From the Easy Chair

America The Beautiful

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 102-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CA144

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CA144, America The Beautiful, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 254, November the fifth, 1991.

This evening Otto Scott, Douglas Murray and myself will discuss a subject, again, once suggested by one of you, but I forgot to bring my file with me so I am sorry I cannot give credit to the one who suggested that we talk about America the Beautiful.

I think I am perhaps the best person to talk about that, not in any, oh, analytical terms, but in emotional terms, because I come from a foreign background. I was born here not too very long after my parents arrived in New York City. And I have a double advantage in assessing this country. One, I am farm an Armenian immigrant family and, second, I grew up in a Christian home that was basically reformed. Then, third, I can add that we came out of the massacres of Armenians by Turks.

That made a difference in my life, because, of course, my earliest memories as a child of various relatives and other Armenians arriving and everyone coming together from 20, 40 miles around to see the newcomers and to ask them in the march into Russia: Did you see my father or my mother or my son or may daughter, my brother or sister and so on? And sometimes the answer would be, yes, I saw them dead beside the side of the road or floating in the river. Or the Kurdish attack led to the seizure of several including your relative and so on.

So I didn’t grow up under any illusions that this was a nice, good population that we had on the planet. I was brought up with the belief in the total depravity of people. And I think that people today are very, very remiss, if I may take a while to develop this, very remiss in failing to educate their children into the fact of life, namely that man is fallen, that people are totally depraved. Otherwise you go into the world expecting too much of people and are constantly disillusioned.

One of the things that happened was we moved from New York when I was six weeks old, settled in a California farming community which was mainly foreign born, 90 percent Swedish, some Danes, a fair number of Portuguese, some Italians and a fair number of Armenian. And there was hostility on the part of some of the Swedes, particularly around 1921 with the first farm crash toward any new comers who were able to buy the land because of their hard work as farm hands or whatever, working in the canneries, saving up money to buy their own farm.

And I can remember as a boy at night, especially when my parents were gone, no one was there except my grandmother, gangs of young hoodlums, coming by, killing all the chickens in the chicken yard, throwing stones through the windows and so on.

I can also remember being faced with the need to fight on the school grounds or having my lunch during the recess for some time thrown into a garbage can so I had nothing to eat. And I knew better than ever to go home and talk about that, about the fights or about my lunch or anything else like that, because I would have been told, well, this is not heaven. Thank God you are to in Turkey. You wouldn’t get into a fight there. You would get your throat slit.

Now this is why to all those people one of the things that was a constant fact of prayer was to thank God for the United States, the land of liberty. And one generation after another of emigrants have come here and almost all of them have come here with a belief that this is the land of liberty and compared to other countries it is.

So I was brought up with a great deal of delight in the fact that I was in this country. And for me, my childhood was a marvelous one. The incidents I described were minor ripples. I had a marvelous life and, let me say this, we lived in a short road, a country road. Our neighbors were all Swedish, the Strids, the Andersons, the Swansons, the Palms, all wonderful neighbors, marvelous Christians. So we couldn’t blame Swedes because of a few hoodlums. We knew how wonderful some of them were, by the grace of God, just as anyone else could be as wonderful. And that, I think is what the United States still represents to people. And this is why at school when we would sing America the Beautiful it was a song I loved because it had a great deal of personal meaning for me. I think it still does. I think I know as well as anyone all the faults of this country, all the very grievous waywardness that exists at the top today and at the bottom. But there is no other country in the world, even today, where the Christian community is more vocal and where the Christian community is doing more to further Christianity the world around than the American churches.

In fact, some years ago I read something by a foreigner who was a Humanist who said that the non Christian Humanists of the United States were really Christian heretics, because they started the foreign aid program as a kind of misguided application of a Christian missionary principle and that was both its stupidity as well as a kind of foolish {?}. It was a very interesting observation.

So with all its faults, America is still America the beautiful. And I am glad that it was suggested that we talk on the subject.

Douglas?

