The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | The Left's Redefinition of Words Leads to Totalitarianism, Homeschooling Leader Warns

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, warns that the Left's redefinition of words leads to totalitarianism. Farris, who also founded the Convention of States, spoke with The Daily Signal Podcast at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, along with Convention of States President Mark Meckler. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, May 30th. I'm Tyler O'Neill. I sat down with Mark Meckler, president of the Convention of States and Michael Ferris, also a leader at the Convention of States, a senior advisor. He's also the General Counsel at the National Religious Broadcasters and founder of Patrick Henry College and the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, many great organizations. And my interview with them took place at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. We talked about the headwinds that conservative Christians face in the public square, why we should speak up anyway, and particularly some of the encouraging things we saw at NRB

2023. Take a listen right after this. For over 35 years, the Heritage Foundation Job Bank has been helping conservatives at all professional levels find employment in key positions in Washington, D.C. and across the country. We can help you connect with positions in the administration on Capitol Hill, in public policy organizations, and in the private sector. To learn more about the Heritage Foundation Job Bank, go to heritage.org slash job dash bank. Well, this is Tyler O'Neill, I'm managing editor at The Daily Signal. I'm joined by Mark Meckler, president of Convention of States,

and Michael Ferris, Grand Puba or former Grand Puba of NRB, ADF, COS, and homeschool parents everywhere. In all seriousness, he is the General Counsel at NRB and Senior Advisor at Convention of States at the moment, but he's founded so many organizations. It's hard to keep track. It's an honor being with both of you. It's really an honor to be with you. Thanks, Tyler. It's great to see you. Yeah, so I was chatting briefly with Mark about the state of the culture and how, you know, we've kind of seen a sea change in the past year with a huge rise. I mean, we're at the

National Religious Broadcasters Convention, and we've seen really a flourishing of Christian culture in, you know, at this convention and throughout. And I'd like to hear more about what that feels like to you and what sort of hope that brings you. So for me, last year was my first NRB and I was blown away by how good it was. I was very impressed. I didn't really know much about it. I saw it was going on in the culture. But I would say I could sum up a sort of Christian media culture last year, a year ago, by saying, the chosen. That was the phenomenon, right? And in my family, it was a phenomenon. Among my friends. It was a phenomenon. It still is. An awesome, incredible series changing the cultural landscape. This year at NRB, you come back, and I would describe what's about to come out of NRB as a supernova.

You know, the star is collapsing in on itself. If you're here, we're at the white, hot center of it, we're seeing so many high-level productions being introduced here that are about to come out of NRB, some of them already launched. It's going to be hard to know what to watch. I feel like we're actually, as Christian, is going to have a selection of great quality culture stuff that also carries our values. Yeah, that's amazing to see. But we're also at a point with the Biden administration cracking down on pro-life, Americans citing the Southern Poverty Law Center getting an SPLC a confirmed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. And how is Convention of States, you know, this movement you've been spearheading, you know,

I've heard it can hit a plateau, but it's still growing. And how does it respond to sort of the rot we're seeing in our institutions today? I think it's actually one of the core responses. And the reason that I say that is what we're trying to do, what we started the idea, was restore self-governance in America. And that's where it comes from. God gave us free will. We get our system of governance essentially out of the book of judges.

If you want to find a truly self-governing society before America, you go all the way back to the book of judges in the Hebrew Bible. And so what we're trying to do is restore those muscles in the American body politic. And so we're teaching people how to govern themselves. They do that in Convention of States by learning about what the Constitution says, learning about the process for amending, and then they have to go get engaged at the local level. Learn who their local rep is, their local senator,

to them, lobby them, and then get a piece of legislation, a resolution across the finish line. So I think what we're doing is restoring the core civic muscles in the United States of America. When the Convention of States would bring together the states to have a constitutional amendment to really restrain the size and scope of the federal government, what are your main goals in that and what's the progress at the moment? So the way the resolution lays out is what's called a subject matter resolution. There are three subject matters. Anything that would impose fiscal restraints on the federal government.

