From the Easy Chair

Censorship

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 60-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BD104

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BD104, Censorship from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 214, March the sixth, 1990.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss a very important subject, a grim one, because we are moving into even more troubled times. The subject is censorship.

And, of course, we he to begin by defining the subject. In a sense, life requires a certain amount of censorship in that the supreme court years ago made clear that shouting fire in a crowded theater was a form of speech that had to be censored, that it was very different from the expression of an opinion in intelligent discourse.

Today we have less and less of the irresponsible type of speech censored and more and more of the thoughtful dissenting speech that is subject to censorship.

And so we have a very difficult situation. And the kind of statement made by federal and state officials now is amazing. For example, it was only yesterday I learned that in a particular court where my testimony is an important part of a hearing there is a strong objection to the validity of my testimony or its consideration in any court of law, because I make clear that a man must obey God rather than man at certain points in his life. And, of course, in a trial in North Dakota some years ago, Jamestown, North Dakota, I made the statement that while I did not favor civil disobedience in all forms, nonetheless, certain types of civil disobedience were necessary for social progress and that the United States was born with civil disobedience. And both the state attorney and the judge were shocked and horrified at such a statement. Dissent, in other words, from the accepted opinion as handed down by the federal or state agencies or by the media is today increasingly regarded with opprobrium. So we do have a growing censorship.

Otto, would you like to make a general statement now?

[Scott] Well, I think your comment, your point is very good, especially in a country where Eichmann’s defense that he was following the law of the Nazi Germany and obeying orders was declared to be invalid and that he should have obeyed the laws of God rather than the laws of his country at that time. So you have a complete reversal in American opinion.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... about obedience to the state, depending upon what you differ with.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now I have here ... if you don’t mind...

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] ... the ... The Wanderer which is a conservative Catholic newspaper.

[Rushdoony] And a very good one.

[Scott] ... has an article in the latest issue called “Due Process Violations Abound in San Diego Trials.” Now these are trials of the demosntrators against abortion who were arrested in San Diego, and several hundred of them. And they... a series of trials are underway. They are being arrested and charged with trespass. The prosecution, the deputy district attorney gave a brief to the court, asking the court to exclude from the defense all evidence regarding specific affirmative defensese and other ireelevant matters and they declared irrelevant in advance of the trial issues of the defense of necessity, a defense based on free speech, on good motive, on defense of others and on compliance with international law treaties or declarations. They also forbade the defense to use certain English words such as abortion, fetus, murder, kill, holocaust, God, deity, religious beliefs in any manner or form, genocide, rights or the unborn, Hitler, Nazi or Nazism, manslaughter or baby killer. Those words were forbidden to be used in any context. They also forbade the defense to say in any way religious beliefs or abortion or to use the words killing, murder, slaugher, slaying, sacrifice, destroying, martyrdom, execution, homicide, genocide, fratracide, soricide, infanticide, fetacide, carnage, massacre, eradication and a whole host of other concepts and terms.

Now several of the defense lawyers have been held in contempt of court for using some of these words and terms. Some have been sent to prison. Now, of course, the question arises. If censorship can apply to this extent, to the extent that you cannot express your defense in the English language, what are we doing?

[Rushdoony] Well, as you know, Otto, I have been in many, many trials and in some of these trials the judges have said there must be no citation from Scripture and no reference to the First Amendment, that the court is governed by the most recent opinion of the Supreme Court on matters of speech rather than the original wording of the First Amendment.

Now I think it is entirely possible that those words do not appear in the transcripts because judges very often edit the transcripts. But I have heard statements of that sort made in federal and state courts.

[Scott] When a judge edits the transcript he is censoring the record.

[Rushdoony] Of course. And I was told by a judge, a very godly man, who had a number of judges under his jurisdiction that unhappily that was the case, that it was regularly done and no one was interested in tackling the job, correcting it. No grand jury, no state or federal agency.