[ Murray ] Well, I think it is absolutely essential today that parents with children sometime in the children’s formative years, probably best as around 12 to 15 years old that they travel abroad in a foreign country because it is virtually impossible for kids growing up in the United States to realize how great a contrast there is between what we have here in this country and what is going on elsewhere. The first shock that I received going overseas as a young GI, 18 years old, was seeing a Hungarian refugee fleeing Communist tanks, ran into Austria and he was eating out of a garbage can behind the mess hall and searching all of he garbage cans in the area around the barracks where I was staying for any bit of clothing, shoes, worn out socks, anything that they could find.

And I went and asked the man. Why are you doing this? And he said he had been an accountant or something before he left Hungary and he said, “I would rather live in poverty here than live under the heel of the Russian boot.” And I was just dumbfounded. I just had never seen human beings do that. And, of course, you can probably go down into Appalachia and into some areas of this country and see that kind of poverty, but it really opened my eyes that, you know, we must have something special in this country. And the other thing is I went down and voted today and there was no one standing outside with a sub machine gun. You can still walk freely in and out of the polling booth and that is a privilege that an awful lot of people on the face of this planet do not have. They don’t have any choices or they don’t... they can’t vote at all. And although it was for a minor post on the board of directors of a local fire district, still he spends my tax money and I have a very keen interest in people who spend my tax money.

And so the are a lot of things in this country. You can walk into a supermarket and find food available in this country that you can’t find anywhere else. And they were showing on television this evening Russians who are bartering cabbage for almost anything, television sets, whatever they can get. Food is now king. Food is the currency of survival in Russia and the people who grow cabbage can trade it for enormous sums. A guy ha a load of cabbage there and he was getting a half of a warehouse full of television sets and all kinds of stuff. They can’t eat television sets so... and they are finding out what... what barter means and how to survive over there. So you go into a supermarket here and unless a kid has been out of this country they just take everything for granted. So I feel that it is a very necessary part of a young person’s education, because the schools cannot impart that contrast, that differential. There is no way with the multi cultural educational stuff that they are trying to utilize and with the foreign language programs that they have in the public school system, it still does not teach the kids what they have got here and the kids grow up not appreciating the freedoms that they have and the material things that are at their disposal and the opportunities that are there if they will just reach out and take hold of them, education. We probably have the most under utilized educational establishment in any country in the world. We spend more money on education and get less for it simply because the kids don’t reach out for it. It is like a plum on a tree an they just let it fall to the ground and rot. And that is the way a lot of these things are treated by our population.

[ Rushdoony ] Otto?

[ Scott ] Well, I don't think that your background had been that unusual. This is a country in which everyone has an immigrant background. The Irish have a long hard history. They don’t talk much about it. But no race has ever been more abused for a longer period of time, 700 years.

My great grandfather had a farm along the Hudson 60 miles up from the river. My great grandmother gave the farm to the church when she died and left her two sons to go to work on the brick yards with no property, whatever. And it was a revolutionary war area, New Windsor, New York in Orange County. There was a revolutionary war cemetery not far from where we lived which wasn’t even taken care of. It didn’t even have a plaque. The only reason we knew it was revolutionary war was that some of the old stones still had that on it. And the McGivenys were working class people. And I am sure you remember working class people in the 20s and the 30s would get chicken on holiday, hamburger maybe once during the week, an outhouse in the back and very stark. But they didn’t feel poor. I mean had a suit and paid their bill. They owned their home and so forth.

I didn’t have a happy childhood. I had a very unhappy childhood. My mother was very cruel and mothers aren’t supposed to be cruel and there is now way that a boy could say this. I left home the first time when I was eight and I slept out in the field and I was brought back. And I kept running away at intervals after that.

When I was about 13 we went down to Rio de Janeiro and I ran away in Rio and I was gone for over a month, something like six weeks as I remember it. And I went to work in a coffin factory as an apprentice and I was turned in for the reward and I was brought back by two soldiers from San Palo, Brazil to Rio. My plan was to stay down there until I was 21 and then to turn myself in as an American citizen. And if it hadn't been for the reward, I think I would have pulled it off.

