We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Joshinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well. Today I'm
happy to be joined by Bill Donahue. He is the author of the new
book War on Virtue, How the ruling Class is Killing the American Dream.
He's also the president of the Catholic League, which is celebrating it's fiftieth anniversary
this week. Bill. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Emily's it's
a pleasure to be with you. Congratulations on fifty years of the Catholic League.
In nearly thirty years of your tenure at the Catholic League, could you
tell us just a little bit about what it's been like over the several decades
to helm the organization. Well, it's interesting as I was at a professor
in Pittsburgh and before that I taught in Spanish Halem. I went to the
Heritage Foundation in late eighties as a resident scholar, but back to the college
in Pittsburgh and I've been doing this job now ye July the first, for
thirty years, and it's been very rewarding, coming back home to New York
City, do a lot of radio TV, writing books and articles, and
defending the Catholic Church. Sometimes it creates its own problems, but too often
there are problems which are external, even some of them internal, of course.
But it's been a pleasure because certainly the teachings of the church I agree
with one hundred percent, if not the behavior of all of the teachers.
So it's been rewarding. I can only imagine. And your book again,
I'll say the title is called war on Virtue, and that's something I think
a lot of conservatives have woken up to for sure. I want to ask,
from your perspective, why, what really inspired this book? What motivated
you to write this book? Was there anything in particular that happened recently,
any events, anything that just put this subject to the point where you thought,
I'm going to spend a whole book on the warrant virtue. Well,
I've always been interested in social stratification or inequality within society. Sometimes it's justly
held, other times it's undust. I've been interested given the fact that I
worked in Spanish all but Blocks and Puerto Ricans, and I worked with a
lot of black students when I was a professor, and I was the faculty
advisors and a basketball team, and I've often felt that blacks have not a
novel idea, have not exactly been given a fair shape. Where I think
I have a different I take here is that it's not the proverbial white supremacist
crazy people on the right that Black people need to fear, and it's not
the cops. It's mostly white, well educated people on the left who claim
to have their best interest in law mine and who today make up a large
swath of the ruling class. In other words, I am saying that because
the liberal elite don't look at Blocks as equals, they keep lowering expectations,
that that is the ultimate manifestation of racism. Blocks need to fear the ruling
class, well educated white people who claim to be on their side, be
careful of their patronizing, condescending attitude, because at the bottom, at the
end of the day, they will not treat you as equals. And I
think is the more controversial element in the book. No, absolutely, and
if we could just define the term virtue. I'll confess, until I started
spending a lot of time in the conservative movement, I didn't really have a
solid understanding of that term, certainly not philosophical one rooted in some of the
deeper, permanent, enduring ideas that it should be rooted in. So Bill,
tell us what your definition of virtue is? What should people be seeking
when they seek virtue? Well, the term virtue, it has a very
simple meaning. It simply means good habits. If you go back to the
times of Aristotle and Cicero, they certainly understood it. It was This is
certainly antidated that the teachings of the Catholic Church. And you don't have to
you can be a nonbeliever for that matter, to understand that you can't have
a free society unless people are virtuous. In other words, just take the
idea of civility. Civility breaks down, the social order breaks down unless people
act in a civil way, and that the only way you can do that
is if either people police themselves through virtue, and if they don't do that,
then the police will do the job for you. So a free society
cannot exist without self governing people, because we have self governing institutions. We
have downplayed virtue. We we've understood for time in millennia the necessity of virtue
and creating a good civil society and good citizenship. But I would say that
today, at least in the United States, and so I would say most
of the Western world, virtue is under attack. It's disparaged, it it's
ranched, it's looked upon as old hat atavistic, and quite frankly, those
people make that argument, what are you going to replace virtue with? How
else in the world do we expect individuals to thrive socioeconomically, and to do
well in school and to do well in the workplace unless they practice what I
call the vital virtues, namely personal responsibility, self control, and perseverance.
If you don't practice those free virtues, you are not going to succeed in
our society. Now, if people, if people are looking to trace the
arc of this war on virtue, where would you say that it begins.
Does it begin in the sort of postmodern era or is there something that's supercharged
it recently? Maybe both As the answer that question, maybe neither. But
but when does the left really start? And if you think it's the left.
I could be wrong on just that definition. But when do people really
start attacking that concept of virtue and its importance in our society. Well,
like so many things unfortunately in our society. And look, there are good
things they came out of the nineteen sixties, and in equal rights for blocks
and women and others. I'm not here to thrash the entire nineteen sixties.
