Ep 202 - They're Coming for Your Family...And They're Not Hiding It with Bill Donohue

James Caldwell: Beware of the quiet men in the suits. Beware of the quiet men in the suits. They've got some goals. And Huxley talked about this back in 1932 in Brave New World. That's why I bring him a lot in the book. Orwell talked about it in the late 1940s. That was more of the hard totalitarianism. I'm concerned more about the intellectual seduction. I'm concerned about what's going on in higher education. Because the whole thing is about a group thing. And when you challenge these people, then they punish you. This is the Manly Catholic, the podcast that calls you out of the shadows and into the fight. Here we forge men into warriors for Christ, husbands, fathers and leaders who refuse to kneel to the modern world's lies. No more passivity, no more excuses, no more lukewarm faith. This is your battle cry, your call to arms. The time for weakness is over. It's time to fight. Welcome to the Manly Catholic. Let's get to work. Hello all welcome back to another episode of the Manly Catholic. This is James your host and with me I am honored to have Bill Donahue joining the podcast. Bill, welcome to the Manly Catholic podcast. Well, thank you so much and thank you for your show. Yeah. Now, for those of you who don't know Bill, Bill is the president and CEO of the Catholic lead for religious and civil rights headquartered in New York city. He publishes catalyst, the leaks journal, and is the author of 12 books covering civil liberties, social issues, and Catholicism. earned his PhD in sociology from New York university in 1980 and served on the board of the national association of scholars for 20 years. A former college professor, Bill has appeared on thousands of TV and radio shows. and is one of the most recognizable Catholic voices in American public life. And today we're going to be talking about his latest book. So just flash it up here for everyone is called Christianity and the cross hairs ruling class and radicals find a common enemy. I'm really excited to have Bill to talk about this book. So Bill, let's just give our listeners kind of a bird's eye view of what is the main theme of book and what made you want to publish it. Well, We've known for some time that Christianity has been under attack. We've seen it from the arts. We've seen it from the media. It's in education. But when it comes from the government, then that's particularly pernicious. And under the Biden administration, things got increasingly worse, didn't they? They the FBI spying on traditional Catholics. Well, I began to look around at this, and I've been writing about the ruling class and radicals here and there throughout my life. But they typically have been opposed to each other. In other words, you're back in history, you see that you have the slave master, you have the slaves. During feudalism, you had the lords and you had the serfs. And of course, under capitalism, you had the industry owners and the working class. And they typically have been aligned against each other. And clearly, the radicals, the radical intellectuals and the activists have been on the side of the oppressed against the oppressors. Well, what's interesting, what's happened over the last 10, 20 years, is that many of the people, not all of them, But many of them, with the money, the foundations, the individuals, they're giving their money to clearly left-wing organizations. And you've seen it in Silicon Valley. You've seen it in Wall Street. Kamala Harris got way much more money than Trump did from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. And now that Trump has won, some of them are kind of moving over to his way. But when people talk about the ruling class, they think about, and the radicals, they might think of George Soros. So he'd be a good example, because he's both a radical and a member of the ruling class. But now we have these other people who have come in there, a guy by the name of Singham, okay? Neville Roy Singham. His name is probably not known to most people. I never heard of him until about the last year or two. He's out of Shanghai. He lives with the Chinese communists. He works with Chinese communists. He made hundreds of millions of dollars in this country with software. And his wife, Joni Evans, is working to work against Jews, working with Jews who hate Israel. So they're really, they're an invidious couple here. And what I'm saying is this, you now have a confluence. You now have the ruling class, that is to say the men and the women who make the decisions in this country, whether it be in government, the corporate world, the medical establishment, education, wherever, they are taking many of their cues, many of their ideas from radical intellectuals and activists. And that's why they subtitle it, ruling class and radicals find a common enemy. Because the one thing that they both loathe is Christianity and they don't like the family, the nuclear family. That's because the average Joe, the average American, gives his allegiance to his family and his religion, namely Christianity in this country for the most part. And so if you can disable them, you'll leave people in lurch and then maybe you'll find communion with them. So it's all about power, it's all about control. And I think that the American people need to find out what's going on. So is their goal then, would you say it's just to kind of brainwash the public? mean, because if you can eliminate the