The Eric Metaxas Show - Bill Donahue

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League returns with a new important book: Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show. Have you heard that some people have a nose for news? Well, Eric has a nose for everything. That's why this is called The Show About Everything.

Now, welcome your host, who definitely passes the smell test. Eric Montexis. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show. I get to talk to someone right now whom I've been admiring and watching for a long time. Before I got into the radio business myself and the TV business, there was a guy named Bill Donahue, and he is the head of the Catholic League,

and he's speaking truth about what's going on in the culture, and it's a privilege to have him right now. now as my guest and to talk about his brand new book, Cultural Meltdown. Bill Donnie, you welcome. Thank you. Thank you for all the good work that you do. Well, listen, you've been in this game a long time. You're one of the pioneers, as far as I'm concerned, that you were out there on TV,

fighting the good fight, talking about Christian faith and the culture's hostility to it. And so it's just good to know you, and it's a privilege to talk to you. The new book, Cultural Meltdown, is a brand new book. What is the subject to that, if not the cultural meltdown? Well, what I'm saying is that we have in this country two competing strains of thought, and they are irreconcilable. One is grounded in our religious moorings, the Jeneo Christian ethos, the belief in God, the belief in human nature,

the belief in original sin, the belief in moral absolutes, the belief in truth. And on the other side, you have the second. vision. They don't believe in God. They don't believe in truth. They don't believe in human nature. Everything is malleable. We're like piece of money. We can create. There are no limitations of a human condition. You can't go on like this forever. We're in a major culture war. It's been like this for decades. I understand that. I am not about to say that we've won or we've lost. I'm saying it's up for grabs, but it can't go on like this forever. One side and at the end of the day, we'll triumph over the other. Well, that's a fact. I mean,

in my new book, Religious Christianity, I call it an existential crisis. We've never faced this in our lifetimes. We saw it in the revolution. We saw it in the civil war. For the first time in our lives, as bad as things have ever been, they are now at a crisis point where we have to choose. We are in this war for the soul of this nation. Are we going to be the nation that we have been, or are we going to become something else and cease to be in the same way that we would have ceased to be the nation if we had lost the Civil War. What would we have become? I don't know.

But it seems to me that we're there now, and I can give my version of the details. But what do you say in your new book Cultural Meltdown about what these various forces are that are warring with each other? Well, on the one hand, we have the elites, the ruling class. They tend to be very left in their ideas. And let me just stop right there. We all know that the left has always been in the economy, in higher education, and in the media and in the entertainment industry, and in the arts and the nonprofits. What we have today is these ideas of secularism have permeated the healthcare industry, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the corporate 500. In other words, the ruling class has adopted the politics of the left in many cases.

but there are some important signs that they're not winning. Some of the stuff with this idea of diversity, education, and equity and the like, there's a bit of a pushback going on. But if you believe that there's no such thing as human nature, to take one example, then you can believe in utopia. Then you can believe that if we only get the right people in command, it's always the intellectuals are. They always know better than everybody.

They're smarter than God. That's why they don't need God. And if you get the right people there in charge, and then we can change human nature, we've been down this road. It doesn't work. It leads to mass graveyards. The body bags are piled up to the sky. And it's about time that we learn this. I have faith in the average American.

The average American has common sense. They tend to be a believer. They're good people. The problem with our society today, Eric, is with the elites. They're deracinated. They're rootless. they've lost their morings and they're making decisions which the rest of us can't tolerate. But there is a pushback on a lot of different levels.

Well, you know, what's interesting to me, Bill, is that there's nothing new under the sun. You see the same stuff over and over and over again. Buckley in the, I don't know if it was the 60s or the 50s. William F. Buckley said that I would rather be governed by, you know, the first 300 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard College. In other words, your average person who are not the elites somehow have common sense that the elites don't have. And you see this played out over and over and over again, that you have to be an academic,

you have to be out of touch with reality to have such bad ideas. But they've taken control of all of these institutions. And so as you're putting it, we're now in a war with these. mad elites, but it's something that you can look back to the French Revolution. You have these utopiness schemes. They push God out. They always fail. They always end in a bloodbath.