[Scott] Well, here we have a very interesting situation. Censorship is now being applied to freedom of speech in the United States not only by the courts, but also by private groups. Now, for instance, the suspension of Andy Rooney.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Andy Rooney was suspended by CBS because it was ... some remarks were attributed to him that some groups found offensive. He denied making the remarks but he was suspended anyway. So here we come into something entirely different. This is a new form of censorship. This is not only a censorship which punishes you for using terms or expressions that others may object to, but it is also an insistence that you say something favorable about these groups.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It demands a loyalty oath, so to speak, to perverts in order to have yourself recognized as a person of decent opinion.

[Rushdoony] I felt, after listening to Andy Rooney on his return, that he was a very pitiful specimen because he should have said two things. First, I did not make the remarks attributed to me, if that were the case. But, second, had I made them, it was still wrong for the network to take me off the air and for people to condemn me.

[Scott] Well, yes. We have this ... I will go to another publication entirely, Commentary, which is published, as you know, by the American Jewish Committee. Commentary ran an article in the September issue called “The Campus: An Island of Repression in a Sea of Freedom.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And a professor from Northwestern University named Ian MacNeill, apparently a visiting professor at Harvard School of Law, found himself suddenly confronted, after giving a number of classes with a diatribe, written diatribe which was circulated to the five top administrators from a group of Feminists inside Harvard University headed by Bonnie Savitch who is the chair of the Harvard Women’s Law Association. The HWLA accuse him of sexist remarks and of making flippant and disparaging remarks of a gender nature. For example he said at one point, “Sauce of the goose, sauce for the gander.” I don’t know which is sexist.

Well, that sent them up in flames. And they sent this nonsense or accusation. He finally answered it at great length which he repeats, but he said that the thing that really got him was the fact that their attitude, the attitude of the HWLA association was so widely shared in Harvard by the faculty. He said, “Recently a male colleague referred seriously to the metaphor hitting a home run as sexist.”

Now obviously we are reaching a point here where we will not be able to communicate. We will not be able to speak. And this is a level of censorship which is coming from groups who claim that they are being discriminated against.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And in the name of protesting against discrimination, they are actually telling force... threatening people with academic ruin and what to. He said, MacNeil, that they assume that the Harvard faculty was thinking of making an offer to him. He said he didn’t assume any such thing, but if they had assumed it, certainly this onslaught would have knocked out any consideration, because as we all know, college administrators don't leaves to ripple on the tree even when the wind blows. They want everything to be absolutely stable.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And he winds up by saying in his letter to Commentary, nobody came to his defense. The vast majority of faculty and students, he said, want simply to get on with scholarship and learning. The most common response on American campuses in general, and Harvard University in particular, to those who would destroy academic freedom is, at best, apathy and avoidance and, at worst, cowering appeasement.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I think it is a fitting symbol of the modern university that at one such institution regarded probably as one of the, oh, two or three best in the world where you have this type of intolerance of any variation of the most absurd variety from an established line, that a a student was mugged on the library steps recently.

[Scott] Yes. Doug Murray’s son was mugged on the steps of the library at Stanford. Was it Stanford he went to? No, Berkeley.

[Rushdoony] Berkeley.

[Scott] Berkeley.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] So this is what is happening. And it is not at all surprising. At the same time we are getting measures introduced into Congress that are really totally at war with the First Amendment. For example, one of the men on our mailing list who is a prominent Libertarian as well as a CPA, John T. Harley, one of the statements he issued recently and I quote. “Would you support the same federal controls over your newspaper or station that a bill, S-695, would impose on the schools in violation of the most of the Bill of Rights, with a panel just like the controls Joseph Goebels imposed on the schools of Nazi Germany? A national commission for control of what is taught in all schools sponsored by the NEA which opposes a clean up of the teaching of reading that turns out a large proportion of high school graduates and drop outs as functional illiterates. It is not into reforming the public schools and bringing them up to the standards of 98 percent literacy of the 1930 census. Most of the illiterates then were immigrants or elderly and some of them were classed as illiterates because they could read Spanish or Greek, but not English. If the same controls were imposed on you that they could impose under this unconstitutional law, they would have stronger controls over the books and the school library, the teacher’s remarks in the classroom, the subjects studied and even the extra curricular activates. If a similar panel were established to control the media, they would require their approval for every word you said on the air or printed in the news, just like they did in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Communist Russia and Fascist Italy 50 years ago. It would give the panel to control all schools more power than the censors of England had during the bomb blitz were only concerned with military secrets.

