From the Easy Chair

The Press

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 157-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DD197

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DD197, The Press, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 307, February 8th, 1994.

This evening Mark Rushdoony, Otto Scott, Douglas Murray and I will be discussing in this first hour the press.

Now I have done a great deal of thinking this past week about this subject. I think I have done in my time a great deal of complaining about the media. However, I have tried to think objectively, historically and constitutionally on the subject. Freedom of the press means not that I have the right to expect the media to be what I want it to be, much as I would like that, but that anyone has the right to publish what they want, however partisan it may be.

Now we can and probably will later on deal with the fact that the newspapers of this country are not always as fair or as objective as they could be. However, the basic fact of the freedom of the press means not that I have a right to demand that the press represent my perspective, but that everyone has access to the people by publishing their perspective and viewing the news in terms of conservative, liberal or radical idealogies.

Given that fact, we would have to say we have a freedom of the press here. In fact, I am regularly told by people from all over the world in talking to me that they wish they had the guarantees constitutionally that we have and that they envy us for the freedom of press and freedom of religion we have.

I do believe that we must begin with that positive note. We do have a situation with regard to the press that is a good one. I think a great many major conservative groups have never considered buying up one or another network or creating their own news service and, therefore, a good deal of their complaining, I think, is unwarranted.

Now given that fact, we have to say that we should be entitled, whoever is publishing their perspective, that they be honest and fair minded about it. Our courts have created more problems there with regard to the press than have the media in that they have made libel and slander very, very difficult for anyone to gain a victory in a suit. The courts have so limited liabilities here that it has created a certain amount of license.

So given that fact, we do face some serious problems with regard to our media.

Now with that general introduction, Mark, would you like to take over and make a comment or two?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, I think the issue regarding the media is not just who controls it, but it is... it is our... our expectation that men tell the truth. And I think our problem is a lot of people want to believe lies. Ands so the news that we get and the way that we get it is quite predictable and it is comfortable to a lot of people. And a lot of news organizations because they have profit, the bottom line, TV network news, for instance, has to ... they have to get a certain number of viewers to get the advertising dollars. It is a business. So like a TV show that orients itself to the least common denominator of its viewers... what will get the most viewers, they slant their news to what they think is acceptable to the greatest number of people. And they don’t want to go out on a limb. They want... they don't want to be known for going to any too great of extremes. They may lean to the left because that is acceptable, but it is their... the... the truth is a variable and ultimately I think you have to look at our media today as it does a business. And a lot of times they ... they only want to put forth what they think is acceptable and what will sell.

[ Rushdoony ] Otto?

[ Scott ] Well, at one time the press here had to be supported by its readers. And, therefore, there was a limit on what they could say that wound alienate the readers and, of course, we did, as Rush mentioned, we did have libel and slander laws at one time in this country. Those were removed by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that if ... if a person was a public celebrity that he could not be libeled or slandered unless it was done with malice, deliberate malice. And malice is not photographical. It is not visible. It is an invisible emotion and, of course, you cannot prove the existence of an invisible emotion.

So, in effect, the libel and slander laws were removed and anyone in the public domain became subject to anything that anybody wanted to charge. Rush is in the public domain because he is a published author and lecturer. I am in the public domain. Practically anybody of any prominence at all could be said to be in the public domain and, therefore, we have no protection and we have no means of gaining and compensation for any injuries that the press may decide to inflict upon us. Now you may ascribe all kinds of things to us Anti Semitism, Nazism, whatever and the is no ... no compensation.

We are very at... we are the only large country in the world, the only progressive country in the world that has no libel and slander laws in effect. On the other hand, minorities can apply to the courts for recompense if they can claim that they have been humiliated by the use of some denigrative term and the courts will entertain that. They simply will not entertain things from persons of prominence. So we have a very peculiar situation as far as freedom of the press is concerned. It sounds good, freedom of the press, but the press always needed some sort of social controls. That is point number one. Point number two is that, as you say, the press is a business and it is a business that is supported by advertising.

