We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Tschinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on ex at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website, The Federalist dot Com as well. Today
we are joined once again by Bill Donahue. He is now the author of
the new book Cultural Meltdown, The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis. He's
the author not just of this book, but of other books, and is
the President and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. He
has a PhD in sociology from Ny. You and I think you've written Bill,
you can tell us about this, but ten other books, ten other
books. So this is the question. Yeah, and this is number eleven.
You're right, Emily, Thank you very much, Oh my goodness.
Well, congratulations on the new book, and thanks for coming back on the
show. Thank you for having me. So when you talk about I'll just
zero in on the sub head here of your book, The Secular Roots of
Our Moral Crisis? Can you talk to us a little bit about what you
mean when you say the secular roots. A lot of people might say,
you know, the roots are let's say, you know, different kinds of
religions that have crept in secular religions or you know, full religious let's say,
people would say militant Islam, you know, has contributed to the crisis
of the West and all of that. But you say the secular roots,
can you talk to us a little bit about what that means? Right?
I mean, basically, what I'm arguing in the book is that there are
two irreconcilable visions of society and the human condition. On the one hand,
you have does J Nail Christian understanding, which believes in God, in truth,
in human nature, moral absolutes original sin. And then you have the
secular vision, which denies the existence of God, denies the idea that there
is such a thing as truth, denies human nature, denies the idea that
original sin exists. They think you can create heaven here on earth, and
something's got to give here at this point. Now, are there other aspects
of contributing to our society and the like, including maybe some religious groups certainly,
But I see it as this conflict of visions here, irreconcilable visions that
has led to the kind of cultural meltdown that we have in our society.
You can't bridge this. You can't simply say, well, we can compromize
on everything. You either believe in God or you don't. You believe in
human nature, or you don't either believe in moral absolutes or you believe in
moral relativism. If truth is a fiction, and that's what secularists believe,
then we're in trouble. And that, in fact is why we are in
trouble. There's too many Americans were split believe that there's no such thing as
truth or God, or human nature or moral absolutes, and they reject the
idea of original sin. That's at the heart of our problem. And where
did that start? I mean a lot of people and many times on the
show we've pointed right back to nature. So people would point to Hegel,
so people would point to the Enlightenment period. But where do those secular roots,
how deep do they run? Exactly? Well, Emily, you hit
it right on. The goes back to the seventeenth and eighteenth century, goes
back in particularly with the French during the Enlightenment period the attack on religion,
and then later in the nineteenth century would reach and he said God is dead,
and of course so many people picked up on that. But Marx hated
religion. He certainly hated the family. Before him, you had Rousseau.
So yeah, the tentacles of this intellectually go way back. And let's not
forget in the twentieth century, born in Germany and then coming here to New
York the Frankfurt School, which is a blend of Freud and his and for
Thesm and Marxism with what we would call cultural Marxism today, and others have
contributed to this as well. So we have a serious crisis. It's been
in Europe and it's been in North America where this is taken root. And
clearly the French have played a major role in this. I'm thinking about people
like Fuca, who died a number of years ago, was regarded as the
great intellectual, and these people led the war on truth. And once you
think that there's no such thing as truth, then it makes possible for guys
that think they're girls, girls that think their guys, you can make up
your own silly world but it has drassic consequences for people physiologically and psychologically.
Our culture has been torn apart because we reject the common sensical ideas which Christianity
represents. And just to kind of go back to that question of the Muslim
world for a moment, which is not dealing quite in the same way with
this crisis of secularism, I wanted to ask Bill why you think this emerged
in the West, and again with that sort of context that you and I
are both well aware of, many people have diagnosed this sort of issue as
being within liberalism itself, that this is sort of the arc of classical liberalism
small L obviously is that Do you think that's the case that these small L
liberal societies inevitably slouch into dystopia. Well, I think that's part of it.