Some would include a balanced budget amendment, tax caps, spending caps. Anything that would restrain the scope, power, and jurisdiction of the federal government, this is really the jurisdictional fight, right? Meaning we could say things like, nope, no education from the federal government, get rid of the Department of Education. For example, no EPA, no USDA, things that the federal government was never supposed to have. These were supposed to be in the purview of the states if they were even imagined by the framers. And then finally, anything that would impose termed,

limits on the federal government. And that's not just Congress, which is what most people think of, but it's also the deep state. It's the staffers, the bureaucrats, the judiciary. These are things, institutions that have grown completely out of control and need to be reined in. Has Convention of States been working at all with Project 2025 on that deep state angle? Not really. I mean, because our approach is really an approach of a constitutional amendment. So that's sort of a separate approach at things, and there's a limited amount of angles at it from a constitutional perspective. I would say they're broader, generally speaking, than what Project 2025 would be working on, which is much more specific. We're saying remove authority for these agencies, so really you can paint with a pretty broad brush.

Gotcha. And Mike, you founded Convention of States and Patrick Henry College and the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, and, you know, lead ADF for years. Where do you see the culture right now and the struggle that conservative Christians have living in America? Well, I agree with Mark in part, and there's another side of the coin,

and that is I think the middle is emptying out, and the bright is getting brighter, and the dark is getting darker, all at the same time. And so one of the, you know, the side points of, the COVID mess was people found out what was going on in their schools a lot more. And a lot of people turned to homeschooling and parents' rights movement rose in a big way

because people said, I don't like this. You know, and they're doing something about it. And so the left is apoplectic about all this. They just can't imagine a school system that they don't totally dominate. The parents actually have some say over what's going on. And so I think that getting parents more involved in, every form of education is a good thing. Now, of course, homeschooling is my favorite, but still, any form of parent involvement in education is a good thing. And so the number of Americans that

are waking up and saying, I don't like what's going on here, and I want to do something about it, that's a very encouraging sign. But at the same time, that movement is facing a lot of demonization, a lot of attacks. I just saw the State of Black America report where an SPLC staffer wrote for that report and said that this is the new Uptown Klan, the parental rights movement.

Well, they want to, you know, they play with words. You know, they played with the word marriage. Now they're playing with the word men and women. They're playing with, you know, all kinds of words. They're changing the meaning of words, changing the meaning of ideas. and anybody that does that is bought into a movement that ultimately leads to totalitarianism.

There's a very interesting older book called The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt that was written in the 60s. It's a very prophetic book, wonderful. And there's a new book that I'm reading was published a year ago by a Dutch psychologist and professor that's called the psychology of totalitarianism. And we see this going on in the United States right now. changing words, changing meanings, changing morality is a part of the totalitarian culture, because they have to rip everything down in order to build up the new country, the new agenda, the new culture that they want. And it's a world without God.

It's a world without freedom. I mean, they openly disagree with freedom. Lewis Michael Seidman teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post right after two cases were decided by the court in 2018. I argued in one of them on free speech for pro-life pregnancy centers. And he said, I've given up believing in free speech anymore because it doesn't advance progressive ideals. And so if you've got a constitutional law professor at Georgetown and say free speech is a bad idea, progressivism is worth the cost of jettisoning the First Amendment.

You see the regular old American traditions being emptied out. I think they've outpunted their coverage and it's more and more Americans realize what they're saying, what they're doing, the more we're going to see the shift of the culture, the shift of the country in our direction. Yeah, well, I think we've seen institutional capture on a tremendously shocking level from hospitals endorsing, you know, these radical experimental treatments on children. It will leave them scarred and infertile. And to all of these institutions you've been mentioning that are stifling dissent, how do we retake some of these institutions? Some of these or at least restore them to uphold the traditional American views on free speech.