Now I don’t know why this particular point which I have often made is so difficult for people to accept and that is that advertising is placed by advertising agents and agencies. And the agencies are on the left. And the agencies feed advertising money, which they obtain from business to socialist outlets and no longer feed it to conservative outlets and therefore conservative outlets do not succeed and socialist outlets succeed wonderfully because they get fed enormous advertising revenues or enormous advertising. And as long as they have a lot of advertising they can put out their newspaper or their magazine at less than cost of production. That is the reason you have so many cheap magazines on the racks. They may not seem cheap to you today because they range anywhere form 3.50 to 5.50 each, but we are talking about inflated dollars. And they actually are cheap in terms of the cost of their production. They are produced, they are sold, give always, premiums, prizes, please try this magazine for three months, this newspaper for three months and so forth free because advertising rates are based on their circulation and the circulation are based on the number of subscribers and the number of sales... book... street sales.

So here you have a business that is funded by one segment of the political spectrum and, as a result, you have a above ground, you might say, mainstream media that represents one point of the political spectrum, the socialist, the socialist end of the political spectrum. And the other parts of the political spectrum are not adequately presented and, for that matter, the life of the United States as it actually is, is not honestly or adequately covered because a free press means that a press is free not to print as well as to print and we are just discovering as a nation what that means. With the last national election the press decided half way through the campaign, halfway though the primaries to no longer cover conservative candidates in the primaries. Pat Robertson’s coverage stopped with Illinois. He got one third the Republican vote in Illinois and from them on...

[ Murray ] Buchanan you mean?

[ Scott ] Buchanan, yes. I am sorry. Buchanan. From then on the press did not cover his results in any of the further primaries. In California he got one third of the Republican vote, Republican primary vote and it wasn’t even reported. The same thing was true of Jerry Brown. The same tehig was true of Howie Philips who was not reported from beginning to end. He wasn’t even mentioned and other candidates were totally blacked out.

Since the elections... the election, we have seen the press sit on all sorts of facts about the president that are being printed now in England and in other countries which are not being covered by the American press. It is some of his misdeeds of the past. He was talking about family values. He is an expert on family values and how to break them.

So we have here a very peculiar situation. We have a one party press which represents only the Democratic party, which represents only a socialist view point which represents only a minority of the people and which represents only a minority of our activities as a nation. And we have now laws of libel and slander so that they can libel Mr. Reagan with impunity. They can tell lies about even the recent past with impunity. And we have a large number of very wealthy conservative people who will not, as Rush points out, will not get off their duff enough to float a newspaper of their own or buy a network of their own or enter the arena on their own to give employment to honest journalists or to conservative people or to even express the viewpoints which they claim to believe in. We have an enormous Christian community which only talks to itself and that in whispers, doesn’t enter the arena of the media. So we have an unusual problem, because this is all voluntary. It hasn’t been mandated.

[ Murray ] Well, we... we have had a recent indication of the affect of advertising on newspapers with the demise of the Sacramento Union after publishing continuously for something like 100 years. They have just been starved to death.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Murray ] And they...

[ Scott ] They dared to publish a conservative viewpoint, a traditional point of view.

[ Murray ] That is right.

[ Scott ] And the ad... the advertising agencies cut them off.

[ Rushdoony ] And even with a low circulation they knocked out the state superintendent of public instruction.

[ Scott ] They were the only ones who printed his speculations and all the other newspapers were silent.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right.

[ Murray ] Well, the underground press is being... it seems to be the... flowering with human events and conservative chronicles and American Spectator and some of the others. There is an alternative press, plus there are a lot of newsletters and that has been made possible by the personal computer and the word processor which would have been impossible if to extremely difficult to do without it. In Russia where personal computers were strictly guarded the alternative press is very difficult to maintain a ... an alternative press. Generally they would have to smuggle outright and get it printed outside the country and then smuggle it back in. It is very difficult to get anything printed inside Russia, but it... I think the underground press is what helped to... or... or contributed to the downfall of Communism or at least the apparent downfall of Communism.

