Loading...Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina
I want to talk about a very serious subject this evening, one I fear and I feel is being deeply neglected in a presidential campaign where it ought to be discussed, and that’s the character of the nation that we both love.
I’m sure that you’ve read the story of Cornwallis at Yorktown. When Washington and the French together defeated his army and his army marched out and surrendered, the tune they played was “The World Turned Upside Down.” And I believe that is what has happened in our country in my lifetime.
In my lifetime and my career from 1960, when I went off to journalism school, until 1989 when I left Ronald Reagan’s White House, we were all involved in a great cause, and that was winning for America the Cold War against a wicked, evil Soviet Empire that threatened everything we believed in, including our country. Under Ronald Reagan’s great leadership we won that Cold War. But here at home while we were winning that Cold War, we were losing our country in a way, because what I call Cultural Marxism which goes under the name of political correctness was gradually taking hold and taking control of the great institutions of this republic.
The Supreme Court: its influence is now dominant in the national media, in the entertainment industry, in the academic community, up at the great colleges of the North and the West.
Margaret Thatcher, just the other day, said about her own country, “They are abolishing Britain.” The country she loved is breaking up. Scotland is breaking away, Wales, Northern Ireland are breaking away. Immigration is increasingly becoming a problem. In the government there, they are taking steps to join the European Union to surrender their currency and surrender their sovereignty. And I fear that here at home they are abolishing America. They are deconstructing our country. And this is one of the great issues of our time that really ought to be addressed in a presidential campaign.
Now how are they deconstructing America? There are at least six ways I would like to talk about tonight.
The first; they have dethroned our God. In Washington they have dethroned our God. Harry Truman said, “This is a Christian nation.” Woodrow Wilson said, “America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify that devotion with the elements of righteousness, which are derived from the revelations of the Holy Spirit.” You say that today, and you are guilty of a hate crime against diversity, you are guilty of intolerance of others, and you will be shouted down in the American capital.
Now who de-Christianized America? In my judgment the principal culprit is the United States Supreme Court. It is not only my opinion. Chief Justice William Rehnquist this June, in an opinion on the decision about whether students could speak an inspirational moment at high school games where the court said “No,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist said, “This court bristles with hostility toward all things religious”. He’s talking about his own Supreme Court.
Look at what the court has done over forty or fifty years. God and the Ten Commandments and school prayer have all been expelled from the public schools. Christmas carols are out. Christian holidays are out. The latest decision of the Supreme Court, said, as I mentioned, that children in stadiums and young people at high school games are not to speak an inspirational moment, for fear they will mention God’s name and offend an atheist in the grandstands.
In the state of Ohio this year the federal court ruled that the Ohio motto that says “With God all things all things are possible,” the state motto, must be sandblasted off all public buildings because those are the words of Jesus Christ. Now if Ohio had adopted the motto, “If God is dead, all things are permissible” from Nietzsche, that would have been acceptable. Because they are the words of Christ, they are verboten.
And we have taken it, I regret to say, my generation, which I believe did a magnificent job in fighting the Cold War, has sat still for this. We have let it happen. As I told a crowd in 1996, can you imagine what our founding fathers would have said if the King of England told them you cannot speak about the Ten Commandments in your schools? They would have responded with three little words: ‘Lock and load.’ Why are we such wimps?
The second area where we’re under assault is the moral order of this country, which was rooted in religious faith, has been overthrown. President Washington said, “Morality is rooted in religion and in vain do people try to separate the two.” When Mr. Lieberman made that statement he was admonished during the campaign not to do it again even though he quoted the father of our country.
Two examples of how the moral order has been overturned since I was a young man. Back in 1962, there was a woman in Arizona who had taken that drug thalidomide which had caused all the deformed children in Europe. And she was fearful her child would be deformed and there was a great national debate over whether she should have an abortion. Everyone was involved; we all believed abortion was evil and wrong but some people said an exception had to be made. Before the matter was resolved she flew off to Sweden and had the abortion. Abortion was a felony in almost every state in the union at that time. Now, it has become a constitutional right and 38 million unborn children have been done to death in the United States of America since 1973 in Roe vs. Wade.
