the history of the church is, was going to be more valuable than just strictly, you know, say that theologically, um, of, of Chemnitz. Yeah.
Not, not that Chemnitz isn't good at what he did, but like, why again becomes the question and something about studying history helps, you know, why the now is the way that it is. And so I think, I think that's why this show has, has rubbed a nerve in a good way, uh, is that what we keep pushing on why, uh, not just cause or do it or what you should, but, but the, the bigger question.
[Speaker 1] (9:29 - 13:30)
Right. There's a thinker who is very important for my own thinking named John Philip Kaler, who was a Lutheran theologian in the early, early part of the 20th century is when he comes into his own dives in 1954. And he thought of really all of the branches of theology as essentially historical.
Some of those branches are more authoritative than others. You know, what the Bible says matters more than what the Missouri Senate said in 1956 or something, but it's all historical in that all of it is a display of God's providence. And that display of providence is what you learn when you're learning about history.
So a Christian is not only instructed and delighted by history. He has also moved to awe and praise by history because what he sees is his, his God working out what redounds to his people's good through those events. And that conviction, which you get expressed as usually in the new Testament in terms of either interpretation of the old Testament or in personal terms, you know, Paul's statements about the course that his life has taken in second Corinthians one and two or, or second Timothy or something like that.
That is what Taylor used in his church history, as well as many of his essays to explain the nature of, of the course of history and why, why history is important to know why it's not. I mean, I, I'm, I'm sounding almost defensive in saying this and I, and I don't want to, but I think a lot of people think of it as a niche interest as if you were into drag racing or knitting or, you know, just any sort of hobby that could be very detailed and, and interesting to the people involved, but not necessarily. I don't, I don't see history that way.
I don't think it's, it's not a, it's not an optional subject. It's not an elective you take if you have some spare space in your schedule. So when you're, when you're thinking about it, whether you're thinking about theology, strictly speaking, like what is its relationship to dogmatic theology and how should dogmatic theology engage with the past, which is kind of what I think your friend was getting at.
But, but also when you're thinking about human life, generally, the knowledge of history is not optional and there are parts of history. So when I say history, I'm talking about the kind of analysis we provide on the show. That's kind of a classical definition, but if you think about the muses, so there's a muse of history, Clio, her mother is what a lot of people actually mean by history.
So Clio is the one who would be the patroness of thinking through things and understanding what it meant to the sorts of stuff we do on here. But her mother, Mnemosyne is simply memory itself such that you have no arts, no muses, no fine arts, no visual arts, no history, no astronomy as well without memory. And sometimes on the show, we're not even doing the work of Clio.
We're doing the work of Mnemosyne because we are remembering things for the listener that the listener didn't forget, but was never told. So there, there are two, there are sort of two works here that we do. One is the work of memory.
The other is the work of history. Those are different things, but in modern English, they kind of fall under the same, you know, how much history do you know people, you know, dates and figures and facts. That's really the work of Mnemosyne because without memory, you don't have anything else.
And the muses are the source of all, all beautiful arts and knowledge and endeavors in Greek mythology. And the source of the muses is their mother memory.
[Speaker 2] (13:30 - 14:15)
Well, the word that is, I think, a more modern word that ties into that is worldview. History is, is worldview and to know where you stand, right? So that you can see.
And what we found in, in the 2020 debacle, et cetera, et cetera, is how, how skewed our worldviews had become. And you had people decrying this in churches for, for many years where there's losing biblical literacy, you know, and obviously the young people aren't in church. I don't think that the majority of us realize just how topsy-turvy upside down Alice in Wonderland matrix, all the stuff it had become.
[Speaker 1] (14:16 - 14:16) Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (14:16 - 14:56)
And so now our, for my part, our, our mission here, our quest is, is to red pill in the best kind of way through just planting real memory into a host of Lutherans and or Christians across this country so that we can, we can take our local stands for the truth and the beauty with a firm foundation of, of what really is as opposed to the meme, right. As opposed to Captain America and, and how we're just going to have a red, red wave as we're recording next week, which is great if it happens. I really hope it happens, but like, but it's a meme still.
It is.
[Speaker 1] (14:56 - 14:59)
I've been disappointed before, you know, so I remember. [Speaker 2] (15:00 - 15:02)
Bolsonaro didn't win, right?
[Speaker 1] (15:03 - 15:05)
Oh, see that one actually hurts.
[Speaker 2] (15:05 - 15:07)
Yeah, well, they're rioting in the streets.
[Speaker 1] (15:07 - 19:35)
Even after I lost the entertainment and the joy of Trump, I still held Bolsonaro and now I have neither. So what I was going to say about worldview is that it, it's a, it's a word that like a lot of very compact words has a German origin. And so Kaler takes this up, not when he's talking about church history, which is a much larger book than the one where he takes up worldview.