family, if you can eliminate religion, then you can kind of get the, I guess, the average citizen to do whatever they want. I mean, is that their ultimate goal, basically? brainwashing is a means toward an end. The end is to control. They want the power to control people. And yes, they want their thinking. They want to get inside your head. And that's what's really bad about this. In history, you've always had czars and kings and the like, and they were in charge and they made all the decisions, but they didn't care what was in your head. Okay? In order to get to that, have to get into, you have to see Stalin and you see Hitler and Mao. You're talking to look at the totalitarians. The authoritarians were political dictatorships. The totalitarian regimes of Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, they're interested in a political, economic, social, and cultural Now, in this country, the ruling class is not going to engage in violence against us. I'm not making that argument. I'm making an argument which is not entirely new. It's not brand new for me. But it goes back actually a couple of centuries. Even Tocqueville warned in the 19th century, beware of democratic despotism. Montesquieu and the century before warned of the similar problem. John Paul II talked about soft totalitarianism. as opposed to the hard totalitarianism Hitler, Stalin and Mao. And you can go on like this. Indeed, Bill Ivey, I quote him in the book, most people probably never heard of him with good reason. Bill Ivey was an advisor, an advisor to Hillary Clinton in 2016, when she was casting her lot to become president. And he said very clearly, our goal is the creation of the compliant citizenry. We want the people to be docile, passive. We're not going to use violence. We're going to intellectually rape them, so to speak. They're going to make sure that they begin to think the way we want to think. That gets back to what you said, James, with regard to the brainwashing. Yeah, they're very good at that. So you said, Bill, correct me if I'm wrong, you said about 10 years ago, these two stormily opposite spectrums seemed to come together. Was there a particular incident about 10 years ago that they discovered, we should joined together and actually have a common enemy or was there something even before that? think it evolved a little bit more slowly. You can see the seeds that were going back to the 1960s even. But what's happening really is that they really do work together. Not all of them. I'm not saying that everybody, but when you have, for example, the people in the academy, that's where it always starts, the professoria. When they're the ones who are teaching that a man can become a woman and a woman can become a man. And now that creeps up into percolates up to the Harvard Medical School, and that's what they teach their students, which of course is a lie. That's the problem. Where does it begin? In the academy. Now, unfortunately, it used to be that, look, my doctorates in sociology, that's been left-wing field for a long time. Nothing new about that. The people who work in the social sciences and humanities typically are the most left-wing. What's happened over the last 10 years or 20 years is that left-wing ideology has crept into the medical schools, the law schools, into the sciences. In other words, they've gone way beyond the humanities and the social sciences. And that's why you see this kind of a confluence here, where the ruling class are taking a lot of their ideas from radical activists and intellectuals. Now, there's some good news here, James. I think that they've reached their zenith. I do think that with the pushback against transgender mania, the pushback against DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, you're seeing that the people at the bottom, it's interesting. It's usually the elites are telling the people at the bottom, which is what they want to do, the people at the bottom, the masses, the average Joe are now having some sway in getting the people to the top to come back to their senses. I mean, a lot of this stuff is just based on the absence of common sense. When the ACLU says blithely that men can get pregnant, And we all know it's a lie, but we have to say it's a lie. that's just it. My problem, James, a lot of times is with the people who are on our side, who know that these things are crazy, but they're afraid, they're intimidated from speaking out against it. And you're not going to change a culture unless people like you and me and others who have a platform are willing to speak out. We have the people with the, they have the knowledge. Do they have the courage? And I'm talking about people within the church. and outside the church. Yeah, Bill, you brought up a great point about the medical sciences, because I'm a physical therapist by trade. very heavy involved in the medical field. And for me, the sort of light bulb moment, which I think for a lot of people was was COVID. And with COVID, you know, because I was always, you know, like, these might be political, but, you know, science is science, right? Like, that was what we were always told, like, it's black and white, like, there's no gray area. And when COVID came out and then we had all these experiments and all these lies that we were being told, you know, I think for me, the two biggest things, and you mentioned a couple of them in your book, was one, they basically said the vaccine was more effective against COVID than natural immunity, which