Written by Jerry Newcombe

Dr. Richard Land once called our country, “the divided states of America.” How apt — especially when we survey the various responses to the coronavirus. They are lessons in liberty and lessons in tyranny.

To paraphrase what a friend of mine wrote me recently, “We have 50 real-world government examples of liberty or tyranny — 50 real-time experiments in whether state governments moved towards liberty (as in Texas and South Dakota) or absolute control (as in California, Michigan and New York).” As a resident, I would add: Florida’s leadership is doing a great job.

Churches Closed, Planned Parenthood Open

Nowhere can this contrast be better seen than in how the state authorities deal with churches versus how they deal with abortion, ordering churches closed while deeming Planned Parenthood and other abortionists “essential services.”

How fitting. In her classic book, Godless, Ann Coulter postulates that abortion is the left’s “sacrament.” The sacraments of the church are out. The left’s new sacrament is in. The most pro-abortion leaders are the ones who are most cracking down on real constitutional freedoms in their states. If a politician gets abortion wrong, they tend to get everything else wrong too.

This anti-religious spirit at work is exceedingly ironic because America was born as a religious nation. In the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims explained their reason for coming: “For the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.”

Our First Amendment declares our first freedom — freedom of religion. The founders stipulated there would be no national denomination and there would be no prohibition on the “free exercise” of religion. They didn’t add, “except in times of pestilence.”

“No Pandemic Exception to the Bill of Rights”

Indeed, Attorney General William Barr sides with the churches (following social distancing guidelines, etc.) in this conflict. He said, “There is no pandemic exception to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.”

But many of the left today have used the pandemic crisis to try and shut down a lot of religious services:

• The mayor of Kansas City, Missouri was demanding that churches hand over a list of anyone who attended any of their services. When Mat Staver and Liberty Counsel threatened to sue, the city backed down.

• The governor of Illinois postulated that church services may need to be banned for a year. This is the same governor who prohibited residents in his state from traveling — while apparently his wife vacationed in Florida.

• Overzealous administrators have sought to ban churches even from holding “drive-in” church services, which follow the mandates to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

If your church parking lot permits, holding a drive-in service is a clever way to worship the Lord together. Usually, the pastor would preach to the congregation in their cars though a low frequency on the FM dial in such services.

“A Lesson to Governors”

But even in the Bible belt, such as in Kentucky and Mississippi, some overzealous administrators have tried to shut such services down. First Liberty Institute has threatened lawsuits, and the cities have relented.

The Wall Street Journal had an editorial entitled, “Caesar, God and the Lockdowns,” in which they note, “A federal court ruling on religious liberty is a lesson to governors.”

The editorial talks about Maryville Baptist Church in Louisville, which held a modest Easter service — with some worshipers inside and others in the parking lot, hearing the service through a loudspeaker.

To harass the worshipers, notes the WSJ, “The police took down license-plate numbers. The church sued.”

A panel on the Sixth Circuit ruled in favor of the church: “It’s not always easy to decide what is Caesar’s and what is God’s — and that’s assuredly true in the context of a pandemic. … Why is it safe to wait in a car for a liquor store to open but dangerous to wait in a car to hear morning prayers?”

The Left-Right Divide in Leadership

A new report out of Chicago over the weekend shows the lengths to which the anti-God forces will go. Wirepoints observes that the mayor sought to punish a church, Philadelphia Romanian Church, to prevent it from holding services. They stated, “On Sunday morning the tow trucks descended — not just on churchgoers, but on residents and everybody else, and on a private lot used by parishioners.”

The pastor of the church said, “The mayor is inciting hate against the church which is very sad. A lot of our members risked their lives to escape Communism, only to find it germinating in 2020 under Mayor Lightfoot in Chicago.” Lori Lightfoot is so committed to abortion rights, she helped drive out of office one of the last Democrat, pro-life U. S. Congressmen.

Wirepoints adds, “It should also be a clarion call to the churches across the city as to how far the left will go to crush the faithful of all denominations.”

Freedom-loving Americans can look at a map of the country and see how those on the left versus those on the right are delicately handling the crisis. The abortion-loving, church-hating politicians stand in great contrast with their freedom-loving counterparts in the red states.

Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is a senior producer and an on-air host for D. James Kennedy Ministries. He has written or co-written 32 books, such as The Unstoppable Jesus Christ, American Amnesia: Is American Paying the Price for Forgetting God?, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (with D. James Kennedy) and the bestseller, George Washington’s Sacred Fire (with Peter Lillback). Learn more at jerrynewcombe.com and follow him on Twitter @newcombejerry.

The shooting of GOP House Whip Steve Scalise and several other Republicans during an early morning baseball practice this month is as unsurprising as it was dreadful. Some of our deepest expectations were realized in that moment, as the furious rhetoric being churned out by the Left finally expressed itself in the ultimate form of contempt: an attempt to assassinate political leaders.

It wasn’t hard to predict where our national discourse was taking us. For years in the halls of Congress and in the courts, we’ve been engaged in a civil war. There’s been a marked increase in the use of the term “civil war” by those who spend their days opining on culture. It’s all been there but the shooting, and now we can check that box.

Until that happened, we all hoped that what was left of the original American spirit—the rule of law, respect for human dignity, a sense of honor, and love of country—would hold back the baser instincts of human nature. But we could all feel the rope fraying.

Even a cursory look at the last few years reveals a surprising amount of unfiltered and increasingly hostile rhetoric coming from politicians, entertainers, professors, scientists, philosophers, and other public figures.

It started with words

• Words from Barack Obama: “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” and “I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.”

• Words from Donald Trump: “Anybody who hits me, we’re gonna hit them ten times harder” and “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

• Words from Hillary Clinton: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.… Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America” and “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”

• Words from DNC Chairman Tom Perez: “[Trump] doesn’t give a s— about health care;” U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY): “Has [Trump] kept his promises? No. F— no;” U.S. Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA): “[Trump is a] disgusting, poor excuse of a man;” and former Clinton running mate Tim Kaine (D-VA): “What we’ve got to do is fight in Congress, fight in the courts, fight in the streets, fight online, fight at the ballot box.”

• Words from Fresno State University lecturer Lars Maischak: “Justice = the execution of two Republicans for each deported immigrant;” “To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better”; and “#TheResistance Has anyone started soliciting money and design drafts for a monument honoring the Trump assassin, yet?”

• Words from Trinity College (CT) professor Johnny Eric Williams: “I’m fed the f— up with self-identified ‘white’s’ daily violence directed at immigrants, Muslims, and sexual and racially oppressed people. The time is now to confront these inhuman a–holes and end this now.”

• Words from Art Institute of Washington professor John Griffin: “[Republicans] should be lined up and shot. That’s not hyperbole; blood is on their hands.”

• Words from former Rutgers adjunct professor Kevin Allred: “Will the Second Amendment be as cool when I buy a gun and start shooting at random white people or no?”

• Words from former CNN personality Reza Aslan: “This piece of s— is not just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He’s an embarrassment to humankind.”

• Words from pop diva Madonna: “Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I’m outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House;” actress Lea DeLaria: “[O]r pick up a baseball bat and take out every f—ing republican and independent I see. #f—trump, #f—theGOP, #f—straightwhiteamerica, “f—yourprivilege;” comedienne Sarah Silverstein: “Once the military is w us fascists get overthrown;” and actor Johnny Depp: “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?”

While the words broke an unspoken decorum, they weren’t much without action. Mobs gathered and marched with signs that read, “Become ungovernable” and “This is war” and “The only good fascist is a dead one.” Violent protests shut down presentations deemed hate speech on college campuses: Dr. Charles Murray at Middlebury College, Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley.

From there it was only a few steps to acting out murder fantasies in the form of “art”: comedienne Kathy Griffin decapitating Donald Trump; rapper Snoop Dogg shooting Donald Trump in a “music” video; and a Shakespeare play featuring the murder of “Julius” Trump.

And finally, someone put these sentiments into action, unleashing a hailstorm of bullets on unsuspecting Republican congressmen practicing for a charitable baseball game.

As much as I regret making the distinction, the animus is almost wholly on the Left of the political spectrum. It is the Left that has become hostile to historical, traditional American values. It is the Left that has mocked Christianity and rejected our Judeo-Christian heritage. It is the Left that has labeled the rest of America homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, and misogynistic. It is the Left that accuses white people of having privilege that needs to be checked. It is the Left that has championed the principles of “tolerance,” “diversity,” and “inclusion” as the new American values. It is the Left that has embraced democratic socialism. It is the Left that has twisted American history and alters textbooks, traditions, and monuments.