But he talks about this at the beginning of his history of his own Senate, which was the Wisconsin Senate. And in talking about the Wisconsin Senate, he's going to try to explain why they exist the way that they do. And so he says, we have to start with worldview.
Although some Christians don't like that word because it's not in the Bible and other people don't like the word because it's overused or it's over intellectualized. And that, that over intellectualization of it is how I usually hear American Christians use the word worldview. What they really mean is a set of philosophical positions and his use.
Kaler's use of worldview is that it is what is at your foundation and may not even be capable of rational statement in its entirety because it does things like it gives rise to your feelings and it gives rise to your instincts as well as to what you say and what you sing and lots of other things. So it's, it's a word that Kaler's using for what the gospels would call the fullness of the heart, right? Your worldview is the fullness of your heart.
And out of that issue, things that are both rational, such as the way that you say things, the language in which you say them, but also things as I almost hard to put into words, such as things that I think about when it's fall based on the way I grew up with fall, you know, and, and those, those kinds of things affect you or things that people don't even really talk about, like the quality of light where they live, which is based on the climate of where they live and the vegetation and lots of, and that's going to affect the way that you think and talk and speak. This is a very, I mean, there are, there are lots of very 19th century German things that we talked about a little while ago underneath what Kaler is saying, but that's what he's saying when he says worldview. And I find that helpful because I don't find that when I meet listeners, especially when I meet them in person, that they are listening to the show specifically for knowledge about John Lewis Gaddis's takes on the cold war, or specifically for knowledge about Spain in the 1930s.
Nor am I doing the show, nor are we talking just for the sake of putting that knowledge out there, that knowledge is out there because what happens when you begin to remember true things, but then also learn to analyze them truly in a way that, that does justice to the facts rather than distorting them. Then that does shape you in ways that are sub rational. It's not just that, you know, more things or something.
It's that it changes your approach to life. So I would, I would say, for example, if I remember red waves before, then that's going to give me a certain amount of skepticism now about electoral politics. Or if I see that someone is a certain way that I think is not good, but not going to kill anybody, then knowing history provides a lot more patience because I've either seen myself that way and, or I've seen lots of other people be that way in all kinds of circumstances.
So you get shaped in ways that are not fully capable of being expressed by the knowledge of these things, by both memory and history. And I think that's what happens with people because they, they're interested or they're listening, not just for the sake of the specific topics we cover, but how covering things like this and discovering new things and discovering truth that you never heard before affects you very deeply. And I think, I mean, that that's the joy that I have in doing this.
It's, it's not, it's not just in the books that I read to get ready for it. That's fun too, but, but this is more, more fun.
[Speaker 2] (19:35 - 20:40)
Proverbs one verse four, uh, be the second half of it says, uh, and it's my translation to give to the initiate the knowledge of a framework. Uh, the word framework there, uh, Mitsuma scheme, plan, purpose, memory structure. It's, it's such a broad word.
Um, but the, you know, the, the one who was simple as the earlier part of the verse once initiated, uh, begins to see, and he doesn't just, uh, see things. He sees how they tie together, uh, and, and then is able to build upon that blueprint, uh, because he's got the right blueprint. And so, yeah, very much, uh, uh, I'm, I'm in pursuit of that as a, as a Solomon studier.
Um, but, um, uh, capturing that again, worldview, I think, uh, memory history, they're all in that word Mitsuma, uh, which is a profound, profound Hebrew study for any, uh, pastors out there or lady. They want to go digging in their theological dictionaries. Um, okay.
So, uh, from, from Solomon's deep wisdom to McCarthyism, uh, yeah.
[Speaker 1] (20:41 - 27:02)
Yeah, we're, we're getting started on two weeks on the phenomenon of McCarthyism, which is a general term in its own way, a kind of pre-internet meme about a certain way of hunting people down in McCarthy's specific case for being communist. If you want a larger framework for this, there's both a, let's say an explicitly theological framework, as well as a more narrowly historical framework. The theological framework is a question of what are going to be called, especially by opponents of them, moral panics, or with reference to the Salem witch trials, witch hunts.
And depending on the person's perspective, especially on American history, this may be connected to some sort of, you know, deep paranoia in the American psyche about people who are irreligious or outsiders or something like that. And their desire to find witches to blame things on, or it's going to be connected maybe more narrowly to a paranoia, simply about communists or people that associate with, or are associated with communism. So next week, when we talk about the John's committee in Florida, which I'm using as the most extended example, because there is the least historical prejudice given to things that are somewhat obscure, right?
So if you don't know about it beforehand, I don't have to spend as much time kind of clearing the underbrush. So when we talk about a very specific historical instance next week, it's going to be that one where the John's committee starts out investigating one thing and then discovers that, you know, it's state universities in the 1950s are full of people who are usually simultaneously communist and somehow sexually off the reservation, let's say in various ways. Yeah.