However, it was also the period of moral decay. It was the period
of the sexual revolution, which was not about keeping people away from oppressure.
It was more about libertinism, which is liberty as licensed. And virtue came
under attack in the schools in particular, the moral relativism took over. It
the idea that everybody could make a own idea of right and wrong, which
is a pernicious idea. Society must come to a general agreement. That's what
the word consensus means in order for society to go here. But they started
taking situations in the schools, so it depends on the situation what's right and
what's born. There are no moral absolutes. That's when virtue began to take
a blow. And it continued on, but most recently and I'm glad you
mentioned this. Emily. Postmodernism, while it did come out of the forties
and fifties in Germany and France, it didn't hit the United States much until
the mid nineteen sixties. But it didn't flower in any major way until about
the last ten years. And what postmodernism means essentially is that there is no
such thing as truth, that truth is a fiction, and therefore everything is
a social construct. I can tell you somebody has a doctor in sociology and
has taught every grade from the second grade through newly minted pads around the world.
That is a fiction. No, there is such a thing as truth.
And once you go down that road. Hitler, by the way,
said that there's no such thing as truth. Okay, so he was no
postmodernist. But isn't it interesting how the intellectuals agree with hit And we know
what how and now you better believe in truth otherwise there's no objective reality.
That's the case. Well, today's a woman, a woman claims a man.
Men can get pregnan. We all know this is madness. If you're
saying that is to say, and if you're willing to tell the truth,
Yeah, that's exactly something I was going to ask you about next, because,
obviously from a Catholic perspective, and I'm Lutheran myself, the decline in
faith and in religious attendance, not just faith itself, but in actually people
sitting in the pew every Sunday, and all of the values that come with
that and all the importance that comes with that is clearly tied up in this.
It's clearly tied up in the postmodern rejection of objectivity and of truth itself.
To what extent do you think this is a consequence of this sort of
rejection of faith traditions, the rejection of you know, actual religious religiosity.
I should say, in the United States, there's a direct line between militant
secularism, the rise of millets in secularism, and a decline in religiosity.
And we can go back to the Christians. Ancestors are Jewish brothers and sisters,
and they gave us the Ten Commandments. Okay, Now, today in
our society, I always like to say, the three most dreaded words in
the English language are thou shalt not, we don't be told anything. We
are culture of narcissism. But quite frankly, there are some things that we
should not want to do because they will harm our societies, such as governing
our neighbors, wife is goods, etc. Killing, stealing and the like.
The diacologue demandment is the foundation, the moral foundation of the Geo Christians
heritage, which is the foundation of Western simplization. And if you want to
thrash that, go ahead. And I just have one question, what exactly
are you going to put in its place? Because we've seen what's happened.
It's called radical individualism. And once every individual goes about his way, will
he nearly making up his own idea of wrong? The results are never auspicious.
Ever. You write in the book, and I like the way that
you put this. It's actually a chapter title promoting racism. You write about
that, and you talked about it a little earlier, but I wanted to
see if you could sort of flesh out the point how this war on virtue
ends up also promoting racism, even if you know the ruling classesn't want to
frame it that way or use that lingo. That's what it is. It's
promoting racism. How does that happen? Well, I'd like to go back
to the eighteen fifties to introduce the American people the readers someone who they're probably
not aware of. George fits You. George fits You was America's first sociologist,
and he wrote in the eighteen fifties that he was on the side of
blacks. He was a progressive, he was a left wing or what we
would call today. He argued that blacks would not treated well and the like,
and he made a vigorous defense of slavery. Now, why would somebody
who claims to be on the side of black Americans make a first defensive slavery
Because he came right out and said, they're not equal. They're basically stupid
people. That's intellient. You can't do anything with them. And fortunately for
them, under slavery, they are the freest people in the world because the
white man is taking care of all of their needs, and because they can't
compete with whites because they are intellectually and morally inferior. If you got a
rid of slavery, they'd have to compet against white people in a market economy,
in a capitalist economy, and that's when they really get trouts. So
we've better keep them as slaves. Now, people have said well, so
you found one guy back in the eighteen fifties, Oh no, I found
a lot of people. You can just fast forward to the late nineteenth century
and you get Richard Eli and the other progressives. They said pretty much the
same thing. Oh no, we want to take care of black people,
and it's just that we know that they're inferior to us. And by the
way, I'm not exaggerated. I quote these people word for word in The
War on Virtue and then in nineteen eighty eight, more recent times, Charles
Murray, the distinguished American Enterprise Institute SCALA, who wrote a wonderful piece well
the Coming of Pistodial Democracy, wherein he picted that in future years, the
white ruling class would be the custodians taking care of black people the way we
take care of Indians as wards of the state. In other words, the
white ruling class does not look upon black people as equals. If they did,
they would treat them as equals. But they're saying, as you can't