[ Rushdoony ] I think a very telling illustration of the broader problem of the media is in what is going on in our state capital, Sacramento, at the present time. You are aware, of course, of the fact that an associate of Louis Farrakhan, the black Muslim leader gave a talk which was barely reported by the press, but it called for the extermination of all whites in South Africa and elsewhere. It was as vicious a diatribe as imaginable. At only one point did the media pick up on it in that he spoke viciously about Jews. At that point they did condemn him and were able to get a certain amount of boycott by some leaders, black and white, of Farrakhan. However, the Sacramento Bee definitely not a conservative paper, very much to the left had a cartoon in which it condemned what Farrakhan’s associate had done. But in the course of that cartoon they used a name for blacks that blacks hate.

Now they used it because as the cartoon explained the illustration it was racists rejoicing in what the black Muslims were doing and calling attention to the fact that here was Racism being voiced to the nth degree.

Now the black leaders in Sacramento said nothing about Farrakhan and his associate. But they are now mounting a major boycott of the Sacramento Bee. They are demanding that the editor responsible of the editorial page be fired. They are waging a major vendetta which says not much good for those black leaders in Sacramento. And I know there are a great many blacks in Sacramento who do not like it, who feel it is hypocritical to allow one word to be used to condemn the Bee whereas total hatred on the part of the black Muslims through Farrakhan’s associate received no condemnation.

Now the Bee is really being hard hit by this boycott and this hullaballoo. What this tells us is that there is a great deal of bullying going on in the United States. It is target can be anybody in high places and low. And we have become a people in which the bullies are on top. They can intimidate almost anyone and nothing much is done about it. The Bee is simply hoping that this will die down and that they can go on as usual. I think they should come out swinging and go after these hypocrites. I think the black community will welcome seeing these evil leaders and pastors toppled. But they aren’t doing it.

A good deal of our problem, I believe, is in the community at large. Black and white in Sacramento they are doing nothing about this. They are allowing the bullies to have their way.

So there is a singular lack of moral courage today on the ground level, on the high level and in the media as well as everywhere else. And I feel it is very serious.

[ Scott ] Well, the ... the people really is the fiction. Governments are groups, small group who govern a large group. The minority governing the majority is the definition of a government. And the people, as such, is one of those floating words which people talk about and which you hear from speeches and what not, but it is to specific. The people is a crowd. The people are fragmented. Intellectuals generally can knit them together by rational... rational arguments and leaders put them together.

We recently had a congressman come up here to talk about crime, a congressman representing this area, Hugh Little, a very nice young man who has ... has made a good name for himself very quickly in Congress. And what he did was first to tell the people that crime is ... exists and how bad it is, which was not news to anyone sitting there. And then he wanted to know what they thought should be done about crime. And at this point the conversation, I understand, got a little bit raucous, because they expected him as an elected leader to tell them what he thought could be done. He didn’t... they didn’t expect this young leader to come and ask them what to do, especially on the subject that is as widely covered and as familiar to all of us as crime.

And we might say that although the community seems to be dormant, the community isn’t dormant. Underneath the placid surface there is an awful lot of building anger in the United States, anger and disgust and anger and disgust at the press as one of our oldest emotions. In the first place we have a press that argues that only bad news is news. And therefore all we get is bad news day in and day out.

Now if your wife gave you a list of complaints every time you looked at her, you would eventually get another wife or kill the one you have. And the same thing is true with the media. The media is nagging us to death in the name of change. And it is supporting a socialist movement in the United States that is only talking about change without the consent of the people and without telling us where this change is supposed to take us. And the thing that annoys me the most is that the media is supported by the money of industry and business.