“It could promote its own religion, humanism, or its own particular view of sex bisexualism, or its own factory of history in socialist studies or forbidding the teaching of the alphabet in learning to read or the teaching of multiplication in math instead of in English. And it probably would,” end of quote.

Now this is what we are seeing. And this is not the only bill of this sort.

[Scott] Well, the strange part about this is that the educators are in the forefront.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now I have forgotten who it was that said some years ago that a school teacher is a second lieutenant in the intellectual world. I have some very good friends who are professors, but I have also met a number of very foolish individuals who were in the PhD union and I find it very difficult to accept the fact that the educators of the United States are, as a body, against our freedom of speech. I think that it is more than an oxymoron. It is an absolute raving disgrace. I think that unless we reach the point where we end tenure in this country...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... and start changing the teachers, we are never going to get anywhere in terms of educational reform.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I don’t understand why that all the studies that have been made, the teachers are always held exempt from the results of their efforts, but when we read a thing such as I cited from Harvard University, some idiot woman who is actually chair of a group...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Holding down a job where in any decent society a person like that would be absolutely unqualified.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the situation is going to get worse as Sam Blumenfeld has pointed out in his education report.

[Scott] Sam is the best in the country.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Here are some of the statements that Sam has made, his predictions and I quote. “The academic decline will get much worse. The wholesale {?} and moral destruction of American youth will continue unabated. But the education reform movement is a fraud devised to extract more money from the tax payer. We will also see more teenage depression, suicide and mental problems due to heavier doses of death education, value clarification and new age pagan mysticism. The home school movement will continue to grow. Drugs and school violence will plague public schools,” unquote.

[Scott] Did you... any country ever have such glum young people as we do? Do you notice when you go by that they all have a long face? And I recall when I was a boy that youth was a time of joy. Kids were always laughing, always high spirited. It was a period of coming into adulthood, a period of great idealism. Now the sex education classes have destroyed all the idea of romance that we once had. I remember how I used to feel about the girls that I admired when I was a boy entering high school. The idea of sex and my sentiment towards those people were absolutely foreign, absolutely foreign. I never made that connection.

[Rushdoony] Well, just recently some parents, despairing parents, brought an eighth grader to our school in the hopes of enrolling him so that he could learn how to read and a few other things, because they had been shocked to find how backward he was. And he was, of course, contemptuous.

When Mark spoke to him he responded with a burst of profanity and wanted to know if there were any penalties in the school for that sort of language, very supercilious. And Mark said, “No, because you are not going to be here.”

But that is what the public schools are doing. They get children and corrupt them.

[Scott] Well, they are also corrupting the whole nation.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The whole business of changing the gender of the language. Now, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Latin, every language in the world has a male and female side. And the English language is an enormous language which is now in the process of being totally mutilated.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...by ignorant people in the name of expanding our information, our knowledge. Sauce of the goose of sauce fore the gander. This is not sauce for anybody. This is poison.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Poison of the mind. I remember some years ago telling a couple of stories I thought were funny when I was working in the East. And after the dinner was over there were quite a number of us. A young woman came over and said, “You realize that those were sexist comments that you made.”

I said, “Well, I suppose they were.” And I said, “Does your husband know that you have come over and reprimanded me?”

And she said, “No.”

I said, “When you tell him or when I tell him, he is not going to be very pleased with you.”

[Rushdoony] Good.

[Scott] And it... the look of surprise came over her face. I mean, it was obvious that she didn’t consider herself in the partnership of her husband. And telling a senior officer off she didn't think had any relation to his situation or to mine or to hers. But the world isn’t so constituted. If this country turns into an imbecile, culturally speaking, it will pay the penalty. These people are doing more than simply stepping on Andy Rooneys and on professor McNeil or an individual like myself who may be graced, unexpectedly, suddenly from somebody who took what was an innocuous comment out of context.

What we are talking about here is the collapse of a civilization into some sort of an amorphous ideology. What is the goal? To make men and women appear to be the same, to eliminate all differences? Why should we use names then?