I was sent back and exiled to the McGivenys again. The Scotts were well to do. The McGivenys, of course, we were not. So it took a few weeks of adjustment on each end each time. I missed the middle class somewhere along that line. And middle class people still puzzle me, because they don’t like to face harsh words. They can face harsh situations, but they don't like to talk about them. They don't like to say it. And both the upper and the lower in my experience can be very blunt and will face the truth wherever it is. And both my grandfathers in their separate ways were extremely candid men and so, to a great extent, was my father.

But I left home when I was 15 and a half. Happy boys do to leave home at 15 and a half. Nobody ever asked me why I left at no time. It was always assumed that I was a bad boy. Look at all the grief you are bringing your mother was what I usually heard. And it was no... there was no answer to that. But I wandered across the country in 34. In 34 you were born, in 34 you were in school.

[ Rushdoony ] Finishing high school.

[ Scott ] Finishing high school. And I took my school money, because my father had come up to see me. And my father was all right, but he was never there. He traveled. He was busy. I liked him. I admired him. But he wasn’t there to protect me most of the time. And he was going to send me to school in Spain. He said, “You will master Spanish.” Dominate Spanish was the phrase. You will study international law and he described the University of Madrid. It had a wall around it. It had mass early in the morning. You then had breakfast. You had class. When classes are finished about three o'clock you were free then until about nine, I believe, eight or nine in the evening and then you were locked up. You went back into your room. It sounded like a prison to me.

And also I didn’t trust him, because he was a promoter. He sometimes went broke and it never bothered him. He could go broke any time. It was all right. I felt that I could over there... I would have a hell of a time with the language. He would not pay the bills. I would be humiliated and I said, “I don’t think I will do that.”

He said, “As long as you live off my bounty, you will do what I say.”

And I said, “I will not live off your bounty anymore.”

I went up, packed, took my school money and left. And I never went back to live with my parents. I went back. I saw them. We became friendly and all that, but never again did I live off their bounty. And I have never forgotten the phrase. I have never thought my own children live off my bounty. I always thought that was a duty.

But it was an interesting time, 34 was an interesting time to wander across the United States. I hitch hiked... No, I took a train to Albany. And then from Albany I hitchhiked Buffalo. I tried to join the navy. It was a very cold winter, 34, very cold. They weren’t taking anybody in. They had closed the recruitment.

So then I took freight trains all the way across the country and various parts of the country. And there were lots of young boys and men on the road that year. They had hobo jungles all over the... all over the country. I got odd jobs from time to time. I knocked on back doors. And I had some bad experiences. I remember a train in Arizona in the summer. They stopped about 20 miles out in the desert and the brakeman came along with a steel bar and forced us all off the train. I had to walk 20 miles in that sand and that desert and that heat and my face was swollen. I could barely see. And I haunted the yards, the railroad yards for several days after that looking for that fellow. I am very glad I didn’t find him. It was not something that I was going to overlook. And I finally came to my senses and said, “Well, we will forget about it for now.”

I remember in Ohio we were.... the train was stopped in a field and a posse came and drove us all off and took us into a shed that had a table. It had photographs on the table of dead men and they asked us if we had ever heard of Lima Slim, a railroad detective who shot men dead for riding the trains without permission. And these were his victims. And they then took us in trucks to the edge of town to get out.

California you couldn’t get into because there was a strike, a general strike going on that summer and the police ...

[ Rushdoony ] I was in it.

[ Scott ] The police came and told us not to go any farther, any closer to San Francisco. They had posters on the... on the trees in the hobo jungles of the ... of the strike breakers. And I picked apricots at... along the Columbia River, lots of different things.

I camped at Lake Whitefish through the summer when the ... when the weather got cold I went down to North Dakota to Fargo. In Fargo they had a transient camp and I was in the transient camp, 3.50 a week and they made me a clerk, five dollars a week and then I became a clerk for... I have forgotten how much, maybe 15 a week, in the state capitol building. And I was transferred from there to Washington with the FERA administration. And finally from there to a camp, an adult camp in North Carolina and from there I finally got newspaper job and I was on my way.