make it without us, and we will force the quality, we will order
it into being, because you're not equal the way we are. That is
why I say they are the ultimate racist in our society today and not unrelated,
you write about this as well, the approach to poverty that the War
on Virtue ends up taking. Can you tell us more about how this ends
up really, as you say, devaluing the poor. Yeah, I mean
you just take a look at the black family. I mean it went through
the hay Day of slavery, and you had a great sex and balance between
men and women. Or they wanted more men over here to do the hard
work. That doesn't create for a stable environment. It did have a stable
environment with blacks who were not slaves, and they did have a nice sex
ratio pretty even between the number of men and women. They grew up to
have the first Black middle class, the first Black book. Wassi all the
way through slavery and discrimination in the worst parts of it, right up the
mid A black family not as strong as the white family, as Moyning Hand
pointed out. Nonetheless, they weren't devastated. The devastation took place in the
nineteen sixties. Now we know that when economic times are hard, like in
the nineteen thirties, we expect people to be on public relief. But when
they underwood like they were in the nineteen sixties, almost no unemployment amongst blacks
as well as whites. Why then did the welfare state balloon? Why did
it spike at the time of economic app ruins. It did so because of
the civil rights movement was taken over by some people who made some bad mistakes,
but exactly what they were doing, and they said, listen, let's
get every black person we can find, put them on welfare, make New
York City go bankrupt. Then the federal government has to come in and institute
socialism. And that's how we'll make progress. Now, who are the day
Richard Cloward and Francis Fox given a husband and wife couple from Columbia University giving
the advice to Mayor John Lindsay. And that's what they did. They use
blacks as pawns, as political objects to further their own political agenda, and
to this day they don't regret anything. The people have to understand that there
are people who claim, mostly white people, not exclusively, who claim to
have the best interests of blacks and find and some of them do, and
they make bad mistakes. You know, there are a lot of good intentions.
Times you get aired outcomes. I'm talking here about a hardcore group of
leftists who are able to capture the ear of the ruling class and their idea
of equality is something which state will order into being because unlike for the book
who have made a major success, that is to say, Asians, Jews,
Mormans and Nigerians, the ruling class does not believe that that African Americans
are capable of possessing and exercising the vital virtues of personal responsibility, perseverance,
and self discipline. So they feel it's their job and that of the state
to push them across the finish line. Yeah, that's really interesting, And
I also think about how social media sort of enters the conversation literally the conversation
around the late aughts and has probably supercharged some of this as well. What
are your thoughts on, you know, whether social media is maybe democratizing the
conversation, as a lot of people would say, it's showing the ideological corruption
bias of people who control, you know, the ruling class, people who
control the levers of power in media and government, etc. Or if it's
making a lot of these decisions a lot worse, pouring salt on the wounds,
etc. What's your thought on that. I make social media overall,
there's been more of a minus than a plus. It has certainly been that
way for teenage girls. They have suffering more than any other segment of the
population. Yes, there are some good things about social media, which we
hop can talk about, but unfortunately because back even before social media, just
with the entire idea of the Internet, which has done some great things,
and as a researcher, I love it. I don't have to leave my
office to do some really great research. On the other hand, it has
also created a society where everybody who has an uninformed opinion is all of a
sudden mister genius who is an expert, just like everybody else. So what
you have to people who are professional researchers like myself, I can make the
distinction between somebody who's a junior league person, somebody who's a crazy right wing
racist or a crazy left wing racist, and somebody who has has something to
say. But to the undiscerning eye or ear of Americans, they can't really
make that distinction too often. And so what they have is they well,
now I don't know if I can believe that because I heard X, Y,
and Z, because they don't know enough to discern what the source is,
what was the source of X, Y and Z, in order to
determine what it is? And unfortunately, today a lot of the divisions that
are created racial divisions in particular, or fomented by people some on the right,
but more of them on the left, who are taking advantage of the
moment, would heighten racial tensions. Try and make the argument that things are
now worse than ever before. As a matter of fact, in terms of
education and income, things have never been better for Black Americans than they are
today in twenty twenty three, nowhere near, And as Glenn Lowry and other
black scholars have pointed out, no place in the world are black Americans better
off in terms of education and economic welfare and permitting conditions than they are in
the United States. But nonetheless, we are fed the steady diet that every
time there might be a negative interaction between a cop and a black guy,
therefore the entire country is reeking of racism. So when blacks kill blacks,
as they do all the time in places like Chicago, nobody says the word
if black lives matter, and of course they do. It shouldn't matter whether
whether the violence is taking place in the womb or whether it's being taking place
at the hands of other blacks. It should matter equally in every case,
but we're playing off of the racial stereotype trying to make it this way.