John Adams once warned in a letter to the Massachusetts Militia:

Should the People of America, once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and Insolence: this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World. Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

In other words, our society was organized on the assumption that our “moral and religious people” would govern themselves under the auspices of godly conduct and that if they didn’t, our country would become a hellhole. Does anyone doubt the truth of his statement?

He wasn’t the first to recognize that laws can’t keep people from wickedness. “When people do not accept divine guidance, they run wild,” wrote the wise man, “but whoever obeys the law is joyful” (Proverbs 29:18).

James T. Hodgkinson didn’t pull the trigger in a vacuum. He did what many of our fellow citizens seem to be calling for. Now that the barrier has been broken, is it only a matter of time before others unbridled by morality and religion step through the breach?”

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Many years ago, I witnessed what happens when people who prevent others from speaking are not dealt with promptly.

During a “Firing Line” taping with William F. Buckley at Bard College in New York State on the topic of “Resolved: The ACLU is full of baloney” (the short answer is “yes”), two female activists stood up and started chanting “women of color have no voice.”

The moderator, a well-known liberal (well, okay, it was Michael Kinsley, who did an otherwise fine job), asked them politely to stop so the debate could continue, but the protesters refused.  At this point, he could have motioned to the campus cops to remove them, but instead let them go on ad nauseum.  I leaned over and whispered to then-ACLU President Nadine Strossen, “Nadine, do something. They’re your children.”  I meant her ideological offspring, of course.  And she did try to reason with them, to no avail.

Unlike some recent incidents, the debate finally went on after Mr. Kinsley gave in to the protesters’ tantrum, let them read a list of nonsensical leftwing ultimatums, and Bard’s president agreed to leave the team he was on in the debate.

I’m not sure how much of this made the eventual PBS broadcast, but it showed the folly of giving in to the heckler’s veto.  That’s when, in the name of free speech, someone silences someone else.  Courts have made it clear that the heckler’s veto is not protected speech under the First Amendment, no more than falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.

Since President Trump’s election, the Left has been in full heckler’s veto mode, egged on by the same progressives who cheered the violent Occupy mobs in 2011 and 2012 and the goons disrupting the Trump rallies last year.

[Recently], protesters threated violence against Republican Party participants in the 82^nd Avenue of Roses Parade in Portland, Oregon, and managed to get the event canceled.   An anonymous email promised that “two hundred or more people” would “rush into the parade into the middle and drag and push those people out…. police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely.”

Then, amid threats of violence, conservative author Ann Coulter was forced to cancel her speech at the University of California, Berkeley.  In February, the campus had suffered $100,000 in property damage when black-clad leftist rioters stopped iconoclast Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking.

In March, political scientist Charles Murray was forced to change venues at Middlebury College in Vermont during a mob attack in which a female professor was injured.  Middlebury itself may be failing to teach about constitutional rights, if a letter signed by 450 alumni prior to Murray’s appearance is any indication:  “This is not an issue of freedom of speech.  In this case we find the principle does not apply.”

Well, okay then. Disagree with us and you lose your rights.

In early April, hundreds of activists blocked an auditorium at Claremont McKenna College in California to prevent author Heather MacDonald from speaking.  Ms. MacDonald’s analysis of crime statistics blows away the media narrative about racist cops spun by the Black Lives Matter movement.  No wonder they wanted her silenced.

For the Left, the issues themselves matter less than a show of force.  As author Angelo M. Codevilla has observed, “The point of PC [political correctness] is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself.”

In “State and Revolution” (1918), Vladimir Lenin wrote:

“The replacement of the bourgeois (middle class) by the proletariat state is impossible without a violent revolution … it is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush its resistance.”

Even if none of this involves something you hold dear, the mobs will get around to you if you’re out of step.  A byproduct is the chilling effect it has had on discourse in general.

I recall when liberals and conservatives could agree to disagree during, say, a party, and leave as friends, or at least not as enemies.  But when’s the last time you went to an eclectic gathering and heard genuine views exchanged?  Nobody dares anymore.  The Left’s scorched-earth tactics have poisoned the well.