And you just said that as well. Right. And let me say, you know, one thing about Bill Buckley, you know, he founded National View in 1955. He did a lot of great work. But when he was writing, it was just the beginning. In the 1960s, the French gave it to us postmodernism. This idea that truth is a fiction.

This is the driving force behind a lot of the problems that we have in our society today. The average person doesn't believe it, but the average elite does. I even give an example in the book of a woman who I'd never heard of before. She's a philosopher by the name of Lori Calhoun. And she was asked by another philosopher who's got his head screwed on straight, David Detmer. He says, now, Laura, you're a postmodernist. You don't believe in truth. That's right.

He said, I just have one question. are giraffs taller than ants. Now, a preschool kid should be able to answer that. Her answer was, no, that's a matter of religious faith. See, it used to be that we'd only put the people who had a chronic condition in the asylum. I would like to put half of the academy in the asylum today, because that's where they belong. It's much worse than when Bill Buckley was talking about it. You had the new left and things of that nature.

But, you know, even then, they had a vision of you. utopia. Now, I know it was flawed. Marks didn't understand human nature. And before him, obviously, Rousseau didn't understand human nature. It always leads to a bloodbath. But today, today the left are spent intellectually and they're admitting it. They have no utopia. That's why you have the nihilism. That's why you have this destructive thing. It's like a little boy trying to put together the director set and he can't do it so he takes a hammer and smashes it all. They have no blueprint for the future. So we're all going down. was of what? Antifa? Is this the future of America? It better not be. Well, you know, you bring

up so many important things. First of all, you're right. When Buckley was saying these things, I mean, look, it was already there. I mean, it's funny when you try to trace it backwards, right? When he wrote God and Man at Yale in 1951, okay, I was at Yale in the early 80s. In 1951, he writes, God and Man at Yale about the Yale of the 40s when he was there. And it was all, already in place. The elites were already there pushing communism, pushing atheism. So this stuff has been in the academy. You know, you can trace it back and back and back. C.S. Lewis, when he writes his book, The Abolition of Man, he's talking about some of these things. But you're right, it's not until the 60s that we find, you know, postmodernism and critical theory in the 70s and so on and so

forth. So you can trace it back and back and back. But it all goes back to the same thing. There's God's view of the world. And I guess for shorthand, we have to say, and then there's the devil's view of the world, right? And over and over and over again, we're facing these same kind of battles for what is true, what is real, can we know what is real, can we know what is true? But to your point, things have gone so crazy that it's like the snake swallowing its own tail. The left is now in kind of full crazy panic mode, throwing ideas out there, being seen. self-destructive. Just 30 seconds left in this segment, and then we'll be back. We've got you for the whole hour. So please, final thoughts. Yeah, I mean, Buckley would not believe what's going on today.

At least back then, nobody denied if you're a man that you're a man, and nobody would pretend that you're a woman. Today, I don't think you can get tenure at any academic institution of any consequence in this country today unless you believe in the fiction that a man can become a woman and vice versa. Folks, I'm talking to Bill Donahue. The brand new book is Cultural Meltdown. We'll be back with plenty more. Don't go away.

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Keep your number, keep your phone, or upgrade. Their team will help you find the best plan for your needs. Just go to Patriotmobile.com slash metaxus. Patriotmobile.com slash metaxus or call 972 Patriot. 972 Patriot. Get free activation when you use the offer code metaxus. Join me. Make the switch today. That's Patriotmobile.com slash metaxis. For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless provider. And when I say only, trust me, they're the only one. Glenn and the team have been great supporters of this show, which is why I am proud to partner with them. Patriot Mobile offers dependable nationwide coverage, giving you the ability to access all three major networks, which means you get the same coverage you've been accustomed to

without funding the left. When you switch to Patriot Mobile, you're sending the message that you support free speech, religious freedom, the sanctity of life, Second Amendment, and our military, veterans and first responder heroes. Their 100% U.S.-based customer service team makes switching easy. Keep your number, keep your phone, or upgrade. Their team will help you find the best plan for your needs. Just go to Patriotmobile.com slash Metaxus. Patriotmobile.com slash Metaxus or call 972 Patriot. 972 Patriot. Get free activation when you use the offer code Metaxus. Join me. Make the switch today. That's Patriotmobile.com slash metaxis. Welcome back, folks. It's the Eric Metaxis show. I'm talking to Bill Donahue, whose brand new book is

