Manufacturing and Trade as a ‘Moral Crisis’

Both as a candidate, and now as president, Donald Trump knows how to intensify attention on a topic. Since he launched his presidential campaign two years ago, manufacturing jobs and fair trade have been the focus of a massive debate on the political right.

Is this a topic for the Illinois Family Institute? Here are a few excerpts from an article by John Horvat II titled “Work without Men” that suggests it might well be. He writes that negotiating new trade arrangements, and lowering tax and regulatory burdens are all critical to bringing back jobs.

Such measures will indeed create jobs and open up opportunities, but they alone will not make America great.

America faces a grave moral crisis that needs to be addressed. As Charles Murray and so many other scholars have stressed, America is coming apart. A vast underclass has developed that is the result of broken families, shattered communities, a nonexistent work ethic, substance abuse, and godless education. The mantra of “bringing jobs back” is not going to reverse the downward path of a nation without finding ways to rebuild a strong moral foundation.

So much for the claim that economic issues are separate from moral issues.

“Americans have changed over the decades,” Horvat writes, and many “no longer have stable families.”

Here’s a shocking stat from the Manufacturing Institute I’d never seen before:

[N]early two million U.S. manufacturing jobs will remain vacant over the next decade if current trends continue. The crisis is aggravated by growing numbers of retiring baby boomers while the younger generations are not stepping up to the plate.

The reason for the lack of workers is a great talent gap between what is needed and what is available.

. . .

Thus, the problem is not a lack of jobs but a lack of skilled workers. In fact, one labor study found that the average U.S. manufacturer is losing as much as 11 percent of its annual earnings due to a talent shortage. Another survey concluded that almost half of executives would consider reshoring manufacturing operations back to U.S. yet are also concerned about the need for skilled workers.

The root of these economic problems is a moral problem.

“There are indeed many Americans who are out of the workforce to the point that they are not even looking for employment,” Horvat writes, and refers to Nicholas Eberstadt’s “masterful study,” America’s Invisible Crisis: Men Without Work:

The book documents a disturbing fact that “an invisible army” of ten million idle American men of prime working age, some ten percent of the male workforce, now “spend absolutely no time at a job.” Most don’t want to change their nonemployed status.

Horvat outlines how many of these men prefer to live — and it is not a pretty picture (you can read it here).

“[T]hat is why the focus must be expanded from just the jobs and infrastructure projects that are now all the rage. Unless the new administration concentrates on invigorating the moral fiber of the country, strengthening marriage and the family and limiting the power of the state, America will not recover from its present woes.

With Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Michigan voting for Trump because of his “bringing back jobs” promise, Horvat’s close might be a little overstated:

Indeed, when the jobs come back, there is the risk that no one will show up.

The “invigorating the moral fiber of the country, strengthening marriage and the family and limiting the power of the state,” reads a lot like the mission of the Illinois Family Institute and Illinois Family Action.

A few weeks ago, IFI executive director David Smith and I had the pleasure of visiting with John Westberg, a man who helped build the manufacturing powerhouse AutoMeter in Sycamore, Illinois, about sixty miles west of Chicago.

In the meeting, Westberg was vocal about the fact that the moral foundation of the country is the number one challenge facing us all. But he also has an idea of what to do about the problem of jobs being “shipped out of the country.”

John Westberg’s opinions and ideas deserve attention, since he led his family’s business from 25 to 625 employees, filling 3 plants in 2 states. AutoMeter received national honor by being voted “Manufacturer of the Year” in the automotive high-performance aftermarket. “This honor occurred not once but 4 times.”

After he retired and sold the company, Westberg started the New Hope for America foundation (NHFA), and its website has a plethora of materials supporting his proposed solution.

The SPLC: An Anti-Christian Hate Group

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:18-19).

In the wake of the Charlottesville melee, the mainstream press is citing the disreputable Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and its “hate” groups list ad nauseum with nary a peep about the repeated criticism of the SPLC as a bastion of anti-Christian bigotry.