Deviant and why do those things go together and how did they go together and stuff like that? So, but I think the theological framework here for understanding McCarthyism is to see that there have always been elements of ferocious opposition to any desire for uniformity in American life. And that is, that is partly because although we didn't always have religious freedom, let's say in all the colonies, we had the capacity because you could go elsewhere to, to retain your particular religious convictions.
The problems come in or quote, moral panics come in when you feel that the person who is the problem isn't or can't or won't go away. Okay. So let me make that a little clearer with some examples.
You have various debates, for instance, in Puritan, New England, theological debates about infant baptism and the nature of the law. That's called the antinomian controversy. All of those things will end with someone leaving.
If someone can leave, then it's okay to disagree vehemently, ideologically, because you can just go away. I mean that the presence of space, space to leave, space to go away, space to make a different life elsewhere, that really cannot be overstated as a condition of American life before the 20th century. By the 20th century, the problem is there isn't really anywhere that you can go.
And at this point, because of our, the nature of communication, there is nowhere you can go where you don't have to be aware of these things if you want to be a participant in modern life. So we're talking with McCarthyism about, you know, a specific historical instance of the investigation of potential communist influence in the United States government conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin in the 1950s. That's specifically what we're talking about.
But the theological framework for this is a very old American tradition of severe ideological disagreement. But that's having been mediated by the fact that we could split up. It's when and where we have to be together and vehemently disagree that we begin to have severe problems in American life.
So examples before the 1950s would involve, think about, you know, abolitionists and slaveholders both moving to Missouri or Kansas, or think about suffragettes and people opposed to women's suffrage, both living in the borough of Manhattan or whatever, where you're not going to go away from each other, but you vehemently disagree with each other about things that seem basic to the functioning of life. Today, I think the prime example of vehement ideological disagreement is abortion.
You know, is this a human life? Should this human life be killed, murdered? You know, these are kind of non-negotiable, utter, quasi-religious, often explicitly religious disagreements.
When you have those, it's really hard to have a country or a polity of any size together because it's like we just basically disagree on everything that's most important, okay? When that happens, something that will happen if the people don't go away is that you get some sort of attempt at expulsion or punishment. So if you look at, for instance, the Salem witch trials in their historical context, that is a reaction that actually very few communities in the 17th century are taking, which is to have what the Puritans believed was a biblically mandated trial to see whether someone was practicing evil, okay?
In most cases, if you were suspected of being a witch, the community would just kill you, right? So they were trying to do what they understood to be biblically mandated, reasonable, and moderate, and trying to discover who was a witch because they believed in the reality of witches, which I think practically everybody does now anyway.
[Speaker 2] (27:02 - 27:05)
Kind of glad to since there's a section on it like Barnes and Noble, so...
[Speaker 1] (27:05 - 28:21)
We're all the way back to 1693. But that idea, it's a very powerful meme, is that this is a witch hunt. And the premise behind the phrase witch hunt is that witches don't exist.
Now, somebody who is literally a pagan might be saying that, but the premise behind the phrase is that witches don't exist. So that a witch hunt or a moral panic, panic coming from the god Pan, who screams horribly out in the wilderness, that's a panic, and you're kind of possessed at that time. You're not in your right mind.
A moral panic or a witch hunt is understood by virtue of what those phrases connote to be hunting after fakery or coping with one's own inadequacies by finding the inadequacies of others or whatever kind of Freudian turn you want to put on these things. But that's the ideological, if not explicitly theological framework for McCarthyism or investigations of any kind. There's a historical chain of events that leads up to McCarthy that I want to cover this week.
But I just said a lot, so I don't want to skip over something if you have something right now or if you want to talk about Cotton Mather.
[Speaker 2] (28:23 - 29:31)
I'm more interested in talking about modern witchcraft and how to deal with it, but that would take us in a completely different direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead.
The accepting that witches are real, that the dark is real, that it is impactful, that it is supernatural, capable of doing more than we perceive, capable of not following rules of physics and logic. It really does kind of flip on its head, this idea of, oh, witch hunt, they don't exist. So you can't really have it both ways where you think the Puritans were so awful, but I'm a witch, but the Puritans were awful because they did witch hunts.
Well, they believe you're in communion with demons, and you are, and you say you are. And that's just such a topsy-turvy type of conversation right there by itself that it is far more interesting to me than McCarthy is. But I really want to go where you're going on this too.
[Speaker 1] (29:31 - 35:26)
Yeah, and the reason to put it in that framework and to take it back to colonial times is because I don't really see McCarthyism as this unique evil. And like we've said about a variety of things throughout history, people generally will get power over you by convincing you that something is uniquely evil rather than patterned after other kinds of human evils. About which you can learn, and then from which you can draw whatever lessons may be profitable to you.