Businessmen provide the money for this satanic situation. And I personally have not been able to talk to a single businessman out of the hundreds that I know to get them to switch their advertising into more beneficial areas.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, as in Sacramento, black and white, business man and clergy man, they are all waiting for somebody else to speak out and nobody is doing anything.

[ Murray ] Well, that is one of the frustrations that people have when they go on these boycotting things like K-mart, you know, for selling pornography through Walden Books and so forth is that the advertising is handled by agencies so it creates an out for the business people, because they can say, “Well, it is handled by an agency. We have no control over where they place the advertising.”

[ Scott ] And the agencies are supposedly staffed by experts and they are experts. They can certainly feed their friends and starve their enemies, very expertly.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think there is a radical lack of moral courage on all levels in this country. And we can beat the press over the head because they certainly represent such a lack of moral courage, but we have to start with ourselves and we have to start with the churches.

At this point, I would like to call attention to a very interesting and ugly fact. For some years now there have been attacks on Chalcedon and on me not only here, but in Canada and Australia and England and elsewhere. The interesting thing to me is that this bile is building up so that any time they want to go after us they reach into the file and get all the data. Where does this data which is false come from?

It comes almost entirely from church sources, Church or Christian related publications. It comes from publications like Christianity Today and a host of others like that, manufactured or twisted so that when we talk about the media we have to say one of the ugliest areas of the media today is the Church media.

Now this is nothing new. Shortly after World War II because the thinking of Cornelius Van Til was challenging the whole of the religious community, the theological community, the seminaries and the Christian colleges, an attack was unleashed on him that was total venom as though here was a wild man, irresponsible, making fantastic charges. And it was all a manufactured thing. It was so bad that he did develop a heart condition and was under a doctor’s care. It was totally venomous. And this has happened again and again in the Church media.

Now, to skip a beat there very quickly, to mention—and I will go on with it a little later—the academic media, the academic publications are as malicious as can be towards any dissenter in the academic community so that as you go from sphere to sphere you have people performing hatchet jobs on any man who has an independent voice.

Routinely in professional publications of one group or another or of one academic of scientific group after another, the lives and reputations of very able men are destroyed so that the ugliest media anywhere today is the media that is academic, professional or church related. It is no holes barred. They know they are not going to be taken to court. First of all, you can’t win in court and, second, they know that not having any capital assets of any consequence, it wouldn’t do any good to sue them, so that they literally get away with the most flagrant kind if misrepresentation and abuse as is at all possible.

[ Scott ] It is very true and it is part of a totalitarian tide.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The essence of Totalitarianism is an inability to endure dissesnt.’

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Total power. Somebody says ... said to me.... for what purpose? And I said, “Power is its own purpose.” People achieve power in order to exercise power, not for any other reason. Power is all that is necessary. And this is true in a little group or big group or a nation. We have a totalitarian minded press. The Oklahoman, for instance, is never picked up and it is one of the biggest papers in the middle America. None of the low papers in Vermont, New Hampshire are ever quoted. Any dissent in the press is ignored or, if possible, put out of business. I was thinking when you mentioned people who attacked you and Chalcedon, I was thinking of First Things that publication...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... that is headed by Richard John Newhouse. Now Mr. Newhouse is an interesting individual. He began as a Lutheran minister apparently in the ghetto and he was very much on the left. In one of the best, most strident voices against the American participation in Vietnam. Now the Vietnamese war which is described by the press and such as Mr. Newhouse as immoral was immoral because it was fighting Communism. That is the only reason. After the tide began to change Newhouse changed his position. And he became a sudden conservative. And he began to dump on his former colleagues in the anti Vietnam War effort.

As a conservative he became friendly with Mr. Buckley and got... became the religious editor of the National Review. He also was given a platform by the Rockford Institute which put up the money and gave him an office and hired some people to help him put out a publication called Religion and Society. And from that podium he attempted to exercise editorial control over the Rockford Institute’s magazine Chronicles. Chronicles, at one point, ran an issue against unlimited immigration. And Norman {?} of the Commentary magazine said, “They are talking about us.” And Newhouse reported that the magazine Chronicles had ... it put out an anti-Semitic issue. And they, of course, denied it. But he insisted that they either retract or give him editorial control in the future so that they wouldn’t again offend.