Cultural Meltdown. And we're talking, Bill, about where things have come. In other words, you and I have seen a lot of crazy over the years. But we never dreamt that we get to a place where a Supreme Court justice asked point blank, what is a woman, says, I'm not qualified to answer that. It is a level of madness. But the funny thing is, I just feel like the left, the secular left, is in a death spiral. They can't pull out of it because nobody can say, well, wait a minute, yeah, I know what a woman is. They have to go along and go along and long. And it gets harder and harder to pull out of the death spiral. They're basically destroying themselves in a sense.

The absurdity goes on and on until your average American who maybe wasn't paying so much attention is suddenly paying attention. They said, what? Now I'm paying attention. Well, you're right. I mean, that's why we have groups like Mons for Liberty. They learned under COVID what was being taught in the classroom, and they began to organize. You know, there's a glimmer of hope here, though, and I'm not, I'm not Pollyannish.

but just take the whole madness of transgenderism. In Europe, they're moving the other way. They're going back. They've learned through science. They've admitted back in 2011 that this Dutch study, which claimed all kinds of good things about gender affirming care, it was based on faulty data. Most of Europe now has changed on this.

Actually, it's the Americans and the Canadians who are in last place. And in this country, I don't like to see a litigious society. However, if the only way the elites are going to learn is through being sued, then I'm all in favor of it. You've got a lot of these girls, 80% of the ones who transition are girls wanting to become boys. They've been ruined psychologically and physiologically, and they're now suing because they knew that the therapist just gave them 20 minutes, and now all of a sudden they're deformed, and they're suing the doctors and the institutions. You know, it's amazing. Eric, if you walked into a doctor, into a hospital, and you say, listen, doc, I got a problem, I want to amputate my left leg, he wouldn't do it. He'd say, wait a minute, we need to have a conversation.

You can't do that. If you say, I want you to cut off my genitals because I'm not happy being in the body that I have in, he'll say to go down to room 12A. I mean, this is how crazy it is. Take a look at these young girls who are involved in detransitioning. They're suffering mightily. So I do think that the elites are going to have to learn from the masses. This is the strange thing about it. When you have the ACOU coming out officially saying that men can get pregnant, now you know that they're crazy in many respects, they know they're lying.

When you have people in Harvard Medical School and saying this pretty much the same kind of thing, as you pointed out, Tempty Brown, what is a woman? I don't know what a woman is. We got a guy, it's a man. he claims that he's a woman who's an assistant health secretary to Biden. His name is Richard Levine already changed it to Rachel.

His father had two children. Okay? But he claims to be a woman. He did that in his 1950s. Now, what kind of a society is it that we try to make a role model out of somebody who has obviously severe mental issues? And if we don't say

what it is, I'm talking about minors now. If we don't call this child abuse, then we are the problem. It is the greatest child abuse issue of our day, the idea that you could take a minor, a teenager, and you could

transition that kid behind the back of the parents. And you know who's in favor of that? And I have it in the book, Cultural Meltam, the Biden administration, and the National Education Association, the N-E-A. They say it's okay to transition

a young girl or boy without the consent of the parents. This is the devil at work. You mentioned the devil before. I don't use that word permissuously, but it has to be invoked here. Use the word again, if you don't mind, because I didn't catch it. The word devil. This is the devil at work. The idea that you have the elites, such as the education gurus at the National Education Association and the Biden administration, including the president himself, all endorsing the idea that a young person, a minor, can be transitioned to the other sex,

which they can't do anyhow, but they could try it without parental consent. That is the work and the handiwork of the devil. No doubt, no doubt. And I think, again, we've got to be clear. I feel like on this program, I'm trying to help people process this. You think, how did this happen?

Where are we? And part of what we're talking about, Bill, is the idea, for example, that some government bureaucratic, or some public school figures could know what's better for our children than we the parents could. That is, you talk about a bold red line. Holy cow, they used to have that in communist countries. You would hear about kids turning their parents in or the state arresting parents because the kids are or kids being taken away from their parents to be raised by the state.