has never been the case, like throughout all of humanity. And then they said, you needed to wear masks outside. When you're going out in public, which again, makes zero sense when you're outside. And the last one was when they had all these shutdowns with, with church services and things left and right. But then when all the riots happened, cause that was when the whole BLM, you know, craziness was going on. It was okay to go out and protest, but then, you know, you can't go to your mass on Sunday because you know, quote unquote, you want to, well, they stopped the spread. So to speak. all those things kind of cumulate. like, ⁓ so you guys actually don't know what you're talking about. ⁓ this actually is political. Otherwise it's pretty black and white and you guys allow this, but you don't allow this. So I want to kind of kick it back to you because that I think for a lot of people that kind of woke a lot of people up. like, ⁓ so you're lying about this. So what else are you lying about? So I don't know. You could even make the argument. I guess maybe they overplayed their hands, so to speak. And then The average Joe or the common folk, if you will, sort of woke up. It's like, oh, this is what they're trying to do to us. So I know if you have any comments on that as well, Bill. Well, in fact, I have an entire chapter on that and everything you said is accurate. Let me just punctuate that. There's no question about it that, you know, just take the idea of, right, you have to keep social distance from each other. Yet, 1,300 epidemiologists came out and said, It's okay for Black Lives Matter protests to take place even during the pandemic, even though you're not being engaged in social distancing, because it's more important to fight racism. Now that told you, you just correctly said they overplayed their hand. The mask came off and talking about mask, yeah, that was the other gambit that they played. How many times did we see people like Nancy Pelosi going into her salon? had Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. We had de Blasio in New York. All these people were playing the games. They never wore the mask when they went to their parties. The famous one, which I mentioned in the book, is Obama at birthday party that he threw for himself, the narcissist that he is, in Watha's Vineyard. And none of the people who were there were wearing masks except for the servers. The servers had to be obedient. They had to be obedient, and they were told what to do on that. Let's remember, too, that's right, you had... Costco had more rights with the shoppers than people going to church on Sunday. And San Francisco was the worst of any city in the United States. Thank God for Archbishop Corleone for standing up against Gavin Newsom. People have to remember, Gavin Newsom actually said you could not have worship in your own home. In your own home, you could not have private worship. That's how far they went to try and control people. You're absolutely right. COVID was a perfect example of the ruling class taking the radical ideas. They didn't believe a word of it, unless we think that what? They're not going to wear the mask, so they're going to put their own life at risk? No, no, no. They knew their life wasn't at risk. So that's why they didn't wear it. Why did they insist that everybody else wear it? Because it's a matter of control. If you get used to this, maybe you'll get to like it. And remember, there were students, I think it was at the University of Nevada. where the students actually complained after they said, you don't have to wear the mask. They complained that we want to wear the mask. Now these are the same students who say, this is my body, I can do whatever I want with it, can abort the baby, ⁓ don't tell me what to do with my body. Meanwhile, they were angry, you didn't tell them what to do with their body, putting the mask back on. So yeah, the whole thing kind of blew up. And that's why I think we're on the way back to common sense. coffee and prayer. It's the perfect blend. Mystic Monk Coffee isn't just another cup of coffee. It's handcrafted by the Carmelite monks of Wyoming, roasted with care and infused with prayer. Whether you're starting your morning or fueling your day, Mystic Monk Coffee has you covered. It offers rich, bold flavors that are as divine as their mission. By choosing Mystic Monk, you're not just enjoying exceptional coffee, but you're supporting a community of monks dedicated to their work, to prayer, and to the church. is coffee with a cause. So what are you waiting for? Visit mystic monk coffee.com and experience the brew that's feeling faith and flavor. Well, I think to a bill what what's so crazy to me is that so they say these things and then when you call them out on it like two years later and then they basically say like, we we never said that or or we never meant that, you know, and so same thing with like President Biden. He came out and he said, I forgot the his exact words. said, if you get this vaccine, you will not get infected. Like it is 100 % foolproof. If you get it, you'll never get infected. And then they came out and said, no, we never said that. We said you are less likely to get it and blah, blah, blah. They tried to like backtrack it. then, know, Fauci who, gosh, we could have a whole episode on Fauci. He said, oh, you should actually wear two masks because two masks are better than one, which is just like You guys are just making up the most random rules. It