[Rushdoony] Well, there are some who feel numbers would be better.

[Scott] Numbers would be better.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] As in prison.

[Scott] Yes. Well, this, of course, is an imprisonment of the mind.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because I notice on my travels now that people no longer sit and talk the way they used to, relaxed. In fact, if I don’t institute the conversation I have flown from one end of the country to the other and I have done this as an experiment. If I don’t star the conservation the other person will never say a word. Now that may be nice if you are busy and you want to read or do some work or another. That is fine. But even when they talk they are guarded, because they are afraid suddenly that you are going to jump at them. Perhaps something that they say will give unintended offense.

[Rushdoony] Harley pointed out that in 1930, 60 years ago, 98 percent of the American population was literate and the other two percent were literature usually in a foreign language. We can add to that that in 1930 the literate portion of the population was literate to a degree that our colleges and university students are not. For example Dorothy had things in grade school like the vision of Sir Launfall, as I did also. And we read serious poetry. I had Shakespeare in the eighth grade.

[Scott] I know. I was there.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And my cousin who lived a mile from me and whereas I walked a mile into town to the town school, he walked about two miles to a country school now closed. And his education was even more classical than mine. In grade school he read George Eliot and other novelists.

[Scott] So did we. Yes. We read The Mill on the Floss.

[Rushdoony] Yes. He read The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner.

[Scott] Yes, both.

[Rushdoony] So it has not only been a decline of literacy, but a cultural decline.

[Scott] Of course. That is across the board. But we are going farther in a voluntary sense.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now this is the strange part of it. We have discovered, of course, that a free press means that a press that doesn’t have to tell you anything it doesn’t want you to know. And we are now discovering that a public education operated by presumably free individuals is intent upon locking us up.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I handed you, before we began, some items and in there I believe is a letter from one of our very best friends, Lou Fromakis, together with a clipping on how we have in recent years lost our industrial preeminence, because of this kid of thing.

One of the very interesting developments which has been repeated again and again in history is that as freedom wanes, license increases. So while our ability to express our opinions and our faith are increasingly limited, freedom is granted or license in the area of pornography, in the area of all kinds of things in films and elsewhere that would not have been tolerated when we had more freedom of speech, because there was then a sense of what is right and fitting, what is a breakdown of culture and of human relations.

[Scott] Well, I will... don’t know if I have told this on these tapes before. It is an anecdote which comes to mind in this area. When I was on a troop ship in the Pacific in May, 1944, I kept hearing over the loudspeaker a list of names to report the sergeant major’s office on the double. And I was intrigued enough to go to the sergeant major’s office to see what was happening and there were some soldiers typing and others mimeographing and others stapling pornographic booklets for distribution to the troops. And this was at a time when pornography for the average person was absolutely untouchable, unthinkable. And I asked a intelligence officer later why the army did that and he said to take their minds off of what was ahed of them. We were heading for the invasion of Saipan.

Now I think when autocracy moves, when freedoms begin to diminish and when the government promotes this, sexual license in various forms and licentious behavior in various forms is permitted as a diversion to take your mind off what is going on, and I think this is what is happening here. We have... and I have recently written his in the... and told you that I was going to...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...give a speech on this subject next week. We have here a government that has no particular discernible goals. It seems to be living from election to election. It only pays attention to the media and to appointments and to the results of elections. I don't think that it has any secret goals. I don't think it has any goals. And I think we have here a society without direction.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] A society without any standard. And therefore it is a society that is falling apart. The Feminist movement reflects upon the men.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It really is a reflection upon the decline of manhood in the country.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And just as the murderers of women escalate while the men stay home watching football on television. So we are in a state, we are falling into clusters and into groups.

[Rushdoony] One of the things I have looked at very closely in recent years has been books of photography, historical records. And if you look at men, let us say, in 1900 and in 1910, and even into the 20s their stance, their confidence, their sense of assurance, their sense of having something to do in life is dramatically different from what you see today. They were men who were a part of a working world and had a place in it and knew it.

[Scott] Well, you...

[Rushdoony] Now they are playboys.