I think that McCarthyism gets brought up as a kind of meme about hunting down communists. Now, there are predecessors to this, and then we can talk about what McCarthy actually found that turned out to be true. The predecessors to this are what you get, let's say mainstream, that is essentially leftist historians.
We'll say that there are in 20th century America, two Red Scares. So there is the first Red Scare immediately during and after the First World War, which is kind of has its capstone in the raids that Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Swarthmore College class of 1904, very proud to say that, conducts against what are mainly foreign nationals, mainly foreign nationals in the United States, who are actively and openly communist and or anarchist agitators.
And large numbers of them are deported. Others are punished in other ways. But for most, it's deportation because most are foreign born.
That's the quote first Red Scare. Now, there are actually people getting blown up by bombs at that time, but it's remembered as a quote scare. The second Red Scare happens after the Second World War.
So notice to how war is always connected to these events of social change and in this way, political loosening or malleability, it can become kind of anything when people are living lives they never lived before in all kinds of ways during wartime. So the second Red Scare is then understood to be like the first, largely imaginary, but unlike the first, partly because of our immigration policy after 1924, that is, immigration is turned from a steady flow down to a very small trickle from almost every nation, except maybe the British Isles, Scandinavia and Germany. But all of it is low.
So we have many fewer foreign born Americans. We won't have a very large number of foreign born people in the United States until roughly the 1990s. Because of that, what you're looking for in and after the Second World War, and especially in the 1950s, are people who are Americans who have been co-opted by communist ideology or understanding or whatever the case may be.
In the 1930s, membership in certain communist organizations increased widely and largely, partly as a result of exploitation, political exploitation of the suffering of especially workers during the depression. Joseph McCarthy, who is conducting investigations in the name of the Un-American Affairs Committee is of Congress, is not either the first guy to do that in Congress, nor is he actually nationally unique. There are in many states after the Second World War, a sense that, and this actually predates Soviet possession of the bomb.
So it's not just paranoia about the Soviet Union, but a sense that somehow communism is the great enemy of the American people. And therefore, we need to find out what kind of influence it has over our, particularly our educational and governmental institutions. So there are state committees everywhere from Ohio down to Florida, Mississippi, all kinds of places to find communist influence in public life.
That's what they're for. There had been things like that since the quote, first Red Scare in the United States Congress. There's the Dyes Committee, then there's the House Un- American Affairs Committee, and so on and so forth.
So McCarthy is really not unique or even unusual in what he's doing. It's really the scope of what he does and other things at that time associated with that have singled him out generally for reprobation by those who usually write our history. So McCarthy really in his own context is not unique.
And in that larger framework that we set up earlier, it's all of this is happening because we don't have space to, you know, unlike colonial New England to say, just go over to Rhode Island and we're never going to talk to you again, which is what most, you know, dissenters of various kinds do in colonial New England. They'll go to, you know, they'll go to Rhode Island or later on, they'll go to Vermont, which was famously irreligious, or they'll eventually go into upstate New York. We don't have space to do that.
And usually our dissenters are not interested in doing that because they usually come from our most highly urbanized populations. So McCarthy really is, he's been singled out doing something that plenty of people at all levels of government were doing after both world wars.
[Speaker 2] (35:27 - 35:32)
And it isn't so different from what the current regime is doing. [Speaker 1] (35:33 - 39:57)
Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, this is something that you'll see over and over again is that when something is denominated a moral panic or a witch hunt, there's that presumption of unreality that we talked about.
This is basically fake. So this guy needs to get over himself. He's making it all up.
Simultaneously, the very same tactic or tactics will be employed by the people denouncing witch hunts and moral panics later on. So if you think that, you know, pedophilia is becoming more and more accepted, you're engaged in a moral panic. But if you deny that the lives of all 435 house members and all 100 senators were endangered on January 6th, 2021 by insurrectionists who staged a violent coup against the peaceful counting of the presidential electoral votes, then you are yourself a threat to our democracy.
So the issue here is not whether in a community of whatever kind, and I don't mean that in sort of the mushy protected class sense of like the gay community. I mean, like a group of people who live together, whether they like that or not in a community, there will be policing of morals and mores. There will be decisions about what is okay and what is not okay.
That's not really debatable in any human community anywhere at any time. So the idea that the really reprehensible thing about Joe McCarthy or anybody else is that they said that certain views are unacceptable in the United States of America. That's kind of a silly thing to criticize because that's like saying, well, I'm criticizing him for claiming that trees grow upwards.
I mean, it's like this is just an obvious thing. So there's always going to be enormous self- contradiction in critique of McCarthy because it never genuinely. I mean, I have never found anyone on the left genuinely engaged in the question of one, was McCarthy lying that there was large communist influence in the United States government, particularly in the State Department?