I grew to love the United States very much during those years. The people were decent. The poorer they were, the kinder they were. And I ... I was in every part of the United States except upper New England. Never quite got around to that.

And there were, of course, in a childhood like that, rather unusual experiences. In ... In Brazil I remember we stayed at the Copa Cabana which was the best hotel in the country. And there were little men out on a hill not too far away. They were making stone bricks out of a mallet and with a mallet and a hammer and you could hear the chip, chip, chip, chip going on all day long. My father took me out and said, “Do you use those fellows?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Do they work hard?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “How much money do you suppose they make?” Well, I told him. I made a guess. And he told me how much, some ridiculous sum. He said, “Let that be a lesson to you. Use your head.”

[ Murray ] Well, I think it is a tribute to the United States that ... that Irish and other nationalities were willing to endure, in effect, slavery through indentured servitude to come to this country for the economic promise that it held. I doubt if there are very many people who are willing to work in a Russian gulag in order to become a Russian citizen.

[ Scott ] No. That is true. My grandmother McGivney, Fitzgerald her name was, could speak Gaelic. She died in her 90s in the 60s. She said that the teacher came to the kitchen at night because Gaelic was against... to teach Gaelic was against the law. The language was outlawed under the English. Now they didn’t behave like the Turks, but there were the snottiest people in the world. And there are humiliations which almost equal death which they were expert at inflicting, a very cruel race a very subtle and very bright race, very smart, but very, very cold and very cruel.

My father later on when I visited him in Caracas used to point out men and say he was under the... this general and that general. He was in prison.

He was there. He... this happened to him. This happened to the other fellow up and down the ladder. And, of course, I saw a great deal of the world between later travels and the sea and so forth. I have been everywhere except Russia and Australia. Most of the other major areas I have been to. And not being raised in a very Christian environment I had a belief in God, but it was very unformed. A vague sort of thing. It was a matter of the blind faith more than anything else.

And outside of no newspaper work doesn’t impress you with the goodness of mankind. On the other hand, you don’t have to find very many good people. You don’t need very many good people. If you go into a room with 100 men and then you find an honest man, that is a great day and we shouldn’t forget that. And I also became very well aware, of course, that there is a very, very many smart people in the world. To learn the world as I did from the bottom up gives you a very interesting view of mankind. And I would rather have been self taught than anything else.

[ Rushdoony ] Otto, you were wise to stay away from San Francisco during the general strike of 1934. I was there and I was working. Every day there were a number of dead bodies found floating in the bay. The longshoreman’s strike was to be the beginning of a general strike that would bring about revolution to the United States. For years I kept the handouts we got at work, pure Marxism, total revolution and the thing that was startling to me was, as I looked at them and I finally threw them away after a few moves. I just had too much paper, was first how totally Marxist they were. And, second, how ignorant they were of this country.

They actually believed that all they had to do was to start a general strike in San Francisco after having first terrorized as many people and killed as many as they did and it would catch fire with workers from coast to coast and turn us into Soviet America. Nobody has ever written the true story of that general strike, but he people behind it, even though they helped kill San Francisco as far as its position as a great port was concerned, were so totally ignorant of the United States it was as though they had never lived here.

Then, some years later, Dorothy and I saw a case of a similar ignorance. We ... well, I mentioned at the beginning that one of the things that made America so wonderful to me was that I had been brought up to believe in man’s total depravity, the teachings of John Calvin.

Now there was a young man who came back from the Korean War who, although he was nominally of the Church, actually knew nothing about the faith. Korea was a very poor country at that time and he saw poverty on a scale that staggered him, such as you talked about, Douglas, on a mass scale. And he came back in state of shock, convinced there could not be a good God who permitted any such thing to happen. And as I recall it, Dorothy tried to tell him that these things are a product of the fall of man, man’s sin. But he couldn’t see it because his view was so Humanistic. Man was good. God had to be bad to allow such things to happen.