Well, it's a multi-front attack. We sue them. We don't let them, you know, go. We, you know, we teach them the lesson that Budweiser beer is learning right now. It is a bad decision economically. But I would say the hospitals in the transgender arena and in the COVID arena were driven by this one thing. money. They made money by classifying deaths as COVID deaths. I mean, people go in with a heart attack and they classify it as a COVID death. You follow the money and you'll see what's going on. And that's why the Convention of States gets that kind of money out of the system. You know, the federal government shouldn't be paying people to give medical care based on their favorite sickness. You know, it's craziness. And, you know, the craziest thing I've heard lately is the

front page of the Washington Times declared that the FBI no longer uses race, gender, or any other protected characteristic, including disability, for apprehending suspects. So if a white guy in a wheelchair robs a bank, the FBI can't say, look out for the white guy in the wheelchair. They have to say, a person robbed the bank. Now, if that's not the definition of utter insanity, I don't know what is. And so, but most Americans think that's stupid. And the consequences of that are horrible. And I think that any time the government decides it needs to control what people say or think or believe,

which is we saw that all so much in COVID. You know, anything that you'd say to the contrary was disinformation and they're going to stop you. They're going to stifle you. You're going to make you lose your job. They're going to do all kinds of consequences against you. The stifling of free speech is the clearest example of who's on the right side and who's on the wrong side of almost any issue you want to look at. Yeah, and what would you say about that, Mark? I mean, I think we're at a point, and I agree with Mike's saying, is we're seeing this great divergence in our society.

And again, I'm sort of a contrarian on that issue as well in the sense that I think it's a good thing. In our lifetimes, there's been a lot of gray area in the middle. Between right and left, Democrat and Republican, today you have the left saying that we should kill babies up until birth and maybe beyond, that boys can be girls. And in fact, what we should do is cut off their genitals when they're young, feed them castrating drugs. It's a child abuse. Literally, they're promoting child abuse, child sacrifice.

It's just insane. And so I think the black and white have become very clear in our society about what's good and what's evil. So the question is, can we even survive as a country in those circumstances? And this actually brings me full circle to Convention of States, because the answer is only if we restore federalism. You know, this country, we've always disagreed. There have been dramatic disagreements from before the founding all the way until today. We've never had a period where everybody in the country agreed on all the major issues.

And so what federalism says is, look, if you have a country with a diverse population that believes different things, we can still stay a country because mostly we're going to decide those things at home. in our states and in our local communities. Federal government will do a few things that only they can do. And now you can go back to New York and be New Yorkers, Texas and be Texans, and those are very different things. The problem we're having today is so many things are being decided from Washington, D.C., and that naturally makes us hate each other, because half of us are going to be mad at any

given time, roughly. And so if you go back to federalism, I think we can keep the country together. We can cool, take off a lot of the heat, cool a lot of the pressure out of the system by just saying, by just saying New York's New York, California is California, and the conservative states or whatever they want to be. That's the solution. And the only way back to that that I'm aware of is to call a convention of states, rejigger the jurisdiction, bring the power back to the states, and let them be who they are. So Trump, 2024, Biden, 2024, DeSantis, 2024, or Convention of States? Yeah, look, I'm not in the business of predicting elections. Every time I've tried to do it, I'm wrong. You know, I hope and pray that we end up with a conservative in the White House.

That's really what I'm looking for. I hope and pray that we end up with somebody with the fortitude to emasculate the administrative state. To me, that's one of the most important issues of our time. The administrative state is largely, in my opinion, unconstitutional. It should have never been created in the first place. And we're going to have to get rid of it if we're going to restore liberty. So somebody conservative and somebody with the backbone to stand against the administrative state, that's what I'm looking for. of who ends up being the Republican candidate.

Definitely, I don't think that's going to be Joe Biden. Well, but if Joe Biden is president, the goal of Convention of States, you know, if he wins again, God forbid, you know, would be to hold Washington accountable regardless, right? Yeah, you know, although I would argue it doesn't change whoever's president. Maybe it becomes more urgent if Biden's president. But the reality is, and this might be unpopular for me to say this, I don't want Trump or Biden or a Republican Congress or DeSantis or any of those people in D.C. to hold that much power over the rest of us in the states.

We are supposed to have a very weak central government, and most of the power is supposed to be out in the states. And that's going to be true whether we have a Republican president or a Democrat for president. Yeah, what about you, Mike? Well, I believe that the, you know, I also hold. that there's a conservative in the White House, a consistent conservative in 2024. The reality is that we need long-term structural change to really have a shot. And, you know, the slogan that Trump made popular in 2016 was, let's drain the swamp. Well, the swamp got bigger under Trump.