is not backed by size. And then you said six feet of distancing. It's like, where do we get the six foot rule, which is just again, made up of thin air and but it's like they're all in line and in step with each other. And then of course, you can talk about the media at large. And it's like, we're going to keep repeating these lies, you know, and and again, being in the healthcare field, but they had a mandate of having to get the the COVID vaccine if you were a Medicare provider, basically. And thank God I worked for a private company and they allowed religious exemption. So I was able to get out of getting the vaccine because I'm not putting this experimental drug, especially for men where they had a bunch of heart problems, had a bunch of difficult, especially in like high schoolers. There's a number of kids who like couldn't play in sports for that whole year because they had an enlarged heart because of after they had the vaccine. But then it's like, well, there's no, there's no proving that this actually the vaccine causal. This was like, okay, what else could have caused it? And it's just a lie. after lie after lie. it just, it's almost like don't believe what your eyes are telling you because your eyes are deceiving you, essentially. Well, it's not only the lies there and everything you said is accurate. What about the lie that the idea that men and women can interchange? You can have sex reassignment surgery. No, nature fixes things. You know, the men are XY, the women are XX, you're not going to change that. But they lied about that. And now they're beginning to try and pull back on that. You know, the thing is this. They know that they can succeed. And that's what the second half of the book is about. The second half of the book is about the attacks on the family and the attacks on Christianity. Because once they can kind of pull you away from the family and pull you away from your religion, then you're open to seek communion with them. And this is an old idea. It goes way back to the totalitarians, the hard totalitarians of Hitler and Stalin. As I say, today they're using softer measures. Remember what C.S. Lewis said. Beware of the quiet men in the suits. Beware of the quiet men in the suits. They've got some goals. They've got some ideas. And Huxley talked about this back in 1932 in Brave New World. That's why I bring him a lot in the book. Well, talked about it in the late 1940s after World War II. That was more of the hard totalitarianism. I'm concerned more about the intellectual seduction. I'm concerned about what's going on in higher education because the whole thing is about a group thing. And when you challenge these people, then they punish you. So when you had a heterodox view on COVID, they tried to silence you. And we know all about the kind of games that were played. They do this in the academy, not just within the hard sciences, they do it in everything. It's hard for a conservative to get a job in higher education. And once they find out that you are there, they'll try to deny you tenure. So it's not an hospitable place. ⁓ And as I've said many, many times, and I'm going to say it again here today, there's more free speech. in your local pub than there is tolerated in your local college or university. Now that's a sad statement. And I spent a lot of time in both pubs and in college and universities. Well, you have more fun at the pub anyways, right? Absolutely, you do. A lot more fun in the pub. You deal with these drigs in higher education. Well, because you mentioned the family a couple of times, Bill. I wanted to, because I was appalled. I forgot what chapter it was I was reading. It was about, not population control, I think it was right before it where they basically talked about all these higher ups and they're basically saying like, these aren't the parents' children. Like these are actually our children and all these like teacher unions are coming out. like, we have to remember this is actually the community's children. And you look at that, like that is just appalling. These are people, they actually believe that. Like these are not children that need to be, you know, parented by their own biological parents, but actually by the state, by the government and the government's inflict everything. So I wanted to ask you about that. Cause I didn't realize like, You were quoting people directly, especially like Hillary Clinton and things like that. It's it's appalling. This, this kind of pride and arrogance is just like, ⁓ yeah, you may have had the children, but they're actually ours. So why don't you just hand them over to us so we can kind of control them as we will. Well, that's right. And that's why I have an entire chapter called, to whom do children belong? It's been the goal of radicals for a long, long time. There's way, way you can go back to for that money. Go back to Plato where he thought about it'd be a good idea to have communal rearing of children. But he didn't have the kind of brainwashing idea that they have today. Hillary Clinton with her idea of it takes the village. No, it actually takes parents. And by the way, a man and a woman, thank you. Okay, man and a woman, not just a couple of guys or a couple of gals and not threesomes and foursomes. We know, for example, that the goal, of course, of these people has been to, if we can get the kids to think the way we want them to think, then we don't have to worry about parental rights. So they keep talking about the children