We're going to say with evidence, no, he wasn't lying. Number two, are there ideological ideas that are out of bounds for American public life? As there might be for Estonian public life or South African public life?
Yes. Just give you an example from the constitution. We are supposed to refuse foreign titles and honors.
Why? Because we saw differentiations like that as incompatible with Republican life. If we're all going to be distinguished by aristocratic titles and things like that, we cannot maintain the understanding of the equal protection of the laws and things like that, that are essential to our common life.
So the idea that somehow McCarthy was doing something unusual or unprecedented or unthinkable is really very silly. But when an otherwise intelligent person knows that his position is silly, the thing that he will generally do is evade. So he won't engage, he'll just portray McCarthy as frothing at the mouth or something.
He will not answer the question, you know, was there communist influence? What was that doing to American life? Just like he's not going to tell you like, yeah, well, witchcraft is real and it does affect people.
So they weren't wrong to, you know, try to find the witches in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1690s. There's always going to be evasion of the main issue where the person is not even perhaps himself guilty, but simply cannot concede that his opponent is looking for something real.
[Speaker 2] (39:57 - 40:21)
It comes back to that. They're just mean. And this is the way that the progressive, what movement wing party, I don't know, regime, it's all these things.
The way that the progressive religion has gained ground year by year is by accusing its enemies of doing what it's doing.
[Speaker 1] (40:21 - 40:22)
Yeah, right.
[Speaker 2] (40:22 - 42:01)
And this is just continually the thing. And so the problem with McCarthy is that he wasn't against McCarthy. That's it, right?
Right. He disagreed with some people and then used the power that he had to try to hold his position. And you're not allowed to do that unless you are in the progressive religion, in which case you must do that and you must tell those who don't do that that they are witches to be burnt.
And there's such a disingenuousness to this, which is it comes down to or is connected to the same way that the postmodern philosophy asserts itself to deconstruct, right? That it is good to deconstruct everyone else, but we are not in any way susceptible to being deconstructed. And so what perhaps is to me most valuable in seeing that is that at that point, the accusation that you're wrong because you're mean rests upon a certain moral expectation worldview.
Yeah, right. And that moral expectation worldview is Christianity. Because as soon as you remove love your neighbor as yourself, who cares if I'm mean?
So what? I'm Genghis Khan. Die, right?
Like, what does it matter? And and so here they are using your goodwill against you as a weapon with disingenuous, dishonest, pure power, hatred, right?
[Speaker 1] (42:01 - 42:02)
Right.
[Speaker 2] (42:02 - 42:23)
And this isn't about, you know, how you vote, although it is now, it's become that. But this is about, can you see how they lie to you? And can you learn to at the very least?
Well, scoff at the scoffer, you know, laugh at the lie? [Speaker 1] (42:24 - 42:24)
Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (42:24 - 42:24)
Yeah.
[Speaker 1] (42:25 - 45:58)
The Scott, the scoffer in in our particular historical, I don't know, in his particularly American historical appearance, okay, in the 20th century, is going to be somebody who is unable to even consider in a fair manner, whether what you are saying about him is right. So I find that very often people are, people are shocked by what is going on in the present 2022. They're shocked by what's going on.
And they, they are shocked by the unreasonableness of it. If you study things like the left wing response to McCarthy's investigations, or Pat McCarran, who was a senator from Nevada is another name to know in this time. They will never concede that any of this is a fair question.
They will simply refuse to answer the question. Okay. I, this is happening right now in South Carolina, because you got this leak from Tim Scott's Democratic opponent, Crystal Matthews, talking about how you have to treat white people like insert four letter word, because otherwise they, they don't behave.
And then they don't vote for you. And they like it when you tell them what to do. And this was just leaked.
The audio of this was leaked by Project Veritas. And she accused them of, you know, trying to take down a black woman. She's not addressing the justice of either what she said or what she's doing.
That's so it's what's essentially going on here is they're angry that they, they themselves could ever be literally or figuratively on trial. They are above law, right? They are above law.
They are, they are like Steven Paulson's God, you know, they are, they are outside the law, right? They're outlaws, meaning they cannot be put on trial by anyone for any reason under any circumstances. And the anger about something like McCarthy's investigations or the dies committee in the 1930s, or any other similar things is that anyone is talking about who they are and what they're doing, because there are several circumstances to know about the late 40s and the 50s domestically about the Cold War that might be helpful in understanding why this is happening.
One of which is that nuclear secrets are obviously being passed from us to the Soviets. After a certain point, we taught, we mentioned when we talked about nuclear research, that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of the Manhattan Project, his brother had been a member of the Communist Party USA, but was also working on the Manhattan Project.
And there are many similar cases. We've mentioned Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department. We mentioned Alger Hiss in the State Department.