And I try to go through this scolly material and debunk it in War on
Virtue. And that raises this question of why it is people on the left
don't see what is clearly racism or classism as exactly that. They think it's
it's pro poor, it's you know, they'll call things anti poverty that are
actually the opposite. They will call things anti racists that are actually nakedly,
very clearly the opposite of that. Why is it that they're so deluded and
confused by these definitions. Well, a couple of things here. I think
that it would be fair to say of most liberal minded Americans who who swallow
this, that they've been somewhat deluded, somewhat indoctrinated. However, there's a
hardcore group of leftists and they're not delusional at all. They hate America,
That's what I'm saying. They hate America. Jean Kirkpatricks was brilliant, one
of my favorites, head of the Round the un for the ambassador for the
UN back in the nineteen eighties under Reagan. She tooted Georgetown wrote many books.
He's the one who talked about Firth, the hatred that so many of
these people have. They always blame America first. And I spent many years
as a professor, in many years on the National Association of Scholars board.
There is a sizable segment. I'm not saying most professors, but I am
saying not a few who literally hate America, Western civilization. And unlike the
mortist in the past, who well, they didn't understand human nature and they
had a fluida interpretation of history, they did try to make things better.
They thought that by having capitalism crash, we could then institute socialism and then
in communism and there you go, bingo, we got nirvana, the utopian
At least they had some good motives at the end. However, what are
you're dealing with today? Or nihilists? People who know they can't defend the
Soviet Union, Paul Potts, Cambodia, Vous China, gastros cue, but
they can't defend this anymore. They've all wound up in bloodshed. But are
they happy to come over to our side? No, so like a little
boy who builds the erector chip, he said, he's in a burnt pown
right away. They're into not only the politics of personal destruction, They're into
into the politics of the nation's destruction. They hate America and the great division.
That's what this is all about. This is about division, and you
saw it's it's early manifestation back in the nineteen eighties with the development of multicosualism
in the Academy's never about let's respect other people's cultures. It was always about
let's tear down Western civilization, and we will do it by dividing people against
each other. That's why we have separate graduation ceremonies based on race in almost
all the Ivy League school Why else would we have that? Isn't that with
plan hearing for that snation? How we have the left wing is about the
clan didn't want in one integration because they hated black people. They need the
left wing people in the ruling class. They want segregation because they want to
divide people. Once you look at it in that protective and all of a
sudden, your eyes will open, And I know a lot of people felt
like this happened really quickly, or that it got mainstreamed really quickly, because
you know, it's sort of lingered on the fringes of academia for a really
long time, but not really. I mean, if you go back to
Jesse Jackson, you know, hey, hey, hoho, Western sieve has
got to go, all of that stuff. I'm curious for your perspective on
the path that you know, people now would call it wokeness, but the
sort of fringe radical cultural leftism has taken from those fringes and then gone,
you know, into the point where you're hearing it on cable news, you're
hearing it and the New York Times, whatever it is. How did that
happen? And how did that happen in a way that feels really fast to
a lot of America. Well, I'm glad you mentioned Jesse Jackson, but
I mentioned yeah, you're right, hey, hey, oh, let's Western
culture has got to go. He said that back in the nineteen eighties at
Stanford University that was pushing multiculturalism. But what he did was even a worse
as any as bad as anything him and him and now I'll shoupon they were
shakedown artists on Wall Street to give us what we want, or we're going
to create some problems for you. So they wrote him checks. Well,
fast forward to what we've had here with with the Riyots in twenty cop interactions
and people exploited it like Antieper and Black Lives Matter, and they began to
shakedown of Wall Street in these places, and to get them off their back,
they wrote the same checks they wrote earlier to Jackson, to Shopton.