In Massachusetts, an editorial at The Wellesley News on April 12 openly advocated attacking anyone who fails to bow to leftwing orthodoxy.  Their definition of what will not be allowed includes “racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia or any other type of discriminatory speech.  Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech.”

The good little Maoists (who are punctuation-challenged) went on to declare, “if people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.” Later, they denied that this meant engaging in violence.

Incidentally, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater charges about $63,300 annually for tuition, room and board.  Apparently, that buys the finest brainwashing against the bourgeoisie that a campus can conjure.

This article was originally posted at Townhall.com

The snowflake metaphor for Millennials who quash speech they don’t like seems particularly inapt. These petulant ruffians are more like jackhammers.

Snowflakes are delicate, silent, complex, singular, ineffably beautiful, and naturally occurring. They fall from the sky through no human intervention.

In contrast, jackhammers are brute, noisy, simplistic, uniform, and ugly creations of man that destroy the seemingly indestructible foundations of the buildings in which we live and the solid paths on which we trod.

Millennials who stomp through the streets, smashing windows and shouting obscenities and witless slogans to protest the expression of ideas they don’t like from Ann Coulter, Heather MacDonald, and Charles Murray are not snowflakes. They’re jackhammers.

They aren’t hurt or offended. They’re outraged at the audacity of anyone who dares to utter ideas with which they disagree. They’re poseurs. They don’t need safe spaces, therapy dogs, coddling or mollycoddling. And they know it.

These fake victims/real jack hammers are the ugly, noisy, brute creations of a Frankensteinian culture. Who is our Victor Frankenstein? Victor is our schools, our heterodox churches, our professional mental health communities, and our storytellers (that is, Hollywood).

Many are aware of the jackhammering of presentations by Coulter, MacDonald, and Murray because those attacks on the First Amendment have been well-covered by FOX News. A lesser known attack was perpetrated against the inestimable scholar Anthony Esolen, who until last week taught at Providence College (aptly called PC), a supposedly Catholic college in Rhode Island. Writing on Public Discourse, Michael Bradley, a graduate student in theology at the University of Notre Dame, offers this description http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/03/18900/ of Dr. Esolen, a prolific writer who contributes to Crisis and Touchstone magazines:

Anthony Esolen is the contemporary incarnation of GK Chesterton. The simple and beautiful prose, the acute diagnostic precision, the commonsense appeal to and on behalf of everyday things, the recipe for renewal—all these things Esolen shares with Chesterton, the preeminent cultural physician of the early twentieth century. Like Chesterton, Esolen bluntly identifies our problems. And like him, Esolen’s solution centers on God and faith, learning and virtue, and a robust sense of human nature.

What, you may be wondering, so incensed the jackhammers at this tiny Catholic-in-Name-Only (CAMO) College that camouflages itself as a Catholic school and lies in wait for unsuspecting Catholic students? Here is an excerpt from the essay Dr. Esolen wrote about intellectual diversity at PC for the Catholic magazine Crisis that got the jackhammers’ motors roaring:

[T]here is no evidence on our Diversity page that we wish to be what God has called us to be, a committedly and forthrightly Catholic school with life-changing truths to bring to the world. It is as if, deep down, we did not really believe it. So let us suppose that a professor should affirm some aspect of the Church’s teaching as regards the neuralgia of our time, sex. Will his right to do so be confirmed by those who say they are committed to diversity? Put it this way. Suppose someone were to ask, “Is it permitted for a secular liberal, at a secular and liberal college, to affirm in the classroom a secular view of sex and the family?” The question would strike everyone as absurd. It would be like asking whether we were permitted to walk on two feet or to look up at the sky. Then why should it not also be absurd to ask, “Is it permitted for a Catholic, at a college that advertises itself as Catholic, to affirm a Catholic view of sex and the family?” And I am not talking merely about professors whose specific job it is to teach moral philosophy or moral theology. I am talking about all professors.

In my now extensive experience, Catholic professors in Catholic colleges have been notably tolerant of the limitations of their secular colleagues. We make allowances all the time. We understand, though, that some of them—not all, but then it only takes a few—would silence us for good, if they had the power. They have made life hell for more than one of my friends. All, now, in the name of an undefined and perhaps undefinable diversity, to which you had damned well better give honor and glory. If you don’t—and you may not even be aware of the lese majeste as you commit it—you’d better have eyes in the back of your head. 