So there are communist sympathizers in many places. There are obvious leaks going on. And so the Truman administration in 1947 forbids the hiring or continuance in employment of employees with politically suspect pasts.
Now, this will be denounced in a way familiar to us because we've mentioned the free speech movement in the 1960s in an utterly disingenuous way. It's on well, you know, what's on American President Truman is to fire people for their political beliefs. What if your political beliefs involve the non-existence of the United States, hopefully?
[Speaker 2] (45:59 - 46:01) Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. [Speaker 1] (46:01 - 51:29)
I mean, there is such a thing as loyalty and there isn't there is a philosophical or political or ideological component to loyalty to a state. I mean, if I'm if I'm a convinced, you know, small or Republican, I can't sing God save the king with a straight face. I mean, I don't care.
Right. Like there there are things like this. This does make sense.
So Americans are aware of this. What's interesting to me is that McCarthyism gets remembered for something that it only indirectly impacted, which is the entertainment industry. So people probably know the term blacklist because and they might know that the entertainment industry, both in New York and in Hollywood, draws up a blacklist of certain people that are unacceptable for certain jobs, certain performances, maybe any performance during this time.
Hollywood does that not because, you know, it has plenty of convinced, I don't know, MAGA Republicans in charge in 1949. They do that because they believe that Americans will not go to movies with people suspected of communist sympathies. Now, I don't know if they were right or wrong about that, but that was a self-policing measure.
It's because of their fear of, you know, the reprehension of the American public that a blacklist is drawn up. McCarthy doesn't give somebody a list that says, don't hire this guy or don't hire this guy or don't hire this woman. So he's remembered for something that he didn't even do.
What he did do would be later on revealed, especially once Soviet archives were opened after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, to be true. And a lot of Americans don't know, for example, about those who were tried and convicted of various things such as perjury and treason during this time. Calgar Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Most people don't know those names or what they did. They're not aware of any connection between our nuclear program and the Soviet nuclear program. All of this is just gone.
What gets remembered is that Joe McCarthy was hunting down something that was fake. He was neither alone nor was he really all that crazy. The thing that really stops McCarthy, and this is why I think the overturning of Roe v.
Wade has become so bitter on the left, is because beginning really in the 1930s, but particularly picking up steam once Earl Warren of California was the chief justice of the Supreme Court in the 40s, is that the left has relied on the court to accomplish its objectives for American public life. Because far too often in their thinking, both elected executives, such as the president, but particularly legislators, have too closely represented the interests of the American people. And the American people are insufficiently, let's say, reconstructed or at this point woke or whatever adjective you might want to use.
So the Warren court steps in and overrules McCarthy's both legislative efforts and also investigative efforts, as well as Pat McCarran's and some others. And that is what will prevent in further investigation into communist influence, particularly in the US government, from proceeding after about the mid 1950s. It's that stoppage, right?
Much like the later opinions about the rights of criminals or the right to an abortion or lots of other things. It's that reliance on the judiciary that's going to be really crucial for their capacity to change American life, right? And now that that tool is being used against them, like, okay, so suddenly abortion goes back to the states or potentially soon, suddenly affirmative action is unconstitutional, or suddenly New York's gun laws cannot be enforced, whatever the case may be, is that that tool is now being used against them, that judicial tactic, and they find it unbearable.
So you're hearing calls for, let's get a new constitution, or you can compare the hyperbolic reaction to whatever it was that happened at Paul and Nancy Pelosi's house in San Francisco, versus when Steve Scalise was actually shot. Nobody remembers that. Steve Scalise was actually shot at the congressional baseball game, but also Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh were personally threatened at their homes.
Nobody remembers that. All of those things are examples of, basically, you've been doing this for a long time, and we figured out how to do it too, and now you're upset that it's happening. But again, never is the question of the validity of McCarthy's investigation actually engaged by his opponents.
[Speaker 2] (51:30 - 51:34)
Before someone goes out and fact checks us, I think it was a softball game, but yeah.
[Speaker 1] (51:36 - 51:37)
Yeah, that's interesting.
[Speaker 2] (51:38 - 53:27)
Yeah, I think it was a softball game, congressional softball game. I could be wrong. So fact check both of us, let us know.
So where you've brought me here now is where you started us with talking about the Puritans and the old American way of parting ways, and how it's impossible for us to do so now while we have a religious variant screaming bloody murder over the system not being in their power when it's actually still in their power. And there is nowhere to go. There is no way to divide or create space.
And in one very real way, they wouldn't let us anyway. You really have some form of parasitic conquest going on. Which again goes back to, McCarthy wasn't so wrong about this, the tentacles of communism.
I mean, what makes communism wrong? A number of things, but I think atheism is a big piece of that. And this is always going to tend toward some form of a radical human tyranny, the belief that there are those who know better and that they will control.