Now what we have is no longer is this hatred of America U and this
division U centered in the education area, in the arts, in the media
and entertainment industry. It's now it's now captured the healthcare industry, the military,
the FBI. These are all traditional institutions which either never got involved in
politics, or if they did, they were supportive of traditional moral values,
Disney being a classic example among them. Now, the good news is that
just recently we're seeing some pushback on the whole transgender agenda. Who're seeing what
happened with bud Light. Okay, and I don't think this is going away
all too quickly. People who are beginning to say, wait a minute,
enough is enough, We've gone too far. It's one thing to ask for
tolerance. But you're not looking for tolerance, You're looking to shove down our
throats a radical, militant, secular agenda which which we rescily disagree with.
So this fight, Emily, is not over. I'm not a seer.
I don't know which way to wind up. I am saying the culture has
moved left, but there's some signs a pushback, And I say this culture
war is not over. It. Anybody who thinks it can't get worse is
crazy. I also think you're crazy. You think if you think there's an
iron war of history and were and we're done, close up shop. No,
both extreme interpretations are wrong. It helps us up for grants. M
Yeah, okay, that's that's really interesting as well, because it leads into
something you also write about, incivility. There's incivility is often rewarded in our
media culture now, and it's not just more pronounced um, you know,
among our everyday reactions. It's also the incentive system has shifted so that it's
you know, it becomes a vicious cycle. We reward incivility. What part
of the war on virtue? UM then creates that process of just a less
civil culture. Well, we can begin with with with parents and the broken
families that we see across the country. It's very difficult. Boys in particular
need fathers, all right, Girls need them too, but boys need them
at least to tame them because they have a higher just us their own rate,
which is why they're more risk prone, which is why they're more likely
to get involved in violent crime. And when you don't have that, when
you have a breakdown, that's when you've got the situation getting under control.
The schools are not demanding discipline. They have now equity education, which means
that you have to have a quota for the number of kids who can be
disciplined. They say it's a problem of people of color. No, it's
not a problem of people of color. The Asians are almost never involved,
all right. It's usually whites and Hispanics and blacks in an ascending order there.
And it typically is related to the fatherless families. I make the point
in the book I come from a fatherless family and I was constantly in trouble
throughout my young years. It has nothing to do with race. That's racist,
and has everything to do with the absence of the father, which today
seventy of the black kids have born out of wedlock, this time in the
nineteen sixties because, as I said, because of what the ruling class did,
creating welfare dependency into destroying the family. It's not inherent in black people.
So that's part of the problem there in the schools. And now you
have to add George Sorrows. All right, he comes in and he funds
the district attorneys in Los Angeles, Gascone, Brand New York City, places
like Chicago and the last guy who just got just one Philadelphia. They're all
funded by George Soros, the intentional breakdown of the social order. Don't arrest
people, Alvin Briggs said, just lastly, the dam here in New York
said, we should not arrest black kids for poverty, for stealing, because
they come from poverty. Now just think about that. You're not going to
arrest black kids for stealing, but theft because they come from poverty. Now,
I've worked in Spanish, all of them. I'm a sociologist who is
torch criminology. Guess who young black steal from. They don't go into Beverly
Hills, all right. They steal from other black people, often women.
So he telled the black woman who had her purse taken from her and all
our money has gone, and our credit guards that we don't want to prosecute.
I didn't even though we have him in our custody because he's black and
he comes from a poor neighborhood. What do you think she is? Where
do you think she lives? I mean, this is another example of just
in this case here a black elites on the left looking down on their own
people, and that's what we're faced with. You we have to pull the
mask off of this facade that if I have good intentions and my rudder is
good, therefore I am good. I don't believe that for a moment.
You have to look look deeper to find out in every case whether that is
true or it's not true. Now, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask.
You mentioned the FBI. Some of this has obviously seemed into the FBI,
and particularly we've learned recently with a target on the Catholic Church, this
idea that some parishes should be as we've seen in FBI documents, some parishes
should be infiltrated by informants in order to keep tabs on, you know,
potential domestic terrorism, How does how do you react to how have you reacted
to hearing all of that about the FBI? Today we look back on former
eras of the FBI not as proudly as we probably you know, would have
preferred the FBI to be operating differently. But now it seems they're doing something
even more insidious. But in particular with particular regard to the Catholic Church,
how have you reacted to news of the FBI's targeting well, you know,
as an Irish Catholic New Yorker, surprise, surprise, second generation. I
come from a family of an awful lot of law enforcement people, and I've
always loved them, and I still do as family members as many of them
have past. But quite frankly, I've never say anything like this in my
life. And I'm not talking about the average FBI man or woman who's an
agent. I'm talking about the elites. It's always the elites. It's the
ones that who have become corrupt. Now they began by going after ju aditional
Catholics who like the Latin Mass. Now listen, I like the Latin Mass.