[Scott] Look at the cartoons.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In the 20s, up through the 20s and the 30s Uncle Sam was always portrayed with a striped pants and a stern hatchet faced individual ready to roll up his sleeves at any time.

[Rushdoony] Yeah.

[Scott] You know, Uncle Sam needs you and so forth.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, now look at what the political ... how the political cartoonists portray us. They portray a big fat flabby slob. That is Uncle Sam, almost uniformly…

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They portray the national image as some baggy pants clown. And they are very sharp. The political cartoonists pick up nuances in the national mood quicker, I think, that almost anybody. And I often wonder how they get away with it with the kind of editors, liberal editors that they have. But they do get away with it.

And it is very close to the fact.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, one of the things that we have discussed more than once, not on these tapes, is the fact that biographies now feel that they have not done their job properly if all they do is to describe a man’s life and work. They have to imagine or dig up, if they can...

[Scott] They want to get into his bedroom.

[Rushdoony] ...into his bedroom, yes. But I am beginning to realize that they are not as bad as the autobiographers. Some of them, now, are getting to be really pornographers.

[Scott] Well, I was very surprised at the number of women who write about all their bed partners and I remember that when I was a young man and you when you were a young man, that a man who spoke about his love affairs in any explicit detail was really considered the lowest of the low.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It was one of the things that destroyed Denunzio’s reputation was his description of his...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... affair with {?}. And now we ... what if... there is no word for a female cad. We... we...

[Rushdoony] We need one.

[Scott] We need one, because we have got quite a good number.

[Rushdoony] Well I finished the first volume of a biography recently and that is enough, by a man who is really a very superior mind. He has been a reasonably successful composer of symphonic music. He has written scholarly works and literary criticism and has had, oh, perhaps 20 or more very successful novels published, one of which has been one of the more successful movies of the past decade or so. And it is an appalling work, because he leaves nothing to the imagination in describing the private lives of his parents, of his relatives, of himself and his wife and of everyone he knows. Apparently they sit around and do nothing but discuss the most intimate details.

Now that a man who is a very able thinker and whose book is not without its remarkable insights to indulge in such repulsive writing indictes how far we have fallen.

[Scott] It is very strange. I... I remember reviewing a biography I reviewed for The San Diego Union a biography of William Pitt the Younger. His only weakness was a rather big one was an addictio to wine and always time for another bottle. But he was a very brilliant...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... a very brilliant British leader and a very famous for his mastery of the House of Commons for a long, long time. And the biography was a good biography and I gave it a good review and then I ran into a friend of mine who said I... I ... I always read your reviews, Otto, but he said the review on William Pitt, he said, “Now that fellow seems to have had no sex life whatever.”

And I said, “What the hell do you care?” I was astonished that he would be interested.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes. Well, that...

[Scott] I mean, what business was it of his or anyone else?

[Rushdoony] Well, Forbes hasn’t been dead very long, a matter of days, I believe, and already two biographies are apparently in the works. And they deal in particular with his latter years, when apparently he became deeply involved with the gay community as a member of it.

[Scott] Good heavens.

[Rushdoony] So that ...

[Scott] I am sorry...

[Rushdoony] They could hardly wait to get into print with that.

[Scott] I am... I am... I am sorry to hear it.

[Rushdoony] ... and talking with the gay community.

[Scott] I am shocked and sorry to hear it. Gee, that is terrible.

[Rushdoony] Well, it was in the papers today.

[Scott] Well, I didn't read the papers every day. You know, I can’t stand the papers every day. I mean, to read the papers at the end of the week is enough. I read the Wall Street Journal, but that doesn’t cover much crime, as you know, except fiscal peculations.

I am very sorry to hear that about Forbes.

The ...

[Rushdoony] Well, the son seems to be of a very different character.