belong to us. Biden said it. many times. The National Education Association said it many times. They believe it. If they could, they would take the kids away. And in fact, and this is what I'm going to say now, it's not a matter of hyperbole. It's not an hypothesis. It's happening already. I'm not saying it's widespread, but it has happened where Christian parents who are raising an adopted kid, the kid is going through a rough patch. And usually it's a girl, 80 % of the time, they want to transition to the other sex. She wants to become a boy. And the parents are not going to, the adoptive parents are not going to affirm it. The state literally takes the kid away. I call it legalized kidnapping. It's happened in the state of Washington. This is what they want to do. Ultimately, they want to be able to take the kids. Now here in New York City, where I'm at, the mayor, a Marxist Muslim millionaire, Zoran Mamdani, starting this September, they're going to be able to, you can drop your two-year-old, two-year-old and up, starting at the age of two. They want them early. Drop them off at 8 a.m. and you can pick them up at 6 p.m. All day long, even in the summertime. This doesn't just go for the school year. This is all the time. They want to be able to get a hold of the kids and teach them the way that they should be thinking. And that's why these people are against homeschooling. They hate homeschooling. They hate parochial schools. They hate charter schools. Wherever there's a private niche, they're against it. They want the public sector to dominate everything. the family, the religion, and so that way they can gain control. Yeah, the homeschooling thing really bothers them because now it's like, wow, you've got the telling their kids and a lot of them are Christians, what's right and wrong? That should be our job in the state. No, it's not your job and you're an imperialist when you try to do so. Yeah, the homeschooling thing. There's a couple of things too you mentioned, I wanted to get your take on it because I actually did not realize, I think it was in the family chapter and you talk about the family wage. Which I think was, was prominent up until I think the 19, mid 1900s. I could be wrong on that, but, but I did not know that basically the, the justification was men who were married and had children should get paid more than women and single men because the idea was they only wanted one, a single income household. But again, maybe this can tie into as well as like, well, you know, the intellectuals and the radicals, they get together and it's like, Well, we can't have that because then the women can just raise their children at home all day long, maybe send them to school and things like that. But then we don't have as much control over them. then, you know, naturally all these labor laws and stuff probably got passed and things like that. But yeah, the homeschooling thing is, is actually something that my, my wife and I have decided to do this year. It's, you know, like Catholic education, public education, public education is obviously worse and You know, a lot of the Catholic schools in our area are good, but around the country, I know a lot of people are like, is Catholic a name only, but they're still teaching all this stuff. So the homeschool thing is something that it makes perfect sense why they would hate that because one, it's mostly Christians who are doing it. I think you mentioned that in your book, but two, just allows less control over those families and that unit, which is what they want to destroy anyways. Right. And if they weren't interested in power and in control, why would they do these things? Why are they so enthusiastic about getting a hold of the kids? They're not interested in their welfare the way you and I would be as parents. They have sort of another design on them. And then they regard the parents as the problem. No, the problem is them. And I think people need to understand that and to speak out about it. Again, too many people on our side, they may understand that there's something wrong going on, but they're a little bit afraid to say something. Now, I'm not expecting everyone to be a cultural warrior like I am. I get paid to do it and I love it. But I am asking people to become a bit more aggressive, to hold up a stop sign, to say, can't do this, something is wrong on this. It doesn't take a whole lot. I'll give you a very small little example, which just happened this morning. I'm on the Long Island Railroad. I'm coming into work in New York City. And there's a guy sitting across from me. He has his phone on and some kind of conversations or music or whatever it is. It never stops. And I'm trying to read. Other people are just trying to maybe not out. So I looked over and I said, could you do me a favor and just please just turn that off? And he looked at me like I was nuts, but guess what? He did. Okay. Now I'm just saying that we put up with stuff for too long. And particularly when it's come from the ruling class. Remember you mentioned before about COVID, the parents found out, the mothers found out what was going on in the classroom. That's where that was the springboard to moms for Liberty. Now, and that's why a lot of conservative women have been ⁓ running for a school board elections, because they know where that's a lot of the power is. In the past, they yielded it to people and they had another agenda on this. So I keep saying to people, if you hear somebody on radio or TV who