That happens in North Korea. That happens in the former Soviet Union. That happens in East Germany. in America, the family is sacred. The parents' rights over their kids are sacred and beautiful and part of what made us, the great nation. We are to have that line crossed in America. I never thought I'd see that.

I simply never thought that I would see that actually happen. And it is an issue of the elites, the quote unquote experts saying, we know better. We'd never seen that in America before until now. No, we haven't. the idea might be old. Plato believed in communal rearing of children. He didn't think that the parents should be able to raise their kids by themselves and have to be done by everybody else. And in a slightly different matter, Hillary Clinton, the whole idea of it takes a village. Well, I thought it took a father and a mother, and now a sudden we got the village involved.

Be careful with that. The village idiot might be the one who's really in charge. You're right, Eric. I mean, today, the disrespect, the contempt for parents and parental rights is at an all-time high? You know, a lot of these people are making decisions don't have children of their own, all right? They've avoided their kids. Almost inevitably. Almost enough.

This bears my interruption, so forgive me. The idea, in other words, when we're talking about these elites that are out of touch, they're out of touch because they haven't been forced by reality to deal with reality. So if you're a community organizer or you're some intellectual at some university, or you're a person, professional career politician, you've never had to deal with the basics, the basics of

balancing a checkbook, having a job, getting along in a community. You've been able to live in this rarefied false world. And part of that is having kids. When you have kids, it's one of the ways that God forces you to deal with a kind of reality. And it turns out that many, many of these elites, not all, but many of them do not have children. And you don't have children. You're going to think about children radically different than those people who have had children. So the elites are increasingly becoming a class unto themselves. But I think the good news is that the madness, as you're saying, in your book cultural meltdown, it's brought us to a place where people who were ordinarily just kind of going along are saying, wait a minute, what did you say? What? You know,

we've arrived at a moment of madness that is waking up people. And I think that's what gives me hope. it does with me too and i keep telling people on radio and tv the next time you hear someone say something who has an alphabet after his name you know like phd like i have one be careful if that person says something which in your gut strikes you as being absurd trust your gut people i'm not saying that you should hold these people who have degrees in a great deal of cynicism and disregard them altogether that's going too far but be skeptical keep an open mind If you hear something said by somebody who's known as doctor or whatever the label might be, and it strikes you as being just simply positively absurd, go with your gut,

because chances are what you're hearing doesn't, is not grounded in common sense. Well, and again, it comes down to common sense, right? I mean, when you're suddenly told by experts that, oh, this thing that we've lived with for millennia, there are men and their women, that's obsolete. I think the logical thing is to say, excuse me, what are you talking about? Where did you get this information? Because it's like saying, you know, pigs can fly? You think, okay, maybe.

Can you show me why you'd make that statement? Because I need to see little evidence because as far as I know pigs cannot fly. But the idea that we're supposed to accept this, we're supposed to shut up and go along with it, that to me is what reveals the falsehood of the other side because they're not open. to critical examination. I mean, look, it's no different when the Nazis said, we've got German science and Jewish science, and Jewish science is out. So we're not going to read Einstein. We're not going to write, you know, a normal person would say, excuse me, when did you figure this out? How did you come to this new view? And they would tell you, don't ask questions. Shut up.

That's kind of where we are today. Well, not only that, but let's face it, we Christians, we've been the ones regarded by the great savants, the great intellectuals, as being anti-science. If you want to find out where anti-science is thriving, go to the local college campus, go to the humanities, go to the social sciences. They believe that a man can become a woman and vice versa. We know that that is simply not true. And if I hear one more time of somebody saying, well, what was your sex assigned at birth?

Nobody ever assigned my sex, okay? The sex of every person who ever walked the face of the earth is determined by one person, your father. Okay? That's simply Biology 101. It wasn't assigned by somebody. Somebody may have recorded it in an operating room, but they didn't assign. Basically, it's the chromosomes, the moment of conception. You can tell moment of conception.