So where does that leave us? I mean, if you listen to me anywhere else, I say pray the psalter against your enemies with some conviction in the name of Jesus thrown in. But my guess is you've thought this through quite a bit.
So where do we go?
[Speaker 1] (53:28 - 58:03)
From the perspective of looking at it as communism rather than, you know, personal spiritual dysfunctions or personal life problems, which is one way to look at a lot of the ideological changes that have aligned everyone from, you know, black single mothers like Crystal Matthews to white, but gender non-binary people on the left is that the goal here of communism is always an absoluteness of power over human life that really has no ancient parallel apart from slavery.
And that is why people flee it even when they perhaps voted for it or thought it used to be in their interest. It's why Venezuela has changed so rapidly. It's why before that Cuba changed so rapidly.
It's why the Hispanic vote in Florida is very different from the Hispanic vote in many other states because it is so much a and a former communist, you know, country expat or refugee vote is that what happens with the creation of the various protected classes that our country shift vastly to the left. So by the left, I don't, I don't mean like a certain position on labor unions. Okay.
But a certain position on sexual morality, a certain position on the moral weight of race and reparations, lots of things that get articulated after the 1960s, but are there. If you look at communist party, USA literature in the 1930s, the point of that governmentally or politically in a, from a big perspective is not just that the person gets to dye his hair, whatever color or have whatever, you know, sexual proclivities he wants to express. It's that the things that he's doing make him weak and slavish and therefore make him susceptible to state control.
That's the point. And it's not that his opponents want to like do whatever they want or that your options are like friendly, peaceful socialism or a warmongering cowboy capitalism. It's that your options are slavery or some modicum of freedom in your life.
That's, that's the point. And that what you're looking at is that you will either maintain some kind of freedom, perhaps even extended, or alternatively, you will end up a slave of various kinds and become completely dependent in a way that really is contrary to human nature, dependent in a way that is contrary to human maturation, contrary to, I've grown in wisdom over my time, but someone who knows nothing and hates me is in charge of me.
So those, all of those dynamics wind up in a political sense, resulting in the loss of the loss of freedom, the loss of self-determination, also the loss of any trust in a common government that you will generally find in formerly communist countries. That is part of the ardent love of the United States that you get in people like Cuban expats, because they have seen the stakes of what the alternative was. McCarthy, I think, is an important demon in the, you know, let's say inverse pantheon of modern media, not only because he, if not actually, you know, did anything to Hollywood himself directly, but because he implied that they could be a problem, that media could be a problem, especially.
So he's an important demon because he attacked the media. But he's also an important demon because if you can demonize someone who denounces communism or say he was a kook, then you're able to get away with a lot more. If you allow active promotion of socialism or communism, which I just see as, you know, sort of like a vanilla or French vanilla, if you allow those things to be off limits, then there's a lot that you can't achieve.
So it's very important to demonize people who would denounce socialism or communism in order to make socialism or communism thinkable or achievable or presentable.
[Speaker 2] (58:04 - 58:12)
Yeah, it comes back to that there is no conversation between these two poles. And yeah, it is like a jihad. It's a jihad.
[Speaker 1] (58:13 - 1:01:33)
Yeah, it is. And that is why, I mean, I've thought about doing a series, maybe not, probably not this year with the time that remains to us, but maybe next year sometime doing some parallels between the run up to our civil war and today because that comparison is so often made. And but unlike when, you know, I'm maintaining that we're not the Roman Empire, we're the Ottoman Empire.
I don't know what episode we first talked about that in, but some people will know where that is. I do actually see more parallels between the run up to our civil war and today because of the vehemence of disagreement and the vehemence of disagreement about things that seem basic to everyday life. Those aren't always.
And if we did this series, I would, you know, I would talk about, okay, well, here's how people thought about slavery and here's what they wanted to do if slavery went away and whatever. And some of that will probably be unknown to most listeners. But the idea that not only, you know, can, you know, what should be in the constitution and should we amend the constitution?
But think, think about, think about it this way, right? Like there's an experience somewhat common in the biographies of Northerners prior to the civil war where for some reason they go to the South on a trip. It's usually a business trip, right?
So Lincoln is taking logs down to New Orleans or Ulysses S. Grant goes to the South for the first time after graduating from West Point or whatever. And they see slavery operating as a public institution for the first time.
And they are, it's not a, it's not a rational reaction. I'm not saying it's a bad reaction. I'm saying it's not rational.
It's like, it's an emotional, intense revulsion at how this works and, and how life operates. If that's a reaction that someone from San Francisco might have, if he, you know, walks out of the airport in Oklahoma or vice versa, I'm, I'm not sure how long we're going to keep it all together because when it, this goes back to this level of, you know, Kaler's level of worldview. If we cannot even imagine the way that each other lives our lives, is it really possible for us to remain in the same polity?