Moreover, partial birth abortion, which is almost too ugly a procedure to describe, was outlawed by Nebraska and the Supreme Court struck down the Nebraska law. And what is that partial birth abortion? It is fundamentally, as the child is about to be born, as it leaves the mother’s womb the child is stabbed in the back of the head with scissors, the brains are taken out without anesthesia, and the child is killed. That is what is going on in the country we used to call “God’s Country”.
The second issue is this new issue of so called “homosexual rights”. In literature they used to call it “the love that dare not speak its name.” But, if you watch the talk shows all over America it is the love that will not shut up. Can you imagine, back in the 1960’s, a First Lady of the United States, as happened this June, marching up Fifth Avenue to celebrate a lifestyle that has always been associated with social decadence and national decline and today is the prime means by which the AIDS virus, that terrible dreaded disease, is spread? The First Lady, marching up the street, in celebration of that?
And the Boy Scouts, could you imagine a time when the Boy Scouts of America would be under attack because they do not allow homosexual scoutmasters to take Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts on weekend trips? The Boy Scouts are under attack, and only one vote in the Supreme Court prevented them from losing their tax exemption and being forced to change their policy.
In the state of Vermont, homosexual unions have been elevated to the same level as marriage, civil unions. And Republicans voted for that. Republicans voted for that! I am happy to say that last Tuesday, in the Republican primary, five Republicans who voted to make gay unions, civil unions with full rights of married couples, were thrown out of the state legislature by the people of Vermont.
Now, how do we deal with what I believe is become the judicial dictatorship, which is basically imposing on us a revolution from above which you didn’t vote for in South Carolina and we didn’t vote for in America. No one voted for these policies. You have un-elected judges and justices imposing them from above in a manner in which George III would never have dared. We have a judicial dictatorship in America. How do we deal with it?
One way to deal with it is to stand behind men like Judge Roy Moore of Alabama. Judge Moore was told — he had a wooden plaque of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom-he was told by an Alabama court, “Take those down. Remove them from your courtroom.” And the judge said, “I’m not going to do it. And the only way you’re going to get that plaque of the Ten Commandments out of my courtroom is to send federal troops down here and take it out!” Judge Moore stood up and now he’s headed-because the voters of Alabama are going to put him there-to the Alabama Supreme Court.
Second, we’ve seen in some of these high school games, the students have ignored the U.S. Supreme Court. We’ve heard recently about how, on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, how civil disobedience against unjust laws that were biased and discriminated against black people, civil disobedience was justified. Well, I’m proud to say that some of these Christian students at these high school games have gone right up there in the microphone and started the game off with the Lord’s Prayer. We need more defiance like that in this country.
Third, with regard to these Federal judges like the one that ordered the Citadel to change its 150 year policy, ordered California’s laws overturned, some of these Federal judges have become so arrogant in my judgment, we need to put term limits on every single one of them.
With regards to the Supreme Court, Mr. Gore says he’ll continue to appoint justices like the two appointed by Mr. Clinton; Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer, both of whom voted against prayer, both of whom voted to make “partial birth abortion” legal. Mr. Bush says, “I don’t have any litmus test.” Well, I do. And my litmus test is this: If I’m elected President of the United States, only pro life constitutionalists and conservatives who respect our religious traditions will be appointed to the United States Supreme Court and no liberal judicial activists need apply.
Let me talk a little bit now, about what Dr. Bob talked about in the introduction. And that is the rewriting of history and what’s been done to our founding fathers. Look at what is happening in public education, and in our public life to the great heroes of this country. When I was young, they celebrated Columbus’ birthday. Columbus, who had “sailed the ocean blue,” discovered the American continent. On the 500th anniversary in 1992, Christopher Columbus was portrayed as a genocidal racist who brought an inferior culture and destroyed a culture of native Americans. He is widely condemned.
In New Orleans, George Washington’s name has been taken down from a public school because back in those days General Washington had owned slaves so his name is being removed from public schools. Robert E. Lee’s portrait, one of 32 portraits up in Richmond of great Virginians, he was in his confederate uniform, one of the greatest Americans who ever lived in terms of character and courage, one of the most respected men of the 19th century all over the world. The legislature down in Richmond denounced General Lee, and his portrait was desecrated. Andrew Jackson, who captured Florida from the Spanish, is now politically incorrect in parts of Florida. In San Jose, California, they were going to put a statue up to the American soldier, an Union officer, who’d captured San Jose for America, in the Mexican War. That was rejected in favor of a statue of an Aztec god who presided over human sacrifices. Of course, George Armstrong Custer, the most politically incorrect of them all, they’ve taken his name off the “Custer National Battlefield” because it’s going to offend the descendents of Crazy Horse.