And I think that is a great deal of our problem. Not only is our leadership today Humanistic and, therefore, unrealistic, like the people who started the general strike. They have no more sense of reality in Washington than Harry Bridges and his crowd had in San Francisco. And that is why they are going to fall.

[ Scott ] Harry Bridges was a preacher and a smarter man. I knew Harry Bridges later on and I liked him. He was an unusual fellow. He ... he would stand up and he would get rather good if he was pressed. And the more pressure you put on Harry the stronger he got. If he didn’t have pressure he would sit back and he would sort of diminish. Yes, so I don’t think... you know, Marxism in the United States in those years was very crude. It was really translations from another culture.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And they read like translations and the language was wooden and the people were rather strange. Most of them frustrated types of one sort of another. I knew a lot of them. And of course you would, because I was in the newspaper business and there was an awful lot of radicals around at the time. Most of them became unradicals later on and they ... they went through the party, so to speak, very quickly.

The United States that I knew up through the 50s was a wonderful country. It is not a wonderful country today. The 60s probably by coincidence, Mr. Kennedy came in. It was a very strange thing to see. I was standing with the chairman of Ashland Oil in the airport in Washington, DC during the riots. And he ... we had the company jet waiting for that to pick us up. And he said something about the president. The president, Johnson, was in the White House. He was in residence at the White House.

I said, “That S. O. B. should be impeached.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...because he is sitting on his ass while they are burning up the city. And the chairman looked at me with great surprise. This was a small town liberal who had gone to the University of Virginia who was very proud of getting minorities into the country club and who believed, I guess, that we were living in some form of Disneyland. And he had never heard anybody express those kind of sentiments about the President of the United States. But I came out of a much more realistic world.

I know the difference between right and wrong. I have seen the difference between right and wrong. And a country that has gone into a funk as this one did, it came out of World War II as though it had lost, afraid of the Russians. And most of the men never saw action. They didn’t hear a gun. They didn’t... they didn’t see any planes. They got medals for, I guess, mental agony. And it is as though a sickness overtook the land from the 60s onward. The inability to stand up and I was steeped in American history when I came back as a boy from Brazil. You can imagine how well... how good this country looked. I mean it gives you bifocals to get out of the country when you are a child. I agree with you in this business of all ... all kids should get out of the country because you will have a double vision ever afterwards. You will never get out of it. And, of course, I have it because I have done a lot of traveling. But there has been a great deal of ingratitude in this country, a tremendous amount of ingratitude.

American history is written about... by our historians now with a certain air of contempt. And the ... the America that you recognized, the basic America is being mistreated, mistreated. I still think the people are the same. I don't think people change. It is a polyglot country. It doesn’t matter whether they are Swedes or Armenians or anything else. We had fights to the... practically to the death when I was a boy. And it was ... it didn’t matter. They eye... there were Polish... Polish people who moved in and the Irish and the Polish used to have some wonderful types.

My best friend was a Pole, a Polish both who ... who had to come by the house and call for me and my grandmother wouldn’t let him in. She wouldn’t invite him in. He was Polish. I had to meet him outside. He died in the Battle of the Bulge. He was a wonderful man. And what is the... what is that little poem?

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

'This is my own, my native land!'

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Where do you hear that anymore?

[ Rushdoony ] Sir Walter Scott. We all had to memorize that when I went to school.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you mentioned 1960 as the turning point and very rightly so. But in the providence of God things like that are used for good, because 1960 also marks another date. It was then that the Christian school movement began to take off.

Now I think my intellectual schizophrenia on the Christian school movement came out in 1959. I had delivered it as lectures, oh, 57, I believe. And outraged people. But after 1960 Camelot and all that, the ... was very appealing to the media.

[ Scott ] That is...