Every cell will tell you, are you a male or a female? So, yeah, it's not a sign. We'll be right back talking to Bill Donahue, the new book, Cultural Meltdown. Do I have a great movie suggestion for you, full of bravery, patriotism, and hope? It's the new Kevin Costner film, Horizon and American Saga, the epic tale of how the West was won. Horizon dives right into the heart of our nation when thousands of courageous men and women sacrificed everything, crossing the country and covered wagons in pursuit of the American dream. It's a timeless film about freedom, family, and our quintessential pioneer spirit,

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We're talking to Bill Donahue, the brand new book, Cultural Meltdown. Bill, you just said about science. This is another one of these things that I find fascinating. You and I have grown up with this lie that science is somehow at odds with faith. You know, people always trot out the story of Galileo, blah, blah, blah. Well, I wrote a book, came out just a couple years ago called This Apeasem Dead, where I talk about this. Not only is faith aligned with science and science aligned with faith, but it is, in fact, Christians who brought into the universe this idea of modern science, the last four centuries

or whatever of the kind of science that we have came about because of Christians. Science arises out of Christian faith. And I mean, I write about that in my book, because atheism is that. I'm not going to talk about it here. But the idea that science is somehow at odds with Christian faith is nonsense. But it goes further. Science is out of step with atheism. In other words, if you are an atheist, a pure secularist, you have no basis to believe that the universe is understandable. You have no basis to understand, to believe that this process of science makes sense that there's a search for the truth. So it is atheism, ironically, that is at odds with science. And those of us who are reality-based, and we're trying to examine the world in which we live,

whether it's through science or other things, we're really doing what God created us to do. And I think, you know, as we've been talking here, things have gotten so crazy in the secular left that we're beginning to see clearly the wheels are coming off. And they don't know which way to turn. And all they can do now is really preach nihilism. You've said it in the beginning. They don't have a view of this glorious utopia. They just know if we burn it all down, something better will come. Well, I doubt it.

And as you alluded to before, Eric, these people live in a bubble. It's self-reinforcing. Look, I spent 20 years in education, four years in Spanish Harlem with wonderful black and Puerto Rican kids in a Catholic elementary school, a rough neighborhood back in the 70s. Those kids could learn. All you had to do is demanded from them. But the other 16 years as a professor and 20 years on the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars, I saw it firsthand. These people, they live in an intellectual ghetto. They're impervious to reason.

You try to debate with them, and they just walk away. And just let me remember this. Back in the 1980s, I cut my teeth on TV on Crossfire with Tom Braden and Bob Novak and Pap Buchanan and others and Michael Kinsley. And later with Hannity and Combs. All those shows are gone. And you know why they're gone, Eric? Because the left lost almost every single night, not just to me and people like yourself and others. But I don't care what the subject matter was.

They don't have common sense on their side. They live in an intellectual ghetto where everything is self-reinforces. They don't know what new ideas represent. In order for us to get our education, we had to study under the left. I studied under the left at NYU and in the New School for Social Research and back at NYU. I know the way the Marxists think. If you're a sociologist, you're going to know your marks. And I know how they think.

They are so utterly predictable, living in the wrong little bubble. And now they're safely in constant in the academy and the carols in the library. And they don't have to be exposed to a Hannity and Combs or to across the... fire because there are no more debates left. And the left killed the debates because they got their clock clean almost every night for years. Well, so this is interesting because it brings us to how we've come to this point of cultural meltdown, the title of your book. I call it in my book Religinalist Christianity. I say it's an existential crisis because we are at a place where I think the left realized we cannot win on ideas. So we just have to take the gloves off.

and fight. We cannot possibly reason toward what we want. We just have to be brutal about it. And that's where postmodernism comes in. It's all about power. It's not about reasoning our way toward the good, the true, and the beautiful. It's all about power. We know what we know and we're going to do whatever we need to do to get there. In other words, they've abandoned any principles, whether it's the principles of we're going to debate. We believe in logic. We have a common set of assumptions. they've abandoned that, but they've even abandoned the idea that I shouldn't lie. In other words, they've achieved this kind of postmodern place where they have no principles. If I need to lie or cheat, steal an election, whatever I need to do to gain power now is the time.

And that's basically what we're seeing. It seems to me. In fact, you're so apt. I have a section in the book where I think it's from the Pew Survey. It could be Gallup, but it's sort of established the survey house. And they asked people, if you thought you could cheat and get your candidate elected, would that be okay? Most Americans said, no. Those people who were liberal Democrats, more women than men, the left in general, they said it was okay.