Newhouse also talked to Buckley and said that the Jewish community was upset on this question of immigration. So the next thing that happened was, of course, the Rockford Institute fired Newhouse and Newhouse immediately went public with a charge of anti-Semitism which cost Rockford a number of their biggest backers. Buckley, as usual, immediately joined in with the charge and printed it without even contacting the people at Rockford to get their side of the case. Mr. Newhouse in the meantime attacked Chalcedon, not just once or twice, but a number of times and then moved on having fouled two or three nests in a row and was embraced by the Catholic Church which, in due time, will get indigestion, I am sure.

Now this sort of individual is now numerous on the landscape. They take advantage of ethnic, religious and personal disputes in order to build themselves positions. And he is now editor of a magazine which is well funded called First Things. It is a rather strange magazine, but that is all I will say about it. He can print what he pleases. He has... he has gone on out of the targets. But, as you say, Rush, there is no way that you can straighten the record. There is now way that you can hire a lawyer at anywhere between 150 and 300 dollars a hour to go to a court which will not pay any attention to a conservative in the first place or to a white male in the second place.

So we are caught in a position very similar, I think, to that of the Weimar Republic. I have just got through reading a book, a very large book... not from {?} books from something to Dr. {?}. You remember that book. But this is on the cinema in the 20s in Germany.

Germany was divided between Communists, Social Democrats and Nazis and monarchists. And they had a press that was divided. At least they had a press for each one of these points. But three of the points, which a lot of people overlook, three of these groups were socialists. And only one was traditional and monarchist, because the Nazis were Socialists and the Social Democrtats were Socialists and the Communists were Socialists. So they, in effect, had a press that was dominated by Socialist reviewers, Socialist film makers and Socialist intellectuals. And to read the position that they propounded is very intriguing for a modern American. They were pro abortion. They wanted to legalize homosexuality and lesbianism. They wanted to expand governmental programs to take care of all the poor. They wanted to equalize incomes.

Does that sound familiar? What was the result? The result of the socialist propaganda and the socialist votes counting Hitler among the Socialists was the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler who all the time he was in office gave speeches against Capitalism. And we have a press that you could put ... it is almost like if we would use the Weimar Republic press as a template and put it on top of our present press we would find a perfect fit on all the positions that are now being propounded to us.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] We are called the Nazis.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] History does repeat itself.

[ Scott ] Indeed it does. Many times.

[ Rushdoony ] What we have increasingly is a neutered media, afraid to speak out boldly on any issue. I picked up one of the most conservative publications in the United States today. And it had a very well known, prominent and notorious homosexual as a featured writer. And this publication professes to advocate family values. And I think the reason for it having done so to put this man on the staff or at least use his material is abysmal cowardice. They don’t want to be attacked so they have their house gay.

[ Scott ] That is a good phrase.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, that, I think, is exactly the situation. And this is a highly regarded publication. There is scarcely a conservative publication that does not do that now. And it is cowardice. Look at the Church media. When they are not losing their temper and wrath over something we are doing—and I don’t see them attacking modernism with the same eagerness and heat—they are basically a namby pamby press trying to put in as many harmless things at First Church, Podunk, a party was held I honor of the 50th anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. So and so. And they will fill the thing from cover to cover with that sort of thing. And when they publish something serious on the editorial page it will be designed so to water down the faith in the name of defending it, but their attitude is that if you do anything that is clear cut and unequivocal for the faith, you are too harsh or you are judgmental or you are creating waves. You are creating trouble. And we believe we should be nice people and get along with everybody. Of course, everyone except you.

[ Murray ] Isn’t this part of an attempt to redefine family values to whatever the press wants to...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh yes.