says something that your gut tells you is wrong, go with your gut. I don't care what kind of an expert they may see. We've seen it before too often, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Law School, all these people with the lies that they've told us that Listen, I'm not saying that you should have contempt and disrespect for somebody who's an expert. I'm saying be a bit cautious. That's all. Okay? And I want you to become cynical. But you got to be a little bit skeptical. If somebody says something to you like, men can get pregnant, you should know that that's wrong. And that voice should be discredited. You can just go on and move on to somebody else. Otherwise, they're going to win this culture war. And I think that there are important signs now that we're beginning to take the culture back. Amen. Yeah. And I wanted to actually just piggyback off of that. I know we have a few minutes left, Bill. So, you know, is there even hope for us? I mean, obviously we talked about all the negative side effects of what's going on, but it sounds like you do have, you do see some signs of hope of moving forward and turning this thing around. Yeah. I mean, the culture is divided between the militant secularists and those who still hold to traditional moral values. That would be traditional Catholics, evangelical Protestants. Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians, many Muslims and Mormons. So we outnumber the elites, except that the elites by definition have more of the power. They're in the command seats. But if you take a look at DEI, if you take a look at trans mania, if you take a look at some of the school curriculum, things are beginning to move not as fast as I want them to, but they're starting to move back the right direction. We have a Supreme Court, which is religion friendly. thanks to Donald Trump in his first term. So yeah, there's some good things happening, but we can't relax. We have to understand that this is a culture war. That's an apt description. And we understand that the ruling class, if they're going to continue to take some of their ideas, some radicals, we have to be informed about that, and we have to meet them at the gate. The barbarians are already inside the gate. And if they had their way, they would control all of us. But there's a pushback going on. Silicon Valley is beginning to have some second thoughts. People are going to church. Wall Street is beginning to have some second thoughts. So I am mildly optimistic. I'm not wildly optimistic, but I'm mildly optimistic. Bar is moving a little bit for Bill there, but no, you mentioned cultural war a few times there. And I think it's, it's suffice it to say it's also a spiritual war that's going on. And you know, we need more men, especially, I mean, that's one of the reasons why he started this podcast is to kind of ignite a fire in men. like, This is your responsibility. And you mentioned too, just calling out the guy who has had like his music or conversation or going super loud. You know, I think Matt Fradd was saying something on his podcast. He's like, sometimes we need to like publicly shame people a little bit. And he said he was, he was in the airport with someone and he was with his young kids and the guy was like basically watching pornography on his phone. And like his kids can see he went up to him and he said it kind of loud. said, Excuse me, can you please turn off the pornography that you're watching? I have young kids here and the guy like was startled that he would say something to him. But then he was like, he was clearly embarrassed that like, ⁓ someone was watching me. But I think we need more of that. It's like we need to call out this, this sin and, and these, this kind of a misbehaving people that are going around. And I think that will help shift the culture as well. Cause it's like, we can't be afraid to stand up for the truth, to say what's right and to actually, you know, do something about it. So I'll leave you with the final word though, Bill. Again, where can we find out more about you? Where can we find out more about your book? And then we'll say goodbye from there. Right. Well, the website is Catholic League, one word, catholicleague.org, www.catholicleague.org. You'll find a wealth of information, thousands of pages going back decades about all kinds of different subjects. So I would encourage people to do that. And I want to pick up something, in very end there you said, truth. That's what it's all about. It's about truth. And we know what truth is as Christians. And I just think that people need to step up a bit more. I'm glad that you punctuated that yourself, because otherwise they're going to get what they want. They may occupy some of the command seats, but there's more of us than them. And yes, we can intimidate them. Let's do that instead of them intimidating us. Amen, Bill. Well said and I will leave a link in the show notes for all this as well. Bill, thank you so much for all the work that you're doing and for the time you took to come on the show today. We graciously appreciate it and for all of you listening out there. Thank you for tuning in and until next time go out there and be a saint. Brothers, thank you so much for listening to this episode. If the shows add value to your life, I'm going to ask you to do three things. Share with a brother who needs it. Leave us a review and finally support the show so we can keep fighting. Links are in the show notes. We'll see you next week.