The Illinois Family Institute (IFI) is included on the “hate” groups list alongside white supremacist and white separatist groups for no reason other than our biblical view of marriage as a sexually differentiated union and our biblical views of sexual morality—views that are shared by the Roman Catholic Church, many Protestant denominations, many non-denominational churches, Orthodox Judaism, 2,000 years of church history, and the Bible.

It’s not just IFI that finds the SPLC and its leaders unethical. The avaricious founder of the SPLC, Morris Dees, and the dishonest editor-in-chief of the “Intelligence Report” which is responsible for the corrupt “hate” groups list, Mark Potok, have come under sustained criticism from many people for many years. (Click here, here, and here to read more.)

Several months ago, one such critic, Real Clear Politics writer Carl Cannon, wrote an exposé of the SPLC, to whom Cannon attributes blame for the anti-free-speech assault on political scientist Charles Murray at radical Middlebury College in Vermont.

Civil rights attorney Dees co-founded the lucrative non-profit SPLC in 1971, ostensibly to combat the racism endemic to the South, and on the way, he’s made a boatload of money that has enabled him to live the luxurious lifestyle to which he and his five serial wives had become accustomed. His clients? Well, they didn’t fare quite as well financially.

Cannon explains that when the Ku Klux Klan’s power waned and racism diminished, the SPLC had to find new ways “to frighten people into still donating.” He says that “Scaring the bejesus out of people requires new bogeymen, and lots of them.” Further, Cannon claims that “mainstream conservative groups” are among the bogeymen.

Cannon reports that the “most scathing assessments of Dees and his group have always come from the left” like “Stephen B. Bright, a Yale law professor and president of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights,” who describes Dees as a “con man” and a “fraud.”

Even the far-Left magazine The Nation indicts Dees as “the archsalesman of hatemongering,” accusing him of stuffing “mailbags…with his fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of a hate-sodden America in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC…. Dees and his hate-seekers scour the landscape for hate…it’s their staple.”

While useful idiots in the mainstream press disseminate the SPLC’s propaganda, thus smearing Christian organizations and lining the pockets of Dees, the FBI has stopped using the SPLC as a resource.

The SPLC has perfected the tactics espoused by homosexuals Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen who in 1989 wrote what they deemed a “gay manifesto for the 1990’s” titled After the Ball, in which they urged “progressives” to utilize the mainstream media in a campaign to eradicate conservative moral beliefs—what they call “homohatred”—or “silence” the expression of such beliefs in public:

[L]ink homohating bigotry with all sorts of attributes the bigot would be ashamed to possess and with social consequences he would find unpleasant and scary…. Gays must launch a large-scale campaign…to reach straights through mainstream media. We’re talking about propaganda…. Gays must be portrayed as victims in need of protection…. Make victimizers look bad…. The public should be shown images of ranting homohaters whose associated traits and attitudes appall and anger Middle America. The images might include: Klansmen… Hysterical backwoods preachers… Menacing punks, thugs, and convicts who speak coolly about the “fags” they… would like to bash… [or] A tour of Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and gassed.

The SPLC employs all of these propagandistic tactics to stigmatize and marginalize Christian organizations like the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, Liberty Counsel, and the Illinois Family Institute for our beliefs about sexuality and marriage that derive from Scripture and for our willingness to express them publicly.

These are a few of the organizations that have not fallen prey to ravenous wolves or been taken “captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8).

For their faithfulness, Christ-followers will be hated, but enduring such trials brings blessings:

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:11-12).

The cost of discipleship has been minimal in America for over two hundred years, but the cost is rising due to the unholy efforts of “LGBTQQAP” activists.

While Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me,” many Christians—entire denominations—are choosing instead friendship with the world, ignoring the words of James:

“Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” (James 4:4).

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There’s a Method to the Political Correct (PC) Madness

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

Did “Snowflakes” Attack Professor Anthony Esolen?