I mean, for example, the idea that we should have tolerance of
everybody. That sounds very good and I'm certainly not navigating intolerance, but you
have to if you're going to have a free society, there has to be
a moral consensus. That doesn't mean unanimity, it does mean that people,
most people have to agree on what is right and what is wrong. Traditionally
that has been the understanding of the Ten commandments. Now, when you have
a situation where some people who believe in is law not all come into this
country with a very different understanding of man and of society, and are not
willing to assimilate into our society, you have a situation which Henry Issinger described
before he died. He said, you know, one of the big mistakes
I made was encouraging immigration, mass immigration into Europe. It doesn't work.
There are some people who don't want to blend in. They don't want to
assimilate. They don't accept the tenets of the jail Christian understanding of society.
So there's been a role there and unfortunately, isn't it interesting? We just
saw it recently on the campuses queers for Palestine. Why wait a minute,
what's going on here? How can you be a homosexual and promote the cause
of Hamas they're the first people to behead you. Now, how is it
that the people in this country on the left who would be the first ones
to be beheaded if the Islamist took over, are in fact in bed with
them. The one thing that conjoins them at the hit help is the hatred
of the Western civilization, hatred of a America and hatred of Israel. And
I guess the free libertines on the left are willing to gamble that. You
know, we'll take any any encouragement and any help we can get from our
islam as brothers, and maybe we'll escape their persecution. That's how irrational they've
become. And we've just shown here very clearly on the college campuses. You
know, I was just going to ask Bill for people who saw what happened
on campuses over the last and not just on campuses, but throughout our culture
since October seventh, this upheaval, what will they find in your book when
they're looking for answers? How do you address, you know, the events
that we saw at Columbia and UCLA. What will they find in your book
to help them kind of work through what's going on? Thank you. In
fact, the reason I wrote the book is precisely to answer the questions which
I bring up on the first page and quoting Hegel, the world has gone
topsy turvy. We all know that my job as a sociologist is to try
to make it understandable to the average reader. You don't have to be a
specialist how this happened. And at first, the first thing you have to
understand is it always always begins with ideas. You can never understand any ism
unless you understand that the ideologies are driven by the intellectuals. I mentioned the
French, I mentioned the Germans, the Americans. There are certainly many others
who have contributed to the idea that there's no such thing as God. Everything
is possible, we can create utopia here on earth. Truth is a fiction.
Once you go down that road, you set up the situation for tyranny,
as we've seen throughout history. And so if people understand the intellectual roots,
and then they see how they've affected the activists and how the activists put
them into play, you'll see what happens. You know. It's interesting.
I often deal with this when people say, well, no, you Christians,
you've had your problems. Oh yeah, we have. I wrote a
book about the clergy sexual abuse a few years ago. But remember, every
person who has done something outrageous as a Christian or as a practicing Jew,
has violated the tenets of the Jeneo Christian heritage. They violated them. The
people who have plundered and murdered in the name of Marxism, in the name
of cultural Marxism. These are people who are compliant with the very ideas and
the tenants as set down by Marx and angles. So there's an incredible difference.
You've never been able to reach a society which is perfection, and in
fact, I think attempting to create perfection on earth is one of the most
pernicious ideas that we can ever entertain. It always leads to bloodshed and genocide
because the people who believe that believe that they are morally and intellectually superior,
and therefore you must do what you're told, and that's why coercion is always
a possibility. We have to understand the society is held together voluntarily, cooperatively
when people agree that there is something so called civil society. That's what stands
between the individual and the state. I'm talking about the family, the community,
voluntary associations, the school, the church in particular, that's what shields
us from the totalitarianism what we've seen in the past. And so my goal
is to try to make intelligible to the average reader how this happened and how
it unfolded. So now we can get a bit of grass on what to
do about it. You know, I was just gonna ask Bo about the
role that sort of vision of utopia that is not new. As you mentioned,
you said, it always leads to genocide, It always leads to strife,
which implies, of course, that this is part of something we've seen
before, that's nothing new under the sun. But you know, it's funny
you mention that, because I was also thinking about the role that technology has
played in making us feel like we can experience utopia here on earth. There
were, you know, as we're taping this, there was a successful new
whirlink implantation, and it does feel, you know, like we get a
inch ever closer, or not even inch, We're hurling ever closer to this
idea of a life that is free from pain, as a lot of the
tech utopiasts would tell us, Does that play a role in some of this
bill? Yeah, I think you're right, and I think that you know,
this whole idea that's being pushed by lots lots of very wealthy people,
the idea that we can read your thought patterns. It's all about monitoring,
it's all about control. That's what this is really about. And their idea
of the utopian society is certainly not the one I'm sharing. I believe in
improvements, I believe in progress. I don't believe in perfection. In fact,
I think we should resist those kind of appeals. But it's interesting too.