You know, so it's one thing to be disingenuous or to say McCarthy was engaged in a witch hunt or something to have certain demons or off limits topics or something. It's another thing to just have a total revulsion at another person's way of living or another group's way of living that are ostensibly somehow still part of your larger group. And that's, that's why when people talk about, you know, a coming civil war, I don't think about it in sort of, you know, doomsday scenario things, but I maybe I should, but, but I do think about it in terms of how people were before the civil war we did already have and how much more disagreement there is on the basic functioning of everyday life than there was between Northerners and Southerners largely before the civil war we already had.
[Speaker 2] (1:01:34 - 1:02:08)
So what that makes me think about is will our churches survive such a thing like, like me and my neighborhood, my family and my friends and whether or not Rockford mounts its own kind of battle lines and city fight. I mean, that's all, that's all fascinating enough. It could make a good video game and it would really suck to live through.
But what the question on my mind is, would our, would our churches even notice in a sense, right? Or are we prepared to come out from her?
[Speaker 1] (1:02:10 - 1:02:51)
You know, yeah, they, they would have to, because in the last civil war, they were, they were largely very much culturally detached. And, you know, so the, the concerns of an, a Hungarian Catholic immigrant or a German Lutheran immigrant in 1862 are very distant from the American mainstream, the North, which had vastly more immigrants brought in a lot more immigrants into its military. So that is a difference.
But the churches that were riven by the civil war were the ones that were most mainstream.
[Speaker 2] (1:02:51 - 1:02:57)
So you usually get, that's exactly my point. We're not distant enough now. Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:02:57 - 1:04:19)
And I, I think, I think it would, it would, and culturally probably will split us even without a shooting war because of the vast differences in basic ideas about everyday life, what a family is, what a man is and so on. So you wouldn't even need a shooting war for that to happen because you have such vast disagreement about so many things, right? So if you think about things that divide Americans, divide churches, even before the civil war, Southern Baptist convention gets started because Northern Baptists will not send overseas missionaries who are slaveholders.
So that's why there's a Southern Baptist convention. Originally, that's not a disagreement about how the husband and the wife should relate to each other or whether you should have kids or whether those kids should be given gender neutral names when they're born or lots of things. So where you have such vast disagreement about things.
So fundamental, you know, is communism acceptable, whatever, it's very hard to see the policy hanging together if both groups or all groups, however many there may be, keep progressing in the directions they're going right now.
[Speaker 2] (1:04:20 - 1:06:16)
Right, right. Which is, which makes it just all the more imperative that the Christians that are together in things called churches, which function as social clubs, but don't have to be, don't need to be, shouldn't be, that they instill in themselves the fundamental identity of who they are in scripture and talk about that and talk about such things. Make it clear that we are under assault.
You don't have to agree which side's assaulting even, you just have to make it clear that we are under psychological assault and that if we are not going to bind up our minds in a common story, and you can even use the word myth in a very secular sense there, in an identity shaping narrative, if we're not going to commit to that, then we are letting the fractures appear already and we're not going to put any effort into sealing that before the dam breaks.
And when the dam breaks, it's going to break. So for you, listener, where you are, what am I saying? What I'm saying, and not just go to church, I'm saying talk about church.
I'm saying have your voice one which knows enough the stories of the scripture, the wisdom of the scripture, that it's what you speak about. Stop making jokes about movies in the narthex and start talking about what was said by the pastor. Talk to the pastor about it if nobody else will talk to you.
Have something that means more than getting home to watch something else. And if we're not able to do that, then we will be washed away as the dust that we are. But I'm fully convinced that the prayers of the church are heard by Jesus, right?
Because Josiah's reformation was a real thing, and it's still the day of wrath, and we're up against the day of wrath, everybody. So to your prayer book, to your prayer book. You got a closing thought?
[Speaker 1] (1:06:16 - 1:07:22)
My closing thought is just that we'll give a very sort of detailed and extensive illustration and narrative of this next time. And what that's setting up is not continual discussion of state politics in the Cold War, but it's setting up an understanding of how subversion occurs. And our example of that, as we head into the rest of November and the beginning of December, will be the Roman Catholic Church in the 20th century.
We're gonna cap that off with the Southern Baptist Convention. It's recent history, but we're gonna mostly talk about the Roman Catholic Church after talking about the John's Committee next week, because it's change and subversion are perhaps most drastic in the past 100 years. And I think that will be helpful to people, not only in their churches, whether they're Catholic or not, but also to understand how these things occur and that people notice them at the time, but that when X and Y and Z don't occur, you might notice something, but you don't stop it.
[Speaker 2] (1:07:23 - 1:07:27)
You're listening to A Brief History of Power. You know where to find us, or you wouldn't be here.
[Speaker 1] (1:07:28 - 1:10:43)
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