[ Rushdoony ] But the people on the ground level began to see something was wrong with the country. The Christian school movement took off so that Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Carter and Reagan and Bush have served a dramatic purpose. They have awakened the country to the humanistic and evil direction it has taken. And so we are having a revolution that people aren’t aware of. Forty percent of the grade and high school children of the United States today are in Christian and home schools. So the implications of what, say, Woodrow Wilson began came to the surface in someone like Kennedy. Roosevelt to begin with, but Kennedy and Johnson and others and people began to wake up. So we have two Americas now.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes. We have a think governing class which, to me, is a reproduction of the Ancion regime.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is trivial and parasitic.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And we have the people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now I think David Duke and you brought his name up earlier, terrible background, of course, but is addressing issues that the others have not addressed. And other men are going to come along to address those issues without his baggage. But I do think that we are going into a depression and I think it is going to be a different depression than the one that you and I knew, Rush.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] This one is going to have blood on it.

[ Rushdoony ] It is going to be a depression with hyper inflation. We no longer have hard currency.

[ Scott ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] So that they money supply will increase. Paper money can only increase while the economic sector, the jobs are going to be fewer and fewer. Right now the most common complaint I hear apart from those on our mailing list who have lost their jobs and some in high places and others in low, is that their money is not going as far. And somehow they always end up the month with not enough.

So we are in a crisis and I think the old order up at the top is going to be the loser.

Douglas. You have been silent for a while.

[ Murray ] Well, I was reading today they have begun to count up some of the victories that are taking place in the fight against pornography. I feel very strongly that pornography is as much to blame for the ... a lot of the misery, human misery in our society as the drug trade, because they are both addictive and they both contribute to breakdown of the family. But apparently since the Ed Meese put together the commission or pornography and they issued their report, they have strengthened the laws and prosecutors around the country have begun to successfully prosecute pornography kingpins and they have put a lot of them behind bars and although they are using RICO act which I personally don’t agree with. They are ... they have closed 25,000 pornography outlets and the have closed down the largest warehousing operation in the country which was operating, I think, out of Nevada. And it has been a very fertile ground for organized crime, not only of the old mafia, but the other family type crime syndicates that have grown up both in the.... in the Mexican and the... and the Orientals, because they are very big on pornography.

But apparently some significant gains have been made in the past three or four years so there ... some progress has been made. People have begun to speak out and they have begun to oppose the outlets of pornography all across the country. It is not just localized in major urban areas. It is all across the country.

In fact, there are some areas now that can claim... claim to be pornography free, mostly down in the southeast part of the country, but significantly large areas, whole states, groups of states, two, three states together are essentially pornography free.

[ Scott ] I would be ... we have a more difficult problem. We have many resources. We have many bright people. We have a growing Christian community. We have lots of good possibilities. We also have larger problems, I think, than previous generations have had, especially because of the growth of communications and the methods of communications, the films, the tapes, the music, the books and so forth.

Because what has happened here has been a distortion of the American culture and we are confronted with this enormous influx of Asians and Africans and other races and other religious groups which is changing the demographics of this country at a phenomenal rate. Now this is happening to Europe also. It is going to happen to England even more after they open up the tunnel. But what we have here is what... what Hegel called the spirit of the age. I am not very fond of Hegel but the phrase is a very important phrase. You have children. You are up against the spirit of the age. And fashion and fads and the poison that has been poured into this country intellectually speaking is almost incredibly, not simply the... I mean the pornography is well said. It poisons the mind and the spirit. But there has been a twist, a curve given to our history.

The Civil War where white men died for black men has been treated as though it didn’t happen and now we have the larger and larger group of resentful black people. And we have other more recent immigrants who you feel like saying, “Well, we didn’t ask you to come here to change the United States. We asked, you know, you were allowed... you came in here in order to change your own circumstances, to become an American.”

I regard all of us are Americans, first, last and always. I don't feel Scotch. I don’t feel Irish. I don't fit in those countries. I couldn’t transplant and be happy there. This is a very strong culture and you can’t carry... you can carry it around, but you can’t change it very easily. And our problem is that not only do we have these young people, but we have to produce the truth for them against this avalanche.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the best things in our favor is this that these various groups are coming in, but they are recognizing the menace of the public schools so that the number of blacks who have started Christian schools is growing by leaps and bounds.