Emily had here, while the utopians have always failed, Marks failed,
and the like, and now we see today. I kind of end the
book by saying, and the left understands that they're intellectually and morally bankrupt.
They're exhausted. Now they've given up. We now have a kind of nihilism,
as epitomized by whom Antifa. For one, these people are very good
at tearing down that which they don't like. They're horrible about giving us a
blueprint for the future to make things better. Whatever we said about the Marxists
in the past, at least they thought that by tearing down capitalism, creating
socialism and then communism, you could hunt in the morning, fish in the
afternoon, criticize after dinner. That's what Mark said to this wonderland society that
he had. But they did have a vision of making things better. But
now nobody point to the Soviet Union, or to now or to Hitler,
it was another utopian on the left, I might add the National Socialist Party.
No conservative ever believes in the maximum state. They always believe in a
minimal state. Every time you've had these people who think that we're going to
consolidate the power of this state and therefore we're going to make things better,
look out for them. But now they've gone the other way. They like
the little boy who can't build as a rector set, so he takes a
hammit to it and destroys it. That's what we're dealing with here, and
we saw it here in the college campuses. Hey, we're not even like
the ones in the sixties who had some idea of how to try to make
society better. All they wanted to do is destroy things and make sure that
Uber delivered their hamburger on time. But they took over the buildings On Columbia.
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You can uber in the morning, you can tweet in the afternoon. I
don't know what luck would have then come up with. Now I know you're
running right, right right, And you know it's crazy to think about people
who grew up without you know, just your point on consensus makes me continue
thinking about technology. People who grew up after network TV had sort of splintered
into what we get with Netflix. You know, when you have more than
three choices, you just end up with people not sharing, you know,
even the same kind of cultural language. And that sounds like a silly thing,
but it's just it seems to me, you know, I grew up
after Johnny Carson, but it seems to me there was something to the cohesion
that we all got from, you know, watching Johnny Carson and Cronkeye,
and it made it easier to have that point of consensus. Yes, and
the technology has contributed to this kind of aggregatious disaggregation. I should say that
exists in our society today and that plays a role. But let's also not
effect. Remember here, what goes on in the campus is it started in
the nineteen eighties. It's called multiculturalism. Hey, hey, ho ho,
Western culture has got to go. That's what Jesse Jackson and his ilk were
screaming in nineteen eighty eight on the campus to Stanford University. Now, multiculturalism
in its most benign form means we should understand and respect people of different cultures.
That's not what it is. It's a club. It's a tool be
down Western civilization. Then it ain't understood this well Arthur Schlessinger Junior understood this.
Well, that's what it's about. It's about separating people, and that's
why Columbia and others still have to this day separate graduation ceremonies for blacks and
whites. The clan must love this. It's everything they've ever wanted. I
call it my book to do Aparthot. So you're segregating people on the base
of class, on race. It's all about division, and that's why at
the end of the book I have a couple of chips. They're deally divided
before they do exactly what they're doing. And I want the listeners to understand
none of this is by mistake our side. When we say well, you
know, they meant well, and they'd no, no, no, they
don't mean well. They know exactly what they're doing. Read what they say.
I spent my life reading what they say. Sure, there are some
people in the municipalities and who misunderstood some policy and they don't do it right.
They make mistakes. But what I'm talking about here is the hardcore left,
when they like Francis Fox, Pivot and Richard Cloward out of Columbia University,
set in the nineteen sixties. The goal is to get every person who's
remotely eligible and put them on welfare with the purpose of detroying the system.