[ Murray ] ... to define them?

[ Rushdoony ] I think homosexuals and lesbians are now a part of the family value idea as far as some of our major media, especially, some of our conservative media is concerned. They are certainly including people of this sort. And most people don’t know who they are.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, when you only hear one point of view coming at you from the schools, from the universities, from professional societies and associations, from churches, from the films, because we might as well say that the press today has a graphic extension in terms of the film and television. And we have developed in the course of these technological innovations a passive audience. If you spend hours every day of every night sitting on your duff watching and listening without any particular recourse and you have, of course, always the... the newspapers and magazines have always treated the audience as passive, we have a tremendous amount of passivity today compared to what we had when I was younger. We used to get up and go out and do thing and we would either play ball or we went to the gym or we boxed or we danced or we got drunk or we did whatever, but at least we were doing something. And now I have the feeling that people are watching and listening, but they are not doing. Ands this passivity, so to speak, has had an awful lot to do with the apparent docility. But if you drive along the freeway all you have to do to get the other guy to shoot you is to cut him off a little bit too soon and there is instant rage. There is almost instant rage everywhere you look. Everybody is on a short string and a short temper.

[ Murray ] You can get run over in the supermarket ...

[ Scott ] Yes, you can.

[ Murray ] ... by a grocery cart now.

[ Scott ] And...

[ Rushdoony ] {?}

[ Scott ] Therefore my... my sense as a reporter is that things are not as good as they look and that silence long protracted leads more to an explosion than to more silence.

[ Murray ] Do you think this is a... a structured attempt to make people passive? Or do you think it is the effect of trying to create a captive audience so that they can be sold?

[ Scott ] It is treating the audience as captive, but that is overlooking the lesson of the Weimar Republic. The lesson of the 30s was that rising unemployment plus great promises of security and government will take care of you led to... and... and all the social programs led to the dictators, not simply Adolf, but Mussolini, Stalin and the rest.

Now we are spreading images of violence all over the world in our movies and our press is feared and hated by every country in the world because it goes in and upsets all political things. It reports some people up and other people down in socialist terms. It interferes with other countries. We never get anything about any country except their scandals and their disgraces. We don’t know anything really about events outside our country. We don’t know that they are having strikes in France or why. We know once in a while they get a little peace and then the curtain drops.

We are spreading the message of Authoritarianism and terror around the world.

[ Rushdoony ] We are exporting a large number of films, by the hundreds, every year and these are totally pornographic films. They are films that cannot be shown anywhere in the United States they are so bad. But that world is buying them and it represents the United States to the world. It is having a major corrupting influence on every continent.

[ Scott ] Well, you know that we make two versions of every film. And even our regular films...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And when they go overseas the women are topless. We have two versions. We don’t print the... the warning about cigarettes on cigarettes we sell overseas. We... we import a different quality or worse quality of things than ever. We have aroused the disgust and hatred of all the elite everywhere in the world with our movies. They are the worst things that has ever been done to the United States and they are done by people that our press praises, holds aloft as very creative individuals.

Now when Germany exported Socialism, picked it up from Italy, but it went farther, much farther than Italy because the Germans are more energetic and better organized. They are more systematic. All central Europe including France fell for the Fascist and Nazi propaganda. I mean that is the reason why France didn’t fight against Germany. It wanted the same thing that the Germans had, no more unemployment, just tell us what to do and so forth and so on.

It ... England, after the war, became Socialist and there is no Socialism without compulsion and the press of the United States is insisting that we pick up the methods of the 30s, the methods of the Soviet and carry them on. This is what we are... really the reason that I suggested this topic was because I considered what is happening to us via the press.

Now I put out a... the newsletter of my own, the Compass, a very small group subscribe to it. You were mentioning newsletters, a version of our {?}. I ... I received a few complaints when I started because I asked for 50 dollars a year and they thought that was too much. That is... what is that? Five dollars a week? Not even... not even five dollars a week. It is... it is 50 dollars I fifty weeks. That is a dollar a week.