In response, students protested on campus and created a petition signed by students and 40 faculty members in which they pledged to break the silence surrounding the allegedly hateful statements Dr. Esolen made.

I kid you not. Campus Leftists claimed that campus Leftists have been silent about matters related to “diversity” in general and homosexuality in particular.

Worse still the administration refused to meet with Dr. Esolen and a group of other Catholic professors to discuss the issues surrounding diversity (or the lack thereof).

We should by now see the danger in the “hate speech” ideology. Hatred has been redefined to mean absence of  affirmation of all the desires, beliefs, and actions of culturally favored elites. Hatred no longer denotes antipathy toward persons but disagreement with moral claims. To be more accurate, it means disagreement with “progressive” moral claims.

Once hatred was redefined, the Left needed to persuade society that hatred leads to acts of violence via words and then persuade them that acts of violence can be prevented only by banning the hateful words that Leftists claim lead ineluctably to hateful deeds. Voila! The First Amendment is “disappeared.”

Jackhammers believe that if the claim that homoerotic activity is immoral and destructive to individual lives and the public good is spoken, then someone may, in response, say or do ugly things to those who identify as homosexual.

Jackhammers are right. Someone may do something ugly. And whenever jackhammers express the idea that all who hold homoerotic activity as perverse are hateful haters, someone may say or do something ugly to those purported haters. There’s no way to escape or prevent all the dastardly deeds that fallen human beings commit. That’s why we have laws: to prevent and penalize egregiously harmful deeds.

But our Founding Fathers rightly saw that the suppression of speech poses a far greater danger to individuals and the public good than does the abuse that some humans may engage in as a result of hearing ideas.

The mellifluous-sounding babble that has been pouring out of the professional mental health community, our pseudo-educational government  school industry, mainline churches, and Hollywood has taught that self-esteem can grow only when sinful humans are affirmed in their sinful choices and their ids are fed and watered. If we want a metaphor from nature for the juveniles who attack a man of such integrity, wisdom, courage, and intellectual depth as Dr. Esolen, it would not be snowflakes. What we have grown in our cultural hothouses are prickly, unlovely weeds who are taking over the well-tended gardens of civilization.

“Progressives” believe that if we ban the expression of ideas that don’t tickle the ears of “progressives,” we will create utopia. But what about those words that are expressed in print or virtual print? If people shouldn’t be allowed to speak ideas “progressives” find undesirable, why should they be allowed to have them published or posted?  And what about the phenomenon that precedes even speech: thoughts. Just imagine if liberals could find a way to access those.

The good news is that God has worked some ugly things at Providence College together for good for Dr. Esolen, which he describes in a recent heart-melting essay in Crisis Magazine from which this excerpt is taken:

Sometimes a single encounter with what is healthy and ordinary…is enough to shake you out of the bad dreams of disease and confusion. If it isn’t quite yet like meeting Saint Francis on the road, it is like meeting a bluff and jovial fellow who has just come from a conversation with that great little man of God.

I’ve had such an encounter, at Thomas More College, in New Hampshire.

Dr. Esolen’s describes his encounter with devotion to God and love of beauty and truth among both students and faculty at Thomas More College, which led to his decision to leave his tenured position at Providence College for a new position at Thomas More where he will teach and help found a center dedicated to furthering the college’s mission “to wed virtue and scholarship, contemplation with cultural engagement”:

I have countless memories of fine students at Providence College, some of whom are now my close friends; and to my colleagues in Western Civilization—of whom many have retired and some have passed away—I owe a debt I can never repay, for their friendship and support and instruction. But I am too old to want to spend the evening of my career trying to shore up a crumbling wall, when those who are in authority at the college are unwilling to listen to our pleas, or even to meet with us so that we can make the pleas in person….

No, I’d prefer to be in on building something exciting for the Church and for sheer ordinary humanity: The Center for Cultural Renewal, at Thomas More College.

…

A window shuts, and a door opens—or rather the very roof is blown off, and I see again, in their silent and ordinary beauty, the stars.

IFI was deeply blessed and honored to have Dr. Esolen as one of our banquet speakers two years ago.  To be edified by the man jackhammers tried to crush, watch this:

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