If we destroy the system, we'll have to bring in socialism, and then
we'll get a federal answer. That's what they said. People, I'm not
saying and I'm just quoting it. It's well understood what they wanted to do.
Of course, they did bankrupt the city. The city did go backrup.
We didn't bring in socialism, we didn't bring in nirvana, we didn't
bring in some kind of utopian society, which translated means nowhere anyway. But
we didn't make the life of people miserable. And nobody has paid the penalty
for this more than African Americans. Black people have been exploited by white people
who are well educated, who think that they know better, who look down
on these people who don't, who have low expectations for them. It's all
cut on the same court. They always know better than everybody else. And
the President of the United States recently contributed to this at Morehouse College, telling
blacks that basically their losers in society, they've beaten down. They can't expect
any progress because the white man has kept you in his place. What an
encouraging, inspiring speech. Yeah, and that's another question of you know,
there was a pull out just today about comparisons between gen Z and the baby
boomer generation on patriotism, and it's incredible. Bill. My question for you
is how much it seems this is a response to a very deliberate effort that
was happening out in the open. Jesse Jackson, Hey, Hey, ho
ho, Western CIV has got to go. What did people think was going
to happen thirty years down the road. It seems like it's going exactly as
planned by people like Jesse Jackson. Well, it is, there's no question
about it. We're at a crisis point in our society. And I don't
use that word for mismossly. We really are at a crisis. I've never
seen anything quite like it. When you have people who are now wanting to
substitute the American flag and put in an Islamic flag, when they're looking about
the glory and the wonders and the liberating effect of moss how it's good.
I call it child abuse in the book. It's child abuse. But they
called us a good thing to teach little kids to think that they're not really
of the right sex, and maybe they want to undergo a chemical castration and
puberty blockers and sex reassignment surgery. We're dealing with evil here. This is
not normal. But this is what happens when you go down this road.
And we've seen what happens when you believe in moral relativism. That's thriving a
lot of this. And I have a segment in the book about what happened
in Weimer, Germany, back in the nineteen twenties, in the early thirties
before him that came into power. Everybody knows about the political reasons and the
economic reasons as to how he came into power, and the overreaching of the
Versailles and punishing the German people, and the depression and the runaway inflation and
all that's true, and the humiliation on the part of the Allies. But
what people don't talk about was the cultural collapse of Germany in the nineteen twenties,
the kind of libertinism that took place, people having sex in the streets,
people opening up the first transgender clinics. They didn't call it that at
that particular point. The total degradation of society. The why is this important
to hip them? Because when you break down the idea that people have to
restrain themselves, that people have to agree on some type of ordered liberty,
then all kinds of things become possible. This breeds what sociologists call an on
me a condition of normallessness. Whereas there's no sich thing is right and wrong.
Well, if there's no sich thing is right and wrong, oh,
we to tell the Nazis that they're wrong, you know. I mean,
it's just the same mentality which says, listen, if you don't believe in
slavery, that's your opinion. I do. So you don't want to own
a slave, that's your business. I do want to own one. And
what is this is it of yours? I go into this at great length
and the whole idea that morality comes down to consent. That's all that matters
as long as you agree. Really, so the mother and the son can
agree to have sex. So now incest is okay in our society because you
have mutual consent. If people realize where we're going, and it doesn't have
to happen in the most extreme manifestation right now. But that's where we're headed.
If people don't understand God gave us breaks, and particularly men put the
breaks on their end a pleasure of principle, and when you don't, you're
going to have a runaway situation of libertinism. And that's what we see in
our society, which is not liberty. It's the abuse of liberty. Madison
and others Ward, what would happen if we went down this road? A
lot of people have warned us. And actually on that point, it reminds
me of someone of what you were saying about the French Revolution. My colleague
John Daniel Davidson refers to this as or the future as quote pagan America in
his book, which I actuld called pagan America. And it reminds me because
you mentioned the French Revolution of you know immediately what the Jacobins did. Because
a lot of my friends on the left will say, for example, I
can have human rights without God. I can have classical liberalism without a belief
in Jesus Christ. What do you say to that? Bill, I say
that if I want to kill you and make you my slave, on what
grounds can you object? That's what I would say. I feel like making
you a slave. You have a different opinion, So now we're equal.
