1776 and the Spanish Inquisition - Big Picture with Jack Atherton

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Seven six on this Wednesday morning, Dan Carroll in for
Brian Thomas. One more day for me, Harry, Jeff Walker
be here Thursday and Friday. Thank you so much for
Joe Strecker for allowing me to sit here. And I
have to admit I've been holding onto this little, this
little blurb since Monday when I knew we were going
to have our conversation with Jack Atherton. And it is this.

(00:34):
Popstar Madonna sixty seven years old, kicked off this year's
Pride Month by posting a video on her Instagram account.
It shows her crawling around in front of the toilet,
stating that you don't want to see my bleep as
she stuffs her breast back into her dress. She then
leans into the camera and whispers Happy Pride, before blowing
a kiss and cigarette smoke at the camera. And Jack.

(00:57):
All I can say is you dodged a bullet on
that one, buddy.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Those were the days. So I did better. My wife didn't,
but I did better. It's going to be back with you, Dan, Jack.
If Brian is listening at home, hang in there, buddy,
to give our pala laugh. I came up with something
I mentioned Madonna, but let's remind everybody of an old

(01:23):
Monty Python sketch. Dan, are you a Python fan?

Speaker 1 (01:27):
I love a little Monty Python.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yeah, A little goes a long way, But I missed them.
The boys are back in the news. We're hearing the
Iran war is a little bit like Manty Python and
the Holy Grail. The knight who loses one arm and
then the other, then both of his legs uses to
give upruting us. That's the mumma's in the I r G.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
Sir.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
I hope, I hope for not much longer. I hope
President Trump will realize they have to be gone. But
we've talked about that. Let's talk now about a money
Python TV sketch. A guy being given the third degree
by his wife sputters, well, I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.

(02:15):
That's when four cardinals burst in and Michael Palin yells.

Speaker 4 (02:20):
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. It's good for a laugh,
but the actual Inquisition was no joke, and thinking about
it shows what our founders really were up against in
seventeen seventy six and how today's Democrat socialists want to
take us back to Spain. The Inquisition began in the

(02:41):
fourteen hundreds to maintain Catholic orthodoxy. The inquisitors kicked out
Muslims and Jews. Then they tortured Christian heretics. For Monty Python,
that means making heretics sit in comfy chairs. No, not
the comfy chair.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
The actual methods of torture and execution are nothing we
can talk about on morning radio. And it wasn't just Spain.
Civil wars between Catholics and Protestants throughout Europe took about
twelve million lives back when populations were much smaller. That's
why our English pilgrims fled to the New World. The

(03:19):
pilgrims were Protestants, but when it was the Catholics turn
to be persecuted by England's new Protestant Church, they came
here too. Lord Baltimore's chartered land was called the Maryland
Catholic Colony. The point is that religious freedom and toleration
are what America has always been about. From that followed

(03:41):
freedom of speech, a peaceful assembly, and all the rest
of the Bill of Rights. Unlike Europe, where most countries
had a state religion, the First Amendment explicitly outlaws the
establishment of a state religion, although this has been wrongly
interpret as you know Dan, to mean that government cannot religion. Generally,

(04:01):
it can't have anything to do with religion, but that's
another topic. The irony today is the followers of Karl Marx,
who said religion is the opiate of the masses. Marxists
are the biggest supporters of big government that acts like
the Spanish Inquisition. America's founders believe that individual rights and

(04:23):
responsibilities proceed and are the foundation of government. By sharp contrast,
big government leftists following the French writer Rousseau. I think
we're going to talk about him next week because he's
one of the founders of the left. Rousseau believed the
collective will of the state takes precedence over individual rights, speech,

(04:46):
and beliefs. A better writer than Rousseau, who understood this
divide better than most anyone. The Russian novelist Dostoevsky in
The Brothers Karamasov includes a parable of a Grand Inquisitor.
Brian loves this part. During the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisitor
arrests Jesus when he returns to Earth for the crime

(05:10):
of giving men and women too much freedom. Instead of
letting people choose sin over salvation. The Grand Inquisitor imposes authority,
a government mandate, and burns anyone who fails to follow
his dictates. Like all authoritarians stan, including today's Marxists, the
Inquisitor was right to fear Jesus. He did teach that