What has happened to our country, my friends, that we let things like this happen? Look at our holidays. When I was a boy in Washington DC, Washington’s Birthday was a holiday. If you stayed outside the TV store, and you were the first one in line, you could get a television for a dollar. And all the kids would go down there from all the schools, and it was a great holiday in Washington. And then they had Lincoln’s Birthday, it was a few days after. Now, both of those are gone, and they are folded into something called “President’s Day.” And we can all pay homage to Millard Fillmore, Chester Arthur, and Bill Clinton. Let me tell you, if I get elected President, Washington’s Birthday is back!
What happened? Christmas has become “Winter Break.” Easter — can’t have Easter any more because that’s a holiday of Christians that celebrates the resurrection of Christ. So, that’s gone and instead we have “Earth Day” when we can all worship dirt!
Who made these changes in America? Look at our history books! The story of Benedict Arnold’s treason. Benedict Arnold was one of the bravest soldiers of the Revolution. He had done more deeds of heroism than almost any other. When he was given command of West Point, he betrayed it to the British, and he broke George Washington’s heart. That story is being dropped out of history books from which public high school children are learning. So is Nathan Hale, the American who spied on the British, 19 years old, and he was captured and hanged, and as he went to the gallows said, “I regret that I have but one life to give to my country.” These are inspirational, stories like Nathan Hale. They’re taking those out of the history books. Even “The Patriot”, the movie with Mel Gibson, which is set in the South during the Revolutionary War, was denounced by all the reviewers. Why? Because his sons were carrying guns against the British. And they weren’t old enough to have those guns.
You know, Ronald Reagan said about this, if we forget what we did as Americans, we won’t know who we are. I am warning of the eradication of the American memory that could result ultimately in the erosion of the American spirit.
Now, what can we do, politically, whoever your candidates are? Demand of them when they go up to Washington that they get these federal judges and federal bureaucrats out of our public schools and get God and the Ten Commandments and the Bible back in.
Second, we need to restore states rights and state responsibilities in America. Now, South Carolina, and Greenville, should not tell Greenwich Village how they run their schools. But, Greenwich Village should not tell Greenville either. Local decision, local control, parents and teachers deciding. That is the only way we are going to win back at least some of these schools for the things we believe in.
Finally, Mr. Gore is going to expand the Department of Education, Mr. Bush will expand it a little less and empower it, I will shut down the Department of Education and give the money back to the states and to the people.
Let me begin this next segment, the fourth assault upon our country, with a quote from yours truly, Pat Buchanan, in a speech at Houston, which was not so warmly received eight years ago. As a matter of fact, they will never let anyone give an unscripted speech at a National Convention ever again. I said, “There is a religious war going on in this country, for the soul of America. It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall one day be as the Cold War itself.”
I truly believe eight years of Mr. Clinton have shown that I understated my case. Look at what has happened to the culture in those eight years. Set aside the appalling conduct we’ve seen up in Washington. Look at what has happened to the culture. Now, the culture is like a reservoir from which we all must drink. It has been consistently polluted and poisoned, and this poison has gone into the hearts and minds and souls of America’s children.
The Parents Television Council reports that in the last eight years the amount of sexual and violent material in prime time has tripled. Filthy language we never heard on television has become pervasive. And we learned last week that Hollywood has been targeting children. And the people in Hollywood doing that showed up for a big fundraiser for Mr. Gore in New York where they collected six million dollars. The politicians and polluters are one and the same.
Hollywood movies: last year Shelley and I were watching the Academy Awards. The Best Screenplay went to “Cider House Rules” which celebrates the life of an abortionist. “American Beauty” won the most Oscars and that portrays suburban America as basically a social pit and unworthy of the life being led. The villain is a marine, an ex-marine, who keeps Nazi memorabilia and turns into a homicidal maniac. And the only happy couple on the block are the two gay fellows down the street. These are Hollywood values that are being imposed on America through the film industry.