[Scott] Well, I am... I just think of what it does to the family.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And just when you are talking about the decline in morals, now standards, about 30 years ago a friend of mine got a job on the Inquirer, that tabloid that...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Generoso Poppo used to own, still owns, I guess. And it began, you know, as a real bad paper. It had murders, suicides and all that kind of stuff. Since then it has transformed itself into Martian woman marries governor of some state or another, all this nonsense, you know. Even I look at those headlines with fascination as I go by. But in the days when my friend got the job, it was still deep in dirty scandals or different kind of scandals anyway. And he was fired because he refused to put a photograph on the front page of a very prominent man who had been killed in an automobile accident and the police were taking his body out of the car. They wanted to run that on the front page and he said, “That man’s family has to be considered.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And he said, “I wouldn’t dream of running that.” And so they said, “Well, then you don't belong on this paper.” And he said, “No, of course, I don’t.” And he got up and he left. Do we have those kind of journalists anymore?

[Rushdoony] No. And that would amuse the... the men of the media today. They would regard that as laughable that anyone would have such a standard.

Well, we also have a great deal of falsification routinely. For example, last Saturday night I was interviewed for an hour by telephone by a San Diego radio station. And before we went on the air the man told me that the previous Sunday there had been a march, a pro life march just to let the community know where they stood. And he said, “We didn’t have any media announcement of it. It was announced from the pulpit of some churches. The word was passed around by telephone. I felt so badly about something that probably was going to be a flop that I told my wife and children after the church we were going to go down to Harbor Boulevard and take part in it.”

And he said, “I could not believe the crowds that were there, block after block, thick with people.” And he said that one media man said that he thought there were 18,000 but this was not published.

And he said that was a very conservative estimate. What televsion and the press featured were about 30 or so pro choice people demonstrating against this and mentioned that, perhaps there were 300 pro life people also present. That was just a line thrown in.

Now that is total dishonesty and that is dishonesty of a kind that I, myself, have encountered repeatedly.

[Scott] That is censorship.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is censorship. And this is what we are living in. We are being... all kinds of things are being censored because our betters, our betters don't think we should know about it. I was asked to interview on a southern California radio station several times in the last, say, six months or so. And the last time they called me and asked me to say something on some subject or another, was obviously the last time because this time the girl asked me who I was connected with and I said, “The Chalcedon Foundation.”

And she said, “And what is that?”

And I said, “That is a Christian think tank.”

And she said, “What? Oh. Just a minute.”

And then there was some silence and then somebody else came on and said, “Could you tell us more about it?”

And the whole atmosphere changed.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I had made a terrible mistake. I had identified myself with the Christian community. And I ... they went ahead and interviewed me anyway, but I know they will never interview me again.

[Rushdoony] Well, I have been interviewed by reporters who never used a single sentence and have invented statements and ascribed them to me. And this is routine.

[Scott] Well, ask Mr. Rooney.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now I assume that one of the PR men at CBS told Rooney to allow himself to be interviewed by that gay magazine.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because I am...

[Rushdoony] Probably.

[Scott] ... I am quite sure that Rooney himself wouldn’t have... wouldn’t have lent himself to it, not if he has ordinary intelligence. There are people there is no point in talking to because you know they are going to... they are out to kill you. And, of course, this goes beyond the gay community which we had another word there. There are other words, but we are not allowed to use them. It... it has now gotten into the ethnic community. There is hardly anybody that cannot, if they choose, take umbrage at something that you say...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... on the basis, of the tribulations of their grandparents.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I mean, my ... my Irish grandmother was taught Gaelic after dinner at night and the teacher had to come to the back of the house because the teaching to the Gaelic language in Ireland at that time was illegal. Now that is a brand of prejudiced oppression which you don’t hear anything about anymore. But it certainly doesn't affect my relationship with any other race of group of people. I am not that crazy.

You cannot vicariously carry on these matters. It doesn’t work. But we are turning into a seething mess. It is almost imposilbe to make a speech or to write a book and get through these mine fields without being blown up somewhere shot somewhere along the way. It is practically destroying communication and, of course, I think... I believe it was Buckley, William Buckley who said that he appeared at some college and he gave a speech and after the speech he was surrounded by students and he said something to one of them very pleasantly and he got back a snarling reply and he said, “It tore apart the social fabric.” And this is what we are really alking about.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Censorship is an... the deepest of insults to the intelligence of the other person.

[Rushdoony] Well, in the remaining time I would like to take a different tact, to call attention to what is happening in a more favorable vein.

[Scott] Good.