(05:34):
we have free will, and within obvious limits, must be
allowed the freedom to exercise it. For instance, the Gospel
of Matthew tells us that Jesus was tempted by Satan
to turn stones into bread and to rule all the
kingdoms of the world. But while Jesus did free some
of his followers and he did feed them, he never

(05:55):
sought to feed them all. Jesus did not buy their faith,
and he set the bar high. When a young man
asked how to gain eternal life, Jesus told him to
obey God's commandments, sell all he owned, and give the
proceeds to the poor. Sad and hearing this because he
was rich, the young man exercised his freedom to just

(06:18):
walk away. Not all of our founders were Christians. Thomas Jefferson,
the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, was a deist.
Like Spinoza, Jefferson believed God was creation. They were synonymous,
and God did not change the laws of nature to
direct man's affairs. So the Bible that Jefferson edited for

(06:41):
his own use leaves out miracles. However, like Jesus, Jefferson
believed in freedom, he opposed divine right monarchs like George
the Third. He opposed mandates censorship, anything that would require
us to march in lockstep, not to say, goost, even

(07:01):
if politicians and their paymasters are bribing us with handouts
to ruin our character and make us more dependent on
big government, because, as the Python Boys realized, when it
robs you of ambition and personal responsibility, there's nothing more
to humanizing than a handout or a do nothing government job,

(07:23):
or a comfy chair. Not that comfy chair.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
What do you say, old friend, Well, Jack, as always,
your comments are always thought provoking, and about halfway through
your presentation there I was thinking about, well, this really
correlates to what was going on during the pandemic, and
we had such government overreach at that time, and what

(07:49):
was going on, Well, we had dictates from on high,
from Washington, d C. From Columbus, Ohio that you must
follow these rules that you must get tested, you must
get the vaccine, you must follow certain certain government dictates
in order to do what in order to have a job,
in order to be part of society, in order not

(08:12):
to be docked, in order not to be de banked
or deplatformed on social media. So I think this was
probably the clearest example that we have of a government
trying to exercise the exact same kind of powers you
lay out there when you talk about the Spanish Inquisition.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
And so it's an go Aheadn's extremity, Man's extremity is
God's opportunity, and the Left changes that to man's extremity
is government's opportunity.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
Absolutely, and and and look these to my way of thinking,
these people are still out there and they look to
increase government power at every single turn. I mean, it
was not long ago we were told what the hantavirus
was coming after us, and this may be another COVID

(09:06):
nineteen situation. Then we had the Ebola outbreak in Africa
or wherever the heck that was going on, and we
were told, well, that may be coming to the United States.
And I think I think the reaction of the American people,
at least to this point Jack has been to know
we're not going down that road again. I think that

(09:28):
memory is still fresh in the mind of the American
people that by and large we are going to stand
up to being under the thumb of this type of
government control again.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
This crisis goes way beyond diseases. It all boils down
to whether you want a top down or a bottom
up government. Our founders chose the latter. But democracy requires
free and fair elections. And look what's happened in California,
just like Minnesota with Al Frank years ago, Arizona with

(10:02):
Katie Hobbs, the discrepancies and late ballots without any need
for id never ends until a Democrat has declared the
winner or two Democrats. In Los Angeles, as Gavin Newsom
gloated on camera, Democrats had what Greasy called a break
the glass plan. That's the phrase he used to break

(10:24):
the glass plan to guarantee a Republican would never win
in Los Angeles or even a peer on the November ballot.
If you're a Republican sunk in a deep blue state,
you might as well be a muddy python, dead parrot.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
Jack. Yeah, you always have the best way of putting
stuff Are you going to hang around for one more segment?

Speaker 2 (10:46):
Absolutely?