They were okay with it. And this idea of power, when Saul Olinsky was agitating back in the 60s and 70s in Chicago, he kept telling his followers, yes, we have to be concerned. concerned about the issue that we're arguing about, could be housing, police, whatever. He said, remember, the ultimate issue is one word. It's power. We want control. Forget about housing and education and the cops. We've got to be in control. That's our goal, because you can't have a revolution unless we occupy the command seats. And you're right. They're spent intellectually. They know it themselves. That's why they become nihilist and trying

to destroy everything in our works. This day, too, will pass. But our side, has to remain resolute. And we have to call them out on this. I know you do this for a living and I do it for a living, so it's easier for us to speak, maybe. The average person is not a warrior, and I don't expect them to get into the streets, et cetera. But we have to be able to say to people, time out, we're not going to put up with this. We know this is a lie. We know it's false. And let your neighbors and your friends and your family know about it too, because we need to reinforce each other. Otherwise, the elites will stop on us. Well, that's a big person. of what I try to do on the show to say to people, hey, folks, you know how you think everything's

crazy? That's because it is crazy. And I'm here to affirm the fact that sane people are seeing insanity and you need to be affirmed and to know you're not alone and that people like Eric Bataxas and Bill Donahy want to help you process this so you can be part of the solution. Bill, we'll be right back. Final segment, the book is Cultural Meltdown. Okay, I have never seen a discount this huge from Balance of Nature. And this discount is for a very limited time. So today is the day to order it. Look, if you've listened to me for any length of time, you've heard me rave about Balance of nature's amazing fruits and veggie supplements. You've heard their customers rave about how much they love Balance of Nature and how good it makes them feel. If you've been on the fence about

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Get 50% off your first set today using the code. Eric, you can go to balance of nature.com or call 800 2468-751. Check it out. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Bill Donahue. the author of a brand new book, Cultural Meltdown. It seems to me that the heart of everything is a rage against God. That's really what we're talking about.

And it's becoming more and more open that the secular left has become angry at God in a way that was never so explicit before. We saw that even in a lot of the LGBTQ lunacy, the Pride Month lunacy a year ago, there was openly satanic symbolism. Like, you know, in the past, we would have made that up or we would have thought, oh, that's coming. Here it is. At Target stores had pride stuff with pictures of the devil. And you think that's something that somebody would make up. No, it's real. I think this rage against God, again, it's kind of like I call it, this death spiral.

They can't get out of it. And they become more and more explicit and more clear about what they're raging against. And it's a rage against God and the reality that God created, including the idea that they're men and women. they can't bear that, that they hate that, they hate themselves. I mean, we've really never seen anything quite like this. Well, you know, you're right. I mean, Jefferson talked about nature and nature's God in the Declaration. That's what this is about.

They don't like nature. They don't like nature's God. So we're going to be in charge. But it's always led to a bloodbath in history. They have nothing to show for it in terms of anything good that's ever happened. And it seems to me that it's kind of late in the day for the intellectuals. to think that they can win in this argument. It's over in that sense.

But yet they still persist, and they're in the universities. They're becoming increasingly angry. And quite frankly, one of the things I point out in the book, too, a lot of these people, not only do they have these pernicious ideas, they in their own lifestyle are dysfunctional. People need to know about Rousseau. He wrote a book, A Meal, about child rearing. Are they taught in the schools that he fathered five illegitimate children?

never gave them a name. Box is the great humanitarian. He's concerned about the working class. As Paul Johnson pointed out, there's no evidence that he ever stood put in a factory. He also fathered a child off of his maid. Her nickname was Lentgen. And we know that because on his deathbed,

Engels admitted that his son, Freddie, was really called Marx's son. But he had to protect the reputation of Marx. And I can go on and on with the people today and take a look at the French intellectuals, and how many of them are pro incest. This is in the book. I name names, I've got the facts,

I'm a social scientist, I get footnotes, I'm not taking this stuff up. I just had family over the weekend, and people are saying, hey, God, what do you get all these papers here all over the place? They said, yeah, that's the backup stuff. They say anybody wants to challenge Bill Donnie,