What about our higher culture, the museums? I went out to the Brooklyn Museum last year to see that famous exhibit “Sensation”. They had a cartoon figure of the Mother of God, done in elephant dung with obscene female body parts all around it. There were pornographic mannequins on display of little girls, five and ten years old. That what was out there being financed in part by your tax dollars. I didn’t go to the Whitney Museum, but I understand they had an exhibit of garbage cans with Nazi insignias on them and Nazi music coming out of them and names on the garbage cans. One of them was Rudy Guiliani, another was Jesse Helms, and another was me! Now this is the kind of nonsense that is passing for art in America. It doesn’t bother me, I’m glad to be recognized by them. “By your enemies shall you be known as well as your friends.”
So, what do we do about what is going on? When I was growing up, we had something called the Legion of Decency. And various folks went down and reviewed the movies and rated them, and if the movies were obscene or objectionable then we were told in our churches and we boycotted the theatres. I think it’s an excellent idea – a new legion of decency.
Also, instead of breaking up Microsoft, why don’t we break up Disney? Now, there is a media monstrosity! Now, what did Bill Gates ever do to me? As I understand it, he tried to sneak me a free browser. So they’re going to break his company up? What about Disney and these other entertainment conglomerates that are polluting and poisoning our culture? Get your leaders of whatever party; tell them to focus on that.
Finally, and lastly, we should hold our Republican friends to their “Contract With America” and tell them we don’t want any more excuses, we want them to shut down the National Endowment of the Arts, and fumigate the building.
Now, there’s another area that Mrs. Thatcher mentioned. And that is the steady assault upon the sovereignty and independence of this country that is going on, though few seem to recognize or appreciate it. American independence, which was the cause of the American Revolution, that we would be free and independent forever, that independence and liberty is being slowly eroded.
The World Bank and the IMF now have virtual power to put American taxpayers into debt without our permission. The World Trade Organization has power to authorize fines by foreign countries against the United States of America. At the United Nations Millennium Summit, they’ve developed something called the “Earth Charter” that calls for an end to America’s veto power in the UN, a new growing UN army, with a General Staff, and giving the UN the power to tax international transactions, so that it can grow gradually into a world government. The UN is asserting the right to intervene in the internal affairs of nations. The goal of all this is ultimately the transfer of the wealth and power and authority of the United States slowly to a World Parliament, a World Government, which will make decisions as to how that wealth is to be spread about and how that great military power which we’ve compiled is to be used. The end here is far down the road, you can’t see it right now, but we do know where we’re going.
You know, every time I mention this New World Order and global government, even though it’s being spoken of openly now at the UN, they always say, “Pat is seeing black helicopters again.” But, we’re not seeing black helicopters, my friends.
Strobe Talbot, Mr. Clinton’s roommate at Oxford, his advisor on Russian policy, the number two man at the Department of State, wrote just ten years ago, All nations are artificial. The World Trade Organization, the IMF, the World Bank, the UN, these are proto-ministries of a world government that is coming. And one day in this century, the 21st century we’re in now, he said, we’ll all be proud to call ourselves Citizens of the World.
Kofi Annan, at the UN, went out to Notre Dame and castigated the Americans for not giving enough foreign aid. Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” just last fall went up to New York and received an award from the World Federalist Association and said, We Americans have got to have the courage to surrender our sovereignty. We have to have the courage to give up authority to a UN army which alone can keep world peace — a world government, and a world army.
My friends, this to me is one of the great issues of the Millennium after the Cold War is over. It is whether America is going to remain forever independent and free, with Liberty and Justice in this country, determined by us, Americans. Or whether this decision-making authority is going to go back to the UN and leave this country. And that is where a number of elites want to take us.
And so, let me tell you what I will do if I am elected President. I will get the United States out of the World Trade Organization. I will get the United States out of the International Monetary Fund, as Milton Friedman and George Schulz have recommended. And I will tell Kofi Annan up at the UN, “Sir, your lease on Turtle Bay has run out. And we want the United Nations out of the United States by year’s end. And if you’re not out, and if you have trouble leaving, we’ll send up ten thousand Marines to help you pack.”