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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SPLC’s Slur Against and Apology-ish to Dr. Ben Carson

In October 2014, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) put Dr. Benjamin Carson on its “Extremist Watch List.” Why? Because Dr. Carson holds the traditional, historical, and true belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman and has the courage to express that belief.

Who else is on this “Extremist Watch List”? In addition to a host of unsavory Neo-Nazis, KKK members, and skinheads, the SPLC lists the following as “extremists”:

Dr. Michael Brown, Bible scholar, author, and radio host
Cliff Kincaid, director of Accuracy in Media
Charles Murray, fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of The Bell Curve and Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council

The depth of the ignorance and malignity of the SPLC’s leaders is exposed through their defamation of a man of such unquestioned integrity as Dr. Carson.

After being exposed by Bill O’Reilly on his Fox News Channel program this week (video here), and receiving “intense criticism” from the public, the far Left SPLC decided to reverse their decision and issue an apology to Dr. Carson—well, an apology of sorts. You know, the sort that’s not really an apology. Here’s an excerpt from their deeply contrite apology:

In October 2014, we posted an “Extremist File” of Dr. Ben Carson. This week, as we’ve come under intense criticism for doing so, we’ve reviewed our profile and have concluded that it did not meet our standards, so we have taken it down and apologize to Dr. Carson for having posted it.

We’ve also come to the conclusion that the question of whether a better-researched profile of Dr. Carson should or should not be included in our “Extremist Files” is taking attention from the fact that Dr. Carson has, in fact, made a number of statements that express views that we believe most people would conclude are extreme….We laud Dr. Carson for his many contributions to medicine and his philanthropic work, and we, like so many others, are inspired by his personal story. Nevertheless…because Dr. Carson is such a prominent person, we believe that his views should be closely examined.

I wouldn’t want to go so far as to claim that the SPLC is a racist organization, but we can’t help but wonder if Dr. Carson’s skin color may have factored into the SPLC’s decision to remove him from their fear-mongering, money-making “Extremist Watch List” while leaving Dr. Brown, Cliff Kincaid, Charles Murray, and Tony Perkins on the list.

One brief word about “extremism”: “Extremist” is a free-floating term with no fixed meaning relative to truth or goodness. Being an “extremist” can be either good or bad depending on the activity or belief from which one has become distanced. In the midst of a culture so corrupt and decadent that citizens cheer when men legally wed men and women flock to a movie that extols the pleasures of sadomasochistic sex, we should thank God that for our “extremist” status.

If having a public forum and expressing the belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman warrant inclusion on a list of hateful extremists, then the SPLC must be either short-staffed, which seems unlikely given the millions of dollars they suck from a gullible public, or they’re slackers.

There are countless Jews and Christians from Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant faith traditions who believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. And many of these men and women have access to public forums in which they express their beliefs. They express their beliefs in college, university, and seminary classrooms; podcasts; sermons; scholarly journals, magazines; newspapers; websites; speaking engagements; and news programs. So, why are they not on the ethically impoverished Southern Poverty Law Center’s “extremist” list?

Perhaps the reasons for the SPLC’s oddly truncated list are twofold:

1.) A common tactic of homosexual activists is to exploit the natural sheep-like human tendency to desire membership in the cool group and the natural human tendency to avoid pain and conflict. The Left maligns leaders who tell the truth about homoeroticism so that others who also hold these same true beliefs will not want to be associated with them. The Left thereby effectively marginalizes truth-tellers.

2.) The SPLC leaders surely know that if they included every public person who affirms the truth that marriage has a nature central to which is sexual complementarity, the SPLC would discredit itself—further.

We should learn three lessons from this newest unforced error from the SPLC.

Christians need to speak the truth in love about homosexuality and gender confusion with the perseverance and boldness that the Left speaks lies.

Second, Christians need to publicly come alongside those who are speaking the truth about homosexuality, gender confusion, marriage, and children’s rights.

Finally, Christians need to be willing to be persecuted for expressing biblical truth—which is to say, truth—about homosexuality and gender confusion.

Temporal and eternal lives are at stake.