I've got the evidence. This is not an essay, not a matter of opinion. It's not a conclusion by looking at the same data, admittedly, but you can't say that I made this stuff out of whole cloth. We're being gaslighted. We're being gaslighted by the media who protect those in government with the Democratic Party. I mean, I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, because a conspiracy has an element of latency to it. This is right out in the open. This is wide out in the open. Kathy Huckle, the governor of New York, just recently spoke down about the Puerto Rican

working class coming out for Trump, called them clouds. You know what? if they think of them, deplorables, as Hillary called them. She said you're worried about your God. Well, what did Obama say? They cling to their guns and their religion. They really hate religion. If you look at it closely, the elites really think they're smarter than everybody, and we have to do, Hockel actually said it.

We give them the answers they won't accept them. How about that? The average Joe doesn't accept what Kathy Hulko and the other elites are telling us. No, and in fact, we will be disobedient. We won't believe a word you say because you're all crazy. Well, listen, I mean, what I keep saying wherever I go and in my book letter to the American Church and the new one is that those of us who claim to have some kind of Christian faith, I mean, this is true of everybody, but it's specifically true of so-called Christians.

We need to be part of the fight, folks. We need to understand that if we allow these things to happen, we're complicit, we're guilty. And I think for anybody, and Bill, you know your history. Anybody foolish enough to think that really, really, really evil things can't happen here. They don't know history. They don't know 70 years of Soviet communism that did some of the most wicked things imaginable, that persecuted people of faith satanically, cruelly.

This is history. We could have a thousand years of dark ages if we are not vigilant. So I want to be real clear, folks. You have a role in this. You have to understand what's going on and you have to do your part and what that is. That's between you and God. But if you think doing nothing is okay, I want to be clear that the German church, most of them thought we don't need to get involved in this. And it led to the death camps.

And it goes on and on through history. You know, Bill, this idea that they can't win, you don't need to be right to win at least for a time. I mean, the Soviet Union, they were there for 70 years. I never thought I'd see it go away. By God's grace, it did. but they ran for seven decades of cruelty and oppression and forced atheism. This stuff is real in the world, and so people need to be aware of that. Well, fortunately, we have Ronald Reagan and John Paul II, a lot of good people.

But let me punctuate you're saying there about Germany and the culture. I have a section in the book about the Weimar Republic. I'm talking about between 1918 and 1933 when Hitler came into power. What happened to Germany in the 1920s? I'm not going to recount the political and economic toll. took place with the Depression, the Treaty of Versailles, the stamp in the back and the like. I go into something different.

The cultural collapse, the moral collapse of Germany in the 1920s, people having sex in the street, open prostitution, the beginning of transgenderism. And what happens then is that people lose a sense of moral outrage. Sociologists call it an o me, A-N-O-M-I-E. All it means is normlessness. It means that the idea of right and wrong have been blurred. know the difference between one and the other. Once you accept that, then yes, of course,

it's like me walking down the streets of New York. I'm not going to walk on a person, but if I see an aunt, I'll step on him and keep on walking. That's what happens. Albert Spear was second in command to Adolf Hitler. They said, how could you kill all these Jews? He said, I didn't hate them. And when I first read about it, I was perplexed. I thought, baby is a liar. And then I realized what he was saying. He said, no, I depersonalized them. And once you depersonalize the baby in the mother's womb, once you depersonalize anybody. And you get that way in our society today when people are involved in all kinds of drugs, in libertinism, sexual free foralls, it never winds up in a happy stage at the end.

You know, a couple of years ago in another book, I compared cloistered nuns to the Hollywood celebrities. Now, the cloistered nuns should be the ones who are the least free and the least happy. Guess who were the happiest, the healthiest, and guess it was the least happy. I mean, it's there, people. Christianity has the answer. We have to be the ones who make it the answer, though. We just said we have to operationalize the teachings, and that's what that happens. We're at a time, folks.

Get a copy of the book Cultural Meltdown by Bill. Donahue. Bill, got to have you back. Thank you so much. Thank you for the opportunity. Haba, heyba, heyba. I just wanted to quote the Cosby Kids. Remember the Cosby Kids?