Finally, the final step in the abolition of America is the erasure of all of America’s borders. Removing and ending all border controls, and this idea was proposed just three or four weeks ago by Vincente Fox, the President-elect of Mexico, who came up to Washington and proposed a North American union where American gets rid of its borders, Canada gets rid of its borders, and we all become basically one conglomerate called the North American Union. My friends, that is the end of America, if that happens.
The Mexican people have been badly treated; they have been robbed repeatedly by corrupt governments; they have a per capita income that is not even 10% of ours. You erase those borders, and you will have twenty to forty million poor Mexicans in this country within half a decade. And that is the end of America.
And so, when you see what is happening, the erasure of borders, the assault upon your religious faith, the assault upon our heroes, the surrender of sovereignty, we are moving toward a country where we Americans have less and less in common with one another. No common language, no common history we revere, no common faith, no common heroes. What then holds us together as one nation and one people?
You know, Arthur Schlessinger, who is on the other side of the political spectrum than me, wrote a book ten years ago expressing his fear about “the disuniting of America.” And that’s what I fear. And that’s what I see happening.
About the border, let me tell you a story of what is going on on our borders right now that people don’t know. Shelley and I went down, I guess about six or eight months ago, to the border of Douglas, Arizona, which is where the mass of illegal immigration pours in. Thousands are apprehended every night. Cattle are poisoned on the ranches, trash is left on the ranches, footprints, you can see them by the thousands coming through reaching the highways where trucks and vans and others take the illegal aliens north. And I went there to visit a lady who is eighty-two years old and a widow. Her name is Theresa Murray. And Theresa Murray lives right on the border in a ranch house a few yards from where she was born. But her ranch house is surrounded by a chain link fence that has razor wire all along the top of it. And she has bars on every window and door in the house; and she sleeps with a gun at her bed table, because she’s been burglarized thirty times by illegals coming through. Her pets, two guard dogs are dead because someone threw meat over the fence that had cut glass in it. That’s an American woman living, if you will, in a maximum security prison inside her own home, in her own country, the United States of America, because our government lacks the courage to defend the borders of the United States of America.
Meanwhile, we defend all these borders all over the world that you couldn’t find or I couldn’t find or many people couldn’t find on a map. And so I promise you, if I am elected, we’ll bring those troops home from Kosovo and Kuwait and Korea and we will put those troops where they belong, on the borders of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
So let me tell you in conclusion what I believe our struggle is about. It is a struggle for the soul of our country. It is a post Cold War struggle about who we are, and what we stand for, and what we believe, as a people. In some ways, the elites really don’t care about me, our generation, they care about you because you’re the younger generation. They say, “Well, the older ones are passing on with their beliefs. If we can just capture the children with all these ideas and in two generations then it will be the kind of country that we want that will forget about the past, forget about Western civilization, forget about Christian past and it’s history.” And that’s what they want.
What do they believe? Many of them believe that God is dead or never existed. All life begins here and it ends here. There are no objective norms of morality; we make up morality as we go along, and society has no right to impose beliefs or ideas that are rooted in religious faith in law. It is fundamentally this philosophy: anti-Christian, anti-West. As the Chief Justice says, “it bristles with hostility toward all things religious”.
On the other side: probably almost all the folks in this room, and I am there, those of us who believe there is a God, and he has established a moral order. And a good society will try, even though it will fail again and again, to conform its laws and rules and behavior to God’s Law. We believe that all lifestyles are not equal. Some are immoral and ruinous to nation and individual alike. We believe that all ideas are not equal. Some are wrong and ought to be cast out. And we believe that America is God’s country, a providential nation and we have an obligation to preserve that country.
After thirty-five years in the Republican Party, I left that party, not because I abandoned the principals that I’d helped write into platforms for thirty years, or that I fought for, but because I believed Washington had lost the will to fight. I’m tired of the politics where we get speeches delivered from teleprompters which have poll-tested pabulum run though focus groups approved by consultants. We get that from both Beltway parties.
We may not succeed, but I believe we need a new fighting conservative traditionalist party in America.
Up in Vermont, they’ve got a slogan that they’re going to throw out those Republicans and the Democrats as well and take Vermont back. I believe and I hope that one day we can take America back. And that is why we are building this Gideon’s Army, and we’re headed for Armageddon, to do battle for the Lord.
Thank you very much.