Speaker 1 (10:46):
All right, all right, let's go ahead and get to
a quick break and we'll continue.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
On Wednesday morning.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
You Stryker says, this is the perfect song for Jack. Well,
I don't know about that, but it's still a great
song Jack. It's interesting. I was reading a piece where
the author quotes quote by Elena Gorkova when characterizing life
in the Soviet Union, and the quote is this. The

(11:20):
rules are simple. They lie to us. We know they're lying,
they know we know they are lying, but they keep
lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.
The Russians even have a word call for it. It's
called vanyo, a lie that everyone knows is a lie
but pretends otherwise. And so I think that's as a society,
and especially in politics now, and especially as it relates

(11:43):
to our elections these days, we know that there are
lies going on, but for some reason, we pretend otherwise,
and we just let it keep perpetuating itself.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yeah, it's not just the Soviet Union, and it's not
just elections. It starts as early as you can imagine.
We have public schools that pretend to teach children and
push them all the way through high school and give
them diplomas. And we don't require the kind of songs
that I like that they used to call standards. We

(12:16):
don't have standards and songs, and we don't have standards
in education. A lot of liing going around, a.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
Lot of liing going around, And now we have the
specter of the Democrats, with more than seventy percent support,
have elected a guy who bears a Nazi tattoo on
his chest. And look, the guy wants to have a tattoo,
Fine and dandy.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
I don't care.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
But I think we know now that when you talk
about the lack of standards, that when it comes to
having standards, or it comes to at least trying to
seek the moral high ground on a particular issue, the
Democrats will keep trying to do that. But to any
rational way of thinking, because of this election result, I
say that they have that they've lost that ability to

(13:01):
seek that moral high ground when it comes to arguing
a political position.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
What seventeen seventy six was all about on one level
in Philadelphia, and eleven years later in that same city
was compromise. That's a dirty word to a lot of people.
But it's what we had to do because the thirteen
colonies had very different interests. Slavery was the most obvious,
but there were many others. The little states were worried

(13:28):
that the big states would completely swamp them, so we
had to come up with the system at the Constitutional
Convention that everybody could accept. We've come to a point
in our country and we have to change course or
we won't have a country where it's impossible to compromise.
We can't get anything done, and it's not just as
between Republicans and Democrats. I think one of the reasons

(13:48):
that President Trump has been very frustrated lately, and we're
seeing it in his attitude toward Iran, is that he
feels he cannot work, he cannot get any kind of
response can work with from the establishment. Some would say
the Rhino wing of his own party. We're simply not
reaching compromises.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Well, Jack, I constantly refer to a time in America
when look, we've always had political differences, but you talk
about it compromise because I think in the end, no
matter what your political affiliation was, no matter what your idea,
ideological outlook was, in the end, we all wanted to
get to the same place. We all wanted what was

(14:28):
best for the country, what was best for America, because
everyone understood that the ideas behind America were worth We're
worth having and worth promoting and worth carrying on. But
I don't think we can compromise anymore, because especially the
left in this country, I don't think they want to
get to the same place as those of us on

(14:51):
the other side.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
One of the problems is, you know, our profession, the media,
where now at a point where we left and right
separately live in hermetically sealed chambers. We're not hearing what
the other side is saying. It's a problem for the
right as well as for the left. Everybody goes to
hear themselves and their opinions confirmed affirmed by whatever their

(15:15):
media sources. I've done a piece for Brian about the
history of media and the fact that we used to
have what were recognized going all the way back to
eighteen hundred as left and right newspapers. But you know
what people used to do, and this was one of
the shining marks of America. We used to go to

(15:36):
town meetings. The great French writer not Rousseau, but Alexis
to Topeville in the eighteen thirties, wrote about the fact
that America was unique because we started out not from
the top, not from the king, not from the legislature,
but on the town meeting level. That's what the Pilgrims had.
They came up with a charter while they were still

(15:57):
on the boat coming to America, and that became really
one of the abiding graces of America. And people would
have to debate. Now we have candidates on the left
and the right. Candidate on the right is ahead who
won't debate one another. That does not spell any kind

(16:18):
of formula for eventual compromise.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
All right, Jack, we'll have to leave it there. It
is time for us to go. But as always, great
to have you on, great to hear your voice. And
keep up the great work, my friend, and we'll look
forward to the next Big Picture with Jack Atherton one
week from today.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
I love talking with you, Dan, but Brian, get.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Better, all right, Jack Atherton, thank you very much. Seven
six fifty five krc DE Talk Station. A Minute of
Hope has brought to you by the Linder Center of Hope.
Linder Center of Hope dot org