Hey, hey, hey. And then there was Mushmouth. Who doesn't remember Mushmouth from the Cosby Kids? I don't know if you can do a mush mouth and not get canceled. Mushmouth from the Cosby Kids. Google Mushmouth from the Cosby Kids. And if you really want to get canceled, Google Bill Cosby. Hello.

I'll be here all week. Hey, but Fredba. Why, Bado, be you? I mean, really? Why are we talking about the Cosby kids? No one knows, including. Brown Hornet. I don't know. The Brown Hornet. Okay. So, we have a couple things to mention here. First of all, I want to mention to everyone the other night, the other night, last night, we did a Socrates in the city event with RFK Jr.

It was electric. It was crazy. Honestly, you set the bar. I'm a little concerned we set the bar too high, because where do we go from here? Where do we go from here? We get an interview somebody who's walked on the moon, for example. we've already done that. I think now we've just got to get, you know, Elon Musk. That's right. That's right. And, you know, we have to just... That's right. We have an A-list and we just, like, kind of mark them off.

Like a disgruntled middle schooler. Yeah. You know, it's like, someday, I'm going to get these guys. Yeah, yeah. Oh, wait a minute. Before we talk about this other stuff, I want to mention our friends at Americans for Prosperity. They are again on the front lines fighting against the border crisis. Did you know that there was a border crisis?

Did you know that the Biden administration is allowing millions of strangers into the country to destroy the America we love? Did you know that, folks? I hope you're going to vote in November, by the way. I hope you care about your country. But it's clear the politicians aren't going to solve this on their own. It's going to take good old-fashioned grassroots activism. And that's what Americans for Prosperity specializes in. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation has taken hundreds of concerned citizens to see the border for themselves.

turning them into informed activists. We need that, folks. Everybody needs to become an informed activist. And they're helping underscore what we need at the border, more border agents, more walls, more technology, mobilizing people. They've just announced a major campaign to hold Biden and his allies accountable for the crisis at the border, which they created. You can learn more at SecureBorder, SecureAmerica.com.

That's secureborder, secureamerica.com. Yeah, it's scary down there. It's ironic that it's Sleepy Joe because he seems fond of sleeper cells. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Read them bedtime stories. I was just going to crack the same joke, but then I rejected it as insufficiently funny. But here's the thing. There's something there.

I'll be back with yours too. But here's the thing. I probably haven't mentioned it. Tomorrow is my birthday. Hey. Tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, is my birthday. And I want to ask you, I'm going to be posting some stuff on Instagram. And if you do not get my newsletter, Ericmataxis.com.

you got to sign up for the newsletter, sign up quickly because you'll miss tomorrow's post. But we're putting out the Socrates event we had the other night. We're going to be posting photos. There were a lot of people there. I looked out in the audience. Yeah, I was full. And I was freaked out. My brother was there.

Yeah. I was thrilled to see my brother there and lots of like really old friends that I haven't seen in a while. And for security, they had a thing that we've never had before there. They had a barricade. A little like they had a barricade. And when your brother jumped over to give you Nugie halfway through. I was going to say they, uh, but they did have a barricade. They had a barricade.

No, it was, it was very interesting. I mean, the whole thing was crazy, but. There was like extra, extra security there. And in my monologue, I came out for Joe Biden. I want to be very clear. I cannot vote for RFK Jr. I would not vote for him because I'm a Biden guy. Yeah.

And, you know, I'm not, I'm not ashamed of that. But, but I, everyone, everyone thinks Eric metaxis, they think that's pulling the lever for Biden right there. Yeah, that's me. That's who I am. because I just don't care anymore. Actually, we've got a lot of exciting guests this week, folks. Tomorrow, as I say, it's special because it's my birthday. And typically, I only have my birthday once a year, which is rare.

So one out of every 365 days is my birthday. I can't speak for other people. But it's tomorrow. I'm excited about it. I'm going to be posting some stuff on Instagram, on Twitter, and on the newsletter, yada, yada, yada. Anyway, thanks for listening. Don't forget to support our friend Mike Lindell. Go to MyPill.

Use the code Eric. Mike Lindell, mypillow.com. Use the code Eric.