So we have not only a passive audience, but a non reading audience and a non thinking audience. And those who can read and can think, as Rush says, are too involved in placing themselves. This was the downfall of the conservative movement. They sold out for a few jobs in... in Washington.

[ Rushdoony ] You mentioned complaints about the price of the Compass. What people do not realize is that when they buy a newspaper or a magazine most of the cost is picked up by the advertiser.

[ Scott ] Exactly.

[ Rushdoony ] The advertisers are subsidizing the publication so that you can get it for 25 dollars a year or 30 dollars, something like that in order to give the advertiser an opportunity to sell his goods to you so that your subscription price to these publications covers only a small part of it so that they don’t realize the actual cost of publications. Now the Chalcedon Report, of course, costs far more than most precisely because we maintain a large staff. We carry on charitable work in a number of continents so that they are paying not only for a publication, but they are paying for men to think and write and for men to think and act.

But people assume that it must cost only a few cents per copy.

[ Scott ] Well, it is in a good cause, therefore it is free.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It supports itself like angel dust.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But the cost of publications today is very high. The hopeful note is that in spite of this fact a growing number of newslettersa and independent periodicals have arisen in recent years. When the Chalcedon Report began publication we were alone. It was a new idea. Nobody thought it would work. Now whether it is political, economic, religious or in some instances literary, you have a vast number of periodicals which are reaching people with a totally different perspective.

I am going to add something else and this is developed in our own circle of readers. They have begun in some instances family newsletters, regularly, reporting all the news in the family which sometimes can number a hundred people from coast to coast as brothers and sisters, cousins and all migrate from one area to another so that you now are having these people being drawn together, plus you are having editorial comment of a very blunt and forthright sort in some of these family newsletters. It is a marvelous development and I would like to encourage anyone and everyone that this is something that hsoudl be done. It is an opportunity of bringing the family together, to communicate something of the past to the family by going into where they came from, what the family has doe since they have been in this country, the kind of thing that is presently going on, what some of the young people are studying. It is a marvelous thing.

Those who send me these I find very, very interesting, especially as, in some instances, they trace the history of the name. That in itself sometimes unearths a very interesting bit of history. So I think remarkable things are taking place at the grass roots level.

[ Scott ] Well, as you know, that Robert Conquests a few years ago put together a series of essays called “Tyrants and Typewriters,” which he had written through the years about the various writers and he described them as sitting down with a sheet of paper and five carbon sheets, writing something for the {?}. And this ... some of these writes... he feels that it was the writers that brought down the Soviet culminating in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and all of the items in the Archipelago, by the way, had to be sent... written and sent to Solzhenitsyn for him to put it together. And it ... you see the Soviets had destroyed the clergy. They destroyed the Church. They didn’t kill all the believers. That wasn’t possible. But they did destroy the churches and they did destroy the clergy. And in effect... they locked up the intellectuals and most of them remained locked up.

But a handful of writers smuggling their manuscripts outside the country drew the odium of the world down upon them and exposed enough of what was going on to bring that terrible system to its knees.

[ Rushdoony ] I have heard from some of these people and I don’t even remember their names now except for one that simply sending these family newsletters out every month, every quarter has done some remarkable things in bringing some of the young men and women who have gone astray back into the family fold, because ... and in one instance... in one instance an older person in his 60s or 70s, I believe.

What has happened is that by describing the life of the family, the past of the family, the faith of the family, these people have suddenly realized the wealth they have abandoned. And it has created stirrings in them of a suddenly loneliness they had not felt for their roots, for their... the faith they were brought up in. And the results have been dramatic. So I would like to encourage everyone here to get busy with a typewriter or a computer, Xerox the copies and start sending them out to your family. You may not get much of a response for a while, but in time... and encourage them to make contributions, wonderful things will happen.

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.