And so, you know, I think he meant well. I think he went. But it didn't work. And it didn't work because the way Washington-D-E-Wing. see functions and you have the best of intentions, you can send the toughest person in there. And it's, you know, you're going to drain the swamp. You've got to take away their power because it's not about whether we spend X dollars or Y dollars. It's you spend no dollars. You take away their subject matter jurisdiction because, you know, and the administrative state as Mark was talking about is key. There are 50 books. It takes 50 books to put all the

laws that Congress has passed. It takes 200 books. to pay all the laws that the administrative agencies have passed. And Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution says, all legislative authority is vested in the Congress of the United States. And you shouldn't think that Congress is jealous of it. They did it to themselves because they don't want to take political responsibility for this. And so it's nameless, faceless bureaucrats the voters have no control of, no idea who they really are.

They're the ones that are running our lives in three. of four laws in this country. And so we just have to stop that. We've got to go back to Congress passing the laws. And the administrative agencies should not be able to make law, period. You know, if they want to make, you know, internal dress codes for their offices or, you know, talk about what the hours of operation for the national parks are, okay. You can do that administratively.

But when you're telling private people how they run their businesses, how they raise their kids, how they spend their money, what you can grow in your garden. That's not an administrative function. If that is at all within any government's jurisdiction, it's a legislature that you can vote out of office if you don't like what they're doing to you. Yeah, no, I think that's a very key point. Too many Americans are unfamiliar with the way that Congress delegates saying, we want clean air, you administrative agency actually create the laws, then we're not held accountable when it messes people up. But is there anything else you'd like to add about how, what Christians are facing in the world today and, you know, what NRP means to you?

I can just tell you a story. In 1984, I was picking a jury in a criminal case in San Diego County. I represented a Christian mom who was being charged with kidnapping because she took a little extra time on visitation after a judge awarded custody to her ex-husband who was a homosexual. And so she ran and hid with her son for 18 months. And she was being charged with a form of kidnapping. In picking the jury, I asked every juror, do you know a born-again Christian? Do you know a homosexual? This isn't recently.

This is 1984 in San Diego. And every juror knew a homosexual. one juror knew a born-again Christian. Now, what that taught me was this. They had to know born-again Christians. They just didn't know that they knew born-again Christians, because homosexuals

were more open and obvious about who they were than the Christians are. And people, when they make public policy decisions, personalize it. You know, my uncle's a homosexual, my aunt's a lesbian or whatever. And they, you know, or that I know Ellen DeGeneres from television.

They personalize it. And if Christians are an abstraction, no wonder our rights are under siege. The best thing that people can do to embellish the rights of people like us is to start, first of all, be nice to your neighbor. You know, be a real neighbor and be a good person. You know, you coach the little league team.

You're not the guy that screams at everybody. You're the guy that inspires the team. You go win, but you do it kindly. And when we live that way and we tell people who we are, that's the most important single thing I think we can do, because until people know that there are good people in this country who believe like we believe, our rights really are in jeopardy because of our own silence.

Wow. Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on the head. Mark, do you have anything else to add about Christians in the culture? I think the biggest thing is don't give up. Have hope. First of all, we have the ultimate hope, right? So we should never give up because we know the end of the story. But I would say here in the here and now, don't give up.

We're not called upon to sit and wait and watch evil take over the earth. We're called upon to take territory for the Lord. And we should be doing that in every day and in every way we can. And so I'm hopeful. I'm a happy warrior. I'm out there. I'm going to fight for something that I believe in every single day of my life. And if all Christians did that, we would be winning every day.

We would win the elections. We would win the cultural fights. We have to be willing to engage in those fights. You're here. Well, thank you so much, again, both of you for joining me. Thank you very much. Thanks again for joining us and listening. Again, that was Mark Meckler and Michael Ferris.

And I'm Tyler O'Neill. If you appreciated this podcast episode, feel free to leave five-star rating and review. We read all of your feedback here at the Daily Signal podcast. You can find this podcast anywhere you get your podcast just by searching the Daily Signal podcast. And we'll be back this afternoon with another show where we record the top news of the day. And you can find that right here in your podcast feed.

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