Right, all opinions are equal. If we take up position, then you
can justify everything in this world. And by the way, John does very
good work. Commend him. And he's right to talk about the paganism.
Remember people, it was the paganist in the Roman era said that every kind
of sexual expression man, boy, sex and life, that's all good.
You could do whatever you wanted to woman. The woman had no right,
The husband had all the rights. Where did we get the idea that rights
that the men have to respect them, that you have to stay be involved
in a monogamous relationship and practice fidelity. Shouldn't accept every alternative lifetile good.
The sexual revolution of the first century, it's called the Christian sexual revolution.
So if you believe then everything goes, then you have no moral grounds than
to resist when people disagree with you. I can come back and say,
no, God commanded us. It's in the Ten Commambments. You don't believe
in God, you're down to opinion, and that doesn't seem to work too
well. And you know, another question for disaffected leftists who are even just
looking at the cover of your book. The cover art is excellent. People
should check it out if they haven't seen it yet, and co get the
book. But I feel like that would resonate with a lot of people who
maybe are always center. They would vote Republican and they vote Democrat. Maybe
they consider themselves socially liberal fiscally conservative, but they're really upset about what happened
in twenty twenty. They're really upset about what's happened since twenty twenty. They're
looking around and they're wondering what on earth. Only thirty three percent of Generation
Z is proud to be an American. That's the pole that I was referencing
earlier. They're thinking, where did what happened in the country I grew up?
And I'm terrified about the future. If this is what it's going to
look like, what should they start thinking about? Bill Well, For one
thing, they are to be educated. I mean, the ignorance is incredible.
I spent twenty years in education, sixteen as a professor. As I
say, multiculturalism was the beginning of this, that was even after the nineteen
sixties. But we're literally teaching people to hate the ignorance on the part of
today's students about anything and you know, the only thing which I talked about
in the book, which is apropos here if you compare the American creed,
which is the belief in freedom and equality for everybody and rule by law,
to reality, of course we fail, obviously, because you're never going to
get the situation where it's perfect. But what the intellectuals have done, they
don't compare us to the where we were in the past. When I taught
a class in social problems, I never had the students just go by the
textbook, which is always written by the left. I said to them,
wait a minute, let's talk about race, let's talk about class, let's
talk about women, whatever the subject might be. Let's compare today to where
we were fifty one hundred and fifty two hundred years ago in this country.
Have we made progress? And then I would say this, let's take the
same subject and compare us today. Ladies around the world. How are they
doing in Africa, how are they doing in Latin America, how are they
doing in the Middle East? On the Muslim run nations, how are they
doing in communist China? How are they doing in Russia? And now you
get a mature understanding. Instead they compare us to a never never land.
You know, the professor could always create utopia on the blackboard, and he
compares present conditions to the American creed. Remember back in nineteen forty before it
was a sweetish economist. I'm gonna Myrtle who come over here and wrote an
American dilemma. He said, America is clearly not a racist society, but
it has had racism, has marked its history. And how will it work
out? Well, you have a tension between the American creed, which is
beautiful, and the reality that they are making progresive market, and eventually it
will reconcile itself by a triumph of the American creed. What we're teaching today
is we're all phonies, we're all liars. Everyone's been exploited. You know,
is it doing it the most? The people who actually live a world
of white privilege, And they're the ones now telling us that everybody else lives
the world of white privilege. So I guess that the Hispanics who are cleaning
the toilets of the NBA and the and the nfl H multimillionaires, they might
be the oppressors. According to these people's logic, it really is striking?