[Rushdoony] One of the things we have seen in the past two years, especially, is a proliferation of an alternate media.

[Scott] True.

[Rushdoony] And we are seeing a dramatic growth of Christian television which is still on a low level, but some improvements here and there. Christian radio stations, some of which are beginning to show a maturity that is excellent and newsletters of varying qualities but some of them very, very important so that a remarkable amount of information is getting out.

For example, there has been nothing in the press about what Mr. Harley sent me, but a number of Christian groups and Libertarian groups as well have been publicizing this particular issue. We also have the fact that a number of groups, including John Saunders, are now providing information through computer hookups. And this is becoming an important aspect. As a result, the media is being bypassed by more and more people. In fact, when you look back before World War II you find that even the poorest families took a daily paper and a great many families subscribed to two papers. Now an increasing percentage of families take no paper.

[Scott] For a very good reason.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I have experimented with newspapers across the country as I have traveled. I pick up a newspaper in every town where the trains... the plane stops if I have several connections to make. And I find the same news in every newspaper from one end of the country to the other, the same features, the same editorials, the same viewpoint, the same writers, the same front page, the same headlines and everything else. These aren’t newspapers. I mean under Pravda they had more diversity.

[Rushdoony] Well, consider the fact, again, a dramatic change that whereas all newspapers have their business section and you had the Wall Street Journal, now you have a multiplicity of economic reports.

[Scott] True.

[Rushdoony] Tremendous number.

[Scott] You need them.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Many of them specializing.

[Scott] Right. And there is... it is an end run around the communications giants.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

[Scott] And their ... they are dinosaurs. By the time a thought that appears in their pea brain reaches the tail which comes out with some information, an eon has passed.

[Rushdoony] One of the things that helped do that in the economic sphere was the fact that it became apparent that many of the financial sections of newspapers were touting various stocks to shoot them up briefly while someone on the staff profited and then dumping them.

[Scott] That was the story of Arthur Brisbane. In fact, the Wall Street Journal every so often has to flog somebody for this.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And, in fact, local newspapers are very heavy on that sort of thing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I know personally of columnists... I know one of the biggest columnists for many years in San Diego who practically... trucks used to come up to his home every Christmas season with the gifts, because these columns are used as a sort of a weapon for the writer.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well now these various financial reports are trying to give an analysis and you are developing people who are more knowledable about investing.

[Scott] And there are... there are Christian newsletters now.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Keeping the Christian community better informed of what is happening.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The ... this is rising, you might say, almost from the ground.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You have the political newsletters.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] You have foreign policy newsletters. There is one out, at least I know of there is one that deals with exclusively with military matters.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Quite a variety.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And it is because people want to know and they are having to go outside the established media to get knowledge.

[Scott] And they are paying more of them.

[Rushdoony] And are ready to do it.

[Scott] And are ready to do it, because we are kept uninformed by the official channels.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And everybody knows it.

[Rushdoony] So in spite of the censorship a lot of material is getting out.

[Scott] Well, of course, the censorship forces you to think.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Some of these efforts to shut everybody up will, of course, fall apart. When the day comes when, for instance, somebody is acused of being a racist or whatever, he says, “So what?” And the whole process comes to a close.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] After that, what can be said?

[Rushdoony] I believe I... it has begun to take place. I think the Andy Rooney incident was healthy in that a great many people were so disgusted with the network that they tuned out. They turned off 60 Minutes.

[Scott] Yes. Well, 60 Minutes, especially 60 Minutes...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...which has made a career out of lynching people.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...turns out to be vulnerable to blackmailed by... from the lowest quarter of the country.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well our time is almost up. Is there any final statement you would like to make, Otto?

[Scott] Well, of course, you can’t be final on a subject like this. It goes on forever.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But I must say that they are teaching us tolerance in a very strange way, by testing our tolerance to its limits.

[Rushdoony] Let me add one thing that in our October, 1989 Chalcedon Report Shelby Sharpe’s article broke through the censorship barrier on that particular subject, the ABA attack on Christianity. And it has been amazing to see how widely that has been picked up by all kinds of newsletters and magazines and the like.

[Scott] I just received a copy of one such reprint from Britain.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.