[ Scott ] Now that is very hopeful.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, well in ... go get your stuff.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Of course.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] You see an example of that.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] And that has been very alarming to the public school systems that the blacks are moving so heavily into Christian schools. The Asiatics, although they don’t share with the Christian school a common faith, are sending their children to Christian schools because they find that if their children are in the public schools in a short time they are afraid of them. They are turned...

[ Scott ] This is the parents.

[ Rushdoony ] ...and it is dangerous. Yes. So the Christian school movement is off and running and this is why there is the voucher movement now being advocated here in this state by some Humanists.

[ Scott ] They are actually moving to kill...

[ Rushdoony ] To control.

[ Scott ] .... to kill...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...private schools all together.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And that is their purpose. So the Christian school movement is working a revolution in the country and you visited Dr. Ellsworth Mc Intire.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Look at all the children he is reaching.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] The majority of them are not Christian.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And he is going to shape them for life. He has them from the ages of two to five. Now he is going to buy a high school and he is going to fill in all the grades in between. He has five or seven schools already in his building them almost every year.

Now this is the kind of thing that is happening that is phenomenal. And it is a revolution that is underway and it is a Christian revolution.

You rightfully titled our symposium “The Great Christian Revolution.” And it is underway again, rolling in a remarkable way. And the opposition is very much afraid of us.

[ Scott ] Well, shooting the Niagara falls in a canoe is lots of fun, you know.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I had a top executive officer of a corporation call me recently. He had come across our material and was startled because he didn’t know such thinking existed. So this is what is happening.

And we had evidence last night—we won’t go into it—of the kind of impact we are having. So it is an exciting time in which to be alive and a great country. We are in for a ... a battle, I believe, which is going to be the toughest in all of history.

[ Scott ] It is going to be very tough, but Bush is in his late 60s. He is the last of the World War II presidents that we are going to have. And if he is re elected, which is now somewhat fancied, although I think he probably will because the Democratic party is in such a terrible condition, Cuomo is not a very good candidate. He is think skinned. He is a very deceitful man. And it is very hard to come from the streets of New York and sell a bill of goods to the United States. But the Bush generation is moving off the stage, my generation, you might say is... in political terms is moving off the stage. And new and younger men are coming up who have grown up under the liberals, under this forced compassion and caring that they have talked so much about which has turned everyone of their stomachs and they are going to be different breed.

[ Rushdoony ] Bush and his kind are moving off stage, Otto. But you and I and Douglas and the rest of our group are moving on center stage. And I believe that.

[ Murray ] Well, the... the humanists believe... operate in a philosophy that ... that saying that there is no limit to what you can accomplish as long as you don’t care who gets the credit. And our position is and should be there is no limit to what you can accomplish as long as the Lord gets the credit.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Exactly. And the Lord is at work and I think this is the most exciting period in all of history in which to be alive. And I wanted to...

[ Scott ] Well, it is the period that God selected for you to be alive in.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So it is good that you feel that way.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, my hope is that long enough to see some of these bastards get it in the neck and our side ....

[ Scott ] You want to win.

[ Rushdoony ] Right. I want to win and I believe we are going to win by the grace of God.

Well, is there a last comment either of you have to make? Our time is running out.

[ Scott ] You say it. Sum it up for us, Doug.

[ Murray ] Well, I ... yeah. All of us go through lots of experiences in our lives and things seem to move very, very slowly, but it seems that the pace of life is speeding up in this time that we are living in and I think that we will see change more rapidly than we are accustomed to.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] When change occurs it always surprises people, because it occurs zip like that.

[ Rushdoony ] Well thank you all for listening and to the woman whose name I did not bring with me who suggested America the beautiful, thank you. It has been a particular delight to deal with this subject. We don’t feel confident to deal with all the subjects that some of you suggest and some of them I don’t think we could talk more than four or five minutes on, because not all subjects lend themselves to an extended discussion, but we do appreciate your suggestions and although we don’t always give you credit for the idea because I get absent minded sometimes, we are grateful for your suggestions and do pass them on to us.

Thank you and God bless you all.

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