I don't go to it. I go to the Nova's Order, which
is the new Mass, and that's fine. I've met a lot of people
who are the traditional Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass. Some of them I
like, some of them I don't like. They can get a little far
out there in some cases. But quite frankly, I've never known any of
them to be a threat to the social order. They're not exactly Antifa.
So I wonder what is the FBI doing? But then things got worse.
Then things get worse. Now the latest revelation is they started going after mainline
Catholics. No, it's not just the traditional ethics, which is bad enough
because they didn't do any wrong. But you go after the mainline people,
the ones who go to the English Mass, so to speak. And what
have they done? Why are you asking Catholics to spy on each other?
And that's what the FBI has been doing. Now. This is an egregious
violation of the First Amendment, the right to free exercise of religion. The
idea that the government, the FBI is now going to police Roman Catholics is
either Pew, not even some extremists, but the ones in their Pew who
are great contributed to American society. This is a very, very dangerous path
that we're going down. And I wouldn't care if they're going after Jews or
Muslims, or Protestants or Mormons. If you're talking about the average person in
every group is a good person. If you got an extremist and you think
there's violence there, okay, that's different. The FBI wasn't doing that.
They were just simply going after at this case, now all Catholics. They
started with the Some people might regard them as the fringe. I don't,
but if you want to call them as fringe, fine, But now they're
going after the ones in the pew, the mainline Catholics. There's no evidence
whatsoever the Catholics are the country. Meanwhile, Antipa and James Revenge, the
pro abortion group have been thrashing and vandalists and destroying Catholic property and killing people.
And what has been the response of the DOJ under Merritgal and I've written
Jim several times, what have they done? At least Jim Jordan, the
Jim of the House Indistry, has responded and it is looking into this.
But we've got to get to the bottom of this. We can't have corruption
in eye places when we deal with this religion in particular, you know,
and that's a good place to start, you know, winding down here because
the ruling class, as you use in the title, um and I think
it's a great definition of the kind of enemy. It's a virtue here.
How do you go about truly changing the ruling class in an era where they're
using the FBI to go after the Catholic Church. What can what can be
done for the future to ensure that rather than waging a war on virtue,
our ruling class upholds virtue. Well, I think we can again with the
corporate ruling class for than government. In the terms of the government, you
have to vote people out, you who are putting in the DA's like who
are the Soil's fund of das. In terms of the corporate world, which
is a great disappointment, they've gotten so involved in this. I'm telling about
Walmart as well, not just Apple and Google and an Ouphment and and others.
Because we've even seen religious organizations, unfortunately a wonderful group the Salvation Army,
where the elites have been selling out to adopting critical racetary Most of the
people in the corporate world would rather be a political they'd rather be agnostic.
They'd rather just go back there and sell their brand. And that's why the
thing that's happening with bud Light is so important, because if there's a pushback,
I mean, it's going to be the push up. It has to
come from the bottom up, not the top down the tops. The problem
the top is the pump pushback. If they earned that we have paid attention
to the shareholders and not the stakeholders or the activists, they'll begin to say,
you know what, we went to par in the first place. Why
don't we just get back and sell soap, sell talcolm powder, sell beer,
sell cheese, whatever it is that we're selling, sell shoes. Why
do we have to make a political statement about everything? And I think that
quite frankly, there would be a sigh of relief in many corporate quarters where
they'd say, let's make that shift. So I don't believe that this thing
is irreversible. I think that you have to vote people out who are in
government, in the ruling class, and I think you have to push back
in the way of Boycott's and the like with the corporate world. And this
can be done. It's just that we have a long ways back. Fantastic
insight. Thank you so much both. Donnay, author of the War on
Virtue, How the ruling class is killing the American Dream. We really appreciate
you joining the show. Well, thank you for this opportunity. Keep up
to great work. Of course you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dreshinski, culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll
be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious
for the frame.