And where do you think lawmakers, people who deal in policy and even you
know people voters, right, people who are you know, on their phones,
on the phones with congressman or you know, quizzing them at the local
town hall meetings. Where should people who are thinking about the policy space be
focused when it comes to fixing this issue? Is it something that you know
you need both obviously policy and cultural change? Does the cultural change have to
come before any policy change because it's a country that doesn't have the appetite for
the maybe the tough medicine that it needs in the policy space. What happens
going forward with just laws? Yeah, I'm you know, as a sociologist,
obviously I lean to the culture changing the society, and everything in society
pretty much is a reflection of it. However, I want to emphasize this.
I do believe that you just take one issue, the transgenderism, the
child abuse, these eighty percent of these into a transition. You know,
girls think they want to be boys and they ruin them for life. The
only way you're going to stop that is through the state, to litigation,
to Paris rebel. Now they're already doing that in Europe. So there's some
good signs here. The Dutch of a greed at the twenty eleven study which
started this as all flawed. The English, the Swedes, the Norwegians or
the French, they're all beginning to say that this is crazy. Sometimes it
takes lawsuits to change the culture. It did, you know, with integration.
Let's face a Brown versus Board of Education in nineteen fifty four was a
legal decision which had held, which which propelled the kind of integration that we've
seen in the progress in many respects nineteen the right. Sometimes you can't wait
for the culture to teach them to teach the state. Sometimes the state has
to teach culture. So I can see it both ways. But the American
people need to be educated. And I keep saying to people if you hear
somebody on radio or TV, or you read something that strikes you in your
gut as being bizarre, wrong, I don't care if the person has how
many alphabets after his name, trust your gut. Too. Many of the
so called experts have ruined our society. Again. I've worked with professors most
of my life. Many of them are good men and women, but some
of them are the most dysfunctional people I've ever seen. They don't have a
lick of common sense. I even quote Laurie Calhoun in the book, who's
a postmodernist philosopher, and one philosopher who's onto her game. He asked her
a very simple question. And I'm not making this up, people, It's
all annotated. Every one of my books is rich with attribution. I don't
just have opinions. And this professor Detmar said to her, I got to
ask you a question. Are jiraffs taller than ants? And her answer was
no, that's an article of religious faith. That's what happens when postmodernism goes
off the rails, You become crazy. Is Trump going to raise taxes?
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Also, when most modernism goes off the reels and is combined with hyper modern
technology, that makes it impossible for us to It feels like, at least
from my perspective, bil it makes it impossible to find those points of consensus.
I guess I just am curious if you have any more thoughts on that
building consensus. When the tech has us sort of algorithmically intentionally all clustered into
different niches, well we have to do a better job of reaching of course
the isle in terms of the faith communities. When I first started here in
New York, and I mean back coming back home to New York, you
have to be in a stint in Pittsburgh as a professor. There was a
guy to the Artchsdyce in New York. His name is Jack Swane. Since
passed away, they should institutionalize people like him. His goal was to reach
out to Jews, that Protestants, other Catholics, the Orthodox, the Muslim,
every community possible, not just here but elsewhere. We have to understand
there are an awful lot of people who may not share our faith in our
theological understanding, but then nonetheless, culturally they're on the same side with us,
and so we shouldn't say, well, you know, I can't identify
with all these Muslims because I don't agree with everything. You don't have to
agree with everything. We've got to get mature on this and start reaching across
the aisle, educating ourselves, but also we're willing to form coalitions where it's
possible with reasonable people, and particularly within the faith communities. That's so interesting,
especially in education, if we you know, it's kind of where we
started. But just as we're winding down, I'm curious about what prescriptions for
change in academia you might have, Bill, because you've spent a long time
thinking about this and you know academia very well. To me, also,
I've worked with students a lot, and I've worked on campuses. I wonder
if it's not too big of a challenge, And that sounds pessimistic, but
it just seems like turning the Titanic around. What do you think Bill can
be done? Well? It is a big problem on the campus. There
are very few schools that haven't gone and accepted the Wolk agenda. I would
simply do this all you need to do. I'm not going to aim any
particular school. It could be any school you want. Let's say your kid
is in high school and he's thinking about going to ABC college or university.
One of the things you may want to do is to reach out to those
professors. There's always good, level headed, common sensical, patriotic American professors
on every college campus. They may be in a minority, but they're there.
Find out who they are. You can find well, my office and
we'll give you a couple of resources the different places you can check find out
who they are and sit down or ask to meet with somebody like that who
could maybe guide your students to some of the professors on campus who will not
corrupt your kids mind ideologically, so when they come back at Thanksgiving for their
first opportunity to find out there's a different kind of society there. Altogether,
you can't you can't do it all together, but you have to navigate this
a little better. I understood as a guy who worked as a professor as
a conservative. I know I was outnumbered and sometimes am I case because I'm
out I'm outspoken. Anyway, it actually helped me to be outspoken, because
if they came after me, it was so obvious what they were doing.
I think sometimes when you try to hide the fact that you're a patriotic American,
now, maybe sometimes you have to do it sometimes. Can you setting
yourself up for disaster? But check out the colleges and universities and check out
those level headed people on the campuses and ask for their advice in terms of
what as and what professors on the campus that you might facilitate your kid's education.
And Bill, I do have one more question, just again based on
the cover of the book, which I love. It evokes the protesters who
are throwing soup and whatever else onto great works of art in the name of
climate change. And there's what's called climate anxiety that some holes have found is
actually rather widespread among Generation Z, which is interesting because as they are also
kind of aiming for utopia, they're sort of miserable. And you know,
it's it's ugly to deface art. It's it's ugly to take these great works
of beauty and deface them in the name of climate justice or you know,
anti capitalism or whatever it is. What do you think that speaks to that,
you know, these these protests have been so specifically in many many cases
focused on defacing beauty. I think it deals with the dinirationation of a large
segment of our population, and by that I mean the rootlessness. I just
did a paper recently on suicide. We're now up to about fifty thousand Americans
record number committing suicide. Who are the most likely to do so, young
people who have no belief in God, who are the most secular in the
generation ze liberal Democrats are the most likely to kill themselves. Men are far
more likely to kill themselves than women. But leaving the men out and the
like. What I'm saying is that these kids are suffering from anxiety or sometimes
it's constribed. There's no question about it. Newsreare young kids. The therapy
dog doesn't work all right. It may make you feel a little bit better
right now, it's a massage people of faith, and I wrote a book
about this a few years back called the Catholic Advantage Out, Health, Happiness,
and Heaven Await The faithful people of faith, and not necessarily Catholics across
the board, particularly in Western religion, are the ones who can handle adversity.
They're also the happiest of people without question. Now, you just don't
adopt religion because I want to be happy. So it doesn't work on like
a light switch. But you know, I compared the cloistered nuns, who,
according to our society, they must be the least free. I compared
them to the Hollywood celebrities, who must be the freest people on earth.
And guess who the healthiest are psychologically, physically, and who are the happiest
Yeah, clearly people of faith. So the fact is that every time we
have a problem on the campus. I just looked at the CDC's recommendations to
help people who are suicidal. Not once did they ever mention that perhaps you
ought to consult a clergy person. No, it was always a secular response.
The problems are secular driven, and their answer is another secular response,
which only makes it worse. I mean, I'm not sure what the leftists
ever done right, beginning back when Brousseau is teaching Robust Pierre what to do,
and now we're aout crisis situation. The long as we keep religion as
the boogeyman we're going to be, we're going to suffer the consequences in our
society, and I'm on that proclaiming some you know, crazy far right out
you know cults. I don't believe in that myself. I'm talking about a
moderate, common sensical understanding of our religious roots, tothlic, modestly Jewish,
and others. Bill donahue is the author of the book Cultural Meltdown, The
Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis, and of course ten other books. As
we mentioned at the top, that book is out on June eighteenth. He's
also the President and CEO of the Catholic League League for Religious and Civil Rights.
Bill, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Well,
thank you, it's been my pleasure. You guys do wonderful work.
Keep it up. Oh well, we really appreciate that. We appreciate you
being here. I'm an Alisashinsky, culture editor at the Federalists